A Killing Winter

Chapter 54

It was an hour or so after dawn when I left the station, my throat raw from too many cigarettes, too many explanations.

The threat of snow still hung over the city, but a thin smudge of blue over the mountains held a promise that winter might be drawing, at long last, to a close.

I walked back to my apartment, leaving fresh prints in the overnight snow. It crunched under my feet, the echo of fingers being broken in a basement room.

As I reached home, the morning was starting to emerge, with new hopes and as many fresh betrayals.

I paused and looked around. Just a few hundred yards up the road was where Yekaterina Tynalieva was butchered, nothing there now to serve as her memorial but tatters of crime-scene tape fluttering in the wind.

I thought of Chinara in the moments before her death, breath rasping in her throat, one thin hand gripping the sheet that would soon become her shroud.

And I remembered how tears stung my eyes as I pressed her grandmother’s wedding cushion down upon Chinara’s face, to take her away from a hard dying, to a place free from her pain and my sorrow. Her hands rose like startled doves from her sides, settled themselves upon mine, adding what strength she had left. I stared at the thin blue veins beneath the parchment of her fingers, willing them to fade and be still. And after her last breath had fled, I lifted the cushion from her face, wiped a few flecks of saliva from the lace, settled it gently beneath her head.

The end of a marriage, of a life – or rather, two lives.

Perhaps fragments are all that remain of us, fragments and the memories of those we loved and who loved us in their turn.

I wondered if Saltanat would be waiting for me upstairs, if she was already over the border, if I was now only a memory, or not even that.

I can’t say if we can create a life for ourselves, if desire can remain and grow into something else.

How long might we have together? Who knows?

I unlocked the door and stepped into darkness.