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.