She and Mila were starting over. Nadia put one arm around Mila’s back. “My sweet,” Nadia said, “let’s not tell Grandpa and Baba about what happened this week, all right?”
Mila drew another loop. “All right.”
“Pretend I’m Grandpa. Hi, Mila, what’s new with you?”
“Nothing!” Mila said. “The other day a pipe broke and it made an ice rink in the house.”
Nadia paused. “That’s what we’re not telling.”
“I thought we weren’t telling about you and Daddy being mad at each other.”
“That, too,” Nadia said. “All of it.” She squeezed Mila’s shoulder, took her arm back, sank in her seat. Pushed her knees against the seat pocket ahead.
It didn’t matter what Mila said. In a month or two, their life would be good enough that Nadia would no longer have to misrepresent it to her parents. So instead of wasting words on what they were leaving, that iced-over shithole, Nadia unlocked her phone, scrolled to a Rihanna album, and put one earbud in. “Here, kitten,” she said to Mila, who tilted the side of her face up. Nadia tucked the other bud into her daughter’s soft ear and let pop music play them in.
They came at Palana from the east. The town was the administrative center of its district, but looked shabby from above: streets smudged gray, apartment blocks crumbling, rows of wooden houses trailing into the sea. Nadia hadn’t been back since she and Mila moved south to Esso. She could not see any new structures from the air.
Her parents met them at the airport. Neither of them questioned Mila on what was new. Nadia’s mother said, “I will not ask why Chegga didn’t come.”
“He’s busy with work,” Nadia said. “Not only the newspaper anymore—weddings, events.” That wasn’t the reason, but it was a flattering fact.
“He needed a break, I imagine. You’re not easy to live with.”
“And who raised me that way?” Nadia muttered. Her mother, too deaf to hear, was squinting at the other disembarking passengers in search of anyone she recognized. Her father was bent over and squeezing Mila’s cheeks.
Mila had on a new coat, shining purple, that Nadia had bought her for New Year’s. Thank God for Sberbank: it was Nadia’s job that had landed them here. Seven weeks of paid vacation. She and Chegga had talked about using that time to go to Sochi for the summer, before one burst pipe, one final argument, and one firm conversation with her boss about what Nadia had called a “family matter” changed those plans permanently.
They had seven weeks now, which would take them into May. Long enough to find a quality place to live. Not in Palana, certainly, or in Petropavlovsk, where Chegga’s sister was in university, but on the mainland—perhaps Kazan?—or even Europe. Istanbul? London? Without Chegga to hold them back, Nadia and Mila might become world travelers. Sberbank had branches everywhere.
In the car, Nadia took the passenger seat, while her father and Mila climbed into the back. Sitting close to the steering wheel, Nadia’s mother continued to squint, though there was nothing but iced-over parked cars in front of them.
“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 acknowl
edgment. 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.
“SHE DOESN’T WANT ANY MORE,” said Nadia.
Clicking her tongue, her mother took the bowl to scrape back into the pot. Boiled potatoes fell splat, splat. Onions sprouted out of old mayonnaise jars on the counter. “It’s because you’re not eating. You don’t set a good example for her.”
Nadia flushed. “It’s because she ate on the way.”
“What?”
“IT’S BECAUSE SHE ATE ON THE WAY.”
“That’s not why,” her mother said.
Nadia ducked her head so her hair made a dark wall between them. “Papa, doesn’t she wear her hearing aid anymore?”
“Your mother’s an excellent woman,” her father said. He was lifting his spoon.
Nadia’s nose prickled and she raised her face in surprise. She wasn’t going to cry! Silly. But the way her father said that reminded her of the best of Chegga. The compliments Chegga delivered to Nadia through Mila—Isn’t your mama funny? Aren’t we lucky? The way he did show he loved her when he remembered to try.
She was simply getting sentimental because she was worn out after days of mutual silent treatment. Exhausted from the coordinating it took to get Mila out of preschool and herself away from the currency-counting machines.
Tired, too, from covering for the insufficiencies in their household. She could only imagine how people in Esso talked about their situation. That Chegga Adukanov, who lived in a dump, couldn’t afford to fix his rented pipes. Maybe they did not even say “couldn’t afford”—people could assume instead didn’t care. They might think, There’s a certain type of man, indigenous, probably drinks too much, seems polite when he’s on the job but then see how he acts at home. Lives with a woman but doesn’t follow through with marriage. Acts sweet enough to take on another man’s baby but lets that child freeze. Except for the drinking, all those potential whispers were true. And Nadia could not stand being subject to more gossip.
This month and a half would give her the time to sort out what propelled her toward him in the first place. If she had been willing after high school to spend a few more days here, instead of getting pregnant by the first man who approached her, would she have ended up a couple lovers later in an even tinier village than where she started, with someone who took her and her baby on double dates to a communal swamp?
Once the lunch dishes were cleared, Nadia opened their suitcase in the living room. Mila’s things were microscopic, rhinestone-dotted. “You’re a very brave girl,” Nadia told her daughter. Mila wrapped her arms around Nadia’s neck and leaned into her lap. The girl smelled soupy: dill, black pepper, lemon juice. Nadia hugged her tighter.
Nadia shouldn’t, but she could not resist. “We don’t miss Daddy, do we?” she asked against Mila’s cheek.
At first Mila was quiet. Then she turned her face in to Nadia’s shoulder. Sniffed. Sniffed again—Nadia had made her daughter cry.
“Oh, my duckling,” Nadia said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” She held her daughter hard, trying to squeeze the tears back in before Mila really started to go off.
“He’s not coming?” Mila asked. Her voice was all choked. Nadia released some of the pressure around her daughter’s ribs.
“He’s back at home. Remember? We’re staying with Grandpa and Baba for a while.” Mila got louder, saying no—no-o-o—Nadia tried to talk over her. “Don’t you remember how he broke the kitchen? He has to stay to fix it.” Nadia had put Mila in this position, she’d asked her daughter about Chegga, and still she was getting angry at the girl. Nadia wanted to ask her, Remember Tuesday? Leaving the house cold and sobbing? The frost up the walls—the school attendant’s pity—the way Chegga afterward had acted so defensive and put-upon? For once, couldn’t Mila remember whose side she was on?
Nadia pushed her nose into her daughter’s round cheek. “Do you want to watch TV?” There. Snot sucked back up into little sinuses. Cheburashka cartoons could undo any tragedy.
A swollen-faced Mila curled into Nadia on the couch. When Nadia was growing up, this was the spot where she slept, did her homework, fantasized about freedom; now she came back to this place as a mother and a professional. Together, she and Mila watched animals dance on her laptop. The light faded overhead.
When her phone buzzed, Nadia slipped out. In the hush of the hallway she looked at Chegga’s picture on the screen. Then she silenced the call. The vibration stopped, but his face remained, backlit by last summer’s southern sun. His smile.
She felt that old tug he put in her. A finger hooked under her ribs.
The phone screen went black for a second, then lit up again. Another call. She knew exactly the conversation that was going to come—why didn’t you, when are you, why not, and so on. She silenced the call again and pulled up their text message chain. In Palana, she sent. Will call when I’m ready.
The phone stayed silent. She watched the screen until she had to close her eyes against it. From the living room leaked the tinny sound of a song about trains.
Picture that hovel in Esso. Her daughter’s breath fogging as she dressed. His barrel of a body looking ridiculous in gym shorts as he stood with his feet in ice water. Imagine anything but his voice rough at night, the toast and jam he prepared for Mila each morning, his breath over Nadia’s shoulder as he showed her his latest work on his computer, the
way his mouth must have fallen when he came home today and found his family was not there.
Again the phone vibrated. The tug was a yank, and she rocked with the urge to answer. The number coming up was unknown. Maybe he’d bought a new SIM card…Impressive, Chegga. She exhaled, picked up. “What is it?”
There was silence on the other end. A guy she didn’t recognize: “Nadia?”
She pressed her hand to her forehead. “Yes? Sorry. Hello?”
“It’s Slava Bychkov.”
“Ooooh,” she said.
“You don’t still have my number, huh.”
“I’m surprised you still have mine.”
“Nadechka, it’s not a question. So. How does it feel to be home after this long?” Nadia narrowed her eyes. Had her mother told the neighbors she was coming? But then he said, “My aunt saw you at the airport. You can’t hide anything from anyone in this town.”
“I guess I forgot.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll remind you.”
“Uh-huh,” Nadia said. “We’re having a great time here—my daughter and I.” She lay on daughter a little harder than she needed to, probably, but she would like to hear him lose that ease in his voice. She and Slava had been seeing each other when she was pregnant. He left once she really started to show.
“Do you ever tell her about me?”
Nadia laughed. “No, Slav.”
“Maybe she’s too young to understand fairy tales.” Nadia chose not to respond. “Does she like hot chocolate?”
“Yes, Prince Charming, she does.”
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