After it breathes itself out they find themselves hunched against the wall. Maria lights a cigarette, and they compose themselves under the bare bulb’s light. And now they have two items to pass, the vodka and a cigarette.
Maria is the first to break the silence.
“Another city, where would you go?”
“East or west?”
“Whichever.”
“The big ones. The ones with good TV and plenty of hair spray. Paris, London, New York. Maybe Tokyo.”
“Tokyo?”
“Yes, the lights. I imagine they have a neon skyline. And the cramming of people in the underground train. And to be a foot taller than everyone else. To look down on everyone from a height. To be the queen of the rush hour.”
“Tokyo. But you’d have to bow fifty times a day.”
“Well, that would be another reason. The bowing, all these little people paying homage to me. And you?”
“A city with a white beach and women who drink from fancy glasses. A city with palm trees. I’ll do what foreigners always do, open a bar on the beach. You can come and sit, wear large sunglasses, be mysterious, and Zhenya can play for tips, take requests from drunk honeymooners. Maybe even get a little action for himself.”
Alina palms her on the side of the head. More a sweep of the hair than an actual strike.
“What, the boy will never have sex?”
Alina scrunches her face and flails around Maria’s head, both laughing again. With who else could they let their guard down like this, become schoolgirls again, enjoying surreptitious cigarettes and speculating about boys?
The moment passes and they take another drink.
“The hand exercises. You know about these?” Maria asks.
“Of course I know. The kid’s obsessed. I come to wake him in the morning and he’s lying there with his arms up towards the ceiling, bending those skinny wrists.”
“You know about the rose clippers?”
Alina stops laughing, alert now. She doesn’t like it when Maria notices something about her boy before she does.
“What about them?”
“Nothing. A funny thing, that’s all.”
An edge to her listening.
“So funny that you won’t say what it is?”
“Well. It’s nothing. I found him a couple of weeks ago, that’s all. He was clenching and unclenching a pair of rose clippers.”
Maria does the action.
“Where did he get them?”
“Evgenia Ivanovich downstairs—you know how she likes her flowers. It’s not important. Anyway, he’s clenching and unclenching and I ask him what he’s doing and of course he says, ‘Nothing.’ So I keep pushing and he says he’s strengthening his hand. And I say, ‘Why are you strengthening your hand, surely it’s strong enough?’ And he says, ‘When I’m in the audition, and the other kids are there and we shake hands. I want to crush them. I want them to be scared of me.’”
Maria tails off as soon as she’s said this. When it comes out of the mouth of a nine-year-old, one as bedraggled as Zhenya, there’s a ridiculousness in the schoolboy bravado. But the words coming cold, straight out of her own mouth, carry a supreme sadness. Even music, beautiful melodies become an instrument of power here. The kid is constantly surrounded by forces that want to crush him to dust.
“I think he’s still being bullied.”
“Don’t worry. He’s a stubborn kid, he’s smarter than any of them. He’ll do okay.”
“The other day, I get him to slice some carrots. I tell him to roll up his sleeves—why add to the laundry basket?—he refuses. I get suspicious. I walk over and pull up his sleeves and there’s a red mark on his arm. He says they call it a Chinese burn. He says it’s nothing, some game. Says it’s just a thing they’re doing.”
“It’s a Chinese burn. This is what kids do.”
“Since when? It never happened when we were young.”
“It happened, it just never happened to us.”
“Meaning?”
Maria didn’t mean to bring it up. The age-old argument leaking out again, slipping its way between sentences.
She sighs. “Meaning what it means.”
Alina shakes her head in disbelief.
“And so it begins. Cling to it, dear sister, cling to your bitterness. What else do you have?”
Maria shrugs her shoulders.
“It’s not bitterness. I’m just willing to recognize him for what he was.”
“How do I spend my hours? In a hairnet pulling sheets from a line, feeding them through a mechanical roller. Ironing like a madwoman in the evenings. I have a mouth to feed; he had four. It was some extra money. A side job. People, the few who knew what he did, understand that. There are such things as shoes and bread and soup. I never saw you refuse them; our bones never jutted like some other children. Necessity. People understand, even now. Those who know.”
The tension rises, a particular tension for this particular subject.
“It was not laundry work. It was not even work. And people don’t understand. And everybody knew, everyone knows. Name his friends—go ahead, count them. Who came to console us when he disappeared?”
“They were frightened. They didn’t wish to be connected. They were all involved to some extent. He took no pleasure in it. How can you make this be anything else? We had dolls, we had books. Do you think you would have led the life you did if we had no books?”
“It was not just a side job.”
“Did he beat us? Did he make her life a misery? Not him. Be ashamed of those men instead. Set your life against those men. I say it again: you had dolls.”
“It was not a side job. The day that you realize it, that day will arrive.”
“Well, I’m not young and it has no marking on the calendar. I’m still waiting.”
Neither of them speaks. Maria goes back inside and places the pressed clothes into a delivery bag, one hand on top, one on the bottom. She puts a saucepan of water on to boil and spoons tea into the pot.
Their father went to the races on a Saturday afternoon and never returned. There were no explanations or justifications for his work, how he betrayed others, led them to a life of imaginable misery. They couldn’t sit with him, understand him, listen to an old man’s regrets. Only a void remains, and it continues to wrap around their lives, tying them together in ignorance.
Maria sits listening to the water boil, currents of the past lapping inside her. The clank of a card hitting the metal bucket occasionally makes its way into the apartment. It’s always like this. The recurring subject that dominates their lives. Every lengthy conversation comes around to it eventually, teasing out the intangibles, the unknowables. Because who really can have a clue as to why Nikolai Kovalev did what he did, pushing his little wood pieces, aligning all his forces. Maybe it was valour or self-sacrifice or vanity or greed. Maybe it was something he never thought about, just numbers on a sheet, little codes. Maybe he was more worried about his opponent’s opening gambit or the exposed position of his rook.
Alina shuts the balcony door and places the near-empty bottle on the kitchen counter. She wets the tea with the boiling water and waits for the leaves to settle into zavarka. Maria watches her by the reflection in the glass door.
Alina fills the pot and takes down two cups and puts them on the table, letting the tea stew again, then, after a few minutes, pouring. It smells strong, relaxing. Maria thinks that she’d like to take a bath, but she’d have to clean off everyone else’s scum first, not something she’s prepared to do right now. Instead she tells Alina about the meeting.