Read Online Document Z by Andrew Croome - Free Book Online

Australian daughter. Was Volodya serious, or was he simply up there in Sydney halfway drunk? Thinking it over, it eventually occurred to her that his suggestion was probably an attempt at making amends for his hunting. An apology of sorts. The idea was actually quite galling—Volodya presenting the possibility of a child to her as if the suggestion of a daughter was a peace offering equivalent to bunched flowers, a piece of jewellery or some coffee. It stung. It was infuriating. She began thinking about Irina—the slight that her husband had just delivered on herself and her daughter both. Then she pictured Volodya’s face again from that day’s end; his arrival at her apartment, her struggle to relay the news and his developing of that crippled look that she’d never forget, her daughter’s lifeless body in its bed. The forty strange hours of flu and fever; the nausea, the cold limbs and the flights through delirium; the lucid hours that were perfect resurrections until each time the fever hit again and with increased vigour. Until the last.
    It was difficult to reconcile Volodya’s kindness at that time with now. Still, she thought their marriage was strong. In the beginning, after their wedding in Moscow, he’d directed upon them a focus that was at times overbearing, their lives overlapping to the degree that she often complained she needed release. But it was an intensity that had had its uses, allowing her to cope. Perhaps it was just the natural way of things that, since then, his attentions had been slowly travelling beyond them. She thought he was increasingly self-focused, progressively more foreclosed. On their excursions or at the gatherings they attended as a couple, there was a developing sense of his acting alone, of needs that excluded her, a selfish-ness in his behaviour that wasn’t malicious but that was there all the same. The secrecy did not help. In Sweden, and here in Australia, he seemed to know full well that he could cloak whatever he wished by evoking the MVD’s name. Still, none of this concerned her too much. She thought that these were ordinary pressures—the same as those on any union. What husband wasn’t selfish and unthinking at times?
    She had arrived at the window of the spare bedroom. About to draw the curtains, she saw through the window two human shapes: two pin-prick glints of cigarette, two men sitting outside in a car—the car where you’d park if you were trying to surveil or intimidate the house.
    She was being paranoid, she knew. She closed the curtains and went and reheated some stew; dropped bits of potato into Jack’s mouth while listening to a news broadcast on the radio. Returning to the bedroom, she looked through the gap between the curtains, with the light off. The car was still there.
    Modes of fear. She wasn’t afraid to begin with, but as time wore on a nervousness set in, a tightening sensation in the blood. She rang the operator and asked the girl to pass a message to the police: a suspicious car on Lockyer Street. Prowlers?
    The police came in a gleaming white utility with a loudspeaker on its roof. One officer, turning into the street from Canberra Avenue, parking right behind the car with his headlamps ionising the back bumper. He spent a few moments at the wheel of the utility, as if pondering the object in front and gathering his thoughts. Then he got out and walked up the gutter and leaned into the car. The conversation lasted a few minutes. The policeman wrote something on a pad and went back. He sat in the utility—Evdokia thought maybe talking on his radio—then he cut half the power to his headlamps and drove away.
    The car remained. One figure looked directly at the house now, the other behind and around.
    There was a heavy spanner in the bathroom where Volodya had been changing washers. She stood with this weapon in one hand and Jack’s collar in the other. Jack knew that something