She might try cleaning the house — her boss used to say: “When I hit bottom, like when they gave me the diagnosis, the same as my sister’s and she’d just died — well, I came home and just started mopping the floor.” This was always followed by the tale of the diagnosis — magically mistaken! And the lesson was, Don’t give up! Keep the floor clean!

The laundry, the dishes — everything everywhere after last night’s preparations for that idiotic birthday with her husband’s college friends. So Olga should clean up and all the while think about how no one does anything to help her? Her husband will get up, hungover, won’t look them in the face, will nag, yell, brood over the magic vision of the little girl from last night, the daughter, that’s right. Then he won’t be back until evening. No, she needs to get out, get away, hide somewhere. Let them take care of themselves for once in their lives. She’s tired.

And then Olga realized: Why not visit the only place on earth where no one will turn her away, where they’ll always be happy to see her, where they’ll sit her down, make her tea, ask how she is and even invite her to stay over; why not visit their old landlady, from the dacha, where they lived so many years in a row when Nastya was still little, and she and Seryozha still hoped for a better life? She was an especially dear memory, this landlady, for Olga; with her complicated relations with her own mother, Olga had become attached to this stranger, this wise and touching old woman. She even seemed beautiful to Olga, and kind, and clever like a child. Meanwhile Baba Anya had been long divorced, if you can say that, from a daughter who never visited and was sleeping around on a grand scale, and who left the mother something to remember her by in the form of little Marina, a beaten-down creature in black hair who was afraid of everyone.

Yes! When you’ve been abandoned by everyone close to you, do a kindness for a stranger, and you’ll feel the warmth of their gratitude on your heart, and it will give your life meaning. And most of all, you will find a quiet refuge, and that’s all we want from our friends, isn’t it.