So instead she could choose something solitary. Go down to the city center, buy a sausage from one of the stands by the bay, and sit to eat her food on the shore. The water steady, the mountains beyond layered in dark blue, light blue, white. Looking like cut paper. Rocks pressing under her heels. She used to loiter there when she was a schoolgirl. She and her friends stayed late, drank on the beach, watched the horizon flatten, saw the night ships pass…But what if her husband drove by and saw her?
She could…why didn’t she tell Tatyana Yurievna that she’d be gone three hours? An hour was not enough. Neither was a day or a week. Zoya could move to St. Petersburg, too. She could get away from this. She could leave.
But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t, really. Her chest tingled with milk letting down. She couldn’t.
She exhaled fog. When she first moved to this apartment, the church was shut up in scaffolding. This courtyard was a stretch of gravel, no trees. Zoya was nineteen, and her mother’s new man bought this place for Zoya so he and her mother could have their privacy. That was before Zoya met Kolya, before they fixed up the apartment; the wallpaper was stained, one stove burner did not work, the washing machine shook so hard that it jostled its plug from the outlet halfway through a cycle. And Zoya loved it. Some mornings before she left for class, she walked circles around the bedrooms, just looking. Anything seemed possible.
Things were different now. Zoya checked the time on her phone and picked up the groceries.
As soon as she got to the bottom of the courtyard stairs, she saw the workers. They stood together on boards over wet earth and sipped steaming cups of tea. Oh—her stomach twisted. These were the few minutes of their lunch break. She came toward them slowly, measuring out her steps to make the walk last, and as she approached, they broke off their conversation. To watch.
One said, “Hello, miss,” in that half-swallowed way he always did. His accent made the greeting dirty.
A cord of tension extended from Zoya’s eyes, her sinuses, the back of her throat, through her body, out her ribs, to the men. So close. The line was taut. She swallowed. “Hello,” she said to the street ahead of her. She was almost past them now. The men said nothing in return. She kept her head up, tightened her fingers around the grocery bag, and let herself in the door of her apartment building.
The hall was cold and dark and left her alone again. If some neighbor brushed past her right now, she would thrum. Only two words—and still the migrants did this to her.
The locked joints of her knees. Her neck tense, her jaw hard. A thousand things to say behind her teeth. She pressed her back to the wall and listened to her heart pound them out: I want you, it said in the dark. There was no one around to hear.
Climbing the stairs, Zoya pressed herself down, holding fingers on her fantasies so they settled. Be still. Tatyana Yurievna met her at the apartment door with the baby in her arms. “We knew you were coming home, didn’t we, Sashenka? We saw you from the window.”
Zoya kept her face down as she pulled off her boots. “Is that right?” She took the bag into the kitchen. They followed her.
“Did those men say something to you?” Tatyana Yurievna asked.
Zoya was already putting the food away. Hidden behind the refrigerator door, she said, “Who? No.”
“The migrants. It’s dangerous. Nobody keeps an eye on them,” Tatyana Yurievna said. “I heard on the news this morning that the police found a body in the bay.”
Zoya shut the door to look at her neighbor. “One of the Golosovskaya sisters?” The lights, the boats, a child’s slack limbs bumping along stones.
“They said it was probably an adult. But who knows? I get my information from other sources.” Tatyana Yurievna winked. Zoya returned to her groceries. “What did Kolya tell you? Do they have any suspects?”
“I didn’t know the searches were back on,” Zoya said. “He didn’t tell me anything.”
“Because you’re busy with this little angel.” Tatyana Yurievna’s voice rose and fell as she bounced Sasha. “I’ll ask him myself. Those men outside, I wonder…any one of them could have taken those sisters. You’re too young to remember what it was like before the collapse. It’s only after Kamchatka opened to outsiders that we started to see any crime.”
“They’re just construction workers,” Zoya said. “Not child molesters.”
“We don’t know who or what they are. Why would someone come to a different country if he didn’t have something to get away from in the last? You be careful, Zoyka. Who knows what they might do to a girl like you?”
Her back to her neighbor, Zoya rinsed the vegetables. She, too, believed in the migrants’ power—not the power to steal children, but the power to take a woman, to transform her, to turn her life that was growing smaller all the time into an existence that was dark and mighty.
That they came here from somewhere else only made Zoya hungrier. The workers’ dirtiness, their ignorance. That they hardly spoke. The way, when she was in school, they stood over her on the bus and looked down. Her neighbor was right: this was not their country. They had nothing to lose. Zoya wanted to enter that little cabin, which must smell like sweat, mud, gasoline. A white woman’s picture would be stapled to its wall, and she would be the white woman in its center. She needed to find out what these men might do to a girl like her. She craved that knowledge; her hands, her mouth, wanted it like they wanted cigarettes.
Tatyana Yurievna talked on. Zoya took cheese, cucumber, and tomatoes from the fridge, sliced them up, and set out a platter. She poured them both cups of tea while Tatyana Yurievna, holding Sasha on her lap with one arm, picked up a bite. “At least we have Kolya here to protect us. Zoyka, you don’t know this, but our building used to be full of humble people like us. Real Russians. The whole nation was. No one was a stranger. We were united by our common ideals, we believed in greatness. That was a different era, wasn’t it? A better time.” The older woman looked down at the food as she spoke. Her eyebrows were thin, her mouth loose, her bottom teeth lined with stains like the shore when the tide goes out. The baby chewed on her fingers. Tatyana Yurievna would talk about the way things were until her stomach was full, then she would ask Zoya about Kolya, compliment his service, squeeze the baby one last time, and return to her own floor. Three times a week and sometimes four. This was Zoya’s life.
Zoya took a slice of cucumber. When she bit, freshness burst across her tongue.
The afternoon grew late before Zoya was alone again. Sasha lay in her crib. In the palm-leaf kitchen, Zoya scrubbed two beef tongues clean and slid them into boiling water. Garlic, onions, sugar, celery. She covered the pot. While the meat simmered, she chopped columns of carrots. The windows steamed over. She was a universe away from the park territory, its rainbow rivers, its puffing fumaroles. They used to go out there in the summer when the lakes churned with salmon. Bears gutted fish and scattered shining red roe across the ground. She wouldn’t see such dangerous beauty again for years.
She let her mind wander. It wandered downstairs.
The baby at rest. The food on the stove. The air in the apartment sticky with starch and the walls beading. Hurrying out of her building, she’ll find empty landings on every floor. The railing under her fingers will be rough from layers of chipped paint, blue and gray and yellow. She will press the button, release her building’s front door, and go out into the sun.
An afternoon washed in greenish light, the whole city like a bud about to open. A hundred meters away, beyond the church, traffic will rush by, but no cars will turn down their street. As she comes closer to the building, the workers will lift their chins. They will bring her into the shack. They will take her out of her old body. They will make her new.