He sat down next to her, his long body folding. His bag was dropped between them. He reached over to take her book. “Not nothing,” he said, turning it in his hands. “Econometrics.” He gave the book back, took out a notebook of his own, and started to work.
Chander was the son of a fishing family. In his hometown, they went out in the winter for seal, the spring for pollock, the summer for flounder, the fall for crab. “Anatolyevna would call it traditional,” he said.
Ksyusha had never tasted crabmeat. Chander rested his head on the hallway’s tile wall. They were alone as always outside the locked practice room. “Next time I go back,” he said, “I’ll bring you some.”
She had never had a friend like him. So comfortable, so quickly—out of all the people Ksyusha grew up with and the classrooms full of student strangers, Chander became the exception.
During practices, he was polite to the other members. Margarita Anatolyevna liked him especially, and corrected him quietly when she would not hesitate to shout at anyone else. But he didn’t seem close to anyone in the troupe but Ksyusha. When Margarita Anatolyevna switched on the music for the herders’ dance, he glanced at Ksyusha and raised his leather strap, which he knew irritated Ksyusha, which he knew made her laugh. In moments like this, she thought, We’re friends. The idea came as a surprise and a comfort every time.
She looked forward to tasting crab. She asked Chander for more stories about Palana: if he wished he were still living there, if his family ever came to Petropavlovsk to visit, if he had ever met her brother’s girlfriend. No, no, and no, Chander said, though he softened those answers with tales from childhood. He described a place, four hundred kilometers north of Esso, with a population a fraction the size of Petropavlovsk’s but apartment blocks built just as tall. It was cased in ice in the winter and had a windy avenue leading straight to the sea. Pylylyn, he told her, was the town’s Koryak name. Meaning “with a waterfall.” His language came from farther back in the throat than the Even she had grown up hearing from her grandparents. When she tested its vowels out, he smiled.
He talked to her about Esso, too. The one land route south from Palana was a snow road passable only from January to March, yet Chander had been in Ksyusha’s village dozens of times, because the flights he took between Petropavlovsk and Palana were often grounded in bad weather at Esso’s tiny airport. Chander had spent days in her village waiting for storms to settle. When she showed him a picture her brother had taken of the house they grew up in, he took her phone in both hands, zoomed in with his thumbs, and peered at the screen. The hall was warm. They were sitting on their jackets.
“I’ve seen this house before,” he said. “Do you have a cat?”
Ksyusha squinted at him. “We used to.”
“A black and white one. I remember.”
She drew back. “No, you don’t,” she said to test him.
“I do.” Infallible. Was this how all doctoral students behaved? He tapped on the screen to bring the picture back to normal size. “A blue house with a black and white cat sitting on the fence.”
“And me inside.”
“And a Ksyusha inside.”
Letting him scroll through the rest of her phone’s camera roll, she explained each image. “My mother, in our kitchen, making dinner…She doesn’t like this picture. She doesn’t like, in general, to be photographed. She doesn’t consider herself pretty.” Chander shook his head in silent comment on the wrongness of that, and Ksyusha was grateful once more for how appropriate he was. The picture only showed her mother’s profile. Disagreeing out loud would have been too much. She flicked to the next image. “This is home, again, the same night, the meal she made.” Chander looked hard at the food, the furniture, before flicking to the next. “Ruslan,” she said.
In the picture, Ruslan was in a white undershirt, close to her camera, half-stern, half-smiling. She had straddled his lap to take it. She hoped Chander couldn’t tell. Heat rose to her cheeks as she attempted to look at the shot like it was new.
“He’s handsome,” Chander said.
Again, the right response. Her nervousness left her. “He is.” They went through her phone until Margarita Anatolyevna reached over their heads with the key to the practice room.
Chander, too, had dated a Russian. A white girl. In the city, while he was an undergraduate—they were together four years. “I loved her,” he said. Ksyusha was looking at the side of his face, the line of his jaw, his high cheeks, and his blunt nose. “She was willful, though, and we would fight—she finished university the year before me, with a degree in international relations, and she wanted to leave Kamchatka for work, but I—”
“Nymylan,” she said. Another Koryak word Chander taught her. It meant “settled”; he taught her “nomad,” too, when she first told him how her grandparents moved with the deer. (He had asked her for Even words in return, but while she understood her family’s language fine, all she could confidently pronounce was the vocabulary she’d been taught in elementary school. Asatkan, nyarikan: “girl,” “boy.” Alagda. “Thank you.”)
Chander turned his head toward her. His eyes were dark gloss. “Exactly,” he said. “I couldn’t do it.” His voice was as gentle as a finger down her spine. He turned back to face the tiles, which reflected spots from the overhead lights. “I was supposed to move into her apartment when I graduated, but she kept talking like that would only be the first of many moves. First Petropavlovsk, then Khabarovsk, then Korea or something, some new frontier. I told her I needed time to think. She said, Fine, take all the time in the world, we’re done, and I said, Fine, if that’s the way it is. I took my final exams and went back home to help my father. She and I didn’t talk for a month and a half. As the summer was ending, I started to call her, but her phone was never on. I thought she’d blocked my number.” His eyelashes were straight, short, dry. “Know where she was?”
“No.”
“Australia.”
“Australia!”
“Australia,” he said. “She went to be an au pair. Her friends told me, eventually. One called me…I’ll never forget that conversation. She’s still there. In the end of ends, I heard she got married.”
This girl was unimaginable. Ksyusha and Ruslan had not yet started dating when she applied to university, but if they had, she would’ve kept living in Esso and enrolled in distance learning instead. As it was, she thought of dropping out her whole first year. Her parents had insisted on her taking the scholarship, and she did want to get a diploma with honors, and Ruslan agreed to keep an eye on her—those were her only reasons to stay this far from home. Anyway, she was almost done. Only a year and a half until graduation.
“Australia,” Ksyusha said. “Do you miss her?”
“No,” he said. “I’m done with that.”
“What, with dating?”
“With those girls.” His calm look. A top lip with no bow, and stubble dotting black under the skin. “With Russians.”
Ksyusha had heard her people talk like that before. She pushed her head back hard against a tile. “You don’t mean it.”
“I do.”
“Well, you should be smarter.”
“Uh-huh. You haven’t noticed by now that you can’t trust them? They don’t care about us the same way they care about themselves.” Ksyusha waited for Chander to voice an exception: Ruslan. He did not. In her thoughts, Ruslan slipped from a man she should defend to a man who might abandon—Ruslan could leave her so much more easily than she could leave him. Chander was talking about something other than love now, though. “Something happens in the north,” he said, “and no one pays any attention. Then the same thing goes on down here and it’s news. When we had the fuel crisis in ’ninety-eight—remember? At home we had a solid year without power. People froze to death in Palana. But the ones in the city talk like it was just three or four months of cold, like the rest of the time didn’t matter because it only happened to us.”