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Illya pulls a stack of shirts out of his suitcase and dumps them onto the floor. He’s searched everywhere and still can’t find what he’s looking for. It’s not big, but it’s not invisible, either. Maybe he’s forgotten it. Stupid. He blinks back tears of frustration. Such a little thing, not worth getting worked up over. And yet, his head pounds, and his eyes won’t stop welling up.
He flips the case and shakes it. Along with the rest of his clothing and whatever possessions he hasn’t already discarded in his search, a small object drops to the floor with a hollow rattle. Illya snatches up the aspirin tin and counts three into his palm. Finally.
The springs of the cot groan, and Illya pauses, afraid his display of temper has awakened his partner, but Napoleon only rolls over, murmuring. Illya’d had to call upon all of his gymnastic skill to untangle himself from Napoleon’s embrace when he had woken earlier – amazed that one could feel so parched and, simultaneously, have to piss so badly. It was as though the body didn’t know what was good for it – or knew it and still couldn’t keep hold of what it knew it needed.
His expedition to the toilet had, at least, netted him a glass of tea, even at the price of an awkward conversation with the custodian Marya Sergyevna. Illya holds the tablets on his tongue and takes a sip of tea. Napoleon, were he awake, would chide him for taking aspirin on an empty stomach. There are still blini on the table, and Illya weighs the hunger that, he’s surprised to find, he does feel, against the certainty that he’ll be sick if solid food so much as touches his lips. No, he decides, closing his eyes, he’s best staying where he is.
Illya wakes without knowing where exactly he is, aware only that there is something poking into his side. He’s torn for a moment between pleasant fantasies and less pleasant memories. The something, though, doesn’t feel like a cock, and feels even less like the barrel of a gun. These best- and worst-case scenarios ruled out, all remaining ambiguity is eliminated by the voice that booms at him from above.
“How are you feeling?”
Right. Napoleon. Illya can think of no reason to lie. “Absolutely wretched.” He pauses to work spittle back into his dry mouth and realizes he’d better focus Napoleon’s attention on the physical, before he takes his answer as permission to get mushy – “I never want to drink again. I think this hangover is some kind of warning from my father beyond the grave – ‘don’t go like me, son.’”
As an attempt to inject levity, Illya’s dark joke fails utterly. Napoleon’s tone slips from his careful, faux-casualness, which Illya knows well and can only just handle, into something dangerously close to open concern. “You’re not going to, you know, I won’t let you.”
“Of course I’m not. I just told you, I’m giving up vodka.” Just what kind of power over him does Napoleon think he has, anyway? Stalling for time, Illya half opens gummy eyes and fumbles for the tea. He thinks his brain will fall out if he sits upright, but he manages to prop himself up far enough to swallow without choking. He takes a sip and nearly gags. “Ugh, that’s gone cold.”
“I’ll make you a new one.” Napoleon offers.
As much as he could use the time alone to collect himself, Illya isn’t cruel enough to send Napoleon into the crucible of a communal kitchen. His school-book Russian and overabundant charm won’t be enough to save him if he starts an unwitting turf war with Nikolai’s neighbors over tea, or sugar, or the best ring on the stove. “Don’t bother, he hasn’t got anything. I ran into the custodian, Marya Sergyevna, on the way back from the toilet and she told me I looked like I needed it more than she did. I don’t even know where the kitchen is.”
“That was kind of her.”
“Yes, she is a kind woman.” The woman he’d met in the hall had been terse, bordering on brusque, but she must have been kind, surely, to have done the things that she had. Illya pictures her changing the sheets on the cot, spoon feeding his father porridge and weak tea. He wonders what she must think of him, the son that arrived from America once all the hard work was done with. Maybe her gruffness is for him alone.
He pushes the thought aside and retreats into logistics. “She told me we can have the room until 5 pm, then she has to get it ready for the next tenants.”
“That’ll be, ah, plenty of time to pack.”
Still, Illya can’t shake the image of Marya Sergyevna, changing his father like a baby, easing his pants over swollen legs, wiping him clean of tarry, bloody shit. His stomach clenches with nausea and shame, and he needs to confess his failure to someone. To Napoleon, perhaps, who already knows most, though not all, of his weaknesses. But all he can do is continue to woodenly relate his conversation with the old custodian.
“She wanted me to know she is sorry about Nikolai Lvovitch. She did not know him well, she says, but she helped some, at the end.”
Napoleon, as he should have expected, hears the confession underneath his words anyway, and grants him easy, shallow absolution. “You came as soon as you knew. Whatever happened between you and your dad, I know you would have been here, if he’d have let you.”
It occurs to Illya that Napoleon may be projecting, just a little, and while he wouldn’t ordinarily mind, he feels belatedly protective of his father, doesn’t want Napoleon to think of Nikolai as the kind of belligerent old man who’d keep secrets to spite his son. “We didn’t have a falling out.”
“So you’ve said, but…”
Napoleon doesn’t know enough context to have this conversation, and Illya finds he resents him his ignorance, even though it’s by his own choice that Napoleon knows nothing of his father, next to nothing of his family’s history, and precious little about Illya himself.
He doesn’t know how to tell him what he needs to know, but he supposes it should start, like any good report, with the facts:
“You asked me what I remember of my father? He left for the front in ’41. I barely remember him before then. When he went away, it was chaos. Mama got her youngest sister, Masha, and me to Tashkent. It was difficult to get word out, and anyway, we didn’t know where he was. I think Mama found it was easiest to assume he was dead. It was not an easy journey, and we did not have an easy time there, but my father had it harder.
“By the time we all managed to find each other again I was thirteen, nearly a man. We tried to be a family, but the pieces didn’t fit anymore. He was…it was like he wasn’t really there, even when he was. And there was the drinking, of course. He and Mama split up for good in ’47, I didn’t see him much after that, even if he didn’t manage to get his residency permit for Moscow until later.”
“That must have been difficult, it’s understandable your relationship would be strained after that, but I’m sure he loved you.”
“I know that!”
“I’m sorry.” Napoleon is using the voice that he uses when talking to witnesses, deliberately calm, self-consciously soothing. Illya hates it. “It’s natural to be angry,” he continues, “I mean, my old man was never exactly father of the year, but when he died... It’s okay to feel angry, even with him.”
Napoleon has never met and won’t ever meet Illya’s father. He’d never expected them to meet of course, but the foreclosed possibility still feels new and strange in its finality. The fact remains, Napoleon doesn’t know Nikolai.
“Napoleon, please spare us both our dignity and refrain from amateur psychoanalysis.”
Illya takes a sip of cold tea, trying to think of how to go on. He’s reluctant, for some reason, to focus the telescope on the mass that has exerted its gravitational force on all the rest of the fabric of his father’s life, warping and folding it. He decides, though, that he has to – it’s not fair to Napoleon to wait for him to put his foot in it unknowing. He aims for a breezily casual delivery, though he can’t keep it up past the first sentence.
“My father, he was one of the soldiers who liberated Auschwitz. Did I ever tell you that?” Of course, he hadn’t. “Papa got back to Kyiv before we did, and there was no one there. We were on our way, you see, but he couldn’t have known that – his parents, his brother and sister and their families were all gone, and strangers were living in our apartment. After the things he had seen – he told me once, later, when he was very drunk, that in those weeks he prayed for one thing only: that they had killed me quickly.”
“Christ” Napoleon’s face is pale. His hand settles on Illya’s shoulder, and Illya would love to lean into the warmth of him, as he had the night before, when he was almost sure Napoleon was sleeping, but Napoleon is definitely awake, and Illya can’t trust himself under his touch. He shrugs the hand off and misses it immediately.
“I told you, he loved me. That’s the kind of love life left him with.”
“Illya…” Napoleon begins.
“What time is it?” Illya cuts him off before he can deliver more sympathy. He needs something physical to do – that will let Napoleon feel helpful and then he’ll stop looking at Illya like that. “We should start packing.” In his hurry to redirect his partner, Illya heaves himself to his feet in one motion. His head swims and his stomach lurches. Big mistake.
When Illya finally staggers back to Nikolai’s room, feeling scoured from the inside out, he finds Napoleon seated at the table, deeply engrossed in a stack of papers. He doesn’t even notice Illya watching him from the doorway. Illya feels a momentary surge of fury, but just as quickly sets it aside. This is what you get, inviting a spy to a funeral. Being angry with Napoleon for snooping would be as pointless as insisting a wolf embrace vegetarianism.
He wonders what the papers are, but he can’t tell from this distance. On stocking feet, he steps into the room and comes up to Napoleon, peering over his shoulder.
“What’s that?”
To Illya’s satisfaction, Napoleon starts, guiltily.
All satisfaction drains away, though, when he sees what Napoleon is holding. “Oh,” he says, feeling more naked than he ever has in the gym locker room, “he kept those.”
“Looks like he reread them, too.” Napoleon fingers the creased folds in the paper.
Illya tastes bile, again. He turns away from the pages, and, coincidentally, turns his back on Napoleon’s sympathetic gaze. He spots a valise under the dresser and seizes upon the task of emptying drawers, ignoring the faint scent that clings to his father’s clothes – makhorka tobacco over something else, familiar yet undefinable. “Old letters from the son who did not see him in over a decade and now miraculously arrives to pack-up his socks and throw away his shaving brush.”
“Hey, hey, hey.” Napoleon’s voice is as unbearably gentle as his touch and Illya wants to close the distance between their bodies with approximately the same intensity with which he wants to pull away. Caught between two opposing forces, he stands still, allowing Napoleon’s hand to remain on the back of his shoulder.
“What?”
“I thought I heard someone giving my partner a hard time.” Illya almost laughs at that – it’s so like Napoleon, the urge to protect Illya from all-comers, even himself.
Napoleon continues, making his excuses for him, “It’s not easy, even with your diplomatic passport.”
Illya does not need the nuances of his geopolitical condition explained to him by an American. “I know it isn’t easy!” he snaps, “But I could have…”
“You’re here now, that’s what matters.” Illya’s heard that tone before in the field – Napoleon’s voice is light, but it brooks no argument.
Still…
“Does it?” It’s a genuine question, for all it must sound like bitter sarcasm. Nikolai Kuryakin is surely beyond knowing or caring whether it’s Illya who’s clearing out his room, or Marya Sergevna, or the new tenants, or no one at all. Even in life, he’d never been attached to things, except, apparently, a thin packet of letters. Illya can barely remember what he’d written, the last time he’d written his father. School-boy inanities, probably. Or, no, he’d sent some dispatches from the Navy, hadn’t he? Censored and redacted to meaninglessness, no doubt. The only thing one can’t get here, alas, is red ink.
Napoleon cuts through Illya’s woolgathering, “Come on, IK, what is it you’re always telling me about regret? Something about a second act of stupidity?”
Napoleon is shockingly well read, although he occasionally likes to pretend otherwise. “That’s not me, that’s Nietzsche,”
“Oh, right.”
Illya had switched to using the telephone in more recent years, his calls to his father brief – Happy New Year, Happy birthday, Many happy returns. He doesn’t remember much about their last conversation, can’t imagine what he would have said, if he’d known…
Napoleon speaks up tentatively, as though he’s expecting to be shot down, “Maybe you should ah, tell your father now, whatever it was you would have said to him if you’d been here.”
Illya’s gotten used to Napoleon’s apparent habit of reading his mind, but that doesn’t mean he has to agree with him when he does. “Don’t be ridiculous. There’s no one here but us. And possibly Marya Sergyevna, if she’s listening in the hall.”
“Ok, so there’s no one here to judge you for trying it.”
“I categorically refuse to speak to ghosts.” As if he hasn’t been trying to do so, silently, since they arrived here.
“I know it seems silly, but trust me on this one; it’s hard to carry things around unsaid.”
“Yes, I suppose it is.” Illya could laugh. Of all the things he doesn’t need to be told. He feels the weight of unspoken words each day – on his tongue, in his stomach, in the aching marrow of his bones. A hazard of the trade, yes, but the heaviest secret in the chest that he carries is only incidentally related to work.
He swallows his laughter, and it comes out as a sigh from somewhere deep, deep within. There are no ghosts, but the room is haunted, nonetheless. Haunted by a kind of future-shade. A man alone with a box of bitter memories.
Napoleon’s hand is warm and alive on his back – the only alive thing in the room.
Illya can’t speak around the lump in his throat. He rasps, “I love you.”
The hand squeezes his shoulder. “Good, Illya, I’m sure he knew that.”
The precious fool. “Napoleon.”
“Hmm?”
Napoleon is so close to Illya that he can feel the ghost of his breath on his skin. It’s his last chance to pretend he hasn’t said what he just had. His last chance to avoid ruining their partnership and what’s left of Napoleon’s respect for him. And yet, he clarifies: “My father didn’t speak English.”
“I’m sure that doesn’t matter, it’s about the feeling.”
Illya can’t tell now whether Napoleon is being deliberately obtuse, extending plausible deniability as one last kindness. He’s come too far though, to crawl his way back to the lifeline his partner is dangling in front of him.
“Napoleon, I love you. Despite the fact that you are treading on my last nerve right now with this spirit medium business. You’re right, it is hard to keep things unsaid.” Illya swallows. “There are things that I wish very much I could speak of with my father, and that I wish he could have said and done while he still lived. But he is dead, and we are alive, for the moment. You don’t have to say anything. I don’t expect anything. But I don’t want to die wishing I had told you, or to miss my chance if the world breaks me before the end, like it did him.”
Napoleon is silent, his hand stiff on Illya’s shoulder as though he’s forgotten it there. Illya can’t bear to feel when Napoleon inevitably jerks it away, so he slips out from under it himself, bending to fasten his father’s suitcase.
He needs to get rid of Napoleon. Needs him gone before he hyperventilates or vomits or breaks down in tears, but he can’t let him know about any of that because if Napoleon sees that Illya is suffering, he will want to stay and help him, even now. He can’t bear the thought of Napoleon’s kindness – polite and impersonal, neatly masking his revulsion or indifference.
If he plays his cards right, maybe he can convince Napoleon to put down his words to the emotional strain of the past few days. Maybe he’ll believe him temporarily mad with grief. That’s what he’ll say when Napoleon comes back later: ‘Forgive me, I was quite beside myself.’ But for the moment, he needs him to go. He’s sure, anyway, that Napoleon is just waiting for an excuse to escape the hopelessly awkward situation Illya’s created for them both.
Illya’s glad to be kneeling on the floor with the suitcase, because it takes all of his strength to control his voice. “Right, well then. Thank you for coming here with me, I appreciate your help. I can finish packing up myself if you’d like to go to a museum, perhaps, or see the sights.”
Napoleon sounds bewildered – who could blame him? – and, unless Illya is imagining things, hurt by the suggestion. “I’m not going to leave you here alone, not unless you’re asking me to?”
Illya flounders. “I thought that you might want…”
“To come halfway around the world to help you when you’re grieving and then abandon you in favor of some dusty paintings and a shiny dome or two? What kind of friend would that make me?” Napoleon sounds properly angry, but not about what Illya would have expected.
What kind of friend? “Napoleon, I just told you that I loved you.”
Napoleon is quite for a long moment, and when he speaks, all the anger has drained from his voice. “Illya, truth be told, I’m more than a bit fond of you.”
“You mean...?” Illya hardly dares to look up.
Napoleon is standing close, practically over top of him. Illya stands up involuntarily, almost in a dream. Then Napoleon’s hands are warm at the back of his head, and his lips are warm on Illya’s lips, and Napoleon is kissing life back into him.
“Is that what you had in mind?” He asks.
“Yes,” Illya breathes, feeling warmth returning to his body from each point of contact with Napoleon and pulling him closer – chest to chest, thighs to thighs. “Yes, Napoleon, but not in my dead father’s bedroom, and” – he remembers a quelling probability – “not with Marya Sergyevna lurking just outside the door.”
“When we get home, then.”
“Yes, Napoleon, when we get home.”