Page 57 of Captured By the Pakhan

"So stop trying to beat me. Try to be somewhere else." He resets. "Again."

We go for another forty minutes, and I don't win once, and I learn more in that forty minutes than in the last two years, and by the end of it my forearms are shaking and I'm — inconveniently — enjoying myself enormously.

Afterward, he gets two bottles of water from the fridge in the pool house, hands me one, and sits down on the step, and neither of us says anything while the sun comes up over the hill.

"You asked me a question," Andrei says. "In the house. On the first day."

I keep very still.

"Why I'm not the boy's bodyguard."

"You said you can't."

“You worked out the rest eleven days ago. Ilya told me he spoke to you.” He turns the bottle in his hands. “So there is no point hiding it. I would rather tell you myself.”

"Andrei, you don't have to⁠—"

"I broke the door." He says it flatly, looking out at the water. "Four years ago. I put my shoulder through it twice, the second time the frame gave. I carried her out."

"I know."

“Everybody knows that part.” He pauses to take a drink before going on, “Nobody knows the rest. Not Ilya, not Bogdan, maybe the boy. He has never said.”

I don't say anything at all.

"She had been quiet for two days," Andrei says. "Not unusual. She was often quiet. But it was a different quiet, and I noticed it, and I did nothing about it, because it was not my business what the Pakhan's wife was quiet about." He turns the bottle again. "That morning I was told to keep Sergei downstairs. Not by her — by no one. By myself. It was my own decision because I did not like the quiet, so I put him at the kitchen table with a puzzle and told him to stay.

"And then a man came to the gate about a delivery."

The sun is fully up now. Somewhere down the hill a car goes past.

"Ninety seconds," he says. "Perhaps a hundred. I went to the gate, and I dealt with a man about a delivery, and when I came back the chair was empty, and he was already up the stairs, and I heard him on the landing before I heard anything else."

"Andrei—"

"He got there first." His voice does not change at all. "He got to that door before I did, and it was not locked, and by the time I reached the top of the stairs he had already opened it. He had been standing there for some seconds. I do not know how many. I have thought about how many for four years."

I sit on a step in California, a bottle of water warming in my hand.

"Ilya thinks I broke the door," Andrei says. "He has thought that for four years because that is what I told him, and it is not untrue — I did break it, afterward, going back in for her. But the door his son opened, his son opened himself. Because I was at a gate."

"That's not⁠—"

"Don't." He looks at me for the first time. "Don't say it is not my fault. I know exactly what part is mine to carry. I’m telling you why I can’t stand in that room."

"Because he saw you carry her out."

"Because he saw me arrive too late," Andrei says. "The carrying is nothing. He does not flinch when he sees me because of what I was holding. He flinches because in his head I'm the man who comes up the stairs afterward."

We sit there for a while.

"Does he know you know?" I ask.

"I do not think a ten-year-old thinks like that. I think he knows only that his chest goes tight when I enter a room. He is polite enough to be ashamed of it." He caps the bottle. "But that’s what makes it the worst thing anybody has ever done to me."

I take a breath.

"You should tell Ilya."