This same era of numbing change, hurt and sacrifice also brought her – like a particularly big and difficult baby under a gooseberry bush – a husband. Just like that! Again, she didn’t like to brood on this fact, but she could not, for the life of her, remember how it had happened. She had been a slight girl then, with milky skin and frizzy blonde hair that she hid under a greasy khaki cap. Entirely alone and so scared she couldn’t recall her parents’ faces, or her own, she had somehow got slung together with Pasha and his field kitchen and a band of stragglers, way behind the front line, with Victory in Europe a few weeks off. Pasha: a little weak, a little lazy perhaps, with liquid brown eyes and a smile as wet as tripe. He kept the black box out of her sight for a while. He smiled and there was a possibility that laughter had, at some point, existed, and had meant that something was funny, not that someone was mad. He felt like a ballast, keeping her feet on the ground as the world shook and the war ended around them.
‘Ah, too bad, butter fingers,’ Galia muttered to herself as the last of the vareniki slid from her tired fingers and plopped with a puff of flour on to the floor. Boroda extended her noble neck a few inches from her box under the table, politely indicating that she would happily clear up the fallen morsel if Galia would permit.
‘Go on then, lapochka, you may as well have it. Do a good job mind, clean it all up, my bearded lady.’ Boroda’s sharp pink tongue lapped up the mixture in seconds and her tail thumped gently on the wall of the box.
‘No gulping, mind – even street dogs don’t have to gulp!’ Galia teased. Boroda flicked her a grateful glance and continued licking the floor clean with a great deal of care. The dog’s needs were simple: bread, potatoes, occasional scraps of fat and bits of fruit were her staples. She, generally speaking, would not have dreamt of begging for food from the table, but if it fell her way that was a different matter. In her turn, Galia would not have thought of putting a collar around her neck. They were equals, and chose to be together in companionable quiet. There was no constraint, and new tricks were not required. The spillage all cleared up, Boroda licked her lips and then the tip of her long thin tail, and settled down to sleep.
Galia was prevented from returning to her reverie by the sudden bleeping of the phone, which brought her huffing into the hall. ‘Oh for goodness’ sake!’ she muttered under her breath, ‘is a body to get no peace in this world?’ and then loudly ‘Hello! I’m listening!’
‘Galina Petrovna, good afternoon! It’s Vasily Volubchik here,’ said a confident but somewhat creaky voice.
‘Yes, I know,’ replied Galia with a sigh, and then, fearing she sounded rude, ‘and how can I help you, Vasily Semyonovich?’
‘I’m just checking that you’re coming to the meeting this evening, Galina Petrovna. We have a very exciting agenda, I assure you: the Lotto draw, and … er, oh, er, bother, what was it? I’ve forgotten the most exciting thing, er—’
‘Yes, Vasily Semyonovich, I’ll be there. I am sure it will be most entertaining. Goodbye!’ and Galia replaced the receiver with a slight frown. Vasily Semyonovich Volubchik was nothing if not determined. He had been phoning every Monday for at least three years to ensure that she didn’t forget to attend the Elderly Club. And every week he promised her something exciting. So far, the most exciting event hosted by the Elderly Club had been a talk on fellatio by a local enthusiasts’ group. Or did she mean philately – Galia could never recall the difference. But it had not been exciting: merely diverting, in her estimation.
She padded down the hall in her soft white slippers to wash her face and neck. She had a feeling that the evening was going to be dull. Looking back later, she couldn’t quite believe how wrong this feeling had been. She had no presentiment of how her life was about to change. People often don’t.
* * *
‘Straindzh lavv, straindzh khaize end straindzh lauoz, straindzh lavv, zat’s khau mai lavv grouz …’
On the east side of town, in a square box of a room with orange walls and a shiny mustard lino floor, a youngish man intoned the words of his beloved Depeche Mode without a recognizable tune. He was wearing some sort of uniform that was very clean, but still smelt to others around him of something not quite savoury. The man was making busy, precise preparations under a bare sixty-watt bulb as the sun set outside, unnoticed. His black nylon trousers, crease-free and firmly belted, sparked small currents against his thighs that made the black hairs there stand up as he moved. His regulation blue shirt was neat and pressed and tucked in snugly all the way around. It made taut pulling noises as he reached to comb his hair, which he found minutely satisfactory. He had shaved carefully, including his neck and that part of his shoulders he could reach, and had fully emptied his nose into the basin (down the hall on the left, no, second left: first left is the room of the violent alcoholic – well, one of them). He had cleaned out his ears with a safety match, and the match had then been safely placed in the bin – not in the toilet, as had happened once, by accident, when it had bobbed about in the yellow-brown water for several days, disturbing him greatly to the point where he couldn’t sleep. For that matter, a match had also once been carelessly left on the bedside cabinet. But only once. The match problem had been overcome and Mitya’s will imposed on the small woody sticks and their sticky pink heads. Now they always went in the bin, immediately, and he slept well.
These things he did every day, in a set order. Or rather, every evening. He turned over the cassette – Depeche Mode, Music for the Masses – as he did every evening around this time, and pressed play with the second finger of his right hand. He inhaled deeply and closed his eyes as the music began. He envisaged the night before him, and emitted a satisfied snort, quietly, just for himself.
Mitya was thorough. He took pride in being thorough. Thorough and careful would have been his middle names, he thought, if his middle name hadn’t been Boris. He frowned and paused with the boot brush poised in his hand. The thought of his middle name spoilt his mood as a bark spoils silence, and he shuddered briefly in the shadow of his thoughts about Mother. There were things he held against his mother, and his middle name was one of them. A drunkard’s name, a name with no imagination: a typical Russian name. His left eye twitched slightly as he aimed the boot brush at a mental image of his mother hovering near the door, and slowly and deliberately pulled the trigger. Her green-grey brains spread out across the orange wall as Dave Gahan hit a rousing chorus and Mitya felt a tremble shoot from his stomach to his groin. Life was sweet. He had his order, he had his job, and in this room on the East Side, he was in control of his own affairs. He was Lord of all he surveyed.
There was a muffled click in the hallway, and Mitya froze, sensing trouble. He was not mistaken: a thumping beat suddenly vibrated his orange walls, snuffing out his tape like a candle in a snow storm. He lowered the boot brush and bit his lip. His neighbour, Andrei the Svoloch, was hosting a party, again. Soon there would be girls with too much make-up, girls with too much perfume, girls with skirts impossibly short and tights with ladders reaching up with clawing fingers towards their unmentionable parts. Girls: his neighbour was a success with them, it seemed. The younger, the better, according to Andrei, although Mitya always tried not to listen whenever his neighbour opened his ugly, tooth-speckled mouth. Mitya violently disapproved of Andrei, and his girls. He frowned at them from around his door, and when they laughed, he closed the door and frowned at them through the keyhole. They came out of Andrei the Svoloch’s room to go down the hall to the stinking shared toilet, and then he sometimes frowned at them through the keyhole of the toilet too, just to make his point, although this always made him feel bad afterwards. He didn’t know why he did it. It wasn’t like he found them interesting. It wasn’t like he wanted to see them at all. They were just hairy girls, after all.
Mitya’s view was that