Work Text:
May 1989
Anatoly is at work. Florence is meeting with her team at the chess club. The children are at school.
That just leaves Frederick Trumper, sitting across from Svetlana at her kitchen table.
He looks at the cards in his hand tensely, studying them like they hold the secret to the universe. This has been the case for at least a minute.
“It’s your turn,” Svetlana prompts.
“I know,” he says defensively, and chews on his lip for a moment. Finally, he sighs in defeat and lays down a six of hearts.
Svetlana can’t help her pleased smile as she lays a jack of hearts on top of it. “That can’t be the best you have.”
Frederick huffs. “This game is hard, okay,” he says, as if he isn’t among the best in the world at one of the most complex games in human history.
Because Svetlana is a good person, she doesn’t tease him too harshly for it. He wanted to go with Florence, but she’s in the middle of preparing for the world championship in the fall, and she’s been very strict with him—while she appreciates his input at times, she prefers to keep her personal relationship with him intact and separate from her professional life, as difficult as that can be with the jobs they have. It was easier for him when he was still in New York. Now that he lives in Birmingham, Svetlana can practically see him trying to reign it in.
He’s been here for two weeks, officially. The cargo ship carrying his things arrived four days ago, and he, Anatoly, and Florence spent the weekend unloading and moving boxes. Anatoly handed in the keys to his flat yesterday morning. It’s all finally official.
“Wait until we’re able to play with four players,” Svetlana says. “This isn’t hard at all.”
“Maybe I’ll just sit that one out,” Frederick says. “You lost me with the stuff about second attacks.”
Svetlana shakes her head and lays down her next card. “You need to know how to play more than one game. It is an important part of learning how to be interesting.”
He scoffs, mock-affronted. “Are you saying I’m boring?”
“I am saying this game was created by peasants,” she says, smiling enigmatically. “If they can understand it, so can you.”
He doesn’t really know what to do with himself yet, in the new place. He hasn’t started working yet, because he should be unpacking boxes, but he isn’t. He showed up on the front porch around lunchtime, and now here they are, passing the time playing Durak.
Svetlana can sympathize. It feels like only yesterday that she found herself in a new country, where the only people she knew were Florence and her immediate family. Everything around her was foreign. She didn’t know where she liked to eat, or where to find what she wanted to buy, or where she could spend her free time. She didn’t have any friends here to talk to. Now, two and a half years on, she is comfortable in England, but it was a rocky transition. Frederick will find his place, she is confident. It’s only a matter of time.
She wins the game they’re playing, and then a few more. Finally, he beats her. It takes him a moment to even realize it, and then when he does, the look of triumph on his face and the way he pumps his fists into the air is wildly out of proportion with the stakes.
“You’re very competitive,” she comments, reshuffling the deck. He probably understands it well enough now to play and converse at the same time.
He grins apologetically. “Old habit. You have to be, to get to the top,” he says, which is something Svetlana knows all too well. She wonders what it was like with him then—how that all-consuming desire to win manifested in him, in another time and place. With Anatoly, she was always on the outside looking in, begging him not to lose himself on that path until it became clear to her there was no return. She wonders if Frederick ever had anyone to ask him. Florence was right there walking the path with him.
“Do you have any family?” she asks as she deals and sets out the trump suite. Florence has never mentioned any, and Svetlana assumes she would, if any were relevant.
“Just me,” he says, laser-focused on his hand, his brows drawn together. So he doesn’t want to talk about it. That’s fine, Svetlana can talk for the both of them.
“I have four older siblings in Russia. All but one of them have been married and have children—there were always people in the house. It could get very loud,” she says. “When I moved to Moscow for university, it took me some time to get used to how different my life was. My mother expected me to come home afterwards, but instead I got married. She was very upset with me.”
“Must have been hard.”
Svetlana nods. “It was and it wasn’t. I missed my family when I left, of course, but there was a part of me that never really felt at home there,” she says. “I didn’t understand why until I came here and felt a similar way.”
They play a few turns in silence. Svetlana has all but given up on Frederick continuing the conversation—which is fine. They don’t know each other very well yet. It’s just that Svetlana knows so much about him that is mainly secondhand, and from now on he’s going to be a much bigger part of her and her family’s lives.
“I never went back to Pittsburgh after I left home,” he finally says, affecting casual. “I just didn’t see the point. The person I was there…”
Svetlana nods, relieved that he seems to understand. “You didn’t know who you were yet,” she says.
“I was starting to get an idea,” he says, laying down a card from his hand. Svetlana gives the turn to him—she doesn’t have anything that can beat it. “I knew I couldn’t be that person there.”
“And here?” Svetlana asks. She wants to see this move through his eyes—it took so long to get him here. So many long-distance phone calls, so many visits that were never quite long enough, pestering from Florence, requests from Anatoly. Svetlana has become very comfortable with her family here in England, and now someone else is being thrown into the mix. She wants to know how stable he sees this as being.
Frederick shrugs one shoulder. “This might be the closest I ever get,” he says. “I never thought I would…”
There are so many ways he could finish that sentence, but Svetlana thinks she understands them all. “Neither did I,” she says, and she can’t help but smile even now, every time she thinks of it—she never could have predicted her life the way it is now. She never would have been able to predict being allowed to love someone like Florence, or having the ability to follow her halfway across the world, or getting to raise her children with her. Some days, it still feels too good to be true. There have been a lot of hardships on the way here, but she wouldn’t change any of it for the world.
A moment later, the door bursts open, and Andrei and Katya dash through. Svetlana abandons the game to intercept them before they disappear into their bedrooms and redirect them to their homework. Andrei tries to deny having any, but he has a tell-tale look of guilt on his face.
“Give me your bag,” Svetlana orders, and reluctantly, he hands it over. She searches through it and pulls out his maths folder and the worksheets inside.
“I’m almost done with my book,” he argues, looking very sad.
Svetlana sighs and hands his bag back to him. “You can have half an hour, then we will do these,” she says. “Remember you want to be done before Papa gets here for dinner.”
Immediately, his mood is bolstered. “Okay!” he says. He turns and notices Frederick at the table for the first time, and bounces over to him excitedly. “Hi Freddie! Is that Durak? Can I play?”
“I don’t know, you’ll probably beat me,” Freddie says.
“I’ll go easy! Promise!” Andrei says.
“After your homework,” Svetlana says, shooing him away with his book and bag in hand. It will be a good motivator for him. He runs off to his room, and Katya is already gone. She doesn’t need anywhere near as much oversight to get things done.
They finish the game, and then Frederick keeps Svetlana company in the kitchen while she gets dinner started. The conversation is less heavy—there is more Svetlana wants to know, but the time for that today has passed. She will have plenty of other chances. After 40 minutes, she calls Andrei back to the table. He sits next to Frederick with his worksheets, and the two of them struggle over them together.
“What the hell is that?” Frederick asks, pointing to something on the page.
“It’s exponents in a fraction,” Andrei says. “I think I know how. But every time I do it, I get a different answer.”
Andrei walks Frederick through the steps, and Svetlana listens in and smirks from the other side of the kitchen at his befuddled expression. Andrei’s logic is sound—he’s probably just making basic arithmetic errors in his eagerness to be finished.
“What grade are you in again?” Frederick finally asks.
“I’m in sixth year,” Andrei says.
“I don’t know what that means,” Frederick says. “Anyway, here’s a secret. None of this matters. I have no idea how to do this and I’ve never needed it.”
“Don’t tell him that,” Svetlana says sternly. “I used this sort of thing all the time at work.”
Frederick shoots Andrei a look. “For anyone who isn’t an engineer, none of this matters,” he corrects. Andrei nods solemnly.
Svetlana leaves her cooking utensils to find and point out the problem. They muddle through a couple more problems before Florence gets home. After setting down her things and greeting everyone, she sits on Andrei’s other side and comes to his rescue. Frederick huffs about the ease with which she explains the sixth-year word problem, and neither she nor Svetlana mention the fact that Florence had initially struggled with it so much she’d ultimately gone out to buy a maths book in order to brush up on her skills, so she can stay just ahead of where Andrei is. It’s a secret Svetlana will keep for her, because she thinks it’s adorable, and because she appreciates not having the work left completely to her even though it’s her field.
Anatoly finally arrives just as the children have finished clearing the table and begun to set it. Svetlana watches out of the corner of her eye as Frederick goes to him, as if magnetized. They talk quietly for a moment in the sitting room as Anatoly sheds his suit jacket and rolls up his sleeves in response to the warmth of the house, and Frederick grabs his tie and insistently tugs him down to kiss him, smiling the whole time.
At dinner, the children talk animatedly about their days at school. Florence, Frederick and Anatoly discuss the upcoming championship very briefly before succumbing to Svetlana’s stern look and changing the subject. She’d instituted a ‘no chess at the dinner table’ policy years ago, when it was just herself and Anatoly and he would bring chess books with him to read while eating, but it is a rule that has served her well. They can talk about it later—now, she wants to be part of the conversation.
“Svetlana, I would literally give you all my organs if you’d agree to be my personal chef,” Frederick says, once everyone has mostly finished eating and the children have run off to their bedrooms.
“I’m not sure I have a high opinion of your organs,” she says flatly, causing Florence to snort.
“Hey, most of them are probably fine,” he says, and then stops as if his thoughts process has just crashed into a brick wall. He looks at Anatoly. “Wait. You literally used to have a private chef.”
“Mostly just for tournaments,” Anatoly says.
“Mostly.”
“I miss Vladislav. He was a good man,” Svetlana says. “His pelmeni was all wrong, but everything else he made was very good.”
Frederick leans over the table to Florence. “Can you believe these two?” he asks. “When I won the world championship I was living off deli sandwiches and instant coffee, and that’s the way I liked it.”
“Only because your kitchen was a biohazard,” Florence says. “Maybe now you can finally learn how to cook for yourself.”
“Oh, no. There are restaurants in England, I’m told,” Frederick says. “It’s too late for me now, I’m too old.”
“You’re 36,” Florence says, rolling her eyes.
“You know, Andrei is learning how to cook now,” Svetlana says thoughtfully. Katya has been helping her in the kitchen for a few years now, but Andrei was less trustworthy with knives and hot stoves and pans. “You could join him. You can’t be much worse than him.”
Frederick laughs. “That’s very kind of you,” he says. “Unfortunately, I need you to like me, so I’m gonna have to pass on that one.”
Svetlana shoots Anatoly a look across the table. “As hopeless as you are in the kitchen, I would have thought you would look for someone with a little more skill.”
“By the time I realized, it was too late,” Anatoly says gravely.
Freddie grins at him, then glances to Florence and Svetlana conspiratorially. “All part of the plan.”
Once the table is cleared, Svetlana gets the cards back out. She deals, and all the while, Frederick boasts about all the practice he’s had, only to be decimated. He takes it well, and slowly starts to wrap his head around the rules as they pertain to more than two players. By the time they finish for the night, he’s no longer consistently coming in dead last. It’s progress—Svetlana feels a little twinge of pride.
It’s getting late, and Anatoly and Frederick have a lot of work ahead of them back at home. Svetlana calls the children back out to say goodnight to their father, which turns into Andrei insisting he come to his room to show him something. Florence splits off to start doing dishes, so Svetlana goes to grab a covered container from the fridge.
“This is for you,” she says, putting it in Frederick’s hands. “A housewarming gift.”
“Thank you,” Frederick says, looking genuinely touched. For a brief moment, his gaze lingers on the hallway where Anatoly had disappeared before returning to her. “That’s—you didn’t have to do that.”
“I know what it’s like,” she says, and she means more than just the move. She thinks back to her wedding, and all the gifts she’d been given, to start a new household. And this is a far cry from that, but still. “Take care of him.”
He gets this look on his face, and Svetlana doesn’t know him well enough to interpret it. “I’m not sure I know how,” he admits quietly.
She puts a hand on his elbow and squeezes comfortingly before letting him go. “It takes time. You will figure it out,” she says, and really hopes it will be true. “It’s polite to bring the dishes back with more food in them, but I think after tonight’s conversation I would rather you didn’t.”
Freddie laughs, startled. “That’s probably safest for everyone involved,” he agrees. And then Anatoly returns, and they say their goodbyes for real this time. Frederick and Anatoly leave together, down the sidewalk and off to their new home, only a few blocks down the road.
Svetlana returns with Florence to the kitchen to help her finish the dishes. She doesn’t know what Florence sees on her face, but she asks, “is everything alright?”
Svetlana nods, thinking about it for a moment. It should be strange, shouldn’t it—to see your husband happy with someone else? In Bangkok, she only ever saw Florence and Anatoly together very briefly, but they never looked happy. Surely they must have been when they were alone. With Frederick, Svetlana can see it.
She’s happy. She wants Anatoly to be, too. Maybe the strangest thing about it is that it doesn’t feel strange at all.
“Now that Frederick is here, Anatoly will have to find something else to complain about,” she says conversationally.
Florence laughs. She’s been looking forward to it, too—Svetlana knows she’s missed him. This is probably the best possible outcome for the two of them. Far enough away to live their own lives, but close enough to reach whenever the desire strikes.
“Just wait until Freddie has to leave the country again for work, I’m sure he’ll start up again,” Florence says. “You did a good job teaching him Durak, by the way. We may have to be careful—he might get competitive.”
“It would be a waste to be competitive about a game he can’t win,” Svetlana says neutrally. “I think he may be a lost cause.”
Privately, she hopes not.