… in the deep country
Where an endless silence reigns.
Nikolai Nekrasov (1821–78)
In Papa Rizhin’s world the clocks race forward to the pounding iron-foundry beat, the brakes are off and the New Vlast tears into the wind, riding the rolling wave of continental cataclysm-shock, flung into the future on the impulse-rip of centrifugal snap, taking a piston-blur express ride–six years now and counting and there’s no slowing it yet. But pieces break off and get left behind. Because the past is sticky. Adhesive. Reluctant to let go. The continent is littered with broken shards. Arrested fragments of slower time. Unhealed unforgotten memories and the dead who do not die.
A house and a village and a lake.
On a day in the eleventh year of her dislocated life Yeva Cornelius comes gently awake in the first grey light of morning. There is some time yet to go before the rising of the cooler, circumspect, conciliatory sun. Yeva stays quite still on the couch, breathing slowly, watching the curtain stir. Lilac and vines crowd against the house. The room is leaf-scented, leaf-shaded, cool.
Her hair has been braided again in the night with loving gentleness: she feels the tightness of the intricate knotted plaits against her skull and smells the clean sweet fragrance the domovoi anoints her with while she sleeps. The prickle of tiny decorative twigs. Trinkets of seed and bird shell.
Take the domovoi’s attention as a mark of favour, Eligiya Kamilova had said. It’s glad there are people again in the house. Leave a little salt and bread by the stove and it won’t trouble us.
The domovoi laid trails of crumbling earth across the floorboards, long sweeps and spirals along corridors from room to room. Eligiya Kamilova was right: it didn’t want to hurt, not like those in the rye and oat fields–they were bad. Watchful and furtive, they came at you out of the white of noon and raised welts and sore rashes on your skin. Sly thorn scratches that stung and drew beads of blood. But the ones to be really afraid of were the ones that moved around outside in the night. Darkness magnifies. Darkness changes everything.
Daylight gathers and hardens in the room. Moment by moment the curtain is more visible, rising and collapsing. It’s as if Yeva is moving it with her breath. Experimentally, she holds back the air in her lungs and eyes the curtain to see if it pauses too. Half-convinces herself that it does.
The atmosphere of a complicated dream is ebbing slowly away. Her mother was in the dream. Her mother was looking for her.
Her mother looks for her always, every day. She will have come back to the apartment and found it not there because of the bomb. But somebody will have told her the soldiers took them away, her and her sister, and put them on the train, and she will look for them. Only she won’t know that Eligiya Kamilova took them off the train again, that Eligiya did something with her hands and broke the door of the train and took them into the night and the snow, and they ran away. Her mother won’t know that.
Everywhere they go, Eligiya Kamilova leaves behind messages and notes so her mother can know they have been there and where they are going next. But her mother might not get the messages. She might not know who to ask. Eligiya posted letters to their old address but her mother can’t go back to that house, not ever, because the soldiers sent everyone away. Some stranger will have read those letters. Or they’ll be in a pile in a big post office room in Mirgorod. Or burned.
They walked south through the winter, Yeva and her sister Galina and Eligiya Kamilova, keeping off the roads and out of the villages, staying in the trees and the snow. The cold was like a dark glittering blade, but Eligiya was a hunter in the woods: she didn’t talk much but she knew how to trap, how to make a warm place, how to build a fire in the night that didn’t show light and a barricade of thorns against the wolves. Sometimes she slipped away to a village and came back with something they needed. Sometimes she found a hut or a farm where the people would let them sleep, maybe in a barn.
Yeva remembered every night. Every single night.
Her sister Galina was sick for a long time but she didn’t die, and in the first days of spring the three of them came out of the trees, following a black stream flecked with brown foam, and found the house in the middle of a wide field of waist-high grass: a big square house of yellow weatherboards under a low grey roof, the glass in the many windows mostly broken. They waded over to it, leaving a trodden wake in the grass that buzzed and clattered with insects. Eligiya Kamilova went up under the porch and broke open the door, just like she had opened the door of the train. A wide staircase climbed up into shadow, and on the bare boards of the entrance hall was a pile of leaves and moss. Twigs laid out around it in patterns like the letters of a strange alphabet. Eligiya stepped round it carefully.
‘Don’t disturb it,’ she said. ‘Be careful not to touch that at all.’
There were pieces of furniture in some of the rooms. Mostly they’d had their upholstery ripped open, the stuffing pulled out and carried off for nests. There were chalky splashes of bird mess in the corners and streaks of it down the curtains. In the kitchen there were lamps, and oilcloth spread on the table.
‘Are we going to stay here?’ said Galina. ‘For a while?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Eligiya Kamilova.
Yeva knew that Galina needed to rest, to stop moving for a long while, to be strong again.
Eligiya Kamilova hadn’t give them any choice when she opened the door of the train and took them away into the trees and made them walk. It all happened too quickly to even think about until after it was done. But if they’d stayed on the train and gone where it was taking them, their mother would have known where they were and she could have come there to get them. Eligiya said the train was going to a bad place, a cruel terrible place, and no one ever came home from there, but she didn’t even know what the terrible place was called, and Yeva wasn’t scared of being in terrible places.
Every day she remembered the bomb. It always jumped her when she was thinking of something else. It wasn’t like a memory. Memories change until you don’t remember the actual thing any more; you remember the remembering. But of the time when the bomb fell nothing was forgotten and nothing was changed. When it jumped her it was like opening the same page of a book again and again, and the words were always all there, and always the same: Yeva’s life hammered open like a bomb-broken building, the insides scattered and left exposed to ruinous elemental fire and rain.
Part of her stopped moving forward when the bomb came. Part of her got stuck in that piece of time for ever, always back there, always smelling the dust and burning, always looking down at Aunt Lyudmila squashed flat, always going down the stairs that used to be inside but were outside now, with nothing to hold on to. Part of her stayed back there, and only part of her was left to carry on. Now was a shadow remnant life of numbed and lesser feeling. Now was only aftermath. Aftermath.
That day when they first found the yellow house in the grass they didn’t stay there but after looking it over they walked on down the stony dry track into the village. Long before they reached the village fields, Yeva could taste the tang of raw damp earth and animal dung in the air. Rooks chattered, squabbled and wheeled across the wide flatness of black soil just turned, thick and heavy and gleaming blue like metal. In the distance women were stooping and crouching at their work. They wore long red or green skirts, and their hair was wrapped in lengths of white cloth.
The village was a collection of ramshackle dwellings under heavy mounds of thatch, and beyond it was the lake and a line of tall pale trees on the shore, blue and dusty and far away. They walked in among skinny chickens and wary, resentful dogs, grey wood barns, grey corrugated-iron roofs. Scrawny cattle browsed in the dust behind a low fence of woven branches. A tractor leaned, abandoned, its axle propped on a rock.
‘What’s the name of this place?’ said Eligiya Kamilova to the knot of men who gathered to meet them.
‘Yamelei,’ they said. ‘This is Yamelei.’
Women from the nearest field came to join them, treading heavily over the upturned mud in rag-made shoes. Eligiya showed them the intricate brown patterns on her dark sinewed arms, and their eyes opened wider at that. A big old fellow with a ragged beard scoured the skyline behind them.
‘There are no men with you?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘A mother and daughters, then.’
‘I am not their mother.’
‘Grandmother?’
‘No,’ said Eligiya. ‘Who lives in the big yellow house?’
‘They left,’ a woman said.
‘How long ago?’
The woman pursed her lips. It was a question without an answer. Seasons rolled, and once in a while a new thing happened.
‘And no one lives there now?’ said Eligiya.
While Eligiya was talking to them Yeva watched the people of the village, their broad flattened faces, flattened noses, narrow dark curious eyes in crinkled skin. The men wore linen shirts and sleeveless jackets of animal hide, the pattern of the cows’ backs on them yet, and shoes of woven bark that looked like slippers. They had knotted hands and swollen knuckles and their teeth were bad. They were looking at her, and she was looking at them, but the space between her and them was like thousands of miles and hundreds of years. She couldn’t feel what they were thinking. They talked the same words but it was a different language.
Eligiya Kamilova told the people of Yamelei she would fix the tractor and make their boats stronger and steadier for the lake, and it was agreed that she and the two girls could stay at the yellow house for a while.
‘Whose house is it?’ said Galina as they walked back. ‘It must be somebody’s.’
‘Small house,’ said Eligiya Kamilova. ‘Small aristocracy, long gone now.’
‘Why doesn’t someone from the village go and live there?’
‘If someone did that,’ said Eligiya, ‘the others would have to resent them, and it would lead to trouble.’
They took water from the stream to drink and cook and wash in. Eligiya Kamilova trapped things in the woods. Pigeons and hares. Yeva didn’t mind the plucking and the skinning and pulling the inside parts out. Galina wouldn’t do it, but it gave Yeva no bad feelings at all.
There was a place behind the house closed in by a high wall of horizontal weathered planking between tall solid uprights. Inside the wall was a mass of ragged foliage, a general green flood: shoulder-high umbellifers and banks of trailing thorn. Week by week Eligiya and the girls cleared it away and found useful things still growing there: cabbage and onion and currant canes and lichenous old fruit trees. On a high shelf in a tool shed Eligiya found a rust-seized shotgun and a half-carton of shells. She fixed the gun up with tractor oil and it seemed like it would work, but she didn’t want to try it out because the noise would reach the village and the men would come.
When summer came the walled yard was gravid with acrid ripeness. Lizards sunned themselves on the planking and wasps crawled on sun-warmed fruit. Eligiya Kamilova and the girls went into the garden and ate berries hurriedly, greedily, three at a time, bursting the sharp sweet purple taste with their tongues against the roofs of their mouths, staining their fingers with the blue-black juice.
Every day Eligiya Kamilova went down to Yamelei to work. Yeva was glad when she was gone and the sisters were on their own together without her. Then there were long afternoons of slow lazy time when few words were said or remembered, only the smells and colours and the day-flying moths in the house and the feeling of the long grass against their skin. Yeva would lie on her back by the overgrown stream and shut her eyes and look through closed lids at the bright oranges and soft, swirling, pulsing reds and browns. There were rhythms there, like the rhythms of her breathing. A plenitude of time. Galina got stronger, and in the evenings the sisters swam together in the big deep pond where the stream was dammed, until the air streamed with night-borne scents and the first stars rained tiny flakes of light that brushed their faces and settled on their arms. Then the night fears started to come out of the trees and across the grass, and Galina said it was time to get dressed and go into the house. Galina was getting better, but she still went silent sometimes and far away as if she was looking up at Yeva from under water.
In the evenings, before she went to sleep, Yeva would empty her pockets onto the shelves in the bookless emptied library and pick through the collection of the day. Feathers, empty dappled eggshells, twigs and leaves and moss, stones and fragments of knotty root. The best of them she put out by the stove for the domovoi.
Morning is fully come now. Yeva can see every thread in the thin curtain, and the dust smears on the broken windowpanes. Soon she will get up and put some wood in the stove and get water and wash her hair and brush the tight braids out. Then she will go down by herself into the woods by the lake. But for now she lies without moving and watches the curtain, and her sister is warm and heavy beside her under the blanket, eyes still closed fiercely in sleep. Galina will stay like that for another hour or so yet. Although there are rooms enough in the house to sleep in a different bed every night for a week, the sisters share the couch in the library. Eligiya Kamilova sleeps out on the veranda with the loaded gun.
In the coolness under the trees down by the lake at Yamelei the dead artilleryman brushes aside his coverlet of damp memorious earth. Conscript Gunner K-1 Category Leonid Tarasenko. The grave mound is sweet and crumbly, layered with rotting leaves and matted fungal threads. Parts of his body are wrapped in warm, wet, skin-like, papery stuff.
The dead man’s mushroom face feels the gentle touch of the conciliatory morning sun in patterns of leaf shadow. The head turns from side to side, moving its dirt-stuffed mouth. Eyes large and dark as berries stare without blinking. As yet they see nothing.
There is a faint perfume on the air.
Soldier Tarasenko, throat unzipped and bled out long slow years ago–a whizz of hot shell casing, a shiv wouldn’t do it neater–rises slowly from the shallow accidental grave where he was planted like a seed.
Yeva Cornelius, night braids brushed out from her hair, leaves the house and her sister and Eligiya Kamilova still sleeping. The early fields are filled with air and light to overbrimming like a cup.
The path down to the lake passes between sea-green rye and scented hummocks of dried manure. In the bottom land the sorrel bloom is over, the crop coming on heavy and dark. Thick green heady vegetable blood. Yeva comes out onto the yellow grass of the lake margin. Old Benyamin Zoff is there already, on his hands and knees, crawling in his best grey suit along the edge of the water. He moves slowly, intently, with sacramental concentration, murmuring words that are quiet and musical but not a song. He will crawl like that all morning. There is a sunken city under the mirror-calm lake. An underwater world. In the village they keep water from the lake in their houses, in bottles and basins, and in the winter people go sliding face down on their bellies across the frozen surface, staring down, trying to see what is there.
The soul of the people is forever striving to behold the sunken city of Litvozh.
Eligiya Kamilova said that soon after they came to Yamelei. It was a quotation from a book. They long not for something that will be but for the return of something that was. They have not forgotten and they never will. The window frames of the village houses are carved with pictures of streets and towers under watery waves.
There are brown wooded islands in the lake and low hills on the horizon beyond the further shore. Yeva waves to Benyamin Zoff, who ignores her, and turns away from the water’s edge to climb up into the woods. There is a dead man standing among the trees. She passes quite close to him, but he is not watching her, and Yeva pays him no regard. Yeva isn’t bothered by the dead: they are preoccupied with their own thoughts and take no notice of her.
War, like storm and famine, has come around the shore of the lake and passed from time to time through Yamelei. The woods near the village are scarred by tank tracks, shallow shell holes and random trenches sinking under bramble, ivy and thorn. The trees are ripped and tattered by gunfire. Here, in these woods, colliding companies of the lost, rolling along on random surges of retreat and advance, attack and counter-attack, stumbled over one another, panicked and rattled bullets into each others’ bodies. Field guns set up among the oats and rye in the upper ground rained desultory shellfire on unofficered and bootless conscripts crawling for shelter under thorn bush and bramble mound. One time a whole truckful of people from somewhere else was driven in under the trees, shot and shovelled into three-foot ditches.
In the woods around the lake the killed have not died right. Uneasily half-sentient, not rotting well, they can be disturbed, upset, awakened. Their uncommitted bodies rise through the earth. They will not sink. They float. From time to time they get up from their beds and wander a while under the trees and lie down somewhere else. When the villagers come across a shallow-buried corpse in the woods they cut its head off, sever the tendons in its legs and drive a wooden peg through the ribcage to pin it firmly down. But they will never find them all.
You put new plaster on the walls but the old stains still seep through. That’s what they say in Yamelei.
Conscript Gunner K-1 Category Leonid Tarasenko, dead, stands with his forehead pressed against a tree trunk and traces the fissures in the bark with his hands. Pushes his fingers into the cracks and tries to pull pieces of the bark away, to see what is underneath. The pieces of bark won’t come free. They slip through the tips of fingers that are sticky from the gash in his throat. His second, silent mouth.
The dead man has probed the inside of the tear in his throat to feel what is in there. He has found soft things and hard things. The hard things are sometimes slippery smooth, and there are some pieces in there that are sharp. There is a hole deeper inside that he can slip fingers into, but the hole is deeper than his fingers are long.
The interiors of things interest him. The inspection of the tree absorbs his attention. He touches the tree with his tongue. Feels roughness, tastes taste.
It occurs to him that the tree is not part of him.
Where is the end of me? the dead man wonders, looking up into the top of the tree. Where is my limit? I am up there. I go past those branches and those branches and up into the bright place up there that looks wet but has no smell of wet. I go past those trees over there, and those trees, and those trees behind me, and that is not the end of it and that is not the end of me. But though I am over there and up there, I am here and not there. It is strange. Fingers and tongue don’t go up there to the top of the tree. They stop short.
The dead man apprehends that the tree doesn’t stand on the earth but continues down into it. The tree reaches into the ground and fastens there, but it isn’t the same with him. Unlike the tree, the dead man seems to be free to go to a different place.
That is interesting.
When he thinks about himself and what he knows and feels, the dead man finds pieces of knowing and pieces of feeling but the pieces are not connected. One of the pieces is angry and one of the pieces is sad because something important has been lost. One of the pieces feels sick, unfathomable horror and despair.
The pieces look at each other as if they have eyes, but they don’t have eyes, not really. Eyes are on the outside, in the sticky-soft raggedy face thing, here, where you can touch with hands. When fingers touch eyes, eyes cannot see trees any more and fingers come away sticky. If you press eyes with fingers you see flakes of light, strange muted flakes of different light, but you only see the light and not the other things, not the trees you could see before. The light you make with fingers in the eyes, that light is inside the head.
Yet inside the dead man mostly there is darkness. He can touch the darkness in his throat with fingers, but the darkness is always there and doesn’t come out. He cannot press that into light. That too is interesting. The dead have a lot to think about. But the piece in him that is sad and the piece in him that is angry want something. They are saying to go down the path.
What is path? says the piece of him that has all the questions. There isn’t any piece with an answer to that, but the feet are walking now, and that seems to be good. That seems to be the answer to the path question.
He notices that if the feet stopped walking then all the other things–all that is not him but other stuff, trees and not trees–stop moving also, and wait, and watch the dead man watching them, waiting.
I see that.
That I understand.
Yeva Cornelius passes the dead man by. As she moves away, he catches the sense of her crossing a splash of sunlight between trees, and his heart is surprised by a deep dim anguish, a recognition of kinship.
Leonid Tarasenko does what the dead don’t do. He starts to follow.
In Mirgorod the woman with the heavy canvas bag on her shoulder takes the tram all the way out to Cold Harbour Strand. She starts out along the spit and, when there is no one to see, leaves the path and disappears into the White Marsh. An hour and a half of hard walking brings her to the edge of a wide muddy expanse of marshland. She unpacks her bundle, spreads the oilskin out on the ground like a mat, sheltered from the breeze in the lee of a fallen tree trunk, and lays the Zhodarev on it. She crouches next to it to push the telescopic sight into the rails and set the graticule. Prises ten rounds from two stiff stripper clips into the toploader. Four hundred yards away across the mud another tree leans sideways in front of a mossy stone wall. She cuts a branch into three short lengths with a knife and binds them with twine to form a makeshift tripod barrel mount. Then she sets the graticule and settles herself into position, kneeling then lying alongside the fallen trunk. Remembers how it feels to be tucked away. Hidden from view. Safe.
She settles the stock of the rifle against her shoulder. Closes her left eye and fits her right eye against the back of the sight. Lets herself relax and sprawl on the ground. Becoming part of it. Settled. Rooted. She has to cock her wrist awkwardly to bring her clawed trigger finger to bear. It feels wrong but she will get used to it.
She fixes the tree in the cross wires. Centres on the place where a particular branch separates from the main bough. Squeezes the slack out of the trigger. The graticule is shivering and taking tiny random jumps. Her heart is busy in her chest. She breathes out, emptying her lungs–calm, calm–and pulls the trigger. The muzzle kicks and deafens her. A puff of dust rises from the wall five feet to the left of the target tree. Waterfowl lift from the mud and circle, puzzled.
Not good.
The woman resettles herself and takes another shot. Forcing her clawed finger to squeeze smoothly.
Two feet to the right of the target. Still not good. But better.
She has put ten rounds aside in a safe place ready for the task itself, which leaves her a hundred and ten to practise with. At ten shots a day that’s eleven practice days. Eleven days in which to remember. Eleven days in which to learn again how to put an entire magazine into a spread she could cover with one hand. She used to be able to do that, six years ago.
Eleven days to get it back. That will be enough.
She has eight cartridges left for this morning’s work. She adjusts the graticule again and prepares herself for another shot.
Galina Cornelius wakes to the empty house. Her sister Yeva is wandering in the woods by the lake and Eligiya Kamilova has gone down to the village to work. Galina is glad to be alone. She has a secret place to go.
She crosses the black stream by a wooden plank and pushes her way along the overgrown margin of the pond, following the rim of still, deep water. The grass, in shadow and still morning-damp, soaks the edge of her skirt. Thorns snag at her clothes and roots try to trip her, but she presses forward. Old statues watch her from the undergrowth with pebble-blank eyes: naked women holding amphorae to their breasts; burly, bearded naked men, long hair curling to their shoulders; a laughing boy riding a big fish. The dark green foliage has almost absorbed them, and some have already lost limbs and faces to winter frost and summer heat. There is a rowing boat beached among the reeds on the lake shore. The oars are still shipped in the bottom but the sky-blue paint on the hull is peeling away. Every time she sees it Galina pictures a mother and her girls, a lilac parasol, a shawl against the cool of the shade, in that boat on the water in the afternoons of summer. She tried to pull it onto the water once, but the wood was soft as cake and came away in pieces.
Galina pushes on towards her destination.
The little concrete building is still there, grey and weather-stained, half ivied-over under the shade of trees. Figurines look down at her from the corners: fat naked children smiling, crumbling, patched with moss. Galina pushes the door open. Inside, in the semi-darkness, there is a dark mouth in the ground, the start of a spiral stone staircase. The air in the stairwell smells cool and earth-scented with a taint of rust. She descends. At the bottom is a narrow tunnel with tiled walls that bow out and then lean in to meet low overhead. The tunnel leads away into gloom, heading out underwater across the floor of the lake, and at the far end is a dim green light. Galina feels her way in near-darkness towards her secret underwater room.
Who knows what kink of imagination caused the people who once lived in the house in the grass to build such a place, a hemispherical glazed dome of white steel ribwork, an upturned glass bowl twenty feet high on the bed of the lake? The water that presses against the glass walls is a deep moss colour at floor level, fading to the palest, faintest green at the top. The steel framework is streaked and patched with rust, and on the other side of the glass is the dim movement of water vegetation and shadowy water creatures. Obscure larvae and gastropods. Muffled fishes. Over the course of the years the lake has rained a gentle silt upon the outside of the chamber, staining the glass yellow and flecking it with patches of muck. The underwater room is filled with dim subaqueous forest light, but when Galina arches her neck to look up she can see light and the undersides of ripples lapping in the breeze, and sometimes the underneath of a waterfowl disturbing the circle of visible surface.
Down here in the underwater room the temperature is constant and cool. The room is furnished. Rugs, a sofa, an empty bookcase, a cupboard, a chair, a desk. A pot of earth stands in the centre of the circular floor, the remains of some long-dead, long-dried plant slumped across it. As Galina moves around, circling, touching, she surprises traces of cigar smoke. The smell of brandy and laudanum lingers in pockets of air.
She has told no one about this place and brought no one here, not Eligiya Kamilova, not even Yeva. It is her own place, where she can come and be herself and think about what she should do. Eligiya Kamilova is not their mother. She has never been a mother to anyone at all. She stays with them and takes care of things, but she would travel further and faster without them; she would go even as far as the endless forest in the east. Eligiya has been in that forest, has travelled there, and it stains the air around her. Part of her is in the forest always and has never come away.
Their mother is in Mirgorod.
I have been too ill to do anything but follow where Eligiya Kamilova went, but that time is coming to an end. I must take Yeva back to Mirgorod. I am the older one, and it is my job to do that. Soon I will be as well and strong as I will ever be, and then I must do that.
But I am not ready, not quite yet.
The rusalka presses its chalky face, expressionless and pale, against the silt-flecked glass and stares in at Galina, watching her intently. It moves its hands through the water slowly as if it were waving. But it is not waving. It is only watching. The first time it came Galina mistook it for the reflection of her own face.
The dead soldier Leonid Tarasenko follows Yeva out from under the trees into the emptiness of tall light. There is a tiny anguished hook of memory somewhere inside him, a diamond-hard strange survivor in the heart, a piece of disconnected understanding no larger than a single word, and the word is child.
The dead man follows child. Child fills his heart with happiness and tears and need. In all the world of the dead man there is only child and follow and no other purpose at all, and the existence of even this one irreducible shard of purpose is a mystery more mysterious than the endless ever-faithful burning of the sun.
But child (all unaware of the following) moves faster than the dead man can. The separation between them stretches and stretches.
The dead man would call out after her if he could, but there is not enough wonder and mystery in the world to provide him with concepts like voice and call. He has been given only child and follow, and it is not enough.
He moves on, following the line she took. Child is gone, but of following there is no end and nothing else to take its place.
The line of his following brings him again to an edge of trees, different trees, but trees. Trees are familiar to him and the smell of earth is familiar beneath them, and that is a soothing ointment for his heart, but also not soothing at all; nothing takes away the happiness and the tears and the need for following child.
Because trees are familiar to him the dead Leonid Taresenko follows his following in under the trees.
Galina Cornelius stays a long while in the underwater room, but eventually it is time to return to the house because Yeva will soon be home from the woods. As Galina is crossing the plank over the black stream, the dead soldier steps out from a tree and comes towards her.
She sees his open earth-filled mouth, the woodlice in the folds of his face and neck.
She screams. It is blank terror.
All the way to the house she runs, heart pounding, fear-blind, and at the veranda she stops and turns. The dead thing is following her, loping unsteadily through the waist-high grass.
Galina screams again.
‘Yeva! Yeva!’
The dead soldier is out of the high grass and coming up the path, coming towards her with fixed and needy dead black eyes, hand stretched out for companionship.
Eligiya Kamilova’s gun is lying on the couch on the veranda.
It could blow up in your eyes. Eligiya had said. Only use it if the other thing will be worse. But she had shown them how.
Galina seizes the gun and swings the barrel up into the face of the dead soldier. His foot is already on the first veranda step when she pulls both triggers together and takes his head apart. The stock kicks back into her shoulder and knocks her down. She can’t hear her own screams any more for the appalling ringing of the double gunshot in her own ears.
Eligiya Kamilova finds the two girls sitting side by side outside the house, on the couch on the veranda, staring at the corpse of twice-killed Conscript Gunner K-1 Category Leonid Tarasenko, a good and simple man but not a lucky one. When she heard the shot she was already on the track up to the house, work abandoned halfway done, weightless, spun out of orbit by the kick of the newspaper in her hand.
The girls look up at her in silence when she comes. Their faces are strained and pale, their eyes rimmed red and wide with shock. She knows that she should comfort them, but she doesn’t know how, she hasn’t got it in her; she searches but it isn’t there, the right thing to do to take that shock and pain away. She stands stiffly on the veranda, bitterly, emptily aware of the newspaper rolled and clutched by her side. The ineradicable, undeniable truth of it burns in her hand. She hasn’t anything to give them for comfort, not even news, not good news, only bad.
There’s no good time to tell them what she knows. She is tempted to wait, but waiting will only make things worse, compounding fact with deceiving, and she has never told them less than truth. She cannot give them loving comfort but she can give them that and always does.
She holds the newspaper out to Galina.
‘Look,’ she says. ‘Read it. Read the date.’
Eligiya was down in the village working on the boats when the musicians came out of the east, walking in with their rangy dog: the gusli player with the long straggled hair and thick coal beard resting on his chest, one leg lost in the war, swinging along on crutches, and the tall old man in the long coat, drum like a cartwheel slung on his back. The drummer carried a newspaper stuffed in his pocket that nobody in the village could read. Kamilova bought it from him for a couple of kopeks.
Galina stares at the newspaper blankly.
‘What?’ she says. ‘What about it? What?’
Galina makes an effort to squint at the stained print.
‘It’s a couple of months old.’ She hands it back to Kamilova and wipes her fingers in the lap of her dress already splattered with the soldier’s drying mess. ‘It’s greasy. It smells bad.’
Galina’s eyes aren’t focused properly. They stray back to the half-rotten corpse on the veranda boards.
‘Not the month,’ says Kamilova. ‘The year.’ She holds the paper up again for the girl to see. Galina stares at it for a while. Furrows her brow in confusion.
‘It’s a mistake,’ she says. ‘A printing error.’
‘No,’ said Kamilova. ‘I talked to the men who brought it into the village. I asked them questions. It isn’t a mistake.’
‘What?’ said Yeva. ‘What are you talking about.’
Kamilova sat down beside them on the end of the couch. She felt suddenly exhausted. Not able to manage. Not able to lead the way, not at the moment, not any more. The strength in her legs, the straightness in her back, was gone. Yeva squeezed up to make room.
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Eligiya Kamilova. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘What?’
‘We’ve been walking in the trees,’ said Kamilova, ‘and we’ve been living here in the village by the lake, and it’s been seven months, nearly eight–a long time but not quite eight months–that’s all.’ She takes the paper from where it lies in Galina’s lap. ‘Look at the date.’
Yeva reads the small print at the top of the page.
‘But that’s wrong.’
‘No.’
‘But it is wrong. It’s five years wrong.’
‘Five and a half. Five and half years gone.’
Kamilova has had longer than the girls to think it through.
The three of them roll the corpse of the twice-killed soldier onto a sheet, wrap it and drag it through the grass far away from the house. They dig a hole up near the woods. It takes all day and they are dumb with exhaustion and heat and stink, and the sun has gone and the fear is coming out of the woods. They go inside and light candles and put wood in the stove, and when the water is hot they wash in the kitchen in silence, the whole of their bodies from head to toe. It takes a long time to get the dirtiness off and they don’t quite manage it even then.
Rank warm cheese and a stump of hard bread on the shelf. Oilcloth on the table. Candles burning. The house and the village and the lake. Some people cannot look at their memories, and some people cannot ever look away.
‘Our mother thinks I’m sixteen,’ says Yeva. ‘Sixteen. Or dead. Either way she didn’t find us. She never came.’
‘I didn’t know,’ says Kamilova. ‘There wasn’t a way to know.’
‘She couldn’t have come,’ says Galina. She looks at Eligiya Kamilova. ‘But tomorrow we’ll go home,’
‘Home?’ says Kamilova. ‘What do you mean “home”?’
‘You don’t have to come with us, Eligiya. You’ve done enough; you’ve done more than you needed to for us. You can have your life back; you can go where you want; you can go into the forest again, or stay here and live for ever. ’
Galina’s words lacerate Eligiya like the blades of knives.
‘I…’ she begins. The pain she feels is shame and guilt and love, inextricable trinity, hands held open to receive the price you had to pay. ‘Everything will have changed,’ she says. ‘You have to think about that. She… Your mother might not even—’
‘You don’t have to come, Eligiya.’
‘I will come,’ says Eligiya Kamilova. ‘Of course I will come.’