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It was a route Dankovsky had trodden hundreds of times before. Down his building’s stairwell, out to the pavement, turn left and continue to the end of the road, turn right, left again, then straight on to the squat little shop pressed snugly below the flat that sat over it. Not a comprehensive shop, by any means — he’d have to go another half a mile for anything that could be called a luxury — but for the basic necessities, it had always served him fine. It carried bread, eggs, milk, meat, cheese, sweets, and even fruit when it was in season. It was enough, for the components of an easy meal.
In his haze of exhaustion, he scarcely remembered making his way from the train station home. He scarcely remembered entering the flat, scarcely remembered setting down his bag and turning back towards the door to stumble out the way he’d just entered moments ago. If he allowed himself to sit down, he knew he’d be asleep within the space of a few blinks; the fatigue weighing heavy on him relished the idea, panted for it, but the gnawing in his stomach took precedence. Food, then sleep. Both such simple acts he’d taken for granted mere weeks ago. Food, at last, then at last, sleep.
It took a concerted effort to place one foot in front of the other. He’d done so much walking in these past wretched days that one would think it might become a matter of easy, mindless mechanics, but the walk to that familiar little store felt like more of an odyssey than any of the frantic hurrying through the streets of that Town. It was as if, he mused wearily, his body sensed that relief — real relief, not the barest rotten scraps of it — was finally within his grasp, and it no longer wished to put forward the last dregs of energy to reach for it. As always, he pushed on. Mens agitat molem. Mind over matter. That had seen him through the plague; it could see him through these last few steps.
The soft jingle of the bell above the doorframe was a welcome sound. How many times had he heard it, in the bleary mornings when there was no milk for coffee, or in the late, dark evenings when work ran long and there was no meat for dinner? The sound itself felt like the laugh of an old friend. No, not quite a laugh — a merry, tinkling promise. A promise that no matter the time of day, no matter the need, there was something on the shelves here.
His feet squeaked quietly on the tile floor as he trudged that oft-traced path through the shop. Past the fruit — meagre pickings, this time of year, and a waste of money on something that wouldn’t fill his stomach — and the sweets — if the fruits were useless, the sweets were even more so — to the racks of bread sitting beside the stacks of egg cartons, where he finally came to a stop. He swayed slightly on his feet and nearly shot out an arm to brace against a shelf, but he managed, somehow, to stay upright on his own. His vision blurred and swam as he stared at the offerings and willed his mind to think. The prospect of a hot meal, even if it was just eggs, was enticing, but bread would fill him faster. Could he afford both? No, definitely not. The bread would be at least two thousand, and as for the eggs, well! This shop only sold them by the carton, and a single egg would cost nearly as much as a single bread roll. Impossible. His gaze wandered slowly to the price card in front of the bread, mentally preparing himself to use the last of his willpower to budget.
120.
He blinked. That wasn’t right. He bent forward, squinting his eyes at the neat black numbers. 120, yes, that was what it said — but that wasn’t right. It should cost thousands. He shifted his gaze to the eggs, disbelieving, and found a similarly baffling price there. 300. 300, for a carton of six. One egg alone shouldn’t be below one thousand at a push, one and a half thousand if the seller was feeling particularly spiteful or paranoid that day. The labels had to be wrong. This was—
And then, at last, his exhaustion-addled mind dragged itself to the realisation. This wasn’t the Town. There was no plague here, no shortages, no panic-buying, no price-gouging. The war meant things were tight, yes, but nowhere near what he’d come to know in the past few weeks. The money in his pocket, left over from the Town, was enough to buy anything in this shop he wanted and then some. Bread and eggs, if he chose; meat, if he liked; fruits, even, and that chocolate he’d always liked and could never find in the larger shops. He didn’t have to count his coins. He didn’t have to consider whether buying a single egg here would mean he couldn’t afford medicine for a patient two hours later. He didn’t have to scrape and budget and prioritise — and he didn’t have to starve.
This time, when his vision blurred again, it wasn’t with exhaustion. A film of tears sprang up, welled, quivered, and began to fall as he hunched forward and gripped the edge of the shelf. His knees nearly buckled, but pride, at least, saved him from sinking down. Any other time, in any other circumstance, he would have bitten off the sobs at the root of his tongue and swallowed any amount of saltwater tears to save his own dignity. Now, here, after everything, he couldn’t bring himself to even try. Keeping one hand locked on the shelf, he pressed the other gloved palm to his mouth and nose to muffle the sounds of the wracking, tired sobs that slammed through his ribs so hard he could feel the very marrow shudder.
“Dankovsky! I’d know that snakeskin coat anywhere! You haven’t been in for two weeks, I wondered where you’d— … Dankovsky?”
He didn’t need to turn to recognise the voice of the old woman who ran the shop. Plump, friendly, and always wearing her white hair piled high atop her head, she never failed to make small talk whenever he came in, whether he wanted to engage in it or not. She’d pried his name out of him in the first month of him living in that nearby flat, and despite how many customers she must have had passing through here throughout the years, she never seemed to forget the name of a single one. He’d found it irksome, at the best of times, how she insisted on prattling on about the weather, asking about his work, or sharing the latest gossip in the neighbourhood. Tonight, that friendly tone turning so suddenly to concern cut him to the quick.
He contemplated turning on his heel and walking out. Once more, his pride prickled and burned and bit. But while pride might have been enough to save him sinking to the floor, it wasn’t enough to will those shaking legs into motion. He was too exhausted, too hungry, too heaped on the shoulders with the weight of it all to move. The best he could do was turn his head away when those quiet footsteps padded closer to inspect his face, but he evidently didn’t turn it far enough or fast enough to avoid her seeing the bruises and cuts littered across it. She breathed out a curse under her breath, then her footsteps rapidly retreated — not to leave him be, as he’d desperately hoped, but to slide the lock on the door with a click. The footsteps returned, accompanied, this time, by a subsequent hand on the hunch of his back between the shoulder blades. “Dorogoy, come here. Sit down. Sit down.”
Gently, with the hands of a grandmother, she guided him on his stumbling feet to the back room, where she coaxed him into a chair at a cloth-covered table. He bent forward to brace his elbows on the tables edge and bury his face in his hands as his sobs, to his shame, continued. Stopping them was a fruitless effort at this point, and whatever effort he could put into doing so would be weak at best. He remained, slumped and shaking, while the quiet sounds of her shuffling over to brew the samovar filled the room. That, at least, took a few minutes, and by the time she scraped a chair over to join him and set a cup of tea at his elbow, he had mastered himself enough to shove his palms across his cheeks to dry them.
“What happened?” She pushed the tea towards him as she asked that simple question. The bare tenderness in her voice was almost enough to draw tears up again, but he bit them back this time. He settled his hands around the cracked old mug, letting the warmth of the tea soothe the ache in the stitched wounds sitting beneath the leather gloves. Defensive wounds, when a thug had managed to catch him off guard in the street at night. They’d scar, those slashes. Like the bullets left in his shoulder, torso, and leg. Like the burns from the flamethrowers. Like the bites from the dogs. His body was riddled and marred forever, now, and when the morphine and exhaustion and hunger wore off, he might weep for that, too.
He should have dismissed the question. She was little more than a stranger, after all; she knew nothing about him beyond his name and profession, along with whatever little scraps of information her small talk had coaxed out of him through the years. She was a shop owner, for fuck’s sake — she shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of a man she barely knew and a man who barely knew her.
And yet, when he opened his mouth, a dismissal didn’t come. What came, instead, was a torrent of everything that had happened over the past two weeks. Nearly everything, at least; he couldn’t have explained something like the Polyhedron to an outsider if he tried, and the wound of that loss was still too raw to think of attempting it. He skirted around any mention of that. But he spoke of the plague, of the dead, of the army, of the starvation, of the mass graves, of all the times he’d tried and failed, and of the strange girl who worked miracles with her hands and the steadfast man who brewed them in bottles. Through it all, she listened. Even as they worked their way through three cups of tea, she listened, leaving the rest of the frustrated customers who passed wondering why the shop door was locked at this time of day.
When he’d wrung out the last drop of the pain he could put into words and slumped, again, onto his elbows, her hand found his shoulder the same way it had before. This time, she drew him into a hug, and he went with a willing limpness. Whether weighed down with exhaustion or shame, his arms couldn’t lift to return the embrace. All the same, it was brief, and she drew away to pat his bruised cheek with a wrinkled, gentle hand.
“It sounds like you did what you could, dorogoy.”
It was those words that followed his slow footsteps out the door, once he’d paid and started home. There was more food in the flimsy paper bag dangling from his hand than he’d eaten in days. Meat. Bread. Eggs. Cheese. Fruit. Even the chocolate he’d given up hope of ever tasting again by the fourth day in that town. Lifting his feet for each step still came as a monumental effort, but he was walking to a bed that could offer rest for as long as he wished, not just for an hour or two. The words clanged in his ears like the bells of that wretched, doomed cathedral.
You did what you could.
Somehow, some way, that would have to be enough.