Ahead of them, the path diverted to the right, and then curved back behind an outcropping of trees. On the other side was the plot of land where Leonid and his brother had lived with Grandmother. When he left, the trees were dry and bare, the cottage visible at a glance. Now the green grew so thick that it was as if nothing at all existed on the other side.
“Is it still there?” asked Leonid, pointing through the woods.
“It is. One of the few that hasn’t been rebuilt. And it’s occupied. I believe you know who lives there.”
Leonid tried to think of who from the village might still be alive. One of the other children? He barely remembered them. Sometimes he could not remember if a particular childhood friend had lived or died. For years he had dreams about people from the village dying. Some were dead before he left, others not. Sometimes he believed the dreams more than his memory.
“To be honest,” said Mykola, “I haven’t seen him in so long, he might have finally died.”
“I’m familiar with that feeling.” Leonid started down the trail.
“Wait, don’t you want to know who it is?”
“I’ll know soon enough.”
Kasha flashed by. Instead of following the path, she entered the woods, dodging around trees like obstacles on a course. Her mother, the other Kasha, had once done the same. Only this Kasha’s tail, always curled up and over, let Leonid tell the two apart. Nadya followed the dog into the woods, brushing her fingertips across the bark of the trees as she passed.
By the time Leonid and Mykola rounded the bend, Kasha and Nadya had already passed through the woods to the other side and sat together in a patch of high grasses. Beyond them, Grandmother’s cottage. Leonid did not recognize it at first, even though it was in the right place and was the right shape and could be none other than the home he had known. He had never expected to see it again, and he could not overcome his expectations so quickly. Finally, it was the pile of firewood beside the front door that convinced him. Knowing that the wood was still stacked in the same spot gave him a feeling of permanence more profound than the unchanging cottage behind it.
“Is it as you remember?” asked Mykola.
“The firewood, yes,” said Leonid. “We never had glass windows.”
“They still have your kitchen table. I remember it being old even before you left.”
Leonid crouched and scratched Kasha behind her ears. A bird sang in a tree. Another bird, more distant, replied. He scanned the canopy. No birds in sight, but a squirrel tightroped down a thin branch and leapt to another limb. Leonid had to search deep into his memory to recall a time when there were squirrels in the valley. Kasha followed the motion of the squirrel with her eyes.
“Does any of this seem familiar, girl?” he said. “Your mother lived here, in these woods and in this cottage. This valley’s in your blood.”
He rose and headed straight for the cottage’s front door. It looked new, but he realized that the door was one thing he had taken for granted. It would always be there to seal them off from the outside, and as long as that was the case, why worry with looking at it?
Nadya rose and followed him, and Mykola eyed her, how one might inspect an old friend’s new wife. Let Mykola think what he wanted. Leonid had learned from Ignatius that the best lies were the ones you let other people assume for themselves.
Leonid knocked on the door. An old woman answered. At first, Leonid thought it was Grandmother, but this woman looked nothing like her except in age and wrinkles. Grandmother was dead. Mykola had said Leonid would know who lived in the cottage, but this woman, even after staring at her, he did not recognize at all. She was far too old to have been one of the other children, too old even to be most of the adults Leonid had known. She did not speak, and Leonid realized she inspected him in the same way he inspected her. She smiled.
“Konstantin,” she shouted back into the cottage in Russian, “you have visitors.”
A voice, airy but with an echo of former power, responded from inside. “I have no business with any of those inbred villagers.”
“They’re not from the village.”
“No one outside the village knows I’m here.”
She smiled apologetically at Nadya. “I suspect they didn’t come here intending to find you.”
“Why must you always speak in riddles, woman?”
“Come in,” said the woman. “I’m Varvara.”
“Thank you,” said Leonid. “I’m—”
She interrupted him. “Oh, I know. At least I have a fifty percent chance of guessing correctly.”
Mykola was right. It was Grandmother’s old table still sitting in the same spot in the center of the room. A strange place for the table, sort of in the way of everything, but Leonid had never questioned its placement as a boy. At the table sat an old man. The word old did not do him justice. He seemed merely a skeleton clothed in skin a size too large. He wore glasses, though his eyes were clouded completely over. What was left of his hair was dry and wiry. He held the hollowed-out horn of some large animal to his ear.
“Who is it?” asked the man.
“Old friends,” said Varvara, speaking loudly, aiming her face directly at the open end of the horn.
“When have we had friends?” said the old man.
“I have many friends.”
“Only because you stoop to socialize with the villagers. They won’t even have a place as sewage workers in the new Utopia.”
Varvara shrugged at Leonid and Nadya, and gave another apologetic smile, this time to Mykola, who still stood in the doorway.
“I saw that,” said the old man.
So he was not as blind as Leonid assumed.
“I didn’t try to hide it,” said Varvara.
“Well, come here already,” said the old man. “I can’t make out faces far away.”
Leonid walked to the table and sat in the chair opposite him. Nadya took the third chair. There had once been a fourth, but Leonid did not see it anywhere in the cottage.
“Tsiolkovski,” she said.
Leonid gripped the lip of the table with both hands. His fingernails cut into the wood. Nadya set her hand on Leonid’s.
“So you know my name. Who doesn’t? Knowing my name means nothing.”
The corners of the man’s eyes drooped even farther and the dour frown had been set in wrinkles as if in stone, but Nadya was right. This man was Tsiolkovski.
“How are you alive?” The question escaped Leonid’s mouth before he could think better of it.
Tsiolkovski laughed in an unkind way. “I have good blood. Good blood is what’s important. And you, who are you?”
“I’m Leonid.” The name he had used most of his life tasted bitter in his mouth.
“I don’t know a Leonid.”
“In fact you know two, and you gave each of us our name.”
Tsiolkovski leaned forward. His eyes were so white all over that Leonid doubted again that the man could see at all.
“So it’s you,” said Tsiolkovski. “And who’s that with you, Nadya? All I can see is a halo of yellow. I assume that’s your hair, Nadya.”
“It is,” said Nadya.
“And in the doorway, all I see is a silhouette. Mars? Valentina? Yuri?”
“I’m Mykola from the village.”
“Get out,” said Tsiolkovski.
“He’s a friend,” said Leonid.
“Get out!” screamed Tsiolkovski. “I won’t have his kind of filth in my very own house.”
“It was my home before you came here.” It might still have been his home if Tsiolkovski had not come in the first place. Leonid’s brother might still be alive. Or they might both have starved. What was worse, the possibility of death or its certainty? Regardless, this man was culpable. If the Chief Designer had been Leonid’s brother’s executioner, then Tsiolkovski was the judge who handed down the sentence. Leonid resisted the urge to drag the man from Grandmother’s chair and toss him out the door.