Unfortunately his formulation was not too far off the mark. Her nose really was pear shaped, and lanky, broad-shouldered Sonechka with her skinny legs and flat and unmemorable bum, had only one indisputable physical asset: large womanly boobs, which ballooned at an early age but seemed out of proportion with the rest of her thin body. She slouched round-shouldered, and favoured shapeless, loose-fitting dresses, daunted by her uncalled for endowment in front and dismayed by her flatness behind.

Her concerned and caring elder sister, herself safely married, remarked charitably on her lovely eyes, but they were run of the mill, if anything rather beady, and hazelnut brown. To be sure she had eyelashes of a rare luxuriance which sprouted three rows deep and weighed down the puffy edge of her eyelid, but what was fetching about that? Indeed, they were a hindrance, since Sonechka was also short-sighted and obliged to wear spectacles from an early age.

For a full twenty years, from seven until twenty-seven, Sonechka read almost incessantly. She fell into her reading as into a trance, and fell out again only on reaching the last page of the book.

She had a rare talent, perhaps even a genius, for reading. Her receptiveness to the printed word was so great that fictional heroes seemed no less real than the sentient beings around her, and she was at least as convinced by the luminous suffering of Natasha Rostova at the bedside of the dying Prince Andrey as by the anguish of her sister who carelessly lost her four-year-old girl: deep in conversation with the next-door neighbour, she overlooked her fat, ungainly, slow-eyed daughter falling into the well.

What are we looking at here? Total inability to recognise the element of play on which all art is premissed? The startling trustingness of a child who failed to grow up? A deficient imagination unable to differentiate between the imaginary and the real? Or was it a self-negating surrender to the realm of imagination so complete that everything outside its bounds lost meaning and substance?

Sonechka's reading mania did not relinquish its hold even when she was asleep. She seemed indeed to read her dreams, dreaming breath-taking historical romances, and able from the nature of the plot to tell what font the story must be printed in, with a strange accompanying awareness of paragraphs and punctuation. The inner dislocation which her obsession produced was if anything more pronounced when she was dreaming, for she then existed as a fully fledged heroine (or hero) walking a tightrope between an authorial will of which she was fully aware, and her own autonomous urge to movement, deeds, and action.

It was the late 1920's and Lenin's laissez-faire New Economic Policy was on its last legs. Sonechka's father, the heir of a blacksmith in a little Jewish stetl in Belorussia, was a born engineer with a practical streak. Sensing a threatening change in the political climate, he prudently closed down his watchmaking business and, suppressing an innate aversion to all forms of mass production, signed on at a watch factory, salving his conscience in the evenings by repairing unique mechanisms created by the ingenious hands of forebears of diverse races.

Her mother, who until her dying day wore a silly little wig under a clean, polka-dot headscarf, illegally stitched away on her Singer sewing machine, running up the straightforward cotton frocks for her neighbours which befitted those strident and destitute years, whose terrors for her were embodied solely in the dread figure of the tax inspector.

Sonechka for her part, just about managing to struggle through the official school curriculum, did her utmost every minute of every day to wriggle out of living in the shrill pathos of the 1930s, and let her soul graze the expanses of the great literature of nineteenth-century Russia, descending into the disquieting abysses of politically suspect Dostoevsky, diving out into the shady avenues of Turgenev and the little provincial estates warmed by the generous and non-judgmental love of Leskov who, for some reason, had been proclaimed a second-rate writer.

She graduated from a college of librarianship, began working in the store in the basement of an old library, and was one of a fortunate few who left her dusty, muggy cellar at the end of the working day with the slight ache of a pleasure curtailed, having not yet had her fill of the succession of catalogue cards and off-white readers' request slips which daily came down to her from the reading room above, or of the living weightiness of the tomes lowered into her thin arms.

For many years she regarded the act of writing as a religious practice. She assumed St Gregory Palamas, Pausanius, and Pavlov to be writers of equal merit since each qualified for a place on the same page of the encyclopaedia. With the passing years she learned to differentiate for herself between the great breakers in the vast ocean of books and the minor ripples, between the ripples and the shoreline scum which almost entirely clogged the ascetic shelves of the contemporary Soviet fiction section.

Having served several years in the library basement like a devoted nun, Sonechka bowed to the promptings of her superior, a reader no less obsessive than herself, and decided to read Russian language and literature at university. She started ploughing through the vast, ridiculous preliminary syllabus with all its ideological baggage, and was just ready to sit her exams when everything suddenly collapsed, changed in an instant. The war began.

This was possibly the first event in all her young life to jolt her out of the hazy world of continual reading which she inhabited. She was evacuated together with her father, who in those years was working as a tool-maker, to Sverdlovsk, where she very soon found herself in the only safe place to be: the library basement.

Is this best viewed as a continuation of the tradition native to Russia since days of yore of hiding away the precious fruits of the spirit, like the fruits of the earth, in a dank underground place? Or should we see it as inoculation for the coming decade of Sonechka's life, which she would be spending with an underground figure, the husband who appeared to her in this first, desperately difficult year of evacuation.

On the day Robert Victorovich came to the library Sonechka was at the issue desk, standing in for her senior colleague who was off sick. He was short, thin and angular, his face was grey and his hair was greying, and he would not have caught Sonechka's attention but for asking where the catalogue of books in French was kept. The library did have books in French, but the catalogue had been mislaid long before for lack of demand. As there were no other visitors at this hour of the evening, just before closing time, Sonechka took this unusual reader down to her basement, to the remote West European corner.

He stood, dazed, for a long time before the shelves, his head to one side, with the stunned expression of a hungry child confronting a plateful of cakes. Sonechka stood behind, taller than him by half a head, and herself rooted to the spot by his excitement.

He turned round to her, unexpectedly kissed her long fingers, and in a low voice which trembled like the light from a blue lamp remembered from the endless colds of her childhood, said,

"How miraculous! What riches! Montaigne, Pascal..." And still holding on to her hand added with a sigh, "And in the Elsevier edition!"

"We have nine Elseviers," Sonechka said nodding proudly, pleased, conversant with the arcana of librarianship; and he looked up at her in a strange way which felt as if he were looking down, smiled with his thin lips, disclosing several missing teeth, paused as if preparing to say something important, but evidently thought better of it and said instead, "Please issue me a reader's ticket, or whatever you call it here."

Sonechka extricated her hand, which had been overlooked between his own dry hands, and they went back up the cold vampire stairs which drew the least warmth from any foot coming into contact with them. Here in the cramped reception room of what had been a merchant's villa, she wrote out his surname in her own hand for the first time, a name of which until then she had known nothing, but which in just two weeks' time would become her own. All the time she was writing the clumsy letters with an indelible pencil which kept turning in her much darned woolly gloves, he was looking at her pure forehead and smiling inwardly at her marvellous resemblance to a patient, gentle, young camel, and thinking, "She even has the colouring: that swarthy, sad umber tint, and the pinkishness, the warmth..."

She finished writing, raised her forefinger and pushed back her spectacles, which had slipped down. She looked at him amicably, without interest but expectantly: he had not given her his address.

He, however, was completely thrown by something which had befallen him as unexpectedly as a cloudburst from the heights of a clear, tranquil sky, an overwhelming sense that his destiny was being accomplished. He had recognised that this person before him was to be his wife.

He had turned forty-seven the previous day. He was a living legend, but because he had suddenly and, in the opinion of his friends, unjustifiably returned from France to his native land in the early 1930s, the legend had become separated from him and was now living a life of its own by word of mouth in the threatened art galleries of Nazi-occupied Paris; his strange pictures too were threatened with extinction, but having suffered obloquy and neglect, they would experience resurrection and posthumous acclaim. But of this he knew nothing. In his arch, black quilted jacket, wearing a grey towel draped around his neck (which sported an unusually prominent Adam's apple), he was the luckiest of life's losers, having been imprisoned for a paltry five years. Now he was working on probation as an industrial artist in the offices of a factory, and he stood before this gangly girl, smiling, fully aware that at this very moment he was about to commit one of those betrayals of which his volatile life had been so full. He had betrayed the faith of his forefathers, the hopes of his parents, and the love of his teacher; he had betrayed science, and abruptly and harshly ruptured the bonds of friendship just as soon as he began to sense a fettering of his freedom... This time he was betraying a solemn vow never to marry which, admittedly, had never been remotely tantamount to a vow of celibacy, which he had taken in the years of his early, deceptive success.

He was a committed ladies' man, and derived a great deal of sustenance from that inexhaustible source, but he guarded himself vigilantly against addiction, fearful of himself becoming fodder for that feminine sexuality which is so paradoxically generous to those who take from it, and so destructively cruel to those who give.

Sonechka, meanwhile, placid soul that she was, cocooned by the thousand volumes of her reading, lulled by the hazy mutterings of the Greek myths, the hypnotically shrill recorder fluting of the middle ages, the misty, windswept yearning of Ibsen, the minutely detailed tedium of Balzac, the astral music of Dante, the siren song of the piercing voices of Rilke and Novalis, seduced by the moralistic despair of the great Russian writers calling out to the heart of heaven itself, that placid soul had no awareness that her great moment was at hand, preoccupied as she was by the question of whether she was taking rather a risk in allowing a reader to borrow books which she was only allowed to issue for use in the reading room.

"Your address?" she asked meekly.

"Well, you see, I am here on a temporary assignment. I am living at the factory offices," her strange reader explained.

"Let me have your passport and residence permit then, please," Sonechka requested.

He delved into a deep pocket and pulled out a crumpled document. She looked at it through her spectacles for a long time before shaking her head.

"No, I'm sorry. You live outside the city limits."

Capricious Cybele stuck out her pink tongue at him. All, it seemed, was lost. He pushed the document back down into the depths of the pocket.

"What I can do is take the books out on my own account, and you can bring them back to me before you leave," Sonechka said apologetically.

And then he knew that everything was going to be fine.

"Only I would ask you to be very sure not to forget," she requested in a kindly voice, and wrapped the three small volumes up in dog-eared newspaper.

He thanked her tersely and left.

While Robert Victorovich was musing with distaste on chatting up techniques and the rigours of courtship, Sonechka unhurriedly concluded her long working day and prepared to go home. She was no longer in the least concerned about the return of the three valuable books she had so insouciantly issued to a complete stranger. All her thoughts now centred on her passage home through the cold, dark town.

* * *

Those special, womanly eyes which, like the mystical third eye, open at an improbably early age for a girl, were in Sonechka's case not so much shut as screwed up tight.

In early adolescence, around her fourteenth year, as if in obedience to some ancient programming of her Jewish heredity which for millenia had given virgins in marriage at this tender age, she fell in love with a comely classmate, snub-nosed Vitya Starostin. Her infatuation manifested itself only in an uncontrollable desire to gaze upon him, and her wandering eye was soon noticed not only by pretty boy but by all her other classmates, who spotted this entertaining phenomenon even before Sonechka herself.

She tried to control herself, she kept trying to find something else to look at: the rectangle of the blackboard, her exercise book, or the dusty window, -- but with the stubbornness of a compass needle her gaze kept swinging wilfully back to that head of fair hair, and seeking contact with the cold, attractive blue-eyed boy... Her understanding friend Zoya had whispered a warning to her to stop ogling so, but there was nothing Sonechka could do. Her greedy eyes continued to feast on the fair-haired boy.

The end was dreadful and never to be forgotten. Wearying of the burden of infatuated goggling, her brutal young Onegin arranged a rendezvous with his silent admirer on a side avenue of the park and slapped her a couple of times, inflicting not pain but deadly humiliation as guffaws of approbation proceeded from the bushes where four of their classmates were hidden. One might chide their insensitivity were it not for the fact that every one of the young peeping toms was to perish in the first winter of the impending war.

The lesson in manners administered by our chivalrous thirteen-year-old was so compelling that the lady fell ill and lay for two weeks in an ague, the fires of infatuation evidently abating in this time-honoured manner. When she recovered and returned to school in the full expectation of new humiliation, her escapade had been totally eclipsed by the suicide of Nina Borisova, the prettiest girl in the school, who had hanged herself in a classroom after the end of the evening's classes.

As for our hard-hearted hero Vitya Starostin, to Sonechka's great good fortune he and his parents had already moved to a different town, leaving Sonechka with the bitter certainty that her sex life was over before it was begun, and for the rest of her life she was freed from any inclination to try to be liked, beguiling, or attractive. Towards more fortunate friends she felt neither soul-destroying jealousy nor ruinous resentment, and reverted to her intoxicating and overweening passion for reading.

Robert Victorovich came back two days later when Sonechka was no longer at the issue desk. He had her called. She came up from the basement, emerging in three steps out of a dark hole, shortsightedly taking a long time to recognise him, and then nodding as if he was someone she knew well.

"Sit down, please," he said, offering her a chair.

There were several warmly dressed visitors sitting in the small reading room: it was cold; the heating was barely on.

Sonechka perched on the edge of the chair. A floppy fur hat lay by the edge of the table next to a package which the man was unhurriedly and very carefully unwrapping.

"It quite slipped my mind the other day to ask," he said with his luminous voice, and Sonechka smiled at his pleasingly old fashioned phrasing, long gone from common speech, "I quite forgot to ask your name. Do please forgive me."

"Sonya," she replied briefly, her eyes all the time on his undoing of the package.

"Sonechka... Yes," he said, as if consenting.

When the wrappings were finally peeled away, Sonya saw before her a portrait of a woman, painted on loose, coarse-fibred paper in a warm brown sepia. It was a wonderful portrait; the woman's face was noble and refined, and belonged to a bygone age. And it was her, Sonechka's, face. She breathed in a little, and smelled the tang of the cold sea.

"It is my wedding present to you," he said. "Actually, I have come to make you a proposal of marriage." He looked at her expectantly.

At this point Sonechka took a proper look at him for the first time: straight eyebrows, a finely ridged nose, a thin mouth with straight lips, deep vertical wrinkles on his cheeks, and faded eyes, clever and brooding...

Her lips trembled. She was silent, her eyes lowered. She wanted very much to look one more time into his face, so imposing and attractive, but the shade of Vitya Starostin gibbered behind her back and she stared fixedly at the light, flowing lines of the picture which had suddenly ceased to represent anything feminine, let alone her own face, and she said in a voice barely audible, but chilly and discouraging,

"Is this some kind of joke?"

Then he was suddenly frightened. He had long since given up making plans for the future. Fate had brought him to this dismal place, truly the gates of hell; his animal sense of self-preservation was almost exhausted, and the twilight shadowy existence that was life in this world no longer held him; now he had found a woman radiant with an inner light and had a presentiment that she was the wife whose frail hands would be the saving of his failing life which still clung to earthly existence; and he had seen her also as a sweet burden for him to bear, unencumbered as he was by a family; a burden for his cowardly manliness which had jibbed at the arduousness of paternity and the obligations of the family man... But how could he have thought... how had it not occurred to him before... perhaps she already belonged to another man, some young lieutenant or engineer in a mended sweater?

Cybele again stuck out her pointed red tongue at him, and a merry cohort of dreadful, unsuitable women, all of whom he had known, cavorted in flickering, scarlet reflections.

He gave a hoarse, strained laugh, pushed the portrait over towards her, and said, "I was not joking. It simply had not occurred to me that you might already be married." He rose to his feet and picked up his unspeakable fur hat. "Forgive me."

In the manner of a Tsarist officer he bowed abruptly, jerking his cropped head downwards, and made for the door. At that Sonechka shouted after him, "Stop! No! No! I am not married!"

An old man sitting at a readers' table with a file of newspapers looked over disapprovingly. Robert Victorovich turned, smiled a smile with his straight lips, and from his recent state of distraction at the thought that this woman was slipping away from him, graduated to a state of even greater distraction. He had absolutely no idea what he ought now to say or do.

* * *

Where did emaciated Robert Victorovich and the naturally frail Sonechka find the strength to carve out their new life in the desolate conditions of evacuation, amidst the poverty and depression, and the shrill sloganeering which barely managed to conceal the underlying horrors of the first winter of the war; where did they find the strength to create a new, hermetically isolated life in an ivory tower with room to accommodate fully every aspect of their separate pasts: the fractured life of Robert Victorovich, like the flight of a blinded moth with its quick, exuberant, lightning turns from Judaism to mathematics and then on to his life's work, senseless but addictive paint smearing, as he himself defined his craft; and the life of Sonechka, feeding off the bookish imaginings of other people, untrue but captivating.

Sonechka brought to their life together a sublime and sacred lack of experience, an unlimited receptiveness to all the important, lofty, and not wholly comprehensible things Robert Victorovich deluged her with; and he for his part never ceased to be amazed how much their long talks in the night revealed his past to him in a quite new and different light. These nocturnal conversations with his wife transmuted the past as magically as the touch of the philosopher's stone.

Of the five years he had spent in the labour camps, Robert Victorovich recalled the first two as having been hardest. After that things settled down somehow. He began painting portraits of the camp authorities' wives and copying art reproductions to order. The originals of these were sad examples of Russian art at its worst, and as he churned them out Robert Victorovich usually amused himself with technical trickery of some sort, like painting left-handed. In the process he discovered that his temporary left-handedness affected his perception of colour.

In the running of his personal affairs Robert Victorovich inclined towards asceticism and had always managed to get by with little, but having for many years been deprived of what even he regarded as the bare essentials: toothpaste, a sharp razor blade and hot water for shaving, a handkerchief, and toilet paper, he rejoiced now at every little thing, at every new day lit up by the presence of his wife Sonya, and in the relative freedom of a man miraculously let out of the camps and obliged to register his presence with the local police a mere once a week.

They had an easier life than many. The factory's industrial artist was allocated a windowless room next to the boiler room in the basement of the factory office block. It was warm. The electricity supply hardly ever got switched off. The boilerman boiled potatoes for them which Sonechka's father brought, his unfailing craftsmanship providing essential extra rations.

One time Sonechka murmured dreamily, with a touch of really quite uncharacteristic sentimentality, "When the war is over and we have won, our life will just be so happy..." Her husband interrupted crisply. "Don't be deluded. We are living very nicely right now. As regards winning... You and I will always be losers, whichever of those cannibals wins the war." He concluded darkly with the enigmatic phrase: "To my teacher I owe having become neither a green nor a blue, neither parmularius nor scutarius..."

"What are you talking about?" Sonechka asked startled.

"Not I: Marcus Aurelius. Blue and green were the colours of the parties in the Hippodrome. I meant that I have never been interested whose horse comes in first. It is of no importance for us. In either case the human is destroyed, private life forfeit. Go to sleep, Sonya."

He wound a towel round his head, a strange habit acquired in the camps, and fell asleep instantly. But Sonechka lay awake for a long time in the darkness, tormented by a sense of things left unsaid, and trying to drive away the even more frightening suspicion that her husband possessed knowledge so dangerous that it was better not even to approach it. She diverted her unquiet mind to another place, to the aching, delicate explorations going on beneath her stomach, and tried to imagine little fingers a quarter the size of a matchstick in just the same darkness as now surrounded her, lightly running over the soft wall of their first dwelling; and she smiled.

Meanwhile Sonechka's talent for vivid and realistic perception of life in fiction seemed to atrophy, to become clouded and cloddish, and she suddenly discovered that even the most ordinary event on this side of the pages of a book, catching a mouse in a home-made trap, the burgeoning of a gnarled, withered twig in a glass of water, a handful of China tea which Robert Victorovich acquired quite by chance, was more significant than the first love or the death of a fictional character, more important than their descent into the very underworld, an extreme literary point where the newlyweds' tastes met perfectly.

Only a week after their breathtakingly speedy marriage Sonechka learned a horrifying fact from her husband: he was completely indifferent to Russian literature, finding it bare, tendentious, and unbearably moralistic. He excepted only Pushkin, reluctantly. In the debate which followed this revelation Robert Victorovich parried Sonechka's spirited defence with cold and rigorous argumentation which she did not wholly understand, and their domestic conference ended in bitter tears and sweet embraces.

Pig-headed Robert Victorovich always had to have the last word, and in the bleak hour before dawn found a moment to say to his wife just as she was falling asleep, "They're a curse! They're a curse, all these authorities from Gamaliel to Marx... And as for those writers of yours... Gorky is all hot air, and Ehrenburg is scared witless... And Apollinaire is all hot air too."

At the mention of Apollinaire Sonechka was jolted back to wakefulness: "I suppose you knew Apollinaire too?"

"Well, yes," he admitted reluctantly. "During the Great War we shared the same quarters for a couple of months. Then I was transferred to Belgium, near Ypres. Have you heard of Ypres?"

"Yes, veteran of Ypres, I have," Sonechka murmured, enchanted by the inexhaustible richness of his biography.

"Well, I'm glad of that... I arrived just in time for the famous gas attack, but as I was up on a hill, to windward, I wasn't gassed myself. Just one stroke of good luck after another, really. I must just be a winner." To confirm to himself once more just how amazingly and uniquely lucky he was, he slid his arm in under Sonechka's shoulders.

They abandoned the topic of Russian literature.

* * *

One month before their baby was due to be born, the term of Robert Victorovich's rather vague assignment, which he had been extending by every means at his disposal, ended, and he was instructed to return without delay to the Bashkir village of Davlekanovo where he was to live in exile in the hope of better things to come in a future which Sonechka still imagined would be beautiful, despite Robert Victorovich's grave reservations.

Both Sonechka's father and her mother, who by now was very ill with pneumonia, did their best to persuade her to stay in Sverdlovsk at least until after the baby was born, but Sonechka was firmly resolved to go with her husband, and Robert Victorovich indeed had no wish to be parted from his wife. This was the only area in which a shadow of dissatisfaction crept into the old watchmaker's relations with his son-in-law. The old man had by this time lost both his son and his elder son-in-law in the war, and he and Robert Victorovich took to each other warmly without a word being spoken. The difference in their social status was now, in a world turned upside down, not so much of no significance as tending to show up the uselessness of the supposed advantages of an intellectual over a proletarian. As for everything else, the underwater part of the cultural iceberg, their Jewish heritage, was something they had in common.

Sonechka's family packed her things in just twenty-four hours, that being the time allowed for Robert Victorovich to wind up his affairs. Her mother, shedding yellow tears, purposefully hemmed nappies, and with a fine needle lovingly stitched little jackets out of an old nightdress of her own. Sonechka's elder sister, recently widowed by the front, knitted little bootees out of red wool while staring straight ahead with unseeing eyes. Her father, who had managed to acquire a two stone sack of millet, measured it out into little bags and kept glancing doubtfully at Sonechka who, even though in her ninth month, had lately become so thin that she hadn't even had to move the buttons on her skirt: her pregnancy was evident less from any change in her figure than from a puffiness of her face, and swollen lips.

"It's going to be a girl," her mother would say quietly. "Daughters always steal away their mother's good looks."

Sonechka's sister nodded non-committally, while Sonechka herself smiled absently and kept repeating to herself, "Lord, grant that it be a girl... a little fair-haired girl..."

* * *

That night a railwayman they knew got them on to a small three carriage train which was standing a mile outside the station, into a carriage which still retained traces of its noble origins in the shape of good solid wood panelling, although its soft seats and folding tables had long since been ripped out and the Pullman luxury replaced by slatted benches.

It took them over a day and a half to get from Sverdlovsk to Ufa in a carriage which was packed, and for the whole of the journey Robert Victorovich kept for some reason remembering a maverick trip in his youth to Barcelona. He couldn't wait to get there after receiving his first big fee in 1923 or 1924 because he wanted to meet Gaudi.

Sonechka slept trustingly for almost the whole of the journey, with her feet pressed into a great tangle of blanket and her shoulder resting on her husband's thin chest, while he kept remembering the twisting street which crept uphill in which his hotel had stood; the naive little round fountain in front of his window; and the swarthy face and chiselled nostrils of the exceptionally beautiful prostitute with whom he had caroused like a merchant for the whole of his week in Barcelona. He rummaged through his memory and readily found small, vivid details, like the completely owlish face of a waiter in the hotel restaurant, the marvellous shoes pleated from ochre calf leather which he bought in a shop with an enormous dark blue sign which said "Homer", and he even recalled the Barcelona girl's name: Concietta! She was Italian but had come to Barcelona; she had been born in the Abruzzi mountains. He didn't hit it off with Gaudi, though. Now, a quarter of a century later, he could visualise Gaudi's odd constructions down to the last detail, completely vegetative, and every one of them contrived and unconvincing.

Sonechka sneezed, half woke, and murmured something. He pressed her sleepy hand to himself and came back to the outskirts of Ufa, to the wilds of Bashkiria. He smiled, shaking his grey head in puzzlement, "Was that really me in Barcelona? Am I here now? No, there really is no such thing as reality..."

* * *

At the end of her period of gestation, at the first sign that the birth was imminent, Robert Victorovich took Sonechka to a maternity hospital on the outskirts of the big, flat-roofed village in a trampled, muddy, treeless spot. The building itself was of clay bricks mixed with straw, a wretched place with small, opaque windows.

The only doctor was a blond man of middle years with fine white skin who blushed easily. This was pan Rzuwalski, a refugee from Poland, until recently a fashionable Warsaw physician, a cultivated man and connoisseur of fine wines. He had his back to the new arrivals, his dazzling bluish white coat incongruous here but reassuring, and he was nibbling the ends of his blond moustache and wiping the lenses of his large spectacles with a piece of chamois leather. He came over to this window several times a day, to look out at this formless land with its dirty tufts of grass, instead of elegant Jerusalem Avenue on to which the windows of his Warsaw clinic had looked, and to dab at his watering eyes with a red and green check English handkerchief, the last one he had left.

He had just examined an ageing Bashkir woman who had come twenty-five miles on horseback, shouted "Give the lady a wash!" to the nurse, and was standing now, trying to control an involuntary tremor of resentment in his breast as he remembered longingly his satin-skinned lady patients, and the sweet milky smell of their costly, pampered genitals.

He turned, sensing somebody behind his back, to discover a large young woman sitting on his bench in a light coloured, very worn coat, and a sharp featured, grey haired man in a patched, double-breasted jacket.

"I make so bold as to trouble you, doctor," the man began, and pan Rzuwalski, identifying the moment he heard the voice of someone from his own caste of the downtrodden European intelligentsia, advanced on him with a smile of recognition.

"You are most welcome, please... You have brought your wife," pan Rzuwalski said half-interrogatively, taking in a large difference in their ages which invited conjecture as to a different relationship between this seemingly rather ill-suited couple. He gestured towards a curtain which partitioned off a tiny study for him.

Fifteen minutes later he had inspected Sonechka and confirmed the imminence of parturition, but advised that she might need to be patient for as much as ten hours even if everything went smoothly and according to plan.

Sonechka was laid on a bed covered with stiff, cold oilcloth. Pan Rzuwalski patted her belly with a gesture more befitting a vet than a doctor and retired to attend to his Bashkir patient who, they heard, had had a stillborn baby three days ago and everything had been all right, but now it was not all right.

Two and a half hours later the doctor, with big tears on his clean shaven cheeks, came out to the verandah where a morose Robert Victorovich was doggedly sitting it out. He confessed to him in a tragical stage whisper, "I ought to be shot. I have no business operating under conditions like these. I have nothing, literally nothing. But I cannot not operate. In twenty-four hours from now she will die from sepsis!"

"What's wrong with her," Robert Victorovich asked numbly, picturing to himself the death of Sonechka.

"Oh, goodness me! Forgive me! With your wife everything is in order, the contractions have begun. I meant that unfortunate Bashkir woman."

Robert Victorovich ground his teeth and swore under his breath: he could not stand neurotic men who felt compelled to blurt their feelings out to all and sundry. He chewed his lips and looked away.

The little four and a half pound girl Sonechka gave birth to in the fifteen minutes pan Rzuwalski was making conversation on the verandah was as fair-haired as could be and had a narrow little face exactly as Sonechka had hoped.

* * *

Everything in Sonechka's life changed as completely and radically as if her old life had turned away from her and taken with it all the bookishness she had so loved, leaving her in return unimaginable travails from the disruption and poverty, the cold and her daily anxieties over little Tanya and Robert Victorovich who took it in turns to be ill.

Their family would not have survived but for constant help from her father who managed somehow to procure and send them the essential supplies on which they lived. To all her parents' attempts to persuade her to move to Sverdlovsk with the baby while things were at their most difficult Sonechka's invariable reply was, "I have to be with Robert".

After a wet summer which was more like an interminable autumn, a severe winter suddenly set in without any season of transition. Living in a shaky little house built of damp adobe brick, they remembered their room in the factory basement as a tropical Garden of Eden.

Their main worry was fuel. The school for combine operatives where Robert Victorovich worked as a book-keeper would sometimes gave him the use of a horse, and already in the autumn he would quite frequently ride out to the steppe to cut quantities of tall, reed-like dead grasses, the names of which he never did learn. With the cart piled high there was fuel enough to heat the house for two days, as he knew from his experience of the winter spent in the village before he had gone to Sverdlovsk.

He compressed the grass, and crammed their lean-to full of home made briquettes. He took up part of the floor, which he himself had laid earlier without thinking he would need somewhere to store potatoes. He excavated a clamp, dried it out, and lined it with stolen planks. He built a lavatory, which made old Rahim, his neighbour, shake his head and smile wryly. In these parts a wooden plank with a hole in it was considered a needless luxury: since the beginning of time people had simply used a place not too far from the house which they called "out in the wind".

He was wiry and sturdy and physical fatigue was a balm for his soul, which was strongly averse to the absurd adding up of sham statistics, the compiling of false reports and fictitious documents writing off fuel which had been stolen, spare parts which had been filched, and vegetables which had been sold on the side at the local bazaar. These were diverted from the college smallholding whose manager was a wily nurseryman, a cheery Ukrainian with a maimed right hand and no conscience.

But by way of recompense, each evening he would open his front door and see Sonechka in the living, fire-breathing light of the oil lamp, wreathed in an uneven, flickering nimbus, sitting in their only chair which he had refashioned into an armchair; and firmly attached to the pointed end of her pillow-like breast was the little greyish head, soft and shaggy as a tennis ball, of his baby. In the mildest way imaginable, the whole picture was shimmering and pulsating, with waves of uneven light, with waves of the unseen warm milk, and with other invisible currents again which left him unable to move or close the door. "The door!" Sonechka would urge in a drawling whisper, all smiles at the return of her husband and, laying their daughter down across the one and only bed, would produce a saucepan from beneath a pillow and place it in the middle of the bare table. On good days this contained thick soup made from horsemeat, potatoes from the college smallholding, and millet sent by her father.

Sonechka would be wakened at daybreak by the little scuffling movements of her daughter and would press the baby to her tummy, feeling with a sleepy back the nearness of her husband. Without opening her eyes, she would unbutton her nightdress, draw out her breasts which hardened towards morning, press the nipples, and two long jets would spurt on to a bright coloured cloth with which she would wipe her nipple. The little girl would start to twist and turn, puckering her lips, slurping and trying to catch the nipple like a little fish trying to latch on to a large piece of bait. Sonechka's milk was plentiful and flowed easily, and feeding her baby with its little tugs at the nipple and the nibbling of her breast by its toothless gums gave her a pleasure which mysteriously communicated itself to her husband, who unerringly woke at this early hour of the morning. He would embrace her broad back, possessively squeezing her to himself, and she would be overwhelmed with pleasure at this double load of unendurable happiness. She would smile in the first light of morning, her body wordlessly and joyously satisfying the appetites of two precious beings who were inseparable from her.

This morning feeling illuminated the whole of the day: her housework seemed to take care of itself easily and deftly, and every God-given day remained in Sonechka's memory, not blurring into those on either side of it, in all its special separateness: one with its lazy rain at noon; one with the large rust-coloured bird with bandy legs which flew in and perched on the fence; one with that first ribbed stripe of a new tooth in her little daughter's swollen gum. For the rest of her life Sonechka retained (What is the point of this minutely detailed and senseless working of memory?) the pattern of each day, its smells and nuances, and particularly, in an exaggerated weighty manner, every word her husband uttered along with all its attendant circumstances.

Many years later Robert Victorovich was more than once to be amazed at his wife's capacity for indiscriminate memorising, which tucked away in some recess of her memory that whole great heap of numbers, hours, and details. Sonechka would even remember every last one of the toys which Robert Victorovich made in large numbers for his growing daughter with a creative delight he had long forgotten. Sonechka later took with them to Moscow all sorts of bits and bobs: carved wooden animals, birds in flight made from twisted string, wooden dolls with dangerous faces; but she never forgot the toys which were left behind for Rahim's children and grandchildren, a cheery flock of indistinguishable, thin little sparrows: a fortress for a puppet king, with a Gothic tower and drawbridge which opened; a Roman circus with matchstick figures of slaves and wild animals; and a rather large contraption with a handle to turn and a great many little coloured slats which moved, clattered, and produced weird, comical music.

His projects were well ahead of a small child's capacity for play. His daughter had a good memory which, like her mother's, retained a host of memories from this time, but it did not register these toys, perhaps also partly because in Alexandrovo, whither the family moved from the Urals in 1946, Robert Victorovich was to build her entire fantastical towns out of wood chips and coloured paper, great strides in the direction of what was later to be called paper architecture. These fragile toys were lost in the course of the family's many removals in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

If the first half of Robert Victorovich's life passed in great, unpredictable geographical leaps from Russia to France, then to America, the Balkans, Algiers, again to France and finally back once more to Russia, the second half, cut off from the first by his time in labour camps and exile, passed in little moves, from Alexandrovo to Kalinin, Pushkino to Lianozovo. In this manner he spent an entire decade gradually moving back towards Moscow, a city he was far from seeing as a new Athens or Jerusalem.

During those first postwar years the breadwinner was Sonechka, who had inherited her mother's sewing machine and the innocent recklessness of a self-taught seamstress who knew how to stitch a sleeve into an armhole. Her customers were undemanding, and the seamstress conscientious and not given to overcharging.

Robert Victorovich worked at jobs more appropriate to a semi-invalid, one time as a school watchman, and another as the bookkeeper of a cooperative which produced monstrous iron brackets of unknown purport. Brought up under the free skies of Paris, Robert Victorovich never entertained the thought of working as an artist in the service of the dull and dismal state he lived under, even if he could have reconciled himself to its imbecile bloodthirsty stupidity and shameless mendacity.

He satisfied his artistic imaginings on a snow white plane-table on which he built a third generation of the paper and wood chip structures with which he had earlier amused his daughter. In passing he revealed a special ability to visualise evolvents, a precise knack for getting spatio-planar relations right, and it was impossible to tear your eyes away from the whimsical figures he would cut from a single sheet of paper. Squeezing something through here, twisting something there and turning the whole thing inside out, he would have composed an object for which there was no name and which had never before existed in nature. He began to play the game for himself.

Sonechka's womanly certainty of her husband knew no bounds. Having already taken his talent on trust, she now looked in awed delight at everything which proceeded from his hands. She had no understanding of the complex spatial problems he set himself, and even less of the elegant solutions he found, but in his strange toys she sensed a reflection of his personality, a moving of mysterious forces; and happily murmured to herself her cherished catchphrase, "Lord, Lord, what have I done to deserve such happiness?"

Robert Victorovich abandoned painting. From his earlier attempts to amuse little Tanya he developed a whole new craft. As always, fortune smiled on him: in the local train he bumped into Timler, now a famous artist, whom he had known back in Paris and who had bravely stayed in touch with him after he returned to Moscow right up until the time of his arrest. Timler had been branded a formalist (Who is going to explain to us, and when, what the talentless upstarts canonised by officialdom had in mind when they came up with that label?) and had gone to ground at that time in the theatre. He came to visit Robert Victorovich, stood in his insubstantial board built shed for an hour and a half looking at several of the structures captioned with series of Arabic numerals and Hebrew letters and, while appreciating their exceptional quality, was too embarrassed as the son of a carpenter in a little Jewish stetl who had studied two years in the heder, to ask their creator the meaning of these strange ciphers. As for Robert Victorovich, it never occurred to him that there could be any need to explain what for him was the obvious connection between the cabalistic alphabet, a dry relic of his adolescent enthusiasm for all things Jewish, and his bold games which took space apart and turned it inside out.

For a long time Timler drank his tea in silence, and just before taking leave said with a frown,

"It is very damp here, Robert. You can move your works to my studio."

This offer was tantamount to unqualified recognition and was extremely decent on Timler's part, but Robert Victorovich did not take it up. His nameless items, called into existence by chance, returned to non-existence when they rotted away in one or other of his later sheds and failed to survive the many house moves.

It was there, in that shed, that the celebrated Timler gave Robert Victorovich his first commission to design a theatre set. Before long his models of settings were the talk of theatrical circles in Moscow, and new commissions rained down on him. On a stage a foot and a half across he could recreate Gorky's night shelter for the denizens of the lower depths, the ownerless study of the intestate living corpse, or cram on to it the ever-popular shops of Ostrovsky's grain merchants.

* * *

Among the woodsheds, dovecotes, and creaking swings stalked odd Tanya. She liked wearing her mother's old dresses. The tall, scrawny girl was swamped in Sonechka's loose shifts, girt with a faded cashmere scarf. Around a narrow face, like a mature dandelion head as yet unblown by the wind, her wavy, wiry hair stood proud, untamable by comb, unbraidable into pigtails. She scuttled about in the dense air, heavy with the aromas of old barrels, mouldering garden furniture and the solid, oh, too solid shadows which surround decrepit and unneeded things and suddenly, chameleon-like, vanished into them. She would remain immobile for a long time, and start if somebody called her. Sonechka was worried, and complained to her husband about their daughter's brooding and edginess. He put his arm on Sonechka's shoulder and said, "Leave her be. You wouldn't want her marching in step with the rest, would you?"

Sonechka tried to instil a love of books in Tanya, but as Tanya listened to her deeply expressive reading, her eyes would glaze over and she would sail away to places beyond Sonechka's imagining.

Over the years of her marriage Sonechka herself changed from a high-brow spinster into quite a practical housewife. She longed for a perfectly ordinary house, with water from a tap in the kitchen, a separate room for her daughter, a studio for her husband, with meat and stewed fruit for dinner, and starched white sheets which were not sewn together from three different-sized pieces. In pursuit of this grand vision Sonechka took on a second job, sitting at night over her sewing machine and, without letting on to her husband, saving up. She also dearly wanted her widowed father to be able to move in with them: he was almost blind now and very frail.

Subjected to the vagaries of suburban buses and ramshackle suburban trains, Sonechka rapidly grew old and ugly. The soft down on her upper lip turned into a sprouting, unfeminine growth; her eyelids sagged, giving her a dog-like expression; and the shadow of fatigue in the bags under her eyes no longer disappeared after her day of rest or, for that matter, after her two weeks' holiday.

But the bitter cup of ageing did not by any means poison Sonechka's life, as it does the life of proud beauties: her husband was unalterably much older, and this gave her an unfailing sense of her own unwithering youthfulness. Robert's matrimonial vigour, which showed no sign of drying up, confirmed as much. Her every morning was coloured by undeserved feminine delight so brilliant that it could never become a matter of routine. Deep in her heart she harboured a secret readiness to be deprived of this happiness at any moment, as something wholly adventitious, something which had come her way by mistake or through an oversight of some kind. Her sweet little daughter Tanya also seemed to her a chance gift and this, in the fullness of time, was indeed confirmed by the gynaecologist: Sonechka had what the medics called an infantile womb, immature and ill-suited to child bearing. After Tanechka's birth she never became pregnant again, which grieved her to the point of tears. She constantly felt she must be unworthy of her husband's love if she could not bear him any more children.