Ivan hugged me awkwardly like the sister he didn’t have and remained standing in the entryway. I guessed that the news would be bad. But still I asked how things were going. Ivan shifted his weight from one foot to the other, zipping and unzipping his tracksuit jacket. I turned to the kitchen to conceal my disappointment. I wouldn’t be getting a new passport today.
“Champagne, vodka, or cognac?”
“Boba’s birch horilka, if you have any.”
After collecting what I had in the cupboard, I carried a platter of food into the living room, keeping my bad mood at bay. I found Ivan admiring the sunset from my window. He commented that this had been the tallest building in the country when it was built and started looking for some suitable music on my record shelf.
“We haven’t had time to talk about the price,” he said.
I nodded. The situation embarrassed Ivan. I could tell from his body language, how he ran his hand along the stubble on his head, fiddled with his zipper, and focused on the records as if the issue of money were secondary. I’d imagined that Ivan would just give me the papers. Because of the transaction he had arranged, I was preparing to leave everything. I poured two glasses of Boris’s horilka and hoped that the amount would be reasonable. Ivan raised his glass.
“To new roads and new opportunities?”
“Why not,” I said.
I moistened the edge of the glass with my lips and then set it back on the table. I felt like asking what had gone wrong with the passport and how long I would still have to wait. However, I couldn’t reveal anything to Ivan that didn’t concern him. Maybe I didn’t trust that he would help if he knew the seriousness of my situation. I didn’t want to force him to weigh what would be most profitable for him and expose him to temptation.
“Have you heard of Tatiana Fedorova? The businesswoman?”
I shook my head. The passport. I wanted the passport. Not to jabber about some superfluous bitch.
“She helps social orphans like Boris and tries to use legal action to remove declarations of incompetence for people who are able to live on their own without a guardian.”
Fedorova wasn’t superfluous after all. Nervously I stretched the hem of my shirt and looked at Ivan with suspicion. I remembered what you said once. Philanthropy is always a façade. There had to be a reason for Fedorova’s activities: expanding a business, networking, or whitewashing her reputation and wealth. But did that matter if she got results? No one was interested in improving the status of wards of the state. If the institutions lost their free labor, who would handle the work they did, and who would pay the wages?
“You don’t believe in Fedorova’s good deeds,” Ivan said. “But maybe someone from her family was institutionalized or maybe she gave up her own child and regretted it later. Is that impossible?”
Ivan poured us two more glasses.
“To Boba,” he said.
I raised my glass. I’d emptied the previous one into a flowerpot while Ivan was looking for suitable music. Hady’s “Junkies in the Garden” began to play. Ivan had often hummed this song. He did so now, too, and that made me smile. Maybe he wouldn’t want anything impossible in exchange for the passport.
“Our Boba is talented,” Ivan said. “No one can make horilka like him.”
“Or take as good care of a compote kitchen.”
“He’s the best cook ever,” Ivan said, tapping his glass and inspecting its surface as if it were a poppy pod, putting his eye right up to it as Boris did when assessing a pod’s ripeness. “He deserves a better future.”
“Absolutely.”
“If Tatiana Fedorova takes up his case, she’ll need help.”
“What kind of help?”
“Your aunt could teach Boba how to read and take him out in public to show him how to ride on a tram car and how to pay for things in a store. The authorities must be convinced that my brother can take care of himself. If your aunt or mother were made his guardian, Boba could move in with them.”
“Is that the price of the passport?” I asked in surprise. “Of course they’ll agree. All you have to do is ask. What do you need me for?”
Ivan paused as he pulled the lid from a tin of caviar. I settled for a pickle. You hadn’t noticed the change in my diet yet, and maybe you thought that I’d cut down on smoking to prevent signs of aging in my skin. I allowed myself a few glasses of bubbly from time to time, so refusing cognac didn’t draw attention. I realized I’d placed my hand on my stomach. I moved it away.
“Just in case,” Ivan finally said. “So this is a trade, not a gift. No one owes anyone.”
I laughed. Ivan was right. This was the fairest way to handle things. As long as I was with you, my family wouldn’t need to worry. And what if you and I didn’t exist? What then? After the Orange Revolution, the civil service had been revamped, but many of them were in debt after paying hundreds of thousands of euros for their posts; they were as hungry for additional income as the politicians were for voters’ favor. You’d told me that poppy cultivation had been slated for enhanced monitoring as expected and that big operations were already being organized. I’d expected the newly opened drug hotline to be jammed with calls from jealous neighbors. The denunciations would send my mother, my aunt, and Boris to jail if they didn’t have a support network. Even without the authorities, competitors and ordinary addicts would be a threat. Because of this plan for Boris, my mother and my aunt would be like family to Ivan.
“Are you ready?” Ivan asked.
“For what?”
“To be a Finnish citizen.”
At which Ivan removed a stack of passports from his inside breast pocket.
“I think Ruslana Toivonen fits you. And one of these is her mother. Or someone who could be Ruslana’s mother.”
Instinctively I fumbled for a pack of cigarettes and managed to get one lit before I realized what I was doing. Once again, Ivan was one step ahead. When I’d agreed to our arrangement, I hadn’t realized my betrayal could put my mother at risk. I only grasped that later. Now I wouldn’t have to think about how to arrange travel documents that couldn’t be traced. What I didn’t know was whether she would come away. At least she would have the possibility, though. Wiping my nose with a napkin, I remembered the package I’d left on the side table, which contained a burner phone. I gave it to Ivan and asked him to hide it with the passport in my mother’s chest of drawers.
“No need to tell my mother.”
“Of course not,” Ivan said with a nod. “My brother misses you, by the way. He’s always asking about you.”
“My mother still isn’t talking about me?”
“She’ll calm down. The Mongol may not be her ideal choice of son-in-law, but mothers always relent.”
I said nothing. Ivan had accepted my panicked explanation for my mother’s silent treatment without complaint, or at least he kept quiet out of tact.
“And that isn’t all,” Ivan said. “Three of these are for Ruslana Toivonen’s children. You can use them as currency if you run short, and one of these could pass as Toivonen’s husband.”
I froze, taken aback.
“Even though your Mongol no doubt has his own collection, passports are like cars for men or shoes for women. You can never have too many. Especially ones that weren’t purchased through a regular dealer.”
For a moment I stared into Ivan’s eyes, loving him more than any other member of my family ever. My hand touched my stomach again. Again, I moved it away. A person could dream.
“Well, aren’t you going to say anything? As I’m sure you can guess, Ruslana Toivonen’s husband was the most difficult. I think he’s Korean.” Ivan laughed and pushed the stack in front of me. Six passports. Six lives. Six possibilities.
I’d forgotten to stub out the cigarette I’d lit and decided to smoke the rest of it. One couldn’t hurt. The nicotine had gone to my head like liquor for a first-time drinker. Ivan spooned more caviar into his mouth.
“I wanted to call you as soon as I got them, but I held off. No sense ruining a good surprise. Don’t be shy. Pick them up. Try them out.”
So I leafed through the passports, bending the pages and finding that they felt genuine. The stamps suggested active traveling. As a citizen of a member state of the European Union, Ruslana enjoyed all the benefits of a Finn, as did her children; the Toivonen family had visited Ruslana’s homeland without visas every time. Despite the fact that she was younger than me, there were enough similarities in our appearances that I could handle the differences with a makeup brush. To my surprise, I found myself smiling, not because of the opportunities offered by these personal documents but because of Finland and the Finnish television I’d watched as a child. Even though that ancient magic had faded, and my Finnish skills had dwindled, the language would come back to me, unlike one that I didn’t know at all. A new life as a new person was even taking on a certain attraction. I was tired of constantly having to develop contingency plans. Finland was a good option: clean nature and good schools, a safe environment for a child to grow up in.
But you wouldn’t leave without Veles’s permission. Unless you had to. Or would you leave if I asked, if no one knew where you were going or under what name, or who had bought the passports? Would you have left?
I’d imagined that knowing I was pregnant would bring a sense of relief—I had the insurance I’d wanted. But the opposite happened. I began to fret more, worrying for two now, and I realized that when the child was born, I would spend the rest of my life worrying about him. I wasn’t sure whether I could stand that, so I sped up getting the passports. I only decided to keep the baby after receiving Ruslana Toivonen’s family’s papers, because they didn’t just offer me the chance for a quick escape: they were full of good omens.
Ruslana had two daughters and a baby boy, and I was suddenly sure that I was expecting a son. Ruslana’s baby was named Oleh. Olezhko. My Olezhko. That was a sign as well. I’d been browsing baby name generators and looked at all the derivations of my Christian name, even though I warned clients against doing that. Oleh traced back to the same Viking name—Helga—as my own name. Didn’t that sound like the north was calling us? As if all of this had been written in the stars ages ago.
I remembered that, at this stage, a mother’s emotional states were already being transmitted to the child, which was little more than an enormous heart. It beat between one hundred thirty and one hundred fifty beats per minute. There was something so miraculous about the heart always coming first, before the senses, before the mind, before the limbs, even before the ability to breathe. Everything else may have just begun to develop, but there was a heart beating beneath my own. Our son already had a name, and he already had a heart. I just didn’t know whether it pulsed with fear, love, or hope.
Now I know that fear was eating away everything in its path, and that perhaps something toxic seeped into my amniotic fluid as I stared at Viktor’s body lying in the back courtyard of our office.