BLOOD AND ASHES

The Rules Of The Compound

Cleo became her map.

Not deliberately, Cleo was not doing anything as organised or intentional as orientation. She was simply a person who moved through the compound the way water moved through known terrain, finding every channel and corner and obstruction by instinct and long practice, and Anya attached herself to the current and learned.

“Three rules,” Cleo told her on day five, while they were in the kitchen, large, warm, smelling of the black bread that the cook, Bogdan, produced every morning in quantities that could have fed a small army and frequently did.

“Whose rules?”

“The compound’s. Unwritten. Important.” She counted on her fingers. “One, the east wing is off limits after nine PM. You’ll know which hallway there’s a painting of a very grim-looking horse that marks the boundary. Two, you don’t speak to the men about business. Any business. Not because they’ll hurt you, but because they’re not allowed to discuss it and you’ll put them in a position they don’t want to be in.”

“And three?”

Cleo looked at her from the corner of her eye. She had the habit of evaluating before speaking, which Anya respected, it was a quality of people who understood that words had weight. “Three is about him.”

“Volkov.”

“If he’s working, you don’t interrupt. If he’s in a black mood and you’ll learn to read the barometric pressure of the compound, everyone does, it’s basically a survival skill you make yourself small. Not because he’d hurt you.” She paused.

“He doesn’t, he doesn’t work that way. But when he’s like that, everything is fragile, and you don’t want to be in the room when something breaks.”

Anya thought about the hallway conversation. The question about his sister. The way he had shut it like a door.

“What happens in the east wing after nine?” she asked.

“Nothing you need to know about.”

“Is that your polite way of saying people get hurt there?”

Cleo put her mug down. She looked at Anya with the expression of someone deciding how much truth was safe.

“This is what I will tell you,” she said. “I came here in a situation not entirely unlike yours. Three years ago. I have stayed, since.” She said this without visible distress, as a neutral fact.

“I have stayed because —” She stopped. Started again. “Because the world outside these walls has not, historically, been significantly safer for me than the world inside them. That is my personal calculation and I would not make it for anyone else.”

“Where are you from?”

“France. Lyon, originally.” A beat. “My family had an unfortunate connection to certain people who connected them to other certain people and eventually to this.” She gestured broadly at the compound, the kitchen, the whole complicated geography of the life she had arrived at.

“I am not a prisoner. I want to be clear about that. I am not, I make choices, every day.”

“But you can’t leave.”

“I could.” She picked her mug back up.

“I have calculated that I don’t want to. Those are different things.”

Anya thought about this. She thought about her own calculation, the car she’d been offered on the day Nikolai had called it a choice.

The conversation in the study. The sketchbook on the desk.

“He’s complicated,” she said. Not a question.

“He’s —” Cleo laughed, small and real and a little tired.

“He is a great many things, Nikolai Volkov. Complicated is generous. He is also, and I say this as someone with no interest in him romantically or otherwise, someone who has rules. His own rules. That he keeps.”

“What rules?”

“He doesn’t hurt people who haven’t chosen his world.” She said it carefully. “He’s ruthless about almost everything. But not about that.”

Anya thought about the drawings on Petrov’s wall. About the sketchbook. About the study door unlocked and the chair pulled back and the word ask.

“Why are you telling me this?” she said.

Cleo shrugged one shoulder. “Because you’re going to be here for a while. And you look like a person who needs to understand the terrain before you can breathe properly in it.” She stood, picking up her mug.

“Also, you haven’t thrown anything at me today, which I’m choosing to read as progress.”

Anya’s mouth did something that might, with significant charity, be described as almost a smile.

Cleo caught it. She said nothing about it, which was exactly right.

“Come on,” she said. “Bogdan makes cabbage soup on Wednesdays and it sounds terrible and tastes like being loved, which is the kind of thing you need today.”

Anya followed her.

She was still a prisoner in the structural sense.

But she was beginning to understand the structure.

____________________________

She laughed that evening, for the first time in twenty-six days.

It was not a big laugh. It was not even, in retrospect, a particularly funny moment, Bogdan, the cook, who was large and had enormous grey eyebrows and the expression of a man perpetually disappointed by modernity, had attempted to demonstrate a cooking technique and had lost control of a pan in a way that resulted in a quantity of cabbage soup being deposited on his own head.

He had looked at Anya.

She had looked at him.

She had laughed. Sudden, helpless, the kind that took you by surprise.

Bogdan had looked at the ceiling and said something in Russian that she was fairly confident was an expression of great suffering, and Cleo had laughed too, and for thirty seconds the kitchen had been simply a kitchen warm and ridiculous and inhabited by people who were briefly just people.

Then it passed.

Anya felt it pass. The laugh went out of her and what came behind it was worse, the way it sometimes worked, joy as a vehicle for grief, each piece of laughter carrying a shadow charge of everything you were laughing instead of doing. She turned away from Bogdan and put her face toward the window.

She heard footsteps in the corridor outside the kitchen.

They stopped.

She knew the quality of them now, three days, and she knew. She had learned the footsteps of every person in this compound, their rhythms and their purposes, because she had decided that bodies were information, that motion was text, and she was going to read everything she could.

She knew his.

She waited for them to move on.

They didn’t. Not immediately. They paused for a moment, ten seconds, maybe in the specific suspended way they had paused outside her room that first night.

Then they continued down the corridor.

She turned back to the kitchen. Cleo was watching her with the particular expression she sometimes got the one where she was thinking something she had decided not to say.

Anya met her eyes.

Cleo looked away first.

_______________________________

That night, she cried.

Not in the desperate, fractured way she had been braced for not the crying she had been containing and rationing since the car in London, the crying she had told herself she could do later, when there was somewhere to put it. This was quieter.

She lay in the dark with the sketchbook against her chest and she thought about her mother and she cried, steadily, for twenty minutes.

She thought about her mother’s face, which she was already forgetting the specific configuration of it, the way it looked when she laughed, the exact shade of her eyes. She thought about the drawings she had made on the wall in Petrov’s house, which she had not been able to take.

The only record she had of the way she remembered her mother’s face, and it was on a wall in a burning house in a country she couldn’t name on a map.

She would draw it again. She would draw it until she had it right.

She opened the sketchbook in the dark and drew by feel not looking, her hand finding the lines from memory and muscle, the face coming out in the dark like a message.

When she switched on the light and looked at it, it was close. Not perfect. But close.

She wrote, underneath it, in the careful small handwriting she used for the things she needed to keep, Catherine Reeves. 1969–2010. She smelled like oranges and she said: the worst things that happen to us are not the whole story.

She looked at that last line for a long time.

The worst things that happen to us are not the whole story.

She wasn’t sure if she believed it.

She was going to try.