7. Ilya
Ilya
Ihear the raised voices coming from the drive.
The irate tone underneath the words, coming out of a lit kitchen window into the dark, and my first thought is that somebody has been shot and my second — arriving about half a second behind it and considerably louder — is that it isn’t Sergei, because one of the voices is a woman's and it is not raised in fear.
I come through the boot room fast enough that Grigor has to step out of my way. The kitchen is at the end of the passage and the door is open and I stop just short of it, because what is happening on the other side of that door is not an emergency.
It is an argument. I’ve been listening to Andrei Dudin argue since I was thirty-one years old, and there are perhaps four people alive he will argue with.
"—it is not an insult." Andrei sounds genuinely baffled. "It is a fact of the situation. There is no one here. Karina is gone. The boy has not eaten."
"Then you cook."
"I don’t know how to cook."
"Neither do I. So we're at an impasse, and here's the part you're going to hate: the impasse is fine. There's bread. There's about nine boxes of cereal. He's ten, he'd eat cereal for a week and consider it the finest hour of his life."
"He has to eat something besides cereal."
"Then make him something."
"I am telling you that I cannot." A pause, and then Andrei says the thing, and he says it the way a man reads out a weather report. "You are the woman in the house."
I stop with my hand on the frame.
Ah. That was a mistake.
There is a silence of about two seconds in which I am aware, with total clarity, of exactly what is about to happen and of the fact that I am not going to be quick enough to prevent it.
"Say that again." Raven’s voice is low, angry.
"You are the woman in the—"
The pan comes out of the rack and across the room at a genuinely impressive velocity.
Andrei catches it. He has caught worse things than a pan and he does it with one hand, almost without looking, and he is still in the process of looking mildly pleased with himself when she crosses the four feet between them and slaps him across the face.
It is not a slap. Let us be accurate. It is delivered open-handed but it is thrown from the hip and it turns his head completely to the side, the sound of it ricochetes down the hallway and hits me in the chest.
And then Andrei has her by the throat and up against the counter.
I am moving instantly.
I don’t reach them quick enough, because Sergei gets there first.
"Stop it!" He screams.
He is standing in the doorway on the far side of the kitchen in socks, with a book still in one hand, and both of them freeze like children caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
Andrei lets go instantly. He steps back with his hands open at his sides, and his face — for perhaps a quarter of a second, before it recovers — is the face of a man who has just been reminded of his place.
Raven doesn't touch her throat. That is the detail I notice and cannot stop noticing. There are slight red marks coming up on the side of her neck but she doesn’t put a hand anywhere near them, because to do so would be to acknowledge that something happened.
She looks at Sergei and her whole voice changes.
"Hey. It's okay. It was just a dumb disagreement about cereal."
"It wasn't about cereal." Sergei says firmly.
"No," she admits. "It wasn't just about the cereal."
He comes into the room fully, and puts his book down on the counter with enormous care, and says, "I know how."
Nobody answers him. We all just stare at him.
"I know how to cook," he says, louder this time. "I watched Karina. And the one before her. I know how to do all of it, I just — " a small shrug " — I'm not allowed near the stove."
And that is the moment I come through the door fully.
All three of them look at me and all three reactions are different. Andrei goes to attention, minutely, the way he does. Raven's chin comes up about a centimetre, which I have learned means she has decided in advance not to explain herself.
And my son's shoulders climb toward his ears.
There it is. Five steps into a room and I have already made him feel small. I have been doing this since he was six – unintentinonally of course – but I have never once caught it happening this cleanly.
I don’t ask what happened. I don’t look at the red marks on her neck, which take me some effort not to look at. Then I take off my coat, and I put it over the back of a chair, and I roll my sleeves.
"Andrei. You have been awake for almost 72 hours. Go and sleep."
He hesitates.
"Andrei." Its a warning.
He goes. On the way past he glances at Raven and she looks back at him steadily, neither of them says one word, and I file the entire exchange for a night when I have more patience.
Then I turn to my son.
"Sergei. You said you know how to cook?"
He goes very still. "Yes."
"Then I am at your disposal. Teach me." I spread my hands. "I can tell you honestly that I have not cooked anything in years and my last attempt was not very successful. So you will have to be specific with me." And then I add. “And patient.”
He stares at me. Eventually he says, in a voice that is testing every word before it lets it out: "...You could cut the onions."
"I can do the onions."
"There's a board. In the — you have to — " He stops, and starts again, and something in him takes hold of the situation.
"Raven, get the big pan. Not that one, the heavy one.
Papa, the onions are in the drawer under the window and there's a board behind the bread bin, and you have to cut them small, not in rings, because Karina cuts them in rings and then they go all — " he makes a gesture " — stringy. "
"Small," I repeat. "Not stringy."
"Small."
"Understood."
And that is how I come to be standing at my own counter at half past seven on a Thursday, dicing onions under the supervision of a ten-year-old.
He is extremely serious about it. He has a system.
He sends Raven for tinned tomatoes and then rejects the tin she brings on grounds she is not permitted to appeal.
He fills a pot and salts the water and says "not yet" in a voice of real authority when she reaches for the pasta.
He tells me twice that my onions are too big and the second time he is correct.
"Like this?"
"Smaller."
"Sergei, at some point these will simply be liquid."
"That's good," he says, with real feeling, and Raven makes a noise behind me that she converts, unconvincingly, into a cough.
He has been in this kitchen a hundred times and never once been allowed to touch anything. Yet he knows where the heavy pan lives. He knows Karina keeps the good oil at the back.
He has stood in the corner of this room for four years, watching a rotation of women who were paid to be near him, learning by observation how a meal is made, and every single one of those women had instructions from me not to let the boy near a stove.
I should have known better.
"That's enough onions," he decides. "Now you have to cook them but not brown them. If they go brown it's ruined."
"And what happens then?" Raven asks.
He considers this with total gravity.
"Then we have cereal."
Raven laughs out loud. It is not a polite noise. It comes out of her before she can do anything about it, and Sergei's face does something I have not seen it do — he looks pleased with himself. Not relieved, not careful. Pleased.
"You made a joke," she says.
"It wasn't a joke."
"Kid, that was a joke, and it was a good one, I want it on the record that I laughed."
I stand at the stove with a wooden spoon in my hand and I don’t turn around, because my face is not currently doing what I would want it to do in front of anyone as I fight a smile that reaches my eyes.
The onions go soft. Sergei directs the tomatoes in, and then something from a jar, and then a great deal of pepper, and he tastes it off a spoon with concentration before he pronounces it acceptable.
"Papa. Try it."
I try it.
"That is the best thing I have eaten in a month," I say enthusiastically.
His whole face lights up.
"That’s not true," he challenges.
"It is not," I agree. "But you made it, and I helped, and I have eaten in a great many restaurants where the food was better and I was considerably less pleased to be there. Both things are true. You should learn to hold two true things at once, it is most of what being an adult is."
He thinks about that. Then he grins, and turns away, and starts issuing instructions about plates.
I look up and Raven is leaning against the far counter with her arms folded, watching us, she has been watching us the whole time. Even now, she doesn’t look away.
We stand there for perhaps three seconds with my son between us clattering plates, and I feel the whole thing arrive — not a thought, nothing so orderly.
A physical fact, low down, the way weather arrives.
I am forty years old and I have not been unbalanced by a woman in a room since I was nineteen, and this one is a federal agent with a doctored warrant and six weeks of marks in her file that say she is the most disciplined person I have ever put in my house.
She is standing in my kitchen because I didn’t kill her.
"Plates," Sergei says as he hands them too me.
We eat at the kitchen table rather than the dining room.
It is a bad meal and it takes nearly an hour, because Sergei talks the entire time — about the model he is building, about a book, about a documentary on hydrofoils that he narrates at length and with total confidence — I haven’t heard him produce this many consecutive sentences since he was six years old.
Raven asks him questions. Real ones, the kind that require answers. She is bad at it in a way I find unaccountably interesting; she talks to him like a colleague, gets a fact wrong about hydrofoils and is corrected at length, and takes the correction seriously.
At one point she reaches over and steals a piece of bread off his plate, and when he protests with a ‘hey’ that is both protest and delight, returns the favor by stealing one back off hers.
I watch my son. Four years. Four years of the room going quiet when I enter it, a child who I have kept alive and secret and entirely alone, and it takes eleven days and a woman I caught burglarizing my house to bring back the life in him.
I owe her something for this, I think.
By nine he is fading. He argues about it, which is new. Ultimately he loses, and Raven takes him up to bed.
I stay in the kitchen and wash a pan by hand that could go in the washing machine, because it is something to do with my hands while I think. When she comes back down twenty minutes later I am still standing there with the water running.
"He's out." She stops in the doorway, leaning against the frame.
"Good."
"He wants to make it again tomorrow. With less pepper this time. He was very clear about the pepper."
"There will definitely be less pepper."
She nods. Then moves as if she is about to go and I hear the words fall from my mouth before I’ve fully thought them out.
"Have a drink with me."
She stops. I stand in my kitchen with a wet pan in my hands and understand, several seconds too late, that I didn’t ask her to come to my office to discuss her employment.
"It's about the job," I add. “There’s whiskey in the office.”
"Sure it is," she says, then goes to get the whiskey.