Fardwor, Russia!: A Fantastical Tale of Life Under Putin

XXXIII

SVETLANA SERGEEVNA HERSELF didn’t even understand where she was—it was some sort of assisted living facility, Soyuz; she saw the sign and could tell that the facility differed from, for example, a mental hospital. But nobody explained to her who those people were, what’s more, they asked her not to ask anybody anything or to tell anybody anything, all that she was to do was to make diagnoses and to prescribe treatments, but nobody had any heart ailments during this month, and all that Svetlana Sergeevna did (to be precise, not her, but the nurse Olya, a Muscovite) was measure each patient’s blood pressure once a week. The patients were ordinary people, only she couldn’t figure out if they were developmentally delayed or if, conversely, they were excessively active. More than anything they appeared to be shell-shocked—two years ago she had treated a shell-shocked victim from the Nevsky Express (the train that was blown up by terrorists), and this guy behaved the same way—his answers hadn’t made sense, but he was anxious and fussy, she remembered. As such, on account of these thoughts about the concussions, she doubted whether this was really him or not, or if it was simply by association; moreover, so many years had passed, and no matter how good Svetlana Sergeevna’s visual memory was, she couldn’t be certain whether this was the same man who had picked up the nurse Nadya from work several years ago. The funniest thing was that she didn’t remember Nadya’s last name, Chernichenko or something else, and what Nadya’s husband’s name was, she could not remember that either. The first time she didn’t ask him much at all, but the second time she couldn’t resist and took him by the hand:

“Chernichenko?”

“Chernenko,” Kostya answered. If only he had developed the ability to analyze his actions, he would have, of course, wondered why he had not given his name in the police station, but he was not yet able to analyze anything.

“Chernenko,” he repeated, looking into the doctor’s eyes. “Kostya.”

That Nadya had lost her son, and that her son’s name was Kostya, Svetlana Sergeevna was, of course, aware, but you can hardly blame her for not being aware of the invention of a certain Karpov, nor could she have known about the events that followed from this invention, and that the boy sitting before her was that very same seven-year old Kostya who had grown into a thirty-five year old man over a mere two weeks. She was sure that the man sitting before her was Kostya’s dad, Nadya’s husband, who said “Kostya” because he remembered his son and she would have probably called Nadya that very day, but they had taken her cell phone from her upon her arrival at work and warned her that for the entire month she had agreed to spend there, she was not to have any contact with the outside world.