34. Sergei
SERGEI
Iam fifty-five years old and I have started painting a nursery, and I do the arithmetic of how old I will be at every milestone, and then I pick up the brush again anyway.
I cannot stop the arithmetic. It runs underneath everything now, a second clock I did not ask for.
I will be fifty-six when the child is born.
I will be sixty-one at the first day of school, a silver man at a gate full of fathers half my age, and I have already decided I do not care what they make of me, that I will be the oldest and the most dangerous and by a wide margin the most grateful man on that sidewalk.
I will be seventy-three at a graduation, if I am careful and the past stays in its grave and my heart keeps its strange decision to go on beating.
I will, almost certainly, not meet the people she will love most, will not be the old man dozing through their wedding, will not be a name their own children are told stories about by someone who actually remembers me.
I have run the numbers from every angle.
It comes out the same way each time, which is short.
And then I pick up the brush again, because a man who only counts the years he will not get is a man wasting the years he has.
That is the sum of what late fatherhood is, I am learning.
It is gratitude and grief braided so tightly you cannot find the seam.
Every time I imagine her first word I also imagine the math of how few of them I will hear, and the two feelings do not cancel.
They sharpen each other. The grief makes the gratitude unbearable, in the good way, the way a thing is unbearable because it is too much and not because it is too little.
I spent eight years certain my life had already been spent.
I am spending what is left of it learning that I was, gloriously, wrong.
Claire caught me at the counting once, in the dark, doing it under my breath without meaning to, the sixty-one and the seventy-three and the long quiet subtraction at the end.
She did not tell me to stop, because she is too honest to hand me a comfort that is a lie.
She rolled over and laid her hand flat on my chest, over the heart that has made its strange decision to keep going, and she said, “Then we had better not waste a single one of the years we do get being afraid of the ones we will not.” And then, in the particular steady voice she keeps for being brave on my behalf, she gave me back my own thieving lesson with the price tag still on it.
“You do not get to know how long, Sergei. Only who, and how well. Those were your terms. You are going to have to learn to live by them now, the same as the rest of us.” I have been a great many men's teacher.
I had never, until this woman, been anyone's student, and I find that I should have started decades ago.
The family has resolved to be insufferable about all of it, which is how I know we have healed.
Anya has appointed herself the head of Claire's personal security, a post Claire did not request and cannot escape.
My daughter, who spent a summer measuring this woman as a liability against my life, now telephones her twice a day to confirm she is resting, eating, and not lifting anything, and has informed the family, the cousins, and as far as I can tell the city itself that any inconvenience to Claire will be treated as a personal matter.
I watched her bring Claire a cushion the other day with the grim efficiency of a woman fortifying a position.
I said nothing. You do not interrupt Anya when she has finally decided to love someone.
You simply get out of the blast radius and feel your chest go tight with something you have no intention of letting her see.
Misha is worse, in his way, because Misha is quiet about it.
He came to the house and found me in the garden and stood with me a while in the manner of a man who has something to say and would rather have a tooth pulled, and then he said it.
“I spent my whole life waiting to meet you,” he said.
“The man under the name. I met him in a warehouse, which is not where I would have chosen. But I have him now, and he is going to be a father again, and I find I am not too old to want that for him. That is all.” And he went back to studying the roses as though he had not just handed me the better half of thirty years I thought I had lost with him.
They argue now, the two of them, the way siblings argue when the thing underneath the argument is happiness. The current war is over what, precisely, the new child will be to Lev.
“The baby is his aunt or his uncle,” Anya said, with the certainty she brings to everything. “Grandfather's child is the parent's sibling. It is not complicated.”
“It is deeply complicated,” Misha said. “Lev is five. The baby will be his uncle and also younger than him by five years. He will be able to put his own uncle in a high chair. The child will be outranked by its own nephew at every birthday party for a decade. There has to be a word for that.”
“The word is family,” I said, from the doorway, but no one was listening to me, which is its own kind of homecoming.
Misha actually drew a diagram to settle it.
He sat at my kitchen table with a pen and a sheet of paper and built a family tree with arrows and dates and small furious annotations, and when he turned it around to prove his point it looked less like a record of a household and more, in my professional opinion, like a hostage negotiation diagram.
There were boxes connected by lines that seemed to imply demands.
Lev studied it with great seriousness, having been brought in as the affected party, and announced that he did not care about the word as long as he was allowed to be in charge of the baby, and Anya told him absolutely not, and Lev appealed to me, and I gave him the only ruling a grandfather can give, which is that we would discuss it after the baby had an opinion of its own.
He has a gap in his smile now where the tooth came out, the one he negotiated with me over the phone in the middle of the worst night of my life. I gave him his two dollars. I would have given him the house.
Under all of the noise, I made the quietest and largest decision of my life, and I made it alone, in the gray spare room, before I told anyone.
I am going to retire. Truly, this time. Completely.
Five years ago I handed back the work and kept the standing, because a man in my family does not stop being a Volkov, he simply stops being asked to prove it, and I told myself the difference between the two was retirement.
It was not. It was a longer leash. There were still threads in my hand, still calls I would take, still a weight the city assigned to my name whether I lifted anything with it or not, and I let it stay because letting it go felt like dying a particular kind of death.
I am cutting the threads. All of them. I have already begun the conversations, with the cousins, with the men who answer to the blood, the careful conversations a man has when he is stepping all the way out of a thing that does not, as a rule, permit it.
I am owed enough fear, after a lifetime of earning it, to be allowed to spend the last of it buying my own way to nothing.
I will be no one. A retired importer with a garden and a wife and a child and a bookshop he is not allowed to reorganize.
It is the most dangerous thing I have ever tried to become, and I want it more than I have wanted anything since the rain.
The cousins did not like it. A man does not simply walk out of the blood.
The blood is meant to be the one thing you never retire from, and a Volkov asking to become nothing makes the family nervous in a way that has, more than once, proved fatal to whoever did the asking.
But I have spent thirty years making myself the single most expensive man in this city to cross, and I have found a use for it I had not planned.
I sat across a table from the head of it, my own cousin, blood of my blood, and I told him plainly what I intended and exactly what it would cost any man who tried to prevent it, and I watched him do the arithmetic.
The soft one who had walked into a warehouse alone and walked back out was not, he concluded, a thing you spend lives to test. He let me go.
At the very end he looked almost glad of it, and I understood that we are not, after all, only the worst of what our fathers made of us.
Some of us are given the chance to learn it before we die.
Because here is the thing I understood, standing in that room with a paint chip in my hand, the thing my entire arc was apparently for.
My father raised me in a house where softness was beaten thin. I am going to raise this child in a house where softness is the whole architecture, and that, not the name, will be my legacy.
He gave me a name and a debt and a long cold lesson that the tender part of a person is a wound to be cauterized, and I spent fifty years proving him right with my own hands.
He is going to lose, finally, in a house he never saw, decades after his death, because his granddaughter is going to grow up never once doubting that the softest thing about her is the strongest, because her father is going to teach her that on purpose, having learned it the hardest possible way, having had to be unmade by a woman and a war and a sofa through a fence before he could even begin.
The cycle ends here. Not because Yuri is gone.
Because I decided it would, in a gray room, with a brush in my hand.
I remember the day my father broke me of crying.
I will not write what he did. I will only say that I was younger than Lev is now, and that it worked, and that I did not weep again for the better part of half a century, until a woman handed me a small word on a safe-house floor.
I am going to remember that day every time my child cries, and I am going to do the exact opposite of it, deliberately, every single time, and that opposite is the entire content of my revenge on him.
He set out to raise a son who could not be hurt, and he succeeded, and it cost me everything I might have been, and his line is going to fill up with softness anyway, generations of it spilling out of the very wound he made, and he is dead, and cannot stop a single drop of it, and I am not.
And there is one more thing I am going to do, the thing I have been turning over since the safe-house floor, and it is the opposite of everything my life taught me, which is how I know it is right.
I am going to ask her in the daylight. In the open, in front of people, with a ring I have already, God help me, begun to choose, like an ordinary lovestruck fool with nothing to hide.
I have spent a lifetime conducting the important things in the dark, the deals and the threats and even, at the start, the loving of her.
I am finished with the dark. I am going to stand up in the light where anyone can see, and I am going to ask Claire Donovan to marry a fifty-five-year-old retired criminal with a garden and a bad heart for arithmetic, and I am going to mean it so loudly that the whole gray careful life I lived before her will not be able to hear itself think.
But first, the room.
It has been gray for eight years. When Vera died the color went out of the entire house, not all at once but the way it goes out of a sky, and this room went grayest of all, because it was the one room we never gave a purpose, the one that was always going to be for the thing we kept saying we had time to decide.
We did not have time. I learned that lesson permanently and I let it stand as a small flat monument to it, a door I kept shut, a square of nothing I walked past every night on my way to bed.
That afternoon I opened the door, and I carried in the cans and the brushes and the drop cloths I had bought without quite admitting to myself what they were for, and I pried the lid off a color Claire had chosen, a warm pale yellow, the exact yellow, I realized only when I saw it on the wall, of the wool Dottie had been knitting since before any of us were allowed to know.
And I, who have measured my life in what I could prune back and keep small and keep safe, who have spent my whole life being very good at endings, dipped the brush, and put the first stroke of a beginning on the wall of a room that had stood gray since the year she died, and I did not stop until the gray was gone.