A medal, a ring, a handkerchief. Svetlana spread them out around her. Someone’s memories. In her right hand she cradled the bottle of vodka. She lifted it to her lips. Nuzzled it. Drank. Nikolai, in the corner, gazed out into the darkness, vacantly. The bottle fell away from her lips. Empty. She dropped it over the side of the bed onto the floor. The sudden clatter startled Nikolai. He looked up. For a moment he gazed at the bottle spinning on the floorboards. Then his eyes shifted, back to the shadows.
He had been taken. When she woke the next morning her father was not there. She made believe it had been a dream. She could do that then. Under the sheets she lay listening to the silence of the apartment, imagining the hour was early yet. That her father was still sleeping. Elaborately she planned her day, and he was there, in his place. She did not allow the silence to undo her. The absence of his voice, the slop of his slippers, the rubber breaking loose of its stitching again, slapping on the parqueted floor in the corridor. She took only shallow breaths and so did not notice the absence of his morning cigarette, the aroma of his coffee.
When finally she slipped back the sheets, acknowledging the time the clock displayed, and washed and dressed in the unnatural silence and went to the kitchen, still she allowed herself to believe it had been a dream. Her mother sat at the table, eyes rimmed scarlet, lips white and her hair dishevelled. Svetlana said nothing. They avoided each other’s eyes. Carefully she stepped around her mother, breakfasted. A sandwich like her father made her. She packed her books into her school bag and left the apartment, closing the door behind her quietly.
The class was subdued. Eyes flicked up from their books and studied her. She wrote carefully, forming each word with pedantic neatness. Sofia Petrova, the teacher, stood behind her. She felt the teacher’s presence but did not look up. It was only when Sofia Petrova placed a hand upon her shoulder that she felt the bubble of tears rise to the surface and she woke from the dream. The pen shook in her hand and the neat word that she had just written disappeared under a thin blue pool of ink. Her eyes blurred and a pain stabbed at her heart so violently she bent forward. The sob caught in her throat and for a moment she could not breathe. It came out then, a howl, which sent a shiver down the spine of her teacher.
Sofia Petrova took her by the arm and led her from the classroom. In the small office, used by the teachers, she sat that morning, gazing out across the rooftops to the forest. The tips of the pines trembled in the breeze. Blond insubstantial clouds were pulled apart and dissolved against the chilly blue celestial canvas. When Sofia Petrova returned at the lunch hour, she carried a small package. She sat down on one of the low stools beside Svetlana.
‘This is for you,’ she said, and handed her the package, wrapped in brown paper.
Svetlana took it. She folded back the crisp, thick paper and pulled a picture from the package. It was an icon of Christ crucified.
‘You must not say anything to anybody,’ Sofia Petrova said. Svetlana saw the anxious look in her eyes. She understood the trouble her teacher would be in if the Communist authorities discovered she was giving religious icons to her students.
‘I won’t, Sofia Petrova,’ she said.
The teacher stroked her hair. Svetlana gazed down at the image in her hands. The colours were bright and new, the sky blue, Christ glistering gold. It was vivid, cheerful, despite the bloody crimson tears of the pierced Saviour.
‘Svetlana – your name means light,’ Sofia Petrova told her.
Svetlana nodded.
‘You should try to be a light to others, to your mother in these difficult times.’
Svetlana frowned, but she nodded again, out of respect for her teacher. She slipped the image of Christ back into its paper wrapping and hid it in her school bag.
She concealed the glittering icon beneath the neatly folded pile of clothes in the drawer beside her bed. When she knelt beside her bed that night, to pray as her father had taught her, she took it out and placed it before her. Hearing her mother’s footsteps, she tucked it quickly beneath her sheets, interrupting her prayer for her father.
Her mother stood in the doorway.
‘It won’t be long,’ she said. ‘They won’t keep him for long. It will just be a for a few weeks, a month or two at the most.’
Her mother’s voice was brittle with emotion. Svetlana leaned her forehead against the bed. She heard her mother approach behind her. A hand reached out to her nervously, the fingers trembled as they rested on her shoulder. They felt cold through her nightdress. Svetlana stood up quickly, moved away. She slipped in between the sheets, and turned her back on her mother. For some moments her mother lingered, silently, and then she went, turning off the light before she closed the door. By her feet Svetlana could feel the cold hard frame of the icon. She pulled it up and hugged it to her breast.
He did not return. Not after a few weeks, nor after a couple of months. In late October a letter arrived. He had died due to complications arising from undiagnosed ulceration of the stomach. This her mother explained to her, sat at the table in the kitchen where he had breakfasted each morning, and smoked his first cigarette of the day from behind Izvestiya.
She did not look at her mother. Nor did she say anything when her mother’s words had dried up, finally, on her thin lips.
‘Svyeta,’ her mother said. She extended her hand across the table. ‘Svyeta.’
‘It was you,’ she said to her mother, as calmly as she could. ‘It was your fault.’ She looked her mother in the eye. Took pleasure in the pain she saw registering in those little eyes.
Drew strength from the knowledge that she could hurt as well as be hurt.
‘You killed him,’ she said. And turned and left the room. In the woods, the shabby copse of willow and birch and maple that shrank back from the apartment blocks, she wept. Her heart was torn with the pain of her loss and the pleasure of her assault on her mother. Her mother had told. Don’t say a word, her father had told her, and she had not, it was their secret. But her mother had told, twisted with fear, blackmailed by the Party representative at the school, as Svetlana was later to learn.
Svetlana gathered the ring, the medal and the handkerchief together and dropped them back into the tin. She glanced inside the jug beneath the grubby Christ but there was no bottle there.
‘Nikolai,’ she said. She rummaged about, grubbing together some small coins. ‘Go get me a bottle.’
He took the coins in his slim little hand and sloped off into the darkness.