In early summer, the herders drove the deer closer to the village, so the animals could graze on mosses only thirty kilometers from home instead of three hundred. All the same, to reach them, Ksyusha’s family had to ride on horses for hours through plains and mountain passes. When she was little, her parents tied her to the saddle with a rope around her waist, and every time she nodded off on her mare’s wide back, her father yelled her name to startle her awake. The sun moved above them as they repeated that routine. At ten years old, she graduated to holding her own reins. The horses aged, their paces slowed, but the tundra kept the same shrill degree of emptiness.
Ksyusha dreaded those journeys. Her parents always ended them by fighting as they wandered the plains looking for signs of the herd. They would shout at each other about her father’s drinking, her grandparents’ health, their narrow wishes for her and her brother’s careers, the weak market for venison, the deer’s feeble calving and ragged pelts, the politicians who were killing the herding industry by refusing to subsidize it. During the rest of the summer her parents managed to keep their marriage together, as her father loaded the family’s bags on their animals to move camp each morning and her mother set aside the best cuts of meat for him each night, but the long days they took to start and end the season only got worse every year.
At last, the summer before university, she told them she could not go out to the tundra with them again. Too much required reading to get through before school started, she said. Maybe because she had never refused before, they actually agreed to leave her home, and she was grateful, and then she was amazed, because that summer was her last one spent unsupervised. It became the season of Ruslan.
But now, in Petropavlovsk three years later, she thought of what she had missed in the tundra that last season. She thought of what she had seen out there all the years before.
The blue-lit black of nights. The limitless dry yellow of days. For all that she loathed about those summers, setting up camp in the rain and pretending not to hear insults spoken in Even and growing sick from the smell of singed fur, they had become some of the most vivid times of her life. The repetition of them: her father’s arrival back in the village, their trip out together, the way when they finally got there that Chegga was folded into the men’s shift schedule to watch the animals and Ksyusha carried water as part of their grandmother’s kitchen crew, the ground the reindeer ate clean overnight, the early-morning packing of tents and bags that followed, and the daily moving of camp, on horseback, again, making their way along the thousand-kilometer loop of trails that took the herd a year to cover. The sameness of each day, each year, acted like the endless reopening of a cut, scarring those summers into her memory.
While the rest of the family slept in separate tents, Ksyusha’s grandmother kept two spots for Ksyusha and Chegga in the yurt where the women did the cooking. After the evening meal, their grandmother banked the fire, spread the horses’ blankets around its coals, and left the siblings to rest in the sudden quiet. The sun didn’t set until almost midnight but the yurt would already be dim with smoke inside. Ksyusha and her brother lay there smelling the day’s sweat with fresh crushed grass trapped underneath.
One time Ksyusha woke up in the middle of the night, not knowing why. The smoke hole at the top of the yurt was filled by the moon. A meter away, her brother, still a chubby schoolboy, was breathing.
The hearth’s coals popped. She rolled onto her side to look. The coals were black, but still somehow crackling; she watched without understanding. Crackles getting louder. Only after a minute did she grasp that the pops weren’t from the fire at all—the reindeer were passing outside the yurt. The men had taken the herd, for some reason, right through camp. The noise that woke her was the motion of eight thousand delicate hooves stepping just beyond the canvas wall.
Why return to these childish images? She had other things to think about these days. Course work, exams, the banking internship her brother’s girlfriend promised her next summer, the phone calls she owed the people who were waiting at home. Ruslan, if she could bear it—or if she couldn’t, then Chander, whose arms were around her. He pulled her close so her head rested on his shoulder. His lips brushed her hair.
Maybe it was because she was working hard at dance practices. Afterward came that same old soreness from the days once spent lugging wood, tending fires, building and taking down the yurt. Or maybe it was because she was around native people again; she hadn’t been with so many since she was still living in Esso. Or maybe it was the troupe’s herders’ dance. Chander did look foolish holding his lasso. A tool like that belonged to her father and grandfather.
She remembered her family, their animals, lessons, and chores. The empty, rolling earth. Maybe it was that her childhood, seen from this distance, seemed simple. And that as much as she now loved these men’s mouths on her, some part of her wished she could go back.
Ksyusha was idling around on her guitar, avoiding schoolwork, when Alisa came home. It was Thursday—no practice. Her cousin’s face was red from the cold outside. “Scoot over,” Alisa said, and Ksyusha made room on the futon. They sat with their knees touching.
Alisa’s leg was chilly. Winter was here. Snow had been falling for a week straight, and the city beyond their apartment windows was heaped in white. The muted television showed the Golosovskaya girls’ school portraits before their faces were replaced by a graph of the falling price of oil.
“Where do you suppose they are?” Alisa asked.
Ksyusha plucked a couple strings. “Who?”
“Those sisters. Do you think they’re alive? Somewhere?”
To her cousin, Ksyusha did not have to pretend away danger. “No.”
“Sometimes I imagine they could be in the next apartment over. You don’t think they’ll be found?”
“Not alive. I hope not.” The missing girls were not like Lilia, old enough to run away. “Whatever happened to them, I hope it ended quickly, and they didn’t have to suffer.”
The news changed again to a weather report: continued blizzards. Stuffed cabbage rolls were heating in the oven. The smells of pork and onion filled their apartment. “Everything with you normal?” Alisa asked.
“Yes,” Ksyusha said automatically. Once that answer came out, it didn’t sound like enough, so she said it again. “Yes.”
“Because you seem different.”
“I’m not.” Alisa laughed at the abruptness of that, and Ksyusha shifted her tingling fingertips. “How do I seem different?”
“You’re nervous. I thought maybe Ruslan did something wrong.”
Ksyusha glanced up from the neck of the guitar. “No.”
“Okay.”
“He wouldn’t.”
Alisa’s mouth twisted. “Great.” On cue, Ksyusha’s phone vibrated underneath them. Alisa dug the phone out, looked at the screen, and handed it over.
“Hi,” Ksyusha said. Her cousin stood up, off to their bedroom to change her clothes. “Nothing. I miss you.” Ksyusha strummed a G-major chord for Ruslan. “Hear that? I’m here. I’m good.”
In many ways, Ksyusha had improved as a girlfriend since joining the troupe. She was more patient, supportive, responsive. The worse she was in private, letting Chander trail his lips down her neck, the better she knew Ruslan to be. He had taken care of her all this time. So she texted him more, and asked for less, and when on the phone he got frustrated, she no longer tried to explain herself. She only soothed him until he settled down.