Wolfhound Century: Radiant State Part 3

'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 ma.s.s 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 sh.e.l.ls. 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 gra.s.s 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 gra.s.s, 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 eggsh.e.l.ls, 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.

2.

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 agoa whizz of hot sh.e.l.l casing, a s.h.i.+v wouldn't do it neaterrises 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 overbr.i.m.m.i.n.g like a cup.

The path down to the lake pa.s.ses 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 gra.s.s 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 sh.o.r.e. 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 pa.s.ses 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 sh.o.r.e of the lake and pa.s.sed from time to time through Yamelei. The woods near the village are scarred by tank tracks, shallow sh.e.l.l 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 sh.e.l.lfire 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 thingsall that is not him but other stuff, trees and not treesstop moving also, and wait, and watch the dead man watching them, waiting.

I am the centre then.

I see that.

That I understand.

Yeva Cornelius pa.s.ses 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 kins.h.i.+p.

Leonid Tarasenko does what the dead don't do. He starts to follow.

3.

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 makes.h.i.+ft 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 c.o.c.k 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 s.h.i.+vering and taking tiny random jumps. Her heart is busy in her chest. She breathes out, emptying her lungscalm, calmand 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.

4.

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 gra.s.s, 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 b.r.e.a.s.t.s; 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 sh.o.r.e. The oars are still s.h.i.+pped 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 gra.s.s to build such a place, a hemispherical glazed dome of white steel ribwork, an upturned gla.s.s bowl twenty feet high on the bed of the lake? The water that presses against the gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s is the dim movement of water vegetation and shadowy water creatures. Obscure larvae and gastropods. m.u.f.fled fishes. Over the course of the years the lake has rained a gentle silt upon the outside of the chamber, staining the gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s 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.

Child is gone.

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 gra.s.s.

Galina screams again.

'Yeva! Yeva!'

The dead soldier is out of the high gra.s.s and coming up the path, coming towards her with fixed and needy dead black eyes, hand stretched out for companions.h.i.+p.

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.

5.

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 n.o.body in the village could read. Kamilova bought it from him for a couple of kopeks.