Also enhancing my life are the Russian lessons Nikolai has started giving me—with Slava’s help, of course. The child takes great delight in my inability to pronounce the Russian phrases he says so easily, while Nikolai delights in a completely different thing: making me say love and sex words to him in bed.
“Say, ‘Ya hochu tebya,’” he instructs me while keeping me on the edge of an orgasm. And when I obey, desperate for relief, he orders mercilessly, “Now say, ‘Ya lyublyu tebya.’”
So I do. I say whatever he wants me to, including phrases so dirty they make me flush all over when I later look them up. But dirty or clean, my knowledge of Russian is growing by the day, which greatly amuses Alina and Lyudmila—the latter of whom finds my pronunciations downright comical.
“You so American,” Pavel’s wife says, laughing, as I attempt to ask her for zavtrak—breakfast—in her native tongue. “Why you even try? Everyone here speak English, even me.”
I’d take offense, but she’s right. Even her English, imperfect as it is, is a thousand times better than my Russian. I’ve offered to give her some lessons to improve it further, but she hasn’t taken me up on it so far—because she hopes to go back to Russia and not need it, according to Alina.
“She really misses Moscow,” she tells me. “She’s bored here, with nothing to do and no one to see.”
I can sympathize with that. Despite all the modern luxury and natural beauty surrounding us, the compound is a prison of sorts, or to put a more positive spin on it, a retreat from the world. I, too, miss my friends, and often scour social media to catch glimpses of their post-graduation lives. I want to contact them so badly, to reply to all of their messages asking where I am, why I haven’t posted on my profiles in months, but I don’t dare do so in case that somehow leads Bransford to me, to this compound and my new family.
I can’t put them in danger, not even to assuage my friends’ worries about me.
I would especially feel terrible if I did anything to endanger Slava. With each passing day, my attachment to Nikolai’s son grows, and I feel increasingly comfortable in the role of his mom. Instead of Alina or Lyudmila bathing him and putting him to bed, Nikolai and I frequently do so together nowadays, telling him stories about superheroes and reading from his favorite books until he falls asleep.
The three of us are becoming a real family, and the knowledge fills me with a gentle warmth, a contentment that shouldn’t be possible with a dangerous, mercurial man like Nikolai.
Not that everything is perfect, of course. For one thing, the two of us disagree when it comes to what a not-quite-five-year-old should be allowed to do. As it turns out, Nikolai and his brothers—and to a lesser extent, Alina—were latchkey kids, allowed and even encouraged to play outside on their own and overall be dangerously independent. So while I panic each time I see a steak knife in Slava’s hand or find him climbing a tree higher than six feet, Nikolai is annoyingly calm about such things.
“Don’t you care that he can fall and break every bone in his body?” I ask in frustration when we go on a hike and he lets Slava scamper up an old oak until his tiny figure is barely visible through the foliage. “Or worse, fall on his head and break his neck?”
“Of course I do.” His golden eyes narrow at me dangerously. “You think I don’t worry about all the terrible things that can befall him on any given day? The stairs he can tumble down, the illnesses he can catch, the poisonous berries he might find and eat? Sometimes it’s all I can think about, so much so I’m convinced I’m going insane. But just as we can’t be there to hold his hand each time he takes the stairs, we can’t expect to be there for every tree he encounters or every knife that comes his way throughout his life. In fact, there’s no guarantee we’ll be there for him tomorrow. Life can be unpredictable and brutal, and the better prepared he is to face it, the higher the odds that he’ll survive.”
“But he’s still a child. You have to teach him how to survive.”
“I am teaching him—by letting him face as many of the dangers on his own as he can. Children his age aren’t stupid; they’ve fallen enough to know that it hurts. He wouldn’t climb that high if he didn’t feel secure in his strength, and the only way to grow and test that strength is to challenge himself when it matters… when there is no rubber mat underneath. Besides,” he adds when I’m about to start arguing, “I am keeping an eye on him. If he should start to fall, I’ll catch him.”