Chapter 8

Grandma died. In late autumn, on her eightieth birthday at five in the morning, she had her third stroke. Or maybe Daddy did something to her. Such is life.

That morning I had made love to a gentle, blond man in an apartment in Podol. The sound of the waking city—the tinkle of the tram and the hum of the cars—wafted through the old window frame. Holding me in his arms, the man kissed me on the lips, and she lay there frozen in bed as Dad tried to give her mouth-to-mouth. The air didn’t enter her lungs, it just hissed into her stomach. He had no idea how to massage her heart.

So often I had imagined that day and my return to him. He calls me once everything is over. He does it late on purpose. Not because he was too busy or upset—it’s amazing how much time frees up when somebody dies—but to scold me once again: “You see, even in a time like this, you couldn’t bother being here.”

He calls and says nothing for so long that it all becomes clear.

I drop everything and take the train, dragging it out just enough to miss the funeral. She lies all night on her bed covered with a blanket. He recites prayers from the psalter left behind by the Orthodox priest who came for an hour to read over her. He doesn’t hesitate to tell me about it. “He was wearing jeans and smart shoes, and he charged a thousand hryvnia for the hour, like a prostitute!” A good girl costs more, Dad.

The house is still. The neighbours drop by to spy the relief on his face, but they leave without finding it. He lights and snuffs out candles through to the morning, kneels and bangs his head against the old carpet, and only once it starts to get light outside does he grow drowsy. He sits in a chair in the corner and sleeps until the hearse arrives to take Grandma away to the cemetery in the village where she was born. To lie next to her husband’s symbolic grave.

She is buried in silence. The day grinds on and nobody knows quite how many glasses of valerian-laced brandy Dad has taken.

I don’t know what made me sadder; that another family member had died or that I didn’t get to enjoy his tears. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier? I would have come to help you?” I rehearsed the conversation in front of the mirror in the train toilet as I fixed my hair and painted my lips. I wanted to look pretty to spite them all.

It was drizzling. The morning was dull and cool. Dad never came home. All day I looked for him in the diners and the slot-machine arcades. After completing a few routes on the marshrutka bus, I visited the hotspots he’d drag me to when I was little. In the end, I found him at a bus stop outside the ceramics factory. No idea what he was doing there. He was just shifting from one foot to another, pulling his head into his shoulders from the cold, crumpling his hat. He looked as aimless and old as I had ever seen him. As the marshrutka slowed down, I looked at him through the unwashed glass and pondered whether I really wanted to get off.