Natalia suspects something is wrong

He couldn't comprehend her spite. It sat ill next to her calm and happy demeanor.  One minute, she was all sweetness and light, but in an instant it would be gone, replaced by a storm of angry rebukes and a swiveling of her eyes enlarged by anger as she scoured him for the truth.

He was at times like these a mere paper ship on her tidal waves of fury, he was tossed around in the swell and helpless to calm the waters.  He floated and drowned at the same time.  Their deep magnetic passion for each another fixed them in opposition and created a tug of war between them, like the moon and the sea drawing ever closer and receding in unceasing struggle. She complained about the way he chopped a clove of garlic, too thick, and he struggled to remember her rules for combining laundry into the washing machine.  Natalia, for her part, watched him reading silently in his chair, paying no attention to her and turning the pages with a hint of violence.

He became all pockmarked inside, and she was a black swirling vortex. When her anger would reach high tide, she demanded to see his phone, his computer, to know where he stayed abroad or where he had been the day when she, tired and disoriented after a visit to the dentist, had almost been flattened by a tram near Dimitrovskaya and he had taken an hour to call her and ask if she was alright (clearly she was alright, but that was not the point).

Natalia began to view him as a liar in small and big things, as someone who played with truth and performed acrobatic tricks to keep it in balance with his actions, always trending away from her to other people, undermining his standing, his masculine being for her. She wondered if he even desired her physically any more. He was absent, reflective and brooding, his brow often creased as they say at dinner or held each other watching television on the sofa and eating dark chocolate.

She did not accept that he could be stressed or that his teeth were again playing up (she had arranged and sent him to her dentist and he had suffered his third root canal surgery). It had to be what was occurring outside the warm tension of their apartment and she assumed he was cheating on her and had to get down to the truth. It betrayed itself in many ways, in the way conversation dried up in the middle of his sentences, when he sometimes showered directly after entering the house and did not pause to kiss her as she sat under textbooks at the living room table, studying the civil code; it was in the missed calls and the lack of enthusiasm she detected on the end of their long distance phone calls, in the sound of people, women's voices in the background when she spoke to him during the patient congress; it was in his reluctance to introduce her to people in his office or to meet her there after her day was finished; in his general avoidance of Smolenskaya as a place for them to meet.

So gradually, locked and brooding in such thoughts, Natalia resolved to check up on him more frequently, to get behind his lies. She watched him as he checked again his messages before going to sleep, she questioned the necessity and implied he was expecting to chat to people (whichever people) and she demanded to know his itinerary for the next several weeks. She started to deny him sex, accusing him of being selfish in bed.

'Why do you always want me to go down on you? This is what you always want. You don't care about my pleasure at all.' She threw one of their cuddly toys at him with the sudden wrath of a child.

'Tell me what you want.'

'I am tired of telling you. Anyway, you are bad at it.'

'You always seemed happy.'

'Vanya, most women you will ever meet will be faking it. And you thought they liked it!' She squealed delightedly, sarcastically seeing the momentary look of consternation flicker across his face. 'You don't know how to find my clit.'

'That isn't true...'

'Once. In our whole relationship. Perhaps twice, you made me come.' She insisted.

So she subjected him daily and he submitted, secretly resentful yet otherwise meek like a flagellant pilgrim, stubbornly content to pay the price for a journey deeper into her inner self.  He drifted into the world of their past, rubbing his forehead and visualizing the times when they were together in harmony and he would bring her freshly-cut flowers down all the platforms of all the metro stations at the heart of Moscow in an effort to make her smile and show him her world.

He sat with a headache at his desk, disinterested in the scientific articles before him and thought about last autumn.  When they talked, in a train compartment on the journey to Tula, she was close and warm under her sweater and her body enveloped him as she clung to him and talked in a half-whisper of her past life.  She had kissed another girl, she had been addicted to amphetamines, ecstasy and weed, and had had panic attacks; the memory of it haunted her at night, when she would grind her teeth in sleep and turn fitfully and troubled from side to side in her bed.

And her bed was their bed for, although small it was hers, it belonged to her as he belonged to her, and dearly he loved it. He loved her standing by the mirror and brushing out straight her perfumed hair, naked and lovely, his perfect woman, visible to him as he lay there under the blue-green duvet and marvelled at her body's secrets that revealed themselves to him brilliantly and pure. Her white skin, her plush slenderness, her long graceful back that was straight as a crisp waterfall, her painted toe nails and the small yet plush shape of her feet.  Most of all he loved to watch her looking at herself intently in the mirror as she brushed her hair, lips pursed and eyes fixated on her image in the glass, almost brutally untangling the tangles of it with the brush, which was an instrument of perfection.

And then she would come to him, her warmth merging with his on the warmer side of the bed which he had heated, waiting, and she arrived switching out the light in a torrid and overwhelming stream of kisses, their hearts pressing together, their feet tenderly together and their caresses almost drawing blood, their mouths filling up with the taste of black, unbounded love; she would cover his skin, eclipsing him in a gaze both regal and terrible, clawing at him with her fingernails and turning him over and over in the night.

Outwardly, he was cheerful, mixing with people at the office and lingering on a Friday evening, in shirtsleeves, to drink beer or vodka with Seva in the atrium bar of the business centre.  Inwardly, he was in a tailspin and felt that any day his emotional helicopter was going to fall from the sky and burst into flames. He felt less and less in control of himself, spinning, rotating, feeling desire for other women who seemed incomparably softer and gentler, in contrast to Natasha who wanted him to suffer inside a prison of jealousy and possessive clinging.

He wondered if she really understood dedication to anything other than herself. He worked, he talked with doctors, he pushed hard so they had dry blood spot kits on their shelves in the remoter parts of Russia to do the genetic test for metabolic diseases. Their relationship gave him strength and he used it to do his work properly, to avoid it being just another indifferent expat living the Moscow lifestyle.  And this propelled him blindly forward, trusting in her understanding of his thoughts without communicating them explicitly.

He was often away, often working late in his small office next to the team, who had long departed home. He spent two or three evenings a week with Ludmila trying to improve his basic Russian with the help of cardboard pictures and blurry photocopies from old teaching textbooks she provided in abundance. He learned the days of the week, the cases, the verbs of motion, the seasons and the lakes, the forests. He learned vocabulary and prepositions, many adjectives. And he tried to string them together into meaningful statements and small talk.

In Kievsky Station

Standing close to the station entrance, Vanya tasted winter.

The air bit into his flesh through the flimsiness of his coat, through the delicate paper shell of his soul.  And he felt pain and loss.  Standing outside, all the people were blurred objects, flowing past abstractedly, he could neither feel them nor reach out to touch them.  A crowd flowed over London Bridge. So many...He smoked dejectedly, head down, eyes glancing outwards from under his Kazakh cap, its ear-flaps pulled down, his cold feet shifting furtively and his thoughts turned inward; except for acknowledging the cold he was a statue.  He backed away as an old couple passed by.  Vanya was ashamed to smoke in the face of old people.  A thought struck him.  She could have passed along the other side of the concourse, unseen among all these dark, hurrying shapes. But stubbornly he waited for Natalia to come.

He felt both alone and comforted in busy places, flowing with strangers.  He stood near the information board and watched them come and go.  He saw people hurrying along to catch a homeward train or hovering beside the coffee bar and the flower stall; a fat man in a sheepskin cap fingered some pink chrysanthemums.  People of all ages were here in the throng passing over the concourse, whose density ebbed and flowed with the coming and going of trains.  Vanya, abstracted, distant, saw scarves, satchels, sacks of potatoes, a colourful dress fluttering beneath a sealskin coat, boots - so many boots - and suitcases wheeled along squeaking like mice.  He watched a waiter unfold a plastic table cloth and spread it airily over a small square table.

Natasha, two weeks ago, stealing into the bedroom in her red polka dot pajamas, had lightly folded her arms around his shoulder-blades, and smoothed out his chest with her hands, straightening his posture, as was her wont when he stooped forward, hunched from too much desk-work or sitting on planes.  She held him for a long moment encircled in her slender arms and gazed at him directly, her familiar smell rising to meet him, her honey-coloured eyes large and glimmering in the lamplight.

He was careful to stay upright  when they walked, hand in hand, through the streets to the apartment, or she would dig into his ribs with fingernails the colour of ochre, sharp even in their gloves, or suddenly turn and bite his shoulder, as though he were a disobedient puppy.

'Straight!' Though soft, her voice was strict, echoing down the years the voice of her gymnastics instructor from her hard childhood in Krasnodar, when every day by reason of her scoliosis she had been forced to stretch over a medicine ball to straighten out her spine.  However, as usual, her tone was subtly mocking.  Vanya only half-believed that she could be so strict, or think that he was not listening to her.

Natasha was changeable. She was above compromising.  She could bite, scratch or wrestle him to the floor and pin his arms and legs, rendering him immobile; in an instant, she would fling her arms around him and plant a tender kiss, running her nails across his flanks so that electricity flowed to his heart.  He could not resist these attacks, and let himself yield passively to her wounding, teasing caresses. He tried not to flinch away, though she kept surprising him with her shifts.  Sometimes, his reflexes caused him to flinch at her approach, and Natasha's face would immediately furrow with a disappointed look, as though his body had rejected her.

Once she trapped him completely in a headlock, interlacing his shins with her small, bare feet and she refused to release him at any cost, tickling him mercilessly and gnawing the edges of his ears.  He felt a tightening in his chest as a shortness of breath enveloped his lungs. He cried out imploringly for her to stop.  Instead, she whispered in his ear, 'You have to be honest,' and then suddenly released him, with the glare of a triumphant combatant.

'I was being honest,' he winced, fingering a tender ear. 'I told you I was going to Samara for the patient congress three weeks ago.'

'No, you didn't.'

'I'm sure I mentioned it when we had dinner outside.'

Her eyes darkened and she averted her gaze to the floor, about to yield, but then bore down on him with a direct look.

'You have to tell me about your business trips. You are always so secretive.'

He raised a hand, still lying on the bed, and tried to deflect her.  'There is too much going on.  I don't even know what's going through my calendar.  Svetlana just books things. I don't even know about next week.'

'Then how are we supposed to make plans? Am I supposed to just sit at home and wait for you to come back? What about my plans?' She began to pace about the room, gesticulating ominously.

'In a relationship, you have to be honest.  All you think about is your business, all you talk about is work.  And you don't even  have a life, or real friends.'

'Yes I do,' he protested. 'What about Seva? What about Kolya?'

'Those people are not your friends.  You are their boss - you feed them, they are obliged to be friendly with you.'

'I don't believe that,' he defended himself, surprised at her cynicism.

'And you, the director,' she practically sneered the word.  'You shouldn't be making friends with your employees.'

'But we're a small team and we are friends.'

'Those people are not your friends!' she exclaimed, picking up a towel and folding it.

'Then what?'

'Do you even know what a friend is? You are so selfish. And your family. Have you listened to yourself when you talk to your family on the phone? I have.' She daggered a tiny finger at him, and her hands were suddenly more pretty to him, more terrible.  'You only talk about yourself. I never hear you ask about them. How they are doing. What they have been doing.  It is all about you and your stupid business situation. Your issues. You are a selfish son, and a careless boyfriend. I should get myself a real man!'

Natalia was animated now, and threw away the towel. Her eyes flashed and blood glowed hotly in her cheeks.  She seemed to be speaking from thoughts that had been deposited inside her and reasoned through into careful, stinging words calculated to wound him, to subjugate his arrogance and indifference to her pain, to her existence.  She stood directly opposite him, speaking forcefully yet quietly into his face, as if reading from some unseen dramatic script emblazened in her memory by each one of his misdeeds.  Vanya could feel her words hotly flicking his face. Her breath carried towards him. He remarked, afterwards - after they had made up - it was so different from the taste of her mouth which by kissing he knew so well.