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gesture around his neck. ‘Marks,’ he said again and closed his eyes, musing on the nature of suicide. She might have been sick. Lonely. She might have been tired, tired of the bad life. Tired of being a toy for any man with twenty roubles. There were plenty of reasons for the girl to want to die, but she hadn’t strangled herself first, he knew that.
    And now officially they were saying he should forget all about it. Forget the smeared lipstick, the transparent dress. Forget.
    At Glasovskaya Street they helped him up the stairs, helped him fish for his key, helped him open his great creaking door. ‘It’s almost time to wake up and go to the dentist . . .’ he mumbled.
    â€˜All right, have a good night then,’ Hokhodiev said, Dudenko’s hand halfway rising in salute as he closed the door behind them.
    Ryzhkov started undressing but he ended up just taking off his shoes and socks, walking out to the front room, covering himself with a dressing-gown and collapsing on the chaise. After only a few minutes he got up and moved to the writing desk. Under the blotter was the running letter he had started a week earlier. He pressed the nib of his pen into the blotter and made a series of dashes over the paper until the ink began to run, then he began to finish the letter.
    . . . only just returned now from the theatre. Unfortunately I have come down with a severe toothache . . .
    His pen hung paralysed at the end of the sentence. The clicking in his jaw was the only sound he could hear. He let his eyes travel up an empty frame on the top of the desk. He had removed her portrait months earlier, unable to live with Filippa’s relentless staring. What to say? What to say to a wife who was gone, gone away for good, gone away to Lisbon for how long?
    Too long. For longer than necessary. Yes. Unavoidable. Gone for all the right reasons: to help her sister and her children cope while their mother recuperated. Oh, yes. She’d had to go.
    It had turned out to be an extraordinarily long illness. Filippa’s mother was unexpectedly delicate. She had suffered from misdiagnosis, and quarrelled with her doctors. Filippa reported on her medical progress in letters that arrived every two weeks or so. He’d found that if he jotted something each day he ended up with enough for a return letter over the same time period.
    . . . as regards the Tsarevich, now the rumours are confirmed and something is obviously wrong with the poor boy’s health . . .
    She had been gone for . . . how long now? Nearly a year. One of the neighbours was probably keeping count of the months. Ryzhkov sat there and drew little cross-hatchings on the blotter while he did the mathematics of her leaving.
    The calculations got too complicated and he closed the curtain against the constant light. Of course the marriage had been a mistake. It was obvious, should have been obvious on the wedding day itself. They had ‘grown apart’ as one of their friends had said. I grow, you grow, we grow. Oh, yes, that’s understandable. To grow apart, yes.
    . . . there is an entire schedule of celebrations, so many that they will continue through the year . . .
    He saw now that she’d always thought of him as a sort of project . Something that with a lot of work might one day be finished to satisfaction and mounted on the shelf. But after a dozen tearful attempts to push him into a series of more acceptable, more fashionable situations, she had abandoned him to the sordid world of policemen and criminals. ‘You’re like them, you’re just like them. You admire them! You want to be like them!’ she’d screamed at him when she’d finally had enough.
    Now it was her idea that all should be forgiven. No one should be blamed, no one should even get angry. It was a modern world now. A woman leaving her husband, what was new about that? They would continue on as before, only on paper.
    In one of her most recent