The Sisters Read Free Page B

gripped the phone.
    "I don't take taxis. They are too expensive. When I go somewhere, I use the metro or walk."
    "Who is it?" Svetochka whispered.
    "Please note the number," the voice on the other end of the line insisted. "You never know when you will need it. So: B, one-forty-one, twenty-one."
    "What does he want?" Svetochka whispered.
    "You have the number, yes?" the voice asked. "B, one-forty-one, twenty-one."
    "I tell you that I do not use taxis," the Potter blurted out, suddenly frightened. "Go to hell with your number." And he slammed down the receiver.
    "Who was that?"
    "Nobody."
    "How can you say it was nobody? Somebody phones you up and according to you it's nobody." Tears of frustration formed under Svetochka's heavily made-up lids. "Somebody is not nobody!' she cried in that tightly controlled voice that angry Muskovites use in communal apartments.
    The Potter had a good idea of what the call was all about. He had made more than one like it during his four-year stint as KGB resident in New York. It was a contact, an approach, an invitation to what the Merchants at Moscow Center called a treff-a secret meeting. Only it wasn't the Moscow Merchants who had initiated it; on that he would have wagered a great deal.
    Svetochka began struggling into her soul warmer. "Where are you going now?" the Potter demanded.
    "Nowhere," she sneered. "Nobody is who called. And nowhere is where I'm going."
    The Potter sprang across the room and gripping the lapels of her coat in one fist, lifted her off the ground.
    "You are hurting Svetochka, Feliks," she whispered. Seeing the look on his face, she pleaded, "Feliks is hurting his Svetochka."
    The Potter set her down, slipped a hand inside her coat and clumsily tried to embrace her. "I only wanted to know where you were going, ' he remarked, as if it could account for the outburst, the months of tension that preceded it, the conversationless meals, the slow seeping away of intimacy.
    "All you had to do was ask," Svetochka snapped, conveniently forgetting that he had. She fended him off deftly. "Svetochka is going to baby-sit for a girlfriend so she can go birthday shopping for her husband."
    "Children are in school at this hour," the Potter said.
    "Her child is too young for school."
    "There are neighborhood nurseries for babies."
    "This baby has a fever," Svetochka explained quickly. "He can't go out."
    With her teeth clenched, she spit out, "Svetochka doesn't ask you where you are going every time you put on your coat."
    "You are lying," the Potter said simply, tiredly. "There was no hairdresser. There were no imitation leather gloves. There is no sick baby."
    "You have a nerve..." Svetochka was screaming now. Down the corridor, the people who shared the apartment discreetly closed the door to their bedroom. "You didn't never use to..." Her phrases came in gasps; they no longer seemed to be glued together by grammar or sense. . . . " not going to only always take this...”
    "Enough," the Potter muttered under his breath.
    "... think maybe you are doing to Svetochka favors ..."
    '
    "Enough, if you please."
    "Well, it don't even work like you maybe think...”
    The Potter's arm swept out in anger, brushing a glazed bowl, one of the best he had ever made, off a table. It struck the floor, shattering at Svetochka's feet.
    "Enough!" shouted the Potter.
    Svetochka, who fancied herself something of an actress, could change moods in a flash. Now she screwed up her face to indicate that she had been mortally offended. "It is not Svetochka who will clean this up,"
    she observed icily. Pivoting on a spiked heel, leaving the door to the corridor gaping open behind her, she stalked from the apartment.
    The Potter poured himself a stiff vodka. When he had been novator, he had drunk nothing but eighty-proof Polish Bison vodka. Now he had to make do with cheap Russian vodka, to which he added the skin in the interior of walnuts to give it color and taste. Svetochka would come back later than usual