“Oh, Dimka, I’m sorry.”

“I wonder who watches Grigor while they’re in bed.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I can’t feel very indignant. I’d be having an affair with you if I had the nerve.”

Natalya looked troubled. “Don’t talk like that,” she said. Her face showed different emotions in quick succession: sympathy, sadness, longing, fear, and uncertainty. She pushed back her unruly hair in a nervous gesture.

“Too late now, anyhow,” said Dimka. “I’ve been posted to Kharkov.”

“What?”

“I heard today. Assistant secretary of the Kharkov Communist Party.”

“But when will I see you?”

“Never, I imagine.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “I can’t live without you,” she said.

Dimka was astonished. She liked him, he knew that, but she had never spoken this way, even during the single night they had spent together. “What do you mean?” he said idiotically.

“I love you, didn’t you know that?”

“No, I didn’t,” he said, stupefied.

“I’ve loved you for a long time.”

“Why did you never tell me?”

“I’m frightened.”

“Of . . . ?”

“My husband.”

Dimka had suspected something like this. He assumed, though he had no proof, that Nik was responsible for the savage beating of the black-marketeer who had tried to cheat Natalya. It was no surprise if Nik’s wife was terrified of declaring her love for another man. This was the reason for Natalya’s changeability, from sexy warmth one day to cold distance the next. “I guess I’m frightened of Nik, too,” he said.

“When do you leave?”

“The furniture van will come on Friday.”

“So soon!”

“In the office, I’m a loose cannon. They don’t know what I might do. They want me out of the way.”

She took out a white handkerchief and touched her eyes with it. Then she leaned closer to him across the little table. “Do you remember that room with all the old Tsarist furniture?”

He smiled. “I’ll never forget it.”

“And the four-poster bed?”

“Of course.”

“It was so dusty.”

“And cold.”

Her mood had changed again, and now she was playful, teasing. “What do you remember most?”

An answer sprang to mind instantly: her little breasts with their big pointed nipples. But he suppressed it.

She said: “Go on, you can tell me.”

What did he have to lose? “Your nipples,” he said. He was half embarrassed, half inflamed.

She giggled. “Do you want to see them again?”

Dimka swallowed hard. Trying to match her light mood, he said: “Guess.”

She stood up, suddenly looking decisive. “Meet me there at seven,” she said. Then she walked out.

• • •

Nina was furious. “Kharkov?” she yelled. “What am I supposed to do in fucking Kharkov?”

Nina did not normally use bad language: she felt it was coarse. She had risen above such low habits. Her lapse was a sign of how strongly she felt.

Dimka was unsympathetic. “I’m sure the steel union there will give you a job.” In any case it was time she sent Grigor to a day nursery and returned to work, something that was expected of Soviet mothers.