The Kukotsky Enigma: A Novel

10

IN THE THIRD WEEK OF MAY A PREMATURE HEAT WAVE set in, making everyone a little bit sick. A few more days remained until the end of classes, but the curriculum had been covered in its entirety, and grades, both quarterly and final, had been given. It was already known who the honor students were and who would have to repeat a grade. The girls and the teachers at the school languished from the emptiness of time and its sluggishness.

Galina Ivanovna, an elderly schoolteacher, a worn-out nag with a flabby croup, came to class in a new summer dress, dirty beige with broken black lines that lost each other, then found each other, and emitted little sprouts.

Galina Ivanovna had worked with this group of girls for four years and had taught them everything she knew: writing, arithmetic, and drawing. Over these same years the girls had memorized both of her woolen winter dresses—one gray, the other burgundy—as well as her dark-blue suit covered with a layer of gray cat fur.

Since their first class that day the future fifth graders had been heatedly debating the teacher’s new acquisition: the belt was a bit plain, without a buckle, and it had Japanese sleeves. Most of the girls were eleven-year-olds, the age when they were most unalike in terms of development, when some of them had already developed curves and growths of curly hair in the hidden regions of their bodies, while others were still thin, sexless children with gnawed nails and scratched knees. But the teacher’s new dress intrigued both the former and the latter.

It intrigued Galina Ivanovna herself no less. She had sewn this dress not simply because her old one had worn out, but also because today, after classes were over, there would be a festive tea party to mark her fortieth anniversary as a teacher. During the class change Galina Ivanovna had even gone to the lavatory to look at herself in the mirror and straighten her collar. She had already achieved the rank of honored teacher, and now deep in her heart she dreamed that she would be given a real award—a medal or ribbon.

She devoted the fourth period to extracurricular reading. At first the girls read aloud in turn, every one of them poorly. Those who did not trip over their words rattled them out so senselessly that it was impossible to catch the contents. When she tired of correcting them, Galina Ivanovna took the book and began reading herself. Her voice, a bit high for such a large and stout person, was slightly nasal, but expressive. She read the part about freezing Kashtanka suffering on the shelterless street with particular depth and feeling.

Only a few minutes remained until the end of the lesson, and the most impatient were already silently collecting their satchels. The sun scorched at full capacity through the windows, and the girls to a one sweated in their woolen dresses that stuck to their wet armpits.

“A freezing dog gets no sympathy in this heat,” Tanya thought to herself, and at that same moment heard first one, then another, sniffle of someone crying into her sleeve.

Galina Ivanovna stopped reading. The entire class turned to look back at the far corner of the last row where for the last four years Toma Polosukhina had sat, insensible and indifferent to everything. She was crying over the bitter fate of frozen, lost Kashtanka.

Desks slammed shut, and the girls jumped from their seats.

“Class is not over yet,” Galina Ivanovna reminded them and, smiling professionally from the corners of her faded mouth, she said to Toma, “Why are you so upset, Toma? Didn’t you finish reading to the end?” She tried to calm the girl. “Everything will turn out all right at the end.”

“No it won’t, no it won’t!” Toma sniffled, tearing her cheek from the sticky school desk and wiping her nose with her apron.

She was one of the smallest, one of the least developed girls, plain and ordinary, like a sparrow or longspur . . .

The bell finally rang. Galina Ivanovna decisively closed her book. As if by magic everyone’s drowsiness dissipated; the languid, intolerable heat outside the windows instantaneously metamorphosed into fine weather—excellent weather—as they all trembled with impatience and dashed to get out into the street to hop on chalked asphalt; skip rope by themselves, in pairs, or in whole groups; or just jump and kick about, like young foals or kid goats, somersaulting, pushing and shoving, and senselessly tearing about . . .

Toma was still sniffling as she collected her dirty textbooks when Tanya went up to her. Why she went up to her she herself did not know.

“What’s wrong?” Tanya asked.

Tanya was no sparrow and no longspur; she was something rare, like a royal lily or a big transparent dragonfly. And both of them knew perfectly well who was who . . .

But that day Toma was going through something huge and awful that Tanya could never go through, and that made them equal, and even, perhaps, elevated Toma above the rest of the world, and for that reason, this little girl who had never said anything about herself and who would never be of interest to anyone said: “My mom’s dying. I’m afraid to go home . . .”

“I’ll go with you,” Tanya offered fearlessly.

Were it yesterday, Toma would have been proud and rejoiced that Tanya was going home with her, but today she almost did not care . . .

They passed through the schoolyard, which rang with girlish shouts and shimmered with greenish gold, slipped through two courtyards, squeezed through a fence, and stopped at the entrance to the “partment.” That’s what Toma’s mother called their housing, which had been assigned before the war to her husband, who had perished in 1944. It was a former garage, with a regular door cut through the garage door. Toma stopped in her tracks at the entrance; Tanya resolutely pushed the door.

It was the stench that hit first. The place reeked of sour dampness, urine, and kerosene, all of it rotten, decayed, and deathly . . . Two pieces of rope strung across the room were draped with wet linen. At the far end, under a wide low window that looked out onto a brick wall, stood the enormous bed on which the whole family—mother, Toma, and her two younger brothers—slept, as atop a Russian stove.

At first it seemed that the bed was empty, but when her eyes grew accustomed to the semidarkness, Tanya could make out a tiny head in a thick headscarf. Next to the bed stood a basin filled with brown linen. The girls approached the bed, the source of the horrible smells.

“Momma, Mom,” Toma called.

A groan could be heard coming from the scarf.

“Maybe you want something to eat or to drink?” Toma asked, her voice full of tears.

There was no answer, not even a groan.

Toma pushed the smelly blanket to the side: the woman was lying on a red sheet. Tanya did not realize immediately that this was blood. The brown linen in the basin also was bloodied, but it had darkened with exposure to the air.

“She needs an ambulance,” Tanya said firmly.

“She won’t let me call an ambulance,” Toma whispered.

“But there’s a lot of blood; she’s hemorrhaging . . .” Tanya was surprised.

“Yeah, she’s hemorrhaging. She scraped herself out,” explained Toma. Not sure that Tanya would understand, she explained: “She brings guys here, then she scrapes herself out. She scraped too far this time.”

Toma sniffled. Tanya winced: bang, screech, crash . . . The walls started to float, her depth perception inverted, and a stinking abyss gaped before her . . . Life was caving in on her, and Tanya understood that from this moment she had left her former life behind her, forever . . .

“I’ll call my dad, that’s what . . .”

“That’s what you say. He won’t come here.”

“Wait . . . I’ll be back soon.”

Within five minutes Tanya had reached the apartment. Her mother was not at home, and Vasilisa opened the door.

“You gone berserk?”

Not answering, Tanya rushed to the phone to call Pavel Alekseevich. No one picked up for a long time, then a voice told her that he was in surgery.

“What happened?” Vasilisa Gavrilovna tried to get her to answer.

“Ah, you wouldn’t understand.” Tanya waved her off.

It seemed to her that she must not reveal this awful knowledge to anyone, because no matter whom she told, their life also would collapse and fall apart, as hers had. The secret had to be kept safe . . .

“I’ll be back soon,” she shouted from the threshold and, slamming the door, dashed down the staircase.

Tanya remembered only vaguely how, not waiting for the trolleybus, she ran to the metro station, rode to the Park Kultury station, then ran once again down long Pirogov Street. It seemed like her running was infinite and went on for many hours. At the security desk of her father’s clinic they stopped her.

“I’m going to see my dad, Pavel Alekseevich . . .”

They let her through immediately. She tore up the stairs to the second floor, pushed open the glass door, and there was her father, walking toward her, in a white surgical gown and round cap. A whole brood of doctors and students milled around him, but he walked ahead of them—taller and broader than them all, with a deep-rosy face and gray-tufted bushy eyebrows. He caught sight of Tanya. It seemed as if the air parted in front of him.

“What happened?”

“Toma Polosukhina’s mother is dying. She scraped herself out!” Tanya blurted.

“What? Who let you in here?” he roared. “Go downstairs, to the reception area! Wait for me there!”

Tanya flew downstairs, gulping down her tears.

For all his bravery, he had taken fright. One denunciation would be enough to turn his life to hell . . .

Three minutes later Pavel Alekseevich came downstairs to the reception area. Tanya rushed over to him.

“Daddy!”

He stopped her again with his gaze.

“Now explain calmly what happened to you.”

“Toma Polosukhina, Dad . . . We have to hurry . . . Her mother is dying . . .”

“Whose mother? Who?” Pavel Alekseevich asked coldly.

“Our janitor, Aunt Liza. They live in the garage, behind our house. She scraped herself out, she did . . . Dad, it’s terrible there . . . Dad, there’s so much blood . . .”

He removed his glasses and rubbed the ridge of his nose. The phrase “scraped herself out” from Tanya’s lips . . .

“Okay, listen . . . Go straight home.”

“How?”

“The same way you got here.”

Tanya could not believe her ears. It was as if her father had been replaced by someone else. He had never spoken to her with such an iron voice.

Slouched, she went outside . . .

Thirty minutes later Pavel walked into the Polosukhin garage. His assistant Vitya was with him. The driver of the ambulance they had arrived in did not get out.

As soon as he set eyes on her, Pavel Alekseevich sized up what had happened: there she was, his patient, the unfortunate object of his professional concern . . . A wartime widow or single mother, probably alcoholic, and probably slept around . . . He touched the little janitor’s wide cold hand and opened an eyelid with his finger. There was nothing to be done here. Near the bed stood the three kids, two little boys and a girl, who stared at him with big eyes.

“Where’s Toma?” Pavel Alekseevich asked.

“I’m Toma.”

Pavel Alekseevich looked at her closely: he had taken her at first for a seven-year-old, but now, having got a better look at her, he understood that she was indeed Tanya’s classmate.

“Toma, take the boys upstairs to apartment number twelve. In the big gray house. You know where?”

She nodded, but did not budge.

“Go, go. Vasilisa Gavrilovna will let you in. You tell her that Pavel Alekseevich sent you. Tell her to set the table. I’ll be there in a second.”

“Are you taking Mommy to the hospital?”

He used his mighty figure to block their view of the bed and the miserable woman who was no longer.

“Go, go. We’ll do what needs to be done . . .”

The children left.

“Well, we’ve gotten ourselves into a mess . . . She has to be taken to the morgue . . . ,” the assistant half-implored.

“No, Vitya. We can’t take her to the morgue. I’m going to send Vasilisa Gavrilovna down here. She’ll be the one to call the ambulance and the militia . . . We were never here . . .” Pavel frowned. “You know yourself I’d take her if she were still alive . . .”

Vitya knew it all too well. Actually, all doctors knew how close this came to the criminal code.

Liza the janitor’s death sent shock waves up and down the baptized population of the odd-numbered side of Novoslobodskaya Street all the way down to Savelovsky Station, raising a storm of passions and arguments that shattered friendships forever. After Vasilisa Gavrilovna called the ambulance and the militia, and the dead woman’s contorted body was taken to the forensics morgue for an autopsy, scandal arose on two fronts—one having to do with housing, the other with medicine.

There were three significant contenders for the “partment.” The first—Kostikov, the house manager—dreamed of getting the place for his own sister and her daughter, who had been living in his quarters for more than two years while she waited to get an apartment through the factory where she worked, but with little hope. The day of the death Kostikov took advantage of the opportunity to sign his sister up for the late Liza’s job, and now he was sure the living space would not get away from them. The second contender was the electrician from the house management office, Kostya Sichkin, who was tired of living in a seven-by-four-foot room with three children and a fourth already on the way. There was one more contender, also not an outsider, a militiaman from the local beat, Kurennoy, who had the largest room in the dormitory, but was planning to get married, and waited in combat readiness. Other minor folk from the nearby barracks also would not have objected to an upgrade, but they had no chances whatsoever.

On the medical front things were more serious. The autopsy showed that Liza the janitor had died of hemorrhaging induced when the wall of her uterus had been perforated and some arm of ill-fated underground medicine, using an unidentified instrument, had pulled half of her intestine through the unintended puncture . . .

According to the criminal code this unsuccessful intervention was worth three to ten years, depending on the qualifications of the person performing the abortion: in the case of a lethal outcome doctors were given ten years, twice as many as an amateur. Which had a certain justice.

The whole neighborhood knew the names of the two women who practiced this impious trade: Granny Shura Zudina and the Moldavian woman Dora Gergel. The former was simpler and cheaper. She gave an injection and inserted a catheter. Usually it worked. Sometimes, with particularly muscular women or those who had never given birth, it did not. In which case Granny Shura shrugged and did not take any money.

Dora was a trained medic, and did everything by the book, with no misfires. She had moved to Moscow from Kishinev after the war. A swarthy beauty with fiery eyes—her suspicious but undiscerning neighbors took her for a Jew. She had a knack for anything she tried: although already pregnant at the time, she managed to marry a major; she was a crafty housekeeper—in Moscow, a new place for her, she quickly figured out what was to be had where, even when food was still being rationed. She got a job as a nurse in a hospital, although her nursing diploma was counterfeit, not even written in Russian. She performed real abortions at the patient’s home, with painkillers even, but she was expensive. Richer people went to her, and Liza could hardly have afforded her. So the neighborhood concluded with no uncertainty that the whole mess was Zudina’s doing.

The next day, an investigator showed up in the courtyard. The “partment” was searched, but no instruments or medications were found.

“Yeah, right, like the idiots are going to leave a trail of evidence,” the yard joked. The inspector, a young kid with a thin neck, interrogated the neighbor women and blushed. No one said anything. But, as always, an informer turned up. Zudina’s neighbor from the other side of the partition, Nastya-the-Rake, did not hold out, because she was a born champion of the truth.

“I won’t say what I don’t know. In Liza’s case I didn’t myself see her do it, but she’s stuck it in others, and it works real good,” she whispered directly in the investigator’s ear.

“Did you yourself ever use her?” the inspector inquired.

“God forbid, I haven’t had the need for a long time,” the Rake pleaded.

“So how do you know?”

Here the Rake led him over to the plywood partition, tapped it with her nail, and immediately heard a reply.

“Whattcha need, Nastya?”

“Nothin’,” the Rake answered zestily, then whispered directly into the investigator’s ear: “You can hear everything, down to the last kopeck. Around here you can’t sigh or fart without your neighbors knowing . . .”

The inspector wrote it all down in his notebook and left: now he had a lead.

The atmosphere of investigation, bickering, and hostility was so strong it penetrated even Pavel Alekseevich’s peaceful abode. It all started the evening of the day Lizaveta was taken away. The Polosukhin children were put to bed in Tanya’s room, and she moved to her parents’ bedroom.

Only the adults gathered for a late dinner—Pavel Alekseevich, Elena, and Vasilisa Gavrilovna, who, though reluctantly, occasionally sat down at the table with them. For this to happen the occasion had to be special—a holiday or some event, like today’s. She preferred to eat in her room, in peace and with her prayers.

Having finished his food, Pavel Alekseevich pushed aside his plate, turned to Elena, and said: “Now do you understand why I’ve spent so many years trying to legalize this?”

“Legalize what?” Elena, sunk in her own thoughts, asked. Polosukhina’s children gave her no peace.

“Legalize abortions.”

Vasilisa almost dropped the teapot: her world was shattered. Pavel Alekseevich, whom she so esteemed, was, it turns out, on the side of criminals and murderers, working on their behalf, on behalf of their shameless freedom. And he was a murderer himself . . . But that was impossible to imagine . . . How could it be?

Pavel Alekseevich confirmed it and started to explain. He was good at that.

Vasilisa clenched her dark lips and said nothing. She did not drink her tea, and pushed her cup aside, but she did not go to her room. She just sat there, silent, not raising her eyes.

“It’s horrible, horrible!” Elena lowered her head to her hands.

“What’s horrible?” Pavel Alekseevich was irritated.

“It’s all horrible. That Lizaveta died. And what you’re saying. No, no, I’ll never go along with it. It’s legalized infanticide. It’s a crime worse than murdering an adult. A defenseless little . . . How can they make that legal?”

“Here we go: Tolstoyism, vegetarianism, temperance . . .”

She unexpectedly took offense on behalf of Tolstoyism.

“What does vegetarianism have to do with it? That’s not what Tolstoy meant. Three of those creatures are sleeping in Tanya’s room. If abortions were legal, they too would have been murdered. Lizaveta didn’t have much need for them.”

“Are you feeble minded, Elena? Perhaps they wouldn’t exist. Then there wouldn’t be three unfortunate orphans doomed to poverty, hunger, and prison.”

For the first time in ten years a serious quarrel was setting in between them.

“Pasha, what are you saying?” Elena was horrified. “How can you say such things? Maybe I am feeble minded, but the mind has nothing to do with this. They’re killing their own children. How can that be allowed?”

“And how can it not be allowed? They’re also killing themselves! And what do we do with them?” He pointed in the direction of the wall behind which the pitiful, sickly children slept, children their mother had not succeeded in getting rid of in time. “What would you have done with them?”

“I don’t know. I only know that you cannot kill them.” This was the first time her husband’s words had ever elicited in her a sense of disagreement, and he himself—a sense of protest and irritation.

“Think about the women!” Pavel Alekseevich shouted.

“Why should we think about them? They’re criminals, they kill their own children.” Elena pursed her lips.

Pavel Alekseevich’s face turned to stone, and Elena understood why his subordinates feared him. She had never seen him like this.

“You don’t have the right to a vote. You don’t have that organ. You’re not a woman. If you can’t get pregnant, then you can’t judge,” he said to her morosely.

Their family happiness—easy and unstrained, their chosenness and their closeness, their unlimited trust for each other, all of it came crashing down in an instant. But he seemed not to understand. Vasilisa directed her single eye at Pavel Alekseevich.

Elena got up. With a trembling hand she lowered her teacup into the sink. The cup was old, with a long crack running through it. Coming in contact with the bottom of the sink, it shattered. Leaving the shards, Elena left the kitchen. Slouching, Vasilisa scurried into her pantry.

Pavel Alekseevich was about to go after his wife, but he stopped in his tracks. No, so it was cruel. How could she pick up stray cats and not feel any compassion for unfortunate Lizaveta? Who was she to judge . . . ? Let her think . . .

Elena thought all night long. She cried, and thought, and cried again. Alongside her, in her husband’s usual place, lay warm little Tanya. Pavel Alekseevich went to his study.

Vasilisa Gavrilovna also did not sleep. She did not think. She prayed and cried. Now Pavel Alekseevich was the villain.

Pavel Alekseevich woke up several times, troubled by vaguely dark dreams. He tossed and turned, dragging the slippery sheet off the leather sofa.

Morning began very early. Vasilisa came out of her pantry as soon as she heard Pavel Alekseevich put on the teapot. She announced that she was leaving them. It was not the first time. It happened that Vasilisa would take offense at who knew what and ask for her separation pay. Usually, having stored up her discontent in her soul, she would disappear for several days, but return soon after.

“Do whatever you want,” Pavel Alekseevich blurted, not yet recovered from yesterday.

HE FELT MISERABLE AND EVEN OPENED THE CUPBOARD and looked inside. There was no bottle. He did not want to send Vasilisa and, besides, it was still too early. He poured a glass of tea and went to his study. Elena did not come out of the bedroom. Vasilisa gathered her things. In Tanya’s room Lizaveta’s children were waiting for breakfast and tussling over toys they had never seen before and that belonged to someone else. Toma was trying to get them to argue more quietly.

When Elena came out to the kitchen to cook morning porridge for the pack of children, Vasilisa Gavrilovna appeared at the stove dressed in a new sweater and new scarf and with a mournful and solemn look on her face.

“Elena, I’m leaving you.”

“What are you doing to me?” Elena gasped. “How can you leave me?”

They stood there, looking at each other, both tall, thin, and severe. One an old woman who looked older than she in fact was, the other close to forty, also getting up in age, but still looking twenty-eight.

“You do as you wish, but I’m not living with him anymore. I’m leaving,” the old woman snapped.

“What about me?” Elena implored.

“He’s your husband.” Vasilisa darkened.

“Husband . . . shmusband,” was all Elena said.

She could not imagine life without Vasilisa, especially in this unexpected situation, with someone else’s orphaned children in the house. Elena persuaded Vasilisa Gavrilovna to postpone her departure at least until the fate of the Polosukhin children was decided.

“All right,” Vasilisa said gloomily. “As soon as we bury Lizaveta, I’m leaving. Start looking for another housekeeper, Elena. I’m not living with him anymore.”

THE FUNERAL TOOK PLACE ONLY ON THE SIXTH DAY, after the autopsy had been completed and they had established scientifically what had been clear without it. The relatives showed up, nearly all of them women: her mother, two sisters, and several old women of various degrees of kinship from sister-in-law to godmother. The one crooked little man called himself a brother-in-law. When she and Toma once dropped in at the “partment,” Tanya marveled at these people and quietly asked Toma to explain who was related to whom.

The entire Polosukhin clan came from the region around Tver, but from different villages—the father’s village and the mother’s village. Toma’s birth father had perished during the war, her younger brothers were not his—no one knew whose they were—but had inherited his name for free, and his family did not look favorably upon Lizaveta.

You might even say that her relatives were feuding. These people quarreled noisily and concurrently, crying and accusing each other of some prewar insults and injuries, kept bringing up something mysterious called a “carucate” and a “half-carcass” . . . It all sounded like they were speaking another language. Tanya got the impression that they were playing some adult game, divvying up things for fun . . . But they were divvying for real . . .

ELENA PLANNED TO TAKE TANYA WITH HER TO THE CHURCH service and the burial, but Pavel Alekseevich would not allow it. Elena thought that Tanya should go because of Toma: “just to stand alongside her in this moment.” This disagreement further deepened their silent enmity. He insisted, he grumbled, he demanded that Tanya be left at home.

“She’s an impressionable child! Why are you dragging her into all this? It’s a profanation! I can see Vasilisa! But what’s Tanechka going to do there?”

“And what makes you think you have the right to a vote?” Although meek and not at all vindictive, she nonetheless delivered a shattering blow. She herself did not know how it came out. “You aren’t Tanya’s father, after all . . .”

It was mean revenge. The blow hit its target. It was one of those rare cases where both duelists lose. No one survived.

But Tanya did not go to the funeral: she had a temperature and stayed in bed.

The day after the funeral Lizaveta’s elder sister Niura left, taking her two nephews with her. According to their agreement, Fenya, the younger sister, was supposed to take Toma. But something did not work out; Fenya had to swap some “furrings.” Tanya, to whom Toma related all this, pictured a flower-bedecked village dance with grown-up girls crowned with wreaths of cornflowers and daisies exchanging rings of fur. Tanya could not understand what sort of problem there could be with furrings. But soon Fenya herself showed up—a large, dark-haired woman who resembled her tiny fair sister only in her rare unattractiveness.

She sat for a long time in the kitchen with Vasilisa and Elena, first crying, then laughing at something, and drank two teapots of tea. They agreed that for the time being she would leave Toma here, in the city, and as soon as she was done with the furrings, she would come to fetch her. All through the conversation Toma stood hunched in the corridor with her bulging school satchel and her winter coat bunched in her arms, awaiting their decision.

Late in the evening, when everyone had dispersed, Toma crept into Vasilisa Gavrilovna’s pantry—she felt more at ease with the help than with the other members of the family, including Tanya. Toma looked Vasilisa in her one live eye and fingered her hem.

“Aunt Vas, I can wash floors and do laundry. And stoke the stove . . . I don’t want to live at Fenya’s: she’s got enough of her own . . .”

Vasilisa pressed the girl’s head to her side.

“You silly bird. We don’t have a wood-burning stove. And we don’t wash the floors ourselves; the floor polisher comes and polishes them. But don’t you worry: there’s more than enough to do in this house . . .”

BUSY WITH THE FUNERAL ARRANGEMENTS, ELENA HAD forgotten Vasilisa’s words about leaving. Over the past few days her quarrel with her husband had hardened, as if having grown a scab. They almost never spoke—only about household necessities. The first evening when the Polosukhin children had shown up in their house, before their quarrel, Elena had made her husband’s bed in his study and taken Tanya into the room with her. At that point, it had not signified a quarrel, but was just a household necessity: there was no place for the three children to sleep . . . And so it remained the whole week, until Lizaveta’s funeral.

Who knows: if the necessity had not arisen, might Pavel Alekseevich have found words and gestures to soften the insult, and would his wife, reassured of her husband’s love, have had a good cry on his broad, hairy chest, and would everything have returned to usual . . . ?

The morning after the funeral Elena found Vasilisa Gavrilovna in the kitchen dressed in the new silk headscarf they had given her at Christmas and wearing new shoes . . . She sat up straight in her chair, a small fiberboard suitcase alongside her together with a large bundle with her linen and pillow.

Elena sat down next to her and started to cry. Vasilisa lowered her seeing eye, pursed her lips, pressed her hands to her breast in a cross, as if preparing to take communion. Silence.

“Where are you going to go, Vasenka?” Elena had not expected such resolve from Vasilisa.

“Wherever it was I came from that’s where I’m going back to,” Vasilisa answered sternly. “God be with you, Elena.”

Vasilisa looked straight ahead, one eye white, the other blue. A hideous gaze.

“Does she really not love us at all?” Elena was horrified by the thought. She took from her purse all the money she had and silently handed it to Vasilisa.

Vasilisa bowed, picked up her belongings, and set off . . .

Just like that. As if she had not spent twenty years together with Elena. Disappeared, without saying good-bye to Tanya, or Pavel Alekseevich. Without looking back.