11

When Mitya returned home, he found the family at the kitchen table, drinking tea with varenye.

“I was able to negotiate Vovka’s release,” Alyssa Vitalyevna said with aplomb, as if she had set a crowd of hostages free from the hands of terrorists. “It all came together quite well: the head of the precinct has a mother who needs brain surgery, and Khristofor Khristoforovich happens to know one of the best neurosurgeons in Moscow. I got her a space in the queue, and your cousin is free now!”

Alyssa Vitalyevna sparkled with her accomplishment like a newly minted coin.

“So where is he now?” Mitya asked, trying to hide his disappointment.

“Drinking somewhere.” Yelena Viktorovna made a helpless gesture.

“One would think that after such a smooth negotiation, he would at least try and thank me.” Alyssa Vitalyevna put a whole preserved strawberry into her mouth. “I guess I shouldn’t expect good manners from him. It’s not in his genes.” She cast a dirty glance at Dmitriy Fyodorovich, who turned on the TV instead of answering.

The next morning, a Saturday, Dmitriy Fyodorovich told Mitya that they were going to see Aunt Sveta, Vovka’s mom. He had been postponing the visit, but now that Vovka had gotten himself into trouble, it seemed like they had to go. Mitya had not been to Sveta’s apartment for a while, not since before Vovka came to live with them. She was a strange woman and, if Mama and Babushka’s whispers were true, had become stranger lately: more secluded, less able to look after herself, more immersed in her obsession with following celebrities’ lives. But Mitya was eager to see Sveta’s friendly dog, Hector, an old basset hound who used to greet Mitya by standing on his hind legs and putting his front paws on the boy’s chest. When Mitya was small, he couldn’t hold Hector’s weight, and they both toppled over. It made everyone laugh.

Previously, it had been only Yelena Viktorovna who went to see Sveta, loaded with a large thermos canister of soup and bags of kotleti and pirozhki. But then she said to Dmitriy Fyodorovich she wouldn’t go anymore. It was time he took care of his relatives himself. Dmitriy Fyodorovich tried to counter the argument: after all, Yelena Viktorovna’s mother lived with them, too, so it seemed like a shared responsibility for all relatives. But Yelena Viktorovna brought up his brother. She knew it was mean to do so, but she’d had enough of the crazy woman.

“You owe it to Seryozha to go,” she said and saw her husband’s eyes dim, his shoulders slope down.

Dmitriy Fyodorovich invited his son to come along. Not because he particularly liked the company but because Mitya seemed like a good buffer to install between himself and Sveta.

Hector leaped to the door with all his sleepy bulk and panted with excitement.

“Yelena cooked borscht,” Dmitriy Fyodorovich pointed out instead of a greeting and ushered Mitya in with the package: a giant gingham polyester bag filled with containers of food. Carrying it made Mitya’s back hurt, but he didn’t say anything, hoping his father would notice his strength. At the same time, Dmitriy Fyodorovich wished he hadn’t taken his son with him: he was so excruciatingly slow. He almost took the bag away, but didn’t. The boy needed to learn to handle his responsibilities.

Sveta saw that Dmitriy Fyodorovich and his son were both wearing windbreakers, and realized it must be fall. She hadn’t been out for a few weeks now, maybe a few months.

“How do you take care of him?” Dmitriy Fyodorovich pointed at Hector, who made circles around Mitya unloading groceries on the kitchen table. “Have you been working?”

“My students come over, and the neighbor girl walks Hector in exchange for help with her son’s stuttering.” Sveta was proud to have everything set up so well. “She is a lovely girl, and single now. Vovka used to like her when they were both in kindergarten.”

“Has he called you?” Dmitriy Fyodorovich asked.

“He has not called since his visit.”

“You know that he was in jail?”

Sveta clutched her chest. She knew she couldn’t trust them with her son.

“It’s fine; we got him out.”

Mitya noticed how Dmitriy Fyodorovich was able to reclaim Alyssa Vitalyevna’s victory in her absence.

Sveta sighed and calmed down. She didn’t ask why her son had been in jail, how they’d managed to get him out. The less of the truth she knew, the easier it was. She invited them to sit down for tea with greenish cheese and stale biscuits.

“As soon as he left the joint, he went to go get drunk,” Dmitriy Fyodorovich continued as he plunged down on the couch in the living room. “And now he’s probably lying somewhere with his pants pissed, passed out, or even dead.”

“Dmitriy, please . . . I tried calling that woman he had taken up with, but there was always some drunken noise on the line, and then silence. I thought about going to the Old Arbat and looking for him there. Maybe I will go next week?”

Sveta had been thinking about this for a long time now. She had almost been ready to go a couple of times, but first the psoriasis came in, and then there was a repeat of a documentary series on the lives of celebrities on TV. Perhaps because of Dmitriy’s words, she felt her inner thighs flare up and patted them, hoping they would calm down.

Dmitriy Fyodorovich nodded, although he was not sure what he wanted from her. Everyone seemed to be powerless to stop Vovka’s demise. What were they going to do if Vovka died? Dmitriy Fyodorovich asked himself. He had two responsibilities to his dead brother: to take care of the two people he loved most in his life. And now one was probably lying somewhere in a puddle of his own waste, and the other one was scratching herself like a mangy dog and not leaving her apartment.

“Do you think Vovka can come to see me again?” Sveta asked.

“I think he will come to you when he needs money. Did you give him money when you last saw him?” Dmitriy Fyodorovich looked at Sveta suspiciously.

She looked down into her cup and felt a tear stream down her cheek into it, as if she were a cartoon character.

“Did you?” Dmitriy Fyodorovich raised his voice.

“I don’t want him to starve. And it wasn’t much anyway, you know my pension is small and I don’t make much tutoring.”

She couldn’t stop the sobs from coming. They sounded like hiccups.

Hector got out from beneath the coffee table and barked at Dmitriy Fyodorovich, who was now off the couch, frantic, screaming, pointing fingers. Mitya looked at the portrait of his uncle in his military uniform, hanging on the wall, and wondered what he would make of all this.

“Find him, Dmitriy,” Sveta begged. “Tell him I need to see him. Bring him here. The neighbor girl, she’s so sweet. She doesn’t know he drinks, and we won’t tell her. They can marry, and she’ll take care of him, and they’ll live with her parents. It’s all clear to me now—the plan in front of my eyes. I need help, I need my boy to come back to me, and then I’ll make sure it all works out. I’ll watch her kid so they can date. I’ll cook an apple pie and a potato pie. Or I can feed them whatever Yelena cooked, since I don’t have the supplies anymore. Maybe they’ll take Hector to live with them too. So sweet! A real family, with a son and a dog already.”

In the metro, though Mitya felt that his father was angry, he tried to make him comfortable.

“Papa, was it long ago that Uncle Seryozha died? I was not born yet, right?”

“I had not met your mother then,” Dmitriy Fyodorovich responded. There was a pulsating dot below his temple, which usually promised Mitya a beating. But not this time. Suddenly softened, his father began talking.

“Vovka was four, maybe less. Sveta was young, too, but they had been married for a while. We were all living together when the telegram came. He was captured by the mujahideen and killed soon after. We never got to know exactly how. The coffin was sealed.”

Mitya thought that he ought to hold his father’s hand in compassion, but fear and the alienness of such a touch made him freeze. Dmitriy Fyodorovich was staring straight ahead, into the rolling darkness behind the glass of the train car.

“Why weren’t you in the army yourself at the time?” Mitya asked.

“I had been dismissed for a few weeks for my twisted ankle. Can you believe it? A twisted ankle. They never sent people back home for that, but the hospital was overcrowded.” Dmitriy Fyodorovich gulped painfully. A wrong brother sitting next to his wrong son.

“I wish my father had lived to see Seryozha grow up, how brave he was, how strong. It’s the goal of every father to see his son a hero in the fight against terrorism or fascism, decorated, even if it’s within the coffin,” Dmitriy Fyodorovich said to his son, eager to have the conversation over with.

They sat in silence for a long, gloomy while, shaking along with the train. Mitya thought about dead brothers, and strength, and realized, an emptiness widening inside of him, that his father would never stay alive long enough to see him growing strong, or becoming a hero. It just didn’t seem likely to happen. Not in the way his father had hoped.