12

Vanya lived in an apartment located above a clothing store not far from the town square. At his firm insistence, we helped him back there, hobbling through deserted streets and clambering over rubble. After the first several blocks, he regained enough strength to walk on his own, but I kept one hand on his forearm just in case.

He made it sound like he just wanted to recuperate at home, but I could tell he was afraid to stay.

“What I did in there was a sacrilege,” he said, once we were on the street again. “I spilled blood in a holy place. Not to mention wrecked the grandest temple from here to Detskaya. Voserka will probably curse me now, if my neighbors don’t tear me apart first.”

He added the last part with a hint of humor, like he was trying to maintain face. But the moment he turned back ahead, his smile slipped from his lips, and he dug his nails into his palms.

The lock on the storefront door had been bashed into pieces. When Vanya held the door open for us, one of the hinges snapped off. Mikhail steadied the panel with both hands.

“It doesn’t look too bad,” Vanya said, glancing around at the ramshackle shelves and broken glass. “Good thing nobody wants to steal clothes.”

“Where are your parents?” I asked.

He picked up a few rumpled shirts and returned them to their shelf. “I never met my mother, and my father died ten years ago.”

“In the trenches?” Mikhail asked.

“That’s right. Not far from here, in what used to be the village of Teykhst.” His gaze shifted to me. “You might actually know the place, Toma. In the early days of the war, the Grozniy troops came as far north as your mountains.”

A shiver swept through my body as I recalled the overgrown trenches, the bones that surfaced with rainfall. I had known the destruction was a product of war, but I hadn’t actually ever considered how the victims might have had friends and family. They were just relics at that point, no more substantial than the portraits and letters I found in abandoned houses.

“Anyway, for about a year now, I’ve been renting the room on the second floor,” Vanya continued, sparing me from having to answer as he turned back ahead. “It gets lonely sometimes, but it’s better than having to clean up people’s vomit at the inn or listening to another lecture from my godmother.”

There was another door at the other end of the room. Vanya climbed onto a stool and retrieved a key from atop the lintel. He opened the door, held it for me, and then promptly let go of the knob when Mikhail tried to walk through.

“Why did you do that?” Mikhail asked sourly, rubbing his arm, where the door had struck him.

Vanya shrugged. “The knob slipped from my hand. Who knows, city boy? Maybe it was witchcraft.”

“Stop calling me that.”