“Me, my mama, and my brother,” I said. “No Konstantinovs here.”
“And what is your name?” the large hat man inquired as he reached into his coat. I flinched, but he pulled out a metal badgewith a clearly marked service number and his last name.
Baranov, it read. The policeman.
“Katya Petrovna.”
“Please, young woman,” Baranov said, tucking the badge into his pocket. “We have a sanction to search the apartment. We won’t be long, if you could let us in.”
I listened to Misha against every instinct and stepped aside, opening the door. Clipboard nodded at me in thanks, and they walked right past me without taking off their shoes.
I don’t know why that irked me so much, or why I thought of it later, after everything changed.
To their credit, they weren’tcompletelydestroying everything. Drawers came flying open, rattled and left hanging on their tracks. Couch cushions flew about, but they only slashed the seats, so that was okay. We could put a nice rug over them to hide the cuts bleeding stuffing.
The walls were stripped of paintings. I cringed when they took the only photo I’d hung up since we moved in—the picture of all of us. Papa, Mama, Maxim and I. We were at the Black Sea, on vacation. They ripped it apart, and they didn’t have to. The cruelty of that one act washed over me like a wave and took my faith in humanity out to sea in its retreat.
I followed them room to room, but always stayed in the doorway. Because that’s what a lawful citizen would do.
They talked amongst themselves and pointed and threw Mama’s dresses on the ground. The atrocious, but innocent, porcelain dolls’ heads cracked like eggs as they were shoved off the shelves.
A calm had settled over me by the time they got to the kitchen. If I found the guns that easily, who was to say there weren’t more here? They were certain to be better at finding them.
Would they just take them? Arrest me?
They aren’t the police.
…Kill me?
I should have been hysterical; anyone else would be in my position. Should I pretend? I had never been able to cry on command, a fact that cost me a prestigious role in a fourth-grade school play. Maybe I could summon some tears if I thought of a childhood cat, but that’d be hard too, because two men were throwing silverware out of the drawers and feeling for false bottoms. That’s no time for cats.
The pot was boiling, and I went to turn the heat down as if it were a normal Tuesday afternoon. So much water had already evaporated that a ring of carrot-potato remains formed above the waterline.
“What are you making?” Clipboard asked.
“Soup.”
“Doesn’t smell like any soup I’ve ever had,” Baranov said. “What is it?”
“Just soup,” I said. “My mama’s recipe. For when we can’t afford meat.” I paused, the thick brick of dollars pressing against my lower back. “Can’t be buying meat in this economy.”
I prayed he didn’t look in the cooler cabinet beneath the window where frozen mutton lay wrapped up in parchment paper. I was going to make pilaf for Vitali, he just bought me fancy Turkish coriander. There would be no pilaf if I died, coriander or not.
He grunted affirmatively and tossed a pan on the ground with a loud clang and ring. Then another, and another. I took a step back as they rolled throughout the kitchen. One hit my foot, spun, and landed upside down.
“Look here,” Baranov said, his voice triumphant. My bloodfroze. “Knew this bitch was lying. Fake back panel.”
Just like that, any remnants of their civility disappeared.
“You lying to us, little bitch?” Clipboard laughed and craned his neck to examine the upper cabinet, the one with the flour and sunflower oil, next to the bag of sugar we hadn’t even opened yet.
The white cloud rose like an atom bomb in the middle of the kitchen as the sack of flour burst across the tile. Something scraped, and Baranov handed a piece of stiff vinyl to Clipboard as he pawed around the hollow space.
In a split-second decision, I took off.
One of them shouted for the other to go after me, and my vision shook as I slid around the corner to the exit. He slammed into me sooner than I hoped, smashing my body with a loud crack against the closed front door.
Hands everywhere—hands and my hair flying and tangling as I tried to scratch and fight him off. I grunted, but didn’t scream. His wide palm struck me, my cheek bouncing off the door again before I buckled, curling into a tight ball as he took a fistful of hair and spewed angry words I didn’t understand because I was too drunk on fear.
