As soon as the door closed behind him, Nadya transformed. She didn’t cry. She didn’t apologize. She turned on the stereo at full blast. Some pop music was pounding with such a bass that the windows vibrated. She ran up to me, pressed a finger to her lips. Then she grabbed a large black garbage bag.
“Dad, sit and be quiet,” she whispered in my ear, over the music. “Don’t ask any questions.”
She started darting around the apartment. She opened the safe (she knew the code) and began to pull everything out. Not things. She was taking out money. Stacks of money. And throwing them into the garbage bag. On top, she threw some rags, old newspapers, empty shoe boxes. I watched, not understanding anything. Then she turned off the music. Her face became stone-cold and angry again.
“Get your things!” she shouted aloud, specifically for the “smart home.” “I’m not going to tolerate your antics anymore!”
She pushed me out into the hallway, shoved this bag at me. And then Vitalik, who had come back—he had forgotten some documents—came out of the elevator. The scene on the stairs was an improvisation, my daughter’s great improvisation.
I opened my eyes. The cigarette had burned down to the filter and scorched my fingers. I flinched, threw the butt in the ashtray. A blizzard was starting outside. Snowflakes fell on the Niva’s windshield and immediately melted, turning into tears. I looked again at the black bag lying on the back seat. Could it be?
My heart started pounding somewhere in my throat. I reached back, grabbed the bag, tore off the tape. The smell of old paper and bank ink hit my nose. Among the crumpled newspapers and old rags, there they were—bricks. Thousand-hryvnia bills. A lot of them. And on top, a sheet of graph paper torn from a school notebook, folded into a triangle. I unfolded it with trembling fingers. Nadya’s handwriting was hurried, jagged, the letters jumping.
“Dearest Daddy, forgive me. I didn’t know how to tell you. He installed cameras and listening devices everywhere. He threatened that if I said a word, he would do something terrible to you, stage an accident, or poison you. He is a terrible man, Dad. I secretly filed for divorce through the ‘Diia’ app. This is all the money that was in the safe. Take it and leave. Urgently. Go to Aunt Valya’s village, he won’t go there. He’s afraid of the country folk, the local policeman is your friend. I will come as soon as I can get away. I love you. Don’t think of me as a traitor. Run.”
I reread the note twice. Then a third time. A spasm seized my throat. Tears—hot, angry, manly tears—flowed down my cheeks, getting caught in my stubble. She hadn’t betrayed me. My girl. My Nadenka. She had outplayed him. She had saved me. I wiped my face with the sleeve of my old down jacket. I looked at the windows of the ninth floor. A light was on. I imagined Vitalik opening the safe now, seeing the emptiness, starting to dash around like a rat in a barrel. The anger passed. A cold, ringing resolve remained.
I turned the key in the ignition. The Niva sputtered, coughed, but started, purring contentedly. An old horse doesn’t spoil the furrow. I put it in first gear.
“Well, Vitaly?” I said quietly, pulling out of the courtyard into the snowy haze. “Check and mate to you, you damn businessman.”
Ahead was the road. A long, winter road. But now I knew where I was going. And I knew that someone was waiting for me there.
The road out of the city was like an escape through purgatory. The snowfall intensified, turning the Zhytomyr highway into a white, undulating canvas. The Niva’s wipers worked at their limit, scraping off the clinging wet snow with a strained creak, but I could barely see the road. I drove on instinct, on the muscle memory of a driver with forty years of experience. In the rearview mirrors, the lights of the metropolis drowned. Yellow, red, predatory.
I was shaking. The adrenaline that had flooded my blood after reading the note began to recede, giving way to an icy fear. Seven or eight million hryvnias lay behind me in a black garbage bag. This wasn’t just money. It was a sentence if the police stopped me now. How could I explain to a patrolman why a pensioner was carrying mountains of cash in his trunk along with dirty rags?
To keep from going crazy with these thoughts, I forced myself to think about the past. Memory is a strange thing. It obligingly served up pictures of how Galya and I lived. Not richly, but with dignity. How we saved up for a cooperative apartment, how we managed to get a wall unit, how we rejoiced at our first car. We lived for the future. When we retire, we’ll go to the Carpathians. When Nadya gets married, we’ll live for ourselves. When we finish building the dacha, we’ll sit there all summer, drinking mint tea. The syndrome of deferred life. We were always putting happiness off until later. In the sideboard. Like crystal glasses that are only taken out on holidays. And the holiday never came. The funeral came instead.
I remembered the day Vitalik first appeared in our house. Five years ago. Nadya brought him to meet us.
“Dad, Mom, this is Vitaly. He’s an entrepreneur.”
Vitalik was different then. Or seemed different. He was wearing a cheap suit that was too tight in the shoulders. He brought a “Kyiv” cake and a bottle of “Zakarpatsky” cognac. He smiled a lot, showered Galya with compliments, and addressed me by my name and patronymic with exaggerated respect.
“I, Pavel Petrovich, am a simple man,” he said then, pouring me a glass. “I don’t reach for the stars, but I’ll provide for my family. I have hands, a head on my shoulders. The main thing is to hustle. Times are like that now. If you don’t hustle, you get eaten.”
I didn’t like him from the start. There was something slippery about him, like a train station taxi driver who quotes a price three times the meter but smiles to your face. Galya, kind soul, shushed me then:
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