8.

Caught—that was the first thing she felt.

She’d been cheating, and they’d caught her red-handed.

Her heart lurched, and all Ulyana could manage into the phone was an incoherent bleat. Had Tatyana realized she already knew about Sasha? Guessed she’d already dashed off to Moscow?

Tatyana Nikolayevna always sounded as if she knew everything; even her intonation was prosecutorial, and she had the look of an investigator. Ulyana had always been under suspicion in her eyes, and now of all times…

Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. The melon-flavored nicotine came on again, calming her heartbeat a little, giving her a chance to think. Ulyana rewound her conversation with Tatyana to the beginning in her head and listened to it again. No, she hadn’t been charged yet; she hadn’t even been reclassified as a suspect. For now, it seemed, she was just a witness.

Fear, all right, had let go of her insides, given them a gentle shake, and promised to come back later. Now something else weighed on her. It turned out Sasha had come back from the dead and hadn’t told his mother a thing. Which meant Ulyana had attributed extra nastiness and extra cunning to her. Which meant Ulyana was the one who’d behaved like a bastard, giving Tatyana only half a day’s head start, then shooting off to Moscow first, in a mad dash and on the sly.

And the truth was, you wanted her not to call you, by the way, one Ulyana said to the other; you weren’t waiting for her to ring, you were waiting for her not to. You set her this tricky condition, knowing she wouldn’t be able to meet it. Put her on the clock, so every second she delayed after you already knew Sasha was alive would count as a debt she owed you, and as self-defense on your part. As if she’d put a sack over your head, when really you’d just decided to play at it.

And she, for her part, didn’t just share her good news with you; she was even ready to take you to Moscow to see Sasha, to travel on the same train. Even if you did give her the idea. So, who’s the bigger bastard here?

The first Ulyana quickly shoved that second Ulyana back down: You know what? If we’re really going to get into it, I wasn’t exactly like this toward her for no reason. There were reasons, and some pretty damn good ones. She told me to get rid of the baby, and in such a bitchy way, too: “You’ll figure out what to do, you’re not a little girl.” No. There was a time when Ulyana trusted Sasha’s mother, a time when she was ready to love her, when she wanted to talk to her and could tell her everything; that time had come and gone. Now, nothing. So don’t fucking bullshit me—you, Tatyana Nikolayevna, and you, whoever you are, talking to me in my own voice and casting a shadow over my solar plexus. Fuck you both.

She rose from the bench—resolute, as if storming a stronghold.

And marched off.

She clicked past the skinny conscript whose mother was stroking his little crew cut, past the frenzied amputees who’d lined up their wheelchairs like a train and were laughing as they trundled around the courtyard, past the nurse filming them on her phone and hoarsely cheering them on, past the doctors smoking with holes where their eyes should be, past the men who looked whole but were being kept here for some reason, and past the people whose heads had been bound with bandages so they wouldn’t split apart. Past the whole anthill, Ulyana walked like a queen.

She found the building, the floor, and the ward by memory.

But right outside the ward she slowed down again, lurking by the door. And accidentally overheard a conversation.

“I just don’t know,” Sasha was saying, “whether my dick’s still there or not. And there’s no way to check.”

Was he joking or not? He sounded confused. Or just sleepy, as usual?

“Well? Want me to take a look?” one of his neighbors answered. “You gonna look, Leshy?”

“Nah, no need, Sery,” Leshy rasped. “Until we check, it’s like Schrödinger’s cat. It’s there and it isn’t, at the same time. So, technically, it’s there fifty percent of the time. But once we unpack it, there won’t be any question. If I were you, I’d take the fifty percent. Better than jack shit.”

“What cat?” Sasha asked weakly.

“Forget it. Just a cat, from physics. A cat in a box. Like, it’s neither alive nor dead.”

“Just like me. Schrödinger’s dick.”

They cracked up.

“Don’t you worry, soldier!” said, presumably, Sery—with a voice like a kid’s whistle. “If it comes to it, me and the guys will ask them to transplant some unclaimed one onto you. Look out the window! See the smoke coming out of that chimney? You know how many they burn for nothing?”

Sasha gave a quiet chuckle. Then asked:

“But if it’s someone else’s dick… would that count as cheating?”

“That’s not what you should be thinking about!” Sery piped up sententiously. “The main thing is that the one you get is bigger than what you had before. Then you come out ahead.”

“Why not ask your fiancée to go down to intensive care and pick one out while it’s still warm?”

“And the color, too. What do you care, as long as she likes it?”

“Wouldn’t that make me a cuckold, though?” Leshy choked out.

They laughed some more. Ulyana smiled on the other side of the wall, too. The boys were joking. If he was joking, he wasn’t planning on dying yet. Then she knocked on the doorframe.

“Knock, knock. Did someone call for his fiancée?”

“Oh…” Sasha even blushed a little. “We were just… Anyway, guys, why don’t you go have a smoke?”

His roommates hobbled out into the corridor; the embarrassment passed, and Sasha turned gray again. But he smiled so warmly at Ulyana.

“You’re late today… I’ve already done everything,” he joked.

“Sorry… I was with the chief doctor.”

“And what does she say?” Sasha blinked. “Am I gonna live?”

“Of course you are. She says just one more operation, and that’s it. They’ll do it this week. The day after tomorrow or the day after that.”

“Cool. One more operation, one less,” he nodded at her. “Let them finish the whole job, then. You’ll come tomorrow?”

“Of course I will! And you know what? Tomorrow…” Ulyana lifted the corners of her mouth and felt a current run over her skin. “They’ve scheduled the wedding for tomorrow.”

“What wedding?” Sasha asked.

“Ours,” Ulyana reminded him tenderly and carefully, as if bandaging a burn. “We decided yesterday, remember?”

“Oh…” he said uncertainly.

“That’s right. So I’ll definitely come tomorrow! And the day after, if they let me. And after that, too. We’re going to be husband and wife.”

“Yeah,” he said, thinking. “Listen… Did I dream it yesterday, or did you really tell me we’re having a little one?”

“You really were awake,” Ulyana said, and once again began to understand for herself that, yes, it was real. “That’s exactly why we have to get married, Sasha. So the baby will be born in wedlock. Our little one. Understand?”

The word “baby” seemed strange to her, sickly sweet. As if she were spooning bitter medicine into the mouth of the bedridden Sasha, masking it with sugar syrup. Could he tell how oversweetened it was? He frowned.

“I understand everything. I’m not an idiot.”

They fell silent—Ulyana kept trying to think of a way out of this, but nothing came to her.

“It’s good we’re having a kid,” Sasha said, helping her out.

“Really?”

“Yeah. At least someone will be left behind, if anything happens.”

“Sash, what kind of bullshit is that?!”

“No, I mean, just… In case.”

He started looking down at the sheet, at his stumps. His intent gaze on the legs that were gone smeared Ulyana’s whole soul with black grease. She kept trying to convince herself that this truncated remnant of a man was the very same Sasha she’d walked along the embankment with, danced with at the club, played drunken naked tag with in her apartment, driven out to swim in the lake in the forest at night with, and thought would do well enough for a normal life.

She wanted to comfort him, distract him, but instead the words shot out of Ulyana without her permission:

“Sasha. Why did you even go there?”

Reluctantly, he tore his gaze from his empty sockets; his lips began to twitch.

“You mean, why did I sign the contract?”

“Yeah. You… You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to…”

“It’s okay.”

He lifted his red eyes to her.

“In case you’re wondering, it wasn’t for the money.”

“I never said…”

“What would I do with that much money by myself… I mean…”

She had the right answer to this question, and she’d kept it inside as long as she could, not giving Sasha a hint. But he was taking so long to think, and the urge was getting stronger and stronger, because that other Ulyana, though she’d been chased off, hadn’t gone anywhere and wasn’t going to shut up; she was whining louder and louder. So the first Ulyana answered her—out loud, with weight, to drown her out more thoroughly.

You don’t need it, I know that. But your mother does.

She blurted it out and immediately regretted it: Why bring her into this, of all things? The man had amnesia, so what? Why the hell couldn’t you just keep your mouth shut?!

Sasha scowled.

“Well… no. I mean, yeah, of course my folks need the money. They asked me to earn it for them, for a new place… That’s true… That was part of it.”

He struggled to get it all out, slowly shaping the words with his uncooperative lips, stopping to understand himself before he spoke. Ulyana was about to interrupt him and steer the conversation onto something else, something more cheerful, but he shook his head—don’t interrupt, I’m not finished.

“I mean, it’s great, all that money… There’ll be enough for everyone. But I… I mean something else. Listen, Ulyan…” He glanced sideways at her. “You know… Like, what do you think… Do you think I’m a man… because I fought there…”

“Of course! Of course I do!”

Sasha grimaced.

“I have these dreams… It’s fucked… I wake up and think… I wish they were just dreams… What if I’m remembering… what happened. What they did. I can’t tell if it’s a dream or if all of it really happened…”

His eyes were completely red now, shining. Ulyana cautiously stroked his temple, the lock of hair sticking out from under his bandages.

“Hey, come on!”

“You know why I signed up?..”

Ulyana let him speak.

“I thought… I’d become… well… someone else there. Not the way I was. Someone tough. I thought I’d come back and, you know… nobody would ever… nobody would be able to shit on me anymore, get me? Not the cops, nobody. Because if you’ve been through the SVO and come back… nobody’s gonna talk shit about me anymore. And all those cops would… would be… I’d have them… well, you know. I thought I wouldn’t just be one of them, I’d have every one of them by the balls. That’s what I thought. Stupid, huh? I’m a dumbass, Ulyan?” he rasped.

He grinned from ear to ear; two teeth were missing. Tears ran down his cheeks. Ulyana hurriedly dabbed them away.

“Sashka, what are you talking about… What dumbass… You’re a man… A real one.”

“A dumbass,” he jerked his chin. “A complete fucking asshole.”

All Ulyana could do was stroke his bandages, his cowlicks; her own throat was tight with grief that it had all turned out this way. But she must have stroked too much, pressed too hard—he winced and let out a little cry.

“Listen… By the way,” he sniffed. “You don’t remember my mom’s number, do you? I can’t seem to remember it. I have to tell her I’m here. Maybe she’s looking for me?”

“She knows you’re alive!” Ulyana rushed to say. “They told her. She’ll call you soon.”

“How’s she gonna call me? Where?”

“Well, the number I’m calling.”

“Leshy’s cell? How’s she going to get the number?”

His painkillers were wearing off; Sashka was sobering up.

“Or the ward, then. She’ll definitely call you soon, Sash.”

“She definitely will? I want to talk to her.”

“Definitely.”

“You don’t have her number, or what?”

A cold hand stroked the back of Ulyana’s neck; even the down stood on end. She was afraid to ask him what he wanted to talk to his mother about. Her thoughts clotted together. It was awful and rotten to manipulate Sasha, but that same cold hand grabbed her by the scruff like a cat caught misbehaving and shook her: Get yourself out of this!

“My phone just ran out of battery,” she lied.

“Oh…” he said, confused. “Okay, then. When you charge it, will you ask her to call?”

“Of course I will.”

His two joking friends appeared in the doorway, Leshy, who had no arms, and Sery, who had one eye, checking on the situation.

“So, boss? Can we come back in? We’ve had our smoke.”

“Wait a little longer, guys.”

They went back to loiter in the corridor. Sasha slipped a hand out from under the sheet, felt around for Ulyana’s fingers, and squeezed them weakly. His palm was cold and damp; apparently, he was hoping some warmth would flow into him from Ulyana. It wasn’t like a man taking a woman’s hand to lead her along; it was like a child reaching out his little hand so he wouldn’t get lost.

Ulyana squeezed his hand, too—here I am, holding on to you, I won’t let go. I’m here. And she felt so disgusted with herself for deceiving this innocent that she decided to confess.

“Sash. I… So, here’s the situation. I’ll tell you your mother’s number, okay? My phone didn’t run out of battery. I just… I lied, sorry.”

Sasha looked surprised.

“Why?”

“Shit. How do I put this… Well, because she doesn’t want us to get married. She wouldn’t let us last time, remember? And I… Can I ask you for something? I’ll give you her number, but… just don’t tell her I’m here, okay?”

He leaned back from her a little, so she came fully into focus. He scowled. His fingers went limp, as if the tendons had been severed.

While he took in her request, Ulyana belatedly came up with a better way she could have handled all this. She should have eased him into it instead of dumping everything on him at once—put the conversation on hold and gone for an ultrasound. They had to do one before tomorrow anyway; without it, they wouldn’t let them register the marriage. Then she could have started the conversation with the scan in her hand, the first picture of their baby. Put the ultrasound on the scales, on her side; it would surely weigh quite a lot. But she’d already blown it, amateur that she was. Her palms immediately started sweating—from her own stupidity and her own cunning. All right, she’d have to do it this way.

“You won’t tell her?”

“How could I?”

“Well, like this. Let’s get married tomorrow first, and then the rest… well. Let it be a secret for now. A little secret.”

Her jaw clenched. The little motor in her chest sputtered. A little secret, for fuck’s sake. She was already being carried somewhere, like a bobsled hurtling at a hundred kilometers an hour; she couldn’t see where it was taking her, and there was no way to get out of the track.

“If I don’t tell her you came, then can I talk to her?” Sasha asked for permission.

“Of course.”

Something loomed to the side again—it was one-eyed Sery standing in the doorway, grinning mockingly, studying Ulyana with a mixture of disgust and wariness, as if he’d nearly stepped on a little snake in the grass with his bare foot and caught sight of it just in time.

“You’ll call her, then? If your phone still has charge.”

“Well, how could I… She’d realize I came, wouldn’t she?” Ulyana took little Sasha’s hand again. “I’ll just give the number to… Leshy here, right? And he’ll call her himself. I have to see the doctor anyway, get an ultrasound… I’ll go, and you can call her while I’m gone. Okay?”

He agreed.

Ulyana took out her phone and stood up. Sery blinked his one eye and stepped aside. Leshy was loitering outside the door, playing some stupid-ass game on his phone.

“Guys,” Ulyana asked them, “I’ll give you his mom’s number so he can call her, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Thank you. And thank you for supporting him.”

“You’re welcome.”

How long had they been hanging around in the corridor while Ulyana and Sasha discussed life and death? How much had they managed to overhear?

Quite a lot, apparently. That was why they’d looked at her like that.

And when Ulyana, having kissed Sasha goodbye, clicked down the corridor toward the exit, someone shot after her, viciously:

“Black bride, for fuck’s sake.”

She pretended she hadn’t heard.

Beyond the hospital fence there was some entirely different life, one Ulyana had already grown unaccustomed to in those few hours. People there behaved as if death wasn’t at work, as if no war was going on anywhere. Well, there was one forlorn billboard about the Special Military Operation in the middle of the highway, but nobody paid it any attention. Beyond the fence, everyone had their own plans for the warm blue summer evening, their own routes, their own complicated trajectories—all around the enormous military hospital, without touching it. It all looked strange. Bizarre.

Ulyana trudged along the streets of Odintsovo, straight as parade grounds, lined with ranks of whitewashed trees. She could’ve taken a bus to the gynecologist, but she felt like walking: she needed to catch her breath.

The return to the surface came slowly. First the noise of the cars came back, then the voices, then the wind blew and stirred her hair. But it wasn’t until she was almost hit at a crossing, honked at and sworn at, that she finally surfaced from the depths.

She looked around again and latched on—as shipwreck survivors half-drowners latch on to any bit of wreckage—to a sign on the balcony of the building opposite: “Apartment for sale.” She took a photo on her phone, of both the balcony and the ad. Then she started paddling on, holding on to it so she wouldn’t sink back to the bottom.

She stopped for a second, spread the ad apart with her fingertips and zoomed in—there were some little numbers: eight million rubles, thirty square meters, a studio. Jesus. Eight million! Where the hell was she supposed to get eight million? Where did people even get that kind of money? Probably better not to even look at Moscow as a place to buy, just to spare herself the disappointment; in Moscow, she wouldn’t have enough for anything. Moscow wasn’t for broke-ass losers. But Odintsovo, though… And if, say, hypothetically, she got a mortgage, could she make it work? Odintsovo was practically Moscow—one quick ride on the bus and there it was, pristine and untouched, or whatever they called it… In Moscow, even a massage-parlor receptionist probably cleared a hundred grand a month, minimum. A whole different economy. So she could work in Moscow and live on the cheap outside the MKAD… Live outside the MKAD and party in Moscow, reach all of Moscow’s insane opportunities by bus for just seventy-five rubles, just half an hour away. What chance would Cinderella have had if she’d lived in Vologda or, fuck, some place like Syktyvkar, with the nearest palace eight hours away by train, or however long it took? You couldn’t commute. Anyway, she shouldn’t dismiss Odintsovo out of hand; sometimes fantasy became reality, and dreaming of a one-room apartment in the Moscow region was definitely a hundred times cozier than dreaming of a two-room place in Fryazinovo.

And so she paddled her way to the gynecologist.

The clinic where she’d managed to get an appointment on the spot was in a one-story sausage-shaped building under a tiled roof, with walls of double-glazed glass and a list of services painted across the windows. Abortion wasn’t on the list. Were they too embarrassed to put it down?

She went in, gave her name, registered, and sat in the waiting area.

That was the kind of day it was: doctors. Another diagnosis, another sentence.

Was she about to see him now?

What did he even look like at this stage?

Was there even anything to see?

Was Ulyana ready for this meeting at all?

They’d show her the baby now, give her a certificate proving he was really there, register her, and then she wouldn’t be able to evade this reality. Or maybe it wasn’t too late to run away? Turn off her phone and disappear, pretend none of this had happened? Just go back to her old, worthless life, where at least she didn’t have to make any decisions or deceive anyone?

There was nowhere to go back to anymore, she reminded herself.

It was all closed up and sealed off.

“Tsareva,” the ultrasound technician called from the doorway.

And Ulyana’s bobsled hurtled down the icy track even faster. She broke out in a sweat.

“Lower your bottoms, lift your top, and lie down. Do you know how far along you are?”

“More or less.”

They smeared her belly with cold, sticky gel; the black-and-white monitor lit up in the half-dark room. The ultrasound technician was older and, judging by her face, not a bitch—one could even call her kind. She began sliding the probe up and down, right and left, tickling Ulyana.

“You’re eleven weeks along, miss. Development is normal. Let’s see… forty-seven millimeters, crown-rump length. Here’s the head, here are the arms. The fingers have separated already. Let me show you.”

She turned the flickering monitor toward her. Ulyana hadn’t even had time to figure out what to say, and there it was: something floating, pulsing in gray pixels, sloshing, echoing through the soft tissues, nestled inside her… Like a tumor.

“Where’s the head, then?”

“Here. There it is.”

Well, maybe. If you looked hard enough…

“This little bean?”

“It’s not a little bean anymore. There’s a person in there, already the size of a plum. This big.”

“And is it… a boy or a girl?”

“Well, it’s hard to tell just yet. We’ll schedule a follow-up for the fourteenth week. Come in then, and we’ll know.”

The fourteenth week… How could she even look that far into the future? What would happen to the world by the fourteenth week? Maybe everything would already collapse.

“What’s wrong? Aren’t you happy?”

“Why?”

“Was this a planned pregnancy?”

“Yeah… Not really. Are we done? Will you give me the certificate?”

The ultrasound technician adjusted her glasses and sighed. Then she reached for the leather handbag hanging on the back of her chair.

“Wait, let me show you a little trick.”

She rummaged in her bag, took something out, and rustled a piece of paper.

“Help yourself.”

“What’s this?”

“A chocolate candy.”

Ulyana tensed all over, almost sitting up.

“Why?”

“Go on, eat it. Don’t be afraid. It’s not poisoned.”

How had she known Ulyana wanted something sweet? It was strange, but Ulyana accepted the chocolate from the ultrasound technician and popped it into her mouth… And for the first time that day, she wanted to live. Sweet bliss spread through her. Why couldn’t she believe that there were simply good, unselfish people in the world?

“Thangk you,” she mumbled; her teeth were stuck together with caramel.

“Oh! Here’s the trick,” the doctor said with a smile. “Look at the monitor, at the baby.”

He started twitching, squirming. He wasn’t just floating weightlessly anymore, drifting through outer space; he was moving on his own. He was really alive.

“What’s that? Why’s he doing that?” Ulyana asked fearfully.

“Dancing. Happy about the candy.”

On the way back into the city, she studied the ultrasound picture: she’d look at it, put it away; sit for a while, take it out again, look again. If you didn’t know what to look for on that black paper, you wouldn’t see anything. Just a blot. But once you knew what it was, you couldn’t unsee it.

Sasha’s son. The Plum Person.

That money was for him, after all. So he could grow up on it. Children couldn’t grow up without money. And what could Ulyana earn on her own now?

Suddenly she had a thought: what if she showed up at the ceremony tomorrow wearing a veil? The cheapest synthetic one, but definitely a white bridal veil. Just for kicks. Let those assholes—the one-armed guy and the one-eyed guy—choke on it. “Black bride, for fuck’s sake.” They stare at her, and then they’ve got the nerve to run their mouths, too.

On the bus, she started searching for “Bridal veil Moscow cheap delivery.” On AliExpress you could get the dumbest one for three hundred and fifty rubles; on Avito, a used one for two hundred, for bachelorette parties. There was some fancy “Bride House” on Leninsky Prospekt, where prices started at three grand. Wedding dresses started at fifty thousand.

For fifty grand, it was something really basic, and already seventy percent off. Minimalist satin. For eighty, you could get a similar one with lace sleeves—pretty, actually. Something like that would suit Ulyana, in principle. I wonder if I could go try it on? Too bad there were only twenty-nine thousand left on her card, less than that. So there was no point getting her hopes up.

Click—and there was another one… For two hundred and twenty thousand, a long, voluminous dress made of French lace, with a bell-shaped skirt, oddly described as “from the Arab collection.” Add another thirty grand and she’d be a princess, “Lilibet Lace Wedding Dress with Bolero.” No idea what any of that meant, but it looked amazing… The model, a little porcelain doll, stood on the terrace of an Italian villa by a lake, gazing languidly at the photographer. Some people really had weddings like that, Ulyana thought. The groom must be just as fitting, in some kind of Ferrari. But something like that probably wouldn’t look so great on Ulyana with her big shoulders—she’d only make the Italian guests laugh for nothing. There was a simpler one, too—one hundred and seventy-five thousand, “Angelina Lace Mermaid Corset Wedding Dress,” and it already came with a floor-length veil. But who would carry the veil for Ulyana? You needed a pageboy for that, or at least a bridesmaid, or her mother. All Ulyana’s friends had stayed behind in Vologda; she’d have to manage on her own. She should call Mom, actually, let her know what was going on. Oh, well, if she was going to spend over a hundred and seventy, there was an even more gorgeous one: “Angelina Mermaid Luxe Lace Corset Wedding Dress.” Same money, twice the elegance.

Dream on, you idiot.

Then she noticed a link in the corner saying you could rent the dresses, and began seriously considering it: what if she really did shell out ten grand and glide in like a swan, let everyone lose their shit? It was her wedding, after all—the real thing, her first one in her life. Didn’t she deserve something like that? And the photos would be great, too, to show the grandkids.

Then she started doing the math—ten grand was a lot. With ten grand, she could live in Moscow for another week, if she scrimped… Wow, what was this one, three hundred and sixty-five thousand for such a lavish thing? “Dianita Glitter Silk Taffeta Ball Gown.” Was that for a wedding to Prince Harry or something? Well, if she was going to take photos for the grandkids, she might as well do it in this one. No point settling.

She came to on the bus at the terminus.

On her way to the metro, she messaged some woman on Avito and arranged to pick up that used bachelorette-party veil for a hundred and fifty. Well, used was used—who’d know? It was all just for kicks anyway, to make Sasha laugh.

The day was tedious and dragged on like a medical tourniquet; Maksim shuffled papers around his desk, stared dully and desperately at the Excel columns, but acetaldehyde, the bastard, got in the way. He was tempted to go get a beer and put an end to all this needless suffering, but in Maksim’s personal hierarchy, a man nursing a hangover ranked far below a man enduring the hardships of a hangover with dignity. In that hierarchy, he was somewhere around the level of Soviet-style courtyard drunks, with only bums beneath them. So Maksim endured. He had to drive later, too: he and Marina had agreed that he’d pick her up from work today. He had to wait until dinner.

He endured it, flinching every time the shop’s front door slammed. He’d go still and listen: who’d come in? He tried to tell what kind of customer it was from their intonation, their vibrations.

He was waiting for retribution for his earlier insolence, his cockiness. Now, in his poisoned state, he was especially anxious—because he knew all too well the vile nature of these people’s avengers, for whom the entire exchange of energy between people came down to one humiliating the other, and the humiliated person had to get even, or else the humiliation would remain a lifelong brand. Prison culture.

And then, one of those times, the door slammed with downright malice, and the visitor spoke in a stern cop’s bass. Unable to bear it, Maksim crept up to the locked door of his office and pressed his ear to the panel: were they here for him? At that moment, the memory came rushing over him. Everything he’d dreamed about that night came back.

It had been a complete load of crap. In it, Marina and he were waiting in their apartment for a visit from the prosecutor’s office. A black paddy wagon stood in the courtyard, completely anachronistic, and yet somehow not; people in uniform were getting out and entering the building, about to come up to their floor—there was no doubt they were coming for Marina and Maksim, even though nobody had called them from downstairs or warned them about anything. They had to hurry and get rid of all the books the inspectors might consider politically unreliable, hide them somewhere, throw them out. So Maksim and Marina rushed to the bookshelves, and there was heresy in abundance: the accursed Akunin, Limonov, Navalny’s autobiography, all kinds of émigré fiction, and more, and more. They started sweeping the books off the shelves and tossing them into boxes, shoving the boxes under the bed, up on the mezzanine, while fists were already hammering on the door: “Open up!” Marina looked back at him in a panic: We haven’t sorted out anything in Kirill’s room yet, and it’s an Augean stable in there; we won’t find anything right away! Stall them! And Maksim ran to the door—to talk, to buy time—and started pleading, while someone on the other side ordered him to open up at once, for some reason in a woman’s voice, but it was metallic, mechanical, and uncompromising. He tried to feed them some bullshit, saying they were people just like everyone else, so why all this sudden attention, hang on, they were looking for the key, but someone on the other side of the door answered: “Cut the crap. You think I don’t know you? Ordinary people, my ass!” And he realized it was Ulyana’s voice. Then he heard a grinder start up outside, a circular saw, and heard it bite into the very spot where he’d pressed his ear.

The windows were dark, but now Ulyana had a key of her own, from Kirill.

She let herself into their empty apartment and took off her shoes at the entrance. She went into the bathroom and touched the tub—spacious enough for two. Did she have the right to take a bath in it? She hesitated, but then remembered her morning conversation with Uncle Maksim and started running herself a hot bath, because fuck it; she didn’t even lock the door.

She lay in the bath, in the foam, soaking. She wanted the crust to soften a little. She almost fell asleep in the warm water, turned into an embryo herself. The owners still weren’t coming, weren’t coming at all, and the bath had already gone cold. A mischievous idea came to her, and she picked up her phone. She did it, got out, dried herself, put on somebody’s robe, padded into the kitchen, and made herself tea. Then she called Sasha from someone else’s phone.

“How are you?”

“I’m good,” he drawled dreamily; she recognized the morphine notes right away.

“I’m good, too. I just had a bath and took some naked pictures for you. I’d send them, but those goblins of yours—I don’t want to. I’ll show you tomorrow.”

“Cool.”

He didn’t exactly light up. She thought: does he even care anymore? Or is he just knocked out by the drugs?

“Listen… Did you talk to your mom? Did it work out?”

“I talked to her.”

“So, what did she say?”

“That she’s proud. That she’s glad I’m alive. That they looked for me, went to the draft office. They were worried.”

“And did she say when she’s coming? To see you.”

“She said she’d come soon. I told her to come as soon as possible.”

“And, um… did anything come up about me?”

“Well… I said what you asked me to. That you’d only called. Right?”

“Right. I’ll come see you tomorrow with a surprise. Tomorrow’s a big day for us, remember?”

“I remember. All right, Uly, Leshiy needs his phone back, I have to call from mine.”

“Okay. I love you, just so you know.”

“I love you too. Night.”

That one conversation sucked all the warmth back out of her, the warmth she’d gathered in the bath. Even the tea did a lousy job of warming her.

Ulyana headed back to the bathroom, uncorked the smelly red nail polish, and started painting pretty little nails for tomorrow’s big event. They came out neat; all she had to do now was let them dry.

Then she floated into the strangers’ living room in their terrycloth robe and switched on their enormous television. She started clicking through the channels, trying to find something to her taste amid the circus. Songs and dancing annoyed her, she couldn’t bring herself to follow a movie halfway through, and she listened to Malakhov for a while, but the story was too boring. So she clicked over to another talk show, about Ukraine. She got hooked because from the first few words, from the first turn of phrase, it seemed tailor-made for her:

“We’re there because we can’t not be there. Because it’s our duty. Because we’re there fighting fascism, Nazism. It’s no joke, it’s a global evil,” said a shaven-headed man in military uniform from a blue plastic lectern. “They’ll twist all of this any which way now, but I was there, and I know: if we hadn’t gone in, they’d all be here by now. First the Banderites would’ve taken the Donbas, and the trenches would’ve been full of the bodies of people who speak Russian, and then they’d have gone even farther! Ukraine is just the spearhead pointed straight at the heart of Russia! Our president was right: there is no Ukraine, there’s the ‘Anti-Russia’ project, created by Western handlers to rot our country from within! To rot it and destroy it! To get our resources! Yes, we’re fighting in Ukraine, but we’re fighting there so we won’t have to fight on our own territory!”

The television was huge, a meter and a half across, and the speakers in the blue-and-red studio looked like actual giants whenever the camera turned toward them. The lecterns stood in a circle, with one speaker behind each. A host in a sober suit and horn-rimmed glasses walked between them, giving one person the floor, then another. He looked, incidentally, every bit as refined as Uncle Maksim, if not more so.

“But how can that be? How can you say it’s on foreign territory? They’ll ask you, ‘What about Kursk?’” the host said, trying to reason with the soldier.

“Exactly! And who did they send to Kursk? Russian Nazi mercenaries, the RVC, degenerates, national traitors! What does that prove? It proves we’re not fighting Ukrainians there, but an international Nazi alliance that installed its junta in Kyiv!”

Some kind of feverish itch, an itching energy, passed from the screen to Ulyana, spilled out of the box and washed over her, brought her back to life. It turned out it felt good to listen; they were saying the kinds of things that had become useful to Ulyana after the hospital. They were like bandages, crutches, painkillers. Like a hundred grams down the hatch. To keep the ache away, Ulyana needed to understand the big picture: why; and these answers were just what she needed right now. Why Sasha, and why she herself was here.

“And what about Kursk?” a red-faced man with a bull’s neck bulging against his collar chimed in. “Kursk was part of the plan from the start! We just struck them first—bam! The Special Military Operation! All their forces were massed at the border! If only we’d managed that in the Great Patriotic War, if there hadn’t been traitors in the ranks of the command and intelligence services who misled Joseph Vissarionovich, the USSR would stretch from Vladivostok to Lisbon by now! But this time we got it right. We pulled it off.”

“Well, some people might object… They’d say the first year of the special military operation wasn’t easy…”

“Oh, let those some people just, you know… In the first year, we took… Liberated! How much? At the peak, it was a hundred and sixty-three thousand square kilometers! That’s like Bulgaria! Esteemed Yemelyan Grigoryevich has already made the point here, but let me emphasize it once more—we’re not fighting the Ukrainian Armed Forces over there. If it were just militants, we’d have smashed them to pieces in the first month, and Ukraine would be ours by now. But it’s England and Germany over there, and our overseas partners, as Vladimir Vladimirovich calls them…”

“Where did we begin? With you asking a question,” the military man interrupted, addressing the host. “Could things have been different? I’m telling you clearly and unequivocally: no, they couldn’t. The President made the only right decision. Russian history has no subjunctive mood. And I’ll speak for myself, too: it couldn’t have been otherwise. It! Could! Not! Because any man who considers himself a patriot had to drop everything and go defend our people in Donbas! Russian people… We put up with this for eight years while they were killing our children over there, but we couldn’t put up with it any longer!”

There was a rustle in the corridor, voices rose: the people who lived here were back. Ulyana felt around for the remote, thinking she’d switch to something else, but caught herself—it was weakness, it was cowardice. If you were sitting there watching, then sit there and watch. Yeah, it was a talk show, so what was there to squirm about, why suck up? Nobody had been home, nobody had minded; she’d put on what she liked.

Uncle Maksim appeared in the doorway—shoes off, but still in his outerwear.

“And what’s going on here?”

For now, he was just surprised. Wait, Uncle Max.

“Oh. Good evening. Nothing’s going on. Just watching TV. Is that not allowed?”

“Didn’t we just talk about this this morning? There are so many decent sources of information, and you put on this garbage…”

Aunt Marina slipped past him into the kitchen, gave a little wave, and declined to get involved.

“Why call it garbage straight off?”

“Because they’re spouting nonsense! Some fascists, some kind of invasion… And it’s everywhere, coming out of every damn appliance…”

“What, they’re not fascists?” Ulyana replied, unruffled. “Those nighttime torchlight marches through Kyiv—didn’t they happen? They did. So who’s lying, then?”

“All right,” he said, drawing a breath. “Let me put it another way: I don’t want that thing blaring in my house. Turn it off, please.”

“Sure.”

Ulyana jabbed at the remote, and the television went black. Your house, your rules. But the spring inside her wound tighter, a coil with one sharp end. She didn’t get up from the chair; she curled up there like a talking rattlesnake on a warm stone. Best not touch me, Ivanushka, or you’ll get a magical fucking wallop right between the eyes.

But Uncle Maksim didn’t leave; something was still itching at him, some last point he had to make.

“About fascists… You know that old Soviet song? ‘June twenty-second, exactly four o’clock… Kyiv was bombed, we were told that the war had begun…’ Do you know who it’s about?”

“Well, who?”

“The fascists, Hitler and all that. In ’41, the fascists started the Great Patriotic War by bombing Kyiv at night. And now we’re doing the same thing to them. To the Ukrainians. February twenty-fourth, twenty-two. Kyiv was bombed. At four in the morning, too. For no reason. Do they tell you about that on your goddamn propaganda train? We’re the fascists here, Ulyanochka. We are!”

“Well, maybe you are…” she retorted. “But we aren’t.”

“Excellent!” He laughed. “Wonderful!”

“But didn’t they bomb first? Didn’t they bomb Donbas?”

And that was when Uncle Maksim lost it.

“What do you mean, ‘bombed’?! Do you even understand where Donbas is? It’s Ukrainian land. We seized it from them, and they were trying to take it back! And do you know why we seized it? So they’d forget about Crimea! Which we’d already snatched from them, too!”

“We didn’t snatch anything,” Ulyana replied calmly. “That’s a load of crap. Why is nobody saying this except you?”

“Why? You’re really something right now… Because if you say that out loud, someone will immediately file a report on you with the FSB and you’ll be hauled in for discrediting or spreading fake news! Like Dovlatov said, you know? Somebody must have written those four million denunciations… What’s so surprising…”

“Or maybe if you just stopped badmouthing your own country, everything would be fine?”

“All right, that’s it! Break! Break! Come on, no politics, okay? We’re not going to fall out over this,” Aunt Marina fluttered into the living room like a dove of peace. “Ulyash, dry your hair for now and come help me in the kitchen, would you? Maksik, go get a bottle of sparkling wine; we’ve run out of the light stuff. And we’ll sit down to dinner in about forty minutes.”