The refinery at Kapotnya had been burning since before breakfast, and by noon its smoke leaned over the southeast of the city like a tower block that had tipped and caught. Stasha walked toward the school where they always voted, with her passport in one pocket and her own pen in the other, and she used the pen to write the shopping list on the back of the gas bill as she went.
Yevgeniy kept to the side nearest the road. “There are cameras over every box this year,” he said.
“Eggs,” Stasha said, and wrote it.
A whine came over the roofs from the direction of the river, high and uneven, a moped climbing a hill that never ended. A second one joined it. Somewhere past the Novospassky Monastery the air defense answered with two flat thumps, and a car alarm started on Bolshiye Kamenshchiki and gave up soon after. Nobody on the pavement ran. A woman with a pram tucked the blanket higher and kept walking. Stasha’s phone had shown no signal since Friday, for security reasons, the city said.
“Bread,” she said. “It is Sunday. They will still have bread.”
Yevgeniy was watching the smoke. “If Yabloko were on the list, I would vote for them. Only to see what number they would print.”
“They were on the list in August. For one week.”
“The court said they stole their pictures.” He shook his head at the sky. “Pictures a computer drew. Nobody owns those.”
“And the name of a song.”
“My mother used to sing it.”
She wrote apples, then looked at the word.
“Don’t carry apples near the school,” Yevgeniy said. “On the television they said someone was planning to throw apples. In Yekaterinburg they called the police over one on an observer’s table.” He shrugged. “Someone will notice. Buy them after, if you want them.”
They turned onto the lane with the school. A loudspeaker over the gate played a song about how wide the motherland was, and a banner promised a car to one lucky citizen who voted online. A kindergarten teacher led a line of children in paper hats through the gate to see how voting worked. Two policemen stood by the fence with their hands behind their backs, looking at the smoke like everyone else.
“The Greens, then,” Yevgeniy said. “The Greens are on the list.”
“The Greens?”
“At least I can say I helped the environment.” He gestured to the refinery.
“One of their candidates went missing on Friday. The woman on the second floor told me.”
“Then someone is paying attention to them.” He rubbed his thumb along the seam of his passport. “That is something.”
At the gate Stasha stopped with the pen on the second letter of smetana. She looked at the list for a while: eggs, bread, apples, the half word. Then she capped the pen and held it out to him.
“Take it. Theirs might be the kind that fades.”
“You are not coming in?”
“I will get the bread.”
He started to say something about lists, the ones they kept at her work and at his, and who read them afterward. He got as far as the word “lists” before giving up. Then he took the pen and went in under the song.
The city channel ran the district results on Monday evening, after the weather. Yevgeniy had told her twice that he had put his mark beside the little green leaf and pressed hard, as though she might one day be asked to testify. The pen lay on the table between them, beside the bag of apples.
The anchor stood in front of a map of Taganka with small flags pinned across it.
“In Precinct 1623, turnout was one hundred percent,” she said. “United Russia received ninety-one percent of the vote. The Greens received no votes.”