Go down to the cemetery and talk! He’s dead. Died three months after your divorce. He’s been gone for almost seven years.” The phone slipped from her fingers and fell to the asphalt with a dull thud, the screen cracking.
They met in a small cafe in Podil. She and Yegor used to love sitting here at the corner table, discussing plans for a future that seemed endless. Petro had aged a lot over the years: thinning hair, deep wrinkles etched into his face, the extinguished gaze of a man who had carried too heavy a burden for too long. He chain-smoked, ignoring the ban.
The diagnosis—spinal cancer with metastases, terminal stage. Selling the company for a pittance just to get the money immediately. The hired actress for ten thousand, playing the part of a mistress outside the courthouse. The apartment across from her windows. The binoculars on the windowsill. The notebook with records of her every move, every piece of good fortune he had bought with his money.
“He told me… — Petro swallowed smoke, not lifting his eyes from the tabletop. — My Lina is stubborn. She’d rather starve than take money from a traitor. But if she keeps it as a reminder of my villainy, one day she’ll need it, and then she’ll be protected.” He even bet me that you wouldn’t spend a single kopek. And he was right. He knew you better than you knew yourself.”
“Show me that apartment,” she said in a hoarse voice that she couldn’t control. “I have to see it.” They drove to Lukianivka, to the very block where she had lived all these years. Petro led her through an enclosed courtyard littered with trash, up a filthy staircase with broken lightbulbs. A rusty lock. A blue door with peeling paint, number 38.
Inside was not an apartment, but a place of mourning. A sagging sofa with springs sticking out. A plastic table with brown rings from cups. A stool by the window, polished to a shine from use. On the wall, an injection schedule was written with a marker directly on the wallpaper—dates and doses in a column. In the corner lay empty medicine boxes, used syringes, crumpled bandages.
And the binoculars on the windowsill—old, military-grade, with worn rubber on the eyepieces. Angelina brought them to her eyes and saw her building. Her kitchen. Her clothesline, where she hung her sheets every Saturday. He was here. All this time, he was here, a hundred meters away from her. She fell to her knees on the dusty, dirty floor and sobbed aloud—in a way she hadn’t cried in all these seven years.
Without holding back, without shame, without trying to seem strong. On the nights she lay in bed cursing him, wishing him every misfortune in the world, he was a hundred meters away, unable to sleep from pain and longing for her, biting a towel so she wouldn’t hear his screams. Petro stood silently in the doorway, letting her cry it out, not trying to comfort her.
What comfort could there be? Then he pulled a worn-out notebook with a vinyl cover from his inner pocket, filled to the last page, and a flash drive on a lanyard. “This is his diary. Everything he thought and felt, day by day. And a video message. He recorded it shortly before the end, when he could still speak.”
He handed her a white envelope, yellowed with age, with bent corners. On it was written a single word, in a trembling, barely legible hand of a man whose fingers no longer obeyed him: “To my wife.” She sat on the floor of that terrible room for a long time, clutching the envelope to her chest, not daring to open it, until Petro touched her shoulder and said they couldn’t watch the video here—there was no electricity; it had been cut off seven years ago.
They went to his place, a small apartment in Obolon that smelled of tobacco and bachelor life, where old photos of the three of them hung on the walls: Yegor, Petro, and her at some party—young, laughing, unaware of what awaited them. Petro took out an old laptop with sticky keys, inserted the flash drive, opened a file named “For Lina,” and went out to the balcony to smoke, leaving her alone in front of the screen.
A man appeared on the screen who was impossible to recognize. Sunken cheeks covered in grey skin, a shaved head with protruding veins and age spots, collarbones sticking out from the collar of a white shirt. The very shirt she had given him for his birthday many years ago, when they were still making plans for the future, and which now hung on him like on a hanger, emphasizing what his body had become.
But his eyes…
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