Nick
I bury my father on a Thursday.
The sky is the color of pewter and the ground is soft from overnight rain. Father Konstantin reads the liturgy in a voice that carries across the cemetery without effort, eighty-one years old and still the steadiest man at a graveside. The casket is mahogany. My mother's icon rests on the lid, and the beeswax candles have been burning since dawn.
I stand at the head of the grave with Dmitri one step behind me. The captains are arranged in a loose line to my left. Ivanov is beside me, because a lawyer at a funeral is a man who is also standing guard, and every person here knows it.
Viktor is across from me.
He stands with his hands folded in front of him, head bowed, the picture of a grieving brother. Black suit, black tie, black cashmere coat. He hasn’t spoken to me yet today. He arrived five minutes before the service and positioned himself on the opposite side of the grave with the precision of a man who has rehearsed his plan.
Father Konstantin commits my father's body to the earth. The words are in Church Slavonic, and I let them wash through me without holding onto any of them, because holding on would mean feeling, and I can't afford to feel right now. Not here. Not with Viktor's eyes on me every time I blink.
They lower the casket. I step forward and take a handful of wet earth and drop it onto the lid. The sound it makes is the loneliest sound I have ever heard.
I step back. Viktor does the same from his side. His handful is smaller than mine and he brushes the dirt from his palm after.
The captains file past. Each one takes earth and drops it. Gregor. Yevgeny. Alexei. Each says "Pakhan" to me as they pass, confirming the order publicly, at the graveside, the way it's supposed to be done.
The burial is just the ceremony. The rest of it happens at the house.
Irina has laid out food in the dining room. Black bread, pickled herring, boiled eggs, the traditional spread my father would have expected. The men filter in and eat standing up, the way they do at these things, and the house fills with low voices and the clink of glasses and the particular atmosphere of men who are mourning and calculating at the same time.
I stand in the doorway of the library and I watch the room.
Viktor is at the far end of the dining table. He has a glass of vodka in his hand and he's speaking to Alexei. Their heads are close. Alexei's body is angled away from the room, which means he doesn't want to be seen listening, which means what Viktor is saying isn't meant for the room.
I don't react. I watch. I note the duration of the conversation, the way Alexei nods twice, the way Viktor's hand rests on his shoulder for a beat longer than friendship requires.
Then Viktor moves. He crosses the room to Gregor's wife, a woman named Karolina who has no business being spoken to at a funeral by a man who isn't her husband. Viktor says something to her. She laughs, covers her mouth, looks across the room atGregor, and then back at Viktor with a smile that tells me he's being charming.
He does this for forty minutes. I watch every second of it from the library doorway while men come to me with condolences and I accept each one with a nod and the right words and a handshake that communicates exactly what it needs to.
Dmitri appears at my elbow.
"Alexei," I say, without looking at him.
"I saw it."
"And Karolina."
"Saw that, too."
"Find out what he said to both of them. Tonight."
"Done." He pauses. "You should go home. You've been here long enough. Irina can handle the rest."
He's right. I've shaken every hand that needs shaking. I've heard every condolence that needs hearing. The captains have said Pakhan at my father's graveside, and the will is filed, and the ink is dry. What's left is Viktor working corners, and I don't need to stand here and watch him do it. I need to know what he said, and Dmitri will get me that faster than my own eyes.
I leave through the kitchen. The car is waiting. The drive back to the townhouse takes twenty minutes, and I spend every one of them thinking about the woman in the upstairs bedroom.
I haven't seen her since this morning when Mikhail checked her vitals and told me her sugar was holding steady at one-eighteen. She was asleep when I left for the cemetery. Mikhail removed the IV yesterday. She's been eating, small meals, the kind her body can process without spiking, and Mikhail has been adjusting her insulin doses with a precision that makes me grateful, once again, that my father saved his life thirty years ago.
I come through the front door and the house is quiet.
Then I hear water running upstairs.
I take the stairs and stop in the bedroom doorway.
