— the last source of warmth in his rapidly cooling darkness. The weeks flowed by, and Yegor sank deeper into his strange, painful routine as an observer from the shadows, who saw everything but had no right to intervene. But just watching wasn’t enough for him. He wanted to protect her, to shield her, to cushion her fall wherever he could reach, even if she would never know about it.
The first call from Petro came in early December, when the snow was swirling outside and the radiators in his den had finally given up, turning the room into something like a freezer. “Her mother has a thyroid tumor,” Petro said without preamble. “She needs surgery urgently. Three hundred thousand hryvnias.” Yegor was lying on the sagging sofa, covered with two blankets and an old coat, staring at the stained ceiling.
Every movement was an effort: his spine had become a red-hot rod stuck in his body, and any attempt to move sent a wave of pain through him. “Arrange it through a charity foundation,” he rasped. “A treatment grant for residents of the region. Let her think she won.” “Yegor, this is…” “Just do it, Petro. And make sure no document points to me. Not a single paper, not a single signature.”
A week later, Angelina received an official letter stating that she was the winner of a support program for residents of the Kyiv region. Yegor saw through his binoculars as she stood by the window, clutching the envelope to her chest, crying with happiness, with relief, with faith that justice exists. She didn’t know that her ‘justice’ was lying on the next street over, choking on a bloody cough, watching her through the optics of old army binoculars.
In January, there was an accident. Some local hotshot in a beat-up foreign car crashed into her scooter near the bus stop and started throwing his weight around: threatening to sue for a scratch on his bumper, yelling something about connections in the police. Yegor found out about it from Petro, who was monitoring the situation, and immediately pulled a wad of cash from under his mattress. He kept cash there for emergencies because he could no longer walk to an ATM without help.
“Sixty thousand. Find a fixer, make this guy go to her with an apology and the money himself.” “Wouldn’t it be easier to go through the local policeman?” “Petro!” Yegor propped himself up on his elbow, a movement that cost him a minute of heavy, ragged breathing. “I’m not asking what’s easier. I’m telling you how it needs to be done.” The next day, the thug indeed showed up with a bouquet and compensation, pale and subdued.
He swore it was all his fault and that he was ready to sign any papers. Angelina later told a friend on the phone that the police were finally starting to work properly, that there was still justice in the world. Yegor heard snippets of the conversation through the open window when the wind blew in the right direction. He smiled then, looking through the binoculars at her radiant face, and wrote in his notebook: “She believes in justice. Let her believe. It’s more important than the truth.”
He had been keeping the notebook since his first day in that apartment, filling page after page with his gradually deteriorating handwriting. He called it his “unofficial log.” In it went dates, sums, names of intermediaries, diagrams and arrows showing through whom and how the money passed. Through whom he arranged an interview for her at a travel agency—that required three handshakes and one old debt.
How much he paid the landlord so he wouldn’t evict her for being late with the rent when she completely ran out of money in March. Who he called when she didn’t leave her apartment for three days, and the light in her windows didn’t turn on in the evening or the morning. “Her light hasn’t been on for the second evening in a row,” he wrote in December in a trembling hand, the letters jumping and overlapping. “Everything inside me is tearing apart. I called Petro.”
“Have him drop something off for her, but anonymously, you hear me? Say it’s from a neighbor. If she finds out it’s from me, she’ll throw it all in the trash, I know her. God, please don’t let her be seriously ill. Let it just be a cold, let her just be tired and went to bed early.” Petro brought a thermos of broth and medicine then, saying it was from Baba Masha on the fourth floor, who saw that the light wasn’t on and got worried.
Angelina thanked him, surprised by the kindness of a neighbor she didn’t even know by sight. And Yegor watched from across the street as she drank his broth, sitting in her kitchen with a blanket draped over her shoulders, and felt almost happy. As happy as a man can be when an invisible fire is consuming him from within? This wasn’t accounting. This was a chronicle of love, written by a dying hand on cheap paper.
By February, the morphine had stopped working. His body had grown accustomed to the dose, and there was no way to increase it further. The pain became constant—thousands of red-hot needles in his spine, day and night, without respite, without hope of relief. Yegor bit down on a towel to keep from screaming. The walls in the old building let every sound through; the neighbors might hear, might start asking questions.
“Seizures again last night,” he dictated to Petro, because he could no longer hold a pen himself, his fingers wouldn’t obey. “I wanted to cut off my own leg, just to make it stop. But then I’d become even uglier. Angelina would see me and be sick. It’s better to endure. Did you write that down? That’s enough.” Petro put the notebook aside, his voice breaking into a rasp: “Enough of this madness. Call her. One call, and she’ll come running. She loved you, for God’s sake.”
“No.” “Yegor, you’re dying.” “That’s exactly why—no. That’s exactly why, Petro.” One night, delirious from a fever that had spiked to forty degrees, he started calling for her: “Lina, Lina, I’m cold. Hold me.” And he reached his hands into the void, to where she should have been, where she used to sleep, curled up like a kitten by his side.
Petro grabbed his wrists, trying to keep him on the sofa, to stop him from falling to the floor. “I’m here. Petro’s here. Hold on. Can you hear me?”
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