BLOOD AND ASHES

What She Draws

On day nine, Nikolai Volkov found her sketchbook.

She had left it on the kitchen table, not carelessly, not accidentally, but in the specific way you left something when you needed to believe that you were a person who had a sketchbook that they could leave on a table, a person with an ordinary life and ordinary habits and a kitchen table that was theirs. It was an act of stubborn normalisation and she knew it, and she did it anyway.

She had come back for it forty minutes later.

The kitchen was empty. Or should have been.

He was standing at the table.

The sketchbook was open.

Her whole body went cold. She stood in the doorway and looked at him looking at her drawings looking with the concentrated stillness she was beginning to understand was how he did everything, the quality of a man who had decided that anything worth doing was worth doing with complete attention and she felt the violation of it so acutely that her hands clenched.

These were hers.

Every single person she had ever had had the capacity to take something from her. Her father: her safety, her future, twenty three days she would never retrieve. Petrov, her freedom, the version of herself that had not yet learned to divide and endure. The men in the cargo hold: her phone, her name in the world, her brother’s voice.

The sketchbook was what was left. The inside of her. The things no one had been able to reach.

“Close it,” she said.

He looked up.

“Close the book.”

A pause. He closed it. Carefully she noticed that, despite herself, the carefulness with which he handled it, the way he didn’t drop it closed but laid the cover down with an attention to the spine.

“I apologise,” he said.

She walked to the table and picked it up.

She held it in both hands and looked at him and she knew that her face was doing something she hadn’t authorised it to do the face of someone holding the last intact thing. She hated that he was seeing it.

“Those are mine,” she said. “That is the only thing in this house that is mine.”

He said nothing for a moment. Then: “I know.”

“You don’t touch them without asking.”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t ask.” She held his gaze. “There is no asking. They are not available for you to look at.”

He looked at her steadily. He did not look chastened she would not have believed chastened, exactly, from this man but he looked, again, accurate. Like he was seeing something and acknowledging it without flinching.

“Understood,” he said.

She did not believe it would be that simple. Men like him, men with the specific architecture of power he had built around himself, did not take corrections from women who lived in their compound and ate their food and were, by any external measure, entirely under their control.

She waited for the reversal. For the gentle reminder of the power differential. For the thing that would come after the understood.

It didn’t come.

He moved to the door of the kitchen. He stopped.

“The drawing of my face,” he said, without turning around. “You did it from memory.”

She felt heat in her face. “Observation is habit. I draw everything I need to remember.”

A pause.

“You made the jaw too strong,” he said.

She stared at his back.

“The left side,” he continued, still not turning.

“It’s slightly asymmetrical. An old break. Your drawing has it perfectly even.”

He walked out.

She stood in the kitchen for a long time after, the sketchbook pressed against her chest, her thoughts doing something complicated and unmappable.

He had not looked at her drawings to possess them.

He had looked at them the way she looked at things the way she had looked at the pigeon on the sill on a Tuesday morning in Peckham that felt like another woman’s life to understand something.

She opened the sketchbook. She found the drawing. She looked at his jaw.

She picked up the pencil.

She adjusted the left side.

She hated that she was right about the asymmetry, the moment she corrected it. She hated that he had known about his own face with that precision.

She hated, most of all, that the drawing was better now.

She closed the sketchbook.

She went to her room.

She sat at the desk and thought about a man who knew about an old break in his own face and said nothing about why, and who had looked at her drawings without possessing them, and who walked his compound at night and stopped outside a stranger’s door and moved on without explanation.

She thought about his sister, who had drawn on walls.

She thought about the photograph on the desk, turned face down.

She opened to a fresh page and began to draw from memory: the study, the books in five languages, the worn leather chair, the desk with its papers and half finished coffee.

The photograph, a blank white square.

Her hand moved to where his face should be, above the desk.

She left it empty.

She wasn’t ready to put him there yet.

But she left the space.