He feels a shove from behind. The men from the poker game pour onto the street, full of hurried purpose. Iakov grabs Yevgeni’s neck and steers him in their direction.
“Come on.”
“Where are you going?”
“We have some things to do.”
“I need to go home. I said I’d be home soon. My mother will be worried.”
Iakov stops, looks at him. Slaps him on the back.
“Of course. We’ll give you a ride. Besides, it’s too dangerous to walk.”
A swell of blue light propels them forwards.
MARIA BOLTS DOWN the stairs, two at a time, feeding the banister rail through her right hand. She’ll find a phone box, maybe down near the Metro stop. She doesn’t want to call from too near her building in case they trace it back. She may trust Danil by now, but she doesn’t know how prominent he is, how much attention he attracts.
She’s careful where she steps. Can’t take a tumble now. Watch out for needles, broken glass. There’s a wad of toilet paper here and there, and she doesn’t want to know.
Mr. Leibniz was right, they’ve mollycoddled the boy. Apart from everything else, this is his moment. Where is his ambition? Does he want to be like all the other kids? Does he see the lives around him and think he wants one of those, wants to dull his imagination, spend all his evenings watching TV, or drinking and talking about inanities with no end in sight? All these weeks she’d been thinking that he didn’t like the pressure, but maybe it was the possibility of success that scared him, that he may have to stand apart in this world. Be something other than average. She knows that if she sees him outside she’ll grab him by the shoulders and shake him. Tell him there are only so many opportunities in life, even fewer if you come from where he comes from.
She bounds down the last flight and comes to a stop beside the lifts. She needs to hurry but not look as if she’s hurried. She doesn’t want people asking why she’s running to a phone box. Word will get back to Alina, or others. She’ll be asked why she didn’t make the call from home.
She hands around some cigarettes, asks the men drinking meths if they’ve seen a boy wandering around. They look at her, trying to figure out what she wants to hear before answering. She doesn’t wait to listen to their replies: she should know better than to ask.
The faces of dead soldiers leer down at her, the pages almost transparent with the lights on behind them, phantoms all of them.
She finds herself scanning cars, trying to make out if there are figures in the front seats waiting for her to pass, whispering into radios while heaters on the dashboard trickle out streams of warm air. She heads towards the phone box near the school. She waits at the traffic lights, and ranks of cars pass slowly by, ploughing through black sludge, causing it to fan out from their tyres.
They’d be leaving now, Anna and Nestor and the rest of her colleagues, no doubt resenting her, having to give up their evening to hear some spoiled brat. The lights turn red but she doesn’t cross. She wonders what happens if tonight doesn’t go ahead. Will she need to flee? Word will surely get out. You can’t have a plan as extensive as theirs and keep it a secret for too long. The supplies alone will give them away. Danil may have been able to get them into the building without any fuss, but try getting them out again. Her fate is being played out without her. She has no control over the next few hours. Why did she not pick Zhenya up herself? Too much faith, that’s why. All of this turning on the fulcrum of a nine-year-old boy. Of course it was bound to go wrong. She crosses the road at the next opportunity and passes the school, graffiti tainting the lower part of its façade, crawling up past the window ledges, coming to an abrupt end at the height of an outstretched arm. People pass, returning late from their shifts, many with dust or dirt on their shoes and jackets, determined to get home, their bellies cavernous. A twist of her shoulders to avoid a collision. It’s not just manual workers though, unskilled production drudges like herself; men walk by in suits as rumpled and baggy as their skin, looking downwards, too weary to face the horizon, their only wish to be alone.
She reaches the phone box, saying a silent prayer that the thing still works. She doesn’t grab the handset, she clutches the cord instead, pulls on it, and it doesn’t come away in her hand. Miracle of miracles. She pushes some kopecks into the slot, takes the number from her pocket, and dials. Even in this, a phone call, she’s taking an enormous risk, the possibility of a recorder automatically spooling in some dark room, her voice transferred to tape. The call connects and she hears a single beep, a machine; it could be Danil’s, it could be someone else’s. There should be a code, she thinks, some prearranged, ambiguous phrase, but there isn’t one. She thinks quickly and says enough to get the message across: “He isn’t back. We can’t go ahead,” and then hangs up.
She puts the handset down and walks hurriedly away. The pace is probably unnecessary; they can easily find her if they are in fact looking. She should go home and pack a bag, get a train somewhere, try to mitigate the risks for Alina and Zhenya. She can be out of the city in an hour or two.
Everything goes dark.
Maria stops in terror. Her long-held fear has come to pass: blindness has come upon her. She used to wake in the middle of the night and wonder if she had lost her sight. The fear is still so present that she insists on keeping the hall light on, so when she wakes in this state she can look at the glowing seam under the door and reassure herself. She never thought it would happen while she was still awake.
But no, there are shapes, a moon, cars cresting the hill. Her panic releases. The power is out. She starts to run. Alina will be in a state. If she had managed to stave off fearing the worst, she will no longer be able to do so. Her child is out there, in the black. Her worst fears will be unleashed.
Maria runs for a few minutes, then stops; she has no idea where to turn off for home. She crosses the road and then crosses back. All the shadows the same, all the buildings indistinguishable without their surface features visible She needs to find the school, a different building from the rest. She can navigate her way from there.
She slows and passes two men and sees their attention fixed on a point behind her, hands held in the air bearing witness, and so she turns, looks where they are looking. Fireworks blossom over the city, umbrellas of bright blue sparks burst open, distributing delight, a gasp of wonder from unseen figures nearby.
She walks steadily now, her heart rate returning to normal, and she finds the school and turns and traces her way home by instinct. She moves in the opposite direction to everyone else, people emerging from the buildings to stand in the road and stare, people coming together to stand and gaze and murmur speculation with strangers and friends alike. They yearn for surprise, a moment of wonder, which they’ll chew over and savour and return to in the months ahead.
Maria finds the multilayered voices calming. Her childhood fear has abated now. Lights will return—already she feels certain of this—bringing Zhenya with them. She’ll pack a bag and be gone from their lives before morning. The unknown holds no fear for her; she’s spent enough years swaddled in ignorance. At this very moment, on the other side of her country, the sun is rising. So much out there for her. She sees the horizon pushing out like an old carpet being unrolled.