Part Two: The Two Years
Construction sites in countries where the pay is enough to matter are a specific kind of world.
Aleksei had known work. He had worked with his hands since he was sixteen, had spent his twenties on sites and in warehouses and in the physical labor that builds things and moves things and maintains the material infrastructure of daily life. He was not unfamiliar with hard work or long hours or the specific exhaustion of a body that has been used to its limit.
But two years of it, abroad, alone, without the anchoring of home — this was different.
He worked on a construction crew during the day and had taken, for the first eight months, a night security position two nights a week when it was available. He slept six hours when he was lucky and five when he wasn’t and learned to function on that, the way you learn to function on whatever the circumstances provide. He sent money home every two weeks without exception — the same amount, carefully calculated against what was needed and what was being paid off and what margin remained.
He called Masha every Sunday.
The calls were the center of the week. He arranged his schedule around them — if Sunday’s shift ran late, he negotiated the end time. He called at the same hour every week, which was the hour that Masha expected, because predictability mattered for a child who had already had too much unpredictability. He asked about school. He asked about her drawings, because she drew with the focused intensity of a child who has found something that is entirely hers. He asked about the park, the neighbors, the cat that lived in the building’s courtyard and that Masha had been feeding since she was five.
He spoke to Vera on those calls too. The conversations were adequate — functional, covering the necessary information, reporting on expenses and schedules. He told himself this was because they were both busy, because the connection of a long-distance call through an application was not the same as being in the same room, because two years of separation would naturally produce a certain distance that would close again when he returned.
He told himself many things.
His mother called him separately, on Thursdays. Her calls were shorter and she said less, in the way of someone who has decided that certain things should not be said on a telephone and who is waiting for the time when they can be said properly. He noticed this. He filed it.
He sent money. He worked. He paid off the debts, one by one, with the specific satisfaction of watching a thing that has been oppressing you become smaller and then smaller and then gone. The last debt cleared in the nineteenth month. He worked two more months after that — building a reserve, making sure the return was complete and not just adequate.
In the twenty-third month, he bought his ticket home.
