“Mama, can you see?” Nadia asked. No answer. Nadia twisted in her seat. “Can she see?”
“Of course she can,” her father said. “She drove us here.”
Nadia studied him, his knit cap, his own clouding eyes, and leaned over into the back to buckle Mila in. Her mother pulled into the line of cars leaving the airport lot. “Papa, I got a raise in January,” Nadia said. “I’m a manager now. Sixty more an hour.”
“With the way the ruble’s falling, that’s nothing,” her father said. “Your mother’s pension hardly buys our bread.”
“Do you need help?” Nadia asked. Her father frowned. She had been away too long; she’d forgotten his habits, the complaints about money segueing into the same concerns about politics, bureaucrats, criminals clogging parliament. His lack of a wish to change. She took a breath. “Sorry. How’s the catch these days?”
“What’s there to say? Winter waters. How’s—”
“How’s our Chegga?” her mother asked.
“He’s fine.” Her mother didn’t react. “HE’S FINE,” Nadia said. “SAME AS EVER.” At this, her mother shook her head, her bun drifting from side to side across her scalp while her shoulders stayed fixed over the wheel.
The last season Nadia lived here was the first she spent with Chegga. He had finished his military service and decided to work a month in Palana’s fishing camps, then extended his stay once they met. Nadia’s parents fell all over him: a good boy, native like them, and from a place that was not theirs but seemed enough like theirs, meaning not too white, not foreign. Chegga was responsible, Chegga was talented. After Mila fell asleep with her mouth open each night, he and Nadia made silent love on the freshly laundered sheets. Next to them, Mila never stirred.
A month younger than Nadia, Chegga dreamed as big as she did. He already wanted to be a father. He loved that Nadia had Mila, who at that time was starting to speak, looking for someone to call Daddy. He talked up their future together. In his descriptions, Esso was the most beautiful village on Kamchatka, with carved log cabins and mountain air as fresh as an apple. After he went back, he called her every night: I found us a place, he said then, a temporary place, two rooms to stay warm in while we look for somewhere down the street to keep building our family. And while they saved for her and Mila’s tickets south, Nadia walked around Palana flush with the knowledge that a better life was coming. Here were all the half-collapsed buildings, the flaking Soviet murals, the stained smokestacks, the mended nets, the tethered rowboats, the exes who no longer acknowledged her, the classmates who tittered when they passed Mila having a tantrum—and there, a flight away, was Chegga.
But in Esso, Nadia and Mila only found a half-collapsed shack of their own. It’s temporary, he had shouted again on Tuesday morning as they stood in the flood. For three years he had been saying the same thing while pieces of the rental house fell off. Last fall, Nadia had approached her office about a home loan. She and Chegga argued about the bank for a month. No mortgages, he said, no debt. “We’re not Americans. I won’t live on credit.” Goddamn it, she said to him, if we won’t live on credit then we’ll be stuck here—and still he insisted. So Nadia tried other methods. His parents had piled up savings from years of work in the reindeer herds; with Chegga’s sister in university on a scholarship, their money just sat there. When the radiator began to leak this winter, Nadia went in confidence to Chegga’s mother to suggest how they might see those savings spent. “Your generation always wants more,” his mother said then. “Your avarice. Will that really seem good enough for you, to own someplace you borrowed and begged for? Will that satisfy?”
Nadia had not been begging. But now she saw his mother might be right: nothing in Esso would satisfy.
The village Chegga had flown them to was like the town they’d left. Over the January holidays, he had made Nadia and Mila spend their days with his sister and her boyfriend at Esso’s public thermal pool. Whatever compromises Nadia suggested—Can we pay for admission to a private pool, a cleaner one? Can we take Ksyusha, Mila adores her, but not invite Ruslan? Can we go out as a family, just the three of us?—he turned down. Instead, they paddled in community waters, sweating, smelling sulfur, feeling the slip and give of algae on the cement under their feet.
In the pool, Chegga and Ruslan, his sister’s sleazy boyfriend, had dissected the other villagers who came to swim—this one’s mental deficiency, that one’s weight problem, this one’s unfaithful spouse. Chegga’s sister, Ksyusha, only laid her head on the edge of the pool and shut her eyes. Once a man on the other side of the water waved in their direction. Mila dipped under, and Nadia clicked her tongue: “Mouse, don’t get your hair wet. You’ll catch cold.” She stretched to grab a towel for her girl. Over her shoulder, she said to Chegga, “Someone’s trying to say hello.” Chegga glanced the man’s way without acknowledgment. Ruslan, looking after, laughed.
“You’re not going to greet him?” Nadia said.
“That’s Yegor Gusakov,” Ruslan said. “He graduated in Chegga’s year.”
“He’s not normal,” Chegga said. “A freak.”
Nadia wanted to dip herself underwater, then, too. The man across the pool was no hero—soft-bodied, sitting alone—but he was not monstrous. Chegga, meanwhile, was ignoring the misbehavior of his chosen child, who had undone her towel turban and let cords of hair freeze over her forehead. And Ruslan was about as agreeable as a feral white dog.
“You should feel sorry for him,” Ksyusha said. Sweat glistened on her cheeks.
“I don’t,” Chegga said. “When we were kids he used to torture cats.”
“That was a frog,” Ksyusha said. “One time.” Careful as always, this university girl. Ksyusha was restrained while her brother gave himself every liberty.
“A frog when we were watching. The cats, he did on his own. Lilia Solodikova told me Yegor left them in front of her house every week of sixth year. Her mother complained to all their neighbors because she thought someone was putting out too much rat poison.”
“Oh, Lilia told you,” Ruslan said. He nuzzled Ksyusha. When she turned away, he revolved to face Chegga. “Should we go ask Lilia what she thinks of him now?”
“You know she was probably murdered?” Chegga said. “You’re an asshole.”
Ruslan puffed his narrow chest up. “You’re the asshole.”
“Everyone’s an asshole,” Ksyusha said. “Let’s talk about anything else.”
Nadia was done with it all. If she wanted to hear family arguments, false superiority, and snide mentions of girls who fled the area years before, she could do that in her parents’ town, where at least the heat worked and wallpaper stayed adhered to the walls. Nadia’s mother drove them along a row of five-story apartment buildings. Blocks like that, half a century old, might not look as appealing from the outside as Esso’s cottages, but their inhabitants could eat together without having to wade through chunks of ice.
Chegga used to swear that apartment blocks had no place in beautiful Esso. Kamchatka’s Switzerland, he said. What did he know? None of them had ever been past Moscow.
At the house, Nadia’s mother served fish soup. She insisted on giving them all a second helping as soon as the level of their broth dipped. Mila pushed her bowl away, and Nadia’s mother pushed it back. “I don’t want any more,” Mila said.
“What?” Nadia’s mother said.