The Silent Answer

She did not leave him. She went where she could not see him — to find out whether anything in her was ever her own.

Mila Sokolova can date a panel from two chisel marks and the colour of a varnish. She has one sentence in her own handwriting, dated, in a notebook at the bottom of her bag, and she cannot authenticate it.

I want to be crowned with him.

She wrote that on the eighteenth of January. On the twenty-first she established, in forty minutes, that the forged icon which began the whole of her life reached her bench because her husband put it there — before they met, deliberately, without ever once lying to her.

Three days between those two facts, and the woman who wrote the first one did not know the second. A finding made on a contaminated sample is not a finding.

So she goes. Moscow, where nobody has called her Frau Volkova in five days; then a rented room in Vienna’s Ninth District with a bench, a lamp and a page ruled into fields. Nine square metres, her own lock, her own name — and a brother on remand she intends to get out by herself.

And Nikolai Volkov does the one thing he has never done in his life.

Nothing.

I have arranged every room I have ever been in, and I have never once announced myself and waited for an answer. She will have a whole winter of my absence. It is the most expensive thing I have ever bought, and she is never going to know what it cost, because the moment she knows, it stops being hers.

He sits at one metre forty and does not move the chair. He pays for a defence in a form that cannot be thanked for. And through Great Lent, through Holy Week, through the fire coming out of the door at midnight, he stands six paces to the left of the bottom step of a church he has not entered in twenty years — and he will not tender the one exhibit that would win her cheaply.

Eighty-two days. A drought with the whole of the heat still in it.

And on Bright Tuesday, at half past ten in the morning, she comes down those steps to put a question to him in the open, with no clause behind it and nothing in a safe.

She has eleven seconds left.