hate that it’s there, but she insists. Apart from that, I love it in here. It’s where I come when everything gets too much.” She gestures for me to make myself comfortable on the bed, then turns down the light, takes a DVD from a shelf, and slips it into the player. It’s a cartoon, very old-fashioned, about a hedgehog going to meet his friend, a bear cub, so that they can count the stars in the sky. Thinking that he has seen a beautiful white horse, the hedgehog tries to follow it and gets lost in the night.
The film is short, lasting perhaps ten minutes, and when it ends Kris’s eyes are shining with tears. “What did you think?” she asks me.
“It’s sweet.”
“I just love it. I feel like that all the time. Like I’m lost in the fog, and all I can see are the outlines of monsters. But it ends happily. The hedgehog is saved, and he finds his friend, and they count the stars together, like they always do. And that’s all I want to do, really. Count the stars with Dasha.”
I don’t know what to say, so I reach for her hand. “You will,” I tell her.
In the bedroom Oxana is asleep in one of my T-shirts. The curtains are undrawn, and on the boulevard outside the fresh snow glitters beneath the street lights. Oxana’s face is turned toward the window, and I watch the flutter of her lashes as she dreams. What stories is her mind creating? Am I there with her?
I pull the covers over her. Her eyes don’t open but her hand snakes out and her fingers lock around my wrist, strong as steel. “G’night, bitch,” she murmurs, and starts to snore.
The next morning Dasha joins us for breakfast. “It’s been great having you,” she tells us. “And thank you for your help with my predecessor. But you need to leave St. Petersburg today. I’m the acting Pakhan of the Kupchino Bratva now, so…”
Dasha doesn’t need to finish. We all know what she means. She’s discharged her duty to us, just as we have to her. Now it is time to go, before our presence makes life complicated for her. “Your passports,” she says, handing Oxana an envelope.
“Thank you. I won’t forget what you’ve done for us.”
Dasha gives me one of her sharp little smiles. “Sorry about hanging you up by the wrists. Must have been uncomfortable.”
“I did punch you on the nose.”
“You did, didn’t you.”
Back in our room, Oxana and I pack our rucksacks and inspect the passports. These appear to be new, and issued in the names of Maria Bogomolova and Galina Tagayeva. I’m Galina.
It takes us very little time to get ready to go. We’ve decided to take the train to Sochi, a modern city on the Black Sea, find a cheap guest house, and review our options. I’m sad to be saying goodbye to Kris. She and I have become good friends in the time we’ve been staying here, and I decide to give her the blue velvet coat from the Mikhailovsky Theatre. Kris is touchingly excited—I know that she wishes she’d seen it first at the Kometa vintage store—and she puts it on at once, posing self-consciously. Dasha accompanies us to the entrance hall of the building. I shake her hand, unsure of the protocol, while she and Oxana exchange a fleeting hug. Kris, looking like a minor character from Anna Karenina in the velvet coat, steps out of the front door. She’s walking with us to the Metro station. There’s been no snowfall this morning, and Kris stands there for a moment, a slight, wistful figure. The wind blows an escaping tendril of hair across her face, and she’s lifting her free hand to brush it away when there’s a smacking sound, not loud, and she lifts from the pavement and flies back through the open door like a blown leaf, landing on her side between Dasha and me.
“Get inside,” Oxana says, wrenching me away from the entrance. “Dasha, move.” But Dasha’s on her knees, gazing at Kris’s surprised eyes and twitching body. As I back away toward the stairs, I see the fist-sized hole and the mess of blood, bone and velvet below her left shoulder.
“Dasha,” I say, my voice shaking.
Still she doesn’t move. Then she slips an arm below her dying lover’s knees and another below her shoulders, and lifts her like a sleeping child from the widening pool of blood.
“Get upstairs,” Oxana orders.