“Is that what you think?” he said, laughing rather cruelly. “All this time, you thought—well,” he said, brushing imaginary dirt off his trousers. “You think you’re so special because you walk around quoting old dead bores, but you’re not. Anyone can get a diploma, but it takes more to learn how to live. And you, Larissa, should not discuss matters you know nothing about.”
He began pushing my son on his swing before I had a chance to apologize.
“You’re flying high in the sky, little man!” Bogdan said.
“I’m a rocket!” my son cried.
“You’ll blast right to the stars if we keep going like this,” said Bogdan, pushing harder, perhaps with a bit too much zeal, but I did not stop him. “You’ll go straight into space.” He did not look at me again, but I could feel him, daring me to tell him to slow down.
I thought the incident would break us, but it never came up again. We remained allies and continued to spend the late afternoons with my son together when I wasn’t working. This continued for the next few years, in fact—Bogdan regaling me with tales of Rome while managing to avoid the topic of my sister, criticizing the Soviet government while I gave my assent by not rebuking him and tried to change the subject by offering amusing tales of my wayward students. How I treasured our conversations! Right up until the day he died.
He was poisoned by accident. I was not there, yet I have pictured the scene again and again over the years. He was carrying a box of chemicals to the Institute and tripped in the snow. Of all the things he had ever carried, he happened to drop several vials of mercury. If he had left the box on the ground, then I might be telling a different story. But he was finally back in the swing of things, eager to please, relishing his status as chief courier. He rummaged in the snow for what he could salvage, placing the few unbroken vials back in the box and carrying it all the way to the Institute. He probably hummed all the way there to keep calm, silver leaking down his hands, staining the white ground. As he approached the majestic building that his father had built from scratch, he might have been filled with a sense of fate, of his small place in the universe.
He began to feel dizzy, but he still made it to the lab, walking up four marble stories. By the time he set the box down on the laboratory table and explained what had happened, his world was a blur. When the concerned scientists sat him down, he began to vomit blood. Misha was summoned to accompany his brother to the hospital, where the verdict was clear: mercury poisoning.
My husband was devastated, of course. “My brother,” he kept mumbling as we got into bed. How did this happen? Why was one brother a strong father and capable scientist, while the other festered in his bed? I should not have been shocked by this cruel twist of fate, when my own father was cold in the ground while his brother was alive and well. I held my husband and tucked him in, and then I sat at the kitchen window smoking all night long. I picked up Karamazov, but it wore me out. Bogdan had been right all those years ago. Fyodor Mikhailovich did take too long to get to the point.
It took Bogdan almost two weeks to die. At first, he was still himself, and though I knew it was selfish, I finally found the nerve to ask about my sister again. Was she happy, all those years away from home? I didn’t dare ask what she thought about me.
“She was perfectly happy,” he said. “More with her dogs than me,” he added with a smile. “How she loved those foul creatures. But yes, Larissa, she was pleased with her life.”
“Good,” I said. Was I relieved? Had I wanted her to be miserable—or at least to feel a dull thud of unhappiness, like I did?
“We were perfectly capable of having children,” he continued. “It was your sister, Larissa. She didn’t want them.”
“Why ever not?”
Once I got married and came to my senses, I did not seriously consider childlessness. At the time, this was unthinkable—like deciding to cut off your own breast. I tried to recall my youthful feelings about my uncle never procreating; he saw what having children could do, especially if troubles arose, Revolutions or typhus or the need to send said children to an orphanage. Polya saw what family did to our father. His family failed to care for him; he failed to care for us. I could understand her desire to forgo children after that, to never worry about not giving adequate care. Still, it was terrible that she was gone for good, and soon Bogdan would be, too, that there would be no trace of them.
“She said she already had everything she needed,” Bogdan said. “What was I supposed to do, Larissa? I loved her.”
“She didn’t seem to care about my child, certainly,” I said, suddenly angry with my sister for leaving this man to die alone, without a child by his side for comfort. I could have brought my son, a serious teenager, but it was hardly safe. “She loved her rabid animals, but she didn’t even bother waiting for my son to be born before taking off. Even that last day at the station—”
“Oh, Larissa,” he said, closing his eyes. “Why don’t you let it go?”
“Of course I have,” I said, hugging myself. “I was just…” Only then did I see how selfish I was acting, grumbling about my sister when this poor man was at death’s door. This man who found it in him to give me advice during his last days on Earth. Sound advice, at that. Then again, he was the one who declared his love to me in the mountains, when my father was missing, when I was fairly certain he was dead already. He didn’t have the most considerate timing either.
“We all would have starved to death in the mountains if it wasn’t for you,” I said.
He offered me one weak nod that was almost a bow. And then I returned his long-ago kiss from the train—right on his mercury-stained lips. I didn’t care if it killed me. I was already dead. He looked a bit stunned but not displeased, and when he closed his eyes shortly after, it took me a moment to realize it was not due to pleasure but because he needed to rest, to prepare his body for destruction. I stood over him for as long as the nurses would allow.
After that, he turned sallow and then gray and then lost consciousness altogether. I still returned every day to see him, recalling what he once said about how it was obvious Father Zosima’s corpse would stink to the heavens, no matter how pure he claimed to be. He smelled like nothing, and I sensed that he would continue to be innocent, even when he passed on.
Two weeks later, the Institute gave him a big, hearty funeral. Why wouldn’t they? He was the son of Konstantin Orlov and the brother of Mikhail Orlov, its director, never mind the fact that it was exactly the kind of thing he would have hated, all that pomp and circumstance from the hypocritical bureaucrats he loathed and yet worked for, the very people who killed him. Misha gave an impassioned speech on behalf of his brother, about how he was an original thinker who never followed trends, an inspiration to us all, a speech that flirted with blasphemy but never crossed the line. There was a banquet afterward for the hundred or so guests, and as I studied the caviar and gleaming grapes and deviled eggs and endless bottles of wine, I couldn’t help but see it through Bogdan’s or my sister’s eyes—thousands of rubles wasted on people who didn’t care for Bogdan, which would have been better spent on the poor, or the roads, or even homeless dogs.
Uncle Pasha, still a bachelor who would live for another few years, made it to the funeral from Kharkov, and was a bright spot on this occasion. “A spirited boy,” he had said, putting a hand on my shoulder. “My princess,” he whispered, “has become a queen.” Though he was approaching old age, he still carried that lightness about him, and did not seem lonely, making me wonder if I knew anything at all about whether or not everyone needed a family, though he was happy to watch over Tolik as my husband and I made the rounds. But you wouldn’t believe who else I saw, a far more unwelcome visitor from the past than my dear uncle.