Chapter 14

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Yura, my little glass bead.

Yuri’s mother had called him by so many pet names that, as a child, he sometimes found himself confused about what his real name was.

There had been a time when the Kiselyov family was happy. It was not the grand, materially comfortable happiness people usually boasted of, but it gave them enough gratitude to endure one more day. They were happy because they had a family they loved. No matter how harsh or exhausting the world outside became, his mother’s gentle welcome always gave them the strength to carry on.

Looking back, Yuri knew his family had not been unhappy from the beginning. When Katya and Vasya exchanged their vows, they dreamed, like any newly married couple, of building a home of their own. Their marriage began during Gorbachev’s reforms, and the two young people, who had always lived quietly and performed whatever work was placed before them, suddenly found themselves swept into the current of history.

A coup rose and collapsed, and while they struggled through the chaos, a new world arrived. It was a cruel reality for people like Katya and Vasya, who had lived honestly and worked hard. Rations disappeared, and the money they possessed could buy almost nothing. Even if they emptied their meager savings, prices had climbed several hundredfold, leaving them able to afford only a few kilograms of sausage and some bread.

Those who had nothing took to the streets to sell themselves, while smugglers and a privileged few seized the country’s wealth. Katya and Vasya saw no future there. They were fortunate if they ate once a day, and even the simplest necessities depended on personal connections.

Then Katya conceived a precious new life.

For his wife’s sake, Vasily knew they could not continue living there. Only two days earlier, he had watched a drunken vagrant seize and harass a woman. Rumors spread that the neighborhood orphanage overflowed with abandoned children and that an infant had frozen to death. Vasily could not bear the thought of spending every night wondering whether some horror had befallen his wife.

That was not all. Every few days brought bitter news that someone in the neighborhood, unable to endure the hopelessness ahead, had taken their own life. Reports also multiplied of new criminal organizations preying on the desperate. Convinced that nothing resembling hope remained on that land, Vasily decided to leave the country.

For Katya. For their child. So he could become a good father.

For months, the two of them agonized over where to go. They gathered what money and information they could, trying to choose the place that would offer their child the best future. They heard that many people were leaving for America. Rumor claimed that people there could earn according to how hard they worked and live as they pleased. Someone among the neighbors who had already emigrated had supposedly even bought a house.

Katya held Vasya’s hand and told him they should go. Instead of waiting years for their turn at a better life, she delighted in the idea that they might work hard, buy a car, and someday own a house with flowers in the backyard, where they could make jam with their child. The black-haired woman smiled so brightly that her white teeth showed, and Vasya swore upon his soul that he would do anything for her.

Vasily raised the money even though his father struck him for the decision. Katya’s parents opposed her leaving, so he had to arrange everything through his own efforts. They preserved the money Katya had saved from her nursing work as settlement funds. After spending nearly everything else they owned on the journey, the two of them finally arrived in America.

There, Vasily met Mikhail, Alexei’s father. Mikhail and his wife, Nina, were a few years older and had crossed over before the Soviet Union collapsed, acquiring forged identities along the way. Because they had arrived earlier, they knew where immigrants could find work. Through Mikhail, Vasily secured a position at a butcher shop.

By chance, Nina had only recently given birth. Katya, whose own due date was approaching, quickly grew close to a woman raising a child of nearly the same age, and the two families became friends. For a while, everything seemed to be going well. In a foreign land, they had found companions from home, and Mikhail, being older, guided Vasily like an elder brother.

Perhaps, they thought, they really could settle in New York. They could buy ordinary groceries with ordinary money, build an ordinary home, and live well.

“Have you chosen a name, Katya?”

“I’m still thinking. I don’t know what my little jewel would like.”

“You shouldn’t give a child too special a name. God might notice them, and then they may not live long.”

On the day Katya chose Yuri’s name, she and Nina sat on the front steps of the small two-story house they rented in Brooklyn. Katya and Vasily occupied the first floor, while Nina and Mikhail lived above them, so the two women often lingered on the stairs to talk. The house stood close to the street, hemmed in by a steady flow of pedestrians, with no space for anything resembling a garden.

Watching Alexei giggle in Nina’s arms, Katya considered her friend’s warning in silence. She gazed absently toward the street for a while, then suddenly clapped her hands as inspiration struck.

“I’ll name the child Yuri. Vasya’s family were farmers once.”

“Oh, my. Then you’re certain it’s a boy?”

“It doesn’t matter whether the baby is a daughter or a son. In America, names aren’t divided so strictly.” Katya smiled and rested a careful hand over the curve of her belly. “If it’s a daughter, I’ll raise her to be strong so no one can treat her carelessly. If it’s a son, I’ll raise him to be gentle so he can be kind to everyone.”

Nina found the idea unusual, but she did not argue. She wanted only to bless the woman who would soon give birth.

The child moved from time to time, but he never kicked hard enough to cause a commotion. Katya later told Yuri that he had been an exceptionally good baby. She claimed she had barely suffered from morning sickness, that he had come into the world quickly without tormenting her, and that he had been as quiet and gentle after birth as he had been in her womb.

“Yuri, you will be the seed that leads us into a new life on this land.”

That evening, Yekaterina shared the name with Vasily when he returned from work. The soon-to-be father beamed with radiant joy at the name his wife had chosen. Bending at the waist, he kissed her belly and spoke silently to the child waiting to be born.

For you and your mother, this father will do anything.

Several months later, the state government began cracking down on undocumented immigrants. Under Igor Volkov’s guidance, the migrants clustered around Brooklyn left together for Saratov. Those who had owed Igor money since entering America followed him out of fear of deportation, and once isolated in Saratov, they became his slaves, shackled by debts they could never repay. Vasily, who had found work at Igor’s butcher shop through Mikhail, became entangled in illegal money as well.

Igor warned that if Vasily exposed the truth, the authorities would treat him as a criminal. Absurdly, Vasily entered a criminal’s service because he feared becoming one. People with something precious to protect were easily trapped. He was diligent but not clever, and so he stepped onto the wrong path. Mikhail did the same.

The world treated a lack of cleverness as a sin, and in practice, it was one.

A person guided solely by conscience might have risked everything and fled, but Vasily could not. He now had a newborn son and a wife still recovering from childbirth, and he believed it his duty to keep them alive at any cost. He honored the private promise he had made to his child, sustaining their lives by staining his hands not with the blood of animals, but with the blood of men. To preserve what little conscience remained to him, he refused work that targeted ordinary people.

From then on, Vasily became Igor’s hunting dog.

He fought criminals from rival organizations that threatened Igor’s interests. Whenever he returned wounded, Katya concealed her reddened eyes beneath the room’s shadows and treated him with the skill and knowledge she had gained as a nurse.

Around that time, Yekaterina began tending to other wounded people as well. Hoping to atone for her husband’s sins in his place, she nursed the poor who could not afford care. Whenever someone was hurt because of Igor, she visited their home late at night and treated them. In that small city, which did not possess even a private clinic, Katya became the only person willing to heal anyone without asking questions.

Whenever one corner of the world brightened, darkness deepened somewhere else. Saratov was a neighborhood built beneath that shadow, and as the darkness spread, Katya grew busier.

On nights when Yuri was left alone with only moonlight shining through the shabby windowpanes, Katya made medovik and left it on the table for him. Before pulling on her fur hat and leaving, she would embrace the son who had come to see her off, kiss the crown of his head, and whisper, “If we strive to live rightly, God will save us, my little jewel.”

His mother’s embrace always carried the honeyed scent of the medovik she had baked.

“Sleep well, Yura.”

Breathing in that sweet fragrance, which seemed capable of dissolving every worry, Yuri believed her. He believed God would someday wash the sorrow from his parents’ faces.

There had been nights when Yuri prayed, then prayed again.

Although Yuri rarely slept easily, he almost never dreamed. Whenever Alexei complained about a nightmare, Yuri listened with a quiet smile and learned what dreams felt like through his friend’s descriptions instead.

Alexei’s nightmares were usually happy. In one, he reconciled with Valeri, the younger brother who hated him so fiercely, and the two of them made Napoleon cake together. In another, the police arrested Igor, and the bastard died exactly as he deserved.

Those dreams did not sound bad to Yuri. When he asked why they left Alexei feeling so miserable, Alexei would light a cigarette and offer the same simple answer.

“Because waking up afterward is unbearable.”

He was right. Yuri stopped asking about Alexei’s dreams, and Alexei stopped giving voice to the future he wanted. That was how they supported each other, not by reciting empty hopes, but by understanding the reality before them and helping each other survive it.

Yuri had no desire to explain his life to anyone who was not Alexei. In the end, he knew everyone else would see him as nothing more than a sinner.