The morning was cool. The men were there. The rippled sheets of the roof of their shack were on the ground where that little structure was supposed to be. The workers stood in a circle around the spot. One had his coat in his hand.
They were standing over ash-black wreckage. A couple of charred planks, and what looked like the metal base of a table. Zoya understood. Their shack had been burned down.
She tapped out a cigarette, put it paper-dry between her lips, and flicked at the lighter. No spark. She wound her trembling fingers around the lighter, tried again. The flame flared. The sun was not yet up. That yellow in the air was the leftover glow from them, their ruined shack, the blackened ground, metallic ash in the smoke catching whatever brightness reflected off the bay.
Do something, she was begging them in silence. Shout or smash something or start to rebuild. Zoya would make up their day together, change the setting, put them all in the dark half-constructed building, if they did something—but they just stood in a circle and stared.
Vandals, the officers said last night. Stolen tools, petty crimes, and arson. The shack had been an easy target. And the men across the street, these foreign workers, the migrants who were supposed to transform her life, were powerless.
Zoya lifted her fingers to take the cigarette from her mouth. She nearly could not get a hold on it. One of the men—she could not tell which—put his hands in his hip pockets. He looked down the street where no police car was coming. Then he turned around toward her.
She drew back against the glass so she couldn’t see them anymore.
The water was probably boiling. Zoya had to finish breakfast or Kolya was going to be late. Carefully, keeping her arm close to the wall, she tossed her cigarette off the balcony. Then she gripped one hand tight with the other. It only took a few minutes to settle down within herself. When she was ready, she slid the door open and went back inside.
MAY
Oksana knew something was wrong when she saw the door. Her security door stuck into the hallway like a dislocated finger. Behind that metal panel, a line of white light shivered out. Both her apartment doors, the outer steel and the inner fiberglass one, hung open.
She was half a flight below, alone on the landing, and heard the blood in her ears. The double-layered entrances to other apartments were shut tight. Oksana held on to the railing for one second, looking up, and then called for her dog. “Malysh?” No one answered. “Malysh?” Oksana said, climbing now. Running. She pulled the security door the rest of the way open and pushed back the inner one to find her apartment quiet, clean, frightening. Her laptop rested on the coffee table. So she hadn’t been robbed.
Oksana called the dog’s name again. She went first to the bedroom to see if he was asleep in there—“Malysh, come!”—then to the living room, kitchen, bathroom in turn. She got on her hands and knees in case he had somehow squeezed under the tub. Feeling a bite on her palm, she turned a hand over to find her unused keys still looped around one finger. She pushed the keys into her pocket and bent deeper on her elbows. Malysh was not there.
The dog had gotten out. Her building’s entrance door always stuck either open or closed, so it had been open for months, all winter long, as snow blew in and mounded ankle-deep over the ground floor. There was nothing to stop Malysh from running. He could be anywhere. Oksana hurried back to the landing and down the flights of stairs—“Malysh, Malysh,” she shouted. The stairway was cool blue, its concrete walls washed by spring light. Up on the fifth floor, the apartment was open for the dog’s return. Oksana was already at the building’s entrance. She was already bursting back into the world.
She had no time to pause and take her panic in hand, so instead she rode it, shock turned to speed in her legs. The day’s strains, the last decade of stiff work in a sediment laboratory, were subsumed by fear. She was moving quickly as a child. Out the building’s door, she ran downhill. Toward the playground—Oksana and Malysh went there each morning before she left for the volcanological institute, when the neighborhood was draped in shadows and empty enough to let Malysh off-leash. Please, she thought, looking into the alleys between apartment buildings as she ran. Cables, trash bags, early patches of grass. She watched the ground though she was sickened to picture what she might find. Beyond the playground was a row of vendors, fruit and bread and flower stands, so there were always cars coming down these streets. Always trucks. Oksana’s shoes flew over the pavement. She thought, Let him be there.
Why did she lend Max her keys at lunch? Why did she ever allow him to stop by? All those instructions she gave over their two trays and the speckled plastic table—“Turn the lock on the security door three times,” she told him expressly—and the confirmation she asked for when he returned the keys to her desk this afternoon. “Everything good?” she said. Something like that, she could not remember now, her mind couldn’t track the details, her breath was short. “Max. Found your papers? All good?” She only knew that he had smiled, agreed, asked her some facile thing about sulfide ore. He certainly hadn’t mentioned he left both her apartment doors open. And now Malysh was gone.
Her heart, that distractible creature, raced inside her chest. As amusing as Max was with his big talk, his optimism, Oksana never really trusted him. Why did she not remind herself of that this afternoon? Of all people to put her confidence in—Max. Oksana’s ex-husband used to roll his eyes during the evenings they spent with Max and Katya last fall. “At my climbing gym, we’re organizing a trip to Kathmandu,” Max once told them. “You should come with us. Haven’t you ever wanted to climb the Himalayas?” Even Katya, sitting beside him, had looked embarrassed. And the way Max talked of their work at the institute was delusional. As if he would become deputy research director, then supervise the department, then lead the Russian Academy of Sciences. “Romanovich told me I just need to wait a few more months for my promotion. He told me, ‘As soon as we permit you to begin rising, you’ll never stop.’ ”
Oksana’s husband had made to pull out Max’s chair. “So go ahead and rise,” Anton said, not really joking.
If someone had told Oksana then that in six months, Anton would be gone but Max and Katya would still be together, and that the two would come over for dinner, Max would leave his notes behind, and Oksana, trusting in her long friendship with Katya, would momentarily believe in this cretin enough to share her keys, she would have poisoned the ice cream she served them all that night for dessert.
The playground held a few schoolchildren, two elderly women, no Malysh. Oksana spotted the dog’s absence from a distance. There were no walls for him to hide behind, just rods, ropes, and slivers of rubber. She circled the little park to make sure. “Malysh,” she called. Her voice was faint behind her pulse.
Once she came back around to where she started, she chose the plumper of the pair of women and said, “Auntie, have you seen a dog?” The other one stared ferociously at Oksana’s exposed knees below her skirt. “He’s white,” Oksana said, holding her hands apart to show Malysh’s length. “A Samoyed. A big, handsome beast, a sled dog, very clean, well fed, strong.”
“No, sweetheart,” the woman said.
“We don’t look after street dogs,” said the other.
“I’m not talking about a stray,” said Oksana. All the blood in her body collected, turned, slammed forward in rage. Her feet stayed planted but her hands wavered.