Mother Russia by Robert Littell Page B

moody, mumbles unintelligibly.
    “What did you say?” Zoya takes the seat across the table from Pravdin.

    “Nothing is what I said,” he answers sullenly.
    She pats his arm reassuringly. “What nothing?” she coaxes. “Out with it, give?”
    From behind the closed door of Mother Russia’s room comes the muted cry of Kerensky:
    “Waak, waak, power to the powerful.”
    “Make an effort,” urges Zoya.
    “I walk on water,” Pravdin finally blurts out, “and soybean soup is all you think about.”
    “Oh Robespierre, you don’t understand. I’m superstitious is all. I’m afraid it will go away if we talk about it.” Zoya covers her mouth with her hand, talks through her fingers. “His nails sound respectable. Do you really think your prosecutor is a serious personage?”
    “He is young and wet behind the ears,” Pravdin says quietly, “but he’s honest, if that’s possible anymore.”
    “I came across an honest bureaucrat once,” recalls Zoya. “It was in thirty-seven or thirty-eight. I was trying to post a package to my husband. The official advised me not to bother because the camp guards took everything for themselves.”
    “Zoya Aleksandrovna, sometimes I think nostalgia is your strongest emotion,” Pravdin says.
    Mother Russia’s eyes lose their focus. “Yes, it’s true what you say. For me the past is more”—she searches for the right word—“intense than the present.”
    “The murder of your husband—”
    “Oh, I don’t mean only the arrests and the camps and the war. I mean the past. I remember when I was a little girl and my father took the family to the countryside to pick mushrooms. It was a great occasion because it was my first ride in an automobile. My father had had one for several months but he had considered it too dangerous for the women in the family. One day, only God knows why, he relented. We drove with planks strapped to the side of the car.It was just after the last snows had melted and the roads were full of potholes. At each hole my father stopped and we children would lay down the planks and he would drive across as if he were traversing some deep, dangerous gorge. Then we would pick up the planks and strap them back onto the side of the car. It seems to me, now that I think of it, that the mushrooms we picked had more taste than the ones I find nowadays. But that’s another story.” Zoya absently pets the head of one of her foxes. “You were naughty not to invite me to lunch,” she scolds Pravdin. “I’m very interested in extraterrestrial phenomena and time travel and that kind of thing.”
    “You don’t really believe in all that nonsense?”
    “I most certainly do,” Zoya replies indignantly. “What was the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night that led the Israelites out of Egypt if not some kind of rocket? What about the Tibetan books that describe prehistoric machines as pearls in the sky? What about the Samerangana Sutrodhara, which has chapter and verse describing spaceships whose tails spout fire and quicksilver? What about the Mahabharata, which talks about machines that could fly forward or upward or downward? Ha! What about that?”
    “What about, what about,” Pravdin mimics. “What about the prosecutor making another appointment to see me?”
    “Shhhhhhh,” Zoya whispers. She lays her bony forefinger against her lips. “You’ll put a hex on it.”
    “Help, help, waak, waak,” cries Vladimir Ilyich from the other room.
    Mother Russia and Pravdin attack the soybean soup; Pravdin meets his spoon halfway, blows noisily, swallows. After dinner Zoya abruptly excuses herself to put the finishing touches on another zinger to Singer.
    “She’s the only person I know who’s obsessed with asewing machine,” Pravdin tells Nadezhda when she arrives with a satchel full of tins of Norwegian sardines.
    “Every healthy person needs an obsession,” Nadezhda writes. “Zoya’s body is too old for sex.”
    “Nobody’s body