“Even if they disconnect all the channels nothing will happen to the satellite, Mum, it’ll just continue circling the world.” But he sat with us until he settled his dishevelled head on the armrest and fell asleep.
When it got late, Sergey turned off the light, lit the fire in the fireplace and brought a bottle of whisky from the kitchen, with two glasses. We sat on the floor in front of the sofa where Mishka, covered with a rug, was asleep, and sipped the whisky; the warm orange light of the fire mixed with the bluish glow of the TV screen, which was murmuring quietly and showing mostly the same footage we had seen in the morning: – presenters in front of world maps with red dots on them, empty streets of various cities, ambulances, soldiers, distribution of medicine and food (the faces of people queuing differentiated only by the colour of their masks), the closed doors of the New York Stock Exchange. I wasn’t translating anything anymore, we just sat and looked at the screen and for a moment it felt like just a regular night in, which we’d had plenty of before, as if we were just watching a boring film about the end of the world, with the beginning a bit dragged out. I put my head on Sergey’s shoulder, and he turned to me, stroked my cheek and said into my ear, in order not to wake up Mishka: “You were right, baby. It’s not going to end any time soon.”
The noise that woke me up stopped as soon as I opened my eyes; it was dark in the room – the fire had gone out and the last of the red embers weren’t creating any light. I could hear Mishka’s breathing behind me, and Sergey was asleep next to me, sitting up, with his head thrown back. My back was stiff from hours of sitting on the floor, but I sat still trying to understand what exactly had woken me. For a few seconds, which seemed endless, I sat in complete silence listening hard, and just as I was beginning to think that I had dreamt the strange noise, I heard it again, right behind my back – an insistent, loud rapping on the window. I turned to Sergey and grabbed him by the shoulder. In the dim light I saw that his eyes were open; he put his finger to his lips, and then, without standing up, reached over and found an iron rake, hanging by the fireplace, which made a clinking noise when he took it off the hook. For the first time in the two years that we had spent in this beautiful house, full of light and comfort, I bitterly regretted that instead of a sullen-looking brick fortress with barred arrow-slits, like most of our neighbours’ houses, we had chosen an airy wooden construction with a glass front, made up of enormous windows, stretching to the ridge of the roof. I suddenly realised how insecure this glass protection felt, as if our lounge and the whole house behind it, with all our lovely little possessions, favourite books, light wooden staircase, with Mishka, peacefully asleep on the sofa, was only a doll’s house without a front wall, which a gigantic alien arm could penetrate, destroying our comfortable living, turning everything upside down, scattering everything, and snatching any of us in a blink of an eye.
We glanced towards the window, near the balcony door which led to the veranda, and saw a silhouette clearly visible against the night sky.
Sergey tried to stand up, and I clung to his hand, which was holding the rake, and whispered:
“Wait, don’t get up, don’t!” and then we heard a voice from behind the glass:
“So how long are you going to hold out for in your fortress? I can see you through the window. Open up, Sergey!”
Sergey dropped the rake, which fell with a loud clang, and rushed to the balcony door. Mishka woke up, sat up on the sofa and rubbed his eyes, looking around him as if he didn’t know where he was. The door opened, letting the scents of the fresh frosty air and cigarette smoke into the house, and the man standing behind the window came in and said:
“Turn the light on, damn you.”
“Hi Dad,” Sergey said, groping for the light switch, and only then did I breathe out, stood up and came closer.
Shortly after we met three years ago, Sergey introduced me to his father. He had waited about six months after his ex-wife had finally loosened her grip on him, post-divorce fervour had calmed down and our life had started becoming normal. Sergey’s dad won my heart from the moment he entered the small flat on the outskirts of Moscow which Sergey and I had rented to be able to live together. He looked me up and down as if devouring me, gave me a mighty and not entirely fatherly hug and demanded that I call him ‘Papa Boris’, something I could never bring myself to say, so I simply avoided addressing him at all. Then, a year or so later, I settled on a neutral ‘Boris’, and we never became more informal than that. But I felt at ease with him from the very start. It was easier in his company than among Sergey’s friends, who were used to seeing him with another woman, and paused obviously and politely every time I spoke, as if they needed time to remember who I was. I was constantly catching myself trying to make them like me at any cost. It was a childish, pointless competition with a woman whose ex-husband I was living with. I hated myself for feeling guilty about that. Boris didn’t visit us often. Sergey and he had some complicated history from Sergey’s childhood, which neither of them liked talking about; it always seemed to me that Sergey was both proud and ashamed of his father. They rarely called each other and saw each other even less – he didn’t even come to our wedding. I suspect simply because he didn’t have a decent suit. A long time ago, to the surprise of his friends and family, he gave up his career as a university professor, rented out his small Moscow flat and left, to live in the country near Ryazan, where he had lived ever since, in an old house with an antiquated furnace and an outside toilet, rarely leaving the place. He did a bit of poaching from time to time, and according to Sergey, drank a lot of vodka with the locals, apparently earning a great and undeniable reputation.
He stood in our lounge, now with the lights on, squinting at the brightness; he had Sergey’s old shooting jacket which had seen better days and a pair of winter felt boots with no overshoes which oozed a small but growing puddle on the warm floor. Sergey lurched forward towards him but then stopped, and they both froze a step apart and didn’t hug, and instead both turned to me and I stood between them and hugged them both. Through the warm, thick smells of smoke and cigarettes I suddenly smelt alcohol and thought to myself that it was bizarre how he made it here without being stopped, but then it dawned on me that it is unlikely anyone bothered about this kind of thing on the road these days. I pressed my cheek against the worn collar of his coat and said:
“It’s so good that you came. Are you hungry?”
In a quarter of an hour fried eggs were sizzling on the cooker and all of us, including Mishka, who desperately tried to stay awake, sat around the kitchen table; it was half past four and the kitchen was full of the appalling smell of Boris’s cigarettes – he only smoked the cheap and strong Yava brand and waved away Sergey’s offer of Kent. While the food was cooking they had time to have one shot of vodka each and when I put the steaming food in front of them and Sergey wanted to pour another one, rather surprisingly Boris covered his glass with his large hand and nicotine-stained fingers and said: “Enough of the high life for me, I think. I came to tell you kids that you’re idiots. What the hell are you doing in this glass house, frying eggs and pretending everything is ok, eh? You didn’t even lock your gate. I know that your fancy gate, and the rickety fence, if you can call it that, and this whole apology for a safe house won’t stop a child from breaking in, but still, I expected you to be smarter than that.”
He was half-joking, but his eyes were serious. I suddenly saw that his hand, holding another cigarette, was shaking from tiredness and the ashes were falling straight on to the plate with the fried egg. His face was grey and there were dark circles around his eyes. Wearing a jumper of an indefinable colour, with an over-stretched collar (probably Sergey’s, too), thick trousers and felt boots, which he didn’t even think to take off, sitting in our stylish, modern kitchen, he looked like a huge, exotic bird. The three of us sat around him, like scared children, catching every word he was saying.