I Will Be Free

The more you know, or think that you do, the more questions it raises. They strike you when you wouldn’t expect them – stiff with uncertainty in the passenger seat, stomach clenched with a sudden pang of dread. (His sleeve brushing your hand reaching to stub out a cigarette.) You would never ask what a single one of his tattoos means, just as you would never ask him what was your family like? or where did you grow up? For the fear that each spot of black ink under his skin might lead deeper and deeper into a place of black unpleasantness, pull you under. But that is safe, those days are not behind him but inside of him. Like the soot under his skin, there they will stay, and can you trust his mind to keep them guarded? They will never be gone.

The longer you spend in his company, the less you care about what the answers are. It is not his past that makes him a good man, scarred and marked and beaten tough as leather, but – his character, whatever flame there was that kept burning, that’s the good in him. You’ve never met someone like that. His business with the vory v zakone still goes on. He still tells you nothing. He doesn’t give gifts or take you exotic places. You don’t sneak off and get married; your trysts are long conversations in parked cars or mornings before school. The two of you don’t even make love, not often, anyway, and Christ, fear has a way of making the moments precious. But in front of you there’s something more precious, that when his work is done, whatever it is that he’s doing now – you have a future with him. Just the three of you, and the past can stay past. It’ll be pushed under your skin and it can stay there, for all you care. He’ll live with you then, the way he visits you now.

Christine grabs for his hands sometimes, when she sees him, which isn’t very often. (She’s going to grow up thinking that he’s her dad, and that’s all right, really.) She seems to think that the marks on his rough hands will come off.