What to do? Stay in one place? Build a shelter? Can’t start a fire without the sun and with the branches all soggy. There was nowhere to wash, nothing to wash with. Could she make soap from ash? Ash and what else? The ashes from the fire and a bit of…lard?
I’ll make soap and clean myself with the ashes, and walk on, live on, fly on, covered with soot, unclean, unfound, just a speck in the woods, and soon I’ll be so lost that I won’t even find myself.
She called out feebly, Dasha, Dasha. She cried to heaven. You who brought me here, bring me out, no other guide I seek. She thrust out her arms in the coming darkness, she waited for a sound, she made one herself, she put down her hands and lay in the leaves to rest a while, covered with twigs, hoping she did not smell like a live thing that other live things could prey on.
Was this what Blanca Davidovna meant when she told Tatiana that her three main lines in the hand—her heart, her head, her life all beginning from one common root—were a harbinger for tragedy? Shavtala saw it, too; was this what she meant?
Tatiana didn’t think so. They didn’t say short life. They said irrevocable trauma. Meaning: struggling, suffering, agony—all values presupposing the requisite life.
Blanca didn’t say death. She said the crown and the cross. The crown—the very best. The cross—the very worst.
Tatiana wished she had known nothing, nothing at all from the lines in her hand, from the leaves in her tea, from the Saturn line of fate that was etched like grief down the center of her palm.
Night was coming again, the third night.
What to do?
I was slain by false smiles.
One thing remained clear as the rainy twilight fell. Saika abandoned Tatiana in the woods to die. And Marina, blindly or willfully, followed her. Saika was Marina’s guide. This wasn’t lightning, or floods, or frostbite, or freak sledding accidents on the Neva. No. This was deliberate destruction.
Tatiana had been walking through the densest taiga-like forest for over two days trying to find the way out; she was emptied of strength. The truths about Marina and Saika had left her bereft.
The universe in which this was possible could make other things possible: the waiting with rifles on the outskirts of fields to kill men who stole wheat for their families. Keeping indecent company with your own closest blood relative without shuddering at the world. Moving from place to place, not just because the job demanded it, but because your own safety demanded it. Living a life in which you made only temporary arrangements lest the people you inflamed decided to take your life, because you took away all they had to lose. In comparison, being willfully forsaken in the woods to die was almost trivial.
Was that Tatiana’s choice? If she survived and became an adult, would she have to live amid this random chaos of malice? Wasn’t it better to have lived out her blissful but brief and ordered life and die rather than exist in the abyss of the other world?
She curled up more and more into herself. Then she got up and continued walking through the pathless forest.
No, Tatiana thought. Unbelievably—no. She wanted to live, that was all.
T
The Hole in the Ground
Tatiana had found a small clearing at deep dusk when she saw him. The woods were slowly emptying of light; the woods were emptying of color, too, the green leaves and brown trunks gray. All dark gray and the ground was brown-black, and Tatiana’s hair was black, too, from mud and grime. She had come to a small natural clearing in the forest and as she was walking around looking for something to eat besides blueberries, maybe blackberries, or cranberries—though she knew that cranberries grew in meadows not forests—she stepped on a pile of leaves and branches that suddenly sank into the ground beneath her foot. Only her innate sense of balance kept her from stepping down with both feet. Tatiana wavered, tottered, spread her arms, and did not put a second foot down on the branches. After regaining her composure, she stepped away and examined the ground. The branches were strewn with a strange, haphazard purpose over an area about three meters square, much like the wake of branches she herself had left behind. She pushed with her foot. The branches gave way. Tatiana pushed them harder; they gave way some more. Tatiana found a long stick and prodded the leaves and the twigs until the lot of them fell into a deep hole below.
At first she thought it might be an uncovered grave. The branches had fallen deep into the ground. If there was something there, it was now covered with forest matter. She smelled the hole. A few times she had found decomposed rabbits in the woods, but this hole did not smell of putrescence like that. It smelled of grass and dirt and leaves and wood and pine cones. Whoever dug the hole out, took the dirt with them. Why? Then she saw—next to the edge, on top of the branches, berries were laid out: overripe, rotting blackberries, blueberries, pieces of apple. Cut pieces of apple.
It was a trap!
A trap for a very large animal, an animal that could fall into the hole and break something, and not be able to get back out.
But what kind of animal would be this big in these parts of the country? She couldn’t think. A deer?
And it was then that she heard a noise behind her, and she was surprised at the noise, because it wasn’t just a howl or a hoot. It was a respiratory noise. A noise of someone, of something breathing in…and then slowly breathing out.
Someone big.
She turned around.
Twenty meters away from her at the edge of the clearing stood a large, dark brown bear on his four legs. His head was tilted to her, his small eyes were unblinking, intensely alert.
Tatiana froze. She had never seen a bear. She didn’t know bears lived in these woods. She couldn’t remember if they were carnivores, if they were peaceful, if you needed to make overtures or stand at attention, if you needed to offer them a piece of something, which they would come and eat out of your hand. She didn’t know. She thought any animal that was that wide, that hairy, that four-legged, and that watchful, could not be coming to eat out of her hand. Could a bear outrun her? A bear was not a tiger; could a bear even run? He looked so clumsy and immobile. And he was immobile. He was just standing flat-footed on all fours, his small head raised, his small eyes unblinking.
Tatiana smiled. She breathed though her open terrified mouth. Her heart was thundering. The bear breathed too, she could hear him. She didn’t want to do anything to scare him, do anything that might be perceived as threatening. She didn’t want to raise her hands, she didn’t want to step back—or step forward, certainly. She did the only thing she could think of, the only thing she ever did when she didn’t know how to make things better but when she wanted to calm, to comfort, to bring impossible things down to possible. She stood motionlessly and very slowly opened her hands, palms out, as if to say, it’s all right. Why such a fuss? Shh. Please.
Bear-baiting. In Shakespeare somewhere she had read about dogs being loosed on bears, on a stage? In a cage? They were loosed until one or other perished. How many dogs, a pack? How many bears, one? Here, there was one matted brown bear and one matted blonde Tatiana.
She glanced sideways at the trees nearby. They were pines, with no low branches. Did bears scale trees? Why hadn’t she read more about bears? Why did all her reading not once lead her to a bear? The pines were so useless! There wasn’t even one suitable for climbing.
And so they stood in the middle of the woods, just Tatiana and a hairy (carnivorous?) four-legged, flat-footed giant mammal. There was a small startling cluster of sound from behind her, a twig falling under the weight of a bird. The bear seemed to smell her well, because he took a slow step forward. Tatiana took a slow step back. She was between the bear and the trap. Could she long-jump over a three-meter-wide hole in the ground? She didn’t think so. Could the bear? She thought so.
“Easy, bear,” she said softly.
The bear breathed.
“Honey bear.”
Bear calmly breathing.
“Slow bear, hibernating bear, nice bear, turn right around and go away from me and from this hole that’s meant to trap you. You don’t want the trappers to come for you. They’ll kill you for sure. Go. Save your life. Go away from me.”
Slowly the bear moved toward her.
How fast could she run?
…The trappers to come for you…
Something echoed in her head. The trappers might come to check the trap for bear.
Tatiana made a choice. Lowering her palms, she turned away from the animal, held her breath, squatted and jumped down into the bear trap, as if she were hopping down from the cherry tree. It was about the same distance, two meters.
She fell on her side onto the prickly twigs. Falling from her bike while racing was worse. She was still on her side when she looked up to see the shadowy head of the bear leaning over the ditch to look down at her.
“No, no, don’t come in here with me,” said Tatiana. “You will never get out.”
The bear didn’t move.
Tatiana moved. She pushed off her right arm to get up. She pushed off what felt like a round metal plate. There was a releasing ping of a tempered steel coil spring and in the next irreversible half-second of time, her thought was trap, her instinct was up, arm flying upward to get away—flying right into the swooshing downward clasping heavy half-moon bracket. There was a savage blow to her forearm, a sickening snap of bone, a sickening shutting snap of a cast iron trap, and then searing, severing pain. One half second of time. Her piercing screams carried up to the fast running bear and echoed through the forest until she lost consciousness.
Tatiana didn’t know how long she had been out. When she awoke, the first sound out of her was a prolonged wail. The agony in her arm was not going away. She couldn’t hear the bear’s breathing for her intense, unending crying. Her arm must have been snapped in two by the closing bear trap. Fortunately for her, the trap was big enough for a paw, big enough to incapacitate and hold a large animal two to three meters long with paws alone probably forty centimeters. It was not meant to incapacitate a human female adolescent forearm, twenty-five centimeters from thin wrist to small elbow. Disoriented, swooning, dizzy, moaning from pain, Tatiana pulled her limp swollen forearm out of the trap, and fainted.
When she came to, it was black inside the hole and out. She wasn’t even sure she awoke. She was under a nightmarish haze of pain and had been dreaming of dull knives slicing into her arms, slowly carving her body to pieces, and she felt every nerve being severed, every blood vessel, every bone. Who was wielding that dull knife?
Awake, Tatiana realized the dream wasn’t a dream at al. She had been and was still in the black with the knives. Her eyes were open—rather, she thought her eyes were open—pain shredded her from her fingertips to her shoulder blades, shot into the jaw, into the throbbing eye, into her skull, and the blood pulsed under the cutting blade. She couldn’t even touch the sleeve over her forearm. She could not make a fist with her hand, could not lift her arm, could not bend it, could not move it. Tatiana had not had anything broken before, but she was certain nothing could hurt this much and not be badly broken. In the dark, she felt for blood, for bones. Tatiana licked her lips. She was thirsty. She wished she could see something, a moon, a star, the tips of the trees, even the bear’s gleaming eyes would have been better than the void of nothing.
Slowly she opened her parched mouth as she sat pressed against the earth, and her dry throat moved to mutely form the words she once could speak so well, words that Osip Mandelstam, the man who no longer existed, wrote. “You took away all the oceans and all the room. You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it. Where did it get you? Nowhere. You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.”
Here are my words in silence. Dear God. I don’t want to die alone in the woods, in the earth, like I’m already in the grave. Soon the leaves and the twigs and autumn will fall over me, soon the hunter will come and move his trap elsewhere, and throw fresh dirt on me, and I will be covered, I won’t even have to move.
I don’t want to die, cried Tatiana.
I don’t want to draw my last breath in a hole.
I haven’t lived, she whispered.
I barely even know who I am.
I have been much too young to see La Môle pass my way.
Please…don’t let me die before once letting me feel what it’s like to love.
Tatiana in her desperation clawed at the ditch, in the dark.
Oh God. I’ll do anything. I’ll bear anything. Just let me live.
Help me…Dasha, Pasha, Deda, Babushka, please, somebody, somebody help me…Lord of the earth, have mercy on me.
She fell into stuporous semi-consciousness, sitting up, her arm propped on her stomach, her head tilted to the side, the prayer of the heart at her lips, desperately in the deadfall.
Mononegavirales
On the morning of the fourth day in the woods, Saika and Marina found a narrow stream.
O joy.
Springing into the water, Marina drank. She put her whole face into the water and gulped to bursting. When she looked up, she saw Saika standing watching her with black eyes outlined by black shadows. Her face was in shadow though the air was sunny-bright and warm.
“Saika, look, fresh water. Come on, drink some. You’ll feel better.”
Saika shook her head. She was twitching.
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing.” She rubbed her eyes. “I have a terrible headache.”
“It’s the lack of food and water.”
“Oh, enough already. You’re not my mother.” Saika did not stand still for a moment.
After Marina took her time drinking and washing, the girls started to walk along the stream. Marina felt almost all right. She was not dry, and she was not fed, and she was not warm, and she was not found. But she felt hope walking along a rivulet. Who told her this? All the rivers flowed into the sea? Who said that to her?
What troubled Marina this morning was Saika. The girl was restlessly and slowly walking along the sloping banks, careful not to come too close to the stream. This was not the same Saika who had sat motionlessly for hours under boulders while waiting to trick Tatiana.
Out of the corner of her eye, Marina cautiously watched her, hoping whatever was bothering Saika would pass as the morning got warmer, brighter, and brought them closer to the lake.
Perhaps all hope was slightly premature. This was less a stream than a run-off from the rain. It drifted down the slope, but the slope was ending, and the run-off was pooling and puddling and ending, too. And Saika was pooling and puddling, slowing down so much that Marina, who had been wading in the stream holding her shoes had to frequently stop to wait for Saika to catch up.
Saika didn’t catch up. Done with walking, Saika stopped and stood leaning against a tree. Suddenly she sank to the ground, turning from side to side, moving her arms and legs and running her fingers along her ribs, her hips, up to her hair.
Marina climbed up the shallow bank. “What’s the matter?” Despite everything, Marina could not help but ask the question, could not help but feel a jitter of concern.
“I can’t walk. My head feels like it’s about to split apart.”
“The lake shouldn’t be too far. We’ll just keep walking in this direction. Come on. Get up.”
“Okay, let’s go,” Saika said, her voice weak. “Help me up. You lead, find the lake, find our boat. I’ll be right next to you. Give me your hand. Just…don’t leave me, Marina.”
“What are you talking about? Come on already, let’s go.”
“Give me your hand, Marina,” whispered Saika.
Marina stepped closer. “What’s wrong with you?”
Saika screamed. Her body rolled from hip to hip, contorting from joint to joint. Then it stopped. She lay still. Her eyes were open, and she was blinking, swallowing with difficulty. “My throat,” Saika hissed. “It’s gone numb. At first it hurt, then it felt like there was something stuck in it. Now I can’t feel it at all. I can’t swallow. My tongue is numb.” She spoke with difficulty. “My lips are numb. My face is going numb.” Her mouth was spasming.
“Oh, what’s happening?” Marina cried.
Saika was ashen. White foam formed around the edges of her lips. “The cave,” she whispered.
“What cave?” Marina gasped.
“The cave…I must have stayed in it too long…”
“What do you mean?”
“Can’t you see?”
“I can’t see. What’s wrong with you?”
“Mononegavirales,” mouthed Saika, and closed her eyes. “Vodoboyazn. Fear of the water. Rabies.”
“Rabies?” mouthed Marina in horror. Now she stepped away. Staggered away. Now she recoiled.
Saika tried to crawl to Marina. “I beg you,” she whispered hoarsely, “don’t leave me. Help me.” She stretched out her hand.
“Saika, oh my God, let’s get you home quick, get you to a doctor, don’t worry.”
Still crawling to Marina on her elbows, dragging her legs behind her, Saika opened her mouth. She looked like she were silently crying. “Oh, Marina. Don’t you know anything? Ask Tania about rabies. She’s around here somewhere.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Close.” Soundlessly she moved her mouth, in laughter? In a cry? In a rasp.
“No! You weren’t bitten. You said so yourself. You didn’t touch a bat, did you? Nothing flew in that cave. It’s something else. A little fever. We just have to get you home. We must go.” But Marina wasn’t coming anywhere near Saika, with a distressed and heavy aching watching the girl on her elbows creeping through the mire of the silt toward her. Marina backed a step away, then another step.
“Come near me, Marina,” Saika said, stretching out her hand. “Come near me. Let me…”
Crying out, Marina tripped over her feet and fell. On her haunches, she tried to move away from Saika. Her legs had gone numb from terror. She couldn’t breathe, she was suffocating.
“I don’t want to be alone,” Saika aspirated. “Come here, Marina. Let me touch you…” She opened her mouth, baring her teeth.
A crazed fear was in Saika’s eyes. White foam and blood were dripping out of her mouth onto the ground. Saika was hissing and slithering closer.
Marina started to scream. And scream and scream.
Bearing Up
When Tatiana opened her eyes, it was morning, the birds were singing, the sky peeked azure through the tall pines, and the arm was throbbing.
She yelled for help but stopped quickly. She didn’t want to expend her precious energy on useless acts. To get out from the hole was everything. What if the trappers were a week in coming? She couldn’t wait. Once she was out, she would be better off than she had been; the sun was out. The sun gave her hope. Not merely because it was shining, but because with it, she saw all else. Other things became possible. She could make a fire, she could dry, she could get warm. To get out was first. The bear hole had tree roots sticking out from its sides. Tatiana grabbed hold of a root with one hand and pulled herself up by just her left arm. It was agonizing. The important thing was not to jolt her broken arm, because sharp pain would bring her unconsciousness, and she would fall back to the bottom, and who knew, maybe break something else, like her neck. Tatiana rested, her face against the moist dirt. The good arm was getting tired, threaded through the root. Her legs were resting on roots below her. She grabbed another root a little higher up and moved another quarter-meter. Another root, another quarter-meter. She rested again, touching the rock jutting out of the earth that was under her cheek. Then she lifted her face and stared at the rock. Rather, at the moist, glutinous, vascular green substance that covered the rock. Ah, she breathed in happiness. Moss!
She rubbed her cheek against it, she kissed it! She ripped off bits of it with her mouth and ate it. Moss!
Moss only grew on rocks close to the water.
She managed another root and another quarter-meter—but she couldn’t hold on. The root gave way, the good arm gave way, and she fell back down into the twigs, onto the steel trap, to the bottom.
Time went by. Went by, went by.
Tatiana regained consciousness and tried again, much slower. She took her time because she had the time. Failure, falling back again was not an option. If she fell again, she would not get up. The sun was shining up above, a pale obelisk in the sky.
It was morning, perhaps ten or eleven. She found south, she found north and west. Perhaps she might find the lake after all. There was only one problem—Tatiana had nothing left for walking. The clearing, with the sun unobstructed by the damned pines, would have to be good enough.
The first thing she did after she crawled out was tie up her arm using the laces from her shoes and two sturdy short branches for a splint. She fainted only once, and finished tying it up while on her back on the grass. After stumbling up, she awkwardly collected some damp twigs and branches using only her left arm, and catching the sun with her magnifying glass like a concentrated hot beam, she managed to set some dry leaves on fire. It took her several attempts, but she did finally light a small twig with the burning leaves, and once she did, the rest of the twigs were blazing in a few minutes. She sat in the warmth, she couldn’t move. On her good side she lay down in front of the fire and closed her eyes.
No sooner did she lie down than Tatiana heard screams—of terror worse than falling into a bear trap. But she wasn’t getting up now that she found an open space with sunlight and built a fire. Going close to the woods? No—not a meter, not a centimeter.
But what to do? The screams wouldn’t cease.
Reluctantly Tatiana struggled up and limped over to the edge of the clearing. Who was that screaming? Was it Marina? But Marina was home in bed under warm covers, wasn’t she?
“God, help me! Help me!” a voice was shrieking. It sounded a lot like Marina.
Tatiana stood, supported by a tree. Finally she called out, “Marina?” She was hoarse; she called out again, and the voice stopped shrieking suddenly, and was mute. “Marina?” Tatiana said again, softly. There was a sobbing gasp, there were crunching, running, galloping footsteps through the woods. There was no more calling, just insane fear and relief in the whimpers and footsteps of another person.
A shape appeared in the trees, a shape that looked like Marina, except this haunted face, this wet, shaking body, black with mud, was not—no, it was Marina.
When Marina saw Tatiana standing at the edge of the forest, leaning against a tree, she completely lost control. She became so overwrought, Tatiana thought Marina was going to hurl onto her. She had to protect herself against a filthy wretch who dropped to the ground, sobbing. Marina stretched out her arms to Tatiana, who, with her body turned sideways to protect her arm, made no move toward her cousin.
“Oh, it’s you,” Tatiana said. “I’m surprised you’re still here.”
“Oh, Tania!” Marina sobbed cravenly. “Oh, Tania. I’m so sorry. But you have no idea what happened to me.”
“And more to the point, I don’t care,” Tatiana said, holding her broken arm to her chest. She turned and walked back to the fire.
Marina hobbled close behind. “We’re not far enough, Tanechka,” she whispered. “We can’t stay here. We have to get away.”
“Get away from what?”
“From her,” Marina whispered, flinching and glancing around. “Please, we have to run as fast as we can.”
Calmly and slowly Tatiana sat down in front of the fire, threw some more branches on, some moss, some old berries. She wanted the smoke to be as black and acrid as possible, and to rise to the sky, and to emit a smell that could be detected from kilometers away. “I’m not moving from this spot,” she said. “You can go though. Why don’t you run along? But quick, Marina. Quick.” She paused. “Like before.”
“Tania! Please! I’m sorry. Tania, God! I know you’re upset. I know you’re furious. You have every right to be. But right now, please, we have to get away. She is going to find us, she’s going to come after us.”
“Let her come.” Tatiana didn’t even turn her head to the woods.
“She’s got rabies, Tania…” Marina whispered with revulsion.
Tatiana glanced at Marina, slightly less calmly. “Ah,” was all she said.
Marina jumped up. “Well? Are you coming or aren’t you?”
“I guess, the answer would have to be,” said Tatiana, “aren’t I.”
“Tania!”
“Stop,” Tatiana said, her face only to the fire. She wasn’t looking at Marina. “Stop. Sit down, or go away. Run or sit, but stop this nonsense. Stop your carrying on and take one look at me. Can you even see what’s happened to me?”
“We found a stream, Tanechka,” Marina whispered. “We found a stream, not too far in the woods. It will lead us to the lake, just like you said.”
“I said that?” Tatiana shrugged. “I’m not going into the woods again. And isn’t she by the stream?” She lifted her face to her cousin. The girls stared at each other. “I’m not going back into those woods, Marina,” whispered Tatiana.
Marina started retching, retching and crying. “I’m sorry, Tania. It was supposed to be a joke. You were supposed to come and look for us.”
“I was, was I? Well, I wish someone had told me what it was exactly I was supposed to do.”
Babbling, rambling, shaking, Marina told Tatiana everything. She kept nothing hidden. She told of her own complicity and of her own realizations, and of Sabir and Murak, and of the days in the woods and of the crawling infected thing trying to get to her.
A slightly trembling but a preternaturally calm Tatiana pronounced, “Well, well,” at the end of Marina’s story, and then said nothing.
“Do you see why we have to run?”
“No.” Tatiana sighed. “Don’t worry about Saika anymore. Worry only about being found yourself.”
“I have been found!” Marina cried. “But we’re hardly going to get out of the woods sitting by the fire!”
“Go then,” said Tatiana. “You’ve been walking three days in the woods, you haven’t found a rock to help you. I’ve been walking three days in the woods. Where did it get me? But now we have a fire, and the smoke is rising over the pines. If somebody is looking for us, this will be what they’ll be looking for. If they’re not, well, then…I’m inclined to sit and wait. I don’t have the strength I had at the beginning of this. But please, don’t let me stop you. By all means”—Tatiana glared at Marina—“do what you like—as always.”
As if Marina could move a meter from Tatiana. “Why do you think she won’t be coming here?” she said, panting.
“Spinal cord paralysis,” said Tatiana. “She might want to. She just won’t be able to.”
“Is it…” Marina paused, “ever curable?”
“No.”
“So what’s going to happen to her now?”
“Saika,” said Tatiana, “is going to die in the woods. She’s probably dead already. Like we still might be.”
Marina lay down in front of Tatiana, in front of the fire. “I’m not alone anymore,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “I don’t care what happens now. I’m not alone.”
They remained close together. Tatiana did not touch her.
“You’re very upset with me?” Marina whispered.
“More than I have the ability to discuss with you.”
“I’m sorry.” But Marina’s eyes were closing. “What time is it?”
Tatiana looked up at the sky. “One maybe. One thirty.” Oh, that pale yellow sun. She wanted a life where the sun beat down on her three hundred days a year, not the miserly sixty-five in this northern neck of the woods. When she looked back down at her cousin, Marina was asleep.
She slept for forty-five minutes, while Tatiana sat awake under the sunshine and fed the fire and watched Marina slumber as if she were home in a comfortable bed.
Just as early evening was covering the land, she heard voices from the woods calling her name. “Tatiana…Tatiana…!” Not one voice, but a chorus of voices. Male, female, young, old.
She struggled to her feet. Marina woke up, jumped up.
“Taaaaaania…Taaaaaania…”
“Oh my God!” Marina cried. “You were right! They found you!”
Tatiana didn’t have the strength to run, to shout, and Marina—who had the strength—didn’t. She took Tatiana’s good hand, ignoring Tatiana’s flinching.
“Tanechka, I beg you,” she whispered in a panic. “Please don’t tell them. Please. It was just a joke gone horribly wrong. I learned my lesson. I almost died, too. I’ll never do it again. But please don’t tell them.”
“Don’t worry. It’s just between you and me, Cousin Marina,” Tatiana said without emotion, pulling her hand away. “It’ll be our little secret.”
Marina ran then, yelling. “Help! Here! Here! Help!”
Dasha came running through the clearing, crying, yelling Tatiana’s name. Pasha was next to her, Babushka behind her, then Deda, and then Mama! That was surprising. Mama! Wailing, Oh, Tania, Tania.
Uncle Boris came too, for Marina, his only child. He looked very upset. “Who do we yell at around here?” he said, holding Marina to him. “Who is responsible for this?”
But Tatiana’s family was so shocked at the state of their baby that they were not in the mood to be yelling at anyone. The broken arm horrified them. When Tatiana told them she had jumped into a bear trap, by the emotional reaction of her family, you’d think they had all jumped in with her.
“You did what?” said Marina with surprise.
Pasha looked away from Tatiana and toward Marina. “What do you mean, you did what?” he said suspiciously. “Where the hell were you that you don’t know this?”
Dasha, too, stared unhappily at Marina, almost if they could tell something unholy went down that Tatiana wasn’t sharing.
“Why would you do such a stupid thing as jump into a bear trap?” asked Mama.
“To save myself from the bear,” quietly replied Tatiana.
Mama almost fainted.
Deda said, enough talking, all of you; she is in no state to be talking. He tried to pry Tatiana from their clutching arms. But they wouldn’t let go of her. He gave her a flask filled with water. She drank, she swooned. Dasha held the flask to her mouth, and Tatiana drank in large gulps with the water running down her chin and onto her shirt. Deda asked if she wanted some bread; he’d brought bread. She took a grateful bite. Did she want some tea? He’d brought a Thermos of hot tea. Did she want some canned ham? He took out a small can and a can opener. “Canned ham?” Her entire family groaned with distaste, even Tatiana, who shook her head. The very idea of canned ham! Deda put the canned ham away. She didn’t want anything. She had everything.
The lake was two kilometers due north. Deda had a good compass and they had cleared a trail on which Uncle Boris carried Tatiana. As they walked, Uncle Boris told the girls what had happened.
The morning after they didn’t return, he telegraphed Luga and Leningrad to notify the Metanovs. The family had been looking for the girls for days now, in two boats, rowing across the lake early in the morning and staying till night. They had found Tatiana’s twigs, they had found Tatiana’s etchings in the trees. But they simply could not find the girls. It was the fire that finally did it.
Deda said, “As soon as we woke up this morning and it was sunny, I told everyone we would find you, because I knew with the sun being out, you would make a fire.” The girls were found almost thirteen kilometers southwest from their boat.
Finally someone remembered to ask about Saika. Marina said nothing, just shook her head. Tatiana said, “She and Marina became separated from me.” She paused. “We got very lost. Right, Marina?”
“Yes, Tania.” She lowered her gaze.
Deda said, “If Saika is still in the woods, we should go look for her.”
“No!” Marina cried. “She went into a cave at night and got rabies.”
“She went into a cave at night?” Deda repeated; even he sounded shocked. “Who in their right mind goes into a cave at night?”
Tatiana spoke slowly, while carried by Uncle Boris. “It was warmer for her, she felt at home there, she didn’t like being out in the open. She went in, scaring the bats, who flew away. She didn’t hear any flapping and thought it was safe. She forgot, or maybe she never knew, maybe she didn’t read quite enough, that the rabies virus, in small confined, heavily infested areas also travels by saliva particles in the air. It obviously found her.”
“What a nightmare,” Deda said. “What are her parents going to think? Well, none of our business. As I always say: know your business and stick to it. What is your father going to think? That’s our business. He’s coming back next week.” He tutted. “We have to get you both back to Leningrad. Tania, you need to go to the hospital immediately.”
“I’m fine, Deda.” She smiled. I’m fine now.
“You didn’t go into a cave, did you, Tania?”
“I didn’t go into a cave, darling Deda.”
He kissed her head while Uncle Boris carried her. “I know your papa will bring you something nice back from Poland when he returns,” he whispered. “It’ll make you feel better, Tanechka.”
“I feel all right already.”
They got the girls into the boat, and Pasha got behind the oars, and said, with unsuppressed glee, “I am rowing across Lake Ilmen. Hee-hee, Tanechka. So really, I win.”
Alexander laughed. Reaching up, he stroked Tatiana’s face, then pulled her down to him and kissed her. “You say it like a joke, little Tanechka, but I know it’s what rankles you most about the whole sorry episode.”
Lightly Tatiana smiled. “Only because he was so annoying. I said to him, that’s the only way you ever beat me, Pasha, when my arm is literally broken.”
“Of course you did. And the Kantorovs?”
“When they found out Saika got rabies, they left without a word to anyone, without saying good-bye. They simply packed up and were gone. When I came back to Luga a few weeks later, they had already gone. Perhaps they looked for her. I don’t know.”
Alexander was thoughtful, contemplating the desert, the sky, the stars, the story. “If Anthony heard one word from your Lake Ilmen tale he would carry away from it two things. One: do not speak of your mysteries to your enemies. And two: have faith and stay alive long enough for someone to find you.”
Tatiana said quietly, “My own husband learned the latter well.”
“As you know, I need my mystic guide for both,” he said, squeezing her and getting off her lap. He stretched his big long body and pulled out his cigarettes. Getting up and stretching herself, Tatiana picked up his Zippo lighter and flicked it on for him. Bending to inhale, he cupped her hand, as she looked up at him, and he looked down at her.
They came back to bed and took off their clothes. She pleaded with him not to hold himself up, so she could feel his whole body, all his bones, all his wounds and the marks of his life on her, his big arms, his smooth chest, the ravages of war, all of him on top of her.
“Tania,” Alexander said when he was in her arms. This was their unimagined whisper. “I have to go to Vietnam to find him. Anthony won’t come out of it by himself. Like I couldn’t. Don’t you feel it?”
She said nothing.
“Something’s happened to him. You know it. I know it.”
She said nothing.
“This is slow death for me.” Glancing down at her, he said with a pained shrug, “Yes. I know. You did it. I let you go in Morozovo because I believed that you could bear anything. And I was right. But I can’t bear this. I’m not as strong as you. One way or another”—a strangled breath—“I have to bring him back.”
She said nothing.
“I know it’s Vietnam. I know it’s not a weekend in Yuma. I promised you I’d never go into active combat again. But I’ll come back.”
She said nothing.
“I have three other children. I’ll come back,” Alexander said. He had barely any voice left to speak the rest. “We can’t leave our boy in the woods, Tania,” he said. “Look at what’s been happening to us. We can’t continue living.”
“Shura, I don’t want you to go,” she whispered.
“I know. Not even for our son?”
“I don’t want you to go,” she repeated. “That’s all I feel.” She wanted to say something else—and didn’t. If she told him of her unspeakable fears, it wouldn’t be free will. She pulled him close. But he was already as close as he could be. Two metal bowls fitted into one another.
“Ordo amoris, Alexander.”
“Ordo amoris, Tatiana.”