Too late now. Too late to marry him, too late to avenge him.
Too late for everything.
*
AT SOME POINT in the next two weeks, I realized the hand holding out my daily dose of valerian didn’t belong to Lena or one of the nurses. It was a man’s hand instead, tough and olive-skinned, with a sniper’s calluses. “Hello, Kostia,” I rasped, the scratch of my unused voice surprising me. He looked thinner, sunken-eyed, terrible. I looked down into my cup. “I wish it were vodka.”
“I have vodka,” he said, indicating his pack.
I nodded slowly. “Can . . . can we get drunk?”
He looked around. “Not here.”
It was midafternoon, the orderlies and nurses mostly assisting the surgeons, the wounded lying quiet. “How long have I been here?”
“Nine days.”
“The platoon?”
“They need you back.”
I held up my hand. Still shaking. Every day I worked, I tried, and it wouldn’t go away. “I want to be out there,” I whispered. “But I can’t. Not like this. I’ll get you killed.”
Kostia rose. “Let’s get out of here. I borrowed a car.”
“I can’t drive.” Alexei could, and he was very proud of that. But I’d never had cause to learn.
“I’ll drive.”
Kostia drove us fast and loose, rattling out toward the fourth defense sector. I knew where we were going before we were halfway there, and I bit the inside of my cheek savagely when the wall of Crimean limestone with its imposing iron gates loomed before us: the Fraternal Cemetery.
We entered through the southern side, parked, and began to climb on foot toward the ancient, bombed-out church at the crown of the hill. The church had been consecrated in czarist days to Saint Nicholas the Wonderworker, which made me think of Alexei’s angry words. Now it wasn’t a church, it was a ruin. I could have used the blackened, crumbled dome for a sniper’s nest.
At the funeral over a week ago I’d had no eyes for the old graves with their white-and-black-marble stones, much less the new graves marked by nothing more than wooden stars. I took a long, steadying breath as I saw Lyonya’s. It had been painted more carefully than the others, and the inscription was longer, his birth and death and full name inscribed in neat, square letters I recognized. “You did this?” I asked Kostia around the lump in my throat. He nodded, and I traced the lettering with a fingertip. “I wish it could say something about how he could make anyone laugh. Even me.”
“He was my best friend in the world,” Kostia said.
“Tell me.” There was a tree stump beside the grave, wide enough for two. I sat down, pulling Kostia to sit beside me. “I—I want to hear more about him.”
For a long time I didn’t think Kostia would speak. “Boys can be cruel,” he began finally. “Konstantin Andreyvich Shevelyov—everyone knew my father wasn’t Andrei Shevelyov. My mother married him because my father was a hunter out on Lake Baikal, and by the time I was coming, she’d found out he had a wife and family back there, not that he’d ever told her when he came to Irkutsk to sell furs. But the boys all knew my father was mad old Markov out on the lake, and even when I went far away to school in Donetsk, someone found out and they all called my mother a whore and me a bastard.” A breath. “Except Lyonya . . .”
My partner and I sat arm against arm on the stump, and in Kostia’s spare, honed words I saw Lyonya as my partner had first seen him: a broad-shouldered, loose-limbed, golden young athlete, all hockey sticks and poorly graded tests, with a streak of kindness most golden young athletes utterly lacked.
“He was good at making friends,” Kostia concluded quietly. “I never was. But that didn’t matter, because I had him.”