Regina’s voice grew quieter and quieter. Volkov rocked to the rhythm of her words. He was breathing deeply, slowly, and infrequently.
“Venya, can you hear me?” she asked at last.
“Yes.”
“Now try to remember. Feel your way. Don’t hurry and don’t be afraid. It wasn’t you. You weren’t there at all, and you have nothing to be afraid of.”
“There are three of them on the banks of the Tobol, in the city park,” Volkov mumbled almost inaudibly. “And I’m the fourth. Two girls, a blonde and a brunette. The blonde is very striking, with blue eyes, a little plump. Like the girls who used to come out in folk headdresses offering bread and salt to greet visiting Party bigwigs. The brunette’s pretty, too, but in a different way. You sense the breeding in her. People like her were shot in ’18 just for their faces, for the curve of their eyebrows and the expression in their eyes. My granddad could immediately recognize bourgeois or noble bones from their hands. Noble bones are slender but firm. My granddad chopped them with his sword… he could take a swing and chop them in two.”
“Venya, don’t get distracted. Leave your granddad in peace,” Regina intervened cautiously.
“Arrogant eyes,” Venya jerked his head back slightly. “Mocking, dark gray… slender hands, a long neck. If she were to… I couldn’t do anything. I stood up and walked deep into the park. A tipsy girl in a sparkly blouse broke off from her friends. The blouse had gold threads, prickly and shiny. A crude, pimply face, the smell of vodka and sweat… Afterward I wanted to jump into the Tobol, fully clothed, I had blood on me and I stank of someone else’s sweat. The bank was too steep and I heard their voices very close by. The first one to reach me was Mitya. He saw the blood. And he saw my face. My soul was still back there, deep in the park, and he could tell it from my face. It was getting very light, and the dawn was so bright the mosquitoes were buzzing.
“I hadn’t had time to wash the blood from my clothes. I’d wanted them to think I’d been so drunk I’d fallen in the water. All four of us were kind of drunk. By the time the girls came up, I had a grip on myself and they didn’t notice a thing. I said I’d had a nosebleed and they got excited and started fussing over me.”
Regina knew the first part of his memories by heart. Her husband was consistent in his revelations. It had been years since this story, uttered in a state of deep hypnotic sleep, had had a single detail added. Only quite recently had a few substantive details appeared.
“He saw my face and he understood everything. Not right away, but after.” Volkov’s voice was a hoarse monotone. “Eventually he figured it out. It was fourteen years later when he came to see me. He came for me from there and there were the two others behind him, and that meant they’d never let me forget.”
“He’s gone now,” Regina reminded him gently. “And the girls didn’t notice anything then and won’t be able to remember now. It’s been fourteen years. They’re different people now. They’re gone, too, essentially.”
“They’re gone…”
Naturally, it would be better if they really were out of the picture, literally, not figuratively, Regina thought, but that involves a lot of effort, and I have to weigh the risks.
“Clean, clear water is shining all around you. It’s light and warm and tickles your skin in a pleasant way,” she said in her well-modulated voice.
“She’s red from the blood,” Venya whispered, swallowing with difficulty. “It’s dark red and thick. It’s boiling and bubbling, and I’m choking and covered in blisters.” He started breathing hard and fast, gulping air with an open mouth, throwing his head back, pounding his chest with his fists.
“Regina Valentinovna!” The cook’s voice came up from downstairs. “Supper’s ready!”
Regina didn’t answer. She knew Lyudmila wouldn’t call a second time because that was the rule: if the mistress didn’t come right away or respond, that meant she was very busy and not to be disturbed.
Volkov’s face turned scarlet. Fat blue veins bulged on his forehead. He was breathing raspily, beating the air with his fists, and muttering something unintelligible. Anyone walking in on this scene would have thought the billionaire producer was having an epileptic fit, or in his death throes while his wife observed the scene calmly. He could die here and now and she wouldn’t bat an eye.
When it seemed as though Volkov was just about to give up the ghost, Regina clapped lightly and said one word in English: “Enough!”
Volkov fell still, first tensely, in an unnatural pose, his head drawn back, his mouth wide open and his arms flung up and back, and then he started to relax, slowly, like a balloon having its air let out. His breathing became calmer and slower, and his face turned abruptly white before taking on a normal, healthy color.
He opened his eyes and sat calmly on the rug. Even in the low light of the table lamp he looked not just good but excellent, as if he’d just been on vacation at an expensive resort—only without the tan.
“Thank you, Regina dear,” he said in a low, velvety voice, kissing his wife’s cool hand. He sprang up lightly from the rug and, wiping his damp palms, asked, “How are we doing on supper?”
CHAPTER 8
Ever since she was a little girl, Katya Sinitsyna had considered herself both deeply unfortunate and deeply unlucky. Even in kindergarten she got blamed for other children’s misdeeds. All the way through school, there’d been no end to her troubles.
Katya was a good student and especially liked math and physics. Her classmates copied her homework and tests. Katya sincerely believed she was doing a good deed by letting them copy the answers to a few physics or math problems. She obligingly put her homework notebook on the windowsill in the school toilet so during the long break, a good five or six people could take advantage of it—that is, as many girls as fit with their notebooks on the wide windowsill of the girls’ bathroom.
At tests, Katya managed to write down the answers using carbon paper and pass them on to her suffering neighbors. The first time she was caught was in eighth grade. The bald little physics teacher in his dark blue lab coat pushed her out of the classroom, erased the test from the board, and quickly wrote a new one.
Katya was taken to the principal, her parents were called in, and she was punished as harshly as the rules allowed. She was lucky she wasn’t expelled. Katya thought her classmates should have appreciated her heroism and given her her due for her self-sacrifice, but the reaction was nil. Just as no one had been her friend before, no one had any plans to be her friend now.
The school Katya went to was the best in Khabarovsk. It was a special English school with a concentration in mathematics. Only children of the Communist Party and military elite could get in. Katya’s mother was a dentist at the elite’s military clinic, so her family’s connection wasn’t exactly direct. They’d accepted Katya at the school because her mother treated the principal and the head teacher.
Children of the elite lived by special rules. For them, people were divided into two categories. First and most important was the small handful of the select. For all the rest they used the contemptuous word “populace.” The word, even the very concept, had been borrowed from their parents.
Everything was different for the populace—their way of life, their morals, even their sausage, which was like cardboard, inedible and nasty. The sausage situation had always been bad in Khabarovsk, and the populace stood in long lines to buy it. An elite child looking at that kind of line through the window of his papa’s Volga was only reinforced in his contempt for those who hadn’t had the good fortune to belong to the close and cozy little world of the select.