Anthony Marra
The Wolves of Bilaya Forest
Fiction by undiscovered talent, the best writers you haven’t heard of yet.
The distant howls could be heard over the water boiling in the saucepan. Vera had sold her kettle three weeks earlier, along with a set of dull knives and all of her daughter’s clothes. She tilted the pan over two cups and hummed as the tea bags inflated and rose in the steaming water. Yelena, her friend from childhood, asked for three scoops of sugar, which Vera thought quite excessive. But she needed Yelena’s help, so she measured three half teaspoons into Yelena’s cup and took no sugar herself.
“This tea is bitter,” Yelena said, in the living room. Her eyebrows were plucked, thin sickles of hair that gave her the appearance of constant incredulity. She went to the salon once a month and flew first-class to Moscow twice a year to trawl the Arbat for the latest styles from Paris and New York.
“Yes,” Vera agreed. “Perhaps I let it steep too long.”
“So, you were telling me about the gas bill, Vera?” Yelena smiled, her lips curving as deliberately as her eyebrows. She felt satisfied witnessing her friend face poverty. For many years, she had been the one in need of Vera’s charity.
“I don’t know what to do,” Vera said. She did not want to grovel, especially not to Yelena. But she also did not want to starve. “My pension has again been halved.”
Yelena shook her head. “In the paper today I read that the economic shock treatment has hurt the weakest members of society — not just you, but also the illiterate and alcoholic.”
Vera glanced at the empty bookcase behind her. Pale rectangles against the pine where her books had stood. She had sold them along with the kettle.
“I was wondering if your son could help me.”
“Ivan?”
Vera nodded. Yelena had only one son, and she never passed up an opportunity to talk about him.
“Ivan is a very busy man. I wouldn’t want to bother him with something like this.”
“No, I suppose it wouldn’t be worth the bother.”
Yelena ran her finger around the rim of the teacup, making a dozen orbits before she spoke. “Ivan is coming for dinner this Sunday. Perhaps I can ask if he has any work.”
Vera nodded and asked her friend if she wanted more sugar in her tea. After Yelena left, Vera washed the dishes with water that had sat in the tub all day to reach room temperature. She said her evening prayers and crossed herself three times to ward off the devils. Beneath the covers, she listened to the cries of wolves. This wasn’t the first time wolves had returned to Bilaya Forest. The Red Army had hunted them to the point of extinction in the ’30s, when Vera was a child. Wolves were the capitalists of the animal kingdom, and the army went to considerable lengths to kill these politically dangerous predators. But they came back during the Great Patriotic War, when panzer divisions pushed the Red Army past the horizon. No one had enough to eat, and the entire town resorted to criminal entrepreneurialism to survive. Wages were paid in hunks of bread. Pensions disappeared. The power of the state collapsed, and Vera watched her parents and neighbors scavenge to survive. After the war, local Red Army units resumed killing wolves, and the forest returned to silence. But Vera, curled beneath heavy woolen blankets, remembered when the howls of wolves heralded the approach of hunger.
In the summer before the German occupation, Vera Pavlova had been extolled in schools and newspapers from Minsk to Vladivostok. She had unintentionally denounced her mother for hoarding food reserves, keeping it from the Soviet people and thereby collaborating with the fascist enemy. Three eggs and a kilogram of flour comprised the hoard. The collaboration was not with the fascist enemy, but with Vera herself, who had grown so emaciated that her shins were as thin as stool legs. In the propagandized version, Vera had caught her alcoholic mother breaking into the state grain supply, proclaiming Trotskyite slogans and stealing 100 kilograms of flour in a burlap sack. Vera immediately reported her mother’s treason to a local commissar, exclaiming, “My mother is an enemy of the state, and worse, she is an enemy of the people.” To which the commissar replied, “Though the state and the people are one and the same, you are a hero of both.”
The reality was that, despite swearing secrecy to her mother, Vera boasted to a friend at school about the loaf of bread her mother had baked. The one friend told several friends, and eventually the local commissar heard of the incident. Each telling had expanded the tale to the point at which a starving woman weighing 44 kilograms was perfectly capable of carrying 100 kilograms of flour.
“And you think I used all of that flour for a single loaf of bread?” her mother said in defense at her trial.
“Profligacy is one of the marked characteristics of a Fascist,” replied the commissar, who would die of pneumonia exacerbated by malnutrition five years later in the Arctic Solovki prison camp, where he’d been sent for failing to prevent the German occupation. One hundred kilograms of flour had in fact gone missing from the reserves over the course of several months, and had Vera investigated the town archives during glasnost, she might have learned that it had all gone to the commissar’s wife.
From pretrial through sentencing, Vera’s mother sent her letters from the courthouse cell. Each letter took more than a week to cross the eight blocks from the courthouse to Vera’s home. The envelopes were open when they fell through the mail slot, and the letters had been run through with the black marker of the censors. In the unedited portions of text, her mother wrote that she was lonely but unharmed, that as a political prisoner she was allowed better rations than she had received as a textile worker, that she missed her daughter and her husband and the taste of vodka. Years later, Vera came to understand that her mother’s life meant nothing to the commissar. When weighed against the future of the Soviet people and the progression toward a Leninist utopia, what could one life possibly be worth? But when her mother was convicted of treason and sentenced to 20 years of hard labor in Siberia, Vera could imagine no greater loss. Due to the war, trains to the gulag prisons no longer ran. Her mother was marched into Bilaya Forest and received her sentence from the barrel of a gun.
Vera’s father took her into the forest so that she might see what her words had caused. The tree trunks were white with frost, and the wind sang through the branches. The wolves had found her mother before she and her father had, and Vera ran from the body. Her father didn’t speak when he returned home that afternoon, just kicked the clumps of frozen dirt from the shovel. They didn’t speak for many years. A week later, Vera was looking at the party’s official commendation for service and sacrifice when she heard the clatter of the mail slot. She bounded to the door and found a letter from the courthouse jail. She opened it, her fingers trembling against the envelope flap. In her final letter, Vera’s mother wrote: I have been given twenty years in — — prison camp. Twenty years is not so long, only two decades, and when —— you will be a grown woman and you will have children and — ———. ———— will — you. Later in life, Vera spent more time thinking of the expurgated text than of the words that survived the censor. She wondered what type of man had in him the power to break her heart with the stroke of a black marker.
Pravda exalted Vera as the future face of Communism. She received awards from the Young Pioneers, Komsomol, and the electricians’ and ironworkers’ trade unions. She despised every honor, yet she refused none. She remembered her mother working 14-hour shifts at the textile factory, attaining levels of productivity that left her hands blistered. She remembered her mother returning long after sunset, falling into the divan cushions, and drinking until her father carried her to bed. One must do what one despises to survive. This is the only way. On account of her heroism in defense of the people, Vera was upgraded to a commissar’s rations. She did not worry about hunger for many years.