They slept together sooner than a month after they met. In the blackness of Artyom’s bedroom, his parents out and his sister a wall away, Revmira peeled off his clothes. His knees and shoulders were bound up in muscles. She ran her fingers over their cords. When she explored his chest, she felt his heart, that athlete’s measured muscle, pounding. His breath was quick. His body betrayed him.
With her fingers tight on the closet rod, she began to cry. They last had sex on Wednesday. Today was Sunday.
How did Artyom want her, even then? How did he manage to survive for so long? For months after they were married, she appreciated him, his long legs, his service, and then all at once she fell in love. They were on the bus together. It was snowing the way it used to and never seemed to anymore, those flakes so dense that the driver followed the road not from sight but from habit. Three blocks from their stop, Artyom turned to Revmira, flipped up her collar, and pulled her jacket zipper to her chin. He tugged her hat down on her forehead and ran his fingers around her wrists to check the seal of her gloves. Then he took her hand and faced forward. Swaddled up, she felt herself—alive. Finally alive. The blood in her body was a rolling boil.
She had sat there warm and thrilled and terrified. She had believed new wonders waited. Her only bare skin was the strip around her eyes, and the world outside looked so fresh, so clean. So promising. After Gleb died, she was alone, alone, always alone, and suddenly, on a plastic seat in a crowded bus, she found that someone else was with her. She’d exhaled with joy into her jacket collar. Artyom.
Her husband. Her rescuer. He had done his duty. Now Revmira was supposed to keep going without him. She wiped her face and went into the kitchen. When she entered, Inna stood up, phone in her hand, and said, “They’re on their way.”
“All right,” Revmira said. She took his mug and plate from the drying rack.
In the bathroom, she grabbed his toothbrush, razor, cologne. The face lotion he used—she added it all to the pile.
For nearly all of the past twenty-six years, she had busied herself with Artyom’s kindness, their careers, the mealtime conversations, the assistance they offered others. She looked at the rest of the country falling apart but believed that she and Artyom could last. She was wrong. Artyom’s twelve-hour shifts, Revmira’s work at the hospital, their appeals to authorities—those were the acts of an earlier age. Those things were useless. In the end, they did not protect anyone.
She went back to the closet, pulled out Gleb’s suitcase, and heaved the case onto the blanket. Its bulk pressed on Artyom’s belongings. She opened the case, snaps biting into her fingers, and saw some objects she had forgotten, some others she could not forget. She needed to be with these things of her husband’s. All of it together was everything she had left. The letters he wrote her. Faded record sleeves. His winter hat, his civil passport. She emptied the old case out, then she put it down on the blanket and crawled onto the bed.
Boots, buckles, papers, and scarves. After Gleb’s accident, she thought she would die. She thought she had. This date took him and pulled her down after, grief determined as gravity. But now she would live. She had to. It was what she did: live while others could not. There was no pleasure in it.
MARCH
Three wordless days after the kitchen flooded, Nadia and Mila took off from Esso’s provincial airport toward Palana’s. They had their own row to themselves. Mila, five years old, spent the plane ride eating cucumber slices and drawing figures with ever-larger breasts. She drew two big circles in her notebook and laughed, then drew two bigger circles around those and laughed again, then set her mouth in concentration to draw two even bigger circles. Peering over her daughter’s head, Nadia asked, “No men?”
Quickly Mila drew another, wider person. She added two tiny nipple dots to the chest.
“I wasn’t telling you to add one,” Nadia said.
Mila put her pen back to the page and circled those dots with breasts. “Wonderful,” Nadia said and looked out the window at the white ground.
They were already past the central mountain range that penned in Esso. Nadia had spent the last few days bartering with their pilot so this twin-engine turboprop, halted by a blizzard after leaving Petropavlovsk, would take her and Mila along for the last leg of its trip north. In the village they left behind was Chegga. His garbage palace of a rental house where they had spent the last three years. The newly broken radiator pipe, the tile floor yellow under ankle-deep water. The last sentence Nadia spoke to him—“Call the landlord,” she had said on Tuesday—and the note she slid under the frozen honey jar on the kitchen table today.
She and Mila were starting over. Nadia put one arm around Mila’s back. “My sweet,” Nadia said, “let’s not tell Grandpa and Baba about what happened this week, all right?”
Mila drew another loop. “All right.”
“Pretend I’m Grandpa. Hi, Mila, what’s new with you?”
“Nothing!” Mila said. “The other day a pipe broke and it made an ice rink in the house.”
Nadia paused. “That’s what we’re not telling.”
“I thought we weren’t telling about you and Daddy being mad at each other.”
“That, too,” Nadia said. “All of it.” She squeezed Mila’s shoulder, took her arm back, sank in her seat. Pushed her knees against the seat pocket ahead.
It didn’t matter what Mila said. In a month or two, their life would be good enough that Nadia would no longer have to misrepresent it to her parents. So instead of wasting words on what they were leaving, that iced-over shithole, Nadia unlocked her phone, scrolled to a Rihanna album, and put one earbud in. “Here, kitten,” she said to Mila, who tilted the side of her face up. Nadia tucked the other bud into her daughter’s soft ear and let pop music play them in.
They came at Palana from the east. The town was the administrative center of its district, but looked shabby from above: streets smudged gray, apartment blocks crumbling, rows of wooden houses trailing into the sea. Nadia hadn’t been back since she and Mila moved south to Esso. She could not see any new structures from the air.
Her parents met them at the airport. Neither of them questioned Mila on what was new. Nadia’s mother said, “I will not ask why Chegga didn’t come.”
“He’s busy with work,” Nadia said. “Not only the newspaper anymore—weddings, events.” That wasn’t the reason, but it was a flattering fact.
“He needed a break, I imagine. You’re not easy to live with.”
“And who raised me that way?” Nadia muttered. Her mother, too deaf to hear, was squinting at the other disembarking passengers in search of anyone she recognized. Her father was bent over and squeezing Mila’s cheeks.
Mila had on a new coat, shining purple, that Nadia had bought her for New Year’s. Thank God for Sberbank: it was Nadia’s job that had landed them here. Seven weeks of paid vacation. She and Chegga had talked about using that time to go to Sochi for the summer, before one burst pipe, one final argument, and one firm conversation with her boss about what Nadia had called a “family matter” changed those plans permanently.
They had seven weeks now, which would take them into May. Long enough to find a quality place to live. Not in Palana, certainly, or in Petropavlovsk, where Chegga’s sister was in university, but on the mainland—perhaps Kazan?—or even Europe. Istanbul? London? Without Chegga to hold them back, Nadia and Mila might become world travelers. Sberbank had branches everywhere.
In the car, Nadia took the passenger seat, while her father and Mila climbed into the back. Sitting close to the steering wheel, Nadia’s mother continued to squint, though there was nothing but iced-over parked cars in front of them.