“She says you she is sorry,” I translated when Axinya looked blank.
“She talks like a machine g*n,” Axinya remarked in Russian. “For what is she sorry?”
I batted the question on to Rain.
“I am sorry about Stalin. Dying.”
Mayday picked that moment to stagger into the kitchen and sniff at the patterns on Axinya’s stockings. Wagging an obscenely hairless stump of a tail, peering through cataract-studded eyes, the dog must have thought she was getting a whiff of an exotic skin disease.
Jerking her knees away from the snorting pink nose, Axinya shrieked in Russian, “What is it?”
“A dog. She is very old,” I added, as if it explained everything—the folds of gray skin hanging from the neck, the black tongue trailing from the drooling mouth, the r
