I had not intended a confrontation quite so soon; but she was provoking it. So let her find out! I hurried up this prospekt, down that boulevard, through the alley, over the square. Workers hurried by wearing stiff caps. Fat old ladies bustled with bundles. I ducked down a narrow street, through a lane, to another street. Did Grusha realize that her gait was springier? Perhaps not. She had not lost her youthful figure.
At last, rounding a certain corner, I sprinted ahead and darted behind a shuttered kiosk. Waiting, I heard her break into a canter because she feared she had lost me. By now no one else was about. Leaping out, I caught her wrist. She shrieked, afraid of rape or a mugging by a hooligan.
"Who are you?" she gasped. "What do you want?"
"Look at me, Grusha. I'm Valentin. Don't you recognize me?"
"You must be ... his son!"
"Oh no."
The distortions wrought by age, the wrinkles, liver spots, crows' feet and pot belly: all these had dropped away from me, just as they always did whenever I took my special route. I had cast off decades. How else could I enjoy and satisfy a mistress such as Koshka?
Grusha had also shed years, becoming a gawky, callow girl --who clutched my arm now in awkward terror, for I had released her wrist.
"What has happened, Colonel?"
"I can't still be a Colonel, can I? Maybe a simple Captain or Lieutenant."
"You're young!"
"You're very young indeed, a mere fledgling."
"Was it all done by make-up--I mean, your appearance, back at the Centre? In that case how can the career records...?"
"Ah, so you saw mine?" Despite the failing light I could have sworn that she blushed. "Make-up, you say? Yes, made up! My country is made up, invented by us map-makers. We are the makers of false maps, dear girl; and our national consciousness is honed by this as a pencil is brought to a needle-point against a sand-paper block, as the blade of a mapping pen is sharpened on an oilstone. Dead ground occurs."
)
