Every lane or alley they came to, he and Nadya marched down, a parade through the city’s forgotten streets. The back sides of buildings blossomed with cracks in the masonry and sprouted black growths like ugly flowers. It was as if each building were actually two, one face clean and one filthy. The stray dogs stuck to the filthy side of things. Leonid had always assumed that dogs just liked trash for trash’s sake, but now he suspected it was privacy they craved. He and Nadya had come across not one other person in all the alleys.
Back on one of the main streets, they passed a woman leading a boy, only five or six years old, by the hand. The woman seemed too young to be the mother, but too old to be a sibling. Leonid’s own family had consisted of he and his brother, separated in age only by minutes, and he found it hard to imagine two people so far apart in age being brother and sister. He decided to think of the woman as the mother.
The child pointed at Leonid’s feet and started to say something but the mother hushed him. The boy’s own shoes were worn and obviously repaired in places. Leonid paused, raised one foot, and wiggled his toes. The boy giggled. The mother glowered, inspecting Leonid’s face, as if trying to see around the sunglasses to the person behind the lenses. For a moment she seemed to recognize Leonid, but that expression crumpled back into pinched lips and slitted eyes. She pulled the boy along by his hand.
“There you are!” Ignatius’s voice came from behind them.
She crossed the street, leading a gray dog behind her on a leash that looked to be made from torn and knotted bedsheets. Every few steps the dog would stop, straining against the leash until Ignatius’s persistent tugging got it moving again. Leonid could tell from far away that it was an old dog, the pale color of its fur once something more vibrant. Its eyes drooped and its jowls sagged from a boxy snout.
Ignatius stopped and pulled the dog forward into the space before Nadya and Leonid.
“Look what I found,” said Ignatius.
“Are you showing us the leash or the dog?” asked Leonid.
“The dog, of course. The first dog I came across after I found the leash was white.”
“Did you come across another dog, then?” said Nadya. “Because this one is gray.”
Leonid leaned down and held the back of his hand to the dog’s nose to sniff. It huffed in a few snotty-sounding breaths and then licked his hand, leaving a sticky strand of mucus when it pulled away. Leonid scratched the dog’s cheek, and the dog nuzzled against his hand.
“She’s sweet, at least,” said Leonid.
“He,” said Ignatius.
“How would you know that?” asked Nadya.
“Don’t be crude.”
The dog hacked. The dark of its eyes was filmed over with white. When it licked its lips—a motion that seemed slowed down, the tongue some sort of limping mollusk—only a few blackened teeth could be seen still stubbornly rooted in discolored gums.
“This dog must be near dead,” said Leonid.
“Isn’t that a good thing?” asked Ignatius. “Don’t we want a dog that’s going to die soon, anyway?”
“A greater concern,” said Nadya, “is that this dog looks nothing like Kasha.”
“Of course he does.”
“For one, Kasha is female.”
“Who will be inspecting its genitals?”
“You did, apparently.”
“It rolled on its back!”
“And he would never do that at Star City? But gender aside, he’s the wrong color. He’s too large by a considerable margin. His face has the wrong shape. His hair is short and stiff, and his tail does not curl the same way.”
Ignatius looked down at the dog, appraising it. It had lain down, its flesh flowing out across the ground as if the dog were melting.
“I don’t see the big difference,” said Ignatius.
“I assume you didn’t have pets as a child,” said Leonid.
“There was a war when I grew up,” she snapped. “If we had an animal we ate it.”
The dog raised its head like a creaky, rusted machine.
Leonid said, “I didn’t mean…”
“You’re right,” said Ignatius. “This fellow looks nothing like Kasha.”
She bent down and loosened the noose of the collar she had fashioned at the end of her makeshift leash, slipping the loop over the head of the dog. He grunted.
“Go on,” said Ignatius, shoving the dog on the rump.
The dog rocked in place, like a heap of the gelatinous, rehydrated food they made cosmonauts eat. Otherwise, the dog did not move at all. Ignatius sniffed the air.
“Is that smell you or the dog?” she asked. “And where are your shoes, Leonid?”
“They didn’t suit me.”
Ignatius consulted her watch. It looked out of place on her wrist, clashing with the drab colors of her costume.
“The train leaves in ninety minutes,” she said. “I suggest we head back to the hotel so you can bathe before we depart. Otherwise they’ll make us ride with the cargo.”
Leonid glanced around as they walked, hoping to catch a white flash of fur in one of the lanes between buildings. But nothing in Georgiu-Dezh was white enough, not even the distant sobor walls, not even with the sun glaring right against them.
Bohdan, Ukraine—1950
The small tract of land planted with the season’s vegetables made it all the way through spring without showing a single sprig. The deep brown, almost black dirt of the valley had dried out to pale gray. Even the fir trees on the hillsides were losing their needles, layering the whole woods with a brittle, brown carpet. The two Leonids used to run barefoot through the forest, but now one wrong step and a needle would pierce the thin skin on the sides of their feet. What needles remained on the trees were clumped together and few, just a reminder of how the forest had once looked. The straight black trunks rose to an explosion of bare branches.
The Leonids sat on the roof of Grandmother’s cottage and looked for images in the branches’ tangled shapes. The younger Leonid saw fantastical things, many-spired castles and airplanes with a dozen wings and animals that could not possibly exist. The older Leonid mainly saw hands.
“Do you know what the branches remind me of most of all?” asked the younger Leonid.
“What?” asked the older.
“It’s the shape of hunger. Whenever I get very hungry, when we haven’t eaten much in a few days, I feel that my stomach looks tangled inside.”
The older Leonid’s stomach offered a faint growl at the mention of eating. He could not usually see the same things his brother saw in the trees, or in the shape of the stars at night, but hunger he understood, and it did feel very much like a ball of sticks poking at his insides.
“We’ll have something to eat soon enough,” said the older Leonid.
This is what Grandmother had told them days ago. To her credit, she had not specified how soon soon would be.
From the direction opposite the forest, the sound of voices carried from the center of the village. The Leonids crept to the peak of the roof and looked. Through the now-bare trees, they could see a dozen villagers clustered together, some of them with sacks in their hands or slung over their backs.
The older Leonid had never realized how close Grandmother’s cottage was to the rest of the village. The slope of the hill and the trees had always hidden each location from view of the other. The path that led to the village twisted far to the left and then back, so the walk was longer than the actual distance between the two points. But now, through the naked trees, it was close enough that he could hear the sound of the villagers’ voices if not their words.