“And then on to the other side of Earth. If we keep at it, I might finally complete my orbit, after all.”
Nadya took Leonid by the hand and led him to the platform. They had an easier time finding the train than they had finding the station.
Bohdan, Ukraine—1964
The train churned upward into the hills, aiming for the higher peaks that it would never reach. Leonid started to recognize the landscape even though he had seen it before only once. Still, this type of tree—Giorgi would have known the name—was the same as in the forests he knew as a boy. One could recognize a forest without recognizing it in particular.
The sound of the train, a sound he had grown used to in his recent travels, came here in a richer timbre, echoing back upon itself so that each thump was actually a chorus of many. It reminded him of the hopeful, fearful sensation the arrival of the train made when he was a boy. The sound would crest the hill long before the train itself. Like trumpets heralding the arrival of a tsar.
The angle of the climb steepened, pressing Leonid back into the seat, a milder version of the centrifuge at Star City. The seat’s padding had been compressed to nothing, just old leather over wooden slats. He had to shift every few minutes to relieve the pressure on one side of his back or the other. He had given up trying to find a comfortable position for his buttocks. The slats underneath pinched and shifted no matter the angle. Beside him, Nadya looked out the window, never moving. He could see the reflection of her open eyes in the glass or he would have thought she was asleep. Kasha, curled on the floor in front of them, slept soundly.
There was no one else in the car with them. Maybe no one else on the whole train, if three cars and an engine could actually be called a train. The only other person they had seen was the conductor, a Kazakh or a Turkman, who did not understand Russian or did an excellent job of pretending not to. The sweaty scent of previous passengers mucked the air.
The train car leveled and then pitched forward. There had been several small descents to interrupt the generally upward progress, but this one was steeper. The view on either side was hemmed in by forest, the distant mountains disappearing like a grand illusion. The sound of the engine hushed and the brakes wailed. The car shuddered for several seconds before settling into a smooth deceleration.
Their stay in Odessa had not extended beyond the train station. On a large map like the one in Kharkiv, Leonid had again seen the name of his home village, Bohdan, this time printed larger, with the red line of a railway leading right to it. He had bought tickets before he even realized what he was doing. America would still be there in a week.
Nadya had not commented when he told her about the detour, as if this new plan had been established from the start. She simply nodded. Leonid worried that he had taken the place of those who had commanded every aspect of her whole life, that he was no better than the Chief Designer. But Leonid would make it up to her. Once they escaped.
Kasha, for her part, dashed aboard the train without prompting, as if she knew it would take her to her roots. It was the little dog’s excitement that made the journey real to Leonid. He was going home, assuming the village still existed, that a single villager had survived the famine, that the old huts still stood, else the green of the valley had grown up over them or the rain had never returned and the valley was now nothing but dust.
Leonid’s skin pricked with gooseflesh. He wanted to turn around and leave. He would sprint to the engine and force the conductor to reverse the train, to pull them out of the valley. He had barely escaped with his life, and only then because of his brother. If he had not been a twin, he would have stayed and died with the rest of them. He sometimes imagined the villagers still alive and waiting for him. More often, though, he imagined their tombstones, jagged rocks with names chiseled there by untrained hands. What would he say to Grandmother? But no, she was most certainly dead. Was she? He realized he had never known her age. He thought of her as old because grandparents were old, when she might have been little older than the Chief Designer was now.
The thought of the Chief Designer gave him another pause. That passed quickly, though. In all his fantasies of returning home, of which there had been more than he had admitted to himself, his brother was with him. The Chief Designer had taken that from him, stripping him of hope and innocence and family and… the list could go on.
Leonid looked at Nadya. She touched the window with her fingertips, as if caressing the trees beyond. Or was it her reflection she saw, and in it the face of her sister?
A bolt of silence, and then the train leapt to a stop. The empty seats rattled. Kasha slid forward several inches, sticking out a paw to steady herself without opening her eyes. Nadya stood, maneuvered around Leonid’s knees, and headed for the exit. Leonid followed, snapping his fingers for Kasha. The dog popped to her feet, bouncing along as if she needed no transition between asleep and awake. His arm started a reflexive wave as he exited the train, but there was no one there to greet them.
The station had been rebuilt. Not that the structure was any larger, but instead of the tumbling wooden shed, now it was made of metal. Leonid could not call the shed new. It had been there long enough to grow red spots of rust. The door did not line up with the lopsided frame.
From down the hill came a rumble, a small truck motoring up the path from the village. Leonid recalled the slow walks to the station when he was a boy, but the truck had almost arrived already. An older man drove, and several teenagers sat in the open back, prodding each other and laughing. The truck pulled up alongside the freight car and the teenagers hopped off. Whiffs of exhaust twined with the green-tinged mountain air.
One of the teenagers slung open the freight car’s sliding door, and the others hopped inside. The older man, who on second glance was younger than Leonid had first assumed, stepped out of the truck and leaned on the hood, instructing the teens from time to time on where to set the boxes and sacks they lugged from the train.
Kasha took a few cautious steps away from the platform, sniffing at the air. She darted over to a kalyna by the side of the road, nosing, then licking the berries.
“No,” said Leonid. He remembered the berries’ bitter taste, and also how sick they had once made the original Kasha when she ate just a few.
The man by the truck inspected Leonid up and down. The man’s beard was thick and showed flecks of white. His bushy eyebrows cast shadows that hid his eyes, making it impossible to tell exactly where the man was looking. He made a deliberate act of spitting on the ground. Leonid realized he had said no in Russian.
Instead of eating the berries, Kasha shoved her rump into the kalyna’s branches and peed. The urine splashed loudly against the dry bed of leaves. Two sacks, thrown by the teens in the freight car, thumped to the ground. Kasha finished and scampered back to Leonid’s side, twitching her head in every direction, taking quick sniffs. She had never smelled mountains before. Leonid had almost forgotten how different the scent was from the choked air around Moscow.
Nadya walked down the hill. The man leaning on the car watched her. It was probably rare that the village received visitors, especially attractive female ones. But the man’s look was not a leer, his brows arched in curiosity. Then he looked at Kasha as if noticing her for the first time. His elbow slipped off the hood. He stumbled forward a few steps.
“Kasha,” he whispered.
Kasha’s ears perked up.
“Is it you, Kasha?”
She looked at the man for a long moment, nudging up to Leonid’s leg. Then her tail broke into a wide wag, and she scampered to the man’s feet. He bent down and scratched her as if she were his own dog greeting him after a long trip away, stroking from her head to her rump, following the curl of her tail with his hand as it arced up and over her back.