āHeās your father,ā I said quietly.
Viktor looked at me the way he looked at things that were in his way.
āHeās lived his life. Now itās my turn.ā
That sentence hung in the air like smoke. Grigori turned toward the wall. Not dramaticallyāhe didnāt have the energy for drama. He simply rotated his head a few degrees, the way you turn away from a sound youāve heard before and no longer need to identify. I watched his profile against the window light: the hollowed cheeks, the skin that had gone translucent over his temples, the hands that used to rebuild clock mechanisms with tweezers now resting motionless on a blanket they couldnāt grip.
Two days later, Viktor packed his fatherās things into three cardboard boxes and a duffle bag.
āI found a care facility,ā he said, setting the boxes by the front door like luggage for a trip no one had planned. āThere are specialists there. Itās better for everyone.ā
Iād looked up the facility. It was adequateāclean, competent, impersonal. The kind of place where people received medication on schedule and died on schedule and the staff rotated frequently enough that no one remembered your name between shifts. It was the kind of place you sent someone when you wanted to say youād done the right thing without actually doing it.
āHeās coming with me,ā I said.
Viktor looked up from his phone. āWhat?ā
āYour father. Heās coming with me. Heās not going to that place.ā
He studied me for a momentānot with anger, not with surprise, but with the mild curiosity of someone watching a decision that didnāt concern him.
āSuit yourself,ā he said.
I rented a small room above an old garage on the east side of town. The landlord was a retired electrician named Tomasz who charged me less than market rate because the space had no proper kitchenājust a hot plate and a mini-fridge wedged into a cornerāand the heating was unreliable in ways that required constant negotiation with a radiator older than I was. A narrow window faced the alley. The walls were peeling in places where moisture had worked its way through from the roof. The bed creaked when you shifted your weight, and the floorboards announced every step with the enthusiasm of a percussion section that didnāt know the song was over.
It was not a place anyone would choose to die. But it was a place where someone would know your name.
I moved Grigori in on a Tuesday. He sat on the edge of the bed while I arranged his medications on the small table Iād bought from a secondhand shopāthe same precise order from the laminated card, which Iād brought from the house along with his blanket, his reading glasses, and the photograph of his wife that had sat on his nightstand for thirty years.
