I don’t know if he made this up to fool me, or if he believed himself. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to my mind. But after that dance, I heard the woman was able to conceive.
It seems like wherever it goes, my mind always comes back to dead children. That Tungus girl’s. And Ping’s. And mine.
Mine was born dead after a three-day labour. It was the worst pain I’ve ever known. In the chaos that had been brought to the city, there was not a doctor to be had.
They took him away and buried him somewhere. We never mentioned it again. I was sixteen. I was never close to a man after that, although I think I could have been. It just wasn’t how things were.
*
My looping route towards the highway took me through a village with an old church in it. The houses around were all rotted and overgrown, but the church was solid enough, with a big wooden cupola and a bell still hanging in it.
The door opened and the air inside had a hint of incense and new whitewash.
Someone called up from the cellarage in Russian. I was too amazed to recall any words of it beyond bog, which, crazy as it seems, is what they call god. Then a man clumped up the stairs with an armful of books. He looked taken aback to see me.
I couldn’t have been more surprised to find a chuchunaa, and, come to think of it, he resembled one a little, being tall and having a long white beard.
We didn’t have enough words in common to say much to each other, but we were able to talk in a kind of dumbshow.
He was the priest of the village, and he had a helper, a kind of junior priest called Yuri. Yuri had a beard too, but his was jet black, and he smelled strongly of onions. I’d put his age at fifty and the priest’s at seventy-five.
*
How they’d managed to survive,st the two of them, with Boathwaite on one side and the Tungus on the other, and keep the church in good repair, I don’t know. I guess they’d just clung on there like a pair of limpets.
They lived in a little house in a yard alongside the church. I put my horse in an empty stall in their barn and they fed me.
We had a kind of soup of salted cabbage and some sausage, and I marked out my route to them on the table top.
They rolled their eyes when I showed them where I was going.
It was too bad that we couldn’t say more. I had so many questions.
After dinner, they took me down into the cellarage and showed me all the books they had squirrelled away down there. The old priest kept giving me things to hold, talking about them, and then looking at me closely as if to check I’d understood. Of course, I had no idea, but whatever it was he was talking about, he was proud of it.
Yuri could see I was foxed, and he kept trying to distract him, but the old priest wouldn’t be told. ‘Here it is,’ he seemed to saying, ‘I’ve got it all squared away. Here are my jams, here are my jellies,’ as he dusted off another book, or roll of papers.
After about an hour, they locked up the church and we went back to the house. Yuri boiled up some kind of herb tea.
We couldn’t say anything to each other, but sitting among them felt like the first happiness I’d known for so long. I wished I had something to give them in return. Then it struck me that I did have some words in their language.
I took the memory stone out of my pack, set it on the table between us, and showed them the girl from Polyn. They weren’t happy until they’d seen it half a dozen times.
They loved it. The old priest most of all, slapping the other on the back each time they watched it. Lyudi budushchevo! he laughed, as though it was the best joke in the world.
I was pleased to see him so lively, then a terrible feeling came over me. I understood that he’d taken it as a picture of the present. They thought that was an image of the place as it was today. If I hadn’t seen where it came from, I would have formed the same idea.
Here they were in their outpost, guarding their trove of holy books, waiting for news of the outside world, and it seemed that I’d brought them good tidings.
The misunderstanding made me heavy-hearted. I said to them, ‘You’ve got the wrong idea. This is a picture of the past. This girl is dead. The city looks nothing like this. I’ve been there.’
But the words I was saying were just so much noise to them. They believed what they wanted to. I was the harbinger of something good. Any day now, people would begin to drift back. There would be damp beds airing out in the street. Shovels would turn over the soil in long-neglected gardens. The silent bell in the cupola would call a congregation to service, and someone would pin a medal on the old priest’s chest for taking such care of his archive.
They made me a bed on a ledge above their tiled stove. I told them I’d be happier on the floor but they insisted. It was too warm and soft for me to sleep well up there, and I was troublelyn. They t I’d deceived them. Seeing what false hope had done to them lowered my spirits.
The next morning they were just as cheery. They gave me buckwheat groats for breakfast and asked to watch the memory stone again.
I gave the stone to the priest and told him he could keep it. He tried to press an old book on me in return, but I refused.
The two of them walked me to the edge of their empty village and kissed me three times goodbye.
I looked back half a dozen times and they were still there, watching me go.
*
Spring was on the land. There was no snow to be seen anywhere. One hot noontime, I decided to bathe. I tethered the horse and stripped at the edge of a stream. My feet were so pale they looked bluish.
Although the river was shallow, it was swollen and faster than it looked. I almost took a tumble as I stepped in. I braced my legs against a rock as the current eddied around my knees, then squatted down to let the water wash all over me. The cold made my head ring.
After I’d got myself clean, I laundered my clothes on a rock and then left them to dry in the sun.
I lay on the bank soaking up the heat like a lizard, fighting the urge to drift off, but the sound of the river lulled me to sleep. I must have slept for an hour or more, because I woke up groggy, with my vision all bleached out from the sunshine.
It took me a moment or two to come to my senses: there’s the horse, munching green shoots off a tree, there’s my damp clothes, here’s me, naked, with dried mud up to my ankles that looks like a pair of socks.
And suddenly, over the sound of the river running, I heard a buzz, very, very faint, but growing stronger. Up in the eastern part of the sky, maybe a quarter of a mile up, was the silver glint of a plane.
I stood there naked, shouting myself hoarse and waving my clothes as she passed overhead.
Judging from the angle of her flight, it seemed like she’d come out of the Far North, maybe from Alaska.
By the time I thought to fire my gun, the plane was in the southwest part of the sky.
I loosed off four or five signal shots, but she gave no sign of hearing me. The bullets would have been barely more than faint pops above the sound of the engine.
The plane slipped away into the deep blue of the sky like a tiny silver fish. But as she vanished over the trees behind me, I was certain I knew where she was headed.
3
IT TOOK ME TWO days to reach the base. I rode like a madwoman. I don’t recall that I ate at all. Sometimes I’d dismount and walk alongside the horse to let her rest. All that time, I could hear my heart banging in my chest with hope.
Seeing that plane the first time at the lake, I’d never known hope like it. I was a castaway. The plane was a sail, luffing and snapping to a new course as it came to find me. I would walk on its warm deck with my pretty feet. There was silk and cloves in its hold, coconuts, oranges. Well, I guess it brought on the hooey in me. There’s a little in there. I am a woman.