From behind stoves, from seemingly abandoned cabins on the edge of villages, from a neighbor woman’s shed, from storage buildings, came the men hiding there, as if awakened from sleep.
For many long years they stayed put—living wherever they had washed up—under someone else’s roof, some did petty thieving, others drank, but all found a food source, leaned on something. Suddenly they seemed to have found willpower, intention, strength; they used to be ashamed of themselves, knowing their pathetic position in the strict village world, but now they were forming groups that quickly turned into gangs. They went out into the woods and found an abandoned forester’s hut or a child’s tent, which they furnished into a scary parody of living space: they dragged in cast-off couches and refrigerators, trashed television sets, and set up this trash around a bonfire covered by an awning or in a pit; they probably stared at the broken screen of the Rubin or Yunost TV, put leftover and stolen garden vegetables into the refrigerators, and tossed piles of clothing snatched from the line while the housewife wasn’t watching into listing cupboards.
A method of earning money appeared in the forest strongholds—stealing metal and robbing dachas; the tramps climbed over the barbed wire of the military airfield to unscrew things from planes and established an exchange with the guards. In the winter they found shelter or moved south or died of the cold, but the gangs reappeared in the spring, with new members, and the forest world grew stronger. The tramps looked down on the dacha owners, uselessly puttering in their gardens, the way in times of pestilence, starvation, and plague they must have looked at the people guarding their houses and fields.
Former convicts became tramp leaders, stupid girls were sent out to beg on their behalf, strange rumpled women walked around the villages and dachas casing the places for their friends. Of course, there weren’t many tramps, they couldn’t ruin the entire forest, and they weren’t seen in every yard, but they set something off, and rumors started in the villages, touching the dachas, too; rumors as musty as a bread box moldy from the inside, rumors that must have spent half a century under a bushel, crept into roach holes and spider corners and old women’s trunks with their burial underwear; mad, inarticulate, and portending disorder and trouble.
About army deserters hiding in the woods who killed two people last week in Pyatikhatka and burned down the house to hide their traces; about the Chernov daughter who took a shortcut to Stary Gorodok and saw two men harassing a dacha owner; about the coming revaluation of the currency, after which everyone would be impoverished; about how planes land every night at the airfield with coffins from Afghanistan and they burn the bodies in the furnace so that no one will know the real losses there—they really did switch the furnace from coal to oil, and the smoke it produced was different.
Grandmother Mara’s village women friends took grim pleasure in retelling what they heard, and in doing so took on the appearance of limping birds of prey. Their conversations revolved around coal, firewood, manure, salt, and sugar, and were interrupted by the next in a line of rumors, as if they could sense the approach, the return of something terrible and forgotten, and were happy that life was just, and that the present prosperity, albeit a relative one, was only temporary, and no one could escape their comeuppance.
The deserter theme was most frequent, the old women savored that city word in a special way, as if it were a lump of sugar to suck on while drinking tea, syllable by syllable; deserters, deserters, they repeated, and I think they meant every escapee, every tramp who went off into marginality, having abandoned their usual world order.
Or maybe they were remembering the war years, men hidden out of fear of arrest, memories of brothers or husbands who fled the front, secretly or with faked papers; cellars and distant farms, foxholes where deserters hid in the chaos of the retreat in 1941. There was a devil-may-care tone, as if they knew something no one else did, hidden in the crevasses of their wooden houses; echoes of ancient artillery thunder and astounding events were bursting inside them, demanding to be told.
Whenever an unknown man dressed in an old army jacket walked past the most distant village yards, looking at hanging laundry or a fowl that came out to drink from the big puddle, and maybe thinking about stealing something to sell for a drink, the old women knew by evening that a deserter had been seen by the Nefelyev place. Her friends brought their stories to Grandmother Mara for certification of authenticity, as if she were a notary, for her to say whether the man who looked greedily at the goose was a deserter or just some fellow; Grandmother Mara generously confirmed it—a deserter!—as if she understood the women’s need to live not ordinary lives but to be in final, terrible times, and she shared it completely.
Simultaneously with the deserter theme, another old story came up, and the children told it, but it originated with the grown-ups. The story was about a mother who had a daughter who banged her finger and her nail stayed blue from bruising for life. One day the daughter vanished—the circumstances were given variously—and the mother sought her in villages, train stations, and marketplaces; six months later at a faraway station she bought a meat pie from a platform vendor’s army-issue thermos and found her daughter’s blue fingernail in the filling.
The old women, who all seemed to be childless (either there were no children or they had moved far away), gabbed about the inconsolable mother, the vanished daughter, and the blue fingernail, as if it had happened yesterday, as if they had known both; it also seemed that they knew it was all lies, and they were sorry and wanted it to turn into truth.
The third theme, which came up on its own and roamed in and out of conversations, was rats; in fact, no one had encountered any rats, there were no rat infestations or stores of grain gobbled up. Once in a while people glimpsed one visiting the garbage pit. Yet there was the feeling that they were expecting rats. If you already had deserters and an inconsolable mother looking for her missing blue-nail girl, then rats were sure to follow; instead of harmless mice, sturdy rat teeth would soon be chewing away at the wooden supports of our houses. And that meant you had to look in the sheds for long-forgotten rat poison, set rat traps, and fill in holes in the floor with clay mixed with ground glass.
Grandmother Mara liked to recount how she killed a red rat with a shovel when it jumped at her from under the floor, and with each telling the rat grew bigger until it was the size of a dog. With the rapture of exaggeration, Grandmother Mara told them how smart rats were, how hard it is to poison them, how cats fear them, how the rat dismembered by the shovel lived on for a few seconds and stared at her with hatred. I got the feeling that they weren’t talking about animals, however smart, predatory, and dangerous in number and stubbornness, but about monsters that came from the beyond. I was amazed that Grandmother Mara and her friends had once seen these monsters, it wasn’t their imagination at work but knowledge. I couldn’t understand it, the source of this intense fear, but understood when I heard Grandmother Mara with her friend Grandmother Vera.
During the war, Vera worked as a switchman at the Leningrad Station in Moscow. In February or March 1941 a train arrived from Leningrad with evacuees, and rats poured out of the cars.
A train with flour stood on nearby tracks, and the rats streamed across the rails; the train was guarded, but some of the men with guns panicked. Vera grabbed a crowbar to chase the rats away from the grain, but then realized that these rats had eaten corpses on the streets of Leningrad—evacuees had told her about it—had survived by eating human flesh and had escaped the city in the trains with surviving humans.