Chapter 5 #3
Raskov woke the way he did everything, all at once and completely, no drift to it — one moment under and the next his eyes open and tracking, finding Luka across the cabin where he sat wrapped in a blanket at the far end of the bench, dressed again, closed again, as far from the berth as thirty feet of boat allowed.
Luka watched the man read it. Watched him take in the distance, the dressed body, the shut face, and understand all of it in about a second, because he read failures for a living, read the seep before the break, and this was a break and he saw it.
Something moved through the dark eyes and was gone.
Not surprise. Raskov had never once, Luka understood, expected anything else.
That was almost the worst part — that the man had given Luka the most naked thing he had, the whole starved person of him, and had done it already knowing the morning would look like this, and had done it anyway, because for one night the wanting had been louder than the certainty of the cost.
"It's all right," Raskov said. Quiet. He sat up slow, mindful of the stitches, and reached for his shirt, and put the distance back into himself with a kind of practiced grace that made Luka want to be sick. "You don't have to say it. I know what it was. I knew going in."
The grace of it was unbearable. He'd folded the whole night up small and handed it back to Luka pre-forgiven, pre-excused — a thing that had happened in the dark between two desperate men and needn't mean anything in the light.
And he'd done it, Luka understood, not to protect himself but to protect Luka; to give Luka a clean door out of the guilt, the same way he'd tried to give Luka a door out of the killing box by turning to buy it with his own life.
The man's entire language of love was getting out of other people's way so they could survive him.
It was the loneliest thing Luka had ever seen, and he'd helped make it.
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"Make it small so it doesn't cost me anything.
" Luka's voice came out wrecked. "Make it easy.
You keep doing it — you keep taking the hit so I don't have to feel my own hand land.
Don't. Not with this." He made himself look at the man, which was harder than looking at his own reflection had been.
"It wasn't nothing. That's the whole problem, Raskov.
If it were nothing I could live with it.
It's that it was the most like a person I've felt since I put my brother in the ground, and you're the one who put him there, and I don't — I can't hold both of those.
I've been trying all night and I can't. The wanting doesn't cancel the grave and the grave doesn't cancel the wanting and I have to carry both of them at once and I don't have the arms."
The boat rocked. The grey light lay flat and cold across the water outside.
Raskov was quiet for a long moment. Then he did the thing he always did, the thing Luka was coming to understand was the truest cruelty and the truest kindness the man had in him, the only way he knew to love anyone: he told the truth, and he made it cost himself everything.
"You don't have to hold both," he said. "You just have to let me be both.
I am both. I'm the man who killed your brother and I'm the man who slept on your chest, and those aren't two people, Luka, they're one, they're me, and the only thing I've ever wanted — the only thing, more than the road, more than stopping — is for one single person in the world to look at the whole of that and not need me to be less of it before they could stand to be near me.
" His voice didn't break this time. It had gone past breaking, out the other side, into something flat and final and unbearably calm.
"You don't have to want me. You should probably put me in the water and be done.
But don't insult us both by pretending last night wasn't real, or that I didn't know exactly whose brother I was reaching for when I reached. "
Luka sat in the cold at the far end of the boat, holding a grief and a wanting that would not fit in the same set of arms, and understood that he had lost something in the night that he was never getting back — the clean thing, the simple road, the man he'd built for two years to hate — and that the country he'd woken up in had no map, no shore he recognized, and only one other soul in it.
He wanted to say something that would undo the far end of the boat — close the thirty feet, tell the man that the distance was Luka's own cowardice and not his verdict.
He didn't have the words. He'd never had the words; that had been Dato's gift, the talking, the easy warmth that filled a room, and Dato was in the ground.
All Luka had were his hands and his silences and a grief that took up the space where the words should have been.
So he gave the man the only thing he could give him honestly.
"We have to move the boat today," Luka said, finally, because it was true, and because it was the only thing left that he knew how to do. "He'll have a hull by tomorrow."
"Yes," Raskov said.
And that was all either of them could manage, in the grey, with the water rising.