His mother gave him a puzzled glance. "You look pale, Ganady. Maybe you should go for a walk. Tea, Yenna?"

"Tea would be good."

Ganny glanced at his pile of RSVP's. Forty-two. But in which pile? He couldn't remember whether he'd been counting from right to left or from left to right.

He got up and slipped silently from the kitchen, leaving the two mamas to their tea.

oOo Standing in the dining room of the The Samovarom, Ganady reflected that even in the worst case, the evening would be over in five or six hours. Less if, as must be the case, his betrothed would fail to appear.

The banquet table was resplendent: the tablecloth was royal red, the place settings shone mirror-bright, the cutlery gleamed, and the crystal sparkled in the light of myriad candles.

Family members were beginning to take their seats, faces garbed in smiles. Smiles were the involuntary (if obligatory) reaction to the rich stew of aromas oozing from the kitchen. Ganady's own lips tugged up at the corners, ignoring the roiling of his stomach. He made a game of cataloguing the smells: galobki, kielbasa, roast capon, babka, sweet red cabbage with caraway seed.

A hand clapped him on the shoulder and he found himself peering into Yevgeny's bright face.

"Sit, Ganny. Sit!" His friend pointed him to a seat on the right hand side of the Puzdrovsky end of the table.

A place of honor. He would sit at his father's right hand, across from his brother, Nick. And at his own right hand, his bride-to-be.

Maybe, Ganady thought, I can sneak out through the kitchen.

He glanced that way, but Yevgeny had stopped pointing and started guiding, not stopping until Ganny was safely deposited in the honorific chair.

He could hear the kitchen door swinging to and fro, beckoning him. From the corner of his eye, he could see other seats beginning to fill. He stared down into his plate. His own features looked back at him, distorted and clownish.

Yevgeny and his beloved Nadia seated themselves on the opposite side of the table, two seats to Ganny's right.

Ganady sighed and glanced obliquely at the empty chair next to him.

His breath stopped in his throat. The seat was not empty. It was occupied by a huge c.o.c.kroach, its carapace gleaming, its antennae waving festively.

Ganady couldn't move. He couldn't avert his eyes. He couldn't speak. His face blazed with sudden heat and he could only sit and burn.

Vaguely he was aware of his Baba Irina's eyes upon him from her seat directly opposite the chair The c.o.c.kroach occupied.

"Ah, Ganny!" Rebecca Puzdrovsky planted a kiss on her youngest son's cheek, cupping his stooped shoulders and shaking him lightly. "Now where is your tei-yerinkeh-your sweetheart?"

Ganady started, ripping his eyes from The c.o.c.kroach. Words failed him. His tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth; his throat was dry as dust. He knocked the cleverly folded napkin from the careful place-setting to the seat of the chair, hiding the creature.

Before his muteness was noted, his father slid into his seat at the table's head, laughing. "No doubt she wants to make a grand entrance, that girl."

Ganady made his lips do something he hoped was a smile, and nodded. His fiancee's flair was well known-everyone had heard the tale of the rug, the galobki, and the babka. Everyone could see the evidence of her elegance in the exquisitely woven carpet that lay beneath the centerpiece of this very table.

His smile stayed frozen in place as he watched his mother's hand enter his field of vision, reach down, and whisk the rich red napkin back to the table.

The kvitch she uttered was most likely heard across the river in Camden. The napkin fluttered into the air, and the chair tilted backwards to hit the floor with a solid thud, expelling The c.o.c.kroach. It tumbled to the carpet, where the napkin engulfed it.

"Ai!" shrieked Rebecca, leaping back from the fallen chair. "Ai!"

In answer to the flurry of questions from around the table, she pointed and stamped her feet, following the progress of the napkin, which seemed to have taken on a life of its own and which was now in full flight toward the kitchen door.

"Is it a mouse?" asked Nick, hovering three feet away. "You want I should put it outside?"

"It's a c.o.c.kroach!" shrieked Rebecca. "Kill it!"

The c.o.c.kroach scuttled into the kitchen, napkin camouflage and all. Rebecca lifted an empty tray from a serving cart and gave chase.

Ganady shot to his feet and followed.

In the kitchen, cooks scattered as the madwoman rushed about with her tray, kvitching and invoking Jesus, Mary, the Father, and Moses in turns. Ganady could barely keep up with her.

Around and around the central prep table they danced and dodged. The napkin was nimble, graceful, cagey. It darted back and forth beneath the butcher's block; it lost itself under the bread rack.

"Mama!" cried Ganady, reaching for her-for the great, deadly silver tray. "Mama, let me-"

"Ah!" she crowed, rounding the butcher's block for the fourth or fifth time. "Now, you filthy bug!"

There the napkin sat, unmoving. As if, at last, Rebecca Puzdrovsky had worn its wearer out. She raised the tray to strike.

The kitchen door swung open and Baba Irina appeared around it. "Ravke! What are you doing? The rabbi is here, and your priest, as well. Why are you hanging about the kitchen and not greeting them?"

Ganady took the opportunity to step in front of his mother. "Mama, Baba is right. You should be greeting our guests. I'll take care of this. You shouldn't have to smash bugs today, of all days."

She hesitated with the tray hovering over her head. "And you should?"

He tried to smile. "I should learn how to do it now-for Svetlana."

"Come, Ravke," said Baba, and her daughter lowered the tray.

Ganady relieved her of it and ushered her to the door where he handed her over to Baba Irina. His grandmother met his eyes briefly, her look enigmatic and opaque.

He made sure they had returned to the dining room before he went back to where the napkin still lay on the black and white checkered floor by the butcher's block. He was surprised to see it there. He'd half expected the creature would have scuttled under cover.

He lifted the napkin. There was no c.o.c.kroach beneath it. There was no c.o.c.kroach beneath the butcher block. No c.o.c.kroach beneath the bread rack. And, he prayed, no c.o.c.kroach on the soles of anyone's shoes.

He was down on his hands and knees on the floor when he became aware that someone was calling his name.

"Jeez, Ganny! What are you doing? You lose something?"

My mind, he thought, looking up into his brother's face.

Nick didn't wait for Ganny to answer, but reached down and hauled him to his feet. "Come on. Da wants to get started."

"But-but Svetlana..."

"Yeah, yeah. Grand entrance, just like Da said, and you not even there to see it." Nick grinned at him. "I gotta say, I almost thought you'd made her up, you know? Had the galobki and babka made at that new deli over on Eleventh. But here she is, after all."

He was steering Ganady toward the door now.

"She-she's here?"

"What'd I say? And beautiful as a movie star, and with a platter of cruschiki that Mama would kill for." He paused to look at his brother bemusedly. "What's with you? C'mon, let's go."

Ganny clutched at Nick's sleeve. "She's here?"

The look turned suspicious. "You two have a spat or something?"

"Uh..." said Ganny. "Yeah. A spat. We had a spat and I wasn't sure she'd come."

He stepped through the kitchen doors, propelled by Nick's insistence.

The girl sitting in the chair next to his had hair the color of a wheat field at sunset. She had her back to him and was engaged in animated conversation with her fellow brides-to-be-Antonia to her right and Nadia kitty-corner across the table. She wore a long, satin dress with voluminous sleeves that fluttered gracefully as she moved her hands in conversation, and of a green so dark it was almost black.

He returned to his chair like a man walking underwater, his eyes riveted on the girl in the seat next door. She was beautiful, radiant, with a laugh like music. She was not even remotely like either a c.o.c.kroach or a ghost. She was as perfect as he had dreamed her. She was Svetlana.

She caught sight of him as he settled into his chair, and smiled as if the sun had just that moment risen. She held out her perfect hands.

He took them and gazed into her perfect eyes. They were green, just as in his dreams and visions. In fact, she was exactly as he had dreamed her, down to the last detail. Except that her hair fell in golden waves only to her shoulders.

She smiled at him. "Did you think I wouldn't come? Didn't I promise I would come?"

"I dreamed that," he murmured. "Didn't I?"

She laughed, her mouth falling back into the repose of a lopsided grin.

Vitaly Puzdrovsky rose at that moment and proposed a toast to the three brides: Antonia, Nadezhda, and Svetlana.

Mouldar Toschev, in turn, toasted the three grooms. Nikolai toasted the family of his bride-to-be and Yevgeny toasted his.

Vaguely, Ganady realized it was his turn, but his fingers were wrapped about the stem of his wine gla.s.s and would not lift it. Out of the corner of his right eye, he saw Nick lean in past Svetlana and raise his gla.s.s.

"To Ganny's mystery girl. I have to admit, brother, some of us thought you'd made her up and that we'd now be hearing excuses as to why she couldn't come tonight. Welcome, Svetlana Gusalev."

Svetlana's sweet laughter trilled over shouts of "L'Chaim!" and "Na sdrovya!" Ganady could only smile weakly, but he did get his goblet to rise from the tabletop. His brother had put voice to his exact plan-to make excuses. Because surely he had made her up. Hadn't he?

"But your family..." worried Rebecca.

Svetlana tossed her golden head and shrugged her perfect shoulders and said, "My father and I had a bit of a falling-out...over the family business. I haven't spoken to him for a very long time. That's very important to my Papa-the business." She looked sad, as if tears were close.

Glancing about the table, Ganady realized she had won their sympathy with that and wondered at her words. They weren't untrue...if his dreams could be trusted, if he had really seen her on moonlit Sabbaths, if Mama had really heard her voice and Stan Ouspensky seen her at a ghost baseball game. If, if, if...

This was it, then: The Moment. The moment in which Ganady must finally (unless, of course, we was dreaming) come face-to-face with the reality of Svetlana in the waking world. He had gone back and forth, believing this, then believing that. She was real. She was a dream. She was a c.o.c.kroach by day and a girl by night. She inhabited his head. She inhabited his heart. She inhabited this Moment.

He peeked at her now past a curl of obscuring and unruly hair. So which was it? he asked himself. Had the creation of his dreams stepped out into the real world his family inhabited? Were she-this perfect girl-and the ever-present c.o.c.kroach one and the same? Or was he dreaming?

Or was he completely, unequivocally mad?

She seemed to feel his eyes on her and turned to smile at him, her short cap of golden hair winging against her cheeks. It had been a yard long and bound into a braid the last time he'd seen her...dreamed her. No...no, it had been tucked up beneath a baseball cap.

He swallowed. "You cut your hair."

She raised a hand to it. "I hope you don't mind."

"Oh...no. It's nice like this. Well, it was nice long, too, but..."

"But so old-fashioned, don't you think?"

"I don't mind old-fashioned," Ganny said and found himself unable to pull his eyes away from her.

"I can grow it again, if you like."

"Only if you want to."

"Galobki, Ganny?"

He looked up to find Yevgeny grinning at him as he pushed a platter of stuffed cabbages across the table.

"A waste," said Vitaly Puzdrovsky. "The boy is too enchanted to taste the 'pigeons.'"

"A pity," added Baba Irina, "since his Svetlana makes such galobki as a czar should envy. You should get her recipe, Ravke."

"I should get your recipe," agreed Rebecca eagerly.

Having received from his wife's own lips tacit permission to praise his daughter-in-law-to-be's cooking skills, Vitaly Puzdrovsky pa.s.sed the platter and launched into a litany on the subject of Svetlana Gusalev's galobki and her babka as well. Not to mention that her weaving skills had led to the creation of the extraordinary piece of cloth beneath the centerpiece of this very table.

Ganady's cheeks burned with a strange mixture of embarra.s.sment and pride. Pa.s.sing the galobki, he caught the rueful glance that pa.s.sed across the centerpiece between Annie and Nadia.

"A treasure that is," his Da was saying. "As fine a piece of weaving as I've ever seen."

And his mother asked, "Wherever did you find such thread?"

Ganady dropped his eyes to the hand woven runner. It was, he thought, a work of art-the golden threads gleaming softly in the candlelight, contrasting the vivid colors woven at the edges. There was no doubt-it was an exact match for her hair.

He looked up to catch her smiling at him. "It was just something I had on hand," she said.

Nadia leaned across the table, her face a peculiar blend of envy, hope, and wariness. "I don't suppose you'd be willing to share the recipe for your galobki? Eugene would very much like that, I imagine." Her eyes slid sideways to Yevgeny, who grinned.

"I'd be happy to," Svetlana a.s.sured her. "You know, there's really no trick to it. It's the cut of meat you start with and the spices in it. My father makes sausage, so I learned all about spicing meat from him. I'd be happy to share what I know."

Under her bright, gracious smile, Nadia melted. The paragon was not above herself, nor did she intend to h.o.a.rd her favors. From the corner of his eye, Ganady saw his Baba Irina smile, while around the table the other grandmothers and mothers and daughters-in-law-to-be shared looks that said Svetlana Gusalev had just hit a triple.

His plate full, Ganady Puzdrovsky allowed himself to relax-to enjoy the food, drink, and company. Svetlana was real and she was here. This was no dream. He could taste the spicy galobki, feel the cabbage virtually melt in his mouth.

He was cutting into the roast capon and listening to the happy banter around him when he beheld his bride-to-be take a galobki from the platter and laughingly slip it up her voluminous sleeve. She made no attempt to conceal the act, so every eye at that end of the table was glued to her when she shook out her sleeve and released a quartet of beautiful white and gray speckled pigeons into the air.

Ganny quickly revised his a.s.sessment of his state of consciousness. Now I will surely wake up, he thought. But he didn't.

Vitaly Puzdrovsky went from open-mouthed astonishment to laughter. "Bravo! Bravo! Ganady, what amazing talent has your Lana. How is this done?"