He paused to offer Temerity a cigarette.
She accepted, leaning closer so he could light it.
Wincing, Kostya rolled his left shoulder, then drew on his cigarette. —Do you remember when you told me your mother died of flu? I can’t remember my mother, either. She died in the 1905 uprising. I was a baby. Her parents raised me. My grandmother died when I was eight, and then it was just my grandfather. I’m illegitimate. The patronymic gets tricky for us. My father abandoned my mother, that’s all I know. I liked to pretend he was a sailor, not a sailor in the Navy but the kind who owns a ship and has adventures, and I’d make up stories about him and how one day he’d come back to Odessa and save me. Anyway, my mother had the right to give her child any patronymic she pleased. It might be for the father, or it might be to honour a man who had helped her after she fell pregnant. My original patronymic was Semyonovich. I don’t know if that’s for my grandfather, Semyon Berendei, or if my father was a Semyon, too. When I got older, I wondered how my parents met. Were they in love, some sort of forbidden affair? Was it just one night? Did he rape her? Am I walking around because of a rapist?
— So your name’s not really Nikto.
— I told you, I changed it.
— And the patronymic?
Kostya tapped ash from his cigarette. —Arkady Dmitrievich took me to a clerk to get new identity papers. I was still dizzy and stupid with the flu. I could walk, that was all. The clerk made things difficult, asking if I’d made a thorough search for my papers. Arkady Dmitrievich got angry and asked the clerk if we should go back to Odessa and ask the occupying Germans to help us find the papers. I only wanted to vomit and lie down. I couldn’t even manage my date of birth. I said 14 April 1905, and the clerk said 26 April 1905. Arkady Dmitrievich had to explain to me Lenin had changed the calendar. The clerk kept asking my name, and Arkady Dmitrievich started shouting, and I couldn’t stop him. I was sweating, and then when the clerk asked me for probably the fifth time for my name, I said Konstantin but froze after that. Arkady Dmitrievich supplied the Arkadievich. Then the clerk started to praise Arkady Dmitrievich for getting his bastard son out of a war zone. The old man tried to explain we’re not father and son, but the clerk wouldn’t listen. He was in charge now, able to push around a Chekist, and he would not give that up. The clerk looked at me then, and demanded I give him my surname. He even made up some horseshit about the papers being invalid if someone else supplied my surname. I had to say it. I froze again. I wasn’t even sure this whole thing was happening. The clerk kept his voice steady, and the politer he sounded, the more frightened I felt. ‘Tell me your surname. Tell me your surname.’ I started to cry. I kept thinking about the orphan’s surname. I didn’t want to be a Neizvestny. But who was I? ‘Nikto,’ I said, ‘I am nikto, nikto, no one at all.’ And the clerk wrote it down. So there I was, reborn as Konstantin Arkadievich Nikto, and as we left, Arkady Dmitrievich promised me he’d have the clerk arrested.
Temerity stroked her fingers over the back of Kostya’s hand. —So, who were you in Odessa?
Kostya sounded impatient. —Konstantin Semyonovich Berendei. I just told you. I left it behind. Fuck, if you’d been there…When history took a shit in 1918, it made a big dump in Odessa. I only had my grandfather, and he was exhausted. We couldn’t get enough food or coal, and none of his patients could pay him, but he kept treating them. Then one night in January, it was bang-bang-bang on the door and frantic shouts for Dr. Berendei. Grandfather told me he had to leave. He walked out of the house, and I never saw him again. Then the schools shut down. I stayed in the house alone. I only left to queue for bread. I’d queue for hours. No one else in that line asked me about Grandfather or checked on me in any way. I was already invisible. After a few days of this, the baker said he could not keep a tab for me when he extended credit to no one else, and when would Grandfather come and pay? I couldn’t answer him. He was a decent man, in the end, and he broke off some of his own loaf and sent me out the back door. I bolted it down, almost choked on it. It was like eating sand. Adulterated flour. And then sleet started, and I wanted to get inside, so I ran. And of course I slipped. I fell, smacked my head off a curb, and when I got up again and back to the house, I found strangers living there. I still don’t know who they were or how they took over. A family of four, a middle-aged man the size of a bear and his two grown sons, scarred from the Great War or the Revolution or who knows what, and a cook. They had all these crates piled up outside the doors, and they’d even changed the locks. They stole my grandfather’s house. I couldn’t believe it. I would knock on the door, explain myself, ask to come inside, and they’d shout abuse at me. They wore me down. Finally I asked just to be allowed in to get a favourite book and my other warm coat. They looked about to relent, when I pointed to a painting near the beauty wall, a watercolour of the Odessa Steps. ‘My mother painted that,’ I said. ‘Look, that’s her signature in the corner.’ One of the sons picked me up and threw me off the porch. Their cook called out to me after a moment, and she gave me buttered bread on the condition that I never come back.
I tried to ask people who knew my grandfather for help. Many had been his patients. I got nowhere. When I could get people to listen, they would shrug and remind me life was difficult for everyone now. I don’t think they believed me. Perhaps they just didn’t want to believe me. I slept outside, in empty buildings or in the catacombs. Odessa is not Moscow, but it’s cold enough. I got so dirty, and the days got so long. Adults chased me away, called me rat, thief, bezprizornik. That last one still galls me. I fell in with the other street kids. I had to. My voice cracked and dropped and whistled and cracked again, so I could hardly get a word out. One day I caught my reflection in a window and saw how my eyes had gone wide. I hardly recognized myself. I had this burnt feeling all the time, like I’d had too much sun. All that mattered was food and sleep and cigarettes.
I counted the days. On day sixteen, I was walking by the waterfront when I saw the battleship Dobrynya Nikitich had docked. Captain Kastalsky knew my grandfather, so, I thought Captain Kastalsky would help me, surely. I’d gone aboard that ship many times. Sometimes Captain Kastalsky might visit my grandfather in his house. More often he would send word, and Grandfather would visit Captain Kastalsky. He’d take me with him. I got to know the boatswain, Shlykov. He taught me how to tie knots and curse in different languages. I always say he was my first tutor. Shlykov saw me through the fog. ‘Your coat is dirty,’ he said. ‘Brush it. And I see you’ve gotten taller.’ An officer came round to see whom Shlykov addressed like that, over the side of a battleship, and his shoulder boards seemed about to slide off his coat. Shlykov explained I was the grandson of the captain’s great friend in Odessa. Fog rose like smoke, and Dobrynya Nikitich faded in and out of sight. Sailors loaded provisions, and I almost followed them aboard until I remembered I must wait for the captain’s permission. After a long time, during which Shlykov had to carry on with his duties and could not talk with me, the skinny officer returned with the captain. Kastalsky looked faded, blurry somehow, like a bad photograph. His skin had gone grey, and his hair and beard had gone white. He stepped with new care, as though worried he might fall, until he reached the side and could look down on me. He called my grandfather’s surname, and when I answered, my voice whistled and cracked. Kastalsky peered into the fog and said, ‘Konstantin, is that you? Where is your grandfather?’