Sonechka by Ludmila Ulitskaya

Author:Ludmila Ulitskaya
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307427885
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

AS SOON as Martin left, she was inundated with work. She got two new customers for massage; the director of the Pioneers’ Club wanted her to knit a dress in mohair. All summer she had sat yawning in the after-school tuition office, but now that the holidays were ending the children started preparing themselves and came in every day. Her main preoccupations, however, were the German language and postcards. Lidia had decided first to enroll in a new course and second to start collecting postcards with reproductions of Russian paintings or views of the Russian countryside.

She mailed them every day. She would write a few sentences on the postcard along the lines of

This depicts one of the most beautiful views of our North Russian countryside. I wish you happiness, good health, and success in your work.

Lidia

Or,

A painting by the famous Russian artist Vasily Surikov, The Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy. It depicts a historical event when the young Czar Peter the First foiled a plot by his sister Sophia. I wish you happiness, health, and success in your work.

Lidia

She would put the postcard in an envelope and affix a pretty commemorative stamp. It was both civilized and not importunate, just a reminder that she existed.

The postcards were being sent not to his home address but to a post office box number. By some caprice of the postal service, Lidia’s postcards took just two weeks to reach their addressee, while she received the first letter from him almost two months after it was sent. Although she was sure she would get it, she felt it was a miracle when it arrived. More exactly, she was sure a miracle would happen and that she would get a letter from Martik. Martik was what she had called him to herself from the first day she met him.

Lidia remembered, as if she had seen it in a film, every detail of the day—the morning—when she removed from her letterbox an envelope as white as a fainting fit, with a stamp depicting somewhere in the mountains and the address finely written in black ink. She pulled off her leather glove and, with her bare hand, extracted the envelope. Even though she had allowed just enough time to get to work, she went back up to her apartment, took off her coat and overshoes, and sat down at the table to read the letter. The first thing to come out of the envelope, however, was a photograph of Martik wearing white shorts, which came down to his knees, and a white vest, standing beside a fence with a tennis racquet in his hands. Her heart fairly stopped beating.

And what a letter there was inside! What a letter: the greeting precisely in the middle—Meine liebe Lidia!—the margins as if invisibly delimited, every sentence beginning on a new line. Oddly, however, although everything was written very clearly she couldn’t make out a single word. None of the letters seemed to have been formed normally. In the

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