For the first time in months he wasn’t running through a checklist of documents in his head or looking for the next hole in somebody else’s paperwork. He just walked and looked at the snow-covered poplars lining the street. That evening he took out the folder and put it away again.
For the first time in two years he didn’t open it before bed. That same night, around one-thirty in the morning, a message came through to his work number, which he had left with Barsukov just in case. The lawyer called him back in the morning, voice dry.
Cherepnova had sent a request to the regional department the night before, asking for a revision of the regulation governing adoptive parents of children with cardiac diagnoses. If approved, the new requirements would take effect before their next hearing. Formally, the case would then have to be reviewed under the new rules.
“Does that mean we go backward?” Victor asked. “That means we go backward,” Barsukov said quietly.
Victor set down the phone. Sat on the chair by the window. Looked outside.
Snow was falling, fine and slanted, sticking to the glass. For two years he had answered every issue put in front of him. Every point, every statute, every regulation.
He had thought the job was simple: find the requirement and meet it. Turned out Cherepnova wasn’t asking him to meet the rules. She was changing the rules while he was meeting the old ones.
He sat there thinking. A long time. Then he stood up, got dressed, and went to work.
For three days he did nothing. Went to work, welded metal, came home. Ate, lay down, stared at the ceiling.
In the morning he got up and went back to work. Petrovich stopped by once during lunch. Looked at Victor and silently set a bowl of borscht in front of him from the cafeteria.
He didn’t ask anything. That was right. On the fourth day Victor took out the folder.
Not to look for another legal loophole with Barsukov. For something else. He read slowly from the beginning.
Cherepnova’s first denial. Her response at the first hearing. The response at the second.
The request to the regional department. He read as a man trying to understand not the wording, but the logic. Not what was written, but why.
By midnight the picture was clear. Cherepnova had not broken the law. Not once, not in a single filing.
She was working inside the system methodically, patiently, without personal malice. Every move she made was legally clean. The request to the department was a lawful procedure.
The citation to the regional regulation was formally correct. She simply knew how to use the bureaucratic machine better than anyone else. And while he and Barsukov were answering her requirements, she had time to create new ones.
That could not be beaten from inside the same system. He needed someone above it. Victor closed the folder and went to bed.
In the morning he got up at six, got dressed, and walked across town. The county prosecutor’s office was in the administrative district on Main Street, in a building with columns whose paint had been peeling since the nineties and a front door that squeaked because nobody had ever replaced it. The prosecutor saw the public on Wednesdays.
Today was Wednesday. Four people were waiting. Victor took a number, sat on a wooden chair by the wall, took off his hat, and laid the folder across his knees.
He waited an hour and twenty minutes. The county prosecutor, Igor Dmitrievich Pryakhin, a large man in his fifties with a close haircut and the tired eyes of someone who had been handed other people’s problems every Wednesday for years, saw him in a small office with a portrait on the wall and a stack of files at the edge of the desk. Victor sat down, put the folder in front of him, and began to speak.
No preface, no emotion, no complaints. Just facts. The child, the diagnosis, two years of trying, two denials, and Cherepnova’s latest move with the request to the department.
He spoke for seven minutes, no more. At the end he asked one question. Is this proper?
To change a regional regulation while a case is actively being heard, if it directly affects the outcome? Pryakhin was silent for a few seconds. Then he took the folder, flipped through it slowly, and stopped at the page with the request to the department.
Read it. Flipped back, found the date of the first hearing. Compared them.
“You see the date on this request?” he asked without looking up. “I do.”
“The request was sent forty-eight hours after the hearing where the court used the phrase question of first impression.” Pryakhin closed the folder and looked at Victor. “That is not, by itself, a violation of law. But it is grounds for a prosecutor’s review into whether a public official attempted to influence an ongoing judicial process through administrative maneuvering.”
He said it evenly, without drama. Just naming the fact. “What does that mean for the case?” Victor asked.
“It means that if the review confirms impropriety, the request to the department may be deemed inapplicable to your matter. And then the new regulation will not be applied in your case.”
He paused. “I’m not making promises. I’m saying there are grounds. The rest is process.”
Victor nodded, stood, took the folder from the desk, and then something happened he had not planned and later remembered only in pieces. Not because he was ashamed, but because it went against everything he had lived by for thirty years. He stopped at the door and turned around.
“Mr. Pryakhin,” he said quietly, “the boy is six. It’s his heart. The doctors said a year, maybe two. That was a year ago.”
Pryakhin looked at him. “I’m asking,” Victor said, “that’s all. Not for sympathy. Not for special treatment”…
