Work Text:
March 1983
Three months after Katya was born, Anatoly had to leave the country again for a chess tournament. He could barely force himself to leave his wife and infant on the train platform. Svetlana had insisted on coming to see him off, and he held their daughter close until it was time to board, just a little bit terrified of… he hadn’t been entirely sure what, even then. That something would happen, or something would changed.
He watched them through the train window until they disappeared from sight, and then fidgeted the whole way to the airport. By the time his plane landed, he’d put them out of his mind, mentally tucked safely away until he returned. It got progressively easier each trip after that. By the time Andrei was born, he was a pro.
Now, he is being forced to practice a new skill—staying home.
Anatoly is still the current world chess champion, but after his defection and return, no one wants anything to do with him. He is on incredibly thin ice with the government. He has two years until the next championship, and an army of Soviet chess players that want to take him down, and he doesn’t know that he actually wants to keep playing, except that he doesn’t know how to do anything else.
He spends a lot of time at home. He goes to the chess library, reads, and comes home. He goes out for lunch and comes home. He plays through games by himself in his office at home. His children are at school and Svetlana is at work, and Anatoly is in front of a chess board, alone.
He and Florence would spend days at a time together at home, playing chess and talking and enjoying each other’s presence, and there was never a moment to be lonely or bored. He tries not to think about it.
He is home when his children come home from school now—sometimes, he goes to the school to collect them himself, just to get out of the house. Andrei is too young to have homework, but Katya does, and sometimes he sits with her at the kitchen table and helps her complete it.
Reacquainting himself with his children has been… a work in progress. He was used to leaving, and used to returning a week or a month or more later, sure in the knowledge that nothing much could have changed. This is no longer the case. At first, upon Anatoly’s return, all he could do was watch them, taking them in and searching for familiarity in them. So much is different—Andrei struggled with full sentences when Anatoly left, and now he doesn’t stop talking. He remembers Katya telling him she wanted to be a singer when she grew up, and she sang all the time around the house. Now, sometimes, if he walks past her bedroom door very quietly, he can hear her singing softly to herself.
They have gotten used to not having him around. They’ve figured out how to sidestep the hole he made in their lives.
“I don’t know how to fix this,” he admits to Svetlana late one night, just before she retreats to bed. He has the spare room, now. The mattress isn’t comfortable, but he can’t find it in himself to replace it.
Svetlana sighs. “I don’t know either,” she says. “They may be children, but they’re still people.”
They’re people who don’t seem particularly interested in him at the moment. “They don’t ask me for anything. They don’t like it when I try to join their conversations, or offer to play with them,” he says.
“Anatoly, you didn’t play with them before,” Svetlana says. It isn’t strictly true, but it hurts. He doesn’t remember the last time he played with either one of them. “You spent all your time thinking about chess. Did you ever think about why you wanted children?”
Anatoly considers it. He thinks back to lifetimes ago, when Svetlana was pregnant with Katya, when they were still carving out space for their little family. He doesn’t remember having plans, just a lot of worries. “You wanted them,” he says.
“You could have just asked for a divorce,” she says. There’s no bite to it, but it isn’t a joke.
Anatoly picks at that line of thought. When they found out they were going to be parents, there was a lot of planning that went into it—they had to prepare the house, they had to gather supplies and clothes. Had he ever thought about what they would do with the children once they were born? Did he think about what kinds of activities he wanted to do with them, what he wanted them to be like as adults, what type of parent he wanted to be? He was so preoccupied with chess.
If he didn’t make any plans then, he has nothing but time now. It doesn’t come naturally—he hasn’t practiced. He looks at the two of them at the dinner table and thinks. What should he want to do with them? What kind of life does he want for them?
Anatoly wants his children to be happy. The simplicity of that strikes him, especially because he knows he has directly contributed to the opposite. That makes shame pool uncomfortably in his gut. He wants them to be happy, to find jobs and hobbies that they enjoy. He doesn’t want them to get so wrapped up in one thing that it consumes every other aspect of their lives.
There was a trip Anatoly took when he was very young. He, his parents, and his younger sister got into a train and rode it for three days to Siberia to visit his mother’s family. They had a room in the sleeper car to themselves, and Anatoly and his sister each had an upper bunk. He spent hours lying on the bed on his stomach, staring out the window at the trees passing by—hours more wandering the length of the train car with his sister. There was another boy there, and they played together until he got off, the night before they did. They must have driven their parents mad, but he remembers lying on his bunk at night and listening to his father read out loud to them. The books he was reading were too complex for Anatoly to really grasp, but each night he fell asleep to the sound of his father’s gruff voice.
It’s one of his strongest memories of his father. He doesn’t think his children have anything close to a memory like that of him.
Anatoly starts to keep Andrei home from daycare sometimes. He’s only three years old, so he isn’t missing much. Away from his sister and mother, he engages with Anatoly more. Anatoly scours the city, looking for places he can take a 3-year-old that Andrei would enjoy, but very quickly, he realizes he likes the trolley ride to the parks and museums more than he likes the destination at the end of the ride. So, they ride the trolley, sometimes for hours. Andrey sits and sometimes stands on Anatoly’s lap and looks out the window, pointing out the dogs and colorful cars and fun-looking buildings, asking questions about the world outside. Anatoly does his best to answer each one.
He picks Katya up from school one day, and they make a detour to a cafe for some hot chocolate. They sit together on tall stools, and Anatoly watches her blow on her cup as steam fats up to her face. Her mittens lie discarded on the table.
“Your birthday is coming up,” he says. She nods. “Is there anything you want to do for it?”
“Mama said I could have a party,” she says. “I want to invite my whole class. Tova’s mama makes the best cakes, and she said I could get one.”
“That sounds like a lot of fun,” Anatoly says, willing himself not to wince at the thought of 20 seven-year-olds running around the house. But maybe Svetlana won’t want him to be there for it. “Your mama is very good at planning parties. I should show you pictures of our wedding sometime.”
Katya perks up a little at that. “Like the picture that was in the hall? With Mama’s big pretty dress?” Katya asks.
“Yes, just like that one,” Anatoly says. That picture was not in the hall upon his return home. He hasn’t asked about it.
They sit in silence for a few minutes. Anatoly doesn’t know if this is normal—she seems to always have something to say to her mother. But finally, Katya finishes her drink and pulls on her mittens again. “Papa, Tovarich Alenkova says we’ll have shooting stars next week,” she says.
“I didn’t know that,” Anatoly says.
Katya nods. “It’s in the newspaper. She gave me a copy, it’s in my bag.”
Anatoly hums. “Would you like to see it?”
Katya looks up at him, her eyes shining. “Can we?”
“I think so,” he says. He will do anything in his power to get her to these shooting stars, he thinks.
She gives him the newspaper clipping when they get home. He talks it over with Svetlana. The meteor shower will be partially visible from their home, but with the light pollution, he thinks they can do better. Anatoly packs bags for himself and the children on a Friday, and as soon as Svetlana gets home, the four of them get into the car and make the drive to the dacha.
It looks just like Anatoly remembers it. Apparently, while he was gone, it had been requisitioned from some politician or other. Anatoly is truly shocked his key still works, but to be fair, it isn’t very lavish, just a little cabin. But it has a good backyard, and a great view of the sky in a clearing between crops of trees. They pull in just as the sun is disappearing over the horizon. Anatoly unloads the car and Svetlana starts preparing a late dinner while Anatoly gets a fire going in the fireplace to fight the chill. The children run around the sitting room, excited by the new environment—Anatoly and Svetlana came here together before Katya was born, and once with Katya before Andrei was born, but never since then.
The newspaper said the meteor shower won’t start until around 2AM, so they get the children to bed with promises to wake them when it’s time. Katya goes to bed soon after, taking the one adult-sized bed. Anatoly has the couch, but he doesn’t go to sleep, instead sitting in front of the fire for hours.
He remembers the last time he was here. The candidates tournament was months away, but it felt like it was closing in on him, suffocating him to the point that being here with his small family felt stifling. Anatoly hasn’t played chess in days. Is that a good thing? Is he giving up?
He doesn’t have a good answer to any of it, but time moves on anyway. The clock strikes 2, and Anatoly pulls on a coat and his boots and walks outside. There is snow on the ground from a few days before, but the sky is clear, the waning moon is fully visible, and it lights his footsteps to the middle of the clearing to look up into the endless sky.
What was it all for? Once, Anatoly wanted this more than anything—to be world champion, to win the title and hold onto it for as long as he could. He did it, but it cost him everything. Twice. What is left?
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees movement. He holds his breath and watches until a second streaks across the sky. Anatoly runs back into the house to rouse his children.
Katya is out of her bed in a moment, and has to be stopped before she runs out into the snow barefoot. Andrei is less enthused, so Anatoly puts a coat on him, bundles him up in his boots and his blanket, and carries him outside where Katya is already jumping up and down and pointing at the sky.
It lasts for about half an hour, the impossible stillness of the night broken by Katya’s joyous exclamations every time she sees a star jump away. Anatoly doesn’t know how much of it Andrei catches, with his head resting against Anatoly’s shoulder, but he tries to point them out. They disappear so quickly.
Svetlana stands by the door for a while, her own coat and blanket wrapped around her. Anatoly looks back to see her watching the sky, her faced raised upwards, the light of the moon glinting in her eye. She doesn’t look at him.
“Papa, I want to be closer!” Katya says, raising her arms up to the sky. She’s much heavier than she used to be, but he crouches down and wraps an arm around her, hoisting her up on his hip. She doesn’t help him much, throwing her hands up whenever she sees a shooting star. He knows he won’t last long like this, a child in each arm, but she’s smiling, so he’ll hold her until his arms give out.
The air curls with white condensation from their breath, and Katya stares up at the sky, her eyes wide. “Thank you, Papa,” she whispers.
Anatoly holds them both tighter.