1.

Why was Ulyana putting it off?

Because she was scared, that’s why. Because it was better not to know than to know: as long as you didn’t know for sure, you could still live your old life, your own life. You just had to find some way to keep the anxiety at bay, some way to distract yourself—in your free minutes, scroll Reels or TikToks, chat with Kristina—and in the evenings, while boiling pasta or frying potatoes, put Radio Mom on speakerphone: what the neighbors were up to, what was happening at the store, how things were in the garden. Then a little series, then a scalding-hot shower, then a tickle with the vibrator, then flop—and into the dark. And then another day just like it, and the same people, and the same ways to kill time.

Maybe if she waited, it would all go away by itself. She just had to stop thinking about it: let it drift somewhere nearby, like a fog or a shadow, and leave it there. Don’t give it a name, don’t summon it. Just buy some time. It would get tired of waiting and pass.

But it didn’t pass.

No matter how hard Ulyana tried to keep it out, no matter how she turned away from it, it kept thickening all the same. Something was congealing in her belly, and at the same time—mirroring her belly—growing heavy in her solar plexus: not a tumor, not a wound, not a premonition, but an understanding now. Ulyana had a suspicion what the answer would be, and that was why she was so afraid to ask the question.

But it kept ticking away in there all the same, seconds stretching into minutes, minutes into hours, days clicking past, and it piled up, piled up. She couldn’t think about it, but she couldn’t think about anything else either.

Ulyana kept recalling the times—the last one, the one before. She asked herself how it could have happened; they’d been careful, hadn’t they? But not everything came back to her—there were gaps, nights blurred by alcohol, of which only brief flashes remained, and she couldn’t even tell whether she was remembering dreams or some wild waking reality.

She counted the days, counted them again, but there was nothing to figure out from the numbers: Ulyana’s body was all out of whack, out of sync; she could never count on it being punctual. It was always one thing or another with her—especially after she’d stopped taking the pills. But why had she stopped? Idiot.

Her head turned to jelly, the air turned to jelly, and she could barely swim through that cold jelly. People asked Ulyana things: clients, her boss, Kristinka, her mother, and it took a long time for their words to reach her. She answered sluggishly, because sound had a hard time getting through the jelly. That cold jelly was fear.

She was putting it off because she knew she would have to make a decision. And there was no way she could make it on her own.

How many times had she walked past the pharmacy and looked at the cross, unable to make herself go in. But one morning she woke up and knew for sure: she’d get up now, wash her face, and go. Maybe something had happened in a dream—the nighttime Ulyana had ordered her daytime self to stop putting it off, then forgotten the order on waking. Or maybe she’d simply realized it was time to lance the boil. Ulyana got up, cooked herself some porridge, dumped in extra sugar to give herself courage, and trudged to the pharmacy—not her usual one, but a different one. Without looking the pharmacist in the eye, she asked for a test. She came home and took it.

Well, there you go. Two lines.

Tatyana was hanging wallpaper. The wallpaper had a pattern: barely visible silhouettes of leaves, acacia-like. Beige, pale, serene. You could confidently put it up in an asylum to calm the violent ones down. Vitalya was standing on a stepladder, balancing on the very top rung, shining the yellow nail of his big toe through a hole in his sock into Tatyana’s eye, and pressing the top edge of the roll into the white paste, while Tatyana slowly rolled it down, smoothing it out and pushing the air bubbles toward the edges so everything would be nice and even.

Vitalya was panting and swearing. He didn’t feel safe up on the ladder; his knees were shaking. Tatyana, though she barely came up to Vitalya’s chest, could have climbed right to the top and stood there steady and cool-headed, but there was no way she could trust Vitalya to smooth the wallpaper. His hands were unreliable, and he would definitely roll the strip on crooked, smear the paper they’d already put up, and ruin all their work. He’d done it before; he’d been yelled at and beaten for it, and still he kept doing it until he was taken off the job.

There was barely enough wallpaper for the living room: better to buy less at a higher price than more at a lower one, Tatyana had decided. They’d waited too long for this renovation, for this apartment. Their whole lives, it seemed, they’d been waiting. So now she didn’t want any compromises; now she wanted to live it up. Who knew if they’d ever get to renovate again. Probably not now.

Tatyana pushed the bubbles to the edge with her spatula; the acacia leaves pressed against the whitewashed wall, and with every stroke it got better. It was becoming even, becoming clean. At last, life was doing what Tatyana told it. It was yielding to her plump, crimson hands, as if scalded, smoothing out, lining itself up in rows.

Even Vitalya, making a show of suffering up by the ceiling, running up the price so this bit of cash-in-hand work might earn him some future favor, didn’t particularly irritate her—as long as he stood there, held it, while Tatyana rolled strip after strip of that soothing beige forest across the living room.

She needed work. She had to do something. Whatever you could do, you had to do. Whatever you couldn’t do, you couldn’t do.

Vitalya started whining, said he needed to pee. Tatyana warned him not to move: wait till the end of the roll, don’t you dare. She knew what would happen—he’d lock himself in the toilet and smoke. But she couldn’t be a complete tyrant with him, poor thing.

The beige strip joined the row of beige strips; the last little bubbles came out of it like air from a drowned man, and Tatyana grabbed a leg of the stepladder. Come on down, then.

Vitalya locked himself in the toilet and, of course, lit up, while Tatyana went into the kitchen. For now it looked as if it were being rebuilt after a bombing: the linoleum was still ripped, but the nice tiles were already laid; one wall had been skim-coated, while another was stripped bare and cracked; the table and stools were temporary, made of planks, but the sink had already been bought and was standing there.

They did it this way: whatever they’d paid for arrived, they got to work on. The apartment looked like a gypsy shack or a junkie’s den, but through the chaos and dirt a bright future was gradually emerging: Tatyana and Vitalya were covering the old with new, painting over mold in white, pasting beige over the torn bits. It was someone else’s apartment, scuffed and filthy, but it had three rooms and was seventy-two square meters; strip by strip, it was being repainted into their own place, where the bedroom would finally be theirs, and the kids would each have a room of their own at last.

Tatyana brushed the crumbs off the table, smoothed the towels, and put the kettle on the gas. She sat opposite Sasha’s icon shrine, which took up almost the whole windowsill. She looked at her son.

There were three photographs here. In the first, he was standing in his school uniform with a bouquet of flowers that was too big for him. His first day of school: a fair-haired little boy, skinny, eyes wide, wearing a frightened smile. In the second photo, taken after technical school, he was sitting with his grandmother—Tatyana’s mother—on a bench beside her house, his sunburned arm around his grannie. Behind them were boards bleached by time; apple-tree branches crept into the edge of the shot; shadows and sunspots fell across their faces as rays broke through the leaves. Grannie leaned her head toward him, smiling through her wrinkles, while his eyes were closed: the camera had clicked at the wrong moment, and he’d been too lazy to take another. In the third picture Sasha was standing in military uniform. It was the most recent, taken just two months ago, so he looked more like himself in it than in the others—and less like himself, too. The same frightened first-grader’s smile was pasted on his face, barely holding; his back was hunched, as if weighed down by a backpack full of textbooks, although there was no pack in the photo, and with his head shaved his ears stuck out like wings. Vitalya and Tatyana stood beside him, each holding him by an elbow. They all looked straight into the lens: Vitalya foolishly, Sasha uncertainly, Tatyana firmly.

This windowsill triptych was ringed by geraniums, and right there among the greenery and flowers stuck out the nose of a faience gnome in a red hat, as if the gnome were lying in ambush.

Tatyana picked up the childhood photo of Sasha and wiped the glass with a towel: it had been clean, and now it was streaked with grease. She stared at it and didn’t hear the kettle whistling right away.

“It’s boiling, Tan!” Vitalya shouted from the toilet.

“I’m not deaf!” Tatyana called back, coming to her senses.

She put little Sasha back in his place, sighed—not to make a sound, just to loosen the tightness in her chest—and started pouring boiling water into mugs, buttering a loaf, slicing up the doctor’s sausage: they might as well take a break now.

Vitalya instinctively looked around for beer, but found only tea as black as chifir. He fixed his watery eyes on Tatyana and didn’t argue—he knew himself that it wasn’t time for beer yet, and it was better not to bring it up. He scalded himself with the tea, grimaced, scalded himself again, and chewed on the springy sausage, pink as if it had been drawn with a child’s marker.

“We ought to call, Tan.”

“I called. They don’t want to say anything over the phone.”

“Then you should go there.”

“Listen here. Why don’t you go, then! You’re always telling me to go.”

“What am I supposed to do there? Who’s going to listen to me? But you could at least make a little noise. They’re afraid of mothers.”

“Make noise… Sure. They’ve got more mothers like me there than they know what to do with.”

They fell silent, slurping their tea. Of course she had to go—Sasha’s phone had been silent for three weeks already, and her mother’s messages, full of pleas, sat undelivered with a single tick.

The sound of chewing made the silence more audible and more oppressive. So Tatyana turned on the TV to talk over them while they ate. The screen lit up blue; the set sprang to life at the first click:

“Combat operations. The breach of the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ final line of defense in Donbas, along the Kramatorsk–Slovyansk–Konstantinovka line, has begun. Once our troops complete the breakthrough, they will have only one natural barrier left to overcome—the Dnieper. Meanwhile, on the night from Thursday to Friday, our aircraft continued to strike deep behind enemy lines, targeting military transport infrastructure used in support of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. These images show a FAB-500 heavy aerial bomb hitting a dam.”

Vitalya stared at the TV, instantly sucked in, and got to work on the sausage with renewed vigor. The polished presenter paced the studio in front of a huge panoramic screen showing Ukrainian land, gouged and torn up, as seen by something between a bird and a god. The presenter waved his hand, and below, at the beckoning of his fingers, the earth burst open and insect-people died; flames blossomed and clouds of black smoke swelled.

Vitalya gave a satisfied little grunt at every strike. Tatyana watched tensely.

“Today, 187 of our servicemen returned home from Ukrainian captivity. This was the result of an exchange for the same number of Ukrainian Armed Forces combatants.”

Images began rolling of buses bringing the prisoners back to Russia—well-fed, but puffy-faced and looking as if they’d been crying. Tatyana turned up the volume and leaned toward the television glass so as not to miss a single face. They were all strangers, all ugly mugs, somebody else’s husbands and sons. Tatyana ought to have felt happy for their mothers, but all she could do was get angry. Those ones had been lucky: they’d been found, identified, exchanged. Those ones had been lucky… Sasha wasn’t among the faces in the buses. It wasn’t fair.

“They shouldn’t have brought the Ukrainians back,” Tatyana said suddenly, very clearly. “They shouldn’t. They won’t understand a thing, they won’t learn their lesson. Tomorrow they’ll be out killing our boys again.”

“Well, what else could they do?” Vitalya asked.

“This,” Tatyana said, shrugging her round shoulders. “Shoot them. That’s all.”

“Seventh Heaven Spa, good afternoon,” Ulyana said into the phone. “Yes, we do massages. Jacuzzi, sauna, tanning bed. Until eleven. No, we don’t work nights. No. Uh-huh, all right then, we’ll be waiting.”

She put the phone down and looked at Kristinka. Kristinka, legs up on the purple faux-leather couch, was sunk in her phone. Above the couch, a tropical island printed on canvas stretched across the wall—sugar-white sand, leaning palms, and an ocean the chemical blue of something heavily bleached. Empty loungers stood by the water, inviting Ulyana and Kristinka to strip off and sunbathe, then run in for a swim. So many white grains on that island had trickled down over the years in the hourglass of Ulyana’s boring job. The colors of paradise had gone flat, the ocean had paled, the sun had faded, and a dreary understanding had settled in: the magic island had been manufactured in Photoshop, and there was no way she’d ever get there from this basement.

“Kris! Smoke?” Ulyana suggested.

Kristinka nodded without looking up from the screen and lowered her legs. She was a petite, neat little brunette with bangs like a cartoon pony, charred dark in their free tanning bed. But her hands were strong, and she kneaded stiff muscles as easily as ground meat for cutlets.

They climbed the steps and emerged from the basement’s equatorial timelessness into the sunny, cool Vologda summer. They took out their vapes and breathed them in: Kris had strawberry, Ulyana melon.

Cars rattled along Lermontova now and then; beyond the road flowed a thick, slow river, like condensed milk. Little river trams were stuck in the condensed milk, people drinking beer and laughing aboard them. On the other side, among lush greenery, the Assumption Church gleamed white with its cluster of small domes, each dome reaching separately toward the heavens with its own cross.

Above the entrance to their basement was a sign: “7 HEAVEN.”

The salon seemed to hide in the courtyards, but in fact it was strategically placed: the neighborhood was a complicated one, though it looked green, empty, dusty, and sleepy. Under its lid, all kinds of wires from Vologda life tangled into a knot, and into that knot—with no logic at all—got tangled the eras of Vologda and the whole country, named in the streets around them.

The Assumption Church stood on an embankment named not for itself but for some Sixth Army, while the Prechistenskaya Embankment lay directly opposite, across the river, with a Ministry of Internal Affairs hospital on it. Behind the church was the regional drug-treatment center, and the low university buildings were scattered around the police hospital. The city administration was here too, along with the ornate memorial house where Varlam Shalamov was either born or died; and here too was an enormous Lenin in a raincoat hanging open like an exhibitionist’s, on a granite pedestal as huge as a giant’s tombstone; the Kazan Church, Victory Avenue, Peace Street, the Church of St. John Chrysostom, Maria Ulyanova Street, Renaissance Square, Komsomol Garden, Pushkin Street, Galkinskaya Street, venereologists, meat restaurants, the migration office, shawarma, barbershops, sushi bars, dumpling joints, the sandy monument to the Heroes of the Revolution, the gloomy bronze Girl with Ice Cream and a Kitten, the World of Forgotten Things, the Gagarin Café, the Parisian Woman Café, the Lace Museum, the Through the Looking Glass entertainment center, the Drug Control Department, the Church of Zosima and Savvaty, and the Seventh Heaven Spa.

History had silted Vologda up with names like river flotsam, like mud. Something from every age got stranded on the shoals, tangled in the larger snags on the riverbed, stuck fast and stayed forever. The names took root while their meanings were forgotten; the names of old enemies fused, rusted together, and, in their shared amnesia, no longer contradicted one another.

All the institutions were housed in two-story pre-revolutionary mansions painted chick-yellow and dirty white; all the churches had been patched up; all the roads were wide, cracked, and empty. There were more trees than houses, more trees than people, and the transparent sky began as soon as the treetops ended; ragged clouds passed almost at head height for the people of Vologda.

Kristinka finished typing her message and slipped her phone into her pocket. She took a drag and squeezed her eyes shut.

“So, what happened?” Ulyana asked.

“Long story short, he took me to the Golden Dragon by the Drama Theater—the sushi place—and ordered a ton of stuff: Philadelphia, California, eel on top of all that. He looks at me all proud, waiting to see if I’ll appreciate what a great benefactor he is, like he’s rolled out a whole magic tablecloth, and I just picked at the salmon one so I wouldn’t be too fucking grabby, and he can go on thinking I’m a budget girl… So he had to eat all the Philadelphia himself. Nearly burst, but polished it off, poor thing—you can tell he had a hungry childhood. Then he goes, ‘I’d like to invite you for a walk along the embankment,’ and I’m thinking, the last thing I need is a walk along the embankment. I’ll see a ton of familiar faces there, and they’ll see me… And that was that. Fucking disaster.”

Kristina laughed, and Ulyana laughed too. Kristina laughed strawberry, Ulyana melon. The shabby hospital building gave off a smell of carbolic acid, and the river smelled of weeds.

“Well, I mean, what’s he like? Is he okay?”

“What do you mean, ‘okay’? You know what he said to me last week? He goes, ‘Well, tell me if you ever need anything.’ I nod, of course, but I’m thinking, what kind of question is that? If you ever need something, maybe, someday… A woman needs everything, all the time! Everything, all the time! And you should understand that if you’re a decent man. You want me to be your little pussy, all soft and glowing, but where am I supposed to get the energy for that if I’m working my ass off from morning till night? I don’t want to be Rambo in a skirt. I want to float and glow! Am I wrong?”

“Floating and glowing would be great,” Ulyana said with a smirk.

“And what about you? Any news?”

“Nope.”

Ulyana hugged herself; she was getting chilly. She didn’t have the strength to share her news just now. She didn’t want sympathetic sighs, advice, or anyone getting involved; first she had to figure out for herself what the news even meant.

None of this was happening the way she’d expected.

Around New Year’s, her TikTok feed had been flooded with horoscopes for Capricorns. With her Scorpio ascendant, the stars promised her major changes, miraculous transformations, and a whole new life. Ulyana mechanically liked them, hypnotized, and TikTok picked up on it, sucked up to her, and instantly fed her more portentous hints: gray-haired tarot readers and astrologers in bikinis took turns predicting a transformative year for her.

And now—it had come true. But what a way to come true.

For years she’d imagined how one day a little person would begin growing inside her, fill her up with itself, make sense of everything for her in her aimless dawdling through Vologda’s stale condensed milk; how it would set Ulyana on course, take her to the next level of the game, to the next level of reality. Because at her current level Ulyana had understood everything, and no longer expected anything good from it—not even anything remotely interesting.

This level turned out to be bewitched. There was no way to jump any higher. The salary was sixty thousand, plus the occasional tip, but in these difficult times you couldn’t even begin to ask for a raise. What could you do with, okay, say, seventy thousand, tips included? Pay the rent and utilities, buy food without splashing out, some item of clothing once a month, have a drink with the girls at a bar every couple of weeks—one cocktail each—and put a little aside for a bigger-screen TV, a trendier phone, a trip to the seaside. The sea, though, remained an impossible dream, because every time she saved anything for it, somehow she’d end up blowing it all on something pointless and impulsive. At least she could get her nails done at the salon for free, as a friend, and use the tanning bed without paying.

So what did Ulyana live for? Well, apparently, this was it: she clocked in at work like she was serving a sentence, waited for payday, dreaming, supposedly, of lace lingerie or a new Samsung, when what she really dreamed of was herself in lace, another Ulyana, gorgeous and irresistibly seductive—or herself with the latest phone model, a cool new Ulyana who’d instantly catch the eye of a completely different, higher-class of man as soon as she set it down on a café table. In other words, what Ulyana really lived for was this interminable wait for a fateful encounter, and all those purchases were just bringing her closer to it, giving fate a nudge. They were lottery tickets she had to keep scooping up by the armful to improve her odds of hitting the jackpot.

But the tops, the shoes, the headphones, the phones—all of them turned out to be duds: they took up her time and energy, but couldn’t change a thing in Ulyana’s life. Under the mound of things, Ulyana remained herself, still under the spell, not transformed into a Disney princess by her dresses, only growing more stale and burned out, accumulating disappointment and gazing ever more intently at herself in the concave makeup mirror, which magnified each of her first little wrinkles—and her fear of the years whizzing past.

Stuck.

Stuck in this unreal present, in a waiting room where time was infuriating and killing it with TV shows and Reels felt perfectly fine, scrolling it away from one payday to the next, from one phone model to another, until she finally found the magic device someone would call and summon her to the future on.

All right. What had Ulyana even imagined this future would look like?

Well… Probably like one of those mortgage ads. Images cut from posters and edited together into a clip: Mom, Dad, me, everyone smiling. A bigger apartment. A dog, too—either a dachshund or a Dalmatian. Family cuddles in front of a big screen, under a blanket. A holiday together, on an island like the one in their basement, only with brighter colors. All that cute stuff, basically. Happiness.

When Ulyana saw couples with strollers, she’d stare at them, her head turning of its own accord. She imagined that, too: the three of them out walking in the park, an ice cream in one hand, a pretty stroller in the other, someone gurgling in the stroller. A boy or a girl? Sometimes a girl, sometimes a boy.

And though her married classmates, having stopped complaining about being lonely, would, after a brief pause, start complaining about their asshole husbands, and though Ulyana’s own father was absent—first he left her and her mother, then married someone else, then drank himself into the ground, and then disappeared altogether—none of it did a thing to discredit the idea of marriage in Ulyana’s eyes. Sure, there were a thousand examples of bad marriages around her, but what did that have to do with her dream of cuddling under a blanket, of sweet idleness beside a busy, preferably taciturn husband, and a gurgling baby? Nothing. That’s real life; this is a fairy tale. You’ve got to believe in the fairy tale!

Yes, Ulyana wanted that. What else was a normal person supposed to want?

But who was it all with? Who was it from?

How to explain… Sometimes photo studios had these cutout boards—you’d see pirates painted on them, or Red Army soldiers, with round holes where the faces should be, so you could stick your head through and have your picture taken. Ulyana always carried one of those boards around with her, too. She herself was painted there, happy and beautiful, and beside her were two figures, one male and one child-sized—vacant, faceless. When she started seeing someone, she’d slot him into the picture. Sometimes it seemed to work out pretty well; they looked right together. Then a black cat would run between them, and she’d have to pry the candidate out of the board and throw him onto the scrap heap of history. Sometimes the candidate’s head would get stuck and wouldn’t come free, and the happy picture would tear to pieces. Ulyana would cry, but time would pass, she’d patch up the tears in her dreamy drawings as best she could, regain her faith in love and the possibility of a happy future, and lead a new guy by the hand—interesting and promising for now—to her picture board, to see how he fit. And although Disney cartoons and Turkish soap operas had a lot to say about waiting for the one, the chosen one, plenty of men had tried their luck at Ulyana’s picture of happiness.

Even Sasha’s big, sticking-out ears fit through the hole.

Ulyana let Kristinka go down into the basement ahead of her and stayed up on the surface a little longer—the signal was bad downstairs. She took another puff of strawberry, unlocked the screen, and opened her recent calls. They trailed away downward, like a ladder made of brackets descending to the bottom of a well, a string of unanswered calls from Ulyana: “Sasha, Sasha, Sasha, Sasha, Sasha—Commander Alex. Serg., Sasha, Sasha, Rostov-Morgue, Dimon Sasha’s Army Buddy, Military Recruitment Office, Sasha, Sasha…”

That well had no bottom.

She tapped the top Sasha with the edge of her finger so she wouldn’t get in the way with her painted nail. Her stomach clenched again: what if they announced the verdict now? But of course, all she got was a little beep saying the subscriber was unavailable. They’d all become unavailable—Alexey Sergeyevich, Dimon, and Marat, another of Sasha’s fellow soldiers. They’d gone somewhere, into some land that radio waves couldn’t penetrate and light couldn’t reach. Into a black hole.

She thought of calling the morgue again, but had run out of nerve. She smoked a little more—inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, quickly, like a diver before a descent, only stocking up on calm instead of oxygen—and went downstairs.

“He’s not answering,” she told Kristinka, answering her silent question.

Kristinka fell quiet, came over, and put an arm around her. She should have stopped there, but stopping was something Kristinka couldn’t do.

“Honestly, I don’t understand,” she blurted. “How could you let him go?”

Ulyana went rigid at once.

The truth was, nobody had consulted her about Sasha’s decision to sign a contract. It just happened: one day he showed up and said, well, he’d decided to go. By then they’d been together for half a year, nearly seven months. Long enough to fit Sasha into the picture of family life and decide that, basically, he’d do. It wasn’t exactly the kind of love you saw on TV, but Ulyana hadn’t had that kind of love since tenth grade. Well, she’d settled into things with Sasha quickly enough; he often stayed the night, his toothbrush had taken up residence at her place, and everything was heading toward them moving in together. They’d even talked about getting married, when their brains were still melting after drunken sex. There were obstacles, but Ulyana let things take their course, and Sasha, in his gentle way, didn’t storm those obstacles; he just flowed around them. She didn’t have to make him take the next steps, didn’t have to pull any strings—everything in this relationship seemed to be moving along all by itself, and that let Ulyana relax.

“What could I have done?” Ulyana said.

She saw her whole life as a movie.

She was a passenger. Things happened to her; she accepted them or didn’t, was sometimes surprised, sometimes cried, sometimes laughed. But it rarely even occurred to her that she could grab the wheel here or there and turn off somewhere else—not where she was being carried. And if, as a teenager, she’d still thought there were places where she could hit the gas and others where she could slam on the brakes, the fifteen Vologda years since then had taught her something different: there was perpetual black ice beneath the wheels, no way to steer off it, no way to stop. All she could do was guess where she’d be flung—feel her way with horoscopes or fortune-telling, or light a candle in church for the outcome she wanted. Nothing depended on Ulyana anymore. Especially in the last four years, ever since the SVO was declared.

Things like the SVO were too big for Ulyana. What could one person do? Nothing. It wasn’t even a matter of accepting it and making peace with it. It was like a tsunami, a supernova, or the Sun going out: accept it or don’t, nobody cares about your feelings.

And yet Ulyana blamed herself for letting Sasha go off to war. She reproached herself for coming to terms with it so quickly, for not crying loudly enough, for not pretending to be pregnant before she really was, to make him feel sorry for her and stop him. And now that she was left alone with Sasha’s child inside her—alone, left to make a decision that was so terrifying to make by herself—she blamed herself even more.

Why had she let him go?

Because she’d had doubts: what if this wasn’t it after all? What if it wasn’t meant to be? So she’d decided to let things take their course, as usual.

“I’d never let mine go, no way,” Kristinka said, shaking her head.

“You know what?” Ulyana said to her then. “Your own! First get yourself a proper relationship instead of just fucking around, and then you can lecture me! You big-eared cunt.”

Tatyana hadn’t wanted to open the door to her, but it was too late to pretend nobody was home, and leaving Ulyanka standing on the stairs would have been downright inhuman. Tatyana swore, threw an angry glance at Sasha behind the glass—look what you got yourself into!—and stomped off to unlock the door. Vitalya tried to go first, but Tatyana shooed him away with a flourish. Vitalya didn’t have anything against Ulyanka, the idiot.

Tema, the younger son, showed up too, to see who’d come. He stood there picking at a pimple on his chin.

“Go get your tablet, where I put it away while I was ironing, and don’t you dare come out of your room!” Tatyana ordered him.

He was delighted and ran off to play.

Ulyanka was standing at the peephole, hunched over her phone, but while Tatyana fussed with the lock, she managed to straighten up—and now looked down at the hostess from the height of her giraffe neck. She was dressed modestly, like she was on her way to church.

“Hello, Tatyana Nikolayevna.”

“Well, hi.”

She was hanging around in the doorway, and Tatyana wasn’t in a hurry to invite her in. First she examined her, scanned her like an X-ray. She had to figure out what Ulyanka had come for, what she’d brought with her into their home.

“I need to talk.”

“We don’t know any more than you do,” Tatyana warned her. “I’m going to the military recruitment office tomorrow.”

“That’s not what I mean. Well, I mean, it’s about that too…”

And then a heavy foreboding swept over Tatyana. What if the X-ray showed what she was afraid of?

“All right. Come in. Take your shoes off, though.”

Ulyanka obediently slipped off her shoes, looked around, and went into the kitchen.

“Doing renovations?”

Tatyana nodded toward a paint-splattered stool for her, and sat on another one herself, so they’d be at the same height. She didn’t offer tea, so they wouldn’t drag things out.

“Well?”

“I… I’m… Well. In short, I’m pregnant.”

It was as if a curtain had been drawn across the window; Tatyana’s vision went dark. Heat rushed to her neck, her cheeks immediately burned with a nasty flush, and her head began to throb. She waited, said nothing, letting it pass first so she wouldn’t show weakness.

“Show me.”

“What, you think I’d carry a test around with me?”

Tatyana weighed it up: believe her or not? Ulyana was sitting there flushed too, her eyes darting around.

“When did you find out?”

“Just now.”

“Why’d you wait so long?”

“Well, my cycle’s all over the place. Then it got really… So I took one.”

“Her cycle’s all over the place… Would you look at that.”

It was getting harder for Tatyana to hold back: she didn’t know how to pretend, and didn’t like it. She was used to being blunt, not sweet-talking people. Let bitches like this one put on a show.

“And what are you planning to do?” she said, her words hard and deliberate, so Ulyanka would hurry up and figure out for herself what she needed to do about her pregnancy.

Ulyanka looked up at Tatyana, bewildered.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, what do you think?”

Ulyanka caught on, scowled, muttered; apparently scraping up some resolve, she straightened and loomed over Tatyana.

“How can you say that? This is Sasha’s child, by the way. Your grandchild.”

“Who knows.”

“What do you mean, ‘who knows’?”

They’d been whispering up till then, but now she spoke loudly, even shrieked. The shriek brought Vitalya peering anxiously in from the hall, craning his neck. The bastard had been eavesdropping, definitely eavesdropping.

“Get out of here!” Tatyana ordered him. “Go watch your own damn show and keep out of this!”

Vitalya recoiled in fright and vanished.

“Oh, so now you’re going to play the saint, are you? Listen,” Tatyana could grill Ulyanka with her eyes from below just fine; she didn’t need to get up. Let the tower keep standing there. “You manage a whorehouse… And you’re probably one yourself, too! While Sasha was having fun with you, it was normal for a guy, so I kept my mouth shut…”

Sasha watched them closely from all three of his incarnations, listening to the conversation. It concerned him too. Well, let him listen. He’d got involved with a slut, and almost married her, too. And you think she only gives it up for you? “The tips are good, too.” What do you think you get those tips for, you fool? What a blockhead. You couldn’t figure it out yourself, so now your mother has to do it for you. It’s not yours, don’t worry! If it were yours, you’d have missed your chance by now.

“You didn’t keep your mouth shut about anything, I know that much!”

“Fine, I didn’t. But this is different. One thing is having fun, another thing is… Anyway. I will not let you into our house!”

“This is your child, your grandchild! How can you be such a monster?”

“That’s enough. Get out!”

“But how am I supposed to raise it?” Ulyanka seemed to have switched back to playing dumb.

“Ah, sweetheart. There it is. There it is!”

Tatyana nodded, satisfied: it hadn’t taken much to crack Ulyanka.

“What do you mean, ‘there it is’?”

“It means nothing but money’s on your mind. Always has been. Get out, do you hear me? Move!”

Now she jumped up too, ready to sweep Ulyanka right out of her home with her huge, heavy bosom, like a bulldozer blade.

But Ulyanka clung to the table, stared at Tatyana, gestured with her long chin toward the three photographs of Sasha, and said, venomously:

“Why did you send him there in the first place? This happened to him because of you… And now I’m left alone with…”

Her voice trembled as though she were about to burst into tears. But she held it in and didn’t cry, which only infuriated Tatyana even more.

“Don’t jinx it! What are you going on about? What ‘happened’? What is this ‘happened’?! He’s fine! You hear me?! You’re going to bury him right here, you mangy bitch, you filthy little whore! My son!”

She shoved Ulyanka in the chest, but hit her stomach, then grabbed her thin, bluish wrist and yanked, trying to pry her away from the table. But Ulyanka was already moving on her own; she’d finally gotten scared of her. She even hurried ahead as though it were her own decision to leave them, not Tatyana throwing her out. She hurriedly tried to slip her sinewy legs into her shoes, missing the openings. Vitalya watched Ulyanka’s expulsion from the room, his face pitiful.

“He went to defend his Motherland, by the way! You understand? Just like in the Great Patriotic War! What would you know about that, you slut!”

“But where’s the Great Patriotic War, and where’s this thing?!” Ulyanka shouted from the stairs, and then Tatyana slammed the door in her face.