Ia leaned closer, putting a friendly hand on my arm, adding conspiratorially, “Baki and I used to be like that all the time, before the children came.”

“Flexible?” I asked.

Ia laughed, sitting back, taking her tea up again. “That and other things.” She sipped through a smile, memory perhaps, and then her face lit again. “Oh! Bakhar has tickets for the Dinamo game this weekend in Batumi, he's taking Koba and he has an extra, he wanted me to ask if you cared to join them.”

“Who're they playing?” I asked, more out of reflex than interest.

Koba answered without pausing from his game. “Spartaki!”

“We're all going down,” Ia said. “Tiasa and I are going shopping, then we'll meet my boys after the game for dinner. You should come! Yeva should come! She could go shopping with us!”

“I'm sure she'd like that,” I said, thinking that it was the last thing Alena would want to do.

The bed Bakhar and Ia slept in would've been called a super king if it'd been in the UK, just a king if it'd been in the U.S. It sat with its foot to the door, headboard against the wall opposite, with enough space on each side for a dresser. On the left side, as you faced it, was a nightstand, and the lamp had fallen from there. On the right there was nothing, and when I finally could bring myself to look up from Bakhar, I saw his wife, or rather the top of her head, the streaked blonde hair that she paid twice a month to be carefully dyed and styled in one of the salons near the beach. She was slumped in the corner, between what had been her side of the bed and her dresser.

Ia had fallen on her knees, or perhaps been forced to them. She was wearing pajamas, a billowy satin top and companion pants, turquoise and violet beneath a pattern of red roses, as gregarious as she had been. The three buttons on her top were missing, though the shirt had fallen closed when she'd collapsed, a comic nod to modesty in the obscenity of the room.