In their final weeks, they spoke to each other only through functions: “Can you pick up some milk?”; “The lightbulb in the bedroom needs changing”; “Are there any clean towels?” There were times she felt close to him, reminded of what she once had, when a tremor of their intimacy would stir her into recognition. The scent of him. Or when he reached past her or stood near her, the disparity in their size, the natural protection he offered. In these times she wanted to reach out, place a hand on him, say a vulnerable word, knowing this was an impulse he shared. But they couldn’t bridge that void, articulate what they needed to articulate. Their language had been unlearned, and it had become too painful now to recall.
Now Maria has a folding bed that they keep behind the couch. Maria has two pairs of shoes, one of these so worn that water seeps through, and so they are only halfway practical for six months of the year. Maria has one pair of earrings and underwear so greyed it looks, and feels, as if it has been fashioned out of concrete. She has a faltering nephew and a long-suffering sister. She has a duty to them.
She doesn’t have ambitions anymore, she has responsibilities.
She flicks matches over the railing. They spit hot flame and twirl calmly to the ground, end over end, disappearing from sight after four floors. She’ll run out of matches and look up, turn around, walk into the kitchen, and ten years will have elapsed. Already she’s surrounded by the past. It seeps into every moment. Like the smallest things that remind her of her father. Someone cracking an egg. Someone sweeping snow from the bottom of their trousers. In the subsequent years there were no letters or postcards, no word sent back about him, and this leads her to believe that whatever happened had happened quickly. If he was locked away somewhere, they would eventually have heard about it. So there was no prison. They didn’t even know if it was the KGB or someone whom her father had informed upon, some family whose lives he had ruined.
After the disappearance, their mother came to Moscow and joined the Lubyanka queue for information. The final refuge of the most desperate. Maria was already studying in the Lomonosov by then, and Alina was married in the city, living south of the river. They took the queuing in shifts, Maria and Alina joining her when they could. They brought each other soup and warm blankets. A ten-day queue. The line snaking from Chistoprudny Prospekt all the way down to Nikolskaya Ulitsa, coming to an end at that small brown door where they had a three-minute audience with a KGB officer who told them, “No information, come back next week”; and people would walk from that door and return to the back of the line, beginning it all again.
Eventually, after a month of this, their mother crumbled. She lay in bed for weeks, wailing and sleeping. They fed her with whatever they could find, stewing old vegetables, leftovers from the market. Often her bed was soiled, and one sister would wash her down while the other scrubbed the mattress.
They placed her in a residential home and, to pay for it, Maria took work in Kursk as a cleaner in a hospital, moving from Moscow because any job that doesn’t need a qualification is filled years in advance. So she went to Kursk and cleaned and saved and Alina stayed in the capital and did the same and they’d visit their mother on alternate months and look into her eyes and search for a gleam of life, hoping she would show some signs of progress.
Alina joins her.
“He’s in bed?” Maria asks.
“Yes. He’s tired. Have you some left?”
The bottle is passed. Alina takes a shot, then smacks her lips, letting out a rasp.
“Look at us. Disappointed women firing down cheap vodka on a concrete balcony. My diagnosis is that we need men,” Maria says.
Alina smiles. “Yes. Men. Remember what they were like.”
“I’m not fussy, you know, not now, I’ll take any old thing: fat, missing teeth, hairy back. One who never remembers how to use a knife and fork. Even one who spits out his tobacco on the streets.”
“Ah. A man who spits. Is there anything sexier?”
“Nothing. Nothing that God has created in his blessed name can be sexier than my fat, hairy-backed, gap-toothed, tobacco-spitting man.”
“Don’t forget the bad table manners.”
“Oh yes, a man who spits on the street and eats with his fingers.”
They shoot out a brief giggle and pass the bottle between them.
They once had men, both of them. They are attractive; Maria can view this objectively, or can at least try to. Perhaps it will happen again.
She phoned Grigory three times after their meeting this spring. Two calls to his apartment. Another to the hospital. His secretary said he was away on business but she’d give him the message when he returned. Maria is half glad she didn’t get through, though. Yes, it would be good to see him, to have him in her life once more. But what then? They couldn’t go over old ground. She couldn’t take him through all her reasons, all that happened around that time. It’s not something she can burden him with.
And yet. Those few minutes in the hospital, when they waited for Zhenya’s X-ray, were such a comfort. Simply to be in his presence was a recognition of the connection they had, a reminder that only the end of their marriage was fatally flawed.
Alina’s husband was killed in Afghanistan. Serving the cause. Maria wasn’t sorry and neither was Alina. He was violent and bigoted; brooded in the apartment; drank with his friends; drove military jeeps into walls just to see how sturdy they were. He cleaned his nails with his army knife, thought it gave him an edge, but it only served to intensify his pettiness, his military vanity. They never spoke of him but both frequently wondered how he had managed to produce Zhenya, the Mendelssohn-obsessed, little, lovable freak.
“He wants a pet.”
“Zhenya?”
“Of course Zhenya, who else do we talk about? He wants a parrot.”
“And? I would have thought it wasn’t particularly strange for a nine-year-old boy.”
“Well, it’s not, except for the fact that he is who he is and lives where he lives. But that’s not why I brought it up. It’s what he wants it for, that’s the killer.”
“Well?”
Alina pauses. It’s the privilege of the older sibling to tell a story with impeccable timing and poise. Her ability to hold Maria in thrall has never wavered since the two of them shared a bed as children and Alina told rambling, fantastical tales. Stories featuring villains with several limbs and princesses with secret, unattainable powers and lines that could cut you bare, faultless scalpel lines that described entire universes in an instant. She honed this gift to early teenhood, Alina the master storyteller, and they can both feel it rise up again, that authority she holds when she wants to titillate her little sister.
“He wants me to teach it to talk.”
She pauses. An exquisite pause.
“So he can still hear my voice if I die.”
And they look at each other, the pathos of the simple request working its way into the backs of their eyes, and then they buckle into laughter at precisely the same moment, tears streaming down, their lungs heaving with the gale of unfettered, unrelenting mirth, because they both know this child, both have an understanding of his kooky ways, the kid who spends entire days humming Mendelssohn but can’t get his timing right, who can recite multiplication tables up to obscene numbers but can’t handle long division, and they let all that has been pent up flow through their ribs and find its expression in full-mouthed hysterics.