What did was picturing pleasure. If only these guests would drink faster so the end of the night could come. She did not especially like talking to the detective version of Kolya anymore, but after people came over, he was always sweet with her. A tipsy Kolya reminded Zoya of the months before she graduated: going to parties, flirting with friends, winding up with him in these same sheets. She turned the baby stomach-up and cupped Sasha’s small face in one hand.
They first met when Kolya pulled her over. Not yet lieutenant, he was Sergeant Ryakhovsky then, watching for traffic violations. She had been going too fast down Komsomolskaya. She was twenty, in the summer before her last year of university, leaving work to stop at the apartment before heading back out to a birthday dinner. And he was twenty-four and seemed so much older. On the gravel-rough side of the road, he watched her from behind his sunglasses. Her cheeks burned under her foundation. He was tall, broad-shouldered, unimpressed. He held on to the sill of her car door with one hand and looked down the length of his arm. She tried to tell him she was in a rush, going to an engagement. The cars behind his back whooshed by. Finally, he said, “Go on, then.” No ticket.
The next week, on her drive home, lights flared again in her rearview mirror. She pulled over with her heart quick and hands sweating. She had not been speeding, or she did not think she was. After five agonizing minutes, her passenger door opened, and he slid into the seat. His sunglasses were off. He smiled.
Six months later he moved into the apartment. They got married a few weeks after her final exams. By then, she was full-time at the park, and on her first day back after the wedding her coworkers kept bringing her champagne in a mug to celebrate, while their director pretended the drink was only milky tea. Zoya and her husband stayed happy for a while; when she found out she was pregnant, he held her and kissed her cheeks. She was crying. He did not ask her why. Now he took her car to and from the police station, while she stayed home and would for ages more. Two years, at least, Kolya said. That was what the baby needed. Enough time had passed that Zoya no longer wrapped herself up in romance over their second meeting, when he slipped into her passenger seat. His unfamiliar body strapped into its uniform, looking so adult, so sure, and hiding the man she would marry.
She had been away from the guests too long. Zoya carried Sasha back through the dim hall toward their voices—still arguing. Then someone in the kitchen said, “Illegals.”
Zoya clutched the baby to her. The workday was over. The migrants were gone—but maybe one of her husband’s guests had stepped out on the balcony in time, looked down on them leaving, seen Zoya’s ashes, and found her out—
She came to the kitchen doorway. “Waste of our time,” her husband said. “They call us then say nothing when we arrive.”
“They’re not the ones who call,” Fedya said.
“Then who? Who else gives a shit? Over nothing. Paint and five thousand rubles’ worth of fuel. They stood and looked at me like they had nothing to do with it,” Kolya said. “Scuttling off afterward like a pack of rats.”
Compact and dangerous, lifting mixed concrete. Black hair shining. And their accents. Zoya could go for hours on a single word. All day…if she had to be alone all day, why couldn’t it be with them, in the cold, by the unfinished building, on the other side of the street…
Sasha wiggled. Zoya waved her hand in front of the baby’s eyes to keep her quiet. She forced herself to ask: “What are you talking about?”
“Nothing,” her husband said.
“Vandalism,” said the assistant.
Fedya corrected her. “Just kids being kids. Graffiti at a construction site. Broken bottles, stolen tools.”
“Where was that?” Zoya asked.
“Nowhere,” her husband said, filling up their glasses. Then he relented. “On the eighth kilometer.” By the library and the volcanological institute. Far from here.
She pictured those workers on the eighth kilometer—like hers but not. The kind of men not strong enough to protect themselves from petty crimes. “So what—” she asked, and as she did, Dima started in saying, “To our—” He stopped, lowering his glass. Zoya waved him on. “To our long days of work,” Dima said, “and our longer nights of pleasure.”
“Good to hear it’s going well,” said Fedya after they all swallowed.
“So fucking rude,” said the assistant.
“Watch your mouth,” said Dima. He put a hand over the assistant’s lips. To the rest of the table, he explained, “Anfisa’s insulted because it’s not just nights with us anymore. She’s good for mornings, too.”
“What a gentleman,” said Anfisa from behind his fingers. Fedya refilled their glasses. “What honor. What chivalry.”
“What did you do,” Zoya asked her husband, “about the vandals?”
“There was nothing to do,” he said.
“My gallant prince,” Anfisa said to Dima. “See what happens if you keep speaking so sweetly to me. Our nights can get much shorter.”
“Long lunch breaks, too,” said Dima. Fedya snorted. “Our Anfisa is a twenty-four-hour kind of girl.”
Zoya said, “But if things were taken. If tools are gone. Don’t you have to catch whoever took them?”
“Why do you suddenly care?” asked her husband. He looked like the tired version of the officer she first met. At her car window, in her passenger seat—unpredictable. “Why should you tell me how to do my job? Do I tell you how to do yours? ‘Sit at home, get fat, and tend to the baby’?”
“Kolya,” Dima said.
“Ridiculous,” her husband muttered to the table.
This wasn’t her job. Or it shouldn’t be. The dinner Zoya had cooked for them sat on the stove. Her husband did not know what she was capable of. Outside, the construction site was empty. The ground there was a mix of mud and snow, and four floors above, Zoya held her child, kept quiet among strangers, waited for tomorrow.
In bed later, Kolya was tender. His cropped hair brushed against her jaw. “Forgive me?” he asked. She hummed, a neutral noise. “They treat me like a child…they make me lieutenant, put me on this case, then treat me like I’m inferior.” His breath on her neck. “I wish I’d never heard of these sisters. I could simply stay home with you.”
She stared up into the dark. “Don’t be angry,” he murmured.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. He held her tighter and she kissed his forehead.
Hello, miss, the migrant will say.
The sound of his voice will wet her mouth. She will say back, Hello. She will check that no one’s watching. She will point to the shack. Take me in there, she will say.
Inside, she will back up until she hits a table. Then she will reach, grip the surface, scoot herself up to sit. His eyelids will be heavy as he watches her body. His pupils will dilate. Shining black. Forearms thick with muscle, jaw clenched, he will be ready for her. Beyond the thin wall, she will hear the others. She will open her hands.
Zoya had always wanted them. Always wanted, and never touched. Before she found these workers, there were others, the men pushing carts through the market, the ones sweeping the block where she was raised. Long before she met her first blond boyfriend, she watched the migrants. And even lying next to her husband, she wanted them still. This was not some fetish, she believed. This was something more. She was not a woman made for sitting home and nursing. She craved things darker, stranger, out of bounds.
Tomorrow. She will give herself three hours. If she can find a sufficient excuse—a doctor’s appointment, maybe. No one will know. One afternoon, and then Zoya will return home, tell Tatyana Yurievna she’s sick, go to the shower and soap away the marks left by the workers’ fingers. She’ll wash slowly, wishing they could stay. And after that she will make it as Kolya’s wife and Sasha’s mother. No more visions of dead children. No desires to undo herself. After tomorrow, she will have enou
gh to make it through.
Zoya fell asleep into that fantasy. She dreamed of geysers and woke to the sound of running water. Her husband was already in the shower. In the kitchen, she brought out eggs to boil, bread to slice, white cheese from the refrigerator’s bottom drawer. The room smelled like a charred pan. Beyond her balcony, the morning was getting so bright.
The kettle was almost bubbling. The bathroom door opened, the bedroom door shut. Watching the sky, gray shot through with yellow, Zoya took her pack and lighter off the top of the refrigerator, slid open the balcony door, and stepped outside.
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.
She could shove the old bitch down. A street dog—a street dog—if this hag had pulled her head out of her own ass for one minute today and seen Malysh, she would not speak this way.
Oksana herself had been a witness to a disappearance; she understood from experience what drew the eye. Ten months ago, Oksana noticed a well-polished car. These days on the street, she looked after smiling women or too-affectionate couples. God knew Oksana was not the most attentive person in the world, but she turned her head in public often enough to know what looked exceptional.
Arms crossed over her chest, Oksana turned away from the women to shout. “Malysh!” Identical apartment blocks filled her view. Behind her, kids giggled. Oksana chose the wide avenue to her left and started running.
By the time she crossed Akademika Koroleva, where true street dogs tricked her with their movements, she burned. Sweat slid down her spine to collect at her waistband. Her dog was nowhere. She called Katya from her cell. As soon as Katya picked up, Oksana said, “Are you with Max? Does he have Malysh?” Katya’s voice drew away from the phone. Oksana shouted, “He left my doors open!”
Max came over the line. “The dog? But—”
“Both doors! What were you thinking? Idiot! Both doors open,” Oksana said, and she was not weak enough to cry, but her voice was cracking. “Didn’t you know Malysh would run? How could you?”
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