It was a daring thing to do, staying out all night, but she doesn’t want to do it again. For one thing it was too humiliating, coming back with West on the streetcar and then the subway, unable to think of what she should be saying to him, then being lifted up by him and deposited on the fire escape platform like a parcel. For another thing, sleeping outside the bedroom with both of them inside it made her too unhappy.

She didn’t sleep, anyway. She couldn’t, because of the sounds. Thick sounds, unknown sounds, deep sounds, haircovered and snouted and root-like, muddy and hot and watery sounds from underneath the earth.

“I think your mother was a romantic,” says Zenia, out of nowhere. She is mixing batter for the langues de chat she’s making; Tony is sitting at the table copying out her own history notes for Zenia, who as usual is short of time. “I think she was in search of the perfect man.”

“I don’t think so,” says Tony. She’s a little taken aback: she thought the file on her mother was closed.

“She sounds fun-loving,” says Zenia. “She sounds full of life.”

Tony can’t quite understand why Zenia wants to excuse her mother. She herself has not done so, she realizes now. “She liked parties,” she says briefly.

“I bet she tried to have an abortion, and it didn’t work out,” says Zenia cheerfully. “Before she married your father. I bet she filled the bathtub up with boiling water and drank a lot of gin. That’s what they used to do:”

This is a darker view of her mother than Tony herself has ever taken. “Oh, no,” she murmurs. “She wouldn’t have done that!” Though it could be true. Maybe that’s why Tony is so small. Neither of her parents was particularly diminutive. Maybe her growth got stunted by the gin. But then, wouldn’t she be an idiot as well?

Zenia fills the shallow moulds and slides them into the oven. “The war was a strange time,” she says. “Everybody screwed everybody, they just cut loose! The men thought they were going to die, and the women thought that too. People couldn’t get used to being normal again, afterwards.”

Wars are Tony’s territory. She knows all this, she has read about it. Plagues have the same effect: a panic, a hothouse forcing, a sort of greedy hysteria. But it seems unfair that such conditions should have applied to her own parents. They should have been exempt. (Her father, the Christmas after her mother ran away, standing in the middle of the living room with an armful of glass ornaments, standing there in front of the-’’ naked Christmas tree as if paralyzed, not knowing what to do. Herself going for the stepladder, taking the ornaments gently from his hands. Here. I can hang them on! He would have thrown them, otherwise. Thrown them against the wall. Sometimes he would pause that way, in the middle of doing a simple thing, as if he’d gone blind or lost his memory. Or suddenly regained it. He was living in two times at once: hanging the Christmas tree ornaments, and blowing holes in enemy children. So no wonder, thinks Tony. Despite his increasingly drunken and fragmented and, yes, violent and frightening later years, she has more or less forgiven him. And if Anthea hadn’t run away, would he have ended up on the floor, with his blood soaking into the morning paper? Not likely.)

“She abandoned me,” says Tony.

“My own mother sold me,” says Zenia, with a sigh. “Sold you?” says Tony.

“Well, rented me out,” says Zenia. “For money. We had to eat. We were refugees. She’d made it as far as Poland before the war but she’d seen what was coming; she got out somehow, bribery or something, forged passports, or else she went down for a bunch of train guards, who knows? Anyway, she made it as far as Paris; that’s where I grew up. People were eating garbage then, they were eating cats! What could she do? She couldn’t get a job, God knows she didn’t have any skills! She had to have money somehow”

“Rented you to who?” says Tony.

“Men,” says Zenia. “Oh, not out on the street! Not just anyone! Old generals and whatnot. She was a White Russian; I guess the family had money, once—back in Russia, I suppose. She claimed to be some sort of a countess, though God knows Russian countesses were a dime a dozen. There was a whole bunch of White Russians in Paris; they’d been there since the revolution. She liked to say she was used to good things, though I don’t know when that would have been.”

Tony hasn’t known this—that Zenia’s mother was Russian. She has only known Zenia’s story of recent years: her foreground. Her life at the university, her life with West, and with the man before him and the one before that. Brutes, both of them, who wore leather jackets and drank; and hit her.

She examines the cast of Zenia’s high cheekbones: Slavic, she supposes. Then there’s her slight accent, her air of scornful superiority, her touch of superstition. The Russians go in for icons and so forth. It all makes sense.

“Rented?” she says. “But how old were you?”

“Who knows?” says Zenia. “It must’ve started when I was five, six, earlier maybe. Really I can’t remember. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have some man’s hand in my pants:”

Tony’s mouth opens. “Five?” she says. She is horrified. At the same time she admires Zenia’s candour. Zenia doesn’t seem to get embarrassed by anything. Unlike Tony, she is not a prude.

Zenia laughs. “Oh, it wasn’t obvious, at first,” she says. “It was all very polite! They would come over and sit on the sofa—God, she was proud of that sofa. she kept a silk shawl draped over it, embroidered with roses—and she would tell me to sit beside the nice man, and after a while she’d just go out of the room. It wasn’t real sex, at first. Just a lot of feeling up. Sticky fingers. She saved the big bang till I was what she called grown up. Eleven, twelve ... I think she did fairly well on that one, though not many of those men were filthy rich. Penny-pinching shabby genteel, with a little put by, or some shady trade. They were all in the black market, they all had an angle, they lived in between the walls, you know? Like rats. She bought me a new dress for the occasion, on the black market too, I guess. I made my debut on the sittingroom rug—she never let them use the bed. His name was Major Popov, if you can believe it, just like something out of Dostoevsky, with brown crusts up his nose from taking snuff:He didn’t even take off his pants, he was in such a hurry. I stared at those embroidered roses on the fucking shawl the whole time. I offered up the pain to God. It isn’t as though I was sinning for fun! I was very religious, at the time; Orthodox, of course. They still have the best churches, don’t you think? I hope she got a hefty slice out of old Popov. Some men will give up a lot of lunches, for a virgin:’

Zenia tells this story as if it’s a piece of casual gossip, and Tony listens, electrified. She has never heard of such a thing. Correction: she has heard of such things, more or less, but she has heard of them only in books. Such baroque, such complicated European things don’t happen to real people, or to people she might meet. But how would she know? These activities might be going on all around her, but she doesn’t see them because she wouldn’t know where to look. Zenia would know. Zenia is older than Tony, in years not so much, but in other ways a lot. Beside Zenia, Tony is a child, ignorant as an egg. “You must have hated her,” says Tony.

“Oh, no,” says Zenia seriously. “That wasn’t until later. She was very nice to mei When I was little she made me special meals. She never raised her voice. She was beautiful to look at, she had long dark hair braided and wound around her head like a saint, and big sorrowful eyes. I used to sleep with her in her big white feather bed. I loved her, I adored her, I would have done anything for her! I didn’t want her to be so sad. That’s how she was able to get away with it.”