The Art of Waiting Read Online Free PDF Page B

would then go home to the shared kitchen and listen to the sailor’s wife’s long monologues of lament about her absent husband. And later in the evening the wife of Vassili Ivanov would lie in bed and think how much better it was when her husband was afloat somewhere far away on the Atlantic or the Pacific or the Indian Ocean, and she would contemplate with a heavy heart the remoteness of the possibility that he would fall overboard and be consumed by passing sharks.
    Katerina followed the boy into his hallway and noticed a greasy stale smell of cooking. Two women were talking in a room off to one side, their voices rising and falling rhythmically, each jostling with the other for space in the conversation.
    â€˜Oleg, is that you? Let the cat back in, will you?’
    It was Oleg’s mother.
    â€˜The cat’s gone,’ said Oleg.
    â€˜Oleg, let the cat back in, will you?’ she repeated.
    Oleg looked in through the kitchen doorway. ‘The cat’s gone.’
    â€˜Where’s it gone? What do you mean gone?’
    â€˜I don’t know. It’s gone, wherever cats go.’
    Mrs Ivanova was sitting fidgeting in the chair opposite Oleg’s mother, picking continuously at her fingers. She periodically looked at the table top with her mad, quizzical eyes, as if it might hold the answer to her questions. Vassili Ivanov, sharks permitting, was due home that weekend, and the woman’s torment had arrived even before the ship had drawn into sight of the Baltic.
    Oleg’s mother noticed Katerina standing just behind her son. ‘Who’s this, Oleg?’
    â€˜A friend. She lives across the yard. She was locked out in the rain.’
    Oleg’s mother looked askance at the girl in the doorway. ‘What’s a nice little girl like you doing locked out of her own house?’ she asked, smiling less than sweetly. ‘I’m sure your mother wouldn’t be happy if she knew.’
    â€˜I’m not a nice little girl,’ said Katerina. ‘And my mother lets me out on my own whenever I want.’
    â€˜Does she really?’
    Oleg’s mother looked at Mrs Ivanova. Mrs Ivanova’s twitching ceased momentarily and the two women silently communicated their disapproval of Mrs Kuznetsova’s dereliction of parental duty.
    â€˜Dreadful,’ muttered Oleg’s mother, to reinforce the point.
    â€˜Utterly irresponsible,’ concurred Mrs Ivanova, her fingers once more turning against themselves, working away at their own nails in a frenzy of neurotic jabbing.
    â€˜She isn’t irrespons—’ Katerina failed to negotiate the unfamiliar word. ‘But she says you’re a fucking whore.’
    Mrs Ivanova’s digits went into overdrive, like the claws of an overexcited, underfed fiddler crab. She launched herself up out of her seat, grabbed Katerina by the scruff of the neck, dragged her towards the door, flung it open, and threw the girl back out in the rain. Katerina picked herself up and went back to sit on her doorstep. She looked up at the window opposite and saw Oleg’s pale shadow watching over her. He wiped the condensation from the glass and sat with her, separated from her only by the bleak walls of his home, the incessant rain and the darkness of the courtyard, until her mother returned with the infants and swept her inside.
    The next morning, when her mother had left, Katerina looked out and saw the boy at his window again. She left the house and motioned for him to come outside. He quietly pulled the door ajar.
    â€˜Come out with me today,’ she whispered to him through the gap.
    He looked appalled.
    â€˜Come on, it’ll be fun,’ she said. ‘You know, fun.’
    The word meant nothing to him. ‘My mum would kill me,’ he said, swallowing hard.
    â€˜Come on, I dare you. You can’t just sit in there all day with that madwoman Mrs Ivanova. Go on, get your coat.’
    He nodded uncertainly.