Readings

I

On the twenty-fourth, Viktor Ilyich Shumilov sat down at the kitchen table. He had done it every month since 1994. In front of him lay the ledger, a flashlight, and his reading glasses.

The ledger was thick and bound in green cloth. He had ruled the columns himself: date, electricity, gas, cold, hot. The last three came when the meters went in. Before that he used them for the outdoor temperature and his blood pressure. Just so the boxes wouldn't sit empty. Thirty years at the rail dispatch station had taught him one rule. Every movement goes on the chart. Otherwise you can't say it happened.

The bathroom and toilet shared one small room, like every flat in the building. Viktor Ilyich opened the access hatch behind the toilet and shone the flashlight in. Cold: forty-one point three one eight. Hot: twenty-nine point six zero four.

He went back to the kitchen and wrote it down. He subtracted last month and sat looking at the numbers.

Three point eight cubic meters of hot water.

He didn't use that much on his own. He had worked it out back in spring. That was when he first took over the bills. Nina used to handle them. He washed fast, like a soldier, and rinsed the dishes under the cold tap. The washing machine ran off the cold pipe. One and a half cubic meters, two at most. March through July, it came to one and a half.

August came to three point eight. September, three point nine.

With Nina it had been four.

He closed the ledger and listened to the fridge relay click for a long time. Nina used to get up at six forty. That gave her an hour and twenty before her shift at the bakery. She stood under the shower twenty minutes, sometimes twenty-five. And she sang in there. He lay in bed behind the wall. He listened to the gas heater roar. Later the heater went and the building got hot water. Then it was the riser that hummed. Nina came out pink, in her terry robe. He grumbled after her: "Nin, you're pouring all our money down the drain." She laughed. "But I'm a clean wife, aren't I?"

She died in February. Seven and a half months ago.

On Sundays Andrey called from Tyumen. He asked about his father's blood pressure and whether he was eating properly. Viktor Ilyich said "fine" to both. Then they were quiet on the line. Andrey would say, "Well, okay, Dad, I've got a shift." Viktor Ilyich said nothing to his son about the meter. Andrey would think his father was counting kopecks. His father was.

In the morning he called the management company. The dispatcher listened and tapped at her keyboard. She said the meter probably needed its calibration check. A technician's visit cost eight hundred rubles. A failed check meant a new meter. That was another nineteen hundred, plus labor.

Viktor Ilyich objected. "But it isn't lying. It turns. I've watched it."

The dispatcher answered without any malice. "Then you're using it, sir."

He hung up. Arguing with a dispatcher was beneath his professional dignity.

II

He did what he would have done at the station. He started a chart.

Every hour, from seven in the morning to eleven at night, he opened the hatch. He wrote the hot reading in a separate school notebook with squared paper. By the evening of the second day the picture was clear as a timetable. During the day the meter stood still. In the evening, when he washed, it moved forty or fifty liters. And between eleven at night and seven in the morning, another hundred and ten. A hundred and twenty.

He set the alarm for five and started writing every half hour. He couldn't sleep anyway.

Six thirty to six forty: zero.

Six forty to seven ten: one hundred seventeen liters.

Viktor Ilyich looked at that line. His lips went numb. He had known, of course. He had known from the first day. He just hadn't let himself put it into words. A train driver knows when the train won't stop in time. He keeps his hand on the brake anyway.

He called a plumber. Rustam came, the same one who had replaced the faucet when Nina was alive. Tanned, with a little beard. He smelled of tobacco and machine oil. Rustam tapped along the riser and checked the valves. He crawled under the tub with a flashlight. He looked at the meter for a long time.

He straightened up and wiped his hands. "No crossovers. Nobody's running their water through you. The meter's fine. Maybe a tap drips at night?"

"Dry. I checked. I put a slip of paper under every tap."

Rustam shrugged and smiled. He seemed about to make a joke. Then he looked at Viktor Ilyich and changed his mind.

On the morning of the twenty-eighth Viktor Ilyich sat on a stool in the hallway. The bathroom door stood open in front of him. The heating hadn't come on yet. He wore his coat over his undershirt. The flashlight beam rested on the glass of the meter. He had left the hatch open on purpose.

Six thirty-nine. Upstairs somebody flushed. Down in the yard somebody was warming up a car. Six forty.

The little red wheel on the dial trembled and began to turn.

He got up and went over. The shower head hung dry on its hook, and the tap was off. He laid his palm on the faucet. Cold. Then on the pipe by the meter. Hot. Water was running through it, he could feel it with his hand. The way you feel a pulse in someone else's wrist. The water ran and went nowhere.

He stood there a while longer, and the wheel kept turning. The bathroom was cold with the door open. And it smelled of chamomile. Nina's shampoo. The yellow bottle with the little daisies on it. In March he had thrown it out with everything else on the shelf. He couldn't stand to look at it.

At seven ten the wheel stopped.

III

Tamara Grigoryevna from the third floor caught him by the mailboxes. She had lived under them for forty years and knew Nina from the bakery. At the wake she had cried louder than anyone.

She glanced at the entrance door. "Vitya, forgive me for sticking my nose in. I'm not judging. A man can't live alone."

He didn't follow. "What?"

"Well, that one of yours. The one in the mornings."

Tamara Grigoryevna looked embarrassed.

"She sings. We share the riser, you can hear everything. Just like Nina, honest to God. The first time I had to sit down. Same song and all. 'Oh, It's Not Evening.'"

Viktor Ilyich was holding his gas bill. He stared at it.

"Only she gets the words wrong. You tell her. The way Nina sang it! This one sings like a foreigner."

At home he sat on the edge of the tub. He looked at the riser for a long time. The pipe behind the toilet had been painted maybe a dozen times. He had done the last coat himself, in beige enamel. Under it you could see the drips of every old layer. Like rings in a tree stump.

The next morning he didn't sit in the hallway. At six thirty-five he went into the bathroom and shut the door. He put his ear to the pipe.

At first there was only the hum. That deep hum, several floors tall, that always lives in a riser. At six forty the hum changed. A tune came into it. It was hard to call it a voice. A glass sings like that when you run a wet finger round the rim. Only the finger was far below. In the basement, or deeper.

"Oh, it's not eve-ening… not yet eve-ening…"

He knew it from the first note. Only Nina sang it that way. With that dip in the middle and the long, dragged-out "e."

"…and so little did I slee-eep…"

Next came: "Oh, and in my sleep a vision came." He had known that song for thirty-one years. Nina sang it every morning. First he hated it. Then he stopped hearing it. And all these months he had heard it in his dreams.

Then the voice in the pipe sang.

"Oh, and in my sleep… in my sleep a vis… a visit came."

Viktor Ilyich took his ear from the pipe. His cheek was hot and wet with condensation.

Sings like a foreigner.

He sat on the toilet lid until the wheel stopped. He didn't think about what it was. He thought about the dip in the middle. How did it know that? Only Nina sang it that way. Then he remembered last night. He had been washing and had started humming the tune without noticing. For the first time since February. With the dip in the middle. No words.

On Saturday he borrowed the basement key from the head of the residents' committee. He said he had to check his valve. Rustam had asked him to.

The basement was warm and damp, and every other bulb was out. The floor squelched under his feet. He walked along pipes wrapped in glass wool and tar paper. The numbers were painted right on the concrete. At last he found his riser: "Apt. 15, 12, 9, 6, 3." Every flat in their stairwell, one on top of the other.

The other pipes ran along the wall to the water meter station. This one went into the floor. Straight down into a round hole edged with broken brick.

Viktor Ilyich crouched and shone his light into the hole. The beam went into the dark and found nothing. No bottom, no water, no bend in the pipe. Warm air came up out of it. It smelled of wet concrete and rust. Under a building like this there's a meter of crawl space. A meter and a half at most. Then it's dirt. For thirty years he had studied track diagrams. He knew what things built by people looked like. Everything has an elevation, a depth, and an end.

He picked a chunk of brick off the floor and dropped it in.

He waited for the knock. Then he waited for the splash. Then he just squatted there, listening to the hum, until his knees went stiff. All his life he had thought it came down from above. It came from below.

There was no knock.

IV

He could have stopped. He understood that clearly, with the same cold head he'd had at the station. A train with a burning axle box goes onto a siding. Nobody drags it to the junction.

On the evening of the thirtieth he stood under the shower. He looked at the tiles and sang the line under his breath.

"Oh, and in my sleep a vision came." His voice was hoarse. The tiles gave the sound back. He felt ashamed, the way you do in front of a stranger at the door.

In the morning the voice in the pipe sang that line right.

He taught it for a week, one line an evening. At the shop by the bus stop he bought shampoo. The yellow bottle with the daisies, the same one. They still made it. He put it on the shelf. He took her robe out of the wardrobe. Terry cloth, turquoise, with a pulled thread on the pocket. He hung it on the hook behind the door. Before bed he stood in the hallway and sang toward the bathroom. Then he lay down and didn't sleep. It seemed to him the whole flat was lying awake.

He knew Nina wasn't in there. Nina lay in the town cemetery past the railroad crossing. Fourth row from the caretaker's hut. The earth inside the little fence still hadn't settled. The thing in the pipe hadn't known the words until he gave them. It hadn't known the tune until he hummed it. It took what he gave. The way water takes the shape of the cup.

But at six forty the hum went through the flat. The air smelled of chamomile. In March he hadn't had even that.

On October twenty-fourth he opened the hatch and took the readings. Hot: five point two cubic meters. The cold in the kitchen was up too, by one and a half. Someone was washing dishes. On his drying rack stood one cup, one plate, one fork. All of them dry.

He sat over the ledger and couldn't write the numbers in. For the first time in thirty-two years his hand wouldn't move. Writing them down meant admitting two people lived here.

Then he wrote them in. Otherwise you can't say it happened.

V

That morning the water woke him.

He opened his eyes in the dark and knew at once. The shower was running. The stream was drumming on the enamel. He had heard that sound for thirty-one years. He couldn't mistake it. The clock on his phone said six forty-one.

He went out into the hallway barefoot. Steam was seeping under the bathroom door. It curled slowly in the strip of light on the linoleum, like smoke. The door was shut. All these weeks he had left it open. Every night.

There was no song. Just the water. Then the water stopped. He could hear drops falling from the shower head. And then he heard her voice. Close, right behind the door. The same tone she had used for thirty-one years. Every morning, without thinking:

"Vit. Hand me the towel."

He stood and looked at the door. He had put that latch in himself, in 1989. Brass, stiff. It only closed from the inside.

The towel hung on the radiator in the hallway. He always hung it there so it would be warm. She liked it warm.

He could go back to bed, he thought. Lie down and pull the blanket over his head. At seven ten it would all be over. And tonight he wouldn't sing. He could call his son in Tyumen. Andrey would say, "Dad, what's wrong, Dad, look, I'll come out." And he wouldn't come, because of the rotation. Viktor Ilyich thought about the bill, then about the voice. The voice knew only what he had taught it. Every last word. And he had never once sung it "hand me the towel."

Behind the door someone said, "Vit. I'm cold."

Hot steam crept over his feet.

The latch clicked.

The door eased off the frame by a finger's width and stopped. Through the gap it was dark. Someone had turned off the bathroom light. Chamomile drifted out. Under the chamomile was wet concrete and rust. The basement had smelled like that. At the hole in the floor, where the pipes went down.

Viktor Ilyich took the towel off the radiator. It was warm.

He pushed it through the gap, the way he had for thirty-one years. Someone on the other side took hold of it. The fingers were wet and cold. And they didn't let go.

Behind the little hatch door the red wheel turned and turned.

In the green ledger on the kitchen table, the November box under "hot" stayed empty.