City of Stairs (The Divine Cities, #1)(74)

“Why is it,” says Vohannes as he walks her to the door, “that whenever we finish our business, it feels like neither of us got what we wanted?”

“Perhaps we conduct the wrong sort of business.”

*

Escaping the air of the club is like swimming up from the depths of the sea. I shall have to throw these clothes away, she thinks. The very fabric has been poisoned. …

“Oh,” says a voice. “Is it … Miss Thivani?”

Shara looks up, and her heart plummets. Sitting in the back of a long, expensive white car is Ivanya Restroyka, face as pale as snow, lips painted bright, bloody red. She looks somehow more colorless than when Shara saw her last, at Vohannes’s party. One curl of black hair escapes her fur hat to curl across her brow and behind her ear. Yet despite these carefully cultivated features, she stares at Shara with a look of unabashed shock.

“Oh,” says Shara. “Hello, Miss Restroyka.”

Ivanya’s dark eyes slide to the club door and dim with disappointment. “So. You were the one he was meeting tonight.”

“Yes.” Think quickly now. “He was making some business introductions for me.” Shara slowly walks to the car window. “He has a lot of business he wishes to drum up with Saypur. It was very good of him to do.” A good lie: serviceable, sound, maybe one-sixth true.

“At this club. The most old guard of any club in Bulikov.”

“I suppose, as they say, times are changing.”

Ivanya glances at the white suitcases and nods, obviously disbelieving. “You knew him once, didn’t you?”

Shara pauses. “Not really, no.”

“Mm. Might I ask you something of you, Miss Thivani?”

“Certainly.”

“Please … be careful with him.”

“I’m sorry?”

“For all his bravado, for all his bluster, he’s so much more fragile than you think.”

“What do you … ?”

“Did he tell you he broke his hip falling down the stairs?” She shakes her head. “He was at a club. But not a club quite like this. It was a club where men went to meet men, I suppose you could say, but … there the similarities end.”

Shara feels her heart beat faster. I knew all this already. But why does it surprise me so?

“The police raided the club the night he was there,” says Ivanya. “Bulikov, as you probably know, has never really given up many of its Kolkashtani inclinations. Such … practices are terribly illegal. And they were quite brutal with the people they caught. He almost died. Hips are quite difficult things to fix, you see.” She smiles sadly. “But he never learns. That’s why he got into politics. He wanted to change things. It was, after all, Ernst Wiclov who ordered the raid.”

A flock of drunken men exit the club, laughing. Smoke clings to their collars in a lover’s embrace.

“Why are you with him?” asks Shara.

“Because I love him,” says Ivanya. She sighs sadly. “I love him, and I love what he is, and what he wants to do. And I wish to look out for him. I hope you want to do the same.”

Headlights splash over the long white car. Shara hears Pitry’s voice calling her name from the embassy car. The door of the club opens, and Vohannes emerges, his white fur coat gleaming in the light of the lampposts.

Ivanya smiles. “Farewell, Miss Thivani. I wish you a good evening.”

*

Shara still remembers the day: long ago, toward the end of the second semester of her second year at Fadhuri, when she was walking up his building’s stairs and Rooshni Sidthuri came rushing down them. She said hello, but Rooshni—mussed, sweating—said nothing back. And when she went into Vo’s room, and saw him sitting shirtless in his desk chair, feet up on the windowsill and hands behind his head, for some reason warning bells went off in her mind—for he only ever seemed to do that after making love.

As they talked—innocuously enough—she sidled over to the bed. Felt the sheets.

How damp they’d been, and in one spot—right where the hips and waist would be, were you to lie upon it—just positively drenched.

How young Rooshni had hurried, as if the building were burning down. …

She did not confront him then. But she began to watch. (This is what I’ve always been, she’d think, much later. Someone who does not intervene in her own life, but only watches, and works behind the scenes.) She watched how Vo seemed to spend so much time with young men, the way he embraced them. She watched the way he watched them, the way his posture grew more languid, relaxed around them.

Does he even know it? she wondered then. Do I?

And one day she could bear it no more, and she quietly walked into his apartments while he and—she cannot even remember the boy’s name now, Roy something or other—moved so slowly and so gently against one another in the very bed where Vo had whispered how much he loved her in her ear not more than two days before.

The look on their faces when she cleared her throat. The boy, hustling out the door. Vo, screaming in rage at her, while she stood silent.

He’d wanted her to scream back at him. She could tell. But she would not give him that. This was not a fight. She was not complicit in what he’d done. She could not imagine a purer betrayal.

The worst of it was how much the boy had looked like her. Shara had never and would never possess a particularly feminine form: she had, she thought, a boy’s body, all shoulders and no hips, and certainly no breasts. Was I just a substitute? she thought afterward. A way to fabricate forbidden love without ever doing anything forbidden? And if so, she was still inadequate, unable to capture the essence of the real thing.