17
Darina
Vadim told the Maletin story again on Sunday, unprompted, the way he occasionally did when something in the week had stirred it loose — this time the lingering gossip about Stas Maletin's territorial overreach, which had apparently traveled through the entire community in the careful, embellished way these things always traveled, until half the diaspora believed there'd nearly been a war over a single customs contact.
"You should have heard Lyuba's version," Yegor said, grinning despite everything still sitting unspoken between us since the back stairs, his old brightness almost fully restored for the length of one easy family joke.
"By the time it got to her, Rurik had personally thrown Stas into the bay.
I'd to tell her three times that nobody got thrown anywhere. "
"People exaggerate because the real version isn't dramatic enough for them," Vadim said, reaching for the bread. "Real power doesn't need theater. That's the whole point most of these stories miss."
"You should have heard Lyuba's version of Mama and Papa, then, fifteen years ago," I said, lighter than I felt, testing the water before I committed to the deeper end of it. "I bet that one had considerably more theater attached to it than the truth ever did."
"You couldn't add theater to that one if you tried. It's already the worst version of itself." Vadim's jaw had tightened, almost imperceptibly, the old grief surfacing the way it always surfaced when the subject came too close to the actual day rather than its comfortable, well-worn aftermath.
"People forget how serious that family actually is," he continued, ladling more borscht into his bowl, the comfortable, well-worn cadence of a story told so many times it had stopped requiring conscious thought.
"The Maletins took out two of the most careful people I ever knew over a freight contract.
Mama and Papa weren't sloppy. They weren't careless.
The Maletins just wanted what Papa managed badly enough to take it the simplest way available to them. "
I'd heard this version, almost word for word, perhaps two hundred times across fifteen years. I had never once, until that particular Sunday, actually listened to it.
"How do you know it was them," I asked, and felt the table's easy rhythm hitch, just slightly, three pairs of eyes turning toward me with varying degrees of surprise.
"What do you mean, how do I know. Everyone knows."
"No, I mean — how did you specifically come to know it. Who told you, the first time. Was there ever an actual conversation where someone explained the evidence, or did you just absorb it the way the rest of us absorbed it, secondhand, from people who'd also just absorbed it secondhand?"
Vadim set down his spoon, something careful entering his expression, the wariness of a man being asked a question he'd never once expected to need an answer for.
"I was fourteen, Dari. I don't remember the exact conversation.
I remember knowing it, the way you remember knowing the sky is blue — it was simply already true by the time I was old enough to ask questions about it. "
"But someone must have told you first. Initially. Someone sat a fourteen-year-old down and said it plainly enough that it became the foundation of everything you've believed since."
"I assume it was one of the older men. Maybe Bogdan, actually, now that you're asking me to think about it specifically — he was the one who handled most of the practical things that year, while the rest of us were just trying to survive the actual grief of it.
" He said it lightly, with no particular weight, and I felt the floor of the conversation tilt slightly under me in a way only I seemed to notice.
"Why does this matter all of a sudden. You've never once asked me about this before. "
"I don't know. I think I've just been thinking about them more lately.
The actual specifics, instead of just the shape of the loss.
" I tried to make my voice match his lightness and felt the effort of it land somewhere short of convincing.
"Doesn't it ever bother you that none of us actually verified it ourselves?
We just believed the men who were already grieving alongside us, because believing anything else felt disloyal to their memory. "
"It bothers me considerably less than it apparently bothers you right now.
" Vadim studied me for a moment, something assessing in his look that I recognized, uncomfortably, as the same careful attention he brought to a soldier he suspected of holding something back.
"Is there a reason you're asking, Dari? Specifically, today, after fifteen years of never once asking? "
"No reason. Just an idle thought." I reached for the bread, giving my hands something to do besides betray me, and felt Gleb's eyes on me from across the table — not suspicious, exactly, but aware, the awareness of a brother who already knew considerably more about my idle thoughts than I'd intended him to know, and who had his own reasons, that night, to recognize exactly the shape of a question someone wasn't ready to fully ask yet.
"It's a fair question, though," Gleb said, unexpectedly, breaking his own careful silence on the subject for the first time in front of Vadim.
"We've never actually questioned where the story came from.
We just absorbed it because the people offering it were people we trusted, and trust isn't the same thing as verification.
I don't think there's anything disloyal about noticing that, fifteen years later, Vadim, no matter how it sounds out loud at a dinner table. "
Vadim looked between the two of us, something working behind his eyes that hadn't fully settled into suspicion yet but was clearly no longer simple unbothered confidence either. "Is there something the two of you aren't telling me."
"No," I said, too quickly, and watched Vadim's expression sharpen by a degree I didn't like.
"Dari—"
"It's nothing, Vadim. Truly. We're just getting sentimental, the way people get sentimental about old grief sometimes.
" Gleb's voice came in smooth and easy, rescuing the moment with the same careful competence he brought to everything, and I watched Vadim decide, visibly, reluctantly, to let it go rather than push further at a Sunday dinner table.
The conversation moved on, the way conversations at that table always eventually moved on, but I sat with the unsettled feeling for the rest of the meal — the vertigo of realizing that an entire family's understanding of its own worst tragedy rested on nothing sturdier than one man's word, repeated so many times across fifteen years that repetition itself had become a kind of evidence.
Bogdan, I thought, turning the name over carefully in my mind for the first time as something other than a kind, distant figure who'd occasionally appeared at the edges of my own life through my brothers' stories.
Bogdan had handled most of the practical things that year.
Bogdan had likely been the one to first tell a fourteen-year-old Vadim exactly whose fault his parents' deaths were.
I didn't say any of that aloud. I simply filed it, the way Rurik had apparently been filing things for months without telling me, and felt the loneliness of carrying a suspicion I couldn't yet name plainly even to the one person who shared it across that table.
Gleb came to Zarya again two nights later, later than usual, which should have warned me before I opened the door — except I'd opened it already half-expecting Rurik, who'd texted an hour earlier asking if he could stop by after a long day, and the two facts collided in my doorway with a speed that left me no room to manage either of them properly.
I'd spent the hour before his arrival the way I'd spent most hours that week, lying to myself about how careful I was actually being.
I'd told Rurik to come to the alley door as always, had poured two glasses of wine the moment I heard his car pull into the spot behind the dumpsters where he always parked now, had not, in the rush of being relieved to see him after a difficult Sunday, thought to text Gleb back when he'd mentioned, almost in passing, that he might stop by sometime that week with an update.
I understood, far too late, exactly how thin the margin had actually become between the two halves of my life running smoothly in parallel and colliding catastrophically in my own kitchen.
"Dari, I need to show you—" Gleb started, already halfway through the door, and stopped dead at the sight of Rurik standing in my kitchen, jacket off, two glasses of wine already poured on the counter behind him.
The silence that followed lasted perhaps three seconds.
It felt considerably longer. I watched Gleb's eyes move from Rurik to me to the two glasses and back to Rurik again, the particular, rapid calculation of a man whose entire skill set had become, over the past two months, reading exactly this kind of small domestic evidence for what it actually meant.
"Gleb." Rurik recovered first, his voice perfectly level, the careful, unhurried register he used for situations that required immediate, invisible recalculation.
"I was reviewing the security rotation with your sister.
There's been some concern about increased activity near the Maletin territory since the incident with Stas, and I wanted Darina's read on anyone unfamiliar she's noticed near the building. "