— “I’d like someone younger,” my husband announced into the microphone at his anniversary party. After 26 years with him, I silently set down my fork and walked away.
“Twenty-six years with Natasha, yeah. Everything’s good, guys. Everything’s good. But honestly—really, honestly—I’m already tired of those, uh… those grannies of hers every Friday… whatever I was saying. Natash, forgive me, you know I love you. I do. But I’d like, well… someone lively. Young and lively. I’m not an old man yet.”
Seryozha said it into the microphone.
He was standing beside the table in his blue jacket, his cheeks flushed, a glass in his hand. The microphone was feeding back. The room erupted in laughter—not the whole room, but the end of the table where the guys from the motor depot were sitting. Antonych slapped the table as if he’d just heard a brilliant joke. Someone else chuckled. Some woman let out an “Oh!”—not indignantly, just for appearance’s sake.
I was sitting opposite him.
There was a fork in my hand with a piece of aspic on it. I still remember that piece of aspic. It had a pea in it—a little green pea frozen inside the jelly.
I heard what he said.
Then I heard it again, because he repeated himself about wanting someone young and lively.
And then I began counting how many people had heard it.
The answer was everyone.
He had a microphone, after all.
My choir was standing near the door. Eleven women in white blouses with ruffled collars. Tamara Petrovna, Baba Lyuba, and I had chosen those blouses together at the Fabrics shop on Sovetskaya Street. We went there twice. The first time we didn’t buy them; the second time we did.
They were standing there, ready to sing.
Five minutes earlier, I had nodded to them as if to say, Soon, girls.
And they had waited quietly, the way people stand when they’re waiting to be called.
I could see them over Sergei’s shoulder.
I watched Tamara Petrovna—she was seventy-four, a former vice principal from School No. 20—slowly lower her handbag onto the chair beside the wall.
She didn’t drop it.
She carefully set it down.
As though something inside the bag had suddenly become unbearably heavy.
And Baba Lyuba—seventy-eight, wearing a calf-length skirt and a brooch shaped like a little branch—pulled a chair back and sat down.
She sat the way people sit in a clinic when they realize the line is going to be long.
Silently.
Hands on her knees, handbag pulled close to her.
Nothing clicked in my head.
It simply became quiet inside me.
As though someone had switched off a radio that had been playing in the background all evening, and you hadn’t even noticed the music until it stopped.
I took one breath.
Then another.
Two long breaths.
On the second one, I lowered the aspic back onto my plate.
Placed the fork beside it.
Stood up.
Walked around the table.
And went over to my choir.
“Girls, let’s go. That’s it. I’m sorry.”
I said it quietly.
Tamara Petrovna looked at me. Picked up her handbag from the chair.
Baba Lyuba stood up and smoothed down her skirt.
The others—Raya, Zina, Valya, the other Valya because we had two Valyas, Galina Semyonovna, Lyusya, Tonya, Marina Borisovna, Ritka—all of them followed me out into the corridor like schoolchildren following their teacher.
I didn’t even count them.
The corridor smelled of furniture polish and bleach. The Blue Lakes sanatorium—what else could you expect?
It was about twenty meters to the cloakroom.
I walked in front.
Behind me came the sound of their shoes—different heels, some low, some completely flat, just ordinary shoes.
No one said anything.
And that, you know, was the worst part.
That they were silent.
My women were chatterboxes.
At the cloakroom, I handed the attendant our claim tickets.
Then I told the others:
“Get your coats. I’ll call taxis.”
I stepped outside onto the porch.
A fine drizzle. Late May, but still cold. Damp air blowing in from the Volga.
I ordered two taxis.
One for four people, another for seven—a larger car.
Fifteen minutes for one.
Eight for the other.
Then I went back inside.
They already had their coats on.
Tamara Petrovna was wearing her dark blue one with the belt. She always wore that coat.
Baba Lyuba’s was gray.
Ritka was wearing a sheepskin coat, even though it was May.
Ritka was always cold.
“Fifteen minutes and eight,” I said. “Galya, Zina, Lyusya, Big Valya—you take the first one. Everyone else goes in the second.”
“Natash,” Baba Lyuba said. “We’re fine. Don’t you worry about us. We understand everything.”
That “we understand everything” was exactly what I had been afraid of.
I wished she hadn’t said it.
Tamara Petrovna said nothing.
She looked past me, through the window.
Outside stood the sanatorium minibus with BLUE LAKES written along the side, one of the letters peeling away.
I waited with them until the first taxi arrived.
Got the four women inside.
Waved goodbye.
Eight minutes later, the second arrived.
Tamara Petrovna was the last one to get in, taking the front seat.
She nodded to me through the windshield.
The car drove away.
I stood there for another minute.
Then I went back into the banquet hall.
They were already serving the hot course.
Pike-perch with potatoes.
Seryozha was sitting there eating and talking to Antonych.
He looked at me as though nothing had happened.
Maybe he genuinely didn’t remember what he had said anymore.
By eleven at night, he rarely remembered what he’d said at nine.
That was one of the things I had learned over twenty-six years.
I didn’t go back to my seat.
There was an empty chair there beside his, with his jacket thrown over it.
Instead, I walked around the table and sat at the other end, near Mitya and Katya.
Mitya looked at me.
Under the table, he took my hand.
His hand was large and warm, just like his father’s.
He squeezed it.
“Mom. I’ll talk to him.”
“Don’t, Mitya.”
“Mom.”
“Don’t. Just eat.”
He wanted to say something else, but I gave him a certain look.
So he didn’t.
Katya—my daughter-in-law, thirty-one, worked at a bank in Moscow—poured me some water from the pitcher.
Silently.
Then she pushed a plate toward me.
Katya does everything quietly.
That’s one of the reasons I love her.
I stayed until the very end.
Until the cakes were served.
Until Valentina Nikolayevna, our director, came over, silently put an arm around my shoulders, and walked away.
Until Seryozha’s driver, Vitya, brought in a box of cognac from the car “for the friends.”
Until Antonych proposed a toast “to our director, who’s still got plenty of fire left in him.”
I sat there.
Alya, our granddaughter, five years old, fell asleep on Katya’s lap.
Katya carried her out to the car and came back.
Sergei and I went home in a taxi.
Mitya and Katya took their own car.
It was half an hour from Tver, along the night road, over wet asphalt.
In the taxi Seryozha said:
“Natash, what’s wrong with you?”
“Seryozh, Monday.”
“What about Monday?”
“We’ll talk on Monday. Just let me get home.”
He fell silent.
Put his hand on my knee.
I didn’t move it away.
I just sat there.
Looking out the window.
Tver passed outside—the bridge over the Tmaka, Sovetskaya Street, our turn onto Kominterna.
The streetlights were yellow and sparse.
At home, he undressed and went to bed.
He was asleep within about three minutes.
I could hear him from the kitchen.
I sat down beside the kitchen window.
It faced the courtyard.
Across from us was a five-story apartment block. One window there was always lit.
Maybe someone worked night shifts.
Maybe someone couldn’t sleep.
I didn’t know.
I’d been seeing that light for years.
In the cabinet above the sink, behind a jar of buckwheat, there was an opened pack of cigarettes.
I had quit five years earlier.
The pack had been there since February. Seryozha’s friend Vova had come over and forgotten it.
I put it away and forgot about it.
I took it out.
Opened the small window.
Lit a cigarette and smoked toward the opening.
My hands weren’t shaking.
No.
My mouth just felt stuffed with cotton, and the cigarette seemed to burn straight through it.
I thought about all sorts of things.
Everything at once.
About the fact that I had never finished that piece of aspic.
About how beautiful Tamara Petrovna looked in her coat, and how I had never once told her that it was a beautiful coat.
Why hadn’t I said it?
You say it, and that’s all.
You’ve said it.
But I hadn’t.
I thought about the fact that we never got to sing “Nadezhda.”
We had been rehearsing it for three months.
Ritka’s voice kept slipping on the line “my earthly compass,” so we moved her to second soprano, while Galya carried the first.
Galya’s voice trembled, but it was pure.
She had taught literature at school for thirty years.
Her voice was trained.
I remembered the autumn of 2000, when Seryozha first came to one of my rehearsals.
Not because of me, really.
He had brought posters from the printing house for the New Year children’s performance at the cultural center.
Back then he drove a KamAZ truck.
He carried the rolls inside while I was rehearsing with the “Rainbows.”
He stood by the door for a moment.
Then he said:
“Your children sing just like they do on television.”
And left.
His wife had died only a month earlier.
Leukemia.
Eight months in a Moscow hospital.
Mitya was five.
Seryozha had lost weight. His cheeks had hollowed out. He had stubble on his face.
A week later, he brought us an artificial Christmas tree.
Two weeks after that, I was invited to his apartment.
His mother, Antonina Ivanovna, invited me.
She was already ill by then.
She died a year later too.
Inside the apartment was Mitya, five years old, sitting on the floor building a Lego fire truck.
He looked at me and asked:
“Are you the lady from the Christmas tree?”
I said:
“I’m Aunt Natasha.”
Continuation in the comments.
“I’d like a young one,” my husband announced into the microphone at the jubilee celebration. After 26 years with him, I silently put down my fork and left.
“Twenty-six years with Natasha, yeah. Everything’s good, guys. Everything’s good. But honestly, I mean honestly… I’m already tired of these, uh… these old ladies of hers every Friday… what was I saying? Natasha, forgive me, you know I love you. I do. But I’d like someone, well… lively. Young and lively. I’m not old yet.”
Seryozha said it into the microphone. He was standing beside the table in his blue jacket, his cheeks red, a glass in his hand. The microphone squealed with feedback. Laughter shook the hall—not the entire hall, but the section where the men from the motor depot were sitting. Antonich slapped the table as though he’d just heard a great joke. Someone else chuckled. Some woman gasped—not indignantly, just for the sake of propriety.
I was sitting opposite him. In my hand was a fork with a piece of aspic on it. I still remember that piece of aspic. It had a pea in it, a little green pea frozen inside the jelly.
I heard him.
Then I heard it again—because he repeated it, about wanting someone young and lively.
Then I started counting how many people had heard him.
The answer was everyone.
He had a microphone, after all.
My choir was standing by the door. Eleven women in white blouses with ruffled collars. Tamara Petrovna, Baba Lyuba, and I had chosen those blouses together at the Fabrics shop on Sovetskaya Street. We went twice. The first time we didn’t buy them; the second time we did.
They were standing there, ready to sing. Five minutes earlier, I had nodded to them—soon, girls.
They stood quietly, the way people stand when they’re waiting to be called.
I could see them over Sergei’s shoulder.
I saw Tamara Petrovna—she was seventy-four, a former vice principal from School No. 20—slowly lower her handbag onto a chair by the wall.
She didn’t drop it.
She lowered it.
As though something inside the bag had suddenly become heavier.
And Baba Lyuba—seventy-eight, wearing a skirt that reached halfway down her calves and a little branch-shaped brooch—pulled out a chair and sat down.
She sat the way people sit in a clinic when they realize the line is going to be long.
Silently.
Hands on her knees, handbag pulled close to herself.
Nothing clicked inside my head.
It simply became quiet inside me.
As if someone had switched off a radio that had been playing in the background all evening, and you hadn’t even realized it was on until it stopped.
I took a breath.
Then another.
Two long breaths.
On the second one, I put the aspic back on my plate.
Set the fork beside it.
Got up.
Walked around the table.
Went over to the choir.
“Girls, let’s go. That’s it. Forgive me.”
I said it quietly.
Tamara Petrovna looked at me. Picked up her handbag from the chair.
Baba Lyuba stood up and straightened her skirt.
The others—Raya, Zina, Valya, the other Valya (we have two Valyas), Galina Semyonovna, Lyusya, Tonya, Marina Borisovna, Ritka—all followed me out into the corridor like schoolchildren following their teacher.
I didn’t even count them.
The corridor smelled of furniture polish and chlorine. The Blue Lakes sanatorium—what else could you expect?
It was about twenty meters to the coat check.
I walked in front.
Behind me came the sounds of heels—different kinds, some low, some with no heel at all, just flat shoes.
No one said anything.
And you know, that was the worst part—that they were silent.
They’re usually such chatterboxes.
At the coat check, I handed the attendant our claim tickets.
Then I told the women:
“Get your coats on. I’ll call taxis.”
I went outside onto the steps.
A drizzle. Late May, still cold. Damp air drifting in from the Volga.
I ordered two taxis. One for four people and another, a larger car, for seven.
Fifteen minutes and eight minutes.
I went back inside.
They were already wearing their coats.
Tamara Petrovna was in her dark-blue one with the belt, the one she always wears.
Baba Lyuba was in gray.
Ritka was wearing a sheepskin coat even though it was May.
Ritka is always cold.
“Fifteen minutes and eight,” I said. “Galya, Zina, Lyusya, Big Valya—you take the first one. Everyone else, the second.” “Natasha,” Baba Lyuba said. “We’re all right. Don’t you worry about us. We understand everything.”
That “we understand everything” was exactly what I had been afraid of.
I wished she hadn’t said it.
Tamara Petrovna said nothing.
She looked past me through the window.
Outside stood the sanatorium minibus, “Blue Lakes” written on its side, with the final letter peeling off.
I stayed with them until the first taxi arrived.
Helped four of them in.
Waved goodbye.
Eight minutes later, the second one came.
Tamara Petrovna got in last, in the front seat.
She nodded to me through the glass.
The car drove away.
I stood there for another minute.
Then I went back into the hall.
They were already serving the hot course.
Pike-perch with potatoes.
Seryozha was sitting there eating and talking to Antonich. He looked at me as though nothing had happened.
Maybe he really didn’t remember what he’d said anymore.
By eleven at night, he could never remember very well what he’d said at nine.
That was something I had learned over twenty-six years.
I didn’t return to my seat.
There was an empty chair there, next to his chair with his jacket thrown over it.
I walked around the table and sat at the other end, where Mitya and Katya were.
Mitya looked at me.
Under the table, he took my hand.
His hand was big and warm, like his father’s.
He squeezed it.
“Mom. I’ll talk to him.”
“Don’t, Mitya.”
“Mom.”
“Don’t. Just eat.”
He wanted to say something else, but I gave him a look.
So he didn’t.
Katya—my daughter-in-law, thirty-one, works at a bank in Moscow—poured me some water from the pitcher.
Silently.
She moved a plate toward me.
Katya generally does everything silently.
That’s one of the things I love about her.
I stayed until the end.
Until the cakes.
Until Valentina Nikolaevna, our director, came over, silently put an arm around my shoulders, and walked away.
Until Seryozha’s driver, Vitya, brought in a box of cognac from the car “for the friends.”
Until Antonich made a toast “to our director, who’s still got plenty of life in him.”
I stayed.
Alya, our five-year-old granddaughter, fell asleep on Katya’s lap.
Katya carried her out to the car and came back.
Sergei and I went home together in a taxi.
Mitya and Katya took their own car.
Half an hour from Tver, along the night road, over wet asphalt.
In the taxi, Seryozha said:
“Natasha, what’s wrong with you?” “Seryozha, Monday.”
“What about Monday?”
“We’ll talk on Monday. Just let me get home.”
He fell silent.
Put his hand on my knee.
I didn’t move it away.
I simply sat there.
Looked out the window.
Tver passed outside—the bridge over the Tmaka, Sovetskaya Street, our turn toward Kominterna.
The streetlights were yellow and sparse.
At home, he undressed and went to bed.
He was asleep in about three minutes.
I could hear him from the kitchen.
I sat beside the kitchen window.
The window faces the courtyard. Across from us is a five-story apartment building where one window is always lit—maybe someone works the night shift, or maybe someone has insomnia. I don’t know.
I’ve been seeing that light for years.
In the cupboard above the sink, behind a jar of buckwheat, there was an opened pack of cigarettes.
I had quit five years ago.
The pack had been there since February—Seryozha’s friend Vova had visited and forgotten it.
I’d put it away and then forgotten about it.
I took it out.
Opened the little window vent.
Lit a cigarette and smoked beside the open vent.
My hands weren’t shaking.
No.
My mouth just felt stuffed with cotton, and the cigarette seemed to burn straight through it.
I thought about all kinds of things.
Everything and nothing.
About how I’d never finished my aspic.
About how beautiful Tamara Petrovna looked in that coat, and how I had never once told her that her coat was beautiful.
Why hadn’t I?
You say it—and that’s it, you’ve said it.
But I never had.
I thought about how we never sang “Nadezhda.”
We’d been rehearsing it for three months.
Ritka’s voice slips on the line “my earthly compass,” so we moved her to second soprano, while Galya carried the first. Galya’s voice trembles, but it’s pure. She taught literature at school for thirty years. Her voice is trained.
I remembered how, in the autumn of 2000, Seryozha came to one of my rehearsals.
Not to see me, actually.
He had brought posters from the printing shop for the New Year children’s performance at the House of Culture.
Back then he drove a KamAZ truck.
He carried in the rolls while I was rehearsing with the Raduzhki children’s group.
He stood by the door for a while.
Then said:
“Your children sing like they do on television.”
And left.
His wife had died a month earlier.
Leukemia.
Eight months in a Moscow hospital.
Mitya was five.
Seryozha had lost weight. His cheeks were hollow. He had stubble on his face.
A week later, he brought an artificial Christmas tree.
Two weeks after that, I was invited to his home.
His mother, Antonina Ivanovna, invited me.
She was already ill herself then. She died a year later.
Mitya was in the apartment, five years old, sitting on the floor assembling a Lego fire truck.
He looked at me and asked:
“Are you the lady from the Christmas tree?”
I said:
“I’m Aunt Natasha.”
After that, for two months, I brought them borscht in jars.
I picked Mitya up from kindergarten whenever Seryozha couldn’t make it.
Seryozha was drinking in those days.
Not enough to be lying around drunk—just enough so he wouldn’t have to sit alone in the evenings.
I poured his alcohol down the sink.
Nothing heroic about it.
I simply poured it away.
I’d say:
“Seryozha, tomorrow you have to pick Mitya up at eight. Pull yourself together.”
And he would.
In January 2001, we got together.
Quietly.
One morning he said:
“Natasha, stay the night with us.”
So I stayed.
We registered our marriage six months later, quietly, at the registry office on Tryokhsvyatskaya Street.
The witnesses were his sister Tonya and my Lena.
Lena is gone now. She died of heart trouble in 2016.
I raised Mitya.
First grade, second, third.
Homework.
Fevers.
Chickenpox.
The military enlistment office when he turned eighteen.
His dormitory in Moscow, at the railway institute—I brought him jam and socks.
He started calling me Mom, probably in second grade.
On his own.
I never asked him to.
Seryozha and I never managed to have children of our own.
Once I got pregnant, but I lost the baby at seventeen weeks.
We tried again afterward.
It didn’t happen.
Eventually I said:
“Seryozha, enough.”
And he said:
“Enough is enough. We have Mitya.”
Twenty-six years.
I smoked two cigarettes beside the window.
Then I closed it, tapped out the ash—there was no ashtray, so I used a metal mug.
Then I washed the mug.
I lay down on the sofa in the living room.
Not in the bedroom.
On Monday morning, Seryozha got up at seven as always.
Washed.
Came into the kitchen.
I was already sitting there with tea.
“Natasha, why are you sitting out here?”
“Seryozha, I’m leaving.”
He looked at me.
Picked up the kettle.
Put it back down.
“Natasha, what are you talking about? I was joking.”
“I know you were joking. I’m leaving.”
He sat down.
His face changed into an expression I’d never seen on him before.
As though someone had suddenly grabbed him by the shoulders from behind.
He said:
“Natasha.”
“Seryozha.”
“Natasha, is this because of yesterday? I was drunk. What are you doing?”
“I know you were drunk.”
“Well, if you know—”
“That’s why I’m leaving.”
He kept talking.
That he was an idiot.
That he’d never do it again.
That he didn’t really think that way.
That he loved me.
That the old ladies were good old ladies.
That he loved them too.
That Baba Lyuba had brought him soup when his lower back was hurting.
I listened.
Drank my tea.
Then said:
“I’m going to Irina Lvovna’s today. I’ll stay with her. Later I’ll come back for my things.”
Irina Lvovna is our accompanist.
Sixty years old.
Lives alone on Tryokhsvyatskaya Street.
Her husband died eight years ago. Her children live in St. Petersburg.
She has a two-room apartment, and one room is always empty.
I called her at nine.
She said:
“Natasha, come over. I have soup.”
She knew what had happened at the jubilee—she had been in the hall, sitting with Valentina Nikolaevna.
I packed a bag.
Two changes of underwear, a toothbrush, a robe, my blood-pressure medication, my rehearsal glasses, a phone charger.
I left.
Seryozha was standing in the hallway in his socks.
He said:
“Natasha.”
“Seryozha, I’ll call.”
I stayed with Irina Lvovna for two days.
Slept in the guest room on a narrow sofa.
We ate soup, then buckwheat, then she made pancakes.
We barely talked.
On the second day, she said only:
“Natasha, if you need anything—you can stay here as long as you want.”
I said:
“Thank you, Ira.”
On the third day, I went home while Seryozha was out.
I packed my clothes, my documents, and two photo albums—the one with Mitya when he was little and the one with my mother when she was young.
I didn’t take the kettle.
Didn’t take the pots.
I did take my blue mug—the one Mitya gave me for my fiftieth birthday, with the words “Best Mom” on it.
A silly mug.
I had hardly ever drunk from it because I was afraid of damaging it.
I rented a one-room apartment in the same neighborhood, on Kominterna, two buildings away from ours.
Fifth floor.
No elevator.
Thirty-two thousand a month.
The owner was a pensioner who lived with her daughter in Moscow.
A month later, we filed for divorce.
Four months later, we divided the property.
We sold our two-room apartment. He transferred my share of the money to me, and I bought a one-room apartment, also on Kominterna, only on the other side of the building.
My windows now face the courtyard, where there’s a swing set and a rusty pull-up bar.
Sergei bought himself another two-room apartment in a new development from Tverstroy, in the Yuzhny district.
We handled everything decently.
No scandal.
Mitya came from Moscow a week later.
We sat in Shokoladnitsa on Tryokhsvyatskaya Street.
He said:
“Mom, are you sure?”
“I’m sure, Mitya.”
“I talked to Dad.”
“You shouldn’t have.”
“I did anyway.”
I never asked what he said to his father.
I know they didn’t speak for about three months.
Then they started talking again.
Mitya is Sergei’s biological son.
I don’t interfere with that.
I called my mother on my second day at Irina Lvovna’s.
My mother is Nina Yegorovna, seventy-eight, lives in Torzhok in a little house with a vegetable garden and a cat named Murka.
I said:
“Mom, Seryozha and I are getting divorced.”
She was silent for a moment.
Then said:
“Natasha, I’ve been waiting for this for a long time.”
“Waiting for what, Mom?”
“I don’t know what. I was just waiting.”
That was our entire conversation.
That’s what she’s like.
She always understands everything before I do.
I gathered the choir again a week after the jubilee.
We rehearse Tuesdays and Fridays, in the small hall of the House of Culture, from four to six.
I arrived ten minutes early.
They were already sitting there.
All eleven.
Wearing their everyday clothes—some in sweaters, some in vests.
I said:
“Hello, girls.”
They said:
“Hello, Natalia Alexandrovna.”
Tamara Petrovna stood up.
She said:
“Natasha, we’ve been thinking. We want to change our name. ‘Veteran’ is a name, of course, but we’re tired of it. We want to be called ‘Nadezhda.’”
I looked at her.
She stood straight, the way she used to at teachers’ council meetings.
The others were silent, looking from me to her and back again.
“All right,” I said. “‘Nadezhda’ it is.”
“We’ll write to the administration,” Tamara Petrovna said. “I’ll write it myself.”
“Go ahead.”
And that was all.
They sat down.
We warmed up our voices.
I opened the sheet music.
That day we worked on “Oh, It Is Not Evening Yet.”
We didn’t mention “Nadezhda” again that month.
Neither I nor they.
We only started working on “Nadezhda” in September.
Not for anyone in particular—it was simply scheduled for the House of Culture’s Older Persons’ Day event.
A year passed.
It passed the way years always pass for me.
September—the Teachers’ Day concert.
October—Older Persons’ Day. We sang “Nadezhda” there. Tamara Petrovna cried at the end. The others didn’t.
November—a festival in Rzhev.
Third place.
December—New Year performances with the Raduzhki children’s group, three shows a day. I lost my voice for a week.
January—vacation. Ten days at my mother’s in Torzhok. We heated the stove and slept under two blankets.
February, March—ordinary.
April—they replaced the windows at the House of Culture, so we rehearsed across the road at School No. 2, in the assembly hall.
May—we returned to our own hall.
During that year, Seryozha messaged me twice.
On my birthday:
“Happy birthday, Natasha. Wishing you good health.”
On New Year’s:
“Happy New Year.”
I replied:
“Thank you, same to you.”
Nothing else.
He and Mitya made peace by autumn.
He gave money for Alya’s birthday, just as he always had.
And then, in May of this year, on a Tuesday, we were having rehearsal.
I was standing beside the instrument.
Irina Lvovna was at the piano.
The choir stood in a semicircle.
It was twenty degrees outside. The windows in the small hall were open, and the air smelled of poplar trees.
We were singing “Nadezhda.”
Third verse.
The door to the small hall is always open for ventilation.
Behind it is a long corridor with checkered linoleum. At the far end are the administration office and accounting department.
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed someone standing in the corridor.
I kept conducting.
I didn’t turn around.
I watched Galya’s entrance, then signaled to Ritka in the second soprano part—her voice still slips on “my earthly compass,” so I cue her with my hand and she catches it.
Only then did I look toward the corridor.
Seryozha was standing there.
Jeans.
A blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
A folder in his hand.
Outside the small hall window, in the courtyard, stood his black Patriot, license plate O-517—I remember that number. I rode in that car for twenty years.
Vitya’s car was beside it.
Motor Depot No. 4 had been under contract with the House of Culture since last year. They repaired our GAZelle vans and the director’s Logan.
I knew that.
Valentina Nikolaevna had told me a month earlier:
“Natasha, just so you know, your ex is working with us under the contract.”
I said:
“Valya, that’s fine.”
He stood there listening.
Tamara Petrovna was singing.
Baba Lyuba was singing.
Galya, Raya, Zina, Lyusya, both Valyas, Tonya, Marina Borisovna, Ritka—they were all singing.
Eleven women, ranging in age from sixty to seventy-eight, stood in a semicircle singing “Nadezhda.”
Their voices blended well that day.
We had warmed up quickly that morning, without any trouble.
I conducted.
Brought them through the end of the third verse.
Then the chorus.
Then the fourth.
Then the final note.
I signaled to Irina Lvovna to finish.
The piano fell silent.
“Girls,” I said. “Ten-minute break.”
They began talking.
Some went to the window.
Others went to the pitcher of water.
I placed my baton on the music stand.
Walked out into the corridor.
Seryozha was standing two steps from the door.
He shifted the folder from one hand to the other.
“Natasha…”
“Seryozha, we’re rehearsing. You’re going to the administration office, right? It’s at the end of the corridor.”
He looked at me.
Nodded.
Said:
“Yes. At the end.”
And he walked away.
To the end of the corridor.
I could hear his footsteps on the linoleum—heavy, just as they had always been.
He had always walked like that.
Twenty meters to the administration office.
He reached it. Knocked. Went inside.
I returned to the small hall.
Tamara Petrovna was standing by the window adjusting her brooch—the same little branch-shaped one. She always wears it on Tuesdays.
Baba Lyuba was drinking water from a plastic cup.
Ritka was telling Galya something about her grandson.
I raised my hand toward the women.
And we started again.
