'She was carrying some of those repulsive yellow  flowers.  God knows
what they're called, but  they are somehow always the first  to  come out in
spring.  They  stood out very  sharply  against her  black  dress.  She  was
carrying yellow flowers! It's an ugly colour. She turned off Tverskaya  into
a  side-street and turned round. You  know the  Tverskaya,  don't you? There
must have  been a thousand people on it but I  swear to you that she  saw no
one but me. She had a look of suffering and I was struck less by her  beauty
than by the extraordinary loneliness in her eyes. Obeying that yellow signal
I  too turned into the  side-street and  followed her. We  walked in silence
down that dreary, winding  little  street without saying a  word, she on one
side, I  on the other. There  was not another soul in  the  street. I was in
agony  because I felt I had to speak to her and was worried that I might not
be  able  to  utter a  word, she would disappear and I  should never see her
again. Then, if you can believe it, she said :
    " Do you like my flowers? "
    'I remember exactly how  her voice sounded.  It was pitched fairly low
but with a catch in it  and stupid as it may sound I had the impression that
it echoed  across the street and reverberated from the dirty yellow wall.  I
quickly crossed to her side and going up to her replied : " No '  She looked
at me in surprise and suddenly,  completely unexpectedly, I realised that  I
had  been in  love with this  woman all my  life.  Extraordinary, isn't  it?
You'll say I was mad, I expect.'
    'I say nothing of the sort,' exclaimed Ivan, adding : ' Please, please
go on.'
    The visitor continued:
    'Yes,  she looked at  me in  surprise and then she said  : " Don't you
like flowers at all? "
    'There was, I felt, hostility in her voice. I walked on alongside her,
trying to walk  in step with her and to my amazement I felt completely  free
of shyness.
    '" No, I like flowers, only not these," I said.
    '" Which flowers do you like? "
    '" I love roses."
    'I immediately  regretted having said it, because she smiled  guiltily
and threw her flowers into the gutter.  Slightly embarrassed, I  picked them
up and gave them to her but  she pushed them away  with a smile and I had to
carry them.
    'We walked on in silence for a while until she pulled the flowers out
of my hand and threw them in the roadway, then slipped her black-gloved hand
into mine and we went on.'
    'Go on,' said Ivan, ' and please don't leave anything out! '
    'Well,' said the visitor, ' you can  guess what happened  after that.'
He wiped away a sudden tear with his right sleeve and went on. ' Love leaped
up out at  us like  a murderer  jumping  out of a dark  alley. It shocked us
both--the shock of a stroke of lightning, the  shock of a flick-knife. Later
she said that  this wasn't so, that we had of course been  in love for years
without  knowing  each  other  and never  meeting,  that she had merely been
living with another man and I had been living with . . . that girl, what was
her name . . .? '
    'With whom? ' asked Bezdomny.
    'With  .  .  . er, that girl  . .  . she was called . .  .' said  the
visitor, snapping his fingers in a vain effort to remember.
    'Were you married to her? ' ' Yes, of course I was, that's why it's so
embarrassing to forget  ... I think it was Varya ... or was it  Manya? . . .
no, Varya, that's it ... she wore a striped dress, worked at the museum. . .
. No good, can't  remember. So, she used  to  say,  she  had  gone  out that
morning carrying those yellow flowers for me to find her at last and that if
it hadn't happened she would  have committed  suicide because  her  life was
empty.
    'Yes, the shock  of love struck us both at once. I  knew it within the
hour when we  found ourselves, quite unawares, on the embankment  below  the
Kremlin  wall.  We  talked as though we had  only  parted the day before, as
though we had known each other  for years. We agreed to meet the next day at
the same place by the Moscow River and  we did. The  May sun shone on us and
soon that woman became my mistress.
    'She came to  me every day at noon. I began waiting for her from early
morning.  The  strain of waiting gave me hallucinations of seeing  things on
the  table.  After ten  minutes I would sit at my little window and start to
listen for  the creak of that ancient garden gate. It was curious  : until I
met her no one ever came into our little  yard. Now it seemed to me that the
whole town  was crowding in. The gate would  creak, my heart would bound and
outside the window a pair of muddy boots would  appear level with my head. A
knife-grinder. Who  in our house could possibly need  a  knife-grinder? What
was there for him to sharpen? Whose knives?
    'She only came through that gate once a day, but  my  heart would beat
faster from at least ten false alarms every morning. Then when her time came
and the hands were pointing to  noon, my heart went  on  thumping  until her
shoes  with their black patent-leather straps  and steel buckles drew level,
almost soundlessly, with my basement window.

-------
"The Show Must Go On"
www.myspace.com/composer2008

Happily Married to  HannahBEE