7.

How much they’d drunk the night before was beyond calculating, though Maksim hadn’t exactly planned to drink much. It had seemed as if the Chablis worked like motion-sickness pills: it suppressed the nausea. Turned out it suppressed nothing, just postponed it till the next day.

Marina was still asleep, but Maksim had been thrown out of sleep. Same old story. Tossing and wheezing in bed, periodically bumping into his wife, seemed uncomradely. “The alcoholic’s sleep is brief and troubled,” he groaned, crawling off to the can.

He’d got out of bed on the wrong side.

On the toilet, with the plumbing spring gurgling away, he read Mediazona on Telegram: who they’d branded a foreign agent while everyone was celebrating anniversaries, and who’d been arrested on treason charges. A roundup of people getting locked up, so to speak. Depression multiplied by repression; he’d almost lost the will to leave the bathroom and face the world. He told himself the joke, “How can you not want to go to school, Vovochka? You have to—you’re the principal,” splashed cold water on his stiff skin, made an effort, and steeled himself.

Ulyana was sitting in the kitchen, watching the news on the little TV. She was finishing her fried eggs and was already dressed and made up. She nodded sympathetically at him—he must have been awfully puffy.

“Up with the lark…” Maksim smiled at her as best he could.

“We have to go to the hospital.”

“Right.”

She’s put on makeup, Maksim thought. For whom? For her fiancé, or for the doctors?

More likely for the doctors, to make them notice her, and him along with her, in the queue of supplicants. It was a factory in there, no doubt, an assembly line: wounded men tipped off dump trucks, hastily stitched up and shoved back out—some patched up for the front, some rejected and sent home, some in coffins, broken. And with a flow like that, the doctors could hardly be expected to take much interest in anyone’s personal circumstances. In a military hospital, it was probably best not to get attached to the patients—as in some fur farm.

But if she dressed up, maybe they’d notice her, at least remember her somehow, and when they had to decide whether to make an effort to save him or just leave things as they were, maybe they’d recall the bride all dressed up and try a little harder than they had to.

Ulyana gazed absently at the screen again. They were drumming up fear about the global cabal or something, but her face showed no genuine concern about the intrigues of the collective West. Just something to make noise in the background over her eggs, maybe to drown out her own thoughts.

And what thoughts were going through her head?

Ulyana had a face that wasn’t stupid or unkind, and you couldn’t call her ugly. A little vacant, perhaps? Or just lost. An unremarkable-looking girl who’d once come to stay with them over New Year’s had turned into an unremarkable-looking young woman. Well, she’d grown taller, sure. That was about it. But who had she become? To know that, he’d have had to know what she’d been like before.

She looked somehow shrunken, maybe. Hunched, chilly.

Maksim wanted to ask her how her boyfriend was.

But he stopped himself. Was he even allowed to feel sorry for him?

Maksim was unequivocally on Ukraine’s side in the war, on the side of the victim. And the more people here tried to explain and justify the war, the more furiously they accused anyone who sympathized with Ukraine of betrayal, the more stubbornly Maksim clung to his position on the war; for him, it had come to mean, above all, preserving the person he’d always been. Not melting down, not decomposing in the acid in which scraps of some of his former friends were bobbing around him.

Once, back in the first year of the war, trying to work out rules for living in this new world, Maksim had decided to apply a test of complicity to the people around him. By this principle, everyone who’d made their peace with the war but hadn’t taken part in it bore some responsibility for the war, but not some of the guilt; those who’d supported the war in any way—by deed or word, helping to inflame or normalize it—became accomplices and shared in the guilt; and only those who’d tried somehow to hinder the war would be acquitted before the court of eternity. As for Maksim himself, even if the court of eternity did acquit him, it would be by a hair: the only credit he could claim was taking part in a couple of demonstrations in the first days of the war and putting the premium edition of 1984 by the shop’s cash registers. Well, all right, and yesterday’s battle over foreign agents. In short, he wasn’t a fighter. But then he didn’t claim to be one, either. He had a different stretch of the front, invisible without a microscope, but important in its own way.

But what about Ulyana’s fiancé? Did being mobilized absolve him of responsibility for everything he’d done in the war? Could he have refused once he was there? What if he’d maimed people? Destroyed things? Killed? Did it matter whether he’d acted of his own free will or under orders, if complicity was defined by action? If it was defined by action, then Maksim couldn’t ask about her fiancé, couldn’t even let her think for a second that he felt sorry for her, and through her, for her boyfriend.

Maksim’s generation had lived through all the craziness the country had gone through, from Brezhnev onward: perestroika, the collapse, Yeltsin’s Russia, the Chechen wars, Putinism. It had been quite a life, you might say: you couldn’t look at it without welding goggles, like a nuclear blast. And Maksim’s contemporaries, his friends and comrades, had learned to see everything through those dark lenses—through postmodernism and cynicism. But you couldn’t do that with the war; you had to take the glasses off, even if it hurt your eyes, because if anything in all that time had happened to the country that was blindingly bright, absolute evil, it was this war with Ukraine. You had to look without turning away, feel it with your raw nerves, bear honest witness; you had to remember history accurately, so it wouldn’t be falsified again, so it wouldn’t happen again one day. You had to, you had to…

That was what mattered, not how some particular guy was feeling in the hospital. It wasn’t as if he’d been hit by a tram, after all! Maksim fell silent, peered at Ulyana from beneath his swollen eyelids, like a bunker through a firing slit. And that lost look on her face… Damn it.

“How is he? Your fiancé?”

“Not great,” Ulyana glanced back at him. “There was a strike. They amputated his legs. Both of them.”

“Oh God…” The nausea rose again. “That’s horrifying.”

He pictured those severed legs, wrapped in footcloths. He squeezed his eyes shut. The stumps only loomed more clearly.

“Poor guy,” he said. “How old is he?”

“Twenty-seven,” Ulyana replied.

“Same age as our Kirill, then?”

“Exactly.”

A picture flashed black through his mind: Kirill without legs. It could have happened, if they hadn’t rushed to evacuate him then. Anything could have happened. What if they hadn’t made it in time, what if the border had closed—any number of things… So how could you judge? Would Kirill have been guilty too, if they’d grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and thrown him into the meat grinder? He’d just been unlucky. It would have been his choice, but this… Luck or bad luck—that’s the whole historical fork in the road, as always here, as everywhere.

Fiancé… A fiancé meant they were planning to get married. It meant some kind of human life had been planned, and that future had been amputated in a single instant, a saw through bone. Maksim remembered how he’d felt when the war began: hopelessness, darkness without a glimmer. Everything he and Marina had planned for themselves—all of it was being smashed to satisfy someone else’s senseless, cannibalistic aims and objectives, justified with pitch-black, incompetent lies; and Maksim’s own life, his real and only life, was being smashed too. But he’d managed to wriggle free from under that fucking asphalt paver with its tricolor and skulls, and crawl away. Crawl away… Another word from the latest chapter of Russian history. We crawled away, yes. We got Kirill out, and Marina’s agency didn’t go without work—in fact, making the city beautiful became even more necessary—and people needed good books more than ever. Marina and Maksim helped people, each in their own way, to stay human in an inhuman time, so their own family hadn’t suffered directly from the war. But Ulyana…

Maksim picked up a sliced kefir-bread loaf, tender as a child, tore off a piece and started spreading it with soft butter. Ulyana said nothing, sipping her tea and watching the morning news.

“The Ministry of Defense’s agitation train has completed its tour of Russia, marking the eightieth anniversary of the Great Victory, and has returned to Moscow in triumph,” the TV cut through the hiss of the kettle coming to a boil. “It covered more than thirty thousand kilometers and crisscrossed the entire country! It spent two and a half months on the road, visiting the capitals of all the military districts, as well as Krasnodar and Makhachkala, Volgograd and Ufa, Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk, Khabarovsk and Vladivostok. Its eighteen cars housed both an exhibition commemorating the Great Patriotic War and a large display devoted to the special military operation. At every station, the propaganda train caused a sensation, drawing thousands of visitors, mainly young people and schoolchildren…”

The TV kept droning on, scraping at his brain; it felt rough. Maksim grimaced. Did Ulyana understand what she was watching? And if she did, why watch it at all? He almost told her, “Don’t read Soviet newspapers at breakfast,” but held back. She listened to the correspondent, her mouth slightly open, but she didn’t look spellbound so much as shell-shocked, as if she’d taken a hit herself.

“Not surprising, since this state-of-the-art interactive museum on wheels offered visitors not only a chance to get better acquainted with recent history, but also, for instance, to experience what it’s like to pilot an attack aircraft or warship with the help of a computer simulator! And, of course, as last year, the star attraction was the captured samples of enemy military equipment, seized from the adversary by our troops on the battlefields of the special military operation. Here’s how the project coordinator, Deputy Minister of Defense, Army General Oleg Semyonovich Goremykin, describes it…”

Did a Russian army general named Goremykin really exist, Maksim wondered. Straight out of Gogol. Though, really, what wasn’t? He poured boiling water over his teabag, straightened out his sandwiches, and sat down beside Ulyana.

The TV showed another sweeping view of the green, decorated train, with chunks of armored vehicles on open flatcars. Ulyana was watching very attentively, thoughtfully. When the TV started talking about the battlefields of the special military operation, she grimaced—and Maksim caught it at once. It made him hopeful. Of course she was against the war, just like him and Marina! How could she support it, in her position?

She hadn’t even said anything yet, and Maksim had already changed his mind about her completely. It was as if she’d gone from being a distant, unrelated relative to one of his own. He was glad now that he’d let her stay with them, glad she was sitting in his kitchen, and wanted to slice her some more cheese, offer her coffee.

“American, British, and Canadian tanks and armored personnel carriers, knocked out and loaded onto special platforms, have traveled across our entire country—but not in the way those who stuffed the Kyiv regime with them had planned,” General Goremykin reported in a perfunctory voice, stumbling over his words as if he were reading an unfamiliar, incomprehensible text for the first time.

A traveling death-circus, fake, bureaucratic drivel—and that vile semantic link between the Great Patriotic War and the special military operation, so that the twenty million killed in that war could pull another million fresh corpses behind them like a locomotive hauling freight cars. Thirty thousand kilometers, stopping at every little station to lie and stupefy people. And, to top it all off, the Gogolian general’s ridiculous toothbrush mustache. Maksim clicked his tongue.

“Horrible!” He turned to Ulyana for support.

“What?” she asked.

“All this,” Maksim nodded at the screen. “Why did they send this train all over the country? What do you think?”

“No idea,” Ulyana shrugged. “Well… It’s eighty years since the victory, you know.”

“Come on,” Maksim scoffed. “You think that’s what it’s about?”

“What is it about, then?”

Well, maybe Ulyana didn’t know how to spot that kind of manipulation? It seemed obvious to Maksim, glaringly so… But it wasn’t as if he’d been handed that knowledge from on high. It had taken years, decades of thought, analysis, reading the right books and the right press… His circle of friends, in the end. Deconstructing the myth of the Great Patriotic War, realizing how they’d all had it drilled into them from kindergarten onward… And how it was used afterward. To him, it was “Victory mania.” To ordinary people, it was St. George ribbons, grandpa’s photos in side caps and tunics, and shashlik on the May holidays.

“Well, it’s to make people believe that this war is, sort of, a continuation of that war, the Great Patriotic War. The Germans attacked us then, so that means we’re not the aggressors now, we’re the victims,” he said. “That means this war is sacred too. And that’s why they have to drag Western armor through every city and village. As visible proof that we’re just defending ourselves again, like we did back then. As if we hadn’t attacked the Ukrainians, as if the West had attacked us. And that’s why we can’t win, going on the fourth year, because it’s us against the whole world…”

Ulyana looked at him expressionlessly. Maksim felt awkward, but he’d already started; he had to finish.

“And the main thing is, they want to use this train to drag as many people as possible into the war. It’s called a propaganda train, after all. They don’t even hide it, the bastards. Because they’re running out of people at the front. Some are in hospitals, like this, and some are in cemeteries. They need fresh meat. To chuck into the fucking furnace, the locomotive’s firebox.”

His niece frowned. Or was he wrong to spell it out for her like that? She might take offense, think he’d called her stupid. And what did “ordinary person” even mean? There you go again with your pseudo-intellectual snobbery…

“Well, come on, it’s not as if we’re fighting Ukraine alone. They showed the armored vehicles for real. They’re not painted on. Somebody sent them there. The Americans did.”

“Ulyan… Are you serious?”

“What?”

Maksim reached for the remote, pressed the button hard, and the TV choked and went dark.

“Sorry. I can’t watch this anymore. All of it, just to muddle someone else’s brain and send them into the meat grinder. So someone else can have their legs amputated. Like your Sasha.”

“Mm-hmm.”

Ulyana turned her gaze to the dead screen. She sighed.

“You don’t believe all that, do you?”

“Me?”

“You. You, Ulyana. Or do you?”

“I don’t know. What should I believe, then?”

“There’s plenty out there… Meduza, The Insider, TV Rain, even the BBC, God forgive me… Let’s set you up with a VPN; everything will open just fine. You seem to have some free time, so you can read…”

“I already have your VPN. What, do you think I’m completely backward?”

“I didn’t say that! You have a VPN, great. Good for you! Just, when you have half an hour, put TV Rain on YouTube. Dozhd TV. It’s news too, just not the same, not puppet news.”

“Okay-dokey.”

Yesterday she’d looked at him differently. Yesterday she’d hugged him like that… pressed herself against him. But now an electric field had formed around her, and Maksim wouldn’t have dared approach her on his own.

“You understand who’s responsible for all this, don’t you, Ulyash?”

He called her “Ulyash,” the way he had when she was little, but immediately heard the baby talk in it, the falseness—and it seemed she’d spotted the falseness too.

“Responsible for what?”

“What happened to your Sasha. His injury, his legs…”

“Well, who?” She narrowed her eyes.

“You do understand, don’t you? You can’t not understand!”

“Go on, Uncle Maksim. Say it.”

“Who called him up? Who sent him to Ukraine?”

She said nothing, drilling him with her gaze. Did she really support all this, deep down? Had he really misjudged her so badly? Who had he taken in… This was the moment to shut up, but Maksim couldn’t shut up anymore.

“The government, Ulyash! The government! Putin, for fuck’s sake! If we’re going to call things by their names! Do you not understand, or do you not want to?”

She hitched her shoulders up again. They were bony, broad, thin. A volleyball player’s shoulders.

“I’m heading out, Uncle Maksim. I have to see the chief doctor today, for sure.”

She got up, put her dishes in the sink, and slipped out of the kitchen. Maksim was left alone with his sandwich on the soft kefir-bread loaf. Dry bread lodged in his throat and choked him. Anxiety swept over him—a foreboding of disaster, belated remorse. He felt heavy, tainted. Come on, it’s just a hangover, classic symptoms, nothing more, he reassured himself.

Oh, and he’d had some awful dream too… Maybe that was what it was all about?

“Jesus endured—and told us to endure too,” Ulyana’s mother used to tell her when she was little.

Well, she’d had to endure the lecture, had to play dumb. After all, she was living in their home; it wasn’t nice to pick a fight with them. He thinks he’s so smart, giving her a lecture. So Sasha’s an idiot for believing it and going, and she’s an idiot too, apparently. No, thanks. That’s just what you tell yourself to explain why you ran to hide your precious son when his draft notice came. Because your little bird is too smart to serve. Because he needs his legs to dance in clubs. Sasha’s the dumb one who believed them about the fascists, so it serves him right that he’ll be hopping around on stumps now. If he even pulls through.

Why don’t you go fuck yourself, Uncle Maksim? She should’ve told him that right there, at breakfast. Too bad being polite got in the way.

She’d spent the entire metro ride simmering in tar, arguing with her uncle in her head. By the end of the trip, her bitterness had given her heartburn. She barely made it out into the daylight and didn’t know who to reach out to. She called Kristinka. In the few days they hadn’t spoken, Ulyana had really hit rock bottom. Between the two of them, Kristinka was the float, and Ulyanka was the weight. She just wanted to hear her voice, let her chirp away in that canary voice of hers.

Kristinka didn’t pick up at first—Ulyana had already boarded the bus—and only called her back later.

“Hello.”

Her voice was muffled and nasal. She’d been crying.

“Kristin?”

“Hi.”

“How are you?”

“So-so.”

“Something happen?”

“Well… Oh, fuck… It’s just one shitshow after another.”

“What’s wrong?”

“The guy dumped me. By text. Can you believe it?”

“Seriously? Which one?”

“I only have one right now, Ulyan! Sasha. What, you’ve already forgotten, living it up in Moscow?”

Right. She had a Sasha of her own too, Ulyana remembered. The one who fed her sushi. They’d been so shocked about it together—how could she have forgotten?

“Sorry. It slipped my mind. There’s just so much… going on.”

“It’s fine. Whatever,” Kris sniffled. “It’s just so fucked up that he did it by text. I was already planning to take him to meet my parents.”

“There’ll be someone else. Fuck him.”

“He was a good guy. Why by text, Ulyan? Why is he treating me like this? Am I some kind of piece of shit to him? What am I, a cat? A dog?”

“Forget him…”

She started crying. Ulyana rolled past concrete fences in a bright new bus, on her way to the military hospital, and wasn’t mad at Kris for forgetting to ask how her Sasha was doing, the one with no legs. She loved Kristinka. She felt sorry for her.

“You know,” Kris said nasally, “it’s just one thing piling on top of another. The job thing, getting fired, and now he’s dumped me too. Fuck, Ulyan, why does life fuck you so hard? What did I do?”

“And it’s really bad with work, huh?”

“You don’t get it,” Kris sniffed. “It’s a total nightmare. Wherever you call, the vacancy’s either already filled or they’ve changed their minds altogether.”

“What about our guy? Anatoly Sergeyevich?”

“Oh, nothing. He called. Says the place is shutting down for good, thanked me for my service.”

“So the salon’s just not going to operate anymore?”

“Are you even listening to me? He’s mad as hell. I asked about severance, and he says, ‘I’ll shove it up your ass if I ever see you.’ Says he’s got so many debts and fines now, he doesn’t give a shit anymore; easier just to go to prison.”

“Holy shit.”

They fell silent. Only then did Kris remember:

“Shit. Why are we talking about me, me, me? How are you? How’s your Sasha?”

Maksim had stayed glued to the kitchen: sitting there, reading bad news with a sense of doom, while half-eaten sandwiches wilted beside him and the tea had stewed to the strength of chifir and gone cold. His hangover had spread from his head to the whole world, and now the whole world was foul and blurry. Marina was still asleep; there was no one to cure Maksim’s anxiety. He could hang himself—figuratively, of course, because Maksim had never even toyed with suicidal thoughts in his life.

What had he been dreaming about? Some kind of filth…

Then the parquet floor creaked and creaked in the hall, and Kirill appeared in the kitchen. He stood in the doorway in his underwear, leaning against the jamb, smiling and stretching. A regular Apollo; Maksim hadn’t driven him to the rowing club on the Grebnoy Canal for years for nothing. Competitive rowing, of course, got results.

“Morning!”

“Oh… Kirill Maksimovich graces us with his presence! Coffee?”

“I’ll make it myself, sit down. Big night?” he smirked.

“It was Vadik Smyslov’s birthday… I think I overdid it.”

“Making merry, are we? In the middle of the week, no less! What time did you get in?”

“Half past one, I think.”

“I hope I’m just as energetic at your age!”

“Our age… What age are we, anyway! Here, want a sandwich?”

“Always!”

He was humming something, whistling. Ah, youth: no job, a summons hanging over your head like the sword of Damocles, three pairs of jeans and a cellphone to your name, and yet you get up in the morning smiling. Your body just bends easily, and you bend it. There’s still no limit to the time ahead, and you feel there’s enough of it to do absolutely everything. And that puppyish joy, anticipating the day, that no hangover can curdle.

“So, how’d the interview go?”

“Knock on wood!” Kirill tapped his forehead. “Seems okay. Tell us where you worked, what you did, why you left, what salary you expect, what your plans are for your life, why our company. Well, I was honest about everything. I’m an honest guy, after all.”

“And what are your plans for your life?” Maksim asked.

“My plan is to get the product analytics team lead position at your bank and build a dazzling career there.”

“And you know that working remotely isn’t encouraged at our bank? Can we count on you?”

“They actually asked me that,” Kirill smiled. “I see you’re in the know!”

“I read the Soviet papers over breakfast,” Maksim sighed. “So, what’ll you tell them?”

“I’ll tell them they can count on me, of course. Yes, there was a break in my career, I went away, but I came back, and I don’t plan to leave again. I see my future in this country.”

“What’s your attitude to the current situation in the country?”

“They didn’t ask that. It’s Tinkoff, everyone there understands everything, Dad. Come on.”

“Tinkoff isn’t Tinkoff anymore, Kirill. Just like Kommersant isn’t Kommersant and NTV isn’t NTV.”

“Oh… I wasn’t even around back then. In your Jurassic period. When the grass was greener and the sky bluer.”

“And you, of course, think the grass is green enough now and the sky is blue enough?” Maksim snorted.

“More than enough!” Kirill assured him.

“Sure, sure.”

“Sure, sure. Anyway, second round tomorrow.”

“Break a leg… No, you’ll do great, I’m sure.”

“Thanks!”

He confiscated Maksim’s spare sandwich and began sipping his coffee. He had a ravenous, cheerful appetite. Watching him, Maksim felt like eating too—and like living. He got up to make himself another sandwich.

Suddenly Kirill remembered something.

“Oh! I met my sister yesterday! Met her all over again. Where is she, by the way? Still asleep?”

“She went to the hospital to see her boyfriend.”

“Yeah… It’s a nightmare there, isn’t it?”

Maksim couldn’t help looking at Kirill’s legs, muscular but almost hairless; he remembered when Kirill had broken his leg skiing as a boy, how the skinny little sticks that were his legs back then had turned into those tree trunks.

“It’s a nightmare.”

“She seemed like a decent girl to me. I think we hit it off.”

Marina got up too, languid, wrapped in a silk robe. She kissed Kirill on the crown of his head and went to make coffee in her brass cezve. When had she turned into a retired diva, a character out of Sunset Boulevard? Maksim wondered. Then he caught himself, as if he hadn’t meant to think that at all.

“Well, she didn’t seem decent to me,” Maksim blurted, scraping the grounds from the bottom of his cup. “Your Ulyana.”

“What’s wrong?” Marina looked at him, concerned.

“How can she not understand what all this started over, in her position?”

“What started?” Kirill asked.

“The war. The war, Kirill.”

“She doesn’t understand?” Marina asked cautiously.

“She’s glued to the TV from morning on. Just sits there staring at it. I think she’s one of those people,” Maksim said. “One of the ones who believe everything.”

Marina tapped and scraped the spoon against the inside of the cezve, stirring in the sugar. Then she took the coffee off the heat and poured it through a special little strainer into an elegant, painted cup.

“People believe the television, Maksim. What can you do? They believe it. They have to live in this country. That’s normal. The television tells them the rules for living here. Why are you picking on her?”

“People fall into three groups: those who understand what’s happening, those who don’t understand what’s happening, and those who refuse to understand what’s happening, Marina!” Maksim declared. “So either she’s stupid, which she didn’t seem to be, or she doesn’t want to understand. And I’ll admit, yes, I’m not exactly thrilled that someone like that has been invited into our home.”

The line to see the chief doctor started on the stairs. The swollen-faced wives and mothers—with dark circles under their eyes and scarves on their heads as if they’d come to church—couldn’t fit in either the waiting room or the corridor. There were no appointments, only a live queue, and whoever got in line first got the chance to ask their question.

As they waited, they told each other what had happened to their men. Her husband had shrapnel wounds, a drone had dropped it; her son had a trepanation, traumatic brain injury, mortar fire; her son had lost both arms, sapper; her brother, fourth-degree burns; he’d gone blind, her husband; abdominal surgery, half his intestines removed, her son, in a coma. One needed a certificate, another disability status, another someone to pay attention, another wanted her son kept from being sent back to the front, and someone else just needed a promise he wouldn’t die.

Ulyana asked a woman in a headscarf what the chief doctor was like. Another woman, who knew him, answered: a former military surgeon, rose through the ranks. Businesslike, not sympathetic. Knows his job, basically.

The line was long, but it moved fast. They were apparently deciding people’s fates in there, sorting the living from the dead like a field hospital. While they waited, many people talked, but nearly everyone came away from the chief doctor in silence. A few were smiling; more often, their eyes were brimming. They cried for themselves, not to make a scene. The court, it seemed, was impartial and incorruptible: mothers went in with gifts and came out with them still in hand.

It was Ulyana’s turn.

The office was spacious but plain. Painted walls; Putin in a frame on one of them, hands clasped; a flag rolled up on its pole in the corner. In the middle of the room stood an imposing desk, with a photo of a man in camouflage on it, mountains behind him. The same man sat behind the desk, twenty years older but still sturdy. He looked tired in the photo and in person. He didn’t look like God so much as a butcher, though it was clear he was retired. Shelves lined the walls, with people’s files on them. A computer sat on the desk, with everything recorded in it.

“Speak.”

“I’m here about Lazarenko Aleksandr Vitalyevich.”

“Ward?”

“Neurosurgery.”

He clicked at the keys. Lowering his steel-rimmed glasses, he peered over them at Sasha’s case.

“Let’s see… Lazarenko… Lazarenko. Shrapnel-compression injury, resulting in… Uh-huh. Delayed evacuation… Gangrene in both limbs… Yes. Amputations. I see. Now, what else… Significant damage to internal organs, condition of the spine… Spinous processes… Bone fragments in the abdominal cavity… Intracranial… Hmm. Surgery scheduled to… Yes, I see. Well, he’s in bad shape, what can I tell you. Your Lazarenko is in bad shape.”

“I know,” Ulyana said as firmly as she could.

“And he’s got another operation scheduled in the next few days. We’ll have to put his spine back together. His spine is shattered. And his pelvic organs… The main thing is, I see he’s got another traumatic brain injury, a compression injury, and his blood pressure… Here, the pressure. Anyway. Better if you don’t know yet. General anesthesia. A difficult operation, to put it mildly. I can’t make any predictions.”

“When is it?”

“Either the day after tomorrow or Thursday. That’s all, there’s no other information I can give you. We’ll keep you posted.”

He nodded, letting her know her time was up.

“Wait,” Ulyana said. “That’s not why I’m here.”

“Then why are you here?”

“We want to register our marriage.”

“Uh-huh. All right.”

“I looked it up. Participants in the Special Military Operation can do it urgently, right?”

“They can.”

“I want to do it today.”

The chief doctor pushed his steel-rimmed glasses up, and his eyes shrank behind the lenses; his scattered gaze, focused into a beam by the magnifying glass, began to burn.

“Today won’t be possible.”

“The internet says it can be done the day you apply.”

“Who knows what they say on the internet. What do you think, you’re the only person here who wants to get married? I don’t register the marriages, the civil registry office staff do. They’ve got quite a stream of them here… Newlyweds.”

“Then tomorrow. Tomorrow’s the absolute latest. If he has to have surgery after that… Please!”

“Why not wait until he comes around after the operation?”

She thought he smirked. Why? Did he suspect she was after something? But how? Why? She hadn’t asked him for anything so outrageous, anything beyond his official duties; she’d only asked for what she was entitled to anyway. And she didn’t think she’d given herself away. Why that smirk? Then it occurred to her: how many people like her were in this line, really… People who needed to get married as soon as possible, just in case. No point pretending to be a virgin: through those magnifying glasses he’d see right through her anyway. Souls passed before him on a conveyor belt, and when you had to decide in a minute who to save and who to write off, you probably understood everything else about a person in a second, too.

“I’m pregnant by him,” Ulyana told him.

He sighed.

“Congratulations. Do you have a certificate?”

“Just a test.”

The chief doctor looked at the computer, at what it said about Sasha’s fate, then at Ulyana. He weighed it all up and tapped his knuckles on the desk.

“Well, go get a certificate. With that, the registry office might get moving. They might schedule you for tomorrow if you have it. They’ll put you ahead of the line, at least. When you leave here, knock on my deputy’s door, Kovalev Artur Ivanovich. Then work it out with him. Agreed? I’ve got more serious things to deal with here than playing wedding planner. That’s all. Good day.”

“Thank you so much!”

He nodded.

Ulyana went out and leaned against the wall: the world was spinning around like a carousel. A weight lifted from her shoulders. They’d settled her fate in five minutes, sorted things out just like all the other cases here. The verdict was in her favor. She could hardly believe it had happened so quickly, and so fairly.

With the deputy—still young, ruddy-faced, but somehow already very bald—the business went even faster. It turned out the chief doctor had already called him, and he knew all the details of Ulyana’s situation. He repeated that she needed a certificate, but assured her she could bring the original on the day of the registration; she should send him a scan on his phone. He promised to sort out the urgency with the registry office himself.

“Come by around twelve tomorrow,” he suggested. “And if anything comes up, message me on Telegram.”

He shook her hand goodbye, as if she were a man. His hand had no calluses.

She needed to go see Sasha now; he was waiting. He’d been messaging her, “Miss u,” “Where are you?” and sending smileys. But Ulyana sat a little longer in the hospital courtyard, breathing before she plunged back into the melon.

She turned on the VPN and opened the chat. She asked the AI: a person born under Pisces, on March 18, has a major operation coming up; which days in July are auspicious according to the lunar calendar, and what will the outcome be? It laid it all out at once, just like a seasoned astrologer. It turned out that if they did it on Thursday, everything should go fucking great.

The e-cigarette gave off a clear, almost invisible vapor. And beyond the roofs of the hospital buildings, black, sinister smoke curled from a tall brick chimney.

They were finishing wallpapering Tyoma’s room when the phone rang. The little idiot had picked racing cars for his wallpaper. Oh well, let him have them.

The number was unfamiliar, so Tatyana didn’t want to answer; she was afraid of phone scammers. But then something gave a little tug inside her: she had to pick up.

“Tatyana Nikolayevna Lazarenko?”

“Who is this?”

“You’re speaking with the regional military commissariat. We’re calling about your son, Private Lazarenko Pavel Vitalyevich.”

“Pavel isn’t my… Mine is Aleksandr.”

“Oh, damn… Aleksandr, yes. Aleksandr Vitalyevich. I’ve been talking so much today I’m getting mixed up…”

“What… What happened to him?!”

“We’re calling to inform you that your son has been found.”

“Thank you! Praise the Lord! Thank you! Where, where is he?”

They gave her the number of a Moscow hospital where they’d brought Sasha. They couldn’t tell her anything about his condition over the phone, just ground out, “Congratulations,” and that was all.

The back of her head throbbed, her ears started pounding: her blood pressure had shot up. Tatyana began rummaging through her pockets, looking for Capoten. God, what happiness, what happiness, dear God. Go on, then, and say prayers don’t work. Tatyana had always known how to come to an understanding with God; all she had to do was ask nicely—and grease his palm a little.

Thank God he was alive. That he’d only frightened her and his father, the fool, acting as if he were going to die, but he hadn’t. And all this time, from the very day his phone went dead, Tatyana had had this firm feeling—he was alive, he’d turn up.

Sashka went missing sometimes; it happened. Even as a little kid he’d disappeared: once he went into the woods with the boys and the police had to look for him. His mother was already imagining a maniac, or convicts, while he’d simply tagged along with some mushroom pickers and come back on his own. Then he vanished for three days when he went into town for a disco—and was gone without a trace. Even Vitalya panicked that time, but Tatyana felt in her heart he’d turn up. And he did—in the holding cell, with the cops, silent, covered in bruises, but alive. They said he’d kicked up a fuss, said he’d got into a fight, and they’d had to calm him down. Well, they scraped together some cash, slipped it to them, and bought the young fool out.

His mother had been fussing over him then, too. Of course he was her favorite, after all the time she’d spent looking after him. She probably hadn’t even gone around after Tatyana that much; she’d put her in nursery from the age of one. So Tatyana had done the same with Sashka: who else was going to work for her? Maternity leave at the poultry farm was a joke, and luckily her mother was about to retire. As far as Tatyana was concerned, nothing terrible had happened to him there, though he did cut down on his roaming and got a job. Vitalya couldn’t talk sense into him, but at least the police had straightened him out. Otherwise it was nothing but discos, discos, while Mom was supposed to hand over money.

And now it was the same thing: “Oh, Sanechka, oh, Sanechka,” while she glared at Tatyana for signing her son up for the army. Well, she had signed him up because a man had to be good for something. One drunk in the family was enough; this one, God forbid, might take after his father, with nothing on his mind but discos. And it wasn’t just “Jaguars” at those discos; there was spice, salts, anything you could think of, with that kind of inheritance. She’d nipped it in the bud—and good.

And the army was the same: surely it was better than drifting around like shit in a punch bowl. The army did turn boys into men, after all, and Tatyana needed a man at home, someone to lean on. Those two blockheads were still growing up; she had to educate both of them. They were already too cramped in that apartment, on top of each other, and there was so little left of life as it was.

Now she could really rub it in to her mother, with Sashka found. And Vitalya, too—though he kept quiet around Tatyana because he knew his place, deep down he blamed her all the same. Well, now even Vitalya would stop turning away from her, stop looking at her with those beaten-dog eyes for no reason.

Let her be happy. Tatyana was very happy herself; she felt as if she’d been dug up from the grave after they’d already thrown dirt over her, dug up and breathing freely again. It was good to come back to how things had been, to a place where nothing had happened to Sashka. It was good that he hadn’t wrecked Tatyana’s plan for her old age, hadn’t forced them to move out of their new apartment, and good that Tatyana didn’t have to torment herself now over having sent her son to his death.

The Capoten worked; the mercury drained away from the back of her head, and her head stopped feeling too heavy and spinning. And Tatyana felt a brief happiness, because God had forgiven her for all the things she’d messed up and let her go on living as she had before.

She didn’t know what to do with it, out of practice.

She shared it with Vitalya and the younger ones. They all ran around, excited and cheerful. Vitalya cracked open a beer, and Tatyana let him. Tema nearly burst into tears. And only as she watched him did Tatyana somehow begin to understand that Sashka was alive—and that he really could have died. And, as change from all that excess happiness, she decided—not so much decided as found herself doing it—to tell Ulyanka. She felt sorry for her, yes, and she was embarrassed, too, about telling her to get an abortion.

She dialed.

Ulyanka answered quickly.

“Hello?”

“Ulyan! I’m calling to tell you this: Sashka’s turned up!” she announced.

She was silent. Didn’t answer right away. Then she started breathing.

“For real?! Where?!”

Her voice was trembling.

“The military enlistment office just called. In Moscow.”

“Oh… Tatyana-Nikolavna… What a joy…”

Tatyana listened closely: Ulyanka sounded choked up, excited. All right, then.

“Yeah! There you go.”

Neither of them could think what to say next. The seconds ticked by. At last Ulyanka asked:

“Are you going?”

“Where?”

“Well, to Moscow? To him?”

“I haven’t thought about it yet. I need to talk to the doctors first, find out…”

“Well, will you tell me if you decide to go? Maybe I could come with you…”

Tatyana sighed and hesitated, but in the end her allotted quota of kindness was more than enough for her to agree.

“I will.”