Temerity peered at him.
— You want tea, don’t you?
Arkady stared at the stains in his toilet bowl. He recalled the day his father announced this renovation to the house, this indoor plumbing, flush toilet and shower bath. Arkady had been eleven, 1903, the same day he brought home failing grades in history, composition, French, religion, and music. Dmitri had wept after dark, when he thought Arkady had fallen asleep, wept and demanded of his wife why their one surviving child must be such an ignorant brute. Ekaterina defended her son: a big boy for his age who frightened the other children, no fault of his own. Perhaps he’d be an athlete one day, or a soldier. He’d find his place. Dmitri had disagreed: I fear a place will yawn open for him, and he’ll fall into it.
The telephone rang: five, six, seven times.
Not now, Vadym.
The ringing stopped.
Arkady glanced at his shaving mirror. In his face, he took after his mother, except for the bloat. Is it getting worse? No, I just had too much salty food today, the damned shchi and sausages at the cafeteria. Age. The face coarsens with age. I look nothing like my father.
Dr. Dmitri Dmitrievich Balakirev had first blamed the Great War, then the Revolution, the Civil War, and finally the flu pandemic and all the resultant overwork for his depleted condition. One evening, while standing in this bathroom, looking at this toilet, he diagnosed himself. Oh, to be certain, Ekaterina later told Arkady, Dmitri consulted with a colleague; the other doctor only confirmed the guess. Yes, yes, very sad, and Dmitri’s father before him. Dmitri Balakirev continued to work until the morning he stared at his stethoscope and did not recognize it. Then he took to his bed and died in great pain. Ekaterina died not long afterwards, and Arkady hid the strange bottles she’d discarded, perhaps dropped. His mother, Arkady told everyone, died of grief. The poison, he told himself, was just a tool.
She did not love me enough to stay. And I was helpless to stop this. Never again.
Downstairs, the cat flap opened and shut: one of three tomcats on his rounds. Sometimes the cats shat in his flowerbeds, and sometimes they perched on his higher windowsills, immovable sentries. When inside the house they scratched the furniture and woodwork but never soiled the floors. Arkady fed these huge cats herring and fowl and any other delicacies he might find, and they repaid him in dead mice and adoration, when they felt like it. They often got busy at dusk.
Arkady sighed. Dusk. His favourite time of day, once. When young Kostya asked him why, Arkady had said, Change. Transition. So much happens.
Tired, Arkady got into bed. Disgraceful, really, to laze like this so early in the evening.
His eyelids felt so heavy.
Disgraceful.
The metro train escaped the light of Vasilisa Prekrasnaya and rumbled northeast. Two stops, then a walk to Arkady’s house to borrow some tea, which he’d replace when he next got to the shops. The old man wouldn’t even notice. The lights flickered in the metro car, then steadied, and Kostya thought of wires, new wires drawing lines in the sky and cutting the wind till it whined. Then he thought of the boys at Home of the Child of the Struggle Moscow Number Two Supplemental Number Three, the nearest orphanage. Once upon a time, he’d visit every week. He called it community work; Arkady called it redemption.
Redemption from what, Arkady Dmitrievich?
Protection, then. You would protect those boys because no one could protect you.
Kostya would listen to the boys’ complaints about food, teachers, lessons, silly rules, and then he’d tell them stories, often finishing with his own story as a child on the streets. The wires cut the wind, that’s how he’d start, the wires cut the wind, and it whined and howled one winter day in Odessa. He’d told the Spanish boys on the voyage to Leningrad about the wind and the wires, about the family that stole his grandfather’s house, how he had to move on. The boys had stared at him in stunned disbelief and then recognition, recognition of suffering, cruelty, and sorrows. Don’t let anyone call you a bezprizornik, he told them, just as he’d told the Moscow boys. A human being is not now, not ever, a stray dog.
He sighed, and his eyes felt gritty. When did I stop visiting the orphans? When did I stop telling stories? And why the hell did I tell Nadia about Odessa?
The wires cut the wind, and it whined and howled one winter day in Odessa. That day the herring merchant boxed my ears, and Timofei had me beaten.
As the memory filled him with nausea and rage, the metro car filled with people, and Kostya shifted on the bench to make room.
All this time, and some herring merchant still hurts me? He’s dead. Fucking dead. Since 1918. After Arkady Dmitrievich found me.
Once Arkady had pried him loose from the ground, Kostya slept at the Cheka depot set up in an abandoned store, where he and his grandfather once purchased sweets and loukoum. The dusty shelves lay in collapse and disarray, looted weeks before. During the day, Kostya continued to live on the street, scouting alleys and buildings, reporting back to Arkady and the other officers. The best method for such reconnaissance, however, was the queue. Kostya, like other street children, hired himself out to stand in line, to keep a place for someone else. Hours of waiting meant hours of eavesdropping. One evening, as Kostya complained of seized muscles and swollen feet, Arkady showed him how to massage his calves and reminded him how suffering yielded wealth. Kostya agreed, adding that other street children endured sexual abuse when hungry enough; his bed and supper at the Cheka depot prevented that. Arkady pounded a fist on the table, disgusted by the depravities of other men. One left the children alone. Then he commanded Kostya never to call himself or allow anyone else to call him a bezprizornik. Do not accept such abuse, not now, not ever. You are far more than a stray dog. Is that clear?
A few days later, Kostya had hired himself to a herring merchant in a line without a queue master, someone to write a number on everyone’s hand and so maintain the order of the line, and he found himself next to Timofei Boykov.
— Kostya? Oh, you remember me, now that we’re in the same queue.
— I always remembered you.
Timofei blew smoke into his face and signalled to a group of boys a few metres off. —No. You pretended not to see me. Your grandfather always gave me cigarettes and kopeks, but you pretended not to see me! Like I didn’t exist. Kostya, I fucking exist.
— No, I—
Timofei spat at his feet. The other boys grabbed Kostya by the arms and dragged him from the line. Kostya cried out for help and mercy; Timofei turned his back. Others in the queue, if they deigned to notice at all, told themselves boys would be boys, so let them play their games in these difficult times, and besides, the fuss died down in no time.
Dragging Kostya into a nearby catacomb entrance, the boys kept a terrible silence; only Kostya’s voice sounded, one thin voice. It cracked. In the darkness then, limestone glittering in the brief flares of a match light, the boys beat Kostya in the belly and face until he vomited and cried. Then, on a signal Kostya missed, they abandoned him. As he lay near a puddle, struggling to breathe, he told himself he knew the way out. He found the path soon enough and emerged — the street children called it going back up to heaven — to find the queue had both moved and grown, and the people between whom he’d stood might as well have vanished from the earth. No number inked on his hand: no proof of his place in the queue. Wrapping his arms round his rib cage, he shuffled to the end of the line. When the herring merchant found him there, he boxed his ears and struck his face. —Fucking useless bezprizornik!