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cealed under a bloodsoaked rag) before he took her on a tour. The most
interesting items in the workshop included a black caiman, frozen in the vigorous
pose of an army-style push-up; a plump, rounded zebra, who looked
as if she had been inflated and provoked an almost irresistible desire to slap
her so that she would jump; an oryx antelope with a powerful bullish chest
and straight ribbed horns; a huge polar bear that Ertel had set up on its hind
legs. Elizaveta Nikolaevna touched the horns, the teeth, the mounds of
coarse bear’s fur; she glanced into the beasts’ eyes—Ertel knew better than
anyone else how to bring them alive, with a moist tear. There was no womanish
pity for the poor animals in her, only childlike curiosity; Ertel had never
seen her so animated before. After the tour, as if they were at the zoo, he
treated her to hazelnut ice cream that was opportunely discovered in the
refrigerator. Sitting in the cramped little staff kitchen (all the staff had discreetly
sneaked off to various places with their grimy ashtrays and liter mugs
of coffee), they chatted far more freely than in the plush drawing room.
Elizaveta Nikolaevna suddenly started telling him about her granny, who was
a famous flyer in the ’30s and ’40s, and her mother, whom she remembered
only vaguely, just a voice and pale hands hovering above an embroidery
frame. The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the stentorian
media magnate who had commissioned the bear. Ertel departed from his
usual practice by not dealing with the client himself but entrusting him to the
care of his efficient assistants, while he drove Elizaveta Nikolaevna home
through thick, obliquely drifting snow, along softened streets that seemed to
have been spread with fluffy white sheets. He would never forget the way
Elizaveta Nikolaevna waved to him from the steps of the porch—there was
so much joy and youth in that gesture—and how the bracelet of her watch
glinted between her sleeve and her glove.
She began changing, slowly and unevenly; one day she seemed like a
young girl, grotesquely dressed but very pretty, with a pearly smile; another
day she would turn into an old woman of seventy—a flabby, delicate maggot
decorously arrayed in fine, crumpled lace. These changes were feverish and
too rapid, as if grandmother and granddaughter were living by turns in the
same cramped little body. All the indications were that when Elizaveta Nikolaevna
was a teenager some catastrophe that occurred in her family had
resulted in a total ban on being alive. A youthful creature, with no right to
make mistakes, gazing straight ahead with strangely dull eyes—that is what
diligent little girls become if they are deprived too early of loving care and
guidance. Ertel was struck by that dull gaze in a seventh-grade photograph