same cause after her death. I fought it for years. But could I blame them? I knew what they called me, what rumors persisted. And even if I was forever branded an adulteress, a seducer, a woman after money and power, a homewrecker, a spy, I was content knowing at least Lara would survive me.
* * *
On the morning they came for me for a second time, two and a half months after Borya’s death, I was sitting in my dark kitchen sipping tea. I’d brewed it too bitter for the third day in a row.
I heard the slow churn of gravel under tires, and I didn’t need to get up to know a black car was making its way down my drive.
I finished my tea and put the cup and saucer in the sink. I thought of Ira, still asleep in her bedroom—how she would later see the teacup with a brown ring and have to wash it, knowing it was mine, and that I was gone.
The sound of car doors opening and closing set me in motion. I went to Mitya’s room first, but saw his bed was empty. “He didn’t come home last night,” Ira said, startling me from behind. She went to the window above Mitya’s desk. “There are two cars now.”
I watched as four men leaned against their cars, smoking and chatting nonchalantly, as if waiting for their girlfriends. I watched as one put out a cigarette in one of my flowerpots and another washed his hands in my birdbath. I closed the curtains and went to the telephone. “Get dressed,” I said. Ira left the room.
Dialing Mama’s number, my hands trembled terribly. “Mama?”
“Are they there?”
“Yes. Are they there too?”
“Yes.”
“They are just trying to intimidate us again. You have nothing to worry about.”
Ira emerged, dressed in her most conservative outfit: a long beige skirt and matching jacket. “Is Mitya at Babushka’s?” she asked.
“Is Mitya there?” I asked Mama.
“He came last night. Drunk again. He’s too young to drink like he does—”
“Mama.”
“He’s up now. I told him to stay put.”
“Good. Keep him there.”
Three hard knocks on the front door shook the floorboards. Ira grabbed my arm. “I have to go, Mama.”
I walked to the entryway with Ira holding my arm like a small child. A man wearing an expensive-looking trench coat cut through the four men in the cheap black suits, leaving muddy tracks across my grandfather’s Akstafa rug. “We finally meet.”
“Welcome,” I said, poised as a hostess.
“You were expecting us, of course,” the man said as his smile grew. “No? You didn’t imagine your activities would go unnoticed?”
I forced a smile to match his. “Care for some tea?”
“We can help ourselves.”
I knew what they were looking for—and they wouldn’t find it at Little House, nor at my Moscow apartment.
The day after Borya was put into the ground, the money—the foreign royalties that would prove I was guilty of crimes against the State—had been given to a neighbor who never asked what was inside the brown suitcase.
Hours passed. Eventually, one of the men, the one with a small scar down the center of his bottom lip, carried a dining room chair out into the drive where Ira and I waited. He asked if we wanted to sit. Ira replied no and the man shrugged, took a seat, and lit up a cigarette. He barely looked at us as we stood and watched the others continue to tear apart our home.
We heard a bicycle approaching. Midway down the drive, Mitya hopped off his bike, letting it crash to the ground. “You have no right,” Mitya cried, his voice cracking.
The man with the scar continued smoking. I went to Mitya and took him by the hand. “Hush,” I said, noticing his sour smell. Looking at him, I could see his shirt was stained with vomit. “Where is Babushka? I told her to keep you there.”
The three of us huddled together as we watched the men emerge from Little House carrying boxes filled with our possessions. When they came out with stacks of journals belonging to Ira—likely filled with musings on school and boys and broken friendships—she stiffened next to me but didn’t say a word. And when the man in the trench coat came out and stumbled on a loose board, Ira squeezed my hand instead of laughing. The image of him tripping would stay in my head later, after he became my interrogator.
I went willingly—without struggle or protest. The man in the trench coat