Chapter Text
Valeriy sat at the plywood table in the police post on Vagonostroitelnaya Street, sipping Georgian tea from a cracked mug and watching through the grimy window as the December snow melted into a grey slurry before it could reach the asphalt. The kettle on the dented hotplate had boiled long ago, and steam was settling on the glass; through the murky streaks, the outlines of the TV tower and the dark boxes of the Khrushchev-era apartment blocks, pressed down by the low Baltic sky, could be guessed at.
He had served in this precinct for barely two months since his transfer from Chernyakhovsk, and behind his back his colleagues had already dubbed him "Smurf" the moment he turned towards the filing cabinet or put on his cap, flattening his unnaturally bright hair. He had brewed the blue dye himself, without any malicious intent; he had simply mixed up the proportions of peroxide and pigment bought for a song from the Vietnamese at the Central Market, and the result was so eye-catching that the deputy commander for drill, unable to help himself, had snorted for a long time at the morning roll call, while the patrolmen hid their grins in the raised collars of their padded jackets.
The shift dragged on, habitually empty; the telephone in the corridor rang insistently but muffled, someone from the shift dropped the receiver, footsteps rustled over the linoleum, and the air smelled of damp plaster and bleach from the utility closet. Valeriy pulled from his pocket a sheet of paper folded into quarters, an advertisement for evening courses at the university that he had torn off a post on Lenin Avenue just last Tuesday, smoothed it out on his knee, and hid it away again, unable to bring himself to throw it out. He was twenty-six; behind him lay his compulsory service near Murmansk, three years in the patrol and guard service in Chernyakhovsk, and an acute sense that life had frozen in an expectation as murky as the window glass. And that he himself was stuck in a passageway courtyard of a strange city, where each day was like the previous one, the way one matchbox is like another.
The call came closer to noon: on Gorky Street, by the grocery store, an old woman was screaming about a stolen bag with ration coupons she had just redeemed. The service UAZ, reeking of petrol and damp broadcloth, coughed for a long time before starting, and Valeriy stared through the mud-splattered side window at the shop windows drifting past, at the peeling end walls of the prefabricated five-storey blocks, and at the men who were pushing a cart of empty milk bottles towards the back entrance of the food shop. The snow fell more thickly, settling on the rusty swings in the empty courtyard, on the concrete fence, on the sign bearing the house number, and this December monotony made his ears ring. The old woman was indeed sitting on a plastic crate by the shop window, clutching a loaf of sliced bread to her chest and loudly recounting to every woman who passed about the young lad with greenish hair who had snatched her bag right in the queue for sugar.
Valeriy, filling out a report on the hood of the UAZ, was writing down the description, and suddenly, out of place, he recalled a very recent incident on the Staropregolskaya Embankment.
A week before, a patrol had come across two teenagers by the rubbish containers behind the Atlantika restaurant: a girl in an old coat from someone else's shoulder, and a boy whose fair, long-unwashed hair gleamed swamp-green in the yellow light of the streetlamp. The boy was thin, stood tensely and silently, shielding his sister, and in his pale grey eyes there was such a deep, ingrained anguish that Valeriy's hand could not bring itself to write the report. They had no documents; his colleague suggested taking both to the precinct, but Valeriy waved a hand, muttered something about a first warning, and for a long time afterwards felt a burning, distrustful gaze on his back. Now, standing by the grocery store and huddling into the raised collar of his greatcoat, he thought that those greenish locks surely belonged to that very boy, and that the city, it seemed, was too small to part forever.
And do you know what?
He turned out to be perfectly right.
Because the very next morning, he met the pair of them in the queue for milk. He did not hesitate. He grabbed the boy by the scruff of the neck, dragged him twenty metres away from the crowd, and discovered with surprise that the boy was not resisting. And his sister, too, simply stood in place, following them with a long, indifferent gaze.
"What did you steal that babka's bag for?"
The boy did not tear away, did not brace himself; he simply walked alongside, his hands thrust into the pockets of his old coat, and said nothing, staring somewhere towards a peeling wall. Valeriy stopped by a stunted little square, where beneath bare linden trees a lonely bench stood soaking forlornly, turned the boy to face him, and for the first time in daylight made out the eyes he had remembered since the embankment. Grey-gold, very strange, as transparent as the water in the Pregolya, and just as cold, ringed with dark circles of sleeplessness.
"What did you steal that babka's bag for, eh?" Valeriy repeated, without raising his voice, but also without releasing his intent gaze from the pale face with its sharp cheekbones and chapped, cracked lips.
The boy shrugged, shivering under his light coat, which was not at all suited to the weather.
"There's nothing to eat."
Valeriy felt uneasy.
He let go of the coat collar, thrust his hands into the pockets of his greatcoat, and noticed that the girl was still standing by the dairy counter, not even trying to come closer, simply watching from afar, huddling into a downy shawl over that same coat from someone else's shoulder.
"Are you from an orphanage?" Valeriy asked, although he already guessed what the answer would be.
"We aged out in August. I know, if anything, I know stealing isn't allowed. You want to break my arm, go ahead."
Valeriy was taken aback by the other's insolence at that moment, it must be said, but he did not let it show.
"I don't want anything yet."
The boy jerked his chin, whether in a smirk or simply from the cold seizing his jaw, and shoved his chilled fingers deeper into his pockets, where, judging by how the lining bulged, something hard was lying.
"Well, want or don't want," he said without any expression, looking not at Valeriy but at a flock of pigeons busily scratching in the wet snow by the empty flowerbed. "Only I won't give the bag back, sorry. We redeemed the coupons yesterday; I sold the butter, and the sugar's already in the tea."
It was a curious thing, whom the kid had got such honesty from. It seemed to Valeriy that he was not at all afraid of prison. He was not insolent or wild, did not curse at him or try to stab him. He was either upset or frightened, although he showed not a shred of fear either. It seemed that right now anyone could do anything to him, and he would not object.
"And how was the tea? Sweet?" Valeriy asked, not knowing himself why.
"Listen, what's it to you? So you fine me, so you lock me up for fifteen days for petty theft; Odette won't make it without me, and that's that."
For the first time in the whole conversation, he lifted his eyes directly to Valeriy. Valeriy suddenly remembered himself at twenty, demobilised from near Murmansk with frostbitten fingers and a complete emptiness in his head, when he had stood just like this on the platform of a strange city and had no idea where to turn. That memory jabbed under his ribs with an unexpected sharpness, and he averted his gaze, staring at a leaning lamppost with a scrap of last year's May Day flag.
"What's your name, then?" Valeriy asked in a conciliatory tone, pulling a crumpled pack of Belomorkanal cigarettes from his greatcoat pocket and offering it to the boy, more out of habit. He knew that such kids smoked, always smoked.
The last thing he needed was for the kid to cosh someone with a pipe for a carton of cigarettes.
"Alyosha." The boy glanced sideways at the pack, hesitated for a second, but took a cigarette after all, turned it over in his thin fingers. "And my sister's Odette. A stupid name, I know, but you can thank our mother for that; she was mad about ballet."
He struck a match against the box, lit up first himself, and then, catching himself, held the burning match out to Valeriy. Valeriy drew in the bitter smoke and thought that it would be a good idea to escort these comrades to the precinct.
Today it was theft, but what about tomorrow?
Would they join a gang and start killing everyone left and right for money and drugs?
"Alexei, then, is it."
"Alyosha."
Valeriy took another drag, tapped the ash straight into the slushy snow underfoot, and suddenly, wearily, almost resignedly, exhaled the smoke into the grey sky from which fine icy grit was sifting. He stubbed out the cigarette butt against the brick wall of a transformer substation, shoved his hands back into his pockets, and suddenly said, counting on nothing.
"All right. We'll consider that I didn't see you."
Alyosha froze with the cigarette not yet brought to his lips, squinted, clearly expecting a trick, and asked again, disbelievingly:
"What do you mean, didn't see?"
"In the sense that I won't file a report, and I'll tell the old woman we didn't find you." Valeriy rubbed the bridge of his nose and added, "But that's the first and last time, understood? If you get caught stealing again, I'll lock both of you up, and your sister won't need any Vaganova Academy after that."
He spoke harshly, yet it was clear that as a person, Valeriy was impossibly soft-hearted, though he was serious.
"And what am I supposed to do now?"
Valeriy said nothing, studying the wet pigeons, the dark windows of the grocery store in which the low Baltic sky was reflected, and suddenly recalled that their precinct was just looking for a freelance stoker: the coal stove in the utility room was constantly getting clogged, and the local supply manager had been drinking for the second week already. The thought was unprofessional, bordering on a direct breach of subordination, but that thought had already taken shape in his head as something whole and irreversible, like the ice on the Pregolya in mid-January.
"Come to the police post on Vagonostroitelnaya tomorrow," he said, tucking the pack of Belomorkanal back into his greatcoat pocket and adjusting his cap. "Ask for Valeriy. I'll find you work."
Alyosha said nothing in reply, only nodded curtly and thrust his hands back into his pockets, as though afraid that the offer of work would dissolve into thin air, like the steam from his mouth, the moment he uttered a single word aloud. Valeriy turned and walked back towards the grocery store, feeling two intent gazes on the back of his head, and thought that tomorrow morning promised to be interesting, if only because Varka would surely give him a dressing-down for taking matters into his own hands.
The queue at the dairy counter had already dispersed; the old woman with the loaf of bread had vanished somewhere, and only the saleswoman in a dirty apron was clattering empty crates, muttering some nonsense under her breath about the second shift.
The snow intensified, plastering the windscreen, and the wipers crawled across the car of some man who was trying unsuccessfully to start it.