Igor's mother's birthday is in November, and every year that birthday has us going in circles for a week.
She lives in the Kirovsky district, alone, in a flat where nothing has changed since the father died. It's forty minutes to get there with a change, and Igor goes once a month and I go once in two, because it isn't that she and I dislike each other, it's that we don't know what to talk about, and we both understand it and we both try.
"What shall we give her?" I asked on Wednesday.
"She'll say she doesn't need anything."
"She always says that."
"And is offended every time if you bring nothing." Igor was sitting in the kitchen mending my bag, whose strap had come off, though I hadn't asked him to. "A blanket, maybe?"
"She has three blankets."
"A fourth won't hurt."
We discussed the blanket, then a kettle, then agreed that her kettle is a good one and that you can't insult a kettle. Then Igor said we could take her somewhere, and I asked where, and he couldn't think of anything.
"She used to go to the philharmonic," he remembered suddenly. "With the father. He'd get her tickets, they'd dress up properly."
"You never told me."
"I didn't remember." He thought. "I was about six. They took me to the neighbour's."
He thought a bit more and added that the father fell asleep at the philharmonic anyway, and the mother knew it, and they went anyway, because she liked going out into town.
I said tickets were a good idea. Igor said she won't go alone now, and he can't go with her, because he'd fall asleep like the father.
It ended with our buying a shawl, an expensive one, warm, grey-green, and the mother said there had been no need for anything, and put it on in front of us, and then went to the mirror three more times.
At the table she talked about the neighbour whose granddaughter has married a foreigner, and about how at the clinic everything goes by appointment slips now and you have to get the slip at six in the morning. Igor said he would drive her himself. She said there was no need. He said he would. She said there was no need, but in a different voice now.
Then she remembered she had photographs and brought the box.
There were a lot of photographs, and I had seen almost all of them, but one I hadn't: Igor's father at a workbench, shot from behind, in a workshop, and not in ours but in some other, larger one.
"And where's this?"
"Oh, that's somewhere at their work." The mother looked at it and put it aside. "He wasn't there long."
Igor took the picture, looked at it and put it back, and we went on with the tea.
When we were leaving she came out with us onto the landing and said to me separately, in the doorway, so Igor wouldn't hear:
"Feed him better. He's thin."
Igor is not thin. He has been like that all his life.
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