Let the Dead Bury the Dead by Allison Epstein

Author:Allison Epstein [Epstein, Allison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-10-17T00:00:00+00:00

Marya

The tension spooling outward from Lena settled over the cold apartment like a shroud. Her actions were ordinary, scrubbing at the floorboards with a wadded-up rag while Marya plunged her own into the bucket of rapidly graying water, but there was a venom to each movement that belonged nowhere near such a mundane task. Each swirl of the rag threatened to strip away a layer of wood.

She should have left well enough alone. Lena shared her thoughts in her own time, arriving at the point of vulnerability only after thinking herself into knots on the way there. It was no good trying to shorten the process. But just then, Marya was willing to risk anything to break this awful, sharp-edged silence. She tossed her rag into the bucket with a small splash and sat with her back against the wall beneath the window. A tight channel of cold air whistled through a gap around the glass, piercing through her scarf to her scalp.

“Come here,” Marya said, beckoning Lena to sit beside her. “The floor will wait.”

Lena flinched, but whether the reaction was surprise or distaste, it was also brief. The look she turned on Marya was perfectly empty. “You want another lecture from Ilya on the virtue of cleanliness, then.”

Marya scoffed. “Ilya can hang.” This was hardly the tenderness she’d hoped for, but at least Lena was talking. At least it had displaced that terrible silence.

After a pause that seemed to bend like a fishing line, Lena sighed, then came to sit beside Marya. Lena’s hand splayed against the floor palm up, and Marya accepted the wordless invitation to slip her own into it. Lena’s smile didn’t fully manifest, but a shadow of it was better than nothing.

“I don’t know what to do,” Lena said.

Each word seemed to weigh on her like a suit of iron. Marya wanted to take Lena in her arms, to remove some of that pain and store it in her own heart, but she knew Lena as well as she knew herself. The best course of action was what she was already doing: to sit here with her, hold her hand, and open the door, which Lena would walk through when she was ready, and not a moment before.

“You can talk about it, Lenochka, if you want to,” she said. “I don’t know what to think about it either.”

Lena gave Marya’s hand a brief squeeze, equal parts affection and the beginnings of a clenched fist. “I’m worried you do know what to think, Masha.”

This was not the response Marya had expected. Marya had heard Lena angry dozens of times—at the tsar, at Ilya, at Isaak, at Petrushka, at an off-duty soldier for cheating at cards. But never at her. She’d considered a hundred reasons for Lena’s distemper, but never once had she thought it was her. “I don’t understand, kotik.”

Lena pulled her hand away, circling her knees with both arms instead. It felt like an attack, though she’d barely moved. “I know you. I can tell what you’re thinking.

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