Sometimes she wakes up at night and listens to Lara’s mumbling when she has a bad dream and Sveta’s even breathing on the bed across from hers. If she keeps her eyes open for a few minutes, the contours of things slowly step out of the darkness, like a developing photograph: the doors of the armoire materialize into a grainy image in the corner of the room, and the table covered with oilcloth gathers into a familiar outline next to what she knows is the doorframe. It is three or four in the morning because it is completely dark and silent: all the buses, trolleys, and streetcars are parked for the night in their depots, and the red neon sign for a Georgian restaurant they can’t afford has been switched off since midnight.
This is the time when guilt, a nocturnal predator, crawls out of its lair. She feels guilty for sauntering around Moscow as though she was born here, for singing on the oldest theater stage in the capital as though she were a professional actress. She feels guilty for living so close to Red Square and not wanting to admire the Kremlin wall or the Lenin Mausoleum. She feels guilty for not wanting to go back to Ivanovo.
She feels guilty about Marik. She sees him the way she last saw him, his eyes white with rage, his fingers clasped around the shell. This is the time she knows she could have stopped him. She could have averted his death, but instead, she ran away. This is the time of night when the tape of that day in the woods spins in her mind, the ruthless tape with no stop and no fast-forward button. Could she have asked Marik in a calm, mature voice to hand her the shell? “Give it to me right now,” she hears herself say four years too late, knowing that he would have done what she asked because he would have done anything for her. It seems so simple now, putting herself in control of a split second before everything changed, before everything slid off its base and collapsed.
She lies with her eyes open, wondering if Andrei is as racked with guilt as she is, hoping he is also awake in his house in Ivanovo, staring into the night. Hoping but far from certain, since this is the time of night her hope often turns to doubt. Did Andrei’s face ever darken over Marik’s death? She never heard him lament placing the shell into Marik’s hand. Shouldn’t Andrei have known that what he drove Marik to do was within the realm of danger? Shouldn’t he wake up at least as often as she does, the weight of Marik’s death constricting his chest? The thought takes her places that only emerge late at night, when everyone is asleep, when the layer of everyday life is stripped away and there is nothing, not a glimmer of light, to detract from the darkness. Terrifying places that she is not ready to acknowledge. To escape from them, she thinks of what happened after Marik died.
She saw Marik’s mother only once after the accident in the woods, as Marik’s death was referred to in their family, when her mother, Grandma, and Sasha went to his funeral at the same cemetery where Uncle Sima had been lying for fifteen years. The new section, with a freshly dug grave awaiting Marik’s coffin, was at least a kilometer from Uncle Sima’s; so many had died since then that the cemetery had swollen past its original fence and spilled onto the field leading toward the underbrush that marked the edge of the forest.
As they walked along the alleys of the dead, she thought it was ironic that Marik’s grave would overlook, for all eternity, as Grandma whispered in her under-the-breath prayer, the woods that killed him. Or was it the remnants of the war that killed him? Or was it Andrei, with his goading and mocking? Or maybe—a thought that still stings—what killed him was her abandoning them by the fire, two stubborn boys who wouldn’t budge, two friends who for a moment became blinded by rage and who had no one to shake them back into their own truth. Maybe what killed Marik was her betrayal.
Marik’s mother stood by the open grave, in a black coat and black fur hat, her hands clutching the edge of the coffin above Marik’s head, as if this were her only support, as if without holding on to it, she would lose her balance and fall.
She had been sick, they were told by their substitute teacher after Marik’s funeral, and no one knew when she was going to come back. “She can’t get out of bed,” Sasha heard her mother say to Grandma when she thought Sasha was out of earshot. She couldn’t imagine what kind of illness could shackle Marik’s mother to bed for so long, the same teacher who read the last chapter of Yevgeniy Onegin to them without interruption, forty students rapt and silent, impatient to hear if Tatyana would leave her old husband to be with the man she had loved her whole life.
Then, one day, a month later, Marik’s mother got out of bed and made her way to where the river settled into a small lake, a little dirt beach for sunbathing and swimming in the summer. It was the end of April, and no one understood how it could have happened that she found herself in the water. No one understood how the placid Uvod’ River, even at its April fullest, could have turned into a stormy sea and drawn someone to its pebbly bottom.