“Just to say out loud what I’ve never said to anyone, not in prison, not after, not in these courtrooms. I’m not entitled to demand anything.”
“I’m just asking.” The office was quiet. Pryakhin nodded once.
“I hear you.” Victor walked outside. The cold hit him in the face.
He walked down the sidewalk, looking at the packed snow under his boots, and thought about the fact that he had just broken the rule he had lived by all his life. He had asked. A second time. Of another man.
About the same matter. For himself, that would have been unthinkable. But this wasn’t for himself.
And strangely, there was no shame in it, no feeling that he had lost something. There was something else. Something he didn’t have a name for, but it felt like air after being underwater too long.
That evening he stopped by the children’s home. Artyom was sitting by the window with the same book, Folk Tales from Around the World, now worn at the corners. He looked up.
“You seem different today,” he said. Victor sat beside him. “How so?”
Artyom thought for a second. “I don’t know. Like you’re tired, but in a good way.”
Victor looked at him, took the book, opened it in the middle. “Want me to read?” Artyom nodded and moved a little closer.
Barsukov called three days before the hearing. His voice was different, not cautious the way it usually was, but gathered, with the dry precision of a man who finally had in hand what he had been looking for. “The prosecutor’s office finished its review,” he said.
“Cherepnova’s request to the department was found procedurally untimely. Not unlawful, and that matters, but untimely, filed during active judicial review, which qualifies as administrative pressure on the process. The department has suspended consideration of the request until the case is over.”
“That means the new regulation will not apply to our case,” Barsukov added. “We go back to the document package from the third hearing, and on that record we’ve covered everything.” Victor was silent for a few seconds.
“Barsukov,” he said, “how much do I owe you beyond what we agreed?” The lawyer answered shortly: “I did my job. You did yours.”
“See you Wednesday.” He hung up first. Victor sat down.
Outside, snow was falling. Fine, almost invisible. You could only really see it in the light of the yard lamp.
He thought about the old beige sedan he had bought cheap years earlier and sold in the fall to pay the lawyer’s first round of fees. The car was long. The engine knocked.
The heater warmed one seat out of two. In summer it overheated on hills. But he didn’t miss it.
Not at all. On February 6, 2007, he put on the same suit jacket and the same tie again. The tie had stretched a little over those months.
The knot no longer sat quite straight. Victor adjusted it in the mirror, looked at his reflection for a second, and left. The courtroom was the same as before, not in the walls or chairs, but in the air.
Barsukov laid out his papers quickly, without fuss. Cherepnova sat in her usual place, but this time her folder stayed closed. Victor noticed that right away.
The judge opened the hearing and gave the floor to Barsukov. He began methodically, the way a man speaks when he has prepared for several sleepless nights. First he read the prosecutor’s findings aloud.
The request to the department had been found untimely, and its review suspended. Cherepnova did not look up. The judge made a note.
Second, Barsukov returned to the very first denial. The one that had started all of it. The denial from May, when Cherepnova had cited the statutory bar on adoption by people with criminal convictions.
He read the wording of her denial and then the exact language of Section 127 of the Family Code. Slowly, without commentary, letting the room hear the difference. The statute said intentional.
Victor’s conviction did not. Cherepnova had applied the statute broadly, without legal basis. Therefore, Barsukov said, the first denial contained an erroneous interpretation of the law, confirmed by the plain language of the statute.
The second denial rested on a regional regulation whose application in this case had been suspended following the prosecutor’s review. Neither of the two grounds for denial survives legal scrutiny. He closed the folder and added quietly:
The court has been hearing this case for six months. During that time the petitioner has met every requirement placed before him. Every one, without exception…
