2.

Ulyana stood in the street. Her ears were ringing. Her mouth tasted salty. She unclenched her fists and realized she’d broken a nail. Something thudded and churned in her chest.

Before her loomed Tatyana’s twisted, beet-red mug, those piggy eyes, mean and stupid beneath pale lashes, yellow, uneven teeth. Her wrist still burned where Tatyana’s greasy fingers had gripped her, clinging like hogweed, and her sour, foul smell still stuck to her, wouldn’t dissipate.

Back there in the apartment, Ulyana had simply been stunned, had just plain fucking lost it at that assault, that hatred she’d done nothing to provoke or deserve. She hadn’t had the words to defend herself, or the nerve, or the time. And now, trying to catch her breath, Ulyana told herself she’d simply decided not to sink to Sasha’s mother’s level, to her vile shouting, to forbidden, dishonest blows—and had stayed above it all. But she felt as if she’d been dirtied, almost raped. As if she’d blindly lost something terribly important, maybe her honor, maybe her hope—and only now realized that this was what she’d had riding on the game.

And somehow it was especially vile that Tatyana had wanted to humiliate her right in front of her son’s photographs, and he hadn’t been able to protect Ulyana from his mother. And those accusations of hers… Had she come there for money?

What money?

She’d just needed not to feel alone in all this. She’d needed to hear that, at least now, with Sasha’s child inside her, she was accepted. She was scared to keep it all by herself; she wanted to be sure that she wasn’t the only person in the whole world who needed this child, who was still barely a shadow of the future, just a vague feeling low in her belly, with no eyes or smile yet, and whose only paperwork so far was two blue lines—and who was already getting ready to plow up and remake Ulyana’s whole life to suit itself.

Ulyana had carried that little seed to her in her cupped hands, hardly daring to breathe. She hadn’t even had time to tell her own mother; Sasha’s mother was the first to know. Please accept it, Tatyana Nikolayevna! Like a cat carrying her newborn kittens to her owners. And instead of a blessing: a bucket of slops. Right off the bat, money. And then: what are you going to do? A little hint for the stupid. What a bitch, huh?

At last she thought of Sasha. She called him. No answer.

She and Sasha had never talked about children. Sasha was still practically a boy, with no whiskers, and he called Ulyana his first serious relationship, as if he had no idea how those relationships usually ended.

Sasha was a good guy. It was hard to take him all that seriously, because he was three years younger, because he didn’t have a proper job—rolling round things, carrying flat things, that was the sort of work he did—and all the education he had was school and vocational college; he wasn’t some BMW-driving prince, not the kind who made you feel secure. Basically, the only good thing about him was that he wasn’t mean… How had he ever signed up for the war, with that gentle nature of his? His mom had pressured him into it.

Should Ulyana have a child with a boy like that?

And if he’s lying dead over there—then should she?

What if this is all that’s left of him, of Sasha—this half of him growing inside her, and nothing else? What if they never find him? Or what if they find him and send him home in a black bag? Then what?

By now Ulyana was walking down the street, blindly, at random, dodging people and cars at the very last moment. She had free time—she hadn’t thought her conversation with her mother-in-law would end so soon. Her feet carried her of their own accord to the mall: that was where she usually went to comfort herself with something.

There was an ice-cream cart in the square. The sun-dazed vendor lazily served the people in line. Ulyana suddenly had a sharp craving for chocolate, to sweeten the bitterness. Strange: she was usually indifferent to sugar, but now it was as if someone had grabbed her by the scruff and put her in the queue.

She called Sasha.

Her gaze snagged on a huge advertising billboard, the first thing everyone saw in front of the mall. It was blue, like the background behind the news on TV, and a tricolor flag rippled across it too. In the foreground stood a guy in some kind of movie-style camouflage, gazing into the distance, past Ulyana, with beautiful eyes. He was probably handsome all over, but his face was hidden by a balaclava, over which he wore a luxury helmet with dust goggles, like the American special forces in the movies. Where had they found a guy like that? In Sasha’s photos, the soldiers were kitted out differently, in plain gear.

There were words on the poster too, saying you should join your own people, and a figure—5,500,000, rubles, and that was just for the first year of service. The handsome guy was holding a rifle, a special one too, beautiful too.

Five million five hundred thousand, Ulyana read in her mind. How much was that, even? You could get an apartment for four million, if you went for something basic out in the sticks, and live there in peace your whole life. And if you divided it by seventy thousand, her monthly income, tips included, how much would that be? Seven times seven is forty-nine, seven times eight is fifty-six… Eighty months. So that’s like working her ass off for seven years? Comes to seven. And some security guard who tops out at thirty grand a month would need fifteen years or so.

So that’s where the money was. The big bucks. Hello, Tatyana Nikolayevna.

“Ma’am, you’re holding up the line,” the ice-cream vendor said sternly.

Ulyana came to. It turned out the woman hadn’t meant her. Some old granny up ahead was stuck, unable to count out her change. She stared at her calloused, creased palm, where little white and yellow coins lay.

“Granny, what do you need? Let me help,” Ulyana offered.

“They blur together,” the old woman admitted helplessly. “I want a Sovietskoye, in a cup. One hundred rubles.”

Like a magpie pecking with her beak, Ulyana picked coins from the woman’s palm with her fingernails, added a five-ruble coin of her own, and made the old woman happy. Then it was her turn.

“A chocolate cone, a Magnum.”

She licked the cone. The air smelled of gasoline fumes and lilacs, a warm wind stirred the birch-bough brooms, and the sun was gentle, not blazing. On days like this, it seemed life was worth living. The ice cream did what ice cream was supposed to: numbed the pain and sweetened things up.

“Just go fuck yourself, that’s all,” Ulyana said, delivering her final word to an imaginary Tatyana Nikolayevna. “I’ll have the baby just to spite you.”

The military enlistment office stood on Chelyuskintsev Street, behind a fence and some fir trees. From the outside it looked like an ordinary four-story building made of faded white and brown bricks. There was nothing imposing or sinister about it. The fence was low and see-through, welded from thin iron bars, as if it were simply enclosing a park. This was the regional enlistment office, the one for the big shots. Tatyana had exhausted the city office on Maltseva Street, shabby and filthy; all they’d done there was fob her off. They’d sent her here, one floor higher.

There was just a poster by the gate: “I believe in myself, I think about the future, I serve Russia!” Four soldiers in body armor and strange helmets with square goggles, like motorcycle goggles. The poster was blue, the uniforms green, the flag red, but the rains had washed all the colors out, leaving everything blue and pink, and the soldiers’ faces were indistinct, like in black-and-white pictures from the war before last.

By the entrance, shaved-headed kids smoked and strutted; potbellied men in short green uniform jackets with shoulder boards smoked and joked around. Someone’s tear-streaked mother stared silently into space. A family had come to see off a man with a drink-swollen face: frightened blond children, a glum, heavyset woman. They were all silent.

Tatyana pushed straight through them all, along the familiar route. She told the duty officer firmly that she was going to the records office; at the records office she said she’d already filed a statement, after three weeks had passed since Sasha went missing, and that she’d already seen the deputy enlistment chief, so now she needed to see the chief himself. They immediately told her she couldn’t get in to see him, but the deputy would see her again—fine, since she’d come all this way.

She followed her memory through the beige corridors, tinged with pink, as if someone had dropped a bit of blood into the paint; went up a floor, joined the queue, and started looking at the posters and portraits. A young Putin glowered there in a naval cap with earflaps; a formation of marines silently shouted “Hurrah!”; guardsmen pointed their toes at the Kremlin parade. In the corner stood a scrawny mannequin in a gas mask and a uniform like the one Sasha had worn when they said goodbye—hanging off him like a sack; and the stupid camouflage wouldn’t camouflage anything. It had probably been put there for decoration.

A row of women sat in front of Tatyana, and they all looked a bit like her. Stocky, red-faced, straight from their vegetable plots. The room smelled of onions and women’s sweat. One had a bag at her feet with a bottle of cognac peeking out; another had a box of chocolates. Tatyana had come empty-handed. She wasn’t going to bribe anyone here. Everything was rightfully hers anyway.

They called her in.

The office was covered in wood veneer. Behind the deputy was Putin in a suit, with a flag in the background, older and more seasoned—some fifteen years had passed since the naval cap. The desks were like school desks. At one sat the deputy enlistment chief himself, yellow-skinned, sinewy, mustached; at the other sat some other military man, clean-shaven, younger, rounder, pinker: the deputy had a deputy of his own too. The desk in front of the mustached man was empty; the smooth-faced one sat at a computer with a black screen, like a gravestone turned around.

“When did you file the statement?” the mustached man asked.

Of course, he’d forgotten everything in ten days—Tatyana, and who she’d been asking about. But she remembered him well.

“A month ago,” she said. “More than that.”

“Lazarenko?” the smooth-faced man repeated, tapping on the black keys.

“Lazarenko, Aleksandr Vitalyevich. They just don’t tell you anything on the phone.”

“Well, there’s no information yet, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel,” the smooth-faced man explained to his superior, not to Tatyana. “The latest we have is that on May twenty-ninth, two thousand twenty-five, he set out to carry out a combat mission in the area of the settlement of Chasiv Yar, as part of motorized rifle units of the Second Army, specifically…”

“I know all that. But what happened to him? What actually happened?”

“Well, I’m reading you what it says here.”

“And they don’t tell us anything at the unit, you understand?”

“Well, if they’ve got nothing to say. What do you want them to tell you?”

“That he’s alive.”

“Well, there…” The lieutenant colonel spread his hands.

“Or if something happened, let them say that too! Just not knowing like this—it’s hard, you understand?”

“We understand, we understand.”

The deputy’s deputy stood up, stretched, and rummaged in a drawer. He found a red plastic lighter, flicked the wheel, and the smell of flint filled the air.

“Smoke break, Pavel Semyonych?”

“Yeah, a minute,” his boss winked at him.

“What kind of attitude is this?” Tatyana protested. “I entrusted you with my son!”

“Listen… Tatyana… Nikolayevna…” He checked the piece of paper. “This is a war, for God’s sake. Why are you acting like a child? Do you think we’re not looking for him? We are. We’ll let you know when we find him. Some people wait six months, you know, and they put up with it. Some wait even longer!”

He started getting up too, making it clear to Tatyana that the conversation was over, but she stubbornly stayed seated; she couldn’t leave it at that. Losing confidence in her own strength, she began to fuss:

“Well, then could you at least give me some kind of certificate, maybe?”

“What kind of certificate?”

“Saying he’s missing. They told me at the fund they can’t do anything without a certificate.”

“Well, he’s not officially missing yet,” the lieutenant colonel replied, already pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and impatiently sniffing the tobacco. “What fund is this?”

“So I can get the insurance money.”

“Ah… Right. Insurance.” He smiled without humor, as if Tatyana had disappointed him all at once. “I see. And why are you in such a hurry?”

“Well, the thing is, we have a mortgage,” Tatyana began gabbling even faster. “Sasha—Aleksandr—was supposed to send us money every month, out of his pay. Now we’re into the second month. We’ve budgeted everything out, you understand? We have to pay; the bank’s demanding it… If I had a certificate, we could at least get the insurance money and pay it off. How are we supposed to wait six months?”

“They take out mortgages and then come whining,” the smooth-faced man said, shaking his head in disapproval. “Money, money… He’s over there doing his duty, in case you’ve forgotten! To his country.”

“I understand it’s his duty. I’m not saying… We’re proud!”

“Well, there you go. We can’t give you anything yet,” the lieutenant colonel said, spreading his hands. “A certificate. Because he isn’t missing; he’s unaccounted for.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” Tatyana cried, thinking they were making fun of her.

“They’re different things!” the smooth-faced man raised his voice too. “There’s a procedure. Yes, he’s missing, but we can only issue a certificate if they haven’t found him. While they’re still looking, we can’t issue one. They’re still looking, do you understand? They’re still looking for him over there, and you’re already drawing a line through your son!”

“I’m not! I haven’t, and I’m not!”

“Well, then, that’s that. All right, then,” the mustached man said conciliatorily.

“But what am I supposed to do?” Tatyana asked, bewildered and pleading.

“Well…” The lieutenant colonel was already at the door, had opened it, and was gesturing Tatyana toward the opening. “If you don’t want to wait for us, you can go through the courts. But that takes time too.”

“I sent my son, you understand?” she said, giving up completely.

“Well, of course you sent your son,” the mustached man said, the corners of his mouth drooping. “Everyone here is somebody’s son!”

They smoked their own things again, fragrant ones, and looked at the distant crosses across the river. The transparent sky had no end anywhere; cars rumbled along the avenue behind the houses, and the air was at that pleasant temperature where you could forget about the stupid body that was forever either freezing or sweating, and imagine that you were just a soul without a shell. Vologda got maybe a month of weather like this a year, at most, and it was a shame to spend it sitting in a basement.

Kris couldn’t stay mad for long. By the very next day, her memory had been wiped clean, and she was giving Ulyana her daily report again.

“So, he’s asking me to the dacha,” she said. “For the weekend. To meet the folks, like.”

“Whoa. Really?”

“Can you believe it?”

“Well, look at you, making progress! By the way, Taurus has a good romance forecast this month. I checked for you.”

“Knock on wood.”

Obediently, Ulyana said, “Tfoo, tfoo, tfoo,” smiled at Kristinka, and ran a hand over her raven-black hair. She could never stay mad at Kris for long either.

“Isn’t it a problem that he’s kind of clueless?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, like… He says, ‘Tell me if you need anything…’”

“Listen… At least he’s asking. There’s something to work with.”

“Well, God willing.”

“Amen!”

Kristina laughed and jokingly crossed herself toward the cluster of crosses atop the Assumption Church across the river.

Kristina was twenty-five, Ulyana thirty. Five years more of all kinds of things going wrong with men, with one puzzle piece or another never fitting: undeserved hurt, broken promises, unforgiven lies, hopes that came to nothing. Five years more of finding it hard to believe that this time it would work out, that a random person would turn out not to be random, that the stupid, overlong chrysalis stage would finally end and the long-awaited butterfly stage would at last begin. But Kristinka’s puppyish joy, her childlike readiness to wipe the slate clean of all her past disappointments and believe yet again that this time, surely, it would all be real, spread to Ulyana too, and she felt warm and excited for her friend. There was no envy. Just a wish that at least one of the two of them would get a decent shot at happiness.

They finished their cigarettes. She called Sasha.

They stood around a little longer, each of them buried in her own phone.

“YouTube doesn’t work at all,” Ulyana complained.

“Girl, come on,” Kristinka said, looking up from her own phone. “You don’t have a VPN? Let me install one. YouTube will fly, and you’ll get all the banned stuff too. I’ll install an American AI thing for you as well, a chatbot. It finds everything Yandex won’t show you, and the cops won’t know. These assholes are about to ban everything anyway—you won’t even have porn, or Instagram, just Gosuslugi and that’s it, fucking game over.”

“They’ve really pissed me off, seriously,” Ulyana agreed, handing over her phone.

Kristina tapped somewhere with her catlike fingertips, claws tucked away, shaped her lips into an “O”—thinking.

“Which country should I set for you?” she asked. “Like, where are you connecting from?”

“Anywhere but Russia?”

“Well, pick yourself a normal one. The States? France?”

“Uh…” Ulyana thought. “Sure, let’s do France.”

“Excellent choice,” Kris puffed out a melon-scented breath. “There, consider yourself already there. You’ve teleported.”

“Imagine if you really could do that. One second… and you’re in Paris.”

“More like Fuck Off,” Kristinka said. “Not in this lifetime.”

“Well, at least this way,” Ulyana said, taking her phone back from Kristina, all set up. “Merci beaucoup.”

The whole day had been dead; summer Fridays were always like that. The less well-off went to the villages and gardens, hoeing and watering, while the rich and powerful vented their spite on animals in wildlife reserves and hunting grounds. The spa salons made their money in winter, when the weather outside was vile and bleak.

But around seven, a door clanged upstairs, and footsteps sounded on the stairs—the stony tread of a drunk. Ulyana turned her head and saw polished shoes. Shiny. Probably a size forty-six.

Then a heavy head poked into the basement, like a fox peering into a burrow full of field mice. It sniffed, then stretched its fat lips wide: supposedly a smile. The mouth was big. The head liked what it saw in there.

Suit, tie. Shirt bulging over a belly. Clean-shaven.

“Hello, beauties!” He said it in such a way that she wanted to reply, “At your service!” even though he was in civilian clothes.

He seemed cheerful, but there was no way to join in with his cheerfulness. Maybe because his eyes weren’t smiling, or maybe because the joke was one only he understood. Kristinka smiled politely; Ulyana didn’t. This was the central district, with all sorts of institutions scattered around, and not all the people working in them were decent.

“Could use a little massage. My back’s all knotted up. Can you do that?” He rolled his shoulders; they were wrestler’s shoulders.

“Back massage is seventeen hundred,” Ulyana quoted. “Three thousand for a full-body. With heat treatment, thirty-seven hundred.”

“Then I’ll have the full-body, with heat treatment, the works,” he grinned at Kristina this time, no longer looking at Ulyana. “Just make sure you heat me up properly.”

Kris jumped off the couch and put her phone in the pocket of her work overalls. They fit her beautifully, following all her rounded curves, even though they looked professional, even rather strict—the sort medical workers were supposed to wear.

“Please come through to the massage room,” she purred. “There’s a little anteroom, you can undress there, then get on the table.”

The client squeezed past Ulyana’s desk, wafting a heavy mixture of sweat, stale booze, and ingrained, rancid cigarette smoke over her: he looked respectable enough, but smelled like a minibus driver. He gave reception another sharp-eyed look, as if memorizing it: so, here’s the entrance, here’s the phone, rooms one, two, three… Then he ducked into the massage room without saying anything else.

Ulyana stayed behind the desk by the computer. She picked up the phone and called her boss.

“Anatoly Sergeyevich? Uh-huh. Ulyana. Well, there’s another one. Three thousand seven hundred, the full amount. So that makes twelve thousand today alone. Well, it is what it is. What can I do? Yes. It’s summer, you know. And even then! Yes, I understand. I’ll take care of it, uh-huh. All right, then.”

When a client pays three thousand seven hundred, it’s easy enough for him to throw in three hundred for a tip. She and Kris would split the tip, as usual. It was nothing, of course, but still. Enough for ice cream.

Ulyana aimlessly moved the mouse around the screen. Then she typed: “my boyfriend disappeared in the Special Military Operation what do I do.” Answers poured in; nine of the first ten were identical: “How to contact an SVO serviceman who has gone missing or is out of contact. A step-by-step guide.”

A step-by-step guide. A step-by-step guide. Why a guide, of all things? Why this strange, mechanical word for a situation like this? To calm you down, maybe? The steps were: make sure the serviceman really is missing and hasn’t merely lost contact. Wait a month or six weeks. Call the Defense Ministry hotlines… the SVO Participants Support Fund… the military enlistment office… You will need a marriage certificate if the person making the inquiry is his wife, or a birth certificate if it’s his parents…

His parents or his wife. What was she to Sasha?

Nothing at all.

Then, from somewhere deep inside, behind the closed door of the massage room, came a muffled squeal. Ulyana tore herself away from the useless instructions and cocked an ear. Again. A girl’s shriek.

Ulyana half rose. Something was going on behind that closed door that definitely shouldn’t be going on.

“Kris?” she called. “Everything all right?”

There was no answer, and Ulyana shot out from behind the counter and headed down the hall. But just then the massage-room door flew open by itself, and Kristina rushed out—her face twisted, eyes round as saucers.

“Tell him, Ulyan! Tell him!”

She ran to Ulyana, clinging to her, hiding like a child with her mother. Then the client came out after her—enormous, red-haired across his chest and his drum-round belly, perched on elephant-stump legs, his rubbery, upthrust cock bobbing. It was aimed at both of them. Ulyana pulled Kristinka behind her and blocked the hallway with her body.

“Sir! Get dressed immediately!” Ulyana ordered him sternly and coldly, like a kindergarten teacher.

“Come on, silly girl, did you get scared?” the client said to Kristina, speaking right through Ulyana, not even noticing her. “How about I throw in another grand, make it more fun!”

“Tell him, Ulyan! Tell him this isn’t a fucking wank shop!” Kristina gasped.

“Get dressed and get out,” Ulyana said, distinctly.

“What did I ask for, then? All I asked was for you to give me a handjob, Christ Almighty. And now you’re carrying on.”

He didn’t leave. He laughed at them, baring his teeth, and his cock didn’t go soft under Ulyana’s sternness—in fact, it seemed to egg him on.

Maybe it was fear, or his arrogance, or the way he looked so openly at both of them like they were meat—Ulyana screamed at him so loudly her own ears rang.

“Get your pants on and get the hell out of here! This isn’t a brothel, you idiot! You don’t get it?!”

“How’s that work? It’s a brothel everywhere else, but not here?”

The client took another step toward them. Kris couldn’t take it anymore and fled behind the counter. Ulyana crossed her arms over her chest and stood her ground. Her anger at being branded a whore all over again wouldn’t let her back down.

“Do you want me to call the police?!”

That only made him laugh harder.

“I’ll call the police on you, you stupid cow. And the Sanitary Inspectorate, too. We’ll shut your dump down in no time. You won’t have your little house anymore; you’ll have to work the highway.”

She snatched up her phone, pretended to get a signal, and tapped a few buttons. Only then did he turn around and disappear through the doorway. Ulyana turned to Kristina: don’t worry, we’ll get through this; we’ve seen off worse than him. Kristinka gave her a miserable, grateful smile—but stayed behind the counter, in no hurry to come out until it was definitely over.

Only it wasn’t over at all.

The guy came barging back into the hallway. Naked again. In his hand he held a little red booklet, his ID, and shoved it in Ulyana’s face. His mug was inside, along with letters that seemed to dance: something about the governor, some department, a stamp, signatures.

“Can you read? Read it.”

Ulyana couldn’t make out all those marks; they had melted and run together. But the meaning didn’t come from the writing anyway. It came from the eagle on the cover, the eagle on the seal, the word “department,” and from the man’s audacity and shamelessness.

“Well, convinced?” He snapped the ID in front of her nose.

“We really can’t provide those services here,” Ulyana said quietly, her throat tightening. “Honestly.”

“Now listen. If you hadn’t gotten mouthy, sweetheart, I might’ve left. But now I’m not leaving. If she doesn’t want to”—the client gave Ulyana an appraising look—“you can take her place. I give you permission. One minute to think it over.”

He turned around; his sagging buttocks swayed with an air of importance as he strolled back. The massage table creaked under his two-hundred-pound bulk.

“Fuck,” Ulyana whispered, glancing back at Kristinka.

“Who even is that?”

“Who do you think? Why are you acting like a little kid? One of them!” She nodded upward.

She turned her whole body toward Kristina and stared at her. With an ID like that, the man could certainly shut down their salon. He could do worse, too. There was no point going to the police. Their only hope was that he’d get too lazy to bother. But from his hooded eyes and thick lips curled into a smile, Ulyana could tell he wouldn’t be too lazy. The man had caught the thrill of it: humiliating them.

“Kris…” Ulyana tilted her head.

“What do you mean, ‘Kris’? What ‘Kris’?! I won’t! I don’t want to! He’s disgusting!” she whispered desperately.

“Disgusting,” Ulyana agreed. “Do you think I’m saying he isn’t? It’s just that if we don’t, we’re finished, Kristina. We’re screwed.”

She’d said it out loud, and only now did it really sink in, and she was truly frightened. What would it hurt, Ulyana suddenly thought. All he was asking for… She could go and jerk him off quickly. Why act like some virgin? And what if they really did shut the place down? She put a hand on her stomach. Then what? Where would she go? How would she pay the rent? Who would feel sorry for her—Ulyana?

Powerlessness—that was what she felt. It was like stepping onto the tracks in front of a hundred-car freight train, ten thousand tons, its warning horn blaring at you, but you knew it wouldn’t stop. Ulyana knew they didn’t stop even when they ran people over; there was no point. Thump—and on it went: they’d wash the train at the station. And Kristinka had put her right on the tracks.

Idiot.

“I won’t! I’m not a whore!”

“Girls!” the man roared from the massage room. “I’m gettin’ co-o-old!”

Kristinka began to cry.

“Well, I’m not a whore either,” Ulyana sighed.

Her left hand on her belly, she moved down the hallway on wooden legs. She stopped in the massage-room doorway. She looked at his spread-out slabs of flesh, his drooping jowls, his slitted little eyes. Disgust made her feel sick; even the fear had gone.

“We’re closed for the day,” she said quietly, but with finality, and flicked the switch, cutting the lights. “Put your pants on and get out.”

At least she felt human.

Tatyana went in first, Vitalya behind her. She looked left and right, expecting to have to fight her way through a queue, but there wasn’t a soul. The stand with the ticket-dispensing screen was gathering dust, useless. It was the bank’s corporate crimson, as was the counter with its clerk, and the clerk’s coquettish little tie, like a Young Pioneer’s, and the bank crest above her head. The ceiling was low, dirty, and made of foam panels, divided into squares; one of them gaped open as a square hole.

The clerk was bored, poking at something on her phone.

“Right! Miss,” Tatyana greeted her. “Your bank keeps calling me, and sending me texts. Says I’m behind on my payments. They’ve already called twice today!”

“Could you show me?”

She handed her phone to the crimson-clad girl and showed her the bank’s threatening messages. The girl read them.

“Oh. Well, then, go over there, to the mortgage department.”

The department was nothing but a red desk and two plastic chairs. They had to borrow a third, for Vitalya, from the consumer lending department. Another girl just like the first came over, finished chewing her sandwich, and sat down. She looked at the passport, shuffled some papers, and opened her little tablet.

“Well, you’re already two months behind. Everything’s automated on our end, you see. No wonder they’re sending those messages.”

There was something automatic in her voice, too, and Tatyana’s unerring instinct told her: they’d come for nothing. But they had to try.

“Our son is in the SVO,” Tatyana told her.

The girl said nothing to that. She just waited to see where Tatyana would go next.

“We pay out of his wages. But his pay’s late. He’s disappeared!”

“I’m sorry,” the girl replied indifferently, “but the late fees keep accruing. And it’s already been reported to the Credit History Bureau that you’re defaulters. The computer does it all. If you’re more than three months behind, it goes to committee.”

“What committee?”

“Well, to decide what to do with the apartment. It isn’t considered yours until it’s all paid off. It belongs to the bank. If you can’t make your monthly payments, they’ll either demand the whole remaining mortgage balance at once, or take the apartment through the courts.”

Tatyana had this instinct: by the slightest shift in someone’s voice—a half-tone up, a half-tone down—she could tell, faster than a thought could form, which of them held the upper hand. And if the other person had even a little more power, before Tatyana had time to realize what was happening, she’d start fawning. But if she herself had even an ounce more power, she had to make that ounce look like a ton, to press the other person down—and, if necessary, crush them outright. Life had taught her that, ever since childhood. Anyone you could bend, you had to bend right away, without wasting time, or you’d always be the one getting bent. And if someone had bent you, you had to pass it on to somebody else at once, like one domino knocking over the next; otherwise you couldn’t get free of that burning weight, and it would ache, it would keep scorching you—you could get sick from it!

“And how much do we have left, at least?” she asked plaintively.

“Well, you’ve barely started.”

The girl opened the calculator app on her tablet and began tapping with a finger. Tatyana watched anxiously.

“Three million nine hundred fifteen thousand three hundred fifty-six rubles. That’s if you pay it off right now. If you drag it out, it’ll grow.”

“But we can’t pay it back… What are we supposed to pay it with?”

“I don’t know. In principle, you’ve still got time before retirement. The two of you can split it down the middle, eighty thousand a month each. You can earn that.” The bitch shrugged.

“Oh! Oh! You think he can earn eighty thousand?” Tatyana waved at the silent Vitalya as if she were bargaining for him at a poultry market. “Who’d even want him? They wouldn’t hire him for thirty grand, not in a million years!”

The girl looked Vitalya up and down, seemingly agreeing with Tatyana. Then she glanced at the hole in the ceiling and came up with a solution:

“Well, you know, you could sign him up for the SVO, too. With the first payment, you could pay off the debt and cover yourselves for a year, then figure things out.”

Vitalya blinked and shrank into himself.

“You’ve lost all your conscience…” He looked at his wife questioningly.

“Just sit there, will you,” Tatyana told him.

Out of habit, she snapped at him so he wouldn’t speak out of turn, but then she felt a little awl of pity prick her beneath the ribs—pity for Vitalya and for herself, and fear of losing absolutely everything in her life now.

“What will the children do without their father? We’ve got two more.”

“Well, then you’ll have to sort it out yourselves.”

“Could you stop calling for a while?”

“I told you, it’s automatic.”

People came and went. The door slammed. Someone nearby was muttering, trying to persuade the robots, too. A light chimed; a number lit up. Their time was up.

“Next,” the clerk said.

Vitalya barely made it to his cigarette; he was so upset.

“What a nasty bitch,” he said, coughing.

“Well, I’m not sending you off,” Tatyana said, taking pity on him. “Good grief, it’s like that MMM pyramid scheme.”

The sun had slipped behind the rooftops. The earth was still glowing along the horizon, but overhead it was already being covered by a blue lid. Ulyana stood at the kitchen window, looking at the sunset, the courtyard, the clamshell garages, the broken carousel, the schoolkids swigging cheap beer in the sandbox. She watched and chopped salad.

The kitchen was five square meters: a cupboard here, a sink there, a little table for two. No room to turn around. It was good that at least one window opened onto the vast world, and good that she was high enough above it.

She chopped tomatoes, onion, dill, and cucumbers. The cucumbers grew in her mother’s garden, which saved them a lot of money: store-bought ones cost almost as much as meat now, thanks to some kind of agricultural imbalance. Actually, everything in the salad came from her mother’s garden; only the sour cream and salt were store-bought. Nice and cheap.

She chopped and talked to her mother at the same time. Well, talked? As usual, it was all one-way.

“So there you are,” her mother went on over speakerphone. “Alevtina Ilyinichna’s sciatica flared up, she can’t weed by herself, so I did it for her, neighborly-like, bent over and all, and it seemed fine, you know, Ulyash, but then I came home, my eyes went dark, I grabbed the table, thought I was going to fall, barely made it to the sofa, then I took some Valocordin, No-Spa, and little by little I came around. Now I’m sitting here watching Field of Miracles, those young fellows in uniform, one of them’s about to win a car. I’m watching and thinking about your Sasha—he’ll come back and maybe he’ll be on TV too…”

Ulyana kept chopping, thinking: should she tell her about the pregnancy or not? Tell her, or don’t tell her? Suddenly she wanted to miss the cucumber and cut off her own finger instead. She even paused for a second, imagining the blood gushing out, then started slicing the white rounds again, chop, chop, chop; then she pushed the knife away from herself.

“Mom…”

“And the Morozovs—did I tell you about the Morozovs? Their daughter nearly drowned. They went to the river, waded in, and there were snags floating right at the surface—you couldn’t see them—and one hit her on the head. Arkady only turned away for a second, and she was already being swept off. He barely caught up with her, thank God, and dragged her to shore. She came around somehow… The Gornostayevs’ Kostya drowned just like that, remember the Gornostayevs? Well, he was drunk, to be fair, when he went in the water. Sober, maybe he would’ve made it out, but they drank so much vodka, and the water was still freezing in May, why on earth did he go in? They buried him on May Ninth, too, right on the holiday. I told you about it, didn’t I? Or don’t you know the Gornostayevs?”

“Mom.”

“Hm? What is it, Ulyash? My sunshine.”

“Nothing. Work was awful today. I’ll go, okay? I want to take a shower.”

“Go on, go on.”

“And I had a fight with Tatyana. Tatyana Nikolaevna. Sasha’s mother.”

“Oh. What did you two disagree about this time?”

“I… I went to see if there was any news. And she just started in on me right away…”

“Well… to hell with her, who needs her. She doesn’t like you, and let her not like you. And don’t go groveling to her.”

“I’m not groveling. Grovelling. Anyway… she can think again if she expects me to grovel.”

“All right, then.”

“All right, then.”

She didn’t tell her. She wanted the relief of telling someone, but was afraid of the advice. A mother’s advice was like that—sticky, like a Gypsy’s fortune-telling. You didn’t want to, but you did it anyway. And Ulyana wanted to be independent; she’d always wanted to be independent.

She picked up the knife reluctantly, finished chopping the salad, and swallowed it without chewing—the cucumbers scraped her throat. She didn’t even turn on the TV; she couldn’t bear to listen to all that. She called Sasha. She went into the only room—bed, armchair, a poster with cats—and pulled her T-shirt and bra off over her head. She opened the wardrobe door; there was a full-length mirror inside. She looked at her naked body uncertainly. Touched her small breasts. Imagined how they’d swell if she breastfed. Ran a finger over her hollow belly. Strange. Impossible to imagine. Couldn’t she have, damn it, been made so she could reproduce by budding somehow?

The phone started ringing an hour before the alarm. Ulyana wasn’t expecting a call, so the first time she missed it and just knocked it onto the floor. It wouldn’t stop: it buzzed a second time, then a third. At last she came to and fumbled for it.

“Anatol. Serg. 7 NEBO Boss.” And a missed call from him, too.

“Yes, Anatoly Sergeyevich?”

“What the fuck are you doing?!”

By the time she got to work, it was all over. The cops had left, the firefighters had left; Kristinka and Anatoly Sergeyevich were sitting on the curb beside the sealed-off basement. Her boss was bright crimson, as if he’d just come out of a steam room; Kristinka’s mascara was running after the dressing-down.

“Who was that? Who did you throw out?!” he yelled as soon as Ulyana appeared in the courtyard.

“He… He didn’t say who he was, just showed me. A little red booklet. An ID. Some kind of Control Department.”

“Are you an idiot?!”

“What was I supposed to do? Do you know what he wanted? Do you?!” Ulyana’s eyes went round.

“So what?! You think that’s the first time?!”

“What if it was a setup?” she came up with an explanation. “So they could lock us up afterward… I thought…”

“Thought? I don’t pay you to think! You! Were! Supposed! To! Call! Me! Do you know what kind of fine they slapped me with? And they refuse to negotiate! A setup, for fuck’s sake!”

“Why does he treat us like shit?” Ulyana couldn’t hold back.

“Because! Because that’s exactly what we are to them—shit! You and me! Were you born yesterday?! Why did you decide all this at my expense, huh? I’ll never buy my way out of this now! Maybe I should take it out of your pay?”

“We don’t have that kind of money, Anatoly Sergeyevich,” Kristinka began to cry again.

“Well, how about you at least come with me to the station? I’ve still got to sort this out, and you can fill them in… About the shit, the setups! You don’t want to?!”

Ulyana said nothing; Kris sniffled. Anatoly Sergeyevich gave them a bitter nod: of course they didn’t want to.

He knocked a cigarette out of the pack and fumbled for a light. He sat there, looking at the cracked asphalt, at the ants. The girls stood silently, glancing at each other. At last he finished his cigarette and flicked the butt into the air.

“You’re both fucking fired.”