They traveled overnight, a compartment for two. Artyom looked out the window at the lights of passing villages and suddenly asked, “Are you afraid I’m going to die?” Victor looked out the same window and answered evenly, “Yes.”
Artyom was quiet. “Sometimes I’m afraid too.” Then after another pause: “But not as much when you’re there.” They didn’t return to it.
But something changed after that night. It got easier. As if saying out loud what had been pressing on them made it less heavy.
The doctors examined Artyom, reviewed three years of changes, and said carefully that his heart was compensating for the defect better than expected. Surgery was not indicated for now.
Observation. Victor listened, nodded, and mentally marked every word. In school Artyom’s grades were uneven. During flare-ups he missed two or three weeks at a time, and teachers responded in different ways.
Some worked with him. Some didn’t. Victor went to every parent meeting, sat in the back row in his coat, and listened. If he needed to speak, he spoke.
Briefly, without aggression, but in a way that made the point clear. Matter settled. Artyom read a lot, a habit from the children’s home, where books had been the only place to go when you needed to leave without leaving.
He grew to love electronics, took apart and reassembled Gennady Pavlovich’s old transistor radio. The man handed it over without a second thought and said it didn’t work anyway. The radio worked afterward.
Gennady Pavlovich listened to it every evening after that. Petrovich came by once a week, brought something for the table, played checkers with Artyom, and lost with theatrical indignation. Nina Stepanovna sent jam whenever she had a chance. Barsukov called once just to ask how things were going.
Victor answered shortly, “Fine.” Barsukov said he was glad to hear it and hung up. Didn’t bother them again. A decent man.
Victor heard about Cherepnova by accident in 2012 from Petrovich, who had heard it from somebody standing in line at the post office. Raisa Gennadyevna had taken early retirement in 2009, two years after the case. People said different things: some said she wanted to, some said she had been encouraged.
Nobody knew for sure. Victor listened, nodded, and said nothing. He felt neither satisfaction nor pity.
He just filed it away, the way you file away a weather report for a day that has already passed. The years no longer looked all the same, the way they once had. Each had its own face. In 2016 Artyom enrolled in a technical college, majoring in electronics service and repair.
Victor rode the bus with him to submit the papers and stayed quiet the whole way. But on the ride back he bought two cabbage hand pies at the station and handed one to his son without a word. That same year Artyom asked for permission to spend a weekend in another town with a classmate.
Victor said, “Call me tonight.” Artyom called at nine, on his own, not because he had to, but because he knew Victor would be waiting. In the fall of 2018 Artyom was sent again to the same major city.
A routine checkup, the third in ten years. Victor went with him, as always. Waited in the hallway on the same kind of plastic chair, his jacket folded over his knees.
The cardiologist came out to them after about forty minutes. Young, maybe thirty-five, glasses, chart tucked under his arm. He sat down across from them, opened Artyom’s file, and turned pages.
Then he looked up. “I want to tell you something good,” he began. Victor didn’t move.
The doctor explained that over the previous five years the ventricular septal defect had shown significant functional reduction. The heart had adapted, the pressure had normalized. It was rare, but it happened sometimes with the right routine, low stress, and consistent monitoring.
One more checkup in a year. If the trend held, the diagnosis could be reclassified as a compensated condition. In 2019, that is exactly what happened.
Artyom was eighteen. The doctor closed the chart, looked at him, then at Victor, and said one word.
“Remission.” Victor sat on the same plastic chair, looking straight ahead, and nodded. Artyom sat beside him in silence for a second, then laughed quietly.
Short, almost surprised, the way people laugh when they have waited a long time for something and it finally comes…
