He raised his hand. I was in the room and heard the scream. I ran out. I saw his raised hand, and something in me switched. The old factory steel. I grabbed his arm.
“Don’t you dare!” I said quietly.
He looked at me with cloudy eyes.
“You… Who the hell are you, old man?”
“You’re nobody here. This is my house. I’ll… all of you here…”
He pushed me. I fell, hitting my hip on the corner of the table. The next morning, there was a huge bruise. Nadya was crying, rubbing my leg with troxevasin ointment.
“Dad, I’m sorry. He drank too much. He’s under stress.”
“Nadya, leave him,” I said then. “He will break you.”
“I have nowhere to go, Dad. I have no apartment, no money, and… I love him. Well, or I’m used to him. Who needs me at thirty-two? Who needs me?”
The damned mantra. How many women endure beatings, drunkenness, humiliation just because of this fear—of being unwanted, of being alone. And now she had found the strength. She took a step. She saved me. And what about me? I drove away, leaving her to cover my retreat. Old idiot.
The entrance to Kyiv met me with a sea of red lights. Brake lights stretched to the horizon. Trucks were skidding on the inclines, cars huddled to the shoulders. I turned onto a side road leading through an industrial zone. I knew this road; I used to drive it to the factory back in the nineties. The potholes were knee-deep, but there shouldn’t be any traffic jams. The Niva plunged into the darkness. The headlights snatched concrete fences with barbed wire, skeletons of abandoned garages, packs of stray dogs with glowing eyes. The car was thrown from side to side, the suspension groaned, but we pushed through.
I reached the building in Troieshchyna an hour later. The windows on the ninth floor were dark. That was the worst part. Darkness is uncertainty.
I killed the engine in the courtyard, in a dark corner behind a transformer box. I took out the ignition key. What to do with the money? Leaving it in the car was dangerous. Taking it with me was insane. I made a decision. I pulled an old, oily spare tire cover from the trunk. I stuffed the bag of money inside. On top, I threw some rags, some wrenches for weight and sound. Now it just looked like an old tire or junk. I threw this bundle under a neighboring Gazelle van that had been parked here for two years, overgrown with weeds. The snow would cover it in five minutes. No one would find it.
I entered the building with a neighbor. Lucky, I didn’t have to break the intercom. The elevator wasn’t working. Again. I ran up the stairs to the ninth floor. My heart was pounding so hard it hammered in my temples. My arthritic knee was on fire, but I didn’t feel the pain.
The apartment door was ajar. A thin strip of darkness. The lock was broken, the cylinder torn out. I froze. I sniffed the air. It smelled of stale alcohol, shattered perfume (Nadya’s favorite Chanel, which I gave her for Women’s Day), and something metallic. Blood?
I pushed the door. It creaked.
“Nadya!”
Silence. I entered the hallway. Glass crunched under my feet. The mirror in the hallway was shattered. Shards littered the floor like diamond dust. The apartment was a wreck. Things were pulled out of closets. Dresser drawers were yanked out and overturned. He had been looking for the money. He realized it was gone and, in a rage, trashed the apartment.
I went into the kitchen. Empty. The living room. Empty. I looked into the bathroom. There, on the floor, curled up in a ball between the washing machine and the laundry basket, sat Nadya. She was alive. Her face was covered in scratches. Her lip was split. A thin trickle of blood, already dried, ran from her nose. On her neck were purple marks, finger marks.
“Nadya…”
I fell to my knees in front of her. She flinched, covering her head with her hands.
“Don’t hit me! Don’t hit me! I don’t know where he is! I don’t know!”
“Nadenka… It’s me. Dad.”
She slowly lowered her hands. One of her eyes was swollen shut. The other looked at me with a wild, animal terror that gradually gave way to recognition.
“Dad?” she whispered. “You came back? Why? He’ll kill you.”
“Where is he?” I asked harshly.
“He left. About twenty minutes ago. He… he hit me. Demanded to know where you went. I kept quiet. I said you went to the train station, to the train to Kharkiv. That you had lost your mind and decided to go to a friend from your youth.” She tried to smile with her broken lips. “I lied, Dad. Just like you taught me. To the very end.”
“And him?”
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