23. Vasilisa
Vasilisa
“If it goes wrong in there, I want you to know that my last thought is going to be about the fact that Kevin still can’t spell Wednesday.”
I say it to Poppy on the phone from the back of the car with an hour of the Hutchinson River Parkway still to run, and she doesn’t laugh, which is how I know she’s been crying, which is how I know she’s read exactly as much of this situation as I let her have and drawn the right conclusions from it anyway.
“That is the least reassuring thing you have ever said to me, Vasilisa, and I once watched you tell a kid a bee sting was a compliment.”
“It is a compliment. Bees are choosy.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t do the thing.” She blows her nose somewhere in Bay Ridge. “You come back, and I’ll take your bus duty for a month.”
“Two months.”
“One month and I’ll do Sir Nibbles’s cage.”
“Deal. Poppy?”
“Yeah?”
“If somebody has to call somebody, it’ll be Danil, and he’ll do it in person, and he won’t do the voice. He’ll just say it. That’s a mercy, so don’t take his head off for it.”
She hangs up on me, which in Poppy’s language is love.
Lev’s beside me with the shoebox on his knees and a black tie done in a knot I watched him tie four times this morning before it satisfied him, and he hasn’t said sixty words since the bridge.
Three weeks of him building a room around a yes he never once said out loud.
Three weeks of Natasha moving from no to absolutely not to a written list of the seven ways this would end badly, and then, last Thursday, after I did twenty-two steps and threw up in her clinic sink, a very long silence and one sentence: bring the cane, sit down the second the leg talks to you, and I want it on record that I said maybe and not yes.
Twenty-two steps. The gap from the doors to the head of that table is thirty, by Danil’s pacing.
“You’ve checked the cane twice,” Lev says.
“I’ve checked the cane four times, you’ve only caught two.” I’ve got it across my lap, Yefim’s, the brass head gone smooth on one side from fifty years of a bad hip, and he pressed it on me on Tuesday in his kitchen and refused every objection in two languages. “He’s going to want it back.”
“He’s going to want to be in the room when you hand it back.”
The estate comes up out of the trees like something that lost a war.
Stone, forty rooms, a gate with a man on either side, and the driveway packed with black cars the whole quarter mile.
Ustin Filatov bought it in 1994 and shut himself in it for thirty years.
My mother was nineteen when she went out a window of it in the middle of the night with a suitcase and a boy waiting on the road.
I’ve spent my whole life building her out of four objects, and here’s the fifth, and it’s a fortress.
She ran from this. I keep it with me as I go up the drive.
The great hall is a room built to make men feel small and full of men who came anyway.
Two hundred at least, dark suits and old faces, ink up throats, three chandeliers going and a fire in a hearth I could park my car in.
The table runs the length of it. At the far end, under a window with the light behind him, stands Semyon Krutov in a gray suit and a cardigan under it, silver hair combed back, holding a glass and telling a story that has nine men laughing on cue.
The doors close behind us, and the room turns.
Danil sets my brakes. My hair’s down. I’m in oxblood because I know what it does to a room, and because it’s the dress I wore the night forty murderers stood up and gave me my mother back, and I want the ones who were there to feel the date on it.
Lev doesn’t touch the handles. He never has, not once, not since a hallway in December when I told him what happens to men who do.
“Thirty feet,” he says at my shoulder.
“I can count, I teach counting.”
“Vasilisa.” He’s got his hand out where I can see it but nowhere near me. “You go down, I’m picking you up in front of all of them, and you can be angry about it in the car.”
“You go anywhere near me before I’m sat down and I’ll bite you in a room full of your own captains.”
“Understood,” he says, and there’s a millimeter at the corner of his mouth that nobody in this hall gets to see but me.
I set the cane. I get my right hand on the brass and my left on the arm of the chair, and I stand up out of it in one piece in front of two hundred people.
Nobody in this room makes a sound.
The first step is the worst one, it’s always the worst one, and today it’s worse than that, because the floor is marble and marble takes nothing back.
The pain arrives on schedule, the wire pulled hot out of the fused place, and I breathe into it instead of away, because the pain is my body sending word that it’s still here and still mine and still in this.
Four steps. Five. There’s a rushing in my ears that isn’t fear.
At six, a chair scrapes.
It’s Yefim, front of the table, first on the left, hauling himself up off a hip made of gravel with both hands on the wood, and once he’s up the man next to him goes, and then three more down the row, and then it’s a wave rolling away from me down two hundred feet of table, chairs going back, men rising, the ones with stars on their knuckles and the ones who came to bury me.
The noise of it goes up into the chandeliers.
Ten steps. My right leg comes through late, and the cane takes what the leg won’t. Yefim’s fifty-year groove in the brass fits my palm like it was waiting.
I don’t look at the men. I look at the chair at the head of the table, green leather, brass caps on the arms, empty.
I keep it in my eye the whole way, and I understand somewhere around fifteen that I’m not walking toward my grandfather at all.
I’m walking the last thirty feet of a distance my mother started at nineteen out a bedroom window, and I’m doing it in the opposite direction, on my feet, in her face, with her name in my mouth.
Twenty-two. The number where I threw up in Natasha’s sink.
Twenty-three, and the leg is a strut with nothing in it. My whole spine is one live coal, and my hand on the brass has gone white to the bone.
At twenty-eight, Krutov starts clapping.
He does it grandfatherly, slow, warm, standing at the head of the table in his cardigan with his glass down.
Half the room takes it as permission, and the applause comes up around me like weather.
He’s beaming. Ten years of tidy funerals and a truck on Vandeveer and a gray van in a bus lane, and the man is applauding my legs.
I get to thirty. Danil has the chair behind me, and I lower into it on my own arms. My hands do not shake, my hands lie like professionals, and I set Yefim’s cane across my knees and take the whole room in with the smile I use on a parent who’s just told me their child would never.
“Semyon Ivanovich,” I say. “Don’t stop on my account. You were doing so well.”
“Vasilisa Gavrilovna.” He comes around the table with both hands out. “Or is it Filatova today? I’ve heard it argued in three restaurants this month.”
“It’s whatever my mother would say it is, and she isn’t here to ask, which I understand was a whole project of yours.”
Two hundred men hear it. Nobody breathes.
Krutov laughs, delighted, monstrous, and turns it out to the room like we’re doing a bit together.
“She’s funny. I told you, Lev, didn’t I tell you?
The funny ones are never boring.” He picks his glass back up.
“But we have business, and business is dull, and there’s an order to it.
Yefim Pavlovich, you’re the oldest man in this house. Open it properly.”
Yefim doesn’t open anything. He stays on his feet with his hands on the table.
“There’s a Filatov in the room,” he says. “Nobody’s confirming anybody today until this house hears her.”
The noise that goes around the hall isn’t agreement, and it isn’t refusal; it’s two hundred men working out very fast who they came in with.
Down the left side, the old ones are still standing and haven’t sat since I passed them.
Down the right there are eleven, twelve, fifteen men who haven’t stood at all.
Lev takes one step and puts himself at my right shoulder. He doesn’t say a word, because a man who says little at a table like this gets reported as dangerous, and because he told me in a car in December that dangerous is cheaper than liked.
“Of course we hear her,” Krutov says. “God forbid. She’s Milyena’s girl, may that woman rest. Let’s hear her.
” He sets the glass down on the table with a small click that carries.
“Although I’ll say this to the room first, because someone has to be the adult.
Sentiment is a beautiful thing. It is not a succession.
This organization has buried a great many people it was sentimental about. ”
“That’s true,” I say. “You’ve done a lot of the digging.”
“Nine funerals,” Yefim says from down the table, and his voice does something I’ve never heard in it. “I carried four of them.”
I put my hand into the front of my dress, and I take out the page.
Ruled paper gone the color of weak tea, small dead handwriting, a column of numbers down the right.
I hold it up between two fingers so the whole room can see its shape.
Semyon Krutov’s face does not move one millimeter, which is how I know he knows exactly which page it is, because a man with a clear conscience asks what you’re holding.
“Grigori Sudets kept your books for twelve years,” I say.
“He’s got beautiful handwriting. Very small.
Would anybody in this house like to hear what my father was paid for my mother’s name ten years ago in March, and then what a man in Ozone Park was paid the spring my car went off Vandeveer Place? ”
The room goes off like a struck pan, two hundred voices at once, and Krutov lifts one hand, but it isn’t for quiet.
It’s for the doors.
They come open at both ends of the hall at the same moment, which nobody does by accident, and the men who come through them aren’t guests.
They’re the estate’s own, the house security, twelve of them in gray, the men who’ve kept this building for months since my grandfather died with no heir.
I understand in the length of one breath that they’ve been Krutov’s since the day of the funeral and that we walked through his gate, up his drive, and into his house.
“Lock it,” Krutov says, pleasant as a man ordering coffee. “Nobody leaves. The lady’s had a long walk, let her sit.”
Lev’s hand comes down flat on the table beside me, and that’s all, but it’s the loudest thing in the room.
“You’re in a house full of witnesses,” he says.
“I’m in my house, in front of my men, with a woman who’s just accused me of nine murders.
” Krutov’s smile doesn’t move at all now, and the grandfather goes out of him like a coat coming off.
“You brought her here to hand her the chair. In front of everyone. Do you have any idea, boy, what I’ve spent ten years on, so that some Brighton club owner could roll a schoolteacher through my door on a Sunday? ”
“Eleven murders,” I say. “You’re forgetting Ruslan Zavgorodny and Dennis Kilroy, and one of those was your own man, so you should really keep better track.”
“Take her,” Krutov says.
Yefim’s nephew, four seats down, comes up with a pistol out from under the table, and one of the gray men shoots him where he stands, and then, the entire hall detonates.
Two hundred men go for the floor and the tables and each other, chandeliers coming apart overhead, glass in the air, the fire roaring in that enormous hearth.
Lev has one hand under my arm and is dragging my chair back off the table with the other, both of us moving toward the wall, and then the gray suits close between us in a line four deep.
He’s on one side of them, and I’m on the other, and I hear him say my name in a voice I have never heard out of that man in my life.