Paid Passage

For weeks a thin man in white trainers had been smoking on the steps outside Daryna's ticket hall, and she noticed him on the day she learned she was carrying a stranger's child.

The clinic on Sofiivska was on the second floor, above a cellar that had been frying fish since before Daryna's mother was born, and the whole staircase smelled of sunflower oil and wet wool. She climbed it at five past one with her lunch hour already spent on the walk and her coat buttoned to the throat, and she did not let herself hold the rail.

The receptionist took her name, her date of birth and the date of her last period, and wrote all three in a ledger with a pen on a string. Daryna watched the pen. Six years behind a booking window had given her a professional interest in other people's paperwork, and this was bad paperwork: no carbon, no copy, a column for the patient's signature that nobody had ever used. Anyone could walk in here and read who had come up these stairs and why.

"Kovalchuk," the receptionist said, without looking up. "Room two. Skirt and tights off, there's a sheet."

Room two had a radiator painted so many times it had lost its ribs, a couch with a paper roll, and a window that looked straight across the street into somebody's kitchen. A woman in a housecoat was cutting bread over there. Daryna drew the blind, took off the navy skirt she had paid a tailor on Rishelievska to take in at the waist and hip, folded it over the chair with the creases matched, rolled the black tights down and laid them on top, and sat on the paper in her blouse and jacket with the sheet across her knees. She was aware of looking exactly what she was, which was a woman who pressed her blouse every morning and had nevertheless arrived here.

The doctor was a broad woman in her fifties with reading glasses on a cord and cold hands she apologised for. She asked the same three questions the receptionist had asked and wrote the answers on a different form.

"First?"

"Yes."

"Anyone with you?"

"No."

The doctor nodded as if that were the usual answer, which perhaps it was, and turned the screen so that Daryna could see it if she wanted to.

She had meant not to look. She looked. There was a grey field like a storm photographed from above, and in it a dark hollow shaped like a bean, and in the hollow something that was not quite a shape at all, a small pale curl. Then, at the edge of it, a flicker. It came and went so fast she thought it was the machine.

"There," said the doctor, and touched the screen with the back of her pen. "Heartbeat. Good and strong. Seven weeks, maybe a day under." She pressed a key and the machine hummed and pushed out a strip of shiny paper, curling as it came. "You want the picture?"

Daryna heard herself say yes before she had decided anything.

The card was the size of a tram ticket, printed on thermal paper that would fade, the doctor told her, if she left it in the sun or kept it next to plastic. A date, a time, her surname in capitals, a measurement in millimetres, and the grey storm with its small curl. She held it by the edges the way she held a passport she had not finished checking.

"Next scan at twelve weeks," the doctor said, writing. "Eat something in the mornings even if it comes back. Folic acid. No lifting. Your work, what is it?"

"I sell tickets."

"Then you'll be fine. Sit down when you can."

She dressed with her back to the window that was no longer there, tights first, skirt zipped and smoothed over her hips, jacket buttoned over the blouse. She checked her hair in the dark glass of the cabinet: the low knot at her nape, not one strand out of it. Then she opened her bag, took out the passport wallet, red leather gone soft at the corners, and slid the card in behind her passport, between the photo page and the lining, where no one would ever look unless they were already looking for her.

That was where it would live. She had decided that much, standing there. Not on the fridge. Not in a drawer at home. In the wallet she carried every day, against the document that said who she was.

On the stairs going down she met the nurse coming up.

Daryna knew her the way everybody born above the port knew certain people, by a name said quietly and a door nobody pointed at: Ulyana, who did dressings on Sofiivska and asked no questions, and to whom, it was said, the quarter brought the kind of burns and cuts that did not go to the hospital. She was a small woman in a white tunic with a grey cardigan over it, carrying a steel tray of gauze and tape and brown bottles, and she flattened against the wall to let Daryna pass, because the staircase was narrow and the tray was not.

Daryna still had the passport wallet in her hand. She had not yet closed the clasp. The corner of the thermal card stood up out of it, shiny, unmistakable.

Ulyana's eyes went to it once. Then to Daryna's face. Then to the next step up.

She said nothing. Not congratulations, not good luck, not are you all right. She shifted the tray to her hip and went on climbing, and her shoes made no sound on the worn stone, and the door at the top closed behind her with a hush of rubber.

Daryna went on down with the wallet still open in her hand.

A stranger's silence ought to mean nothing. A woman with a tray of dressings sees a woman with a scan card; there is nothing to say and she says it. But this was not any stranger, and this was not any staircase, and on the way down past the cellar door and the smell of fish frying in the dark Daryna turned the silence over and could not make it lie flat. It might have been tact. It might have been a professional's indifference. Or it might have been the look of someone filing a fact where facts in this quarter were filed, and the not-speaking was the receipt.

It is mine, she thought, very clearly, as she came out into the wet street. Nobody has it yet. Nobody gets to have it yet.

Only out under the clinic's board on the pavement did she close the clasp on the wallet with her thumb.

Sofiivska was grey and slick and smelled of the sea. She walked back down to the port the long way, under the plane trees on the boulevard where the leaves had gone to brown paper, and took the four hundred and thirty metres of the descent at a clerk's pace, steady, heels clicking, two bends and the whole height of a nine-storey building, until the port road opened below her and the terminal stood at the bottom of it with its glass front catching the cloud.

The afternoon rush began at two. By three the hall was full of the people a Thursday at the end of October always brought: men going to Istanbul for leather and coming back with more of it, women going to Batumi to see daughters, a party of students with rucksacks who wanted the cheapest berth on anything and would argue with a printed fare until somebody explained it to them slowly.

Daryna's window was the third from the left. The glass had a round speaking grille and a brass tray worn smooth in the middle by other people's money. She sat straight-backed on her stool, the knot of hair heavy and neat at her nape, and she did not make one mistake.

She was aware of that as a separate thing, the way you are aware of your own breath when you have a cold. The Istanbul boat on Saturday: four cabins, two deck, one vehicle she had to send to the vehicle desk because a van was not a car whatever the man in front of her believed. The Batumi boat on Saturday: a grandmother who wanted a lower berth and a window and a cabin with nobody who snored, and who got two of the three and thanked Daryna as though she had arranged the sea. A refund on a cancelled Varna sailing that the supervisor had to initial, which she did without reading, because it was her and it would be right.

It was right. The figures went into the system and came out of the printer as tickets, the change went into the brass tray in the order a person would want to pick it up, the passports went back under the grille with the photo page closed. She said next, please in the same voice at four as she had at two. Her colleague at the next window, who had been in Kherson on Monday and wanted to tell everyone about it, said twice that Daryna looked pale and once that she looked well, and Daryna said thank you to both and was not sure which was meant as the compliment.

At half past three the nausea came up under her ribs like a tide under a pier. She drank water from the bottle under the counter, kept her eyes on the screen, and let it go back down. It went. She processed a family of five to Istanbul with a dog.

The passport wallet was in her bag, and the bag was on the shelf under the counter where her knee touched it. Every time her knee touched it she knew exactly where the card was.

By a quarter to five the light outside had gone the colour of slate and the lamps along the frontage came on, one after another, the way they did every evening, coming on down the line. Through the glass front she could see most of it from her stool: the nine steel bollards set along the edge of the pavement, the last of them standing dead in front of the doors, so that every passenger with a suitcase had to decide which way round it to go; the break at the vehicle gate with its striped arm, its little booth, and the man inside with his clipboard and his radio; the police cabin with the pole camera on its mast, which had not worked since June and which nobody in the terminal had ever seen anyone come to mend. Beyond that the white bell tower beside the hotel, and north of everything the red cranes over the freight quays, stopped, as they had been stopped for a long time.

And on the colonnade steps, at the foot of the stairs that came down from the boulevard, a thin man in a grey zip-up track top was smoking.

She knew him. That was the first thing she understood, and it arrived not as alarm but as a sort of administrative embarrassment, as if she had found a booking in the system under her own initials that she did not remember making. She knew the knitted cap pulled down over lank brown hair. She knew the white trainers, which were wrong for October and were always clean. She knew the way he sat, not on the step but on his heels above it, elbows on his knees, cigarette cupped in his palm against the wind as though somebody might take it off him. She had seen him there, she now realised, at this hour and at the morning hour, for weeks. Since the end of September at least. She had seen him the way you see a bollard.

She made herself go back through it, carefully, the way she went back through a ledger that did not balance. He did not buy tickets. He had never come to her window, or to anybody's window. He did not meet the boats. He did not sell anything, and nobody came to him to buy. He sat on the colonnade steps where, if she looked up from her screen at the right angle, she would see him, and he smoked, and he went away when she did.

That last part she could not prove. She had never thought to check.

"Next, please," she said, and sold two deck passages to Batumi to a pair of brothers in matching jackets, and counted their change into the tray, and when she looked up again he was lighting another cigarette off the end of the first.

It is a fact, she told herself, the way she might have said it to a passenger. There is a man on the steps. He has been on the steps for weeks. You have now noticed him. Those are three facts and none of them is an explanation.

But she sat a little straighter on the stool, and she did not look at the steps again for twenty minutes, and when she did, she found she had been counting the minutes.

At six her relief came in shaking rain off her umbrella. Daryna logged out, balanced her drawer to the hryvnia, signed the sheet and took her bag off the shelf. In the staff room she put on the fitted black coat and belted it hard at the waist, and she stood at the mirror over the sink until her face was the face she had brought to work that morning. Then she went out by the front, because she always went out by the front, and she was not going to change anything tonight that anybody could see.

He was not on the steps when she passed them. The place where he had been was a small litter of stubs, wet and flattened, more than one evening's worth.

She did not look round.

The tram up from the port was the old kind, rocking on its bogies, the heaters under the seats smelling of scorched dust. It was full of dock workers and office girls and a man with a crate of apples on his knees, and at the second stop Daryna had to stand, holding the strap, swaying with everyone else as the car ground up the hill. The windows were fogged. Somebody had drawn a face in the condensation and it was running.

Halfway to Chornomorska the nausea came back and did not go. She got off a stop early, walked the length of a dark railing as if she meant to, and was sick quietly into the gutter at the corner by the church, one hand on the cold iron and the other holding her coat back from her knees. A woman walking a dog crossed the street to avoid her. Daryna wiped her mouth with a tissue, straightened, and walked the rest of the way home.

The flat was as she had left it: the bed made, the blouse for tomorrow on its hanger on the wardrobe door, the iron cooling on the board in the kitchen because she had pressed it at six in the morning. Nobody had been in. Nobody ever was. That had been the point of it, for years, a place that was entirely hers.

She did not turn on the big light. She sat at the kitchen table in her coat with the lamp on, took the passport wallet out of her bag, opened it, and slid the card halfway out from behind her photograph. The storm, the curl. In the yellow lamplight the thermal print had a faint sheen to it, like oil on water. She did not cry and she did not smile. She looked at it for a long time, the way she looked at a timetable when a sailing had been cancelled and everybody in the queue was about to ask her what happened next.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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