8. Lev
Lev
“He’s asking to walk her down.”
Danil says it at the church door with his hand still on the wood. Behind him, the incense is already rolling out into Brighton Beach like weather.
“Gavril asked you?”
“Gavril asked me because he’s afraid to ask you.” Danil doesn’t move his hand. “He’s in the second row. He’s been crying since eight forty.”
“Since eight forty.”
“Steadily. Like a tap somebody left running.”
I go past him into the nave. Four hundred candles going, ninety people, half of them have killed somebody and the other half paid to have it done.
The iconostasis takes the whole east wall, gold on gold, Christ Pantocrator up there looking down on a congregation that would strip Him for parts.
My father’s money paid for the roof over this building thirty years ago, out of a dead man’s envelopes, and nobody under it today knows that except me and the priest, who has the sense to leave it alone.
Gavril’s in the second row. The suit’s new, so somebody either bought it for him out of pity or he was gambling again. I’ll find out which. He turns when he sees me coming, and his face does the whole show: wet eyes, working mouth, hands out.
“Lev. Levushka. My son now, eh? My boy.”
“Sit down.”
“I only want to give her my arm.” He gets a hand on my sleeve, and it’s shaking. The shake’s real, which is the actual offensive part. “It’s a father’s right. She’ll want it. She’s my whole heart, that girl.”
I take his hand off my sleeve by the wrist and set it in his lap. “Sit down. Cry where she can see you. That’s your one job today, and you’ve been at it since eight forty, so you’re ahead of schedule.”
He sits. He’s still going when I take my place at the front, and men are watching him do it, but neither of them has any compassion for the man who sold his daughter and wants credit for missing her.
Yefim’s front row on the aisle, cane hooked over the pew.
He got here at seven to make sure of the seat.
Behind him, four rows of the ones who stood up in the restaurant, then the men who’d sell me out for a good enough number, then the ones who’d do it free.
Krutov isn’t here. He wasn’t invited, and he’ll have the guest list by two this afternoon, because some men in this church will sell it to him.
The doors open. The whole building turns.
She comes in white, and she comes in alone.
Gavril’s already half out of the second row with his arm out, but she goes straight past him. Her head doesn’t turn. Her hands are on the yellow rims, she pushes herself down forty feet of stone in front of ninety people, and her father’s arm hangs there in the aisle with nothing in it.
He sits back down. Somebody in the third row makes a noise like a laugh and swallows it.
My heart knocks once against the ribs, hard, out of rhythm.
The honey hair’s down. Not braided, not up, all of it to her waist, with a rope of white flowers through it. The dress falls right when she’s sitting, and the freckles are out across her nose because she’s been on the terrace every afternoon this week purely out of spite.
Forty feet takes twenty seconds. Nobody breathes for any of it.
She stops beside me, locks her brakes.
“You’re staring,” she says low.
“I’m the groom. It’s in the job description.”
“You look like a man attending his own arraignment.”
“You look like a woman who stole flowers.”
“Off the arrangement in the vestibule. Nobody was using them.” Her chin comes up. “They were sitting there being decorative, and I have needs.”
The priest starts. Full Slavonic, the long service, because I asked for every minute of it. A wedding nobody can question is a wedding that runs long enough to bore the room, and a bored witness has no story to sell. The candles come out. The rings go on the gospel book.
Then he calls us to stand for the vows.
There’s a chair set for her. I had the deacon place it, arranged the whole thing so nobody in this building could say the bride sat through her own vows, so it would read as accommodation and not weakness. She catches my eye before I open my mouth.
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You were about to make a decision for me.”
Yefim’s cane comes over the rail.
He does it without a sound, leaning out of his pew, cane held crosswise in both hands, brass head toward her, staring straight ahead at the icons as if his arms belonged to another man. Fifty years since he carried her mother on his shoulders. This is how he honors her.
She takes it. She doesn’t thank him, and he doesn’t want it anyway. The two of them handle it like people who’ve done business before.
She sets the cane, plants her right hand on it, gets her left on the arm of her chair, and stands.
The whole thing comes up through her shoulders. I’ve watched men take a beating with less in their face, and her mouth stays shut, breath in through the nose, out through the nose. Her knuckles go white on the brass. There’s a muscle jumping in her jaw.
Nobody helps her. Nobody in this church would dare.
Then she’s up, still a head and a half under me, sweat already at her hairline, and she turns her face up.
“Well? Get on with it, they’re not paying by the hour.”
The priest gets on with it.
The vows go back and forth in two languages. She says hers in English, then the last three words in Russian, and the accent’s a catastrophe. Yefim closes his eyes. Her mother’s blood coming out of her mouth in a language she never got taught.
She starts shaking in the third minute. It begins in the leg and works up. Her breathing changes and nothing else about her does, no wince, no sound, she just starts paying and doesn’t tell one person in this building the price.
Four minutes. Five. The crowns go up over our heads, gold, held by Danil and Yefim’s nephew, and we go three times around the analogion.
I take her weight without making it obvious, my hand under her elbow, her arm gone hard as rebar.
She isn’t leaning on me. She’s letting me be there.
There’s a canyon between those two, and she’d carve it into stone if she had a chisel.
“Almost done,” I tell her.
“Don’t you dare coach me.”
The priest says the words that make her mine on paper and in front of God and in front of ninety men who’ll carry it across two countries by tonight. Then he tells me to kiss my wife.
It’s procedure. Four hundred candles, ninety witnesses, theater to close a contract. I put my hand under her jaw to bring her face up, because she’s standing on a borrowed cane and I won’t make her reach.
Her mouth opens under mine.
The church goes out.
She’s got a fist in my shirt at the sternum, right over the pocket where her photograph rode for six days, and she pulls, and I go down into it.
She kisses the same as she argues. There’s no give anywhere in her.
Her teeth catch my bottom lip, and she doesn’t apologize, and I’ve got one hand under her jaw, the other spread flat across her back over the scar, and she makes a sound into my mouth I’ll be hearing at four in the morning for the rest of my life.
Her leg goes.
I’ve got her before she knows it’s going, all of her against my chest, my forearm locked under her ribs.
She’s breathing on my throat, hot, her fist still in my shirt.
Her mouth’s an inch off mine. Her eyes come open, and they’re her mother’s, blue, wide, wrecked, and for one full second neither of us does a useful thing.
Then we let go like the other one’s on fire.
She gets the cane under her. I take my hands off her, all of them, in front of everyone, and stand there with my palms empty like a man who’s dropped a glass.
The church roars. Ninety people up at once, the old ones hammering the pews, Yefim on his feet without his cane because it’s still in my wife’s hand, Danil holding a gold crown over nothing at all because he’s forgotten what his arms are for.
Vasilisa sits down. On her own terms, chair under her, lowering herself with the cane and one arm and no help, and she hands Yefim his cane back over the rail.
Her chest is going. Her mouth is red and swollen, and her hand’s flat on her own thigh, pressing, hard, the same as she did in her living room the night I told her she’d be marrying me.
“Your lip’s bleeding,” she says.
“You bit it.”
“Divorce me.”
The priest brings us around to face them. I put my hand on her push handle without touching it, an inch off, because I was told that touching those handles gets a man’s foot flattened, and I believed it.
Ninety men and women who were carving up a dead man’s kingdom, on their feet now for a first-grade teacher from Brooklyn with stolen flowers in her hair.
Nineteen years I’ve worked toward this minute in this building. My father’s roof over my head, his watch stopped on my wrist, the Filatov line breathing beside me in white with my ring on it.
She turns her face up. There’s a flower coming loose over her ear.
“Congratulations,” she says, quiet, for me only. “You just married the biggest mistake of your life.”