Chapter 7

To her husband’s disappointment, Annette didn’t give him any special care. The beauty was too focused on herself. Until noon she didn’t eat a thing; she sank into deep meditation. She did it the way she liked best — wearing almost nothing.

Yuri kept glancing, interested, first at his wife in lotus pose, then at Omar out in the downpour, desperately scrubbing his nickname off a wall. The contrast was brutal: an exalted, sky-born yogini — and a petty, touchy, self-loving janitor who couldn’t tolerate a humiliating label and ran to erase it even in a storm. Yuri understood perfectly well that Omar hadn’t gone out to “work,” but to wipe away the word “WANKER.” How could Annette put a man like that in her mouth?

... By lunchtime the beauty’s appetite returned. Meditation had calmed her rattled soul — at least a little.

“It’s interesting, really, how the system behaves,” Yuri said, sitting down at the table with his wife. “It opens the door to migrant labor, encourages low-paid work — and at the same time doesn’t care about the undocumented at all. As if the system itself didn’t create the influx.”

“Maybe the state’s main purpose is to breed insoluble problems,” Annette offered with a smile.

Yuri saw that she truly didn’t care. She had that post-meditation lift in her, the same bright buoyancy she always had afterward.

It vanished in an instant — because Omar walked into the apartment without knocking and caught her in her underwear.

“Yuri, you didn’t lock the door?!” Annette flung her hands up and ran to the bedroom. The old man followed her ass with an attentive stare ... which, of course, did not escape Yuri. Omar knew Yuri saw it — and he kept getting bolder, paying less and less attention to the homeowner’s feelings.