Here’s the letter:
Comrade Junior Lieutenant,
I know the danger to our beloved country and so I would not waste your time with small matters. Please believe me when I say, however, that our comrade Efreitor Dragomirov, Yevgeny, steals away from his post to have relations with a woman. This woman follows the column. She may well be a spy for the fascists. She comes and goes as she pleases, and knows tricks only a spy would know. I saw her bring him wine, which he shared with us, but when she left, there was only one set of tracks in the mud, belonging to a snowshoe hare. I saw her come to him as a beautiful woman where he slept in a stable. When she left the moon was out and I could see that she had become an old babka. A costume trick! I know that comrade Dragomirov has been a loyal soldier. I wish him no ill. But please, for the sake of our lives, come to investigate this matter of the woman. Before she can betray us to our enemies. Which I believe she will. Others believe this, too. One simple Cossack whose name I forget said she is a witch, a very bad witch, and that she pulled dead men from tanks and cooked them as her meat, and that was whose smoke we saw in the trees though the scouts found nothing. Another man agreed that she was a witch, (Baba Yaga herself, can you believe it?) but said that she was against the Germans, that she had brought a hard winter to kill them all and that frost went with her in the form of a starving wolf. I do not believe such childish things. But I know she is bad for morale. And I believe she is pregnant now. And even if she is not a spy and not a witch it is not fair that one man should have the comfort of a woman when the rest of us do not.
There’s no record of follow-up, at least not from the Soviets.
I’m sure they laughed their dicks off at this guy.
But someone wasn’t laughing.
This Lemenkov went chasing a doe a few days later and disappeared. They thought he deserted. But they found him dead, naked, holding a tree. He had been crying; they know this because his tears were frozen on his cheeks.
His eyes were frozen in his head.
The dude who told on Dragomirov froze to death.
In June.
And nobody fucked with Yevgeny Dragomirov again.
Are you following this? He got some spooky witch pregnant at the same time his wife supposedly got knocked up. But his wife took no time off from the factory. Even hardcore soviet chicks take a little maternity leave. Nothing. Nada. Nyitchevo.
You know what I think?
I think that was Baba Yaga, in the woods, with the smoke and rabbit tracks.
I think she walked right up to Dragomirov’s house with an infant in her arms and made Dragomirov’s wife raise the baby.
I think your rusalka killed Baba Yaga’s son.
Two:
I attached a one-paragraph article about a grave-robbing near Nizhny Novgorod.
A body was taken last week.
It probably would never have made the paper, but it was the body of a heavily decorated hero of the war against the fascists. Even in these days, you don’t fuck with Second World War heroes. You know how protective we are about ours? The Russians are even more hardcore about their WW2 vets, they worship those guys, and for good reason.
I’m getting off topic.
The point is, it was our guy.
Yevgeny Dragomirov got exhumed last week.
I didn’t advertise a three, but there’s a three.
Three:
Somebody’s trying to hack me.
Hack ME.
Seriously?
I tracked the probable source to the Ukraine, and it shouldn’t be long before I have a name and address.
And then?
I bring the whoop-ass.
I’m thinking maybe a…
But I’ll keep that a secret in case he or she intercepts this.
I REALLY don’t think there’s much chance of that.
But.
If you ARE reading this, cocksucker, you should think about taking a little vacation, and not going near anything with a screen and a plug until Carnaval season. Or until the Mayan apocalypse comes.
Which it won’t.
Except for you if you don’t go low-tech, and I mean now.
Which I hope you don’t.
I’VE GOT SUCH A COOL SURPRISE FOR YOU!
74
Vermont.
Anneke squats froglike, fingering the leaves of the maple sapling she just petrified.
“I want to rest,” she says.
Her head hurts and she’s nauseated; the living tree fought with all its sap and chlorophyll and nonverbal stored-up common sense against the unnatural thing she was doing to it. It felt like having an argument in which you knew you were wrong but won because you were better at arguing and eventually, unjustly, wore your opponent down. She wrung the juicy and vibrant parts of it out with an ugly, strong hand she never knew she had, and now it stands before her white and bleached and dead; still beautiful, but beautiful because it is impossible; no sculptor could carve or shape such thin and perfect leaves from granite. Even as she thinks this, a leaf falls from its branch.
It’s exquisite, she thinks.
This would sell for twenty grand.
Michael just looks at her, sitting in his camp chair, drinking his coffee. The lesson takes place in a patch of woods between the farmhouse and the quarry.
This old bastard’s not going to let me rest.
He sees her looking at him and just nods at the tree.
“I don’t feel good,” she says.
“You’re not supposed to. You just broke the laws of nature. Now make it right.”
She bites her tongue.
Broken laws of nature surround them; Michael Rudnick appears to live in a quaint New England farmhouse neighboring an old quarry, but really he lives in the quarry. A perfect overhang of granite hung with vines shields a vintage Airstream trailer. Doric columns modeled after those supporting the Athenian temple of Hephaestus seem to prop the ledge, and brick walls of varying heights partition the space, keyholed with nooks and alcoves wherein unquenchable oil lamps glimmer by night. Stone benches and chairs surround an impressive fire pit topped by a chimney in the shape of a human mouth open to breathe in smoke. How the trailer got into or is supposed to get out of the neoclassic wonderland is not apparent. Rock stairs lead down to the opening beneath the ledge, and another set leads to water.
The trapezoidal lake that has collected at the quarry’s bottom half submerges an outsized sculpture and cypress garden: a granite elephant jets water from its upraised trunk, cyclopic giants, Atlas-like, hunch beneath gardens erupting from stone troughs, a mischievous-looking cherub crouches on a pedestal above the waterline, holding a stone to its chest in the posture of a pitcher, a pile of other such stones at its feet. It seems to be eyeing the steps. The stones are the size of volleyballs. Woe betide anyone approaching Michael’s cave with fell intent.
She looks at the stone tree.
Feels the echo of its vanished life, how surprised it was to find itself so violated, cut off from water, numb to sunlight. Dead. When she touches its trunk she feels its absence.
“Put life back into it.”
She tries.
“See it happening.”
She pictures the breeze blowing through supple leaves.
Nothing happens.
“It’s not like moving rocks,” she says.
“No. It’s intimate.”
She tries.
Her head throbs.
“Why are there no schools?” she says. “Harry Potter and all that.”
He just looks at her.
“Are there?”