She screamed until her voice turned into a hoarse whisper, beating her fists on the ground, on the wet spring grass. Petro stood a short distance away, smoking, not interfering, letting her release everything that had been building up for seven years under a crust of hatred and pride. “He chose this place himself,” he finally said, when she grew quiet, her body only shaking with silent sobs.
“He said you could see the city lights from here. Your city. He wanted to be closer to you, even in death. I offered him a proper plot, I said: at least leave some money for the funeral. But he answered: ‘Not a single kopek for myself. A corpse is a corpse, it doesn’t care where it lies, and she needs the money more.’” She picked up the card from the headstone, wiped it on her coat, and put it back in her bag.
She wouldn’t return it and wouldn’t refuse it. She would live in a way that made his sacrifice meaningful. This was her duty now, her cross to bear, her way of saying “I’m sorry” to him. A week later, she went to Bila Tserkva, to Yegor’s parents, whom she hadn’t seen since the divorce. An hour and a half by minibus from the station, past grey suburbs and villages, past a life that flowed on its own course, unaware of her grief.
An old private house with apple trees in the garden, a creaky porch with sagging boards, curtains with a floral pattern on the windows. Everything was as she remembered it, only older and more weathered, like its owners. Zinaida Pavlovna opened the door, saw Angelina, and grabbed the doorframe to keep from falling, her face turning so pale that all the veins became visible. “My God… Linochka… You…”
“Hello, Zinaida Pavlovna. I know about Yegor. I know everything. Petro Yevgenievich told me.” The old couple cried, hugging her right there on the doorstep, the three of them clinging to each other, and she cried with them. For the first time in seven years, they could grieve together, without hiding, without pretending, without acting as if nothing had happened.
“He came to visit us a month before the end,” Zinaida Pavlovna recounted. “Thin, looking terrible, barely able to stand. He got on his knees right here, in this very spot, and asked for forgiveness. For leaving first, for not giving us grandchildren, for forcing us to stay silent and bear this burden.”
“He forbade us to call you,” added Konstantin Fedorovich, looking out the window where the bare branches of the apple trees swayed. “‘If you call, she’ll come running, I know her, that’s how she is. And I don’t want her to see me dying, turning into a skeleton, screaming in pain at night. Promise me you’ll stay silent, even if she hates you for it.’”
“I dialed your number several times,” Zinaida Pavlovna sobbed. “Especially after the funeral, when Petro brought the urn. I thought: I’ll call, I’ll say something. I can’t stay silent anymore. But every time, I remembered his eyes when he made us promise, and I hung up. Forgive us, Linochka. Forgive us, if you can. We lost our son too and couldn’t even cry with you.”
She hugged the old woman and held her for a long time, stroking her gray, thinning hair. “There’s nothing to forgive. You fulfilled his wish. Just as I did, without even knowing it. Now I will take care of you for the rest of your days. As he would have wanted. As he would have done himself, if he had lived.” The rumors of her wealth spread through the city with frightening speed, passed from mouth to mouth.
Her phone rang off the hook. Numbers that had been silent for years suddenly came to life, and every caller felt entitled to a piece of her inheritance, to a share of this unexpected fortune. A distant relative from Zhytomyr, who seven years ago hadn’t even lent her a couple of thousand for her mother’s medicine (“Linochka, you understand, we have children, what money…”), now sobbed into the phone and asked for millions to develop a business.
“It’s a gold mine, you won’t regret it!”. Former classmates, who had whispered behind her back when she worked as a cleaner, now invited her to a restaurant to reminisce about their youth: “We’ve missed you so much all these years!”. A cousin, who had once thrown small change at her with the words “buy yourself a decent skirt, you’re embarrassing the family,” now begged her to pay off her good-for-nothing son’s gambling debts.
“They’ll cut off his fingers, Angelina! — she shrieked into the phone…
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