Expulsion by Marina Sonkina

Author:Marina Sonkina [Sonkina, Marina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781550719468
Publisher: Guernica Editions Inc
Published: 2015-07-22T16:00:00+00:00

4

It was only when the girl’s mother had had enough that things finally got under way. She scratched her head, tapped the tip of her pencil against her desk, and then, by an obscure subterfuge, obtained room between the two Gogols. A relative had been killed in the war, his widow had disappeared into the camps, and so there it was, that tiny room, waiting to be occupied.

Its window looked out onto the courtyard, where homeless men retrieved bottles left under its two benches, and pigeons cooed around the birch tree.

Even if you couldn’t see the Kremlin or either of the Gogols, for that matter, you still knew they were nearby, a consolation for anybody who might have yearned for a more rarified space.

And the Grauerman Maternity Hospital was little more than a block away, just in case.

Later a mattress would be found, but on their first night in the room, Andrey spread newspapers on the floor, undressed the girl and put her down on the newspapers next to himself. She cried from the sharp pain. It hurt to know that her Andrey could do such monstrous things to her right off the bat. He lit two candles next to the newspapers so he could see his young girl better. That meant he must love her, after all, she thought. And maybe he did. Most likely he did, and why wouldn’t he? Deep in his heart he considered himself a romantic, and expected the world to hold up its end of the bargain.

While serving in the army in far northern Archangelsk and assigned to guard duty, with hoarfrost gathering on his eyebrows and Kalashnikov, Andrey would imagine some vague, tender womanly presence hovering, twirling around him. In the solitude of the black subarctic air, the creature’s soft, gentle laugh would seem to caress his ears, muffling the angry barking of the dogs. That womanly presence was always sweet and forgiving, the woman happy of her own accord. Her laugh and hands were magical, little hands weaving a domestic cosiness all around him, protecting him from the cruelty and pettiness of life. And when the horror of his service was over and he was discharged, he would step back into the world again and find that angel of the night. Only this time she would be real.

But what he got in fact was quite different. The girl was brittle and vaguely dissatisfied. And he sensed behind her brooding melancholy a stubborn, unquenched yearning. He wanted her to be for him, for him alone, while he continued to pick at the hole in the wall and think about taking a stab at one or another of the great mathematical problems in history, exactly which he hadn’t decided yet. Perhaps the Hodge Conjecture, or Fermat’s Last Theorem, if that one hadn’t already been proved, or the Riemann Hypothesis, or . . . whatever would make him famous.

“And while I’m doing that, just be here for me, girl.”

But she wasn’t. She was somewhere else, in a mute world of vague longing.

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