Yelena opened the door with a nod. She’d been expecting Vera. The samovar was still warm in the kitchen.
Vera sat hunched at the edge of the leather sofa, which Yelena never failed to mention had been imported from Italy. She tapped her foot, folded and unfolded her hands. All her nervous energy drained to her extremities. A pack of Benson and Hedges lay open beside a silver ashtray.
“Sugar?” Yelena offered, sliding the teacup to Vera.
“They haven’t come today.”
Yelena stirred three scoops of sugar into both teas. She took her time. It was a strong brew. She had a child any mother would be proud of.
“It’s over,” she said.
“But why?” Vera asked.
“Your daughter. She talks.”
Without asking, Vera slid one of the scrawny cigarettes from the pack. Was this why the wolves had returned? For her own daughter’s denunciation? For her? A ridiculous idea, she knew, but in a world so topsy-turvy, superstition was the only rational system of belief. She drew on the cigarette, her first in twenty-three years, and held the tickle in her throat.
“What will happen to me?” Prison, she imagined, was the best possible outcome. She expected something far worse. “Will I be arrested?”
You’re living in the wrong decade, Yelena thought. The police have nothing to do with it. Yelena watched her old friend’s hands tremble ash to the carpet. No, friend wasn’t the right word. What bound them was more enduring than friendship. In school their teacher had applauded Vera for her courage, for her self-sacrifice in the name of the people; and even during the famine of 1947, when Yelena had shrunk to a malnourished sliver and buried her two brothers, Vera had always had enough to eat. And now Yelena wore shoes whose price, even on sale, exceeded Vera’s net worth. In the end the world is just and righteous. One is always compensated for what one has earned.
“What will happen to me?” Vera asked.
“You?” Yelena shook her head. “Nothing will happen to you.”
VERA returned home to find the front door unlocked. An uncapped bottle stood beside the divan, three fingers from full. A trail of footprints began at the back door and ran in a perforated line across the snowy field to White Forest. Her knees ached as she followed the trail toward the trees. She didn’t stop to count the sets of footprints. She recognized the smallest of them.
A crescent of moonlight dissolved in cloud wisps. Snow soaked her boot linings. Decades had passed since she’d last run, but she did, now, adding her footprints to those that entered the forest. In the darkness she lost the trail. She found blown-out tires, mulching waste paper, yellow plastic leaves everywhere, but no footprints. She spun around, sifted through refuse, searched for a sign, a voice, a clue, an answer, a reason. She’d never know that fifty-two minutes earlier and a hundred and sixteen meters away, her daughter had looked toward that same sky. Even through her terror and bewilderment, the trees of White Forest had reminded Lydia of the redwood forest Gilbert had taken her to a week after she’d arrived in America, when she still could speak no more than a dozen words of English, when she still couldn’t believe her luck.
Two men walk in front of her, two beside. She has no shoes on and her feet are wooden blocks fixed to her ankles. Raw copper wiring binds her wrists behind her back in rings of pain. She focuses on her wrists, on the copper infinity wound around them, her skin a frozen lake into which a skater carves figure eights. Beside her the man’s leather jacket squeaks. He pulls a small bottle of motor oil from his pocket, splashes a bit under his arm, and his jacket silences. Ahead, a hole. An oval missing from the ground. Every particle inside Lydia rises. She has something to say. She must articulate the monstrousness of that hole, the impossibility of her ever going in. If they could only feel what she feels, if she could just position the right words in the right order, they would understand. A whimper is all she summons as she’s pushed to her knees. The moon is a distant and indifferent witness. Mute clouds collide. Kolya’s stricken face appears beside hers. He doesn’t want to do this. No one could ever want to do this. This is her life. This is what she has. There’s so much she has to fix. There’s so much she still has to do. She can’t die now, not when she has so little to lose. She tries to explain this but Kolya frowns at her as if she speaks a language he briefly studied but no longer remembers. She bargains. She’ll leave Kirovsk forever, she’ll quit drinking, she’ll go to university, she’ll get a job, she’ll have kids and they’ll have kids, she’ll live a long, happy, useful existence, she’ll turn her entire life around, she’s never felt more powerful, more capable, more aware of what her life might become if they will just give it back to her. Kolya reaches behind her and gently holds her hands. “Close your eyes now,” he says. “When you open them, you’ll be home.” He releases her hands but his voice still holds her. “I’m right here. You’re nearly there.” This is a good thing, she tells herself. This will change me. I’ll be a better person. I’ll be the person I want to be. Everything will be different. This is what I’ve been searching for.
In the flash there’s no final thought, no final reflection, just the breath carried from her body on the back of the bullet.
THAT night Kolya returned to his flat above the space museum that had been shuttered since his father had passed the previous year. His porridge was still on the table from the morning. He set it in the sink and reached his hand out to press his fingertips against the faint square of less faded wallpaper where his mother’s postcard had hung.
To say he felt guilty would ascribe to him ethical borders that were lines on a map of a country that no longer existed. At least, that’s what he told himself. Better to deny the existence of objective morality than to live in its shadow. Better to tell yourself that the world of right and wrong is not the world you belong to. In the bathroom mirror he saw the face of a man his seventeen-year-old self would have disdained with the vanity of someone yet unaware of the many means the world has to break him.
He turned on the VCR. Deceit Web played. Galina hopped on her motorcycle, paved a narrow corridor of speed down a wide avenue, dodged kiosks and pirozhki stands, the bike steered by her flared hips. Her hazy whisper sounded like Galina’s, but it conveyed no sentiment that could ever come from her natural heart. On the bookshelf lay the Polaroid of his family in leopard-print swimsuits, and on top of it the mixtape his brother and Galina had made for him. It struck him that this mixtape, whatever it contained, was the only question he had to which he could ever hope to receive an answer. Everything else was an afterlife he shared with the child whose first birthday he’d celebrated with an upside-down matchstick wedged into a biscuit.
He tucked the mixtape in his shirt pocket, along with the Polaroid, and stayed awake in the blue television glow until the army recruitment office opened the next morning.
THERE was no funeral, no body found to wash and consecrate. Vera still went to church. She didn’t believe in God because there was no evidence that God existed, and now there was no evidence that Lydia had either. Vera stood at the front of the church before an icon of the Virgin and child. The great golden god was helpless in his mother’s arms. Though she held him across her chest, she looked outward rather than at her son.
On her way home, Vera passed a young woman holding a clipboard. She’d seen the woman before, milling about on street corners to ambush innocent pedestrians with solicitations for signatures. The young woman was still naive enough to believe in whatever big ideas she had on that clipboard.
“Would you sign this?” the young woman asked, thrusting the clipboard into Vera’s hands. “We’re petitioning the mayor to turn White Forest into a nature preserve.”
Vera couldn’t believe it. “You’re not from around here, are you? Have you ever been into the forest?”
The woman blushed.
“The trees are made of metal. The leaves are plastic. It was installed forty years ago to make people forget that we’re living where humans don’t belong.”
&n
bsp; The young woman was unperturbed. “Whatever its origin, a rich and vibrant ecosystem has emerged. Feral dogs and cats, yes, but also arctic rabbits, foxes, and even wolves. This biodiversity, unlikely as it may be, deserves state protection.”
“Protection,” Vera slowly repeated, recalling Kolya at her kitchen table, a fat slice of cake on a saucer, explaining why his boss didn’t fear the police. The clipboard clattered on the sidewalk. The strip of concrete, scabbed in gray frost, stretched to the intersection where it linked with another sidewalk, which in turn intersected with another and another, circumscribing the limits of her life. How often had she walked down them silently? How often had she censored her thoughts, her judgments, her beliefs, her desires, consigning them to some region of her soul where they couldn’t betray her?
“Protection,” she mumbled, low enough that the young woman leaned forward to hear her. She had received honors from the Young Pioneers, Komsomol, the ironworkers’ trade union, had been anointed the future of socialism by Pravda, and only now, at this late date, had she discovered a denunciation that had been building in her for all her sixty-three years. She would denounce Kolya, Yelena, Yelena’s son, the gangsters and bandits that governed the city no less brutally than had the prison guards. The commissar, whose hand she’d shaken and whose congratulations she’d accepted days after he sentenced her mother. Her primary teacher, so afraid of Vera she’d never marked a single quiz less than one hundred percent correct, even when the girl left half the questions blank. Her husband, who had claimed cunnilingus was antirevolutionary and had lived so distantly from her that he’d closed the door to the bathroom as he had a heart attack inside. No one was innocent, no one was unconnected, no one was not complicit. The strongest, most damning adjectives she’d reserve for her own silences, if she could only now raise her voice. But it never went louder than a whisper. She didn’t know where to begin. “Protection,” she said over and over as the girl bent over to pick up her clipboard.
Vera’s reaction didn’t surprise the young woman, who had recently watched her own grandmother descend into dementia. The young woman’s grandmother had cursed the clouds, the factories, the loved ones whose faces she no longer recognized. And here, this babushka cursed a nature preserve. One must have patience and compassion for the elderly, the young woman thought, as she took hold of Vera’s hand and shushed soothingly. They are from a different time. “Just breathe. Everything’s okay, grandmother. Everything is fine.”
Vera clutched the smooth hands that had appeared in hers. She’d have fallen without the young woman’s shoulder for support. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized she would never be a grandmother.
A WEEK later, a knock at the door. Vera approached. In the peephole Kolya was a beaky gargoyle. She held her chin in her hands.
“I know you’re there,” he said. “I can see your shadow at the glass.”
She pressed against the peeling paint, willing herself to slide through the wood atom by atom and dissolve.
“I’ve reenlisted in the army,” he said. “As a contract soldier. I’ll be back in Chechnya. You don’t need to worry about seeing me again.”
The mail slot lifted, then fell shut as a manila envelope dropped to the floor. Vera’s insides tightened. She knew what the envelope contained. It had to be true. It had happened before. A final letter from Lydia, her last words transcribed by Kolya under frozen branches. She swelled with a cardiac rush of hope so entire she could’ve forgiven Kolya, right then, for murdering her daughter, if he had delivered a last message for her to save inside the shoebox, beside the final letter from her mother, a last message in which Lydia said the one lie Vera would’ve sold her soul to make true: that she had died knowing she was loved. Vera fumbled with the envelope. It was far too large, too thick, too heavy for a letter. Inside were ten stacks of banded thousand-ruble bills: compensation money.
Vera opened the door, ready to fling the bills at Kolya because this time her silence would not be bought. But he had already receded halfway down the block. She gripped the envelope tighter, afraid she might drop it. The winter still had months of life left. The gas bill was due. The cupboard was nearly empty. It was late in the day, late in the century. Too late to become someone else.
In her bedroom she pulled the shoebox from beneath the bed. The manila envelope wouldn’t fit inside, not with the other envelopes. She withdrew the various letters and newspaper clippings, laid them on the bed, and began stacking the banded bills in the shoebox. When she finished, she knelt beside the bed and prayed for her daughter, for her mother, and finally, for herself.
Palace of the People
ST. PETERSBURG, 2001
“Is there more, Sergei Vladimirovich?” my father demanded the day I received my conscription notice. His stomach filled half the doorway. In the slip of paper pinched between mustard-rimmed nails, he held a half-gram of heroin. My shoulder blades snap-snap-snapped spirals of peeling paint as I slouched down the wall to the bedroom floor and gazed up with the all-iris innocence of a cartoon kitten.
“Is there more?”
The phantoms of two hundred thousand cigarettes and a street pirozhki haunted his breath.
“Is there more?”
He steadied his wheezy frame against the doorway. He was already an old fart when I was a little boy. Now he qualified as antique. I still hadn’t answered his question.
Strength regained, my father lumbered into my bedroom and pulled the drawers from the dresser, plunged shoulder-deep into the hamper, scattered CDs, crunched videocassette cases underfoot, left the mattress listing drunkenly against the wall, the sheets dangling from the bedposts, employing all his considerable bulk to rip and toss, throw and stomp, until it became clear that whatever he searched for was more elusive than the half-gram stashed in receipt paper at his feet. Once everything shelved, hung, or standing was strewn across the floor, he slumped into the rocking chair and finished the final drag of the cigarette I’d left smoldering in the ashtray.
“Is there more?” he asked.
The year before he went to prison, when I was eight years old, he’d taught me to keep silent in an interrogation. He planted one of my mother’s earrings in my coat pocket, kept me home from school, and grilled me in the kitchen with the windows closed, the oven on, the lamps unshaded. Cold cottony clouds ruffled the skies, but in that kitchen I sweltered like flesh skewered on a grease-brown rotisserie. In the end I would’ve confessed to killing Kirov. I opened my mouth, ready to admit anything and everything, but before I muttered a single syllable I felt the wrath of God in my father’s backhand.
“Is there more?” His voice surrendered to my silence. He knew I’d never confess. He knew he’d taught me well.
“More of what?” I finally said, when his repeated question had softened to whispers.
My father just looked at me as if I’d invited in the national billiards team to practice break shots on his nuts. “You talk? A rat as well as an addict. More of this.” He unfolded the paper. A winter wonderland lay in its creases.
“It’s just sugar. For tea.”
“Sugar, right. And do you put it in your tea with a hypodermic needle?”
When you can no longer deny logic, begin denying everything else.
“Do you have the virus?” he asked. His anger had burned away. Only the sad residue of paternal concern remained.
“Of course not.” I’d only shared needles with my three closest friends.
My father stood and trundled to the door. “Seryozha,” he said, without turning back, “until the army takes you, you will spend your days working.”
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll shoot you.”
“That would violate your parole.”
“I’ll claim self-defense. ‘May it please the court, I was only trying to save my son from the lunatic drug addict who’s moved into his room and begun wearing his clothes.’ No judge in heaven, hell, or the national judiciary would convict me.”
Next
morning’s light was unwelcome proof that the world hadn’t ended overnight. I followed my father to the top floor of the apartment block. A dark gash leaked hall light into the metal door of the last flat on the left.
“Do you see this?” he asked, pointing to the door with a fully cocked frown of indignation. What my father lacked in education, he made up for in opinions. I silently prepared to hibernate through the long winter of his lecture. “They make new doors from recycled fish tins and burglars need only a can opener to break in. Bullshit for brains, these—”
The tin door swung open, thank the merciful heavens. On the other side sat the legless man. Late twenties, clean-shaven, hair the greased silver of a ball bearing, smelling of cheap Ukrainian tobacco and burnt vegetable shortening. He sat in a wheelchair. Two strips of pig leather and canvas sagged between rubber wheels—probably the most advanced mode of transport owned by anyone in the building.
“This is my son, Sergey Vladimirovich, but you may call him ‘asshole,’ ” my father announced, then gestured at the legless man. “And this is Kirill Andreyevich.”
“Junior Sergeant Kirill Andreyevich,” the legless man corrected. Only his unimpressed gaze met my outstretched hand.
I poked around the flat while my father spoke with Kirill in the kitchen. I expected chaos, disarray, but only chair and table legs touched the living room floor. A dish rack sat beside the bathtub. A bit of that morning’s oats ringed the drain. Large glass water jars stood along the bathroom baseboard with red rust clouding their bottom centimeter. Did Kirill know something we didn’t? My throat was dry and my mouth tasted like a compost bin, but it’s never a good idea to drink from jars found in a stranger’s bathroom.
Party-approved volumes lined the bookshelves: Red Army field manuals, censored editions of nineteenth-century novels, flinty odes to heavy industries—the sort of kitsch sold to Western tourists outside the Winter Palace or down the Embankment. I picked up a copy of How the Steel Was Tempered. Had I been born a few decades earlier, I’d have been assigned a novel like this in my final year of school, and I’d have known exactly what the book was about without reading it, and I’d have aced whatever literature exam they gave before the UGEs. But I was born in 1983, assigned The Master and Margarita—a long canal to nowhere, that, no wonder Stalin was a Bulgakov fan—and scored a two on the exam. No university wanted me. The army did.