Lara
If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.
Khalil Gibran
The next few weeks pass by in a blur.
I’m spending more and more time at the monastery. Dom is helping me train Ruslan. Already he comes on command and will sit and roll over. He’s still smaller than his brothers and sisters, but I think he’s the smartest of the bunch.
I haven’t seen Pavel in almost a week because he went out of town. He wouldn’t tell me where he was going or why. I hope it doesn’t have anything to do with the Petrovs. He’s been silent about them, and so have I, though of course he knows where I’ve been going every day because he still has the tracker on my phone.
The more I get to know Dom’s family, the more I like them. Even Maks isn’t so bad. I mean, I still wouldn’t want to be alone with him, but he gave me a little collar for Ruslan, which I think was his way of apologizing.
The only thing keeping me from being completely happy is the flu I picked up somewhere. I’ve had the worst headache, and I’m so tired that I’ve had to take a nap almost every afternoon. I’m not hungry, either. Which is unfortunate, since the food at the monastery is both plentiful and delicious. Particularly the fresh-baked bread that the chef makes every morning.
It makes me feel guilty when I do go back to Pavel’s little apartment. I think of him all alone there, eating his plain food, going over his papers at night.
I know he was alone before I came to stay with him. But it must be worse now that he’s gotten used to having company.
I don’t think he’s ever been married. I asked him once, and he said, “I’m not husband material,” which I suppose could mean that he was married once but failed at it. However, it’s hard to imagine Pavel failing at anything.
Dom is still trying to get me to move to the monastery full time. I want to—of course I want to. It’s infinitely more beautiful and lively than the ugly flat on Sadovaya Street. But I worry that if I leave, Erdeli will forget about our agreement. Or at least, not pursue it as aggressively.
When he does come back from his trip, he sweeps into the apartment much more dramatically than usual. His eyes are gleaming behind his glasses, and his pale face has a hint of color.
I’m sitting on the couch sketching, but I put down my pencil at once.
“What is it?” I say.
Pavel holds up a black leather-bound book, about the size and thickness of a bible.
I know that book.
I’ve seen it twice before.
“No,” I say, shaking my head in disbelief.
“Yes,” Pavel assures me.
“How did you get it?”
“At great cost,” he says simply.
I know what that means. At least one person lost their life. Probably Pavel’s man on the inside. But he obviously got the ledger out first.
I hold out my hand for it, though honestly, I hate the thought of even touching it. I know my father wrote in that book nearly every day. His hands have cradled it, turned the pages, filled them with his cramped, back-slanted writing.
If that book were bound in human skin, it could not be more disgusting to me. Yet when Pavel hands it to me, I take it on my lap and open it up.
I never would have admitted this to Pavel, but I sometimes worried that I wouldn’t be able to read it. My father forced me to memorize the family code from the time I was a child. But that was years ago. And I’d never actually seen inside the ledger.
As I crack the spine and scan the first few pages, I fear it will all be gibberish. But it all comes clear before my eyes. I can read it perfectly. I remember it all.
“Can you translate it?” Pavel says hoarsely.
I nod.
“All of it?”
“Yes. All of it.”
“Then get to work,” he says, pointing to the table.
So I begin the tedious, laborious, seemingly endless task of translating the ledger.
It’s not as simple as providing the code to Pavel. It’s just a Playfair Cipher, using a five by five table containing a key phrase. Only my brother and I knew the table and its phrase. But I could have written that out for Pavel at any time. The problem is that the ledger isn’t written in simple Russian. The code is one thing, and the language of my family is another. Countless terms and phrases within the ledger are only comprehensible from context. They’re part of the criminal lexicon of the Kazarians.
For example, a “bang” is a drug injection. A “cockatoo” is an informant. A “dog” is a traitor. A “spell” is a prison sentence. “Ducking” is waterboarding. “Carting” means smuggling. A “snuff” is an ordered killing. A “spree” is one that was unplanned.
The ledger contains hundreds more words like that—thousands, even. I could never think of them all to write them down. I have to translate the sentences as a whole.
So that’s what I do. Page by endless page.
Now I barely have time to visit Dom at all. Pavel stays with me constantly, never letting the ledger out of his sight. He brings me tea and toast, but I don’t eat much of it. Maybe it’s the horrible memories brought back by the minute and detailed lists of my family’s crimes, but my stomach is constantly churning.
I finally have what I wanted. And it’s making me utterly miserable.
I hate this work. I hate hunching over the book every day.
I miss Dom. I miss Ruslan. I miss the monastery.
Dom calls me and begs to come see me.
“I can’t,” I tell him. “I have to finish the ledger.”
Pavel sits across the table from me, silent and watchful as an owl.
“What happens when I finish?” I ask Pavel. “Will you arrest my father?”
“I’ll do my best,” he says.
So I turn back to the pages and I keep working, writing out the details of theft, torture, murder, extortion, bribery, drugs and arms dealing, money laundering, kidnapping, and more.
At last I come to a date eight months earlier.
A day I remember very well.
There, in cramped, cold letters, it reads:
Execution of Semyon Kazarian. Body dismembered, burned, and buried.
I try to write the words out in the notebook provided by Pavel, but my hand is shaking too hard to hold the pen.
“What is it?” Pavel says, looking up from his paperwork.
“I . . . I have to go to the bathroom,” I say.
I don’t want to cry in front of him.
But as soon as I stand up, my stomach rolls and I have to run to the bathroom for a different reason. I hunch over the toilet, vomiting up the small amount of toast I was able to eat.
When I finish, I flush the toilet and rinse out my mouth in the sink.
Pavel is standing in the doorway, arms folded.
“What is it?” he says again.
“Nothing,” I shake my head. “I’ve been ill.”
“Do you need a doctor?”
“No,” I shake my head vehemently. “I want to finish.”
I head back to the table, seating myself in front of the ledger once more.
Eight more months of entries to translate. Then I’ll be done.
Doggedly, I bend my head and get back to work.