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.”
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.