His eyes—warm, brown, full of love and pain, and everything he had never said out loud during all those months of silence. “Hello, Angelina. Ex-wife…”. His voice was weak, hoarse, with pauses between every word because even speaking was painful for him. “If you’re watching this, it means the grass on my grave is already knee-high. And Petka finally decided to tell you everything.”
“I probably look like a ghost. I asked Petka to put some makeup on me, but he’s all thumbs, so I look like a clown at a funeral. Don’t be scared, okay?”. He tried to smile, and the smile came out crooked, pained. But it was his smile—the very one that had once taken her breath away on their first date in a coffee shop on Khreshchatyk.
He spoke for a long time, stopping to catch his breath, sometimes wincing from a pain he couldn’t hide. He told her about the diagnosis. How he sat in the clinic hallway and looked at the grey rain outside, realizing his life was over. About the decision to hide it, because he knew her: knew she would drop everything to take care of him, and that image would stay with her forever.
About the fear of showing her his decaying body—he didn’t want her to remember him like that. “That girl in the car, the actress… — he said, and something like bitter laughter flickered in his voice. — Ten thousand for one scene. A good rate, right? She didn’t even know why I hired her. Thought it was some kind of prank or a film shoot. And I got sick in the car as soon as we turned the corner. I barely managed to kick her out.”
About the bet on her pride: he knew she wouldn’t spend a single kopek, and he was right. And that both pleased him and broke his heart. “Just don’t cry,” he said, and his voice broke in a way that made it clear he was barely holding back himself. “Crying makes you unattractive: your nose gets red, your eyes swell up, and you have to go to work tomorrow, you can’t scare people. Spend the money on travel, on good food, on a decent life.”
“Buy yourself a new coat, finally. How long can you wear that hideous beige thing? I hated it for all ten years of our marriage. Go to Odesa, we dreamed of the sea, remember? You said you wanted to wake up to the sound of the waves.” He paused, gathering his strength, gasping for air, and added more quietly, almost in a whisper: “Find a good man, Angelina. You’re young, beautiful, smart. You can’t be alone.”
“Just don’t put up with it if he hurts you. You deserve the best. You always deserved better than me.” And then he made a promise, a strange, absurd promise that made her sob aloud, pressing her palms to the screen: “If there’s something after death… I’ll work out, quit smoking, become healthy and strong. The way I was when we met.”
“I’ll wait for you, and we’ll live the life together that we didn’t get to this time. Until we’re ninety-nine. Without sickness, without lies, without goodbyes. I’ll be waiting for you at the end of the road, Lina. Don’t hurry. Live a long life. A happy one. For both of us. And when you come, you’ll tell me everything you saw. Deal?”. The screen went dark.
She sat with her face in her hands, crying as she had never cried in her life, not even on that day at the courthouse when he threw the card at her in a puddle and drove off with a young beauty who turned out to be just a hired student. The next morning, Petro drove her to the Northern Cemetery, on the very northern edge of the city, a place you had to reach first by transport, then by foot along a broken road.
Overgrown paths between the rows, crooked wooden crosses, nameless mounds with plaques instead of monuments. This was where they buried those with no relatives or money: the homeless, lonely old people, the unidentified. Those whom no one was left to mourn. Yegor’s grave was among them—without a fence, without marble, without granite.
A simple tin plaque with a black-and-white photo in which he wore that same smile, and the dates—terrifying in their brevity. Weeds grew knee-high around it, covered with last year’s leaves. No sign that anyone had visited in all these years. The contrast was a punch to the gut. The man who had given her a huge fortune was buried like a poor vagrant, like someone with no family to remember him.
Angelina fell to her knees right in the mud, not noticing her coat getting dirty, and began to pull out the weeds with her bare hands, scratching her skin, breaking her nails on the roots. “Here’s your money! — She pulled the black card from her bag and threw it on the headstone. — Take it! One hundred and twenty million! Take it! Buy yourself a proper grave! Buy yourself a plot at Baikove, next to famous people!”
“Why did you do this to me?! Why didn’t you tell me?!”
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