CHAPTER 27
Stefan
◆
The morning after she said I am yours, the greenhouse-apartment at six-oh-four is at sixty-eight degrees and the kettle is not yet on, and the daybed under the climbing-jasmine arch is turned down with the unbleached linen pulled to the foot, and the cord at my left wrist has gathered heat because I have been holding it on the cab ride uptown.
I came alone. Kostya drove me to the curb at five-forty because Pakhan told him to.
One. Two. Three. Four.
The fourth beat is the one I am listening for. The body is here, answering.
I touch the cord. The first touch of the morning.
Four strands of dark cognac braided leather, the same four strands that were braided into the cord the morning a heart that was not mine was put inside a chest that was, at a hospital in Moscow on the sixth of October in the year two thousand four, when a man held my right hand inside his right hand and counted to four for forty minutes until the anesthesiologist told him it was time.
I have not taken the cord off since. I am not taking it off this morning.
I put the kettle on the front-left burner.
I take the eggs from the door of the small refrigerator — six brown eggs from the Pole on Amsterdam — and set them on the counter.
The brown bread is from the bakery on Eighty-Fourth.
The jam is sour cherry. The coffee will be Earl Grey espresso, as she tasted it the first time on the morning I asked her to stay. Today is not that morning.
I crack four eggs into the pottery bowl. I whisk until the count smooths.
— — —
The light comes through the east glass at six-fifty-one, and it is the color of a sheet of honey held against the side of a window.
The morning light cutting through the greenhouse glass at the Upper West Side has been my measure of a day's beginning since the man who left me this apartment died and I took his keys.
The light comes oblique through the slanted glass and breaks against the two ficus trees at the east and west ends of the room and throws patterned shadows of the ficus leaves across the daybed and the floor. The pattern moves. I have watched it move for nine years.
The Moscow surgeon's medical kit is on the lower shelf of the record cabinet beside the framed photograph of the man at forty-six in scrubs smoking outside a hospital in nineteen ninety-one, and at six-fifty-three the light reaches the photograph, and at seven-oh-two the light reaches the leather of the Gladstone bag itself, and the leather goes warm where the light has been.
The brass clasp catches one ray and throws a small bright pin across the spine of an LP on the shelf above.
The bag stays closed today. The scalpel can wait.
The buzzer goes at eight-fifty-eight. Two beats — pause — one. Kostya's count.
I press the entry button. The elevator engages. Forty seconds. The apartment door is unlocked. I have left it unlocked because we are choosing this.
Nikolai comes through the door first. The Patek is on the navy strap; his hand is at the back of Elena's neck for the length of the threshold and no further.
Behind them, Alexei: gray Henley sleeves shoved to the elbow; the ring on the right thumb; the bruise at the right deltoid I sutured with butterfly closures on the first of November is silver under the cotton because she has him changing it twice a week and she does not let him say I am fine.
Gabriel has stayed back at Lab A to finish cell counts on a long-running protocol; he will join at ten-thirty.
Elena steps onto the terracotta. She is in the unripe-wheat cardigan over a heather T-shirt and her drawstring linen pants.
The medallion is at her sternum. The yellow pencil is in her hair — the knot at the nape — but the knot is looser than I have seen it since the night Nikolai removed it on the bedside table and put it down.
She has put it back in this morning. She has put it back as a woman puts a hairpin back into her hair on her way to a room she has chosen to be in.
"Boys. " Nikolai. The single English word he uses when there is no Russian one short enough.
"Pakhan. " Alexei. He turns the ring on his thumb once.
The two of them move into the greenhouse together at a wide angle to the daybed.
They know to give us air this morning. Alexei sits at the iron stool beside the south-end orchid shelf.
Nikolai stands at the long pane behind the daybed and puts his right palm on the iron mullion at hip height and looks east through the glass at the river he cannot see. He is here as the ground.
I make eggs.
— — —
The light moves across the floor in the long oblique rectangles the panels make and at nine-twenty the rectangles are at the lower shelf of the record cabinet and the leather of the kit warms again, and I do not look at it; I do not have to.
I plate the eggs on white china. I cut the dark bread.
I pour Earl Grey espresso into four brass podstakanniki.
The eighth one, Gabriel's, is on the shelf above the sink waiting for him.
We eat at the island. Elena on the stool nearest the south-facing glass.
Nikolai standing because he is more comfortable standing in a room where she is sitting.
Alexei on the iron stool by the orchid shelf because the orchids are where he set himself.
He eats with his left hand. The ring on his right thumb stays on the rim of the podstakannik.
He looks at her three times across the meal.
He stays silent through the bread and the eggs and the espresso.
She speaks once, on the second egg. "Stefan. Did you sleep."
"Three hours, doll. At the brownstone, in the chair beside the bed, between Alexei coming back and Gabriel going out. The chair was warm."
"Good."
That is all. I want it to be all. She finishes the eggs. She drinks the espresso slowly because she has learned to drink it as I drink it, which is small sips spaced two breaths apart.
At nine-forty the dishes are in the sink. I touch the cord. The second touch of the morning. One. Two. Three. Four.
"Doll. Come sit with me at the daybed. The light is best there at this hour. I have something to say."
She comes.
— — —
Alexei crosses the room without speaking and stands at the south-east corner of the daybed by the lemon tree where the patterned shadow of the leaves lays itself across the back of his hand.
He puts his left hand on the iron of the bed frame at the foot, not on her, and he leaves it there.
Nikolai turns from the long pane and steps to the head of the daybed and sits on the iron arm at the north end.
The three of us have a geometry now. The direction was given on the second floor of a brownstone on a Wednesday night under a carved double-eagle, and the direction has held.
The buzzer goes at ten-twenty-six. Gabriel's count is Kostya's count. He came up by cab.
He steps through the door at ten-thirty-one and goes still — left hand spread flat against the iron of the door frame for one breath as if to confirm the door is the door — and then he comes in.
"Stefan. " He has come for me.
"Brother. The kettle is warm. There is a podstakannik for you on the shelf. The espresso is on the back burner. Take it. We are at the daybed."
He pours. Silent, he carries the podstakannik to the iron stool Alexei left at the orchid shelf, sits, sets it on his knee, and waits. The silence is my answer, warm and exact.
Elena is on the daybed. Her hand is on the linen mattress between us, her right hand, palm up, fingers slightly curled.
The medallion at her sternum. The yellow pencil in the knot.
The hazel-green eyes are on me — they read brown in this light and the freckles across the bridge of the nose are present — and she is doing the thing she has been doing every morning since she woke up with the four of us around her at the brownstone, which is counting without showing the count.
I kneel.
The terracotta is warm under my right knee.
I turn my body to face her square. I open my right hand and lay the palm down on the linen between her knee and her hand, palm-side up, as I have kept my palms since Anatoly Petrovich put his right hand inside mine on the morning of October sixth, two thousand four, and counted me into the chest he was about to open.
That is his name. The name is for today.
I am putting it down at the moment, and then I am lifting it back into the inside of my mouth and not saying it again on the page or in the room.
He is the man in the room with us. The cord at my left wrist is his braid.
The chest under my shirt was put together by his hands.
This count, the one after it, and every four for as long as the chest knows how to do what it knows how to do, are his work and her gift and the small honest geometry between the two.
I touch the cord. The third touch of the morning. The third is the one for the vow.
I open my right palm. The midline scar is pale and faintly raised in the light through the greenhouse glass — four centimeters of vertical white from the base of my thumb across the meat of the palm to the heel — and I put the palm against hers, palm to palm, scar to her warmth.
The pad of her right thumb settles against the inside of my wrist where the cord lies. The pulse there is steady. Steady.
"Elena."
"Stefan."
I let the count hold.
"I have been listening. The next four are yours."
A small breath in the room. Alexei at the south-east corner does not move; the leaf-shadow on the back of his hand does not move.
Nikolai at the north arm of the daybed does not move.
Gabriel at the orchid shelf sets the podstakannik on the floor at his feet very slowly without making a sound, both hands on the brass, as he sets a needle on a vinyl groove.
"I love you."