The stain is in the middle of the bed, but the silovik’s wife never sleeps in the middle of the bed. She sleeps on the left side even when she is alone, which is much of the time. Polina is sure of that. The linens are her responsibility. Now all that is left on the sheet is the maroon stain and slants of light from the window blinds. It is almost noon, long after the hour Polina would usually clean the room.
She is staring at the bed when Olympiada walks in, shrugs, and says, “Could be wine. Or shit.”
They know it is neither.
“Lipka,” Polina chides. Polina, the under housekeeper, is thirty years younger than her colleague. She was nineteen when they first met—the silovik was new to the island, he had just acquired this dacha, and Polina was new to this kind of work. Polina is now twenty-two. “Lipka, please.”
“Don’t Lipka me.”
Polina touches the bed sheet. “Where is Ronya?”
“Where do you think?” She clucks her tongue. “I shouldn’t have to bring him here. He’s only five.”
But her grandson is here—this crime scene. Polina says, “He’s very mature for five.”
“He is a cabbage. Like my daughter. And me, too, I should say.” Olympiada sits on the bed as if it doesn’t matter, as if it is just a bed. “Ronya. He’ll only grow up more like his mother. Like me. Pulled from nursery already when we need to work more than ever.” Olympiada sees the future: Ronya, no longer young, working even lower paying jobs than her, getting fat from beer, pale with poor health, losing a day’s wage playing durak or dominoes, his heart slowly ticking toward a cliché end, seizing in the doorway of some shanty house.
“I’ll check on him,” Polina says, but she is distracted, gazing at the wall around the window. A spider had been there not long before.
“He’s out front with Miron. The boy is probably hungry. He usually is.”
“Miron is here?” The silovik’s chauffeur.
Olympiada nods. “And see to the tea, too.”
Downstairs, all the doors are still open, even the French doors that lead to the veranda. The curtains wave in the breeze. The Black Sea is on that breeze, dissipating into the hall’s antiseptic odor.
Out front, Ronya and Miron sit on the hood of the silovik’s town car. Miron smokes a cigarette. He is a few years younger than the silovik was, but his slicked back hair is already grayer.
“Ronya, don’t sit on that,” Polina says from the doorway of the dacha. “Come inside. Let’s have a snack.”
Ronya waddles over. He is a plump little boy with a black fringe nearly covering his eyes. After he steps into the foyer, he turns back to Miron. “What do I have?”
Miron cocks his mouth to the side. A piece of ash falls from the tip of the cigarette and lands on his loose collar. Miron isn’t wearing his double-breasted jacket today, or his plain black cap. “You have a cheese sandwich. And the biggest tea cake you can find.”
On one of the many occasions Olympiada brought her grandson to the dacha, Miron told the boy a story. He told the boy that he was the boy from the future. That he had come back to give Ronya life advice and to bet on some football matches, too. Ronya smiles and hurries inside.
“What did you tell him?” Polina asks.
Miron’s smile fades. “Same as I always say to the boy.”
“You shouldn’t play head games with a child.”
“How many Mirons do you know? How many can you find on this island alone? You suppose the boy really believes everyone who shares his name is himself?” Miron offers her a smoke. “It encourages him to think he’ll look good someday.”
She shakes her head and instead asks if he told Ronya anything about the silovik or his wife.
“What do you think? Like you said, he is a child.”
Polina asks for a cigarette.
Miron takes a silver lighter from his pocket and lights it for her.
“Where’d you get that?” Polina wears no jewelry, but has some kept away in a wooden box under her bed back in her apartment. If she must, she thinks, she could sell those pieces. A pair of earrings she found on the ground of her old schoolhouse. A gold-colored bracelet she bought two years before, but never wore, and didn’t know was worth little.
“A gift.” He puts the lighter back into his pocket. “From a ghost.”
“Olympiada is not happy.”
“She’s lost her job. Her recommenders.” Miron tilts his head up and releases a long draw of smoke from between his teeth. “Her source of entertainment.”
The sky is blue, but thunderheads loom out over the patch of Black Sea visible between other homes and rooftops lower on the hill. Polina says the name of the silovik’s wife.
“What good can she do?” Miron asks. “You’re as stuck as the rest of us, you know.”
“What should I have done? Go on house making? And you—drive a ghost around?”
“Olympiada is mad at you—not me.”
Polina coughs smoke. “Olympiada helps pay for Ronya’s nursery school. Now she’ll have to look after Ronya herself.”
“I am well aware of what comes first for Olympiada.” Miron and Olympiada, both veterans in hospitality, share more with each other than with Polina. “She’s not angry for Ronya’s sake but her own.”
Polina thinks that maybe she should be angry, too, but she is only confused. She says, “You’re calm.”
Miron waits a long while before speaking again. “No. I’m not.”
Inside, Polina checks the samovar in the kitchen. The kitchen is gleaming, stainless steel and marble. Ronya sits on a stool around the kitchen island with two plates before him. Two cheese sandwiches.
“I made one for you,” he says.
Polina takes the plate but doesn’t sit. “You’re too good.”
“There were no tea cakes.”
“That’s okay.” She forces herself to smile. “Maybe there will be tea cakes tomorrow.”
“Bubbie says we’re going to have to leave,” Ronya says.
Polina takes a bite of the sandwich.
“Uncle Miron says so too.” Ronya quickly adds, “He only told me because I asked.”
“It’s okay. Yes, we might all have to leave.”
“Where did Mr. and Mrs. General go?” This is what Ronya always calls the silovik and his wife.
Polina says, “They’ve gone.”
“Where have they gone?”
“They’ve … moved on.”
The boy frowns.
Polina gets herself a glass of milk, hesitating before the cabinet. When has she ever taken one of the crystal glasses? Olympiada would use the crystal glasses, but Polina has never.
Polina asks if Ronya would like a glass as well. He says yes and says, “Bubbie says Mr. General is not going to heaven.”
Polina sets the two glasses of milk down on the counter. “Be careful with the glass.”
“I will.”
“I know you will.” She tries to smile again.
“What’s heaven?”
Polina eventually says, “I don’t know exactly.”
“Is it in the sky?” Ronya chugs down his milk. Little white drops catch on his upper lip.
“Well—I guess.”
“Like a plane?”
“I guess so.”
“Maybe we can see. I’m going to look.” Ronya slides off his stool and waddles out of the kitchen. Polina doesn’t know what else to do so she follows.
Past the veranda, the dacha has a small backyard. Big enough for a child to kick a football, not that the silovik and the silovik’s wife have any children. But when they weren’t home and Ronya was, he would play out there. There is a garden, too, with hyacinths and tulips and a few low sabal palms that need constant attention to survive. Ronya takes a seat in the grass and looks out to the sky hanging over the Black Sea.
Polina asks herself why she is still here. Olympiada has her own quarters in the dacha, but Polina can leave. She can start looking for another job. She and Olympiada don’t need to pack away the house, and it is clear Olympiada won’t mind never seeing her again. If anyone else is really coming, what does that have to do with herself, or Lipka? Or Miron, for that matter? Polina has no desire to talk to the municipal police again. She’s talked enough. She’s told her story. There is nothing else to say. She waits for nothing.
#
Polina was born in a village inland. She did not know her father. Her babushka helped raise her till she was four. Then her babushka died. After the funeral, she went to live with her mother in a cramped housing complex on the island. Her mother was a maid in a luxury hotel on the sea-facing coast, and on weekends, when school was out, she would take Polina to work with her.
While her mother scrubbed toilets, emptied waste bins, and turned down bedding, young Polina would usually sit on identical balconies with identical views of the Black Sea, the beach, the distant scene of women and men and children sprawled out in lounge chairs under tiny umbrellas. Polina would make up stories for the people she saw below her. The other side of the hotel had no balconies, just windows and views of the estuary that separated the island from the inland hills, the bridges to the factories and power plants billowing smoke. When in these rooms, Polina would watch television.
She was a good student, and as a teenager she went on to secondary school. In her third year, she could finally choose whatever classes she wanted. All she really wanted was to leave the island and go to a real city, so it didn’t matter what she took, she figured. She chose classes that interested her despite their irrelevancy. She took a writing course, and, for one assignment, wrote a poem. In her poem there was a man stumbling through a department store, the kind you’d find in the harbor district where people like the silovik and the silovik’s wife had their dacha, not the touristy areas where new high-rise construction was just beginning. Most certainly not inland. The man wore a gray jumpsuit like someone from the future and his face was on fire. He was looking for someone, though it was never stated who. The burning man went up an escalator searching for someone—a girl, the poem intimated. He peeked around a sunglass kiosk, got on his hands and knees to look underneath racks of clothing and dress shoes. Then he stood. Then he arched his arms as if around an invisible partner and started to dance the polka. In the end, he unzips his jumpsuit and reveals: nothing. No penis at all. Polina’s teacher asked where she got the idea for the poem and Polina, rather than saying that she sat down and thought it up, told a lie—that she got the idea from something she’d seen on television.
At school, the uniforms changed every semester. Even if it was just the color of the plaid skirt that turned from red to blue, students were required to purchase a new one. This was common practice at secondary schools to push out the students who couldn’t afford the uniform changes. After her third year, Polina was one of those students. She dropped out and looked for work, interviewed to be an under housekeeper at the silovik’s dacha, and moved into a small dormitory-style apartment. The rest of her floor worked in the hotels. This was the farthest away she could get.
Three years later, Polina woke to her alarm clock like she would on any morning, got out of her cot, and shuffled to the kitchenette. She put a percolator on the hotplate and heated up some cereal. After eating, drinking her coffee, showering in the shared bathroom, picking a blouse, first a blue one, and then white—both of which had once been a part of her school uniform—Polina took the bus to the harbor district. It was early. The sun was only yellow fuzz out east, and to the west the sky ruffled into the dark sea water.
When Polina came in, she came in as usual—behind where Miron would have parked the car, through the service entrance. She wasn’t yet out of the pantry when she heard someone muttering swear words. In the kitchen, the silovik’s wife stood over the silovik’s body. Polina didn’t scream when she walked into the doorway and saw what was happening, but she stiffened. Her vision pulled into a tight circle. The silovik was lying on his back, stretched out over the marble island, surrounded by an aureole of dark brown-red. His head was unattached and on the floor, double wrapped in white plastic waste bags. The bloody bags—the head and gaping holes in the face half-visible—looked like a misshapen pillow. Next to the bags was an open valise and inside the valise were his arms. The hands were attached to these arms, but the fingers were not. The silovik’s wife stood at his feet, where his legs were splayed out and kept aloft by the marble island. He was wearing pajama pants, but no shirt or shoes. His belly swelled over the elastic waistband of his pajama bottoms. On the edge of the countertop was a cutlass—the silovik’s—and, in her hands, the silovik’s wife held a large pair of shears, the shears that Miron would use for the garden. No one asked Miron to tend the garden, but he did so anyway. A part of Polina’s mind registered surprise that the silovik’s wife had known where the shears were kept.
Some of the silovik’s toes were missing. The silovik’s wife took the shears to the next one, his left foot’s big toe, and squeezed. She squeezed hard, twisting the shears around the pale gray skin of the toe until the toe snapped off. No blood gushed out. All the blood inside and out was already drying. The room smelled strongly of iron. The silovik’s wife picked the toe up from where it bounced to the floor and tossed it into a shopping bag that stood next to the valise. Polina retched. The silovik’s wife looked up at the sound. She looked straight at Polina, but Polina felt as if her employer was seeing nothing, no one. That she was no one to her, that the silovik’s wife was only seeing what she’d done, whatever it was, what she was doing. What she was doing was tearing the silovik into pieces.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “that you came all this way. Please, take the day off.”
Polina didn’t breathe as she reversed. She didn’t go home, though, and instead, after taking a moment to put her hands on her knees and dry heave, she walked around the harbor district in a daze. The pastel shops were still closed. The sea churned and shushed. Polina sat on a bench by the pier as the sun raised itself behind her, warming her back as it topped the island, the bridge to the inland hills, and silhouetted the power plant smokestacks. Here, in the harbor district, the streets filled with bicycles and a few cars, people all dressed well, all strolling at leisurely paces.
She didn’t know where to go, but she needed to go somewhere, so she walked into a bookstore, bought a book, then found a café. The cafés around her apartment were not like this—where young men in polo shirts brought you a tea, a cake on the house. Polina sat in a plush chair out on the patio, but she was the only one who read. The other patrons chatted in polite, smiling voices. Some didn’t even finish their tea or coffee. Polina drank two coffees in the hours she spent there. She ate two cakes, an egg salad sandwich, and a small Olivier salad. She spent as much money as she’d make in a day. She pretended nothing would change and read almost half her book, but without paying much attention. The silovik’s wife’s words repeated in her head like a low gong. After the café, Polina went to a park and watched people play with their dogs. A man came up to her and asked which was hers.
“Oh,” she said and faltered a smile. “I don’t know.”
“Have you lost yours?” the man asked.
“I mean—I don’t have one.”
The man gave her a funny look.
“But I would like one. One day.” And she would, if she had a larger apartment, and more free time.
“You’re funny,” he said and smiled confidently. The man asked if she was from around here. He asked if she was a schoolgirl. Polina said no and that she had to be going soon.
At the end of the day, when the sky was red, she walked into the harbor district’s municipal police station. She walked in and explained what she’d seen.
#
The next day, Polina took the bus once again to the harbor district. She walked to the dacha in the early morning dark and peered over the outer wall. All was quiet. She didn’t know what else to do, even though she knew everything would now be different. The silovik’s wife would be gone. The silovik’s car was missing, too. When Polina let herself in, only Olympiada was home, sitting in the kitchen.
“You like sour cabbage?” Olympiada asked. She leaned her elbows on the kitchen island, smoking, letting her cigarette ash fall and scatter on the otherwise polished marble top. The hot red end of the cigarette was the only real light in the room.
An envelope sat atop a pile of yesterday’s papers and mail. “We’re paid through the end of the month,” she said, taking a wad of cash from the fold of paper. “You might as well leave. You don’t have to live here still.”
Polina just stood there.
“You want to work? Clean clean clean, good little girl?” Olympiada bared her yellow teeth. “Do you suppose the inspectors will come back later today? After they’ve had their breakfast?” There was a rush to the way she spoke. An excitement. “Maybe they’ll rifle through Mrs. General’s things. Maybe mine, too.”
The sun rose and filled the backyard, the kitchen, the whole dacha. Polina didn’t know what to do. She wanted to go down by the harbor again or to the park, but when she left there would be no coming back. As the morning continued, the dacha grew warm, but she didn’t turn the air on. Instead, Polina opened all the windows, letting the breeze bend through doorways and curtains and around the halls. She sat in every chair on the ground floor except the stools around the kitchen island. Olympiada alternated between glancing out to the driveway and sitting in the living room to watch some soap opera on the television.
Nine o’clock came, but Miron did not. Polina watched the television for a while, too, but would find her attention drifting back to the things that she would normally be doing: polishing the dishes, maybe clearing the coffee table, dusting the shelves. At ten, Olympiada made a sandwich from leftovers in the fridge and took her plate to her quarters on the other side of the dacha.
Polina didn’t eat. She raised the volume on the television. The wind was strong outside and blew some palm fronds in through the back door. They lay there for a few minutes before she collected them into a waste bag and wondered what to do next. The phone rang a single time. Olympiada must have answered, or whomever it was had hung up.
She would have to get a job at a hotel, she thought. It might be hard without recommendations, but there were hotels blotting out the sun all over the island now. Demand was high for house cleaning. Just outside the harbor district new cranes spiked up every day.
Eventually, Olympiada came down with a cleared plate and said she had to go get Ronya from nursery school.
“The boy’s fool mother has pulled him out already,” she said.
Alone, Polina walked the upstairs of the dacha. The place was like a museum, the silovik’s wife once said to Polina in one of the few times the silovik’s wife spoke to Polina directly. The study door was open. There weren’t that many books inside, but photographs hung on the walls. Photographs of the silovik with other important officials and oligarchs. A few of the silovik and the silovik’s wife. There was one of the silovik’s wife alone in the street of a huge city, designer stores on every side of her, overstuffed shopping bags in both hands. She posed but did not smile. If this were a museum, Polina thought, there would be little placards next to everything—not just the pictures. Chair, card table, writing desk, mandala rug, moorish lamp, armoire, ottomans. Next to a wax statue of herself it would say: Under Housekeeper. Or maybe just: Maid.
The master bedroom was out of sorts, in a state it would never be by this time of the afternoon. Polina always dutifully kept the bedding straightened. But here, before the rumpled sheets, a stain in the middle, it was as if the silovik’s wife should still be home. In bed. Finally in the middle. If it hadn’t been for me, Polina thought, the silovik’s wife still could be.
Polina heard a car pull up to the gate, cross the gravel drive, and then faint voices. Feeling like a spy in a movie, she pressed against the wall of the bedroom and opened the window without revealing herself. More voices. It was Miron, with Olympiada and Ronya, too.
“Are they here?” Miron asked.
Olympiada, now. “Only that girl. More fools to come. Inside, Ronya.”
“Can you fault her, Lipka? She wanted to do what was right. There’s a difference between doing what’s right and doing your job.”
“You did more than yours.” Olympiada laughed without humor. “She has no reason to be here. I still have to live here. And you … So why, hm? Why did she come back? Waiting for more money? To steal the jewelry? The girl is as dumb as my daughter.”
Polina didn’t flinch at the criticism but inched her brow further to the edge of the window.
Gently, Miron said, “Please. I know you’re angry now …”
“And you aren’t angry?”
“I’m everything. Angry, sad. And free.”
Olympiada snorted. “I should feel free, too, no? So where should I go?”
Miron sighed. “Maybe—”
Just then, Polina noticed a spider crawling above her face. It startled her, being so close. She could see all eight of its glassy eyes. The spider’s body was no more than a few inches long, but with its long, stilted legs, it came to the size of her hand. She wasn’t going to waste time trying to find something appropriate to crush it with—there were spiders in the house all the time—but in the moment it took Polina to dart to the other side of the window, she missed some of what Miron said.
Olympiada clucked. “The carrots are cooked. That’s why I called you after the police called here—Mrs. General confessed to everything.”
“Everything?”
“They will be back for you.”
Miron said that was okay. None of this was unexpected. “I’ll stay here,” he said. “If you want to call them.”
“They’ll be here soon enough. How many do you think? God knows,” Olympiada said. “I should make some tea for them. Stay here, enjoy the fresh air. I’ll send Ronya back out to keep you company. Or maybe that will give the wrong impression, you with a little boy?” She laughed again.
The conversation outside ended and then noises came from the kitchen, wood on metal, a cabinet opening. Polina lowered the shutters as footsteps climbed the stairs. She turned back toward the bed, the stain.
A moment later, Olympiada shrugged into the room and stood beside her. “Could be wine,” she said. “Or shit.”
#
A half-hour later, Polina is back outside, back with Ronya in the garden. She left for only a moment to check on the samovar and to hopefully curtail any further questions from Ronya. Now Ronya is pointing upward.
“Look!”
Above them: a plane sliding like a paper cutout across the sky. It flies out to the sea, toward a mass of thunderheads.
Polina touches the boy’s shoulder.
“Maybe that’s it?” Heaven. Ronya bolts inside. “I have to tell him!”
“Wait,” Polina calls but the boy is already rushing into the kitchen and out to the driveway. “Ronya, wait!”
Ronya freezes halfway across the gravel. “But,” Ronya starts, “but he said he hoped they were okay. I wanted to tell him—”
“It’s okay.” Polina steadies herself in the front doorway. The boy about-faces and, after a moment of hesitation, returns inside. All the while, Miron sits on the hood of the town car and smokes one cigarette after the other.
“You shouldn’t try to pretend,” Miron says once the boy is gone. “He’s going to wonder where I went.”
“I don’t understand,” she says.
“He’s going to ask where he’s going, too, I suppose. And I’ll have to go soon.”
“So I’ll tell him you’re up in the sky now, too.” Polina snaps, realizing halfway through the sentence that Miron can’t have known what she meant.
He nods all the same. “Can I tell you a story?”
Polina crosses her arms. A small pebble has gotten into her flats, between the sole and the skin of her foot. She does nothing about it but stands and waits.
“When I was a child, I lived in the capital. This was long before you were born.” Miron doesn’t smoke anymore. He just holds the cigarette loosely between his fingers. “When I turned thirteen, my father sent me to work in a resort village. For a year, I worked in a botanical garden. All I wanted was to be inside. In the summer it was always so hot. I would always imagine that one day I would be able to spend my days in a nice house on the sea.”
He doesn’t finish his story. Before he can continue, a car pulls through the open gate. A municipal car. An inspector.
Miron drops his cigarette and rubs it into the ground with the toe of his work oxfords. “I should at least be back before Mrs. General.”
Polina asks what is happening. What if they take her, too? Then, at least, she’ll know where she is going. “But this isn’t your fault.”
He walks to the car as the inspector exits and handcuffs him. He gets into the backseat. Before the inspector leaves, he approaches Polina.
The inspector has bushy hair and needs a shave. He says something like thank you, but Polina can hardly tell.
“Olympiada,” Polina stars, “she made tea. She thought—I don’t know, that more of you would be here. That you would need to stay a while.”
“I told her. We have a full confession.” The inspector smiles briefly but his eyes don’t change. “Lucky it’s just me again and not some of the other boys.”
“But what did Miron do?”
“He is the driver, correct? He drove. Nothing crazy. But an accessory, helping to hide the body. People around here get off with much worse. But I’ll tell you, a faggot isn’t going to have an easy time of it anywhere.”
Polina freezes. She almost asks what he means, but she knows. When she squeezes her eyes shut, she sees the black town car not just loaded with trunks and bags full of the silovik’s corpse, but all their bodies, trundling off over a dirt road inland beyond the factories and power plants and into a valley at sundown.
The inspector shrugs. He returns to his car. He leaves. The clouds are closer now, eating away at the sky.
Polina finds herself back in the kitchen with Ronya, who is holding a slice of toast. He has drizzled honey on the bread in circles. Not a spiral, but circles, four of them, each consecutive one smaller and enclosed by another. He isn’t eating or looking at his food. He isn’t looking at anything. The boy is plump, but he will not be plump for long. His years will turn, and the fat will either swell to something harder and heavier or fall away. After a certain point in time, only his bones will stay the same.
“Where is your babushka?” Polina asks.
Ronya continues to ignore the toast and, without looking, points outside to the backyard.
Olympiada is sitting in the grass. Her long skirt bunches around her thighs. The skin there is pale, lumpy, and shot with little blue veins. “So they only sent one, huh?”
Polina stands behind her and says that Miron is gone. As she speaks, she imagines viewing the two of them, Polina and Olympiada, from the front—as if in a photograph, a piece of history to be hung in their exhibit: the backdrop is the dacha, its beige mortar side muted in the darkening light. Olympiada with her knees hoisting her chin, a fifty-year-old woman in the pose of a teenager. And Polina herself, standing, confused, alone, and a few feet behind.
“He told me he’ll be back,” Polina says.
Olympiada doesn’t stand or turn when she speaks. “I thought they’d send more. How long do you think he’ll do? A few years? If he makes it that long.”
“What are you talking about?” Polina says.
“He was better than the soap operas.” Olympiada sighs and walks back inside.
Polina follows into the kitchen, where Ronya still sits.
“Miron always told me about his affairs with that man. That silovik.” Olympiada flips her hand nonchalantly. “One time he asked me if I thought what was going on was wrong.”
“His—affairs?”
“No, I told him. I’m not an Orthodox.”
Polina says she doesn’t understand.
“These past few months he made Miron drive him around even more than usual. Getting careless, no? Mrs. General couldn’t ignore it anymore.”
“Should we go back outside to talk about this?”
“I think he helped her because he wanted to say goodbye.”
But that wasn’t true at all. When the silovik’s wife asked Miron to go with her to help bury the body he said yes because only then did he realize that if you stripped them both of their clothes, shaved away their hair and financial history, if all that was left of them were their twitching hearts and dendritic trees of neurons flaring with each piano note of want and disappointment they were not too different. To the silovik, they were both just holes.
Olympiada walks out the front door. Polina trails behind. At the gate, Olympiada stops, turns, and says, “Mrs. General had no reason. Oh, there were reasons, obviously, but none of them were why she did it. She practically told me. Yesterday after Miron drove her home. She told me everything. They buried the body. You were long gone by then. Probably on the phone with the municipal police.”
“I had to, didn’t I?” Polina’s voice is so small.
“She said she didn’t feel anything. She talked about black holes. At first how she wanted to get away with it, but now that the body was gone, she didn’t care. I wasn’t afraid of her. She was just tired. Her stomach hurt. She lay down, I brought a cup of chamomile tea, and that was it. I was cleaning the kitchen—not of blood, she had done that herself, and a decent job of it, too. I was just cleaning the grease from the stove hood. Then they came.” Olympiada knocks her old knuckles twice on the stone wall that surrounds the front yard. “Two officers and that one lousy inspector. They asked me where she was. I told them she hadn’t been feeling well, that she’d gone to bed early. But it was late.”
Olympiada presses her palm against the stone. The gate is still open. “The officers stayed with me. Just the inspector went up to bring her down. Not long. Not long enough to do anything. He walked her down. She was half asleep. She’d already left the money. I thought she’d leave more. She said she didn’t feel anything. Can you believe that?”
Polina doesn’t have a chance to reply before Olympiada turns and steps away, suddenly much older than she’s ever been before. Through the gate, down the cobbled street, she passes the walls of more dachas, neighbors none of them will ever know, before rounding the corner. Polina calls after her but doesn’t follow. She can’t leave Ronya there alone.
Back inside, Ronya has eaten his toast. “Is Mama going to pick me up?”
Polina wipes down the countertop. “I don’t know.”
“Did Bubbie go out? Did Bubbie go out to get something?”
“I don’t know that. Let’s close up, okay?” Polina can smell the impending rain on the air.
She closes the gate, locks the front and French doors, but leaves the service entrance unbolted. Ronya waddles around with her before she directs the boy to Olympiada’s quarters. Polina finds a bag of knucklebones for him—one that the silovik’s wife kept for whenever he was over. She tells him to play in there, to play for a while.
“It won’t be long.” But long before what? Another frown drags his round face down in the moment it takes for her to close the door.
Polina returns to the master bedroom. Even though the silovik’s wife, Tatyana Arkadyevna Samoilova, slept there more nights alone than together with the silovik, it is not Tatyana Arkadyevna’s room. It is no one’s. The sheets are as they’d been that morning when the sun was bright and warm. But everything is cool now, the breeze through the open window is cool, the view almost uniformly neutral: the slate tops of buildings, the low sheet of clouds, a wedge of visible sea and the outskirts of the district at the horizon, the encroaching construction. Urbanization will continue. High rises will continue to be erected.
The stain on the bed is duller than it was that morning. Tatyana’s period must have come right before the police.
Polina thought about the last years, how Tatyana always grew so calm when her period came. The blood is there. Brown like rust, small and misshapen like the island, their island, which is shrinking to nothing more than a black dot on the sea. She undoes the bedding. Rain taps on the roof. Before heading downstairs to the laundry closet, Polina glances out the window. The rain falls like long threads straight down from the sky, and everything changes to gray, everything but the red booms of cranes that march along the edge of the harbor like towering, elephantine spiders.
Theo Yurevitch’s writing has appeared in venues such as The South Carolina Review, Literary Hub, Saranac Review, Breakwater Review, The Southeast Review, Literary Orphans, Nashville Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Texas and is an Associate Professor at Austin Community College.
Image: Ed Stone, unsplash.com
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