On the train ride home Victor sat by the window looking at the February fields flashing past in the dark. Artyom slept across from him, head tilted back, mouth slightly open. He had grown tall, half a head taller than his father, broad-shouldered, with working hands now, callused from the shop at school.
Victor looked at him for a long time, then turned back to the window and closed his eyes. They celebrated the birthday at home, in the same apartment Victor had long since bought from Gennady Pavlovich after the older man said in 2014 that he wanted to move in with his daughter and didn’t know what to do with the place. Victor had said, “Sell it to me.”
Gennady Pavlovich named a price below market. Victor named the market price. They argued for a while, one wanting less, the other insisting on a fair number. In the end they settled somewhere in the middle and shook hands.
The apartment became his, truly his, for the first time in his life. Over the years it had changed. Not fancy, but lived in. A full wall of bookshelves, most of the books Artyom’s.
In the kitchen, a new table they had assembled together two years earlier. Artyom read the instructions. Victor tightened the bolts. Both quiet, both occupied. Above his son’s work desk were circuit diagrams and boards, a soldering iron in its stand, a magnifying lamp on a flexible arm.
On the windowsill sat the same horseshoe magnet. Guests were few: Petrovich and his wife, whose name Victor had still never quite trained himself to use after twenty years, always just saying “hello,” and she never minded. Nina Stepanovna, now very old, eighty-two, but still straight-backed, carrying a jar of jam in a string bag.
As always, she brought it without warning. Marina Sergeyevna too. Artyom saw her once a year now, called her himself, visited her himself. She had aged, but her eyes were the same, tired and warm at once.
Artyom did the cooking. Victor tried to help and was sent out of the kitchen with, “Go sit down, you’re in the way.” Victor sat down. Petrovich winked at him across the table.
Outside it was March, still snowy, but already with that particular brightness that comes at winter’s end, when the sun stands higher and the shadows of the poplars grow longer and cleaner. They sat down to eat. Talked about Artyom’s work.
He was already in his second year running a small electronics repair shop on the next street over. His own place, modest but his. They talked about Nina Stepanovna’s health, and she waved off all questions with her usual, “I’m not going anywhere yet.”
About how Petrovich had finally bought a motorboat and planned to get out on the river that summer, and how Victor had promised to go, though both of them knew fishing now took more preparation than it used to. Victor sat at the head of the table and spoke less than anyone else. He always did at gatherings, listened, watched, answered now and then. But today it was different.
He looked at his son and thought about the fact that the boy was twenty-three, and that eighteen years earlier, in the hallway of a shabby children’s home, a child in a gray sweater had looked at a strange man with a crooked face and had not looked away. He thought about how much had fit between that bench by the window and this table. Hospitals, courtrooms, overnight trains, plastic chairs in hallways, the folder of documents he had opened every evening…
