“Who are you and what do you want?” she cried out, blocking the aquarium and the puddle on the table with her body. “You?” Her glasses, the same ones, the old ones, the awkward ones, slipped down her nose, revealing her radiant, utterly insane eyes.
“Aren’t you pleased?” Krylov asked in an over-dry voice, as if he hadn’t used it since he’d lost Tanya on the square.
Suddenly Tanya yelped, her whole lanky self leaped in place, and she rushed to Krylov like a cat to a tree. He grabbed her—she was surprisingly long but familiar down to the smallest hollow, the last vertebra of her long spine. Tanya was mumbling and laughing, and her wet hand was ruffling Krylov’s hair. In a few seconds she had torn him to pieces. All of a sudden she pushed him away and took a step back without letting go of Krylov’s tightly held hands.
“Now this is great, this is great,” she muttered, gasping. “But how? How did you get here?”
“You were the one who gave me the keys,” Krylov reminded her quietly, becoming very still in front of this stranger, this elegant stranger in the leopard dress that looked like it had been pasted over with spots of warm chocolate.
“Why, that’s right!” Tanya exclaimed, giving Krylov a jerk. “And I kept wondering where they’d got to!”
Deep down inside Krylov it got dark for a second. All of a sudden he felt how defenseless he was, like a patient on an operating table. The slightest cruelty could kill him. But Tanya was laughing again and her fragile tresses were bouncing amusingly.
“Listen, listen, there’s nowhere decent to sit here,” she kept talking, drawing Krylov over to the smooth bed. “Come over here. Let me take a look at you!”
But they couldn’t see each other anymore. Light and gloom flickered in their half-shut eyes, as sometimes happen in a madly racing car. Both kept turning their heads so that they couldn’t kiss the right way. Krylov couldn’t really get his arms around Tanya and get close to her because there was some unfamiliar energy dancing around inside her that had absolutely nothing to do with what was happening between them now. There were no fasteners whatsoever on Tanya, as if she were a reptile, and her clothing shifted around like a slippery skin. Krylov kept trying to catch a whiff of the old Tanya smell—a bitter pharmaceutical smell from her paper-thin, intoxicated skin—through her heavy new perfume. But he kept picking up the thick and heavy sweetness—behind her large, inflexible ear and her sprayed hair—and it just wouldn’t quit, filling Krylov’s nostrils and head with a stupefying haze. Tanya seemed to have been embalmed alive with this perfume, as if her very blood now smelled of it.
“Oof! Let me catch my breath!” Tanya turned away and, beaming, fluffed her hairdo with her fingers. Then she ceremoniously folded over the edge of her tousled pink fur coat, as if covering something up there. One, two, several compact dollar bundles cleverly criss-crossed with different-colored rubber bands slipped out over its silk caramel lining.
Embarrassed, Krylov looked away. That was when he saw the sodden piece of paper on the water-swollen glass table and on it a mound of glittering wet grains. Unable to restrain himself he stood up to look. Diamonds, approximately one and a half to five carats, cast a slight northern glow onto the paper’s damp whiteness; the water, rather than soaking the stones, trembled on them like dew. Judging from the dispersal of light and the quality of the cut, several of them were so good that they were more like theoretical concepts than material objects; without a doubt, this was the fortune and legacy of Professor Anfilogov, who had seen the theoretical part of things above all. At this, from the faceting of the girdle and a few other fantastic elements, Krylov recognized among the professor’s theorems stones of his own work. Once again he imagined that Anfilogov was somewhere nearby, literally in the room.
“You see, Vasily Petrovich didn’t say exactly how many diamonds he hid in the aquarium,” Tanya spoke, puzzled, smoothing her leopard hem on her knees. “I think I’ve already sieved everything there three times. But I keep thinking, What if there are still some left? Pouring the aquarium out entirely—well, I feel sorry for the fish. They’ve survived here on fish food from the dispenser and could live another year at least. On the other hand, you can see how much it might be worth. And then I would always be thinking and imagining it lying here without me.”
The sediment in the aquarium gradually settled. The torn algae was silver on the water’s surface, which had gone down a third, and the big fish, with faces like metal masks, weren’t swimming but floundering there, wagging their torn tails.
Tanya’s hand, which Krylov was pressing, too hard probably, was still damp and cold.
“Tell me, did you love him?” This was one of those questions that should never be asked under any circumstance.
“Well, here we are again, talking about my husband,” Tanya smiled slyly, thumping Krylov’s shoulder. “Just like old times. All right, if you got here that means you’ve already figured about Vasily Petrovich and me. We were married a year. Did I love him? I don’t know. But now, now …” Her face, touched with the latest kind of rouge, became pious. “Now I’m going to love him my whole life, as if he were my own father. Imagine, he left me everything. Everything! The apartments, the house in Zurich, the jewels, and the money! What a good man he turned out to be!”
“You’re going to take all that? You really are?” Krylov was stunned, still not understanding anything. “What about you and me?”
“Oh, it was all wonderful with you and me. But now I just can’t think about that.” Tanya pulled her hand away from Krylov and started fiddling very quickly with the heavy gold pendant on her chest. “When he was leaving on the expedition, Vasily Petrovich gave me the codes for his credit cards and the passwords for his bank accounts, and he told me where he had different hiding places. But of course I didn’t dare touch a drop and lived on my salary. Remember how you and I never had any money? I was actually afraid I knew too much and that something might go missing before Vasily Petrovich arrived. I had no idea how much of it there was. I didn’t even take a kopek for the funeral!”
Krylov was badly stung. He had guessed, in a general way, that Tanya had had money at the time of the funeral. It was better never to talk to anyone about the origin of that sum.
“Then last Thursday a lawyer called me in,” Tanya kept telling her story, gazing enthusiastically into space. “He read the will. And then I realized that it was all mine now! I can’t tell you what I felt. I think I broke something there. They all smiled when they saw me out of the office. You can’t believe how much money there was in Vasily Petrovich’s accounts! Can you guess how much?”
Krylov shrugged mechanically.
“All right, then hold onto something.” Tanya gave him a merry and terrifying look over her glasses but then suddenly frowned hard and fell face down on the pink coat that was about to slip off the bed. “No, I won’t tell you! I want it to be just mine! Believe me, I can’t sleep more than three hours at night. All of a sudden I wake up as if I’ve been shocked and right away I remember how much! And I completely lose it! I wander around my old apartment and wonder how I could have lived there so long.”
Now the happy patch that had flashed in front of Krylov on the street turned into a full and intolerable glow of happiness. Tanya was looking at the ceiling as if it was a starry sky and a star was burning in her heart. What had recently been Krylov’s—her tiny breast flattened by spotted silk, her long-toed foot with the bone that jutted out encased in a black orphan stocking that didn’t match her expensive new acquisitions—was here, but as if it had been sent into storage.
“Let’s talk about us.” Krylov took Tanya’s elbow and sat her down sharply beside him. ‘I love you. Remember that well. I’m sorry, but I won’t let you make a joke of that. We spent a long time experimenting, and now I want to start a normal life with you. Like all normal, regular people.”
Tanya looked at Krylov with a stranger’s over-bright eyes. She seemed to have gone quite blind. Krylov squeezed her slippery elbow, which
she tried to raise in order to protect her unbearable star, which was piercing her through and through, even harder.
“You and I don’t need that money. You alone could accept the inheritance, but if we’re going to be together, then no way.” Stubbornly, Krylov would not turn his tearing gaze away from the happy fire that seemed to be burning Tanya up from inside. “We can’t handle that kind of money. I don’t know how, but that money would crush us. Is it worth that? The professor had other wives, too, and they’re not young now. He left a son. Let them inherit.”
“Did you just drop down from the moon or something? What are you talking about?” Tanya interrupted him, and a familiar expression of dissatisfaction came through the rather tight facelift that had obviously been done very recently. “Don’t make such a big deal of it. Yes, we dated. So what? If you want to know, I had another lover before you while I was married. For a week, but even so. How else could I have stood all this?”
“Wait, wait up. Either speak well of the dead or not at all.”
“To hell with that!” Tanya broke away abruptly, jumped up, and looked nearly as tall as the ceiling. “It wasn’t you and me, it was Vasily Petrovich who set up the experiment! Do you think I left a good life to marry him? No, and he knew that perfectly well! I was hoping he would make me happy in some way. But Vasily Petrovich was apparently keeping me in everything old and in an old apartment on purpose. He saw visitors there! He said he’d wait an eternity for me to love him. An eternity. Just imagine! How he used to look at my torn stockings and my disintegrating boots! As if he were expecting his displeasure to make them grow back together themselves. You can’t believe how awful it was for me. As if all my things were rotting on me, like on a corpse in a grave. People don’t live an eternity!”
Saying all this, Tanya feverishly rummaged in the pockets of her fur coat, ejecting new packets of money on the floor. She got out her cigarettes in a flat embossed case and a gold lighter dusted with a fine diamond sprinkling. She flicked a trembling flame and inhaled it all through her cigarette-straw, as if it were a cocktail.
“Now you want me to refuse the money. Well, here’s what I’ll tell you. The failure isn’t the one who never had a chance but the one who had a chance and didn’t take it. Damn, damn!” Tanya gave her hand holding the cigarette a shake; it had burned all the way down in a few drags, like a sparkler. “I just can’t get used to these fancy slims, and now there’s no ashtray. There isn’t anything in this apartment. You could count everything here on your fingers!”
Taking a look around, Tanya drowned the butt in the puddle on the glass table, where it immediately swelled up and popped, like popcorn. The whole amber wood floor was covered in Tanya’s long tracks, like a hare weaving in and out to escape the hunt.
“Fine then.” Krylov was dying for a cigarette, too, but he couldn’t do anything here, in this conditional space, where every object looked like it had been drawn on a bare plane. “I may have money in a couple of months. I can’t promise, but the likelihood’s great. Why can’t you take my money over this ill-starred inheritance?”
“Do you think I’m greedy?” Tanya shook her head with a sarcastic smile. “What’s money to me? I’ll tell you. Just a matter of life and death. And I’m not talking about my health. Poisoning would have been pretty easy for me; Vasily Petrovich wasn’t really paying attention. A couple of shots at five thousand euros apiece would have taken care of everything. But you have to understand, a woman has only one illness: old age. Up until age thirty we’re all equal, we all have our rights. After that, some keep living and some start dying. Before, the law of nature functioned identically for everything. So old age wasn’t so repugnant. But now? We have everything now: serums, plastic surgery, nanotechnologies. A woman over fifty has to spend a few thousand euros a month on herself. And the longer she lasts, the more she spends. But even if she’s a top manager, an irreplaceable employee—her powers tap out. And they send the horse that was ridden too hard to its deserved respite! If you’re pension’s good enough, you can eat and pay for your apartment. But health insurance? Don’t make me laugh! Even dentistry now is for separate money. And where am I going to get that? Who’s going to tell me that? No one stays eternally young, of course. But have you seen rich old women? They’re like dolls! And all the rest are like dirt. Do you realize we’re talking about my life? Are you aware that I was born and I’m going to die?”
Blinking his hot eyes, Krylov listened to this monologue and felt Tanya having a direct influence on him, striking with all the strength of her being at some vulnerable spot and drilling a hole in him. Even now he couldn’t have said how old she was. The congealed haze that had concealed her age had vanished only to be replaced by hydrocosmetics, probably like what Tamara used, which covered her face with a thick, perfectly clear liquid that came out of fat vials of dark blue sunblocking glass. Tamara and Tanya now would probably have quite a lot in common—for instance, the gold jewelry from Tiffany that Tanya kept twisting mechanically, looked like it had come out of one of Tamara’s safes. The radical rejuvenation would soon make Tanya rubberized, with a body temperature a degree lower than the human norm. Her sagging tummy would be flat, the sweet scar that looked like a thin thread of noodle would disappear. And what would be left then?
“I did think of you from time to time,” Tanya spoke feverishly, hugging herself back to her shoulder blades with her long arms. “Do you know what I used to dream about when you and I were wandering around? I used to think, What if we found some treasure? Or a platinum credit card with a million dollars on it! It’s stupid, I realize. You can’t imagine all the stupid things that built up in my mind. I used to put our bus tickets into a separate box and imagine getting as much money as the numbers on them. I started spending it in my mind, allocating it. And there was never, never enough! Do you remember that jerk who photographed us on his telephone? I stole two thousand rubles from him! You see what I’m confessing?” Tanya began laughing huskily. “And still I’ll tell you one more time: it’s not money I love. After all, you didn’t just ask me to give up the inheritance but those minutes I had in the attorney’s office when they told me … and the nights I have now, when you lie there on your back and try to catch your breath … and the number I’m never going to tell anyone, that’s in my head, like a fat diamond in a safe. If I write rejecting the inheritance now, all that will have been in vain. Just think. How can you take away someone’s happiness, whatever it’s made of?”
Krylov dropped his head, examining his white socks, which had sagged badly from Farid laundering them in boiling water. Oddly enough, right now he felt almost nothing.
“This inheritance came to me like an act of grace,” Tanya, dark and narrow in front of the watery window, spoke in a muffled voice. “Almost everyone is doomed to a miserable, prehistoric life, when we have everything right here. Almost everyone dies when there are ways to save the patient—except that the patient doesn’t have the money. Almost everyone’s life is inauthentic.”
A huge shudder went through Krylov at the last sentence. Tanya’s talking about that, too! Man must have a secret organ that sends him signals about the world’s inauthenticity. Tanya had nearly hissed the word “inauthentic,” and her movements were like the dance of a snake when it winds its scaly rings with a thick congealed strength.
“Let’s say you’re right,” Krylov spoke dolefully. “Let’s suppose you start living at the level of medical and every other kind of modern progress. But a woman can’t be alone, can she? Will you be happy alone? And if not, won’t you think back to us after all? Open your eyes!”
“You don’t have to scare me!” Tanya cut him off, pale. “A woman’s fear of loneliness also stems from poverty. And from the briefness of her time, because youth passes so quickly. But now everything’s going to be fine for me. I’m in heaven. Heaven! Understand? The place where no one wants for anything. I don’t have to worry about anything anymore. And this is going to last for a long, long time.”
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Tanya asked angrily, turning on her toes and rocking the small crystal chandelier with the top of her shining head.
“You look taller,” Krylov marveled. “How could that be?”
“Because of my heels,” Tanya said casually, dancing in her stocking feet.
Krylov shook his head. All of a sudden he remembered how a long, long time ago, at the train station, he had stolen a glance at the stranger and tried to guess whether he was taller than her or not after all. If she had been taller than him, he probably wouldn’t have started talking to her. Now that she didn’t need Krylov anymore, Tanya had grown like a teenager in the last couple of months. People say that the Mistress of the Mountain, the richest woman in the world, is nearly four meters tall. So this is how all this happens. What Krylov had taken for a facelift done at a beauty spa may have been the onset of mineralization. Tanya’s skin looked like it had been seized from the inside by cold quartz ice.
Nonetheless, she was still alive and real. Krylov had one more fairly strong argument for her. He might get rich in a month or he might die (at this every vein of his body was struck, like strings). He knew mortal danger threatening a man had an irresistible effect on a woman. “No, I want it to be just mine!” a voice rang out in Krylov’s mind, a voice very much like Krylov’s own. Immediately he felt protected, as if a hand lay on his head, softly clouding his consciousness and shielding him from Tanya’s cruel stars, which were still burning in the relentlessly white ceiling.
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