Vitali left, and I patiently waited for Maxim to get ready for school. He was grown enough to walk there on his own, but Mama wouldn’t have it. It was up to me to uphold those rules while she was gone.
Besides, it was a new school in an unfamiliar neighborhood. I needed to learn the routes as much as Maxim.
It snowed the day before, and everything otherwise gray and lifeless took on a fairytale glamour as it waited to be dirtied by cars and people’s boots. Walking through the park was much more pleasant than along the busy roads at our old apartment—
Old apartment. Not home, but‘old apartment.’ It hadn’t taken me long to accept the new district and the luxury of having working electricity.
When I hugged Maxim goodbye, I saw the dark figure leaning up against a divider wall in the distance. Roman wasn’t following me anymore; now, he watched over my brother. I still hadn’t met Roman, but I bitterly thought that maybe it wouldsave me time if he just took my brother to school. It was on his way to work, technically speaking.
There were still a few things of Mama’s to unpack, and the floors needed scrubbing before she came home. I spent a couple of hours crawling around the apartment and catching up on all the cleaning I’d neglected to do, and then braced myself for the three boxes and two suitcases of shoulder pads and fake-pearl sewn dresses. The bedrooms were bigger than our old ones, but not by much, and I had to find somewhere to put away the bulky bags.
Most Soviet-built apartments had very little room for storage. The main available space was integrated into the ceiling in the entrance hallway and could be accessed via a cabinet-like door facing the kitchen. One could only reach it with a chair or ladder, and up to that point, I avoided climbing up there—mostly because it was a pain in the butt.
But the hour had come.
The door hadn’t been used for a long time, and by then, someone painted over the whole thing more than once, including the latch. I got a kitchen knife and dug at it for a good five minutes before I could make it budge.
The cracks in the paint resisted my prying as long as they could, but in the end, I’d won my war against the simple architectural feature. And wished I hadn’t.
There was no room for the suitcases, because the entirety of the space was crammed with guns.
“Oh…” I breathed.
They were large—like the ‘fun’ ones we never got to shoot—and stacks of ammo, and bulky items further back that I couldn’t quite make out.
No wonder the apartment was ready for us so quickly—thiswas a God-damned cache house.
I had the cellphone in my hand and the shaking address book in the other before the latch fell closed. Tohrenwith not calling Vitali unless I had to.
It rang.
He didn’t answer.
I dialed again.
“Katya.”
“What are they doing here!” I tried not to yell, but I yelled. “Vitali!”
“Katya, now is not a good time.” Calm. Like I should be.
“What if Mama had found them? God save him—what if Maxim did?”
“Katya.”
My next words were just frustrated growls, and I could tell he pressed his palm over the speaker on the other end with muffled voices briefly discussing my interruption. Then, the crunch of snow, and Vitali was back on the line.
“Kotik. I need you to breathe. Now is not a good time, but if we can figure this out fast, I can have someone by tonight to get rid of it.”
A ping of‘it gets worse’touched the hairs on the back of my neck. “Get rid of what? What exactly are you getting rid of?”
“Whatever you found.”
“And what did I find?”
“I’m not playing this game.”
“What did I find, Vitali!” I seethed.
