Leo waited for Raisa to dismiss the notion. When Raisa finally spoke her voice was subdued:
– My son is dead.
Fraera turned to Leo, smug with secrets, gesturing with her knife:
– Raisa gave birth to a son. Conceived during the war, the result of soldiers rewarded for risking their lives and being allowed to take whomever they pleased. They took her, over and over, producing a bastard child of the Soviet army.
Raisa’s words were washed out, drained, but they were steady and calm:
– I didn’t care who the father was. The child was mine, not his. I swore I would love him even though he’d been conceived in the most hateful circumstances.
– Except that you then abandoned the boy in an orphanage.
– I was sick and homeless. I had nothing. I couldn’t feed myself.
Raisa had not yet made eye contact with Malysh. Fraera shook her head in disgust:
– I would never have given up my child, no matter how dire my circumstances. They had to take my son from me while I was sleeping.
Raisa seemed exhausted, unable to defend herself:
– I vowed to go back. Once I was well, once the war was over, once I had a home.
– When you returned to the orphanage they told you that your son had died. And like a fool, you believed them. Typhus, they told you?
– Yes.
– Having had some experience of the lies told by orphanages, I double-checked their story. A typhus epidemic killed a large number of children. However, many survived by running away. Those escapees had been covered up as fatalities. Children who run away from orphanages often become pickpockets in train stations.
His past rewritten with every word, Malysh reacted for the first time:
– When I stole money from you, in the station that time?
Fraera nodded:
– I’d been looking for you. I wanted you to believe our meeting was accidental. I had planned to use you in my revenge, against the woman who’d fallen in love with the man I hated. However, I grew fond of you. I quickly came to see you as a son. I adapted my plans. I would keep you as my own. In the same way, I grew fond of Zoya and decided to keep her by my side. Today both of you threw that love away. With only the thinnest of provocations, you drew a knife on me. The truth is that had you refused to draw that knife, I would’ve allowed both of you to go free.
Fraera moved to the door, pausing, turning back to face Leo:
– You always wanted a family, Leo. Now you have one. You’re welcome to it. They are a crueler revenge than anything I could have imagined.