Meanwhile, the court, without waiting for a final decision, issued an interim order temporarily granting Marina custody of Sofya, while I was left with visitation rights for a certain number of hours per week according to a pre-approved schedule. On paper, it sounded dry and almost reasonable, but in reality, it meant that the child’s entire life now officially revolved around her mother, and I was becoming something of an add-on, to be dealt with as they saw fit. Marina immediately presented this as her complete victory. In front of Sofya, she said that the court had almost understood everything, and the rest was just a formality. The fact that I was granted visitation she portrayed as a gesture of generosity, claiming she wasn’t against Sofya occasionally seeing her poor, sick dad out of pity.
The first few visits under this schedule were probably the hardest of my entire life. I would arrive at the designated place, usually our favorite park near the house, early, with a thermos of tea, pastries, or some small thing that made Sofya happy. I waited like a schoolboy, counting the minutes in my head. Marina would bring her, keeping her distance but not leaving completely, standing aside, sometimes pretending to be on the phone, but I could feel her gaze on me like a targeted beam. At first, Sofya would run to me just like she used to, hugging me, telling me about school, her friends, her new tablet. But somewhere in the middle of the visit, an invisible switch would seem to flip, and she would suddenly remember phrases that had obviously been drilled into her. She would start saying that her mom worried about her when she was with me, that Dr. Vorontsov had explained that I sometimes lose control, and that if I started shouting, she must tell her mom or him.
One such evening, as we sat on a park bench drinking tea from the thermos while it slowly grew dark around us and the streetlights were just beginning to turn on, Sofya unexpectedly fell silent. She stared at her shoes for a long time, then quietly asked if it was true that I could do something terrible even if I didn’t want to. That was the moment when I could have snapped, started cursing Marina, accusing Vorontsov, shouting that they were lying. But I caught myself and realized that was the trap. I took a deep breath, tried to speak evenly and simply said that I am a human being who sometimes gets angry, sometimes gets tired, sometimes shouts, but I have never in my life laid a hand on her and never will, that if she had ever seen a real danger in me, she wouldn’t run to hug me and wouldn’t fall asleep next to me as she used to. I added that adults can be unfair too, that a doctor can be wrong, especially if he is only told one side of the story beforehand. But I didn’t say that it was her mother who had orchestrated all this, I didn’t ask her to take my side. I only said one thing: that she has the right to love both of us and shouldn’t have to choose whom to love more. Sofya listened, pressing her hands to the thermos to keep her fingers from getting cold, then suddenly looked up and asked if it was true that if she told the court she wanted to live with me, her mom would be put in jail or have everything taken away from her. I nearly choked, realizing that someone had been very carefully painting scary pictures in her mind to tie her tongue. And again, I held a pause and said that no one was going to jail her mother just because she told the truth, that courts are generally not like they are in scary fairy tales, that her words were important, but they weren’t a machine gun you could shoot someone with, and that the most important thing was to say what she really felt, not what someone expected of her. She nodded, but I could see that several worlds were warring inside her: one where Dad is a reliable but tired person; another where Mom is strong but very scary when she’s angry; and a third where a doctor with a soft voice whispers that there are invisible illnesses that Dad doesn’t even know he has.
That same night, after Marina picked Sofya up and drove away as usual, leaving me in a house that had long since smelled not of family but of some temporary lodging, I sat in the kitchen, staring out the window at the black garden, and thought that perhaps the only thing I could still do for my daughter was not to break her between two fires, not to drag her into our war. Even if it cost me half a life without her. I didn’t know that at that very time, around those same weeks, in another apartment, in another kitchen with windows overlooking a different yard, my daughter would slowly begin to do something that would change everything. That she, a child, would decide to act not according to someone else’s script, but her own, and in a way that no adult had thought of.
Much later, after everything came to light and we had rewatched that video many times, she told me how it began. Marina had taken her for the weekend, and Dr. Vorontsov happened to be nearby. The three of them were sitting in the new kitchen, in the rented apartment where Marina planned to settle after evicting me from the house. My daughter was playing nearby, pretending not to listen, while the adults, as often happens, relaxed, thinking the child was occupied, and began talking as if no one else was in the room. They were discussing the upcoming hearing, crafting the phrases Sofya would have to say, which specific words to use about fear, about shouting, about being unsafe. They discussed how to present my leaving work not as our mutual agreement but as my personal failure. Marina laughed, saying that judges love stories about gentle mothers and mentally unstable fathers. Vorontsov replied that he had already drafted the report to sound as convincing as possible, mentioned some of his connections, and even casually dropped that a couple of grateful clients from the authorities would cover for him if needed. Sofya was sitting on the carpet with her dolls, but every word pierced her ears like a needle. She later admitted that at first, she simply couldn’t believe that her mom and this kind doctor were talking about her dad as someone who could be broken for the sake of a pretty document and a comfortable new life. Then she got scared. And then, a very simple, almost childlike thought came to her: if adults build everything on words, then what’s needed is not just words, but something that can be shown, so no one can wriggle out of it, can get away scot-free. And then she remembered her old tablet, the one I had bought her on a big sale and that Marina had long since written off as junk after giving her the new, bright one with a powerful camera. According to her, the old tablet was right there in the cabinet under the TV. She quietly went over while the adults were absorbed in conversation, took it out, held it to her chest as if she just wanted to sit with a toy, and walked back to the carpet. Amid the clatter of dishes and conversation, she turned it on, muted the sound, and, as a classmate had once taught her, found the camera recording icon, but chose the rear-facing one, not the front. She placed the tablet screen-down on the edge of the table, as if she had just tossed an old, unwanted thing, and went back to her dolls, pretending to be engrossed in play. And all the while, she silently prayed that the battery would last and that the adults wouldn’t realize there was an extra witness to their cozy conspiracy.
I only found out later what exactly was captured on camera and audio that day. And honestly, even for an adult, it’s not easy to watch a replay of yourself, a living person with all your weaknesses and hopes, being discussed as an object that needs to be skillfully molded to fit a legal formula. But at the moment the recording was being made, I was still living my parallel life: going to meetings with Kharlamov, discussing the next hearing with him. We were preparing a list of witnesses, neighbors who could confirm how I had cared for Sofya since she was little, communicating with her homeroom teacher, considering whether to ask the court to summon her to testify about how the child appeared at school after weekends with her mother versus days spent with me. Strangely enough, I had almost stopped crying; it felt as if there were no tears left, only a dry, dense exhaustion inside and a stubbornness that wouldn’t let me give up completely.
The court case dragged on, as they tend to do here. Hearings were postponed, more papers were added, the guardianship authorities requested additional clarification. What was the drama of my life was, for the system, just one of many similar processes, another dispute over a child and an apartment among dozens of others. But one day, Kharlamov and I received a notice with the date of the hearing where the court intended to hear the final arguments and announce its decision. I left his office with that sheet of paper in my hands, stood on the street for a moment, breathing in the cool city air, and caught myself mentally preparing for the worst, playing out a scenario where Sofya is left with Marina, and I am given rare, conditional visits, where I will be monitored, controlled, possibly forced to attend some anger management courses. I thought about what I would do if that happened, where I would live, how I would earn a living to at least support my daughter from a distance and not turn into that broken man they were so insistently trying to make me out to be on paper.
During those days, I wrote several long letters to Sofya, on ordinary lined paper, which I hid in a desk drawer, not knowing whether to give them to her now or when she grew up. I wrote about how we used to bake those chocolate cakes together, how we learned to ride a bike, how she went to the gymnasium for the first time, holding my hand. I wrote that whatever the court decided, I would remain her father, and no document, no report, no recording could change that. I didn’t write anything bad about her mother, deliberately, understanding that the child had already endured too much filth from adults, and for that very reason, I had no right to add my own.
I didn’t know that at the same time, while I was folding those sheets into the drawer, Sofya, in another apartment, was checking the battery of her old tablet, peeking at how to open the right folder, rehearsing in front of the mirror how she would enter the courtroom, how she would raise her hand to be heard. I didn’t know because no sane father would have guessed that it would be the child who would turn out to be the only adult in this story, the one who would not be afraid to stand up to two strong people, confident in their impunity. And that the decisive blow to their flawless scheme would be delivered not by a lawyer, not by a judge, not by an official from guardianship, but by a seven-year-old girl with an old, battered tablet in her hands.
The day the decision was to be announced arrived suddenly, though weeks had passed on the calendar. On the appointed morning, I was once again standing in front of the mirror, tying the same and only decent tie, which I now associated only with court, not celebrations. Sofya was supposed to stay with Marina that day, at least according to the interim schedule. And I deliberately didn’t ask for her to be brought to the courtroom; I didn’t want the child to witness her father being officially broken or saved. We had said goodbye in the hallway the day before. She hugged me tightly and said she believed in me. And I, looking into her eyes, could only think about how not to show how little I myself believed in anything anymore, except for her hugs…
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