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

XXXII

NADYA REALLY COULDN’T be called an alcoholic. At first she really did drink too much when her husband died, but when her son went missing she quit drinking. By the way, she believed in God but didn’t herself in church; but she believed, really and truly, and she had read the Bible, though not the whole thing. And she had her own prayer, fourteen words long, in plain Russian language, not the Slavonic, and she believed that God listened in particular to these words, which meant far more to her than an “Our Father who art in Heaven” meant to some pious old church lady.

She prayed, she went to the police, she sent a photograph of Kostya to the program Wait for Me on Channel One (but Inna, the editor, who had worked for several talk shows, when choosing between photographs of a lost girl and Kostya, chose the girl because Inna herself had a daughter), she wrote as her status on Odnoklassniki in big letters, “MY SON IS MISSING,” and they say that a friend of a friend wrote about Kostya on LiveJournal (Nadya herself didn’t have a very good idea of what exactly LiveJournal was), and the post with its photograph even landed on the top of the Yandex charts of the most popular sites of the day, but still there was no response. And it was for the best that Nadya didn’t read the comments under that top post, because some commenters had gone so far as to write things like—no problem, kids do go missing, you just need to birth some new ones faster, but anyway, being child-free rules.

In any case, Kostya was missing, as if he had never existed. And then something quite incomprehensible occurred in Nadya’s life. Svetlana Sergeevna, a doctor of pediatric cardiology, returned from a business trip; she had gone off somewhere a month ago, and this was also strange, because what kind of business could there be that could take her away from her hospital—all of her patients are right here, and there aren’t enough doctors as is. She returned from the trip and on her first day back gave Nadya a shock. She asked to bring her a photo of her deceased husband. For what, she didn’t say.

Nadya herself called Edik “deceased,” but until the end she did not believe that he had really been killed; they had never found his body, he had detonated a tripwire and that was it, not a trace of him remained, not even his dental crowns. Why a photograph, Svetlana Sergeevna did not explain, but Nadya wondered if he had lived. Sure enough, when she dumped out in front of the doctor a whole folder full of color photographs of her husband: matted and glossy paper, 9×12cm and 10×15cm—Nadya had loved back then to run off to the photo shop with the film, but then she abandoned her camera, and she had far fewer photos of Kostya than photos of her husband—Svetlana Sergeevna looked at the photos for a long time, then took off her glasses and, looking Nadya in the eye, gravely said:

“Your husband is alive, Nadezhda. That is that.”