-Emily-
~~~~~~
Two weeks later and I am, to all intents and purposes, a married woman.
There was no ceremony, no sickening white cake, no uncomfortable speeches, and certainly no dress. It's one of the benefits of having a conman for a fiancé. The documents were forged and printed within a matter of days, and the signing was a twenty minute procedure; quick, efficient, and perfectly painless, Ivan's looped italics next to my scrawled signature, over and over again, in Russian and in English, so that the law would recognise us as a duo rather than two, separate individuals.
This was my doing. I'm sure Ivan, had he had his way, would have wanted the white wedding of the century. The missed opportunity for opulence must have near killed him, but I downright refused to endorse such romantics. He did, however, insist on the exchanging of rings – he said he was a traditionalist at heart, and could I humour him on this one occasion? I did, somewhat begrudgingly. He'd evidently chosen the wedding rings carefully – a gold so white it appears silver, nothing flashy, carved with the two names and the date – so I couldn't complain.
It's late, now. The last document was signed hours ago. It's very strange, having two bands of metal on one finger, very surreal. I'm waiting for Ivan to return – he had a client to con straight after the signing, and said he'd be back later this evening. I busied myself with some spontaneous hacking, but restlessness soon prevailed: I took to lighting every candle in the room and, when completed, began flicking the lighter, aimlessly apathetic, watching the flame lap the oxygen from my air.
Some time later, the door clicks, and I look up, snapping the lighter lid shut and snuffing the flame. Ivan steps into the room, ruffled, hair damp from melted snow, his blazer over one arm. He's got a bottle in his hand.
I twist in my seat, crossing my arms over the sofa armrest.
"You're late," I say. "On our wedding night. Unacceptable."
"Mr Sofyokov was not a friendly client," says Ivan. He shuts the door behind him. "So sorry."
"I might forgive you," I say, letting one arm hang; brushing the floor with my fingertips. "If you beg."
He laughs as he lays his blazer across the counter, combing back the stray strands of hair from his forehead and crossing the room. I watch him set the bottle down on the little side table.
"We shall see. And you?" he says, lifting my legs and sitting down beside me. "You were successful in your coding?"
I swivel onto my back. "I sold the CIA's file on nuclear development to Putin's friends. Not bad, for an hour's work."
Ivan smiles, his fingers tapping out a beat on my shin. "I am impressed."
He reaches for the vodka and holds it up to the light: I see gold flakes shift and settle, fragments of paper-thin glitter. He pours it and I watch, fixated, as they float, suspended flecks of tarnished metal, rose-tinted liquid.
I am handed a champagne flute.
It tastes sweet; notes of fruit, the gold intangible. We talk in low voices, softly, and drink until those voices muffle and the room sways gently on its axis. Once I've drained the contents of my glass, I stretch, the candlelight catching the yellow undertones of my skin; gold blood in clear veins. I look up. Ivan is watching me, his head to one side, enquiringly.
"What?"
His teeth reflect little crescents of light as he smiles.
"You are a very beautiful woman, Ms Schott."
I grin, pleasantly intoxicated, and hold up the hand bearing the ring. "Mrs Yakovich."
He lifts his hand, flattens his palm against mine, then presses his fingers through the gaps in my own.
"Да," he says. "Mrs Yakovich."
His eyes flit across my face, I hold his gaze, my breath hitches. He waits, and then, with a smoothness only experience can justify, leans forwards. Together we shift; I fall backwards, he lowers himself down, I feel his lips touch mine.
I taste vodka on his tongue.
I hum in appreciation; his body is a weight, compressing but not uncomfortable, and – after months of testing and waiting and silently speculating – I find the hem of his shirt with my fingertips and run my hands along the lines of his back, feeling his spine, the ridges of muscle between each rib. They flex under my touch, tensing as he moves and begins working the buttons of my blouse loose.
It is not enough.
I take a fistful of his t-shirt and I wrench him closer, forcing him to pick up the pace: our lips part, his breath hot, and then it is collision once more. Fabric falls to the floor. Everything is softer, more deliberate, less carnal; he twists me with purposeful determination and sits me up, his hands trailing from ankles to knees, and from knees to waist, all touch, all caress, while his mouth and his tongue work with mine to loosen my mind and break me down to the simplest functions of human cognition. He was so fast-paced. That was savage. This couldn't be more different–
Ivan pulls away, without warning.
I look at him, half blind with lust. "Why did you stop?"
"You are thinking about him."
"Him?"
Ivan raises an eyebrow, breathless.
"I can't even remember his name," I say, truthfully. "You must be doing something right."
He chuckles, and I feel the reverberations in the cavity of my chest.
"I have had practice, you see."
"Oh," I say, as I tilt my chin to re-initiate contact. "I know."
He lifts me quite suddenly, standing, his arms behind my back and my legs around his waist. I laugh at the audacity of his actions, holding onto his shoulders as he starts to walk backwards, through his bedroom door. We fall together; I hit the sheets first, and I sigh with the rush of liquid warmth that accompanies the depth of his mouth movement, the intensity of it. It is a fervour I am not used to, and it is more addicting than any alcohol percentage, any quick-fix shot in some run-down bar, any cheap bottle of vodka from the off-licence.
"Do I want to know how many women you got through to perfect that?" I ask, as we break for air.
My arms are lifted, pushed down into the pillows either side of my head. I make some inhuman noise of appreciation as his mouth maps out the curve of my neck.
"Нет," he says, his voice humming against my jugular, "you do not."
"They say ignorance is–" I am cut off as his lips move down, down to the linear jut of my collarbone. "You know, I can't remember what ignorance is. Something good."
He smiles, continues his torturous descent, and effectively silences me mid-speculation; distinguishable words are replaced with noises I would, if my senses were not so overly saturated, register as humiliating. Such noises reach new volumes when Ivan adjusts his stance and returns to my mouth. His grip on my hair tightens. My shoulders hit the headboard.
I am not given the chance to dwell on this embarrassment.
~~~~~~
"Is there anything you can't do?" I ask, my voice rough and skull heavy. I consider lifting my head from Ivan's shoulder, but decide against it; I don't have the energy to open my eyes, let alone move from my current position. "There's got to be something wrong with you."
Outside, snow taps longingly at the window, yearning for warmth, sacrificing its crystallised skeletons to the sheet of glass; it melts on contact, casting live shadows on the sheets. It's dark, but the blue light filtering through the curtains is flecked with snowfall, and I hear it as I lie here, with Ivan, an unabashed entanglement of stilled limbs and soft breathing. I don't think I've ever dared to expose myself to such tenderness, but I can't say I dislike it: it's warm, genuine, his skin like pressed velvet, his hand resting on the small of my back. The rings on my finger glint dully in the dark.
"I cannot answer that."
"You can try. Everyone has something. I know I can be a little... irritable."
"Just a little."
"It's hereditary."
Ivan laughs, and, after a minute of consideration, says, "I am a hopeless romantic."
"That doesn't count."
"Я не согласен."
I tap his jaw. "You're stubborn. That can be your flaw."
"You know me well."
"Actually," I say, "I don't know you at all."
"No?"
"I know your name, I know your crime of choice, I know what you drink, how you play cards, what you do and don't eat. That's it. I married you. In hindsight, that's quite alarming."
"Is it not enough?"
"I don't know anything about your upbringing, how you ended up in England – I don't even know your age. You don't know much more about me. Does that not concern you?"
Ivan rests his chin on the top of my head. "Twenty seven."
"What?"
"I am twenty seven."
I sit up then, holding the sheets to my chest – after confirming that he is completely serious, I regard him with horror.
"Twenty seven?"
Ivan nods, perplexed. I groan, and rest my head in my hands.
"What is it?"
"You're twenty seven. I'm pushing thirty four," I say, sorrowfully.
"That is not so bad."
"You don't understand. I'm turning into my mother."
Ivan rolls his eyes and reaches out, pulling me back down to my original position. After a very short tussle with morality, I sigh, and return his embrace.
"Does this make me a cougar?"
I can feel him frown, and listen to him struggle with the unfamiliar word. "Cougar...?"
"You don't want to know." I shake my head. "I've married a stranger who happens to be seven years my junior. Still struggling to process that."
He doesn't respond immediately. Disbelief softens to contented acceptance, and together we lie in silence, Ivan tracing a slow circle on my arm with his thumb. I give up on conversation, close my eyes, use his chest as a makeshift pillow, and am beginning to slip into sleep when–
"I will tell you, if you would like."
I wrap an arm around his waist, drowsily. "Tell me what?"
"I was born in Moscow," he continues. "You know this."
"Yes."
Ivan pauses for a minute, as if to collect his thoughts – and then, in broken English and accented syllables, begins his bloody recollections.
"It is not a nice story," he says.
I process it as just that; a story, patching his lack of fluency with interpretation and background knowledge. Ivan Yakovich was born in the winter of 1988, to two Politburo politicians, both of them fanatically communist – an attitude that was in its decline towards the approach of the nineties. He describes his mother briefly, his father with detached indifference, and places a distinct emphasis on the life of his sister: she was his elder by eight years, he tells me, a beautiful girl with startling eyes and wild hair that was uniformly braided by their mother every day, to her discontent.
I get the impression they were inseparably close; Ivan explains that she was a substitute parent, a teacher, a confidant – not that his parents were neglectful. They were simply a working family; while Mr and Mrs Yakovich desperately attempted to fend off the advances of capitalism, Ivan tailed his sister like a lost dog, copying her mannerisms, her colloquialisms, her personality. The neighbours called him "Дух Светлана." Spirit Svetlana. Svetlana's ghost.
Five years later, and Russia hit its constitutional crisis. Yeltsin declared the Supreme Soviet dissolved – and with it near eighty years of communist rule. Uproar ensued. Street violence ran riot, military action was imposed, the Russian White House was shot at by government tanks. Gang leaders capitalised from the chaos: all hell broke loose, as pro-Yeltsin and pro-communist officials were targeted – it was not uncommon for such gang members to take bribes from opposing sides and, quite literally, massacre families for pocket change.
It was late September when they came for the Yakovichs.
Ivan's father had been anticipating such action, being an outspoken communist himself, and had planned to flee with his family to Siberia at the end of the month. Ivan describes the following with remarkable calmness – he says it plainly, and without apparent pain or difficulty. He tells me that he was woken by shattering glass. He tells me his mother started cursing, his father told them to get down, his sister pushed him bodily under the bed and instructed him to keep quiet, to cover his mouth with his hands, to close his eyes. He tells me he abided all but the last order, and that he saw the black boots through the slits between the bed slats.
He tells me he heard both parents plead, heard Svetlana cry, heard the resonating crack of five, ruthless gunshots. He tells me he saw his father's blood lash the opposite wall. He tells me he saw them do terrible things to his mother – things he didn't understand at the time – and how he wished she was dead, as they all took their turn. He tells me he felt relief when her head hit the ground. He tells me he met his sister's eyes as they pinned her down with a boot to the throat and fired their guns, again and again, for sport, for fun, until her head resembled a concave mess of pulped meat and bone. He tells me the blood stung his skin.
He tells me that he bit his fist to stop himself from screaming, sobbed silently, howled when the strange men with their guns left the building to collect their payment. He did what any child in that situation would have done: he crawled out from under the bed and he ran, past his shot father and raped mother and poor, dead sister, onto the streets, his feet bare and slapping the iced flagstones until they started to bleed and he couldn't continue. It was sheer luck that saved him – his neighbour had her husband massacred in the same raid, and followed Ivan through the streets to the snow bank in which he curled up to freeze. She smuggled him out of the city, joining a stream of migrants on the overnight train from Moscow to St Petersburg.
There were a lot of them, that night, fleeing the terror.
Together they followed the masses to the port, where they contributed to the efflux of stowaways travelling from Russia to a recipient country, any country, they didn't know which. It was luck of the draw. Many did it: broke the waterlogged planks of wooden crates, climbed into the cargo, entered a high-risk survival game of endurance. Those who lived arrived in a country they didn't know. Those who died fed the rats. The rats provided the survivors with protein. It was a grim cycle.
Ivan left St Petersburg in a crate carrying four tonnes of unprocessed grain. By some miracle, those who chose that particular ship were blessed with a mercifully short journey – the captain opted for the direct route to London, rather than face the turbulent weather in the South. Ivan arrived in England three days later.
As was and is the case with the vulnerable, he fell victim to the darker side of poverty – he doesn't elaborate on this, but tells me he met all the wrong people, and became dependent on them for both shelter and peace of mind. The remnants of the Cold War made him a target for bitter acrimony. He lived off whatever he could find. He said he didn't know what hope felt like, then; it was something they talked about in stories, fabricated by the lucky, the rich, the powerful. His break came three years later, when he was spotted playing a sober game of poker with four equally pitiful, equally homeless individuals. They used him as entertainment, initially; showed off their nine year old Ruski, the strange, thin, boy with the pale eyes and quick fingers and clever card tricks.
Eventually, he became a betting object. He received a few tips, some discarded coins, furtive notes pressed into his palm – and, after saving for another five, agonising years, began purchasing any illicit substance he could get his hands on. Alcohol. Heroin. Tobacco. He sold them to the desperate, then used the money to buy more, sell more, add to his collection, distribute it to the masses. Money is a status, and Ivan worked his way up through the ranks so gradually, so quietly, no-one truly deemed him a threat until he purchased the establishment that had kept him chained for the majority of his childhood and adolescence. He sold it for a profit so enormous, he was able to construct a casino, his casino, from scratch.
As for the conning, he says, he learnt that through all the buying and selling. People trust you when you smile. A little false documentation here and there, and you have yourself a guaranteed source of income, gained at other people's expense. It is a ruthless world, says Ivan. Tooth and claw isn't enough. Sometimes you have to sugar-coat to make such evil easier to swallow.
When he's finished, I am silent.
"I think," says Ivan, shifting beside me, "that is everything."
He's not looking at me. Unable to find or vocalise a suitable response, I rest my head back on his shoulder. The silence is a catalyst: he loses his grapple with sleep first, and I listen to his breathing for some time – it's regular, even, lulling in its repetition.
With an ease I would have killed for two months ago, I find myself drifting into a similar state of unconsciousness.
~~~~~~