Despite the Falling Snow Read Online Free PDF Page B

familiar.”
    She frowns and raises the glass, as though she has just given a toast, and she drinks down the cool liquid. He offers her his own full glass, but she refuses it, and places her hand over his and tries to make him drink.
    “Why am I strange?” he asks.
    “Because those are practically the first words you have spoken to me.”
    “And what is familiar about me?” he asks.
    “I don’t know.”
    “My smell, perhaps?”
    She looks surprised, and then suspicious. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean that smells and scents have strong evocations for people, and usually, when you cannot place what is making you comfortable with someone or some place, it is often the smell of them.” It is the longest sentence he has spoken to her, and she likes the sound and timbre of his voice. It is reassuring and gentle.
    “Are you trying to get me to smell you?”
    “No,” he laughs. “Only if you want to.”
    “No, thank you. Some things should be kept for the future.”
    She cannot think why she has said that. About the future. Without any thought, it just flew out of her mouth, and now he is smiling, he looks happy, as though he is hoping to see her again. She smiles too, suddenly. After all, something has drawn her to this man; perhaps his eyes, which are open and honest and intelligent.
    “How old are you?” she asks.
    “Do you want to guess?”
    “No,” she replies, rolling her eyes. “I just want to know. I can’t tell from the look of you, whether you are eighteen or thirty.”
    “I am twenty five”
    “Like me.” She smiles, as though this satisfies her in some way, and then she closes her eyes. Etched into the skin between those eyes is a furrow of concentration. Alexander watches her, pausing only to ask the girl to pour two more drinks. When Katya opens her eyes, she sees the young man standing before her with his own eyes tightly shut, and a look of absorption on his face. She laughs.
    “What are you doing?”
    “I’m trying to see what you were concentrating on so suddenly.”
    “And? What was it?”
    “The music?” he ventures, and she smiles her affirmation. The musicians are playing more quietly now, and are almost drowned out under the rising of voices made freer by alcohol and laughter, but the music is there, behind everything, and it is soft and emotive. An older man has joined them, and with his balalaika is wafting a mournful tune that twines out over the heads of the crowd like a long curl of blue-tinged smoke.
    “I love this song,” Katya says, so quietly that Alexander can barely hear her.
    “So do I. Doesn’t it remind you of your childhood?”
    “Yes. That’s exactly it.” She looks away from him. “My grandmother used to sing it. She’d make my father play the piano to accompany her, and she’d sing it to my brother and me before we went to sleep.”
    “Is she still alive?”
    Katya shakes her head, but offers nothing more and Alexander looks around, at the deaf crowd, and then back at the liquid eyes of the girl before him.
    “Nobody can hear it except for us, I think.”
    “Perhaps he is only playing it for us,” she suggests.
    Alexander smiles at the idea. “Yes,” he says, and he quickly asks her to dance again, for she seems to be on the verge of tears, as she stands there, alone, listening. His question wakes her from some faraway reverie, from unbidden, unwanted memories – no, they are not even memories, she thinks, it’s just a feeling that has enveloped her without warning; that feeling of being a child and being warm, with everything as it should be, nothing complicated or difficult. The smell of onions and fried potatoes still lingering from dinner, and sitting close between Yuri and her mother, and watching her father and grandmother play and sing, and feeling safe and just happy.
    “Would you like to dance?” he asks again.
    She shakes herself, and smiles and refuses, politely, for she feels that if she continues to focus on that song, even by