The Sisters Read Free

attic workshop, in a cone of pale light cast by a naked bulb dangling overhead, the Potter, Feliks Arkantevich Turov, rinsed his small, powerful hands in a pan of lukewarm water, then kicked the wheel and leaned over the turntable. The fingers of his right hand curled around the outside of the damp clay. His left hand dipped delicately into the cylinder, the thumb hooked back over the lip so that it rested lightly on his right hand. The act of touching transformed the two hands into one perfectly coordinated pincerlike instrument. Wedging the clay cylinder between the tip of one finger and the joint of another, he brought up the wall.
    The Potter had learned the art at the feet of a Japanese master who claimed that throwing a beautiful pot was as difficult as printing your shadow on the sidewalk. In the end, potting represented a classic case of mind over matter. Some days were better than others, but when the Potter was very good, he could overcome the natural tendency of the clay to become what it wanted to become; he could tame it, channel its power, control its pulse; he could force it to flower under his fingers into a form that already existed in his head.
    If only he could control his life the way he controlled the clay! At fifty-six, the Potter already felt as if he were "tied up to the pier of old age" (Turgenev's phrase, first quoted to him by Piotr Borisovich, his last, his best sleeper). Turov's face resembled nothing so much as wax about to melt, giving him a distinctly blurred look; people who didn't know him well often had difficulty bringing him into focus. He was short to begin with-five feet, four inches. Since his obligatory retirement earlier in the year, his shoulders had gradually sagged, as if laboring under a great weight; his body had taken on a dwarfish appearance, underscoring its essential awkwardness. Only his forearms and his hands, conditioned by hundreds of hours of kneading clay, retained anything resembling youthfulness. To his own eye, he looked like one of those worn-out government functionaries visible in the streets at the start of any workday; they never seemed to hurry, eloquent evidence that they had precious little enthusiasm for getting where they were going. Like the bureaucrats, the Potter seemed to be living off emotional capital instead of income, the way a starving man lives off the protein already stored in his body.
    The Potter fixed the lip of the cylinder, braked the wheel to a stop with a scuffed boot, then reached for the length of piano wire Piotr Borisovich had once fashioned for him and cut the vase off the wheel. He turned it upside down and tapped on the base, then set the vase on a shelf next to his electric kiln. When the spirit moved him, he would glaze it and fire it and offer it to some neighbors who always brought him a handful of mushrooms when they came back from their country dacha.
    Either that or he would smash it into a thousand pieces during another tantrum.
    Outside, gusts of soot brushed past the grimy attic window. The Potter glanced at the sliver of Moscow River he could see off in the distance between two buildings. In the old days, when things were going well, when he had been the novator-the man in charge-of the sleeper school, he and Svetochka had occupied an apartment overlooking the river. There had been a bedroom, a living room, a study, a heated workroom for his potter's wheel, a kitchen, even a bathroom-an almost unheard-of eighty-eight square meters-and they had it all to themselves. Then, when Svetochka called him "my Jew," there had been affection in her voice.
    Nowadays they lived in a building with paper-thin walls and shared forty-five square meters with another family. And there was anger in her voice no matter what she called him. Or even worse, boredom. On more than one occasion he had caught her suppressing a yawn when they made love. If he didn't notice her suppressing yawns anymore, it was because he looked up less. With his head