The Price of Harmony

Leningrad, 1992.

Winter arrived before it was expected, as if history had quietly accelerated.

Snow fell in recursive layers—like memory—not to cleanse, but to obscure.

To sediment.

To archive the wound without closing it.

Above, the sky remained in a chronic state of corrosion.

Light was a persistent rumor—circulating, yet unfelt—an illusion too exhausted to dispute.

Katerina Leonidovna Tolstaya was nine years old.

She lived north of the Neva, in a decaying apartment block with flaking walls and unlit stairwells.

Two braided strands framed her small face; behind thick-rimmed glasses, her eyes retreated into a silence no one had taught her.

She wore the same gray coat each day, regardless of season.

Her lips were always cracked, her fingertips pale.

She walked with her head down, as if gravity operated selectively on certain children.

Clutched to her chest: a few worn volumes of Bourbaki.

Not translated—she preferred the French.

She believed in the logic of abstraction, which felt less arbitrary than the world.

Her father, a pilot, had been consumed by a mechanical failure—an error neither human nor divine.

Her mother, a physician, smelled always of antiseptic and blood, and returned only when absence had fully settled into the home.

Her younger brother, Alexei, barely spoke.

He drew shapes reminiscent of Kandinsky, listened to Xenakis, and blinked slowly at the world, as if perceiving it through a mathematical surface tension.

One January morning, she took him by the hand.

They walked through a city that had begun to forget its name.

Posters of missing jobs flapped next to graffiti that no longer bothered to protest.

They passed a collapsed Komsomol youth hall and a map of the USSR missing its western edge.

At school, the teacher was absent.

The blackboard, untouched.

A man they had never seen entered briefly and spoke in a neutral tone:

There will be no more lessons in Marxist philosophy.

Then he left.

The chalk remained unused.

In the cafeteria, three older boys approached.

Words were chosen for their cruelty, not their meaning.

They spoke them over Alexei’s silence until she stood to interpose.

She was knocked down.

Books scattered.

Bootprints left equations smudged across the paper.

Lyosha said nothing.

His gaze remained fixed on the thin, graying porridge.

Later, they walked home through snow that had ceased to fall but refused to melt.

She looked up and murmured:

If a child's tears are the cost of harmony, I return the ticket.

She remembered the line from a book her father once held with reverence.

By the time they reached the apartment, the sky had folded into its nightly shade of steel.

The Neva had begun to freeze—not in stillness, but in fracture.

The ice resembled a mirror abandoned mid-shatter.

The stairwell bulb flickered.

Its electrical hum was the only reply.

Their mother was not yet home.

On the living room wall, the wooden crucifix still hung, casting no comfort—only surveillance.

Katerina placed her books down with a kind of reverence reserved for dead languages.

She sat.

Alexei sat beside her, unmoving, his attention fixed on the edge of a rug lifting from dampness.

“Lyosha,” she said, not expecting response, “would you smile? Just once. Do you want to hear a joke?”

He didn’t answer. But she continued, her tone clinical, like reciting an axiom:

“A man froze to death on the streets of Moscow.

On his stomach, someone wrote: I am liberated.

A Party official passed by, found it indecent, and turned him over with his foot.

On the back, it read: I have turned over.”

Silence lingered—not as a pause, but as atmosphere.

Then, just barely:

a twitch at the corner of her brother’s mouth.