They searched for hours—but no matter how many doors they knocked on, only empty shaded coolness greeted them, as if every house in the village had been gutted, hollowed of all human presence, and left as an empty decoration to await a new set of actors. And the more they saw of it, the more convinced Kovalevsky grew that the buildings must’ve been like that— empty, flat—before they’d moved in. Where were the villagers? And, most importantly, where was Olesya? Was she just a vision, a sweet nightmare created from his loneliness and fear, aided by the soothing latex of the poppies in the yard and Patsjuk’s dark green tea?
“Was it always like this?” Menshov said when the two of them finally stopped, silent and sweating. “Do you remember what this place was like when we first got here?”
Kovalevsky shook his head, then nodded. “I think it was . . . normal. A normal village.”
He remembered the bustling in the streets, the peasants and the noisy geese, bleating of goats, the clouds of dust under the hooves of the White Army’s horses when they rode in. Did they ride in or did they walk? If they rode, where were the horses— gone, swept away with everything else?
And then he remembered—a memory opened in his mind like a fissure—he remembered the view of the village and how quiet it was, and how he said to a man walking next to him (they must’ve been on foot, not horseback) that it was strange that there was no smoke coming from the chimneys. And then they walked into the village, and there was bustle and voices and chimneys spewed fat white smoke, and he’d forgotten all about it. “Maybe not so normal,” he said. “I remember not seeing any smoke when we first approached.”
Menshov nodded, his gray mustache shaking. “I remember that too! See, it was like an illusion, a night terror.”
“The whole town?” Kovalevsky stopped in his tracks, his mind struggling to embrace the enormity of the deception—this whole time, this whole village . . . It couldn’t be. “What about Patsjuk and his tavern? We were just there. Is it still . . . ?”
“Let’s find out.”
As they walked back, the dusty street under their feet growing more insubstantial with every passing moment, Kovalevsky thought that perhaps this all was the result of this running out of land—running out of the world. After all, if there was no place left for the White Army, wouldn’t it be possible that some of them simply ran and tripped into some nightmare limbo? It seemed likely, even.
The tavern stood flat and still, and it seemed more like a painting than an actual building—it thinned about the edges, and wavered, like hot air over a heated steppe. Illusion, unclean forces.
Patsjuk sat on the steps, and seemed real enough—made fatter, more substantial by the fact that Olesya perched next to him, her round shoulder, warm and solid under her linen shirt, resting comfortably against the tavern’s owner’s. Both her hands were intact, and Kovalevsky breathed a sigh of relief, even if he wasn’t sure why.
She grinned when she saw Kovalevsky. “There you are,” she said. “See, you took my medicine, took my poison, and now you’re lost. The loving goat-mother will absorb you, make you whole again.”
Menshov grasped Kovalevsky’s shoulder, leaned into him with all his weight. “Why?” he said.
A pointless question, of course, Kovalevsky thought. There were never any whys or explanations—there was only the shortage of land. By then, the ground around them heaved, and the dead rose, upright, the nails of their hands still rooting them to the opened graves, their eyes closed and lips tortured. The streets and the houses twisted, and the whole world became a vortex of jerking movement, everything in it writhing and groaning—and only the tavern remained still in the center of it.
Kovalevsky’s hand, led by a memory of the time when he cared enough to keep himself alive, moved of its own volition, like a severed lizard’s tail, and slid down his leg and into his boot, grasping for the horn handle of the knife he always had on him. He hadn’t remembered it, but his body had, and jerked the knife out, assuming a defensive, ridiculous posture. He swiped at the air in front of him, not even trying for Patsjuk’s belly, then turned around and ran.
His boots sunk into the road as if it were molasses, but he struggled on, as the air buzzed around him and soon resolved into bleating of what seemed like a thousand goats. Transparent dead hands grasped at him, and the black thing, more goat than a cat now, tried to claw its away out of his skull. Kovalevsky screamed and struggled against the wave of ancient voices, but inhuman force turned him back, back, to face the horrors he tried to run from.
So this is how it is, Kovalevsky thought, just as Olesya’s face stretched into a muzzle, and her lower jaw hinged open, unnaturally wide. Without standing up, she extended her neck at Menshov. The old man grasped at his belt, uselessly, looking for his saber, even as Olesya’s mouth wrapped around his head.
On the edge of his hearing, Kovalevsky heard whinnying of the horses off in the distance, and the uncertain, false tinny voice of a bugle. The Red Armies were entering the town of N.; he wondered briefly if the same fate awaited them—but probably not, since they were not the ones rejected by the world itself.
Kovalevsky closed his eyes then, not to see, and resigned himself to the fact that his run was over, and at the very least there would be relief from the sickening crunch that resonated deep in his spine, from the corpses and their long fingernails that dragged on the ground with barely audible whisper, and from the tinny bugle that was closing on him from every direction.
A HANDSOME FELLOW
1.
When people starve, their eyes become large and luminous, enough so as to invite comparisons with visages of saints on the icons. Which makes sense, since the saints were traditionally ascetic— anorexic even. I forever remember those golden-light eyes, softly unfocused, radiant, otherworldly, so sharply contrasting with frost-bitten fingers and red, peeling skin on wind-burned cheeks.
This is how it went: Svetlana, aged twenty-four and still unmarried despite her beauty, now heightened by hunger, woke up before dawn (which wasn’t all that early in Leningrad, in December), and went to check on her mother. The children, Yasha and Vanya, slept in a separate room—a surprising luxury after most of the neighbors of their communal apartment had died. So did Svetlana’s father—a large, strong man. People like that were built for peace, for hard work and big rations; it’s the small and frail that could last on one hundred grams of adulterated bread a day. His death meant even less food for everyone else—Svetlana was the only one now who worked at the factory and received rations. The only other survivor in their apartment was a young kindergarten teacher Lyuda, all alone in her room adjacent to the communal kitchen fallen into disuse.
Mother was still alive, and she weakly gestured to Svetlana— her hand a scrap of parchment in the dark—to go pick through her jewelry box. They were clever with things they had—most of the rings and nylons were already traded on the black market, for sugar lumps for the children and for extra bread. Sunflower oil and broth from unknown sources were a rare luxury. They avoided meat because of the stories of cannibals who dug up the newly buried bodies and attacked the weak and those who walked alone in the dark—and this is why Svetlana always carried her father’s pistol, with a single shot in it.
Svetlana picked through the box. There were pieces left in it, but who knew how long the blockade would last? They should pace themselves, she thought, and picked up a single brooch—a pink cameo with carved white border, like seafoam made stone. “It’s grandma Anna’s,” mother said. Svetlana could detect no expression in her voice—no argument, no affirmation.
“Don’t wake the children,” Svetlana said. “Let them sleep while I’m gone. When they sleep, they’re not hungry, not cold.” That day, she didn’t have to work her factory shift, and the best pickings at the market were in the morning.
“They sleep longer every day.” Mother sighed. “My boys.”
Big strong boys, one nine, one twelve, with bodies that would soon be too large to live. “We should evacuate them. They send children out every day. And you could go too.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere better than here.”
“But the bombardments.”
“They’ll die here for sure.” She bit her tongue—no mother
wants to hear these words; then again, no sister wants to say them. “You know it’s true.”
“There’s still time.”
The Road of Life was all ice—thick white Ladoga ice, sturdy ice of an unmoving lake. It would hold until at least March. “I’m going, mama.”
“Don’t be long.”
2.
Svetlana wraps her head in a thick grey woolen shawl and wraps her body in an old, oily shearling—her dead father’s—and walks down the six flights of stairs (one per floor, third floor is lucky). The cameo brooch is hidden in her mitten and she toggles it on her fingertips, the golden tip of the pin prickling ever so slightly.
The streets shine ghostly white in the dusk, and she watches her felt boots, making sure that they don’t step on ice slicks— treacherous pools of darkness in the soft powdery white. She is so focused on avoiding ice, not falling, not breaking her fragile bones, not being caught helpless by the roving gangs of cannibals, that she doesn’t notice when someone starts walking along with her, step in step, the smooth swing of his long legs shadowing the uncertain stumble of hers. He smells of earth (its fat, musty aroma was so out of place in the frozen starving city, the stone embankments strangling the black Neva and the sluicing green ice in it in its slow embrace), and she starts thinking of summer without noticing the reason for her thoughts.