Free Everything Happens as It Does by Albena Stambolova

with books from floor to ceiling. The fireplace, unused, was bright and clean. No surprise. Fanny appeared somehow incompatible with fire. He climbed a small folding ladder and tried to read the titles on the shelves in front of him. It was a series of medical books in Latin. He wondered how these could have ended up in Fanny’s house, and for the first time felt curious about her family. That is, if it was not just money, just for show, as it had seemed to him at first. But maybe there was more to Fanny than one imagined. He walked by the shelves, his hands in his coat pockets. It was too cold to pick up and browse through a book. He admired the leather-bound volumes of Dickens’s and Oscar Wilde’s complete works. But then he got angry—what was the point of having such treasures in this awful cold? It almost seemed like the cold was artificially maintained by who knows what kind of demonic contraption. He started looking for possible indications of its existence and stumbled upon the kitchen, whose size and whiteness simply dazzled him. On top of everything, the windowpanes were covered with frost. The heavy rectangular table in the middle of the kitchen was the only dark, alien spot. You could stuff chickens and legs of lamb on it, you could cut cabbage, knead dough, and who knows what else. But why did Fanny need this kitchen, where everything sparkled in its pristine condition? Another mystery. And her bedroom, what could it reveal? Were there any traces of life there?
    Just then he heard the thin crystalline tone of the doorbell. Someone was coming. Valentin headed for the door, and before opening it to see who it was, he was ready to swear it could not be Margarita. But it was Margarita, without her giant bag.
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28.
Other Secrets
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    The father of the twins, Margarita and Valentin, was a pathologist; back when Maria still talked, she often asked him about his work. Then, somehow imperceptibly, she stopped. The same thing had happened to their relationship—it had disintegrated into thin air before he noticed any of it. He woke up one day realizing that he had become useless to his own wife and children. Anything he set out to do got done before he could finish it. Anything he tried to say—a suggestion, a conclusion of any sort—was already a matter of common knowledge. The children shyly slipped out of his arms whenever he wanted to take them out somewhere. Maria had taken them there already. No one asked him any questions, and when he asked a question, the answer stood obvious before him, or no one seemed to understand what he was saying. Of course, it didn’t happen overnight, but the process had been treacherous precisely in its slowness. He hadn’t been able to put his finger on anything in particular that he could have tried to change or complain about. Simply whatever he thought of doing was somehow already done.
    And whatever he undertook in the house, repainting the walls for instance, an occasion he distinctly remembered, inevitably failed because it had been his initiative.
    It was then that he started drinking. No one understood what was happening. Like a desperate man staring down the edge of a precipice, he made scenes. Maria dealt with these in her way, too; could you beat your head against a wall that was continuously retreating? He could no longer recognize the world he lived in. When he screamed through tears that his wife didn’t love him, she seemed unable to understand what he meant. When he accused her of wanting to see the end of him, she merely smiled. He asked her repeatedly what she wanted from him, and while asking, he began to believe in his own imaginary answer. He knew that he was instinctively holding onto it as his only chance of survival. But no other answer was offered. He inhabited a world of deaf people, or a world of strangers, isolated like a benign tumor rejected by a body’s immune system. He spent an indefinite amount of time