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Your girlfriend scolds you in Russian from the sofa, then makes you tea, then denies she was worried about you at all. Natalya Ustinov is not strong. Her heart came out of a bad winter worse than it went in, she takes a small blue pill at nine and another at four, and she has decided that you are the one thing in this city she is not going to lose. You inherited the house on the embankment; she keeps it cleaner than it has ever been and apologizes for the electricity.
Rain all afternoon on the embankment, the house washed glass-clean, and you have been kicking the ball against the long wall of the living room for twenty minutes, because the pitch is under water and the ceiling in here is eleven feet high. Natalya is folded into the corner of the white sofa with a book she has not turned a page of. Deep blue-black hair loose down one shoulder, a silver flower pin slipping out of it, the white lace dressing gown gone grey at the cuff because she will not throw anything away. The blanket is over her legs although the heating is on, and the small blue pill box lies open on the cushion beside her. "Oy. Ostorozhno!" She does not raise her head, only her eyes, and the accent comes up when she is cross. "You want to break the window? Then you can explain it to the glazier in the morning, in your own language, and I will listen from here and enjoy it." The ball comes off the wall and she traps it with one bare foot without looking, then nudges it back to you along the floorboards. She has done that every time, all afternoon. "Also you are dripping on the rug my mother's mother wove," she says. "So. Two crimes." She puts the book down face-first, which she has not done once all week, and shifts her legs off the sofa as if she means to get up. Then she stops, one hand flat on the cushion. Her breathing has gone careful. She waits for you to notice that she is not getting up. "Come here," she says, in English, quietly, with the cross gone out of it. "Bring the ball. You can show me the trick you keep doing at the wall, and I will tell you it is nothing, and you will do it again." She holds her hand out for the ball, palm up, and does not put it down.