10.

By night, Marina’s migraine had flared up. The poor thing tossed and turned, groaned, and only finally drifted off toward morning, it seemed; so as not to disturb her, Maksim moved to the sofa in the living room. And there, unexpectedly, he slept beautifully. Slept well, and forgot yesterday’s quarrel. He had this happy knack: shout it out, clear himself out, shed the extra weight and get on with life.

He ran into Kiryuha in the kitchen. He’d got up with the alarm—puffy-eyed but happy—and decided to make his own omelet. They used to do this when Kirill was in school: Maksim often got up before Marina, on his feet at seven thirty like a tin soldier—some kind of biorhythms, maybe—gently and carefully waking Kiryuha so the boy would go to school in a good mood, then making him toast or cooking porridge. And back then they’d usually chat at this hour before each went off to his own duty. Kiryuha seemed to love that shared hour in the morning, too.

“Well, how was the nightlife? At least productive?” Maksim asked him with a half-smile, beating the eggs.

“I think it’s love,” Kiryuha joked.

“Wow. Serious talk. What’s the lucky girl’s name?”

“Diana. Goddess of the hunt.”

Kiryuha was clearly bursting with joy, and Maksim almost laughed himself, caught up again in his son’s anticipation of a fun summer’s day and a whole summer of life.

“Pretty?”

“I can show you. On Insta,” Kirill said.

“I’d be honored.”

Kiryuha jumped up from his chair and brought his phone over to the stove, already open to the right page. He’d clearly been sitting there admiring his new girlfriend himself.

Maksim expected to see some little cutie, lips puckered into a bow, eyeliner wings around her eyes, like all those little chicks on Moscow’s verandas and on Instagram. Instead, he saw a girl who was genuinely beautiful—carved with perfect precision from bog oak, with lively, intelligent eyes, dressed neither modestly nor sluttily, just plain cool. There wasn’t a trace of fakery in her. You could definitely fall in love with a girl like that, especially when you were twenty-seven.

“Oh.”

“She’s fucking awesome, right?”

“The bomb,” Maksim said, shyly trying out the youth slang.

“A real goddess,” Kiryuha said happily.

“What does she do?” Maksim couldn’t help asking the parental question.

“She’s a DJ. Super fashionable. Super cool. And super sweet. Just top-tier.”

“Well? So, best wishes and may love prevail, then?”

“Let’s not rush things,” Kirill chuckled. “Don’t want to jinx it.”

Maksim ran a hand through his thick hair and ruffled it. It was just like Maksim’s own had been at twenty.

He set a steaming omelet in front of Kirill—not burnt at all, despite the distractions, and with a delicate little snot of egg: masterfully done. Kirill sat down, cut himself a piece, and closed his eyes in pleasure.

And suddenly it was as if someone poked Maksim in the back of the head with a finger.

He turned around—and there was Ulyana, standing in the dim corridor. She shot him a look, muttered something, and vanished. Weird.

She took the veil with her anyway, crumpled it up and stuffed it in her bag. Like a talisman, maybe. Or maybe this was only temporary—the operation. They’d finish, and she’d be right there. If the deputy chief had promised they’d schedule the registration for twelve? Maybe they’d be done by twelve, and everything would still go according to plan.

Of course, she immediately started writing to Artur Ivanovich, demanding an explanation, but nothing was getting delivered and she couldn’t get through by phone. After the second attempt, Ulyana reined herself in, afraid she’d come off like a fucking psycho and scare him off. She shouldn’t have been bombarding him with messages on Telegram; she should’ve pulled herself together and raced over there, to his office, and asked him all her questions in person.

She deleted the extra messages, growled something sour in the kitchen as she left, slammed the door, and rushed out without breakfast. They were pretending in there that nothing had happened yesterday: it’s easy to forget an offense when you’re the one who caused it.

Ding—a message from Tatyana Nikolayevna chimed in: “Which train should I get tickets for?” But Ulyana didn’t read it, pretended to be blind. You can wait. I waited, and now you can wait too.

Puddles lay across the asphalt—it had apparently rained sometime before dawn. The air had cooled and turned harsh. Above her, everything was packed with fiberglass insulation; you couldn’t tell if there was any sun up there at all. Ulyana hopped over puddles as she ran to the metro, thinking: what kind of sign was this? Good or bad?

She saw signs in everything. The wedding champagne she’d planned to buy was sold out at Perekrestok; they’d snapped it all up. In the metro, a crippled man crawled along the carriage, begging for money. The bus had already started to pull away, but stopped and picked Ulyana up after all. The sky was swollen with clouds, the wind whirled scraps of paper and torn leaves into a cyclone, as if a real hurricane were brewing; the newly planted little trees bent over, but only a few leaden drops fell, while the real downpour waited until Ulyana reached the checkpoint. What did all of this mean for her and Sasha?

The October weather in the middle of July had broken something in Odintsovo—with no sun, it had turned gray; the rising hurricane stripped away all its summer languor like camouflage netting, exposing its garrison nature: barracks and infirmaries.

She got off and ran.

Somewhere in there, Sasha was lying under the knife, under anesthesia, while the pass he’d issued her was still valid. The courtyard was empty; everyone was waiting for the skies to open. Only people in blue pajamas and people in white coats were smoking under the awnings.

She slipped into the building where the administrators had their offices and joined the line to see the deputy chief physician. She had a bag in her hands, with a little packet of chocolates and a shell of champagne inside. She ate chocolate so she wouldn’t lose her temper with the administrators on an empty stomach. She rustled the candy wrappers guiltily and hid them in her bag: the hospital was strict and sterile, there wasn’t even anywhere to litter.

She could barely wait her turn.

“Hello, Artur Ivanovich. I’ve been trying to reach you all morning… I’m Ulyana, Ulyana Tsareva, the one engaged to Lazarenko, about the marriage registration? I sent you a photo, a certificate… about the pregnancy.”

“Huh? Yes,” he said, looking at her as if he didn’t recognize her. “And?”

“We were scheduled for noon today, the signing. The marriage registration.”

“Well, wonderful. Congratulations. But what exactly…”

“They took him in for surgery. It was supposed to be the day after tomorrow… You said noon, but he’s not here. You scheduled it for me, Artur Ivanovich. I came all the way here, brought champagne… Like an idiot.”

He rubbed his bald spot with his plump palm, as though smoothing down a nonexistent forelock.

“Ah! Lazarenko… Lazarenko. Neurosurgery? Yes, yes…”

He picked up the phone, grunted something, and looked out the window. It faced the hospital chapel, with its dome and cross. Artur Ivanovich’s office was smaller than his boss’s, but somehow it felt lived-in, settled.

“Uh-huh. Right. Got it.” He put down the phone and turned to Ulyana. “Yes. They’ve scheduled his operation. The surgeon and his attending physician made the decision.”

“But we had an arrangement…”

He furrowed his round forehead.

“Ulyana…?”

“Konstantinovna.”

“Ulyana Konstantinovna!” Artur Ivanovich smiled at her politely. “May I ask you a personal question? Which would you rather have: getting married or becoming a widow?”

“But we’d planned everything…” Ulyana chirped again, like a wind-up toy. “For twelve.”

“Let me repeat. This isn’t a wedding palace. Our job is to treat your fiancé. As much as we can. If the medical board recommends urgent surgery, all other plans—what do we do?—go on hold.”

“And how serious is it?” Ulyana asked fearfully.

“This serious. Internal bleeding has started, so they’ve decided to do everything at once.”

For a second, all this business about getting married stopped seeming important—or even possible—to Ulyana. For a second, she understood that Sasha might really die—maybe even today. It was as if the window in the office had been shuttered.

“And how… The operation?”

“Well, so far it seems to be going according to plan.”

And as soon as the fear let go, ebbed away, Ulyana immediately needed again what she’d come here for. Instantly.

“So, could we still get married today?”

The deputy shook his head and looked at her like she was an idiot, without a trace of warmth; it had been a mistake to think he was one of her people at all.

“The operation will take seven and a half hours. It’s a major operation, do you understand? Afterward—let’s pray it goes well—the patient will be transferred to intensive care, where he’ll be sedated and unconscious. Do you understand what that means?”

“What?”

“It means that you absolutely cannot register your marriage today. Or tomorrow. And of course, no one is going to marry you in intensive care, either. You’ll have to wait.”

He laced his fingers together and looked at Ulyana very intently: had she understood by now, at least?

“He fought over there, my Sasha. He was wounded. He’s a participant in the Special Military Operation. He’s entitled to register his marriage the very same day. It says so everywhere,” she babbled desperately, like incantations that used to work and for some reason had stopped working now.

“Ulyana Konstantinovna. Everyone here is like that.”

He said it, and she hunched over. She’d walked in with a straight spine, but now it had bent into an arch. All the strength that had come over her on the train, in the compartment, when she’d taken the right side, suddenly evaporated.

“And what if he doesn’t make it?” she asked in a hoarse voice, almost soundlessly.

“Well, let’s try to stay optimistic.”

He gave her some more time to ask another question, but Ulyana was paralyzed. The house where she’d put everything she’d spent her life hauling in was ablaze, and she was staring, transfixed, at the glow, unable to move.

“You have my number. Write to me,” he snapped her out of it. “During working hours.”

Ulyana mumbled something, got up, and wandered off. Artur Ivanovich followed her with his eyes—not with sympathy, not with indifference, but with the look of a trainer. There was nowhere else for the conversation to go; it had hit a wall of concrete.

There was nothing she could do, nothing. Nothing could be done.

Ulyana crawled out into the courtyard, twitched her paws, and took out her vape—but it was dead. She cadged a cigarette from some burned soldier, told him her fiancé was having surgery, and he lit it for her. For the first time in a couple of years, she inhaled real poisonous smoke, and it was sweeter than her electric melon. Domes drifted above the treetops, gleaming like freshly minted coins, but Ulyana didn’t want to go there; a church wasn’t a wish-granting machine, and if God existed, you had to be straight with him.

Her phone buzzed.

Ulyana checked automatically—it was Tatyana Nikolayevna. Apparently she’d sent her something else while Ulyana was with the doctor, jabbing her stubby fingers at a greasy screen, demanding an answer: when are you leaving, when are you leaving?

Why are you on my case like a wet rag?

Tatyana had been in a good mood first thing in the morning, still riding yesterday’s happiness, but by noon all that fuel had burned off into a hangover. Ulyanka wasn’t answering her texts, and each unanswered message tightened the noose another notch, the one Tatyana’s guts were winding themselves around: she could feel people in her guts, tell who put her at ease and who gave her a tugging feeling. Yesterday, when she’d talked to Ulyanka, something had stirred in there too, but Tatyana had brushed it off; she didn’t want to spoil her joy with doubts. Maybe she shouldn’t have.

But something else happened, too. Vitalya came back from the builders’ market with a magazine. Tatyana made her morning coffee her own way: mixed one and a half spoonfuls of instant coffee with three spoonfuls of sugar, sat down to leaf through the magazine, and on the next-to-last page saw a big ad: a cottage for sale. It was brick, already built, just unfinished inside, in Semenkovo, about ten minutes’ drive from town. Two hundred square meters! Two hundred and three, even. And it cost only ten million. For a place that big… She started adding things up, just for herself, as a little workout for the mind. If they sold the apartment, paid back the mortgage, and then collected all of Sasha’s payouts—the severe-injury compensation, the disability payments for Group One, and the payout for leaving the service—and bargained over the cottage, too—it should be easy to sell, they wouldn’t have put an ad up otherwise! Maybe they’d knock off a million, maybe even a million and a half. Two hundred square meters—what’s not to like? There’d be room for Sasha, and Ulyanka too, and they could bring her mother in from the village. And they could sell her mother’s house and plot, too, for that matter; everyone could be gathered close, all living happily ever after. Everyone nearby, everyone in sight. It’d be easier to look after Sasha there, Ulyanka wouldn’t go off the rails, her old lady would be under supervision; it was such a long drive to visit her now, she was sick of it.

It started as a fantasy, but then it sucked her in. Why should it be a fantasy? It was all Sasha’s money; surely he’d want to do all this for his parents? Who’d raised him? His parents. And his mother could look after him, couldn’t she? They’d find a place for Ulyanka, too. All she had to do was get close enough to her that Ulyanka would obey Tatyana like a mother. Or better than her own mother.

She sent the first text when she started planning out her day that morning. The second when she couldn’t get through to Sasha, and the third when Alexey, the man sharing his hospital room, answered for him. He answered and told her everything: Sasha had been taken away, they were going to operate.

“Tell me… How is he, at least?”

“Oh, he’s fine, basically. Doing great.” He seemed to say it evenly, calmly—but with the same flatness you’d use to reassure a chicken right before chopping its head off with an axe.

“He’s bad, isn’t he?” Tatyana pressed him, catching that in his voice.

“They took him to intensive care at night, and then straight into emergency surgery.”

“Lord Jesus,” she sobbed, surprising even herself.

“Hey, don’t… He’ll be all right,” Alexey promised her. “He’s a tough kid, you know. No legs, but he’s still a champ.”

Alexey was gentle with her, perhaps because he was thinking of his own mother.

“Thank you. Thank you, Alyosha. Can I call you again?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

She couldn’t show pity to Sasha face-to-face, or he’d lose heart; if she gave in, he’d get all weepy too, and then he’d seem even more pitiful, and it would be harder for him. He had to avoid feeling sorry for himself. Tatyana had never coddled him, and she wasn’t going to start now. If you go all tender, you’ll raise a girl—or worse, spoil them, and then just try keeping them in line; they’ll either get drunk or end up in prison. Raising boys is a job.

That was one thing. The other was that he shouldn’t think his mother was sucking up to him, that she’d begun to doubt herself and what she’d done. A mother is right, and always right.

So she wrote to let Ulyanka know about the operation. But Ulyanka didn’t bestir herself. At first Tatyana felt hurt on Sasha’s behalf, and then everything went downhill from there. After all, she’d told her how worried sick she was, and now there wasn’t a peep out of her. Yet I’m reaching out to her, ready to take her in—not to live in the cottage, then at least to come to Moscow; we’ll see how things go, watch how she behaves. I’ve already swallowed my pride for Sasha’s sake, so as not to hurt him—fine, he’s got attached to that Ivanovna piece of ass, but it’s not like I’m some kind of snake. For Sasha’s sake, yes! But does she even give a damn about Sasha? Look at her: she won’t call, won’t ask, won’t even deign to reply. Well, she’s probably got her own business to take care of right now—probably something more fun. What business could she have that’s so important she can’t even take a second to answer a text?

She held out, held out, then couldn’t take it anymore. She called.

She just had to hear Ulyanka’s voice now—to see how it sounded, whether it rang false.

Beep, beep, beep, beep. “Hello, Tatyana Nikolayevna.” She finally picked up on the tenth try. And in such a tone, as if they were strangers, as if they no longer had anything in common.

“Why aren’t you answering?”

“I got food poisoning or something. I had sushi yesterday, maybe it was that. I’m in bed.”

“If only you’d eaten at home… Well, never mind. You’ll be back on your feet by this evening?”

“I don’t know. Can’t we wait until tomorrow, Tatyana-Nikolavna?”

Someone shouted into her phone, someone laughed. Then it was as if the wind rushed up, and there was a rustling.

“Who’s laughing over there?”

“It’s just that I have the window open… Out in the yard.”

Tatyana fell silent, letting Ulyanka’s phone listen in a little longer to what was going on around her. But nothing else happened. Maybe she’d covered the phone with her hand.

“And you’re not interested in what’s happening with Sasha?”

Ulyana sighed. Waited.

“I am interested, Tatyana-Nikolaevna. I know what’s going on with him.”

How, exactly?”

“He called me.”

“When was that?”

“Yesterday. After you.”

So. They were already making arrangements over there without her, without Tatyana. Between themselves, directly.

“And do you know about today?”

“The operation? I know.”

“And you don’t want to go?”

“I want to. I’m just sick, Tatyana-Nikolaevna,” Ulyanka snapped. “What’s the point of going today, when he’s in this state and that, and then he’ll be in intensive care? They won’t let me see him anyway.”

“You know everything, don’t you,” Tatyana replied angrily.

“Well, I’m worried too, you know—not just you!”

“All right, then. Get better.”

She hung up on Ulyanka and started thinking. By the end, she’d started sounding almost human; she’d really lost it when Tatyana set her straight. And she’d talked to Sashka, too. Good—she wasn’t indifferent. Well, she’d got food poisoning from her sushi, it happens. And now she’s going to eat raw fish while pregnant! Damn, forgot to get that in.

All right. It’ll burn her up till tomorrow.

Why had she been picking at Ulyana? Because she’d sensed something.

How much longer could Ulyana keep stringing things out? The suspicions were already so strong that next time, who knew, they might torture her with electric shocks during the interrogation. Ulyana had wheedled time for herself until tomorrow, lied through her teeth, but she’d bargained for it—and for what? Tomorrow it would all collapse anyway: everything she’d imagined would turn back into a fucking pumpkin, all of it—into dust. Tatyana Nikolayevna would come and, with those scalded fingers of hers, crumple it all up, break it, and grab everything for herself. You don’t need another life, Ulyanka, and your little fosterling doesn’t need any life at all. Hand it all over; we need it more. Is that how it works? So Ulyana was just supposed to swallow all that? Why? Out of respect for her, or what? Yeah, right.

So she was supposed to hand over everything Ulyana had built on a wing and a prayer, and let her have it? The new-build in Odintsovo, where the little apartment was cramped but cozy, a little kitchen-room? And a new tenant had already moved in there, Sasha’s son, the sweet tooth; Ulyana wasn’t doing this for herself now, not just for herself. She’d already pushed his stroller along Odintsovo’s straight streets, scoped out the carousels and sandpits, spotted the children’s clinic, found out where the Pyaterochka was and where the food market was. She’d already looked at the glow of nighttime Moscow from beyond the MKAD with the eyes of a local, at something once beyond reach, now shining for her alone, like a lit window in the dark to a frozen gnat. And now, when routes had been mapped out and paths worn in, what, was she supposed to chuck all that, and everything else, just because Tatyana Nikolayevna said so? And when, exactly, was Ulyana supposed to get to live?

Not a chance.

It was Ulyana’s turn to become, and to be. She’d waited a long time, waited thirty years and hadn’t bitched, but now she wasn’t going to back down. Because there might not be another chance.

She turned and headed back to Artur Ivanovich. She had to bend reality while it was still bendable.

He saw her—and wasn’t even surprised.

“Anything else?”

“I’m pregnant,” Ulyana told him.

“Well, you sent me the scan. I mean, I know.”

“What if he doesn’t pull through? Sasha. I have to think about that. What would happen to me then? Where would I go? Alone with a child.”

“I understand,” he said, nodding at her sympathetically for the first time.

“Register us,” Ulyana pressed softly. “I have every right to this.”

“You did hear everything I said before, didn’t you? He’s unconscious…”

“Register us.”

At first he furrowed his brow, puzzled, as if trying to find a solution to this impossible problem together with Ulyana. Their eyes met, and then they searched each other’s faces to make sure they understood one another. His face had changed completely—before, he’d seemed asleep; now he’d woken up.

“This is going to…”

“Yes.”

He got up, crept over to the door, checked the lock, gave Ulyana another once-over, then turned away from her and stood by the window, as if there was something more interesting out there.

“Well, one,” he said indistinctly, facing away.

“What?”

“One million.”

“What does that mean?” Ulyana asked, confused.

“A million.”

“But where would I get that kind of money?” she exclaimed. “I’ve only got twenty-seven thousand left on my card.”

He turned to her and spread his hands; his face was sympathetic.

“Well, unfortunately, that’s what it costs. Why are you looking at me like that? I’m not keeping it for myself. You have to get so many people involved, and everyone has to get their cut,” Artur Ivanovich began explaining in a barely audible, gentle voice, as if apologizing. “What are you asking me to do?”

“I’m asking you to register me and my fiancé,” Ulyana insisted.

“You’re asking me to commit an abuse of office. The patient is unconscious. How can he express consent to enter into marriage?”

“He could come to for a second and…”

“Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. It’s a procedure! So many eyes. And so many mouths. Registry-office staff, hospital staff,” Artur Ivanovich began listing them, still looking guilty and embarrassed. “Direct superiors, oversight agencies… You understand, if this were just between you and me, I’d be happy to register you, absolutely free. Legally. But what you’re asking for isn’t legal. It’s not just an abuse of office…”

Now he went back behind the desk, leaned toward Ulyana, and purred and purred, wheedlingly. He wasn’t blaming her or extorting her; he’d become her accomplice, honestly and confidentially laying out the whole mechanism, like a partner.

“I came here from Vologda; we live in Vologda. We live from payday to payday, on forty thousand,” Ulyana said helplessly. “Where am I supposed to get your million?”

“Borrow it,” Artur Ivanovich advised her.

“From whom? In one day?” Ulyana despaired.

“You’ll find someone. The world’s not short of kind people.”

He came around to Ulyana’s side, crouched beside her, and whispered conspiratorially:

“You stand to get five million, maybe more. Surely you can take out another loan for one?”

Ulyana wanted to argue, but he was already on his feet, helping her up, already guiding her toward the exit with an arm around her. Her own legs were getting tangled.

“And don’t drag your feet too much there… Though what am I saying, right? Of course you understand perfectly well yourself.”

She nodded: I understand. He’d hypnotized her.

She stepped outside, and there was a flood. Summer had folded in on itself; slanting rain slashed like steel wire, trees bent in arcs, white plastic bags rose in a whirlwind from the hospital courtyard toward the black sky. The air had turned taut, denser than water; it wouldn’t let Ulyana through, it pushed her back.

Without an umbrella, in her wedding dress and heels, she ran for the bus stop through muddy rivulets. She was soaked through, shivering like a puppy, barely waited for the bus as it floated through the murky torrents, jumped aboard, pressed herself against the window, and went limp.

Well, she’d wanted them to name a price, and they’d named one.

Changing her life cost more than she’d ever had. Those were the prices they charged for it in their Moscow. Go on, get back to your Vologda, Ulyanchik, back to your little hovel.

Rain drummed on the tin roof, the wipers couldn’t keep the water at bay, and ahead, over Moscow, lightning flashed in whole networks at once, as if the sky’s wiring had caught fire.

Ulyana was pathetic and dirty, like a poplar fluff ball pressed into the mud by the rain. Powerless.

Well, maybe everything would be all right?

Sasha would come around, Ulyana would persuade him to join her in standing up to his mother, to defend her. Would he? Who was really in charge of him? Certainly not Ulyana. His mother would arrive, tug his leash, shout, “Heel!” and he’d cower again, just like last time. So much for everything being “all right.” Or what? Maybe she’d accept Ulyana, but on her own terms, and Ulyana would end up in Tatyana Nikolayevna’s service for life as payment for that blessing. The very thought made her feel sick.

And what if he died? Without ever regaining consciousness.

The rain lashed down, but it didn’t get any easier to breathe. She was riding as if inside an aquarium. It was stifling outside, and stifling inside. The windows had steamed up, as if they were carrying a whole carful of drunks. Ulyana stared blankly at the fogged-up window and slowly traced the shimmering word “DICK” on the misted glass with a freshly painted nail.

In the metro, she swayed right and left with the whole car as it rocked through the underground bends: the entire car was full of people just like her, the whole train. Everyone had a flexible spine; everyone was being tossed around. Nobody looked at anyone else; they knew there was nothing to see. Everyone’s eyes were turned inward, and those who did look at their phones did so cautiously, keeping an eye on their neighbors. The cars were decorated with ads for contract military service.

Ulyana didn’t even run from the metro to her home. She was soaked through already; it made no difference. Along the sidewalks, the water rushed in torrents like irrigation ditches in a kishlak. It seemed deep enough to drown in without any trouble.

But then she got into a hot shower, and the water at least got her blood moving, charged Ulyana up with stubbornness. She could still fight a little longer, flounder around for a little longer. Artur Ivanovich had been right about everything, of course—including the fact that Ulyana did, actually, have someone she could borrow from. Now she had to go all the way, push as far as she could, since she’d already come this far. Try her luck one more time.

They’d had a fight yesterday, yes. But they’d still let her stay with them, fed her dinner, even asked about Sasha—Uncle Maksim grudgingly, Aunt Marina quite sincerely. Ulyana could feel that Aunt Marina felt sorry for her. You knew these things from someone’s voice, from their eyes—you could tell they saw the blood in you and forgave you like family, because family mattered more to them than some political difference. Besides, she’d said as much herself. A little hope began to coo in Ulyana’s chest. Mom and Aunt Marina had loved each other; they’d played together as children, back in the village. Uncle Maksim was a lost cause, but maybe Aunt Marina could be persuaded. She was kind. And maybe he’d feel sorry for Ulyana, too? He wasn’t completely heartless, even if yesterday he had given her the deputy headteacher. She was pregnant, after all.

And Ulyana had no one else to turn to for this.

She waited for Aunt Marina. She went into the kitchen to have tea with her. Like a pregnant cat returning from her prowling and rubbing against its owners’ legs so they’d put out food, she thought to herself.

“Hi, Ulyash. How are you?”

“Oh, you know… Aunt Marin. Could I, um… ask you for some money? To borrow.”

“Of course, certainly…” Aunt Marina hurried. “Wait a bit, will you? I’ll get my purse. Or would you rather I transfer it to your card?”

“No, I need cash…”

“How much? Would twenty thousand be enough? Thirty? I don’t know how much I have…”

“Aunt Marin. I need a million.”

“How much?”

“Well, a million. Rubles, just so we’re clear,” Ulyana smiled at her as best she could.

Aunt Marina froze in the doorway, twitched her eyebrows, then came back to Ulyana and sat down.

“Why do you need that much, Ulyash? Is everything all right? I mean…”

“Nothing’s all right, Aunt Marin.” The smile had set on her face, making it hard to speak. “They’re asking me for a bribe at the hospital. I have to pay it.”

“How awful… What’s the bribe for, Ulyash?”

“So they’ll register me and Sasha. They won’t register us without money. They won’t marry us.”

“How can that be?” Aunt Marina said in disbelief.

“Well, that’s how. He’s unconscious there. They operated on him today, I think.”

“How did it go?”

“They won’t tell me. I’m nobody to him, apparently. They only give information to relatives in intensive care.”

Aunt Marina tired of looking at Ulyana; she inspected her cup, her plate, the bottle of cognac.

“Well, still—a million… Asking for a million for something like that. Have they completely lost their minds?”

“I’ll pay you back.”

She promised this confidently, and only afterward asked herself: when would she pay it back? Aunt Marina gave her a quick glance too, then immediately looked away, faster than Ulyana could notice. But Ulyana noticed everything, read the question in her face: where are you going to get the money to pay me back?

“The wives are entitled to compensation, that’s all.”

“God forbid…”

Aunt Marina collected her thoughts and, as she had before, stroked Ulyana’s fingers. Her hand was cold. And her eyelid twitched.

“I… When Maksim gets back, I’ll talk to him, all right? We understand. We all understand.”

While Sashka was missing, nothing depended on Tatyana. She showed up at the military enlistment office, checked in, asked all her usual questions: cleared her conscience, and well, go on home. The army was dealing with it, yes, though it had been kicking her from pillar to post—but at least it was taking full responsibility for her son’s fate: we’re handling it, don’t interfere. So she went home to put up wallpaper—she’d done what she could, what else could she do?

But once Sashka had been found, the weight shifted onto Tatyana’s shoulders, too. Now she knew where he was, and she couldn’t put the wallpaper up straight anymore. What had happened with his operation? How had it gone? She had to ask.

She started messaging that Alexey. Was he asleep or what? He wasn’t answering. She sent Ulyanka a message—she was ignoring her too. She yelled at Vitalya for having his hands up his ass, and at Svetka for putting on makeup like a slut. The beef had cooked through; Tatyana had skimmed the scum off the broth and tossed in the potatoes, but nobody answered. Her whole family had hidden from Tatyana like cockroaches, to stay out of trouble.

At least it was easier to think in the silence.

So Ulyanka already knew all about Sashka. And she’d talked to him. If Tatyana hadn’t asked, she wouldn’t have admitted it herself. And why wouldn’t she tell Tatyana? And then she’d conveniently got food poisoning after eating sushi, while pregnant. Tatyana knew you weren’t supposed to eat raw fish when you were pregnant, and back when she gave birth, sushi didn’t even exist. Ulyanka was so modern and all—surely she knew better?

So what was it, then? What?

While she chopped the cabbage, she called Alexey. She kept calling stubbornly, until he got fed up with hearing the phone buzzing. She waited, then kept at it until she got through: he picked up.

“Hello. Alyosha?”

“Speaking.”

“I wanted to ask you something… How’s my Sashka? Have they brought him in yet?”

“Where would they bring him? He has to go to intensive care first.”

“Do you know how it went?”

“They don’t tell us.”

Tatyana’s mouth had gone dry. She chewed to get it unstuck. Alexey breathed noisily for a bit, then took pity on her and added:

“Well, his things are here. If anything had gone wrong, they’d have thrown his stuff out and brought in the next guy. So he’s alive.”

“Oh, thank God. Thank you, Alyoshenka.”

“You know, don’t worry so much. They bring in worse cases than him.”

“How can I not worry… Just wait till you have kids of your own…”

“Little brats?” he replied after a pause. “I’ve got some already.”

“Well, there you go. How many? Children?”

“Two.”

“Boys?”

“Girls. Three and five.”

“Have they come to see you?”

“My wife came, but I told her not to bring the kids. What the fuck for?” Alexey audibly sniffed. “So they can have all kinds of shit giving them nightmares?”

Tatyana sighed.

“Well… And how’s my Sashka? Doesn’t he feel lonely there with nobody? I was planning to come already, but I had to put it off. And now there’s the operation…”

Alexey chuckled at the other end of the line, hawked and spat. He answered someone indistinctly off to the side, then came back to Tatyana.

“Why would he be alone? He’s not alone. His fiancée’s standing guard.”

“What fiancée?” Tatyana went cold.

“His. Tall, lanky girl. You don’t know her?”

“Ulyanka?”

“That’s it, exactly. I almost said Yulka, but she’s Ulka. She’s planning to marry him there, isn’t she? Are you coming to the wedding, at least?”

And that was that.

Then there was more noise, and she shouted over it, telling Svetka to buy tickets to Moscow, but Svetka had already disappeared somewhere and wasn’t answering her phone, and that bitch, of course, wasn’t answering either. Tatyana had called her a hundred times, at least—nothing. She couldn’t hold back and wrote: “I treat you like a human being, and this is how you treat me, you bitch?!”

How could this happen?! How could you trust people after this? And the imagined cottage, where they all lived peacefully side by side, began to fall apart at once—and worse, fear seized her that Ulyanka might actually steal her son away from his mother. If she was capable of this—taking him, deceiving her, sneaking off and marrying him off on her own—what next? Next she’d convince Sashka that his mother wasn’t his mother, take him away and hide him. And he was of age; what could Tatyana do if he was married? Ulyanka would probably fill his head with all sorts of things, pour poison in his ear, until he renounced his mother and his father. The mortgage was one thing, but she might even alienate him from his family altogether, God forbid!

Tatyana started demanding that Vitalya drive her to the station so she could leave that very day on the night train, but suddenly he started shouting that he wouldn’t let her go in that state. Tatyana was ready to fight him, but her head began to spin; she sat down on the sofa and stayed there, everything roaring, fiery specks flying before her eyes. Just when she seemed to feel a little better, people in blue overalls came in: Vitalya had called an ambulance. They started taking her blood pressure, and it was through the roof—so much for your Capoten, it wasn’t helping at all. Sit down, they said; we’re not letting you go to Moscow, and if you start making a scene, we’ll take you to the emergency room, too. Frankly, you ought to be spending the night under observation in the city hospital, not on a train. All right, she pretended to behave herself; they stuck a thick needle into the crook of her arm. The doctor was just a girl, barely managed to hit the vein. They put her on some kind of drip, and she began to feel a little better. They absolutely forbade her to travel that night, strictly, and said she could decide for herself tomorrow.

Well, at least Tatyana gave in to the ambulance crew. They knew what they were doing, after all.

She messaged Svetka to get her a ticket for the first train in the morning, even if it was the six o’clock one. She turned on the TV, and there was Let’s Get Married. Oh, for God’s sake.

Maksim was cutting through the murky waters of the Third Ring Road in his “Six,” which had seen better days, and thought: before all this dries up, the water trucks will be out again tomorrow morning anyway. Those damn water trucks scoured Moscow from morning till night; the city authorities had some pathological drive for cleanliness, bordering on obsession. Scrub, scrub, scrub… What were they washing off, exactly? Everyone knew what. The same thing your wife was hiding in the bushes; honestly, why were you asking questions like an idiot? Come on: be straight with her, and be straight with yourself. Your budget was a shared one, after all, and the question was whose money there was more of.

He called Kiryukha: how had the second round of interviews gone?

“Listen… It was, like, totally top-notch. The woman was really nice, some kind of psychologist or something… I make a joke, she laughs, she makes jokes too… She said ninety out of a hundred, I’m in; there’s just one final boss left… They’ll call and let me know.”

“Well… God willing. Having dinner at home with us?”

“Nah, Dad… I’m hanging out with the guys here. Then we’re thinking of going to a little bar, then a club. We’ve got to celebrate somehow!”

“Isn’t it a bit early to celebrate? You really are something…” Maksim grumbled. “Where do you put it all… You could’ve stayed home. The weather’s like this, and you…”

“I’ll sit around when I’m retired. What about you?”

“On the Third Ring. Trying to crawl home. Everything’s at a standstill because of the hurricane. By the way, stay away from trees. Two people have already been crushed, look… Did you see it on the news?”

“Okay, Pa.”

Maksim turned the dead phone over in his hand and tossed it onto the passenger seat.

Cars were barely inching along; the water came almost halfway up the wheels—the storm drains were all decorative now, thanks to all the beautification, while the whole city center had become one solid expanse of granite, grand and imposing. They laid granite everywhere, the same color as the Eternal Flame. It looked solemn, but had the feel of a military memorial, a cemetery.

Back in the aughts, when the tsar and his boyars were all young—fifty-year-olds—they wanted everything: big money, beautiful women, Italian suits, expensive cars, good food. Ordinary people weren’t forbidden any of it then, either. The aughts were good years, Maksim thought, even if the whole city was downright filthy back then: gaudy signs everywhere, everyone trying to buy something and sell something, rubbing each other’s eyes raw… But Moscow throbbed with a wild, libidinous energy… Just like Maksim himself. And now they’d taken down the garish ads, demolished the kiosks, and all the signs were modest, their lettering matched to the color of the façades… And all this… Paving stones, granite, austerity. Old age.

Marina had explained the thinking behind their campaign to cleanse the city of Luzhkov’s bazaar: a remake of Stalinist Empire style. They wanted to place Muscovites, aesthetically speaking, in a tranquil fifties, while letting the roaring thirties show through and be legible behind that aesthetic, too. Moscow had to be cleared of the products of human activity that had grown like moss or barnacles over the projects of state activity. The little people had to remember their place; in the nineties they’d gotten far too big for their boots.

But whatever the grand design, the execution was clumsy, because, like everything else, they’d entrusted it to thieves, who in turn handed it to ham-fisted incompetents. At least they were their own people. And so here was the result: on paper it all looked respectable enough, but in reality nothing worked worth a damn. They’d spent billions on those paving stones, on that granite, but hadn’t properly designed the drains. So all the shit got stuck in them. And there was shit overflowing everywhere else, too.

People sat in traffic, obedient and silent. In the nineties, everyone would’ve been honking, Maksim thought. In the nineties, everyone was rushing somewhere. Now they were all buried in their smartphones, putting up with it. Either they’d learned to endure again, or there was nowhere left to hurry to.

Or maybe, Maksim thought, the broken storm drains weren’t a bug but a feature, so to speak? Maybe when they remade Moscow, they deliberately plugged the drains so the whole place would flood to hell, until only the top of the Ararat-Hyatt stuck out again? Maybe they themselves were already sick of the whole thing?

Marina called, interrupting his train of thought.

“Hi. Are you close?”

“Go ahead and eat without me, Marin. It’s a total gridlock here.”

“I won’t eat without you. I bought some good Azbuka cutlets, really nice ones. Call when you’re parking and I’ll fry them.”

“Deal.”

“Kisses.”

“You too.”

So he was forgiven for yesterday’s escapade, then? It seemed like it. She’d called him herself, and there were cutlets… Was there really going to be no punishment? Yesterday it had seemed she wouldn’t speak to him for a month after that.

On the other hand, where were they going to go without each other now? He’d probably have to pay some kind of price—a token one. But then it would all be forgotten, because Marina had nowhere to go away from Maksim, and Maksim had no desire at all to leave Marina. Call it love, if there’s no better word for it.

Broken poplars lay across the road; the enforcers’ sirens wailed, stuck in the same traffic jam as the serfs. Police flashers strained and strained to disperse the darkness, but in their blue reflections the enormous black belly of the storm looming over Moscow only grew denser, heavier, blacker, and the hysterics of the insects all clumped together somewhere down on the ground could hardly make it stir.

Maksim admired the way the sky was crushing his city and asked himself: why are we so enchanted by the Apocalypse, why are we always expecting it, yearning for it? What kind of rotten upbringing is this? All those fat years, while the country was gorging itself on oil, passed like a daze, in a self-forgetful stuffing of our bellies—but why? Exactly because everyone thought all this prosperity would soon come to an end; you’d wake up tomorrow and find it had all just been a dream. Surely things couldn’t stay this sweet for this long, so you had to cram in more and more before the dream dissolved. And why did it feel like an illusion? Because of the sense that this prosperity was precarious, undeserved…

Was it the NEP that taught us this, Maksim wondered, the lesson that the seven fat cows would inevitably be slaughtered? Or was it the revolution, which confiscated all the country’s savings? Or was there some pre-revolutionary complex in us, a conviction that history itself had doomed us to suffer? Orthodox masochism? Or was it Ivan the Terrible, sending his oprichniki to gut overreaching boyars? But what did Ivan the Terrible have to do with him personally, with Maksim? Surely this feeling had to be rooted in his own experience… Where did it come from? His grandmother’s stories about the hungry war years? Childhood memories of standing in twenty-four-hour queues for sausage with his parents, because you were allowed only one stick of cervelat per person, so Maksim’s little hands came in handy? Ah, sausage, sausage, sacred symbol… Once you could have as much sausage as you wanted in one pair of hands, we went crazy with happiness and started gobbling down an endless supply. Consumer bulimia, till we puked. He remembered it himself—record players, VCRs, plasmas, phones, the very latest models, of course, German cars, more, more, more, faster, before it all got taken away.

And the more we stuffed our bellies, the harder it became to breathe. The more clearly and ominously the next reset of the cycle loomed ahead, its cause unknown this time, but something no one could possibly avoid. Everything would be taken away; everything would burn in the eternal flame. That was the foreboding gathering in the air—unexplainable and undeniable. As the classic put it: “The Germans make things; we fucking crank out tragedy.”

And what about all those threats of nuclear war against the feeble-minded West on the zombobox? All those missile drills and tests—what was that about? They savored it; they liked it themselves. They thought they were rattling their nukes to scare Europe and its rational mindset; they thought they were merely simulating madness, like the worn-out cons in Shalamov’s camps shrieking and waving a razor, even cutting themselves with it, to terrify prisoners bigger and stronger than they were. But in truth, they too were enthralled by the Apocalypse. The poor bastards had reached the limits of material expansion, realized they’d exhausted this world, and were now ready to reset it, even if it meant burning themselves up along with it—because they were unbearably sick of themselves. Existential dread. Suicidal syndrome. Eschatological frenzy.

Nicely put, you son of a bitch. Maksim glanced at himself in the mirror.

Still not moving.

Beethoven was playing on Orpheus; if Kiryukha had been in the passenger seat, he’d have said, “That fit the scene pretty well, thanks.” Though it had taken him three times longer than usual to get home, with that soundtrack it had actually turned out rather nice overall. Maksim liked to sound clever, but the Apocalypse appealed to him, too, on the whole. A chip off the old national block, so to speak.

As he parked, he called Marina and let her know; somewhere inside, the good Azbuka cutlets began to sizzle cozily, waiting for Maksim to ride the elevator up, wash his hands, and make his way into the kitchen.

Ulyana’s door was shut, a wedge of light spilling out from underneath. Fine, let her sit in there. Only a little guilt bobbed around inside Maksim when it came to her, like sediment in a wine bottle, and that was solely because he’d been so thick-skinned about her pregnancy. But that guilt was easy to push aside—he only had to remember how she’d defended her thug. Like a German shepherd.

Marina was waiting in the kitchen. He kissed her cheek—it felt taut. Maybe yesterday still hadn’t quite blown over.

“So, how was it? A nightmare?”

“Darkness has enveloped the city beloved by the procurator,” Maksim joked.

“Poor thing. How long did it take? Three hours? Want some?” She touched the bottle of whiskey.

“Sure.”

Marina poured him two fingers’ worth and dropped in an ice cube. Maksim took a long swallow: home, sweet home. Right?