A Question of Return by Robert Carr

Author:Robert Carr
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771611480
Publisher: Mosaic Press
Published: 2015-11-12T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

Tanya had rung him that Sunday morning and said she needed to see him. It was, she added, rather urgent.

Laukhin said, “Come home. We’ll have lunch together, like in the old days.”

“There’s none of your women skulking about? Joan Geraldine?”

He laughed. “You know very well Joan Geraldine went back to England long ago. She’s married and bringing up twins now, and has little time for anything else. Come, Tanichka. The refrigerator is full. Old Fenya cooks for an army. You know that, she can’t change. Bring Vadim along.”

“Vadim is away for a few days.”

Come home—that had slipped out, although the Lavrushinsky Lane address remained her home on paper, since she had not officially moved out. And she still kept many of her things in the small bedroom. She had a key to the apartment, and he believed she dropped in to pick up a thing or two of hers when she was certain he was not in. She still worked at the hospital in Serpukhov and would take the train back to Moscow on weekends. For the last three years, she spent any free day she had with Vadim in a cramped room in a communal apartment. It must have been hard on Tanya, after more than ten years on Lavrushinksy Lane, but Vadim had told her he was going out of his mind thinking she was still living in the same apartment as her estranged husband. “And you are too, with your wife and child,” Tanya reminded him. At least that was what Tanya told Laukhin later, while she stored a few of her things in a suitcase. But Vadim was an insistent man, and in some way old-fashioned, and they moved in together in a small room vacated by a friend of his who had been transferred to Kiev.

Tanya arrived out of breath. “The elevator is being fixed,” she explained. “That’s what the sign said, but no one was working on it.”

They ate in the kitchen. He didn’t have to do nuch, just heat up the stuffed peppers prepared by old Fenya on Friday. She cooked the same amount she used to when his sister lived at home with him and his parents.

Tanya declined a glass, but Laukhin poured himself some vodka. He felt a wave of tenderness and regret. She looked good, Tanichka, although—her old battle—she had put on a few pounds. She seemed preoccupied, and wasn’t even indignant when he proposed a trip to the bedroom.

He reached for the saltshaker. Old Fenya had stopped using seasonings altogether. “Well?” he said.

“I’m pregnant.”

She had been pregnant once before, soon after they were married, but felt too young to be a mother, and he hadn’t cared one way or another. She’d had an abortion, and, somehow, afterward, never got pregnant again.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, of course.”

He felt sad all of a sudden. “That’s wonderful, Tanyusha.”

“It was a bit of a surprise. I’m not that young anymore. Vadim took it well, considering.”

He knew what she meant. Considering that Vadim

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