Chapter 7

While Annette was at Suhrob’s, Yuri sat wrapped in a scarf beneath the City of B’s stooping sky, staring at his phone. Through the cameras his private detective had installed, he could see everything that was happening. Something light, sharp and whitish kept striking his face, and if he looked up into the empty sky, tiny pale specks danced before his eyes. But Yuri kept looking at his phone. The cold was draining the battery faster, and the banker began considering going home to charge it. Yet everything inside him was boiling, his nerves stretched beyond endurance. Somehow being outdoors was easier. The vastness of the City of B absorbed some of his anguish like a sponge. Life rushed about everywhere around him, reminding him that nothing ever truly ends and that all troubles are temporary...

At the party, besides Anna herself, dressed in a far-too-short skirt and a top (what, he wondered, was underneath it?), there were Suhrob, Omar, and three other men whom Suhrob referred to as his relatives. Yuri doubted they were related. The three newcomers sat as though attending a performance; indeed, the host hardly seemed to know them well.

Two things immediately stood out, one good and one bad:

The good: Anna kept her distance from the man to whom she’d been sending erotic photographs. Yuri saw no sign that she was infatuated with Suhrob, no romantic feeling directed toward him. He was seriously beginning to think he’d worried for nothing.

The bad: Anna was drinking. A lot. Yes, that isn’t a misprint. The gifted yoga teacher was quite clearly trying to get drunk. How could Yuri know that the reason was her adoring neighbor, the policeman, who had not only disappointed Anna but also stripped her of her shaky faith in the Light?...

Yuri sat with headphones in, listening to the conversations and scrutinizing the guests. He particularly disliked one man of about forty, a fidgety fellow with quick, darting eyes. He was forever trying to pull his chair away from the table so he could inspect Anna’s legs.

“What do you keep staring at?” she finally demanded.

“Oh, I just like your skirt,” the man answered with a syrupy smile. “Short, sexy. I’m thinking of buying one like it for my wife, for ... domestic use, if you know what I mean.”

Anna pressed her lips together in displeasure. Everyone began looking at her legs. She tried to tug the skirt farther down over her knees, but it wouldn’t budge.

“It’s not that my skirt is short. It’s that my legs are long,” Anna said. “And this isn’t a skirt for bedroom games, so stop staring.”

Suhrob exchanged glances with his guests and smiled. Everyone settled back and pretended Anna’s legs weren’t the most important thing in the apartment. They turned the conversation to Omar. Suhrob studied the older man with curiosity, asking provocative questions. It was clear that Omar interested him only as a phenomenon. Something strange, rather ugly, yet endearing ... like a dachshund’s crooked legs.

Smoke floated continuously through the room; everyone smoked right at the table. And a half-finished cigarette was always smoldering miserably in the ashtray as well.

Anna clearly felt out of place. It was hard for the yoga teacher to endure the alcohol, cigarette smoke and coarse men. The energy wasn’t hers. So why was she there? Yuri couldn’t understand it, but something in his groin responded to the thought.

The banker noticed that although his wife kept herself apart, sitting proudly erect, Suhrob lavished attention on her. He kept refilling her glass and looking at her whenever he addressed the others. Indeed, he seemed to seize deliberately on every remark she made, contradicting her gently, gallantly. It was as though he wanted to show her who was in charge. Not crudely or hysterically, as when he had struck her with a belt, but calmly and confidently. For instance, when Anna, already rather drunk, said:

“ ... that’s how a friend of mine put it. The law, he said, is a crutch for morality. We’ve forgotten how to think with our hearts; now we think only with our heads. And we even try to justify it by saying that the heart can’t think, it can only feel. But that isn’t true. The heart thinks too, only differently...”

She was on her own wavelength, apparently too drunk now to realize how ridiculous philosophical reflections sounded in this company. Or perhaps she simply didn’t care. The men liked it. They liked watching her get drunk, and their looks grew steadily more shameless and brazen. Yuri nervously squeezed the fabric of his trousers.

“A lot of people say,” Suhrob remarked mockingly, plainly just to argue with his guest once again, “that the heart’s only good for pumping blood.”

Anna began protesting that he hadn’t understood a thing, while he replied that he understood everything and she was the one who’d tied herself in intellectual knots. Then the conversation turned to politics. Suhrob had deliberately introduced the subject, knowing it was fertile ground for an argument.