Penguin Lost Read Free Page B

woken.”
    “I’ll come and find you.”
    “That’s the way. And when you do, you get a kiss.”
    When they got to Shelkovichnaya Street, she darted into the road, waved down a car and was gone.
    He watched it out of sight, then set off down Lutheran Street.

5
    The Old Kiev Cellar Café was just open and pleasantly cool. The woman in charge of the coffee machine was yawningly laying out yesterday’s pastries.
    The coffee was ghastly, seriously over-sugared, but fortunately not stirred.
    Still in thrall to the night’s experiences, Viktor wondered at petite Svetlana’s possessing a student card. Maybe it was for the sake of cheap travel. Any kind of ID – from old MVD to Ukrainian State Security – could be bought in the Petrovka book market. A photo, a stamp, and the world, within reason, was your oyster.
    He sipped his coffee, but it left none of the usual bitter tang. In its place was a taste of semolina and strawberry jam as remembered from childhood.
    For the first time in his life he’d actually bought a night of happy passion – naturally, with no bad feelings, no qualms of conscience. There’ll
be a time when you won’t get it free and be too ashamed to pay
, Bronikovsky had told him. Not so. $50, yes, as a gift in recognition of moments of bliss. All so easy and homely. Rendezvous in a kindergarten where, when the children are gone, strange, romantic things can happen – computers in the cellar, semolina at night, and God knows what in the attic. Life with a cheerful touch of mystery somehow lacking before his trip to Antarctica, thanks perhaps to the isolation of a full, unsociable life as member of a disintegratingfamily, while feeding Misha, writing poignant advance obituaries, and shedding the odd tear. Added to which, his concern for Sonya, and, to the extent of providing her with money and the sense of being a housewife, for Nina. His own little world of his own, to which he’d had the key and from which, with the change of lock, he was now a refugee.
    He thought of the kindergarten, also two-storeyed with sand pits and swings, where he had been a pupil, with semolina, strawberry jam and the same little melty butterberg for lunch. And after lunch a quiet hour and a song about a little hare to learn.
    He worried about what Sonya, who had not been to kindergarten or played much with other children, was doing. Hers was a very different childhood.
    Leaving the café, he rang his flat from a street phone.
    Listening to the bleeps, he wondered what to say if Nina answered.
    Happily it was Sonya who did, cheerfully announcing that Nina was out, Uncle Kolya hadn’t come back and hadn’t rung, and she’d let the cat out, who, though she scratched, was a good cat, and clever, clawing the door to be let in, and when would
he
be coming home?
    He panicked.
    “Don’t know,” he said eventually, “maybe in a day or two.”
    “Come when no-one’s here,” she suggested. “I’ll make you an omelette. I can. Auntie Nina went away for two days once leaving just eggs and a roll. So I made myself an omelette. I’m grown up now. Seen Misha?”
    “Not yet. I’m going to today.”
    “Give him my love and say he’s to come back soon. It’s dull without him.”
    “I will. And I’ll come when everyone’s out.”
    “And ring more often.”
    “Tomorrow morning then.”
    Ringing off left him depressed and with a sudden urge to go home, resume his old life, only with no more obituaries, no more funerals-with-penguin. But first, he must get organized, run Misha to ground. Then to Moscow, and Bronikovsky’s wife or widow.
    His prime duty was to Misha, and starting right now, he would do his damnedest, though it wouldn’t be easy. Bad as it was, the coffee had done the trick.

6
    At Theophania, a cool breeze, fitful sunlight, rustling foliage, singing of birds, and patients perambulating the grounds of the Hospital for Scientists, beyond which lay the Veterinary Clinic, where – and he blinked back a tear