When the fire crackled and burned, she felt calmer. Suddenly, she understood why humans had once needed to master fire. It was when they’d been driven from the Garden of Eden, when they were alone with themselves and the immensity of the world. With the help of fire, exiled and abandoned ones sought to protect themselves from the gnawing and ultimately crushing fear. The god of fire now protected her too; she and the fire had a pact against what lurked underground.
She took a piece of smoked whitefish from the lunch box and began eating it with her fingers. Carefully, she removed the thick skin and pinched the tender fillets lightly and gently so they came off the bone. Her fingers dripped with fat, and the aroma from the fish, heavy as it was, made her feel full. Imagine that, I’m here, she thought, and briefly felt elated. I’m sitting here by a small fire in the vast sea of trees, I made it out of my apartment, yes, I broke free and came all the way here.
Someone else now lived in the gray rooms where she’d been shut in for so many years. Those rooms didn’t exist any longer, the rooms where she’d lived alone, and with the boy. They were now repainted, refurnished, all traces of her were gone, all traces of the boy, and the traces of her own catastrophic reaction on the day he turned fourteen.
Embers pulsed faintly among the last logs on the fire and the sun disappeared behind the treetops in the north. Marta forced herself to stop ruminating and spread a thick sleeping pad in the back of the car. She arranged her things so that only the driver’s seat was empty and accessible. She really wanted to wash the strong smell of whitefish from her hands, but it would have to wait until morning. Then, she’d go down to the little lake and greet the day by the water. If she’d had a little more foresight, she would’ve gotten some curtains for the car before she left. Now she had to sleep in the light and hope that she’d made the right calculations so that in the morning the car would be in the shade, away from the sun.
~ ~ ~
A flock of geese floated across the tin-colored sky. Night had fallen on Mervas and the surface of the lake rested without a ripple. Supernaturally green, the white night light that seemed to come from nowhere rose from the plains behind the mine. Around it the mountains lay sphinxlike, guardian animals in the silence.
Marta fell asleep as soon as she lay down inside the car. The visions that had filled her head and danced behind her eyes as soon as she closed them swelled and grew like sails filled with wind. They carried her into a dream where the images melded and separated and transformed while she moved deeper into the sometimes familiar, other times foreign dreamscape.
The morning had come creeping into what was actually still nighttime. A couple of mosquitoes had entered through the small crack of the window that she had left open and they now clung to the walls, gorged with her blood. She opened her eyes. The light was mild, fuzzily gray, and she had time to think that it would probably be an overcast day when she spotted the man who stood looking at her a little ways from the car.
He was large and bearded, and his hair was speckled with gray. He was wearing a shapeless green jacket and had a slight stoop. Marta didn’t get scared when she saw him. She knew it was Kosti and it was somehow very natural that he was out there. His gaze was completely focused, and he kept looking into the car as if his eyes were searching for something to hold on to in her features. She felt his gaze fumble over her, searching.
Perhaps he didn’t recognize her. Maybe he couldn’t see her real face. It was hidden beneath a thick skin of years, settled behind a mask of tired middle age. She now saw that he was crying. It hurt him to see her, hurt him to see what life can do, how harsh it can be. He stood so heavy and stooped out there in the gray light, and she saw his tears running down his cheeks and into his beard. He’d also gotten old. His face was grooved and darker than she remembered. It was more rugged, burdened; all of his quick and sensitive boyishness was gone. She wanted to cry like him, let the tears flow. But she just lay still watching him. Neither of them moved. Something had happened to time itself; they had both stepped out of it and stood to the side, watching. They calmly looked at each other, looked through all the years gone by, everything that had been their lives. It was like a photograph in developing fluid slowly taking shape out of white nothingness. Shadows and lines appeared, darker, sharper. Each waited for the other, called soundlessly to the other.
She sat up at the same moment he took a step forward, and gasped for breath. His face was so deeply and wrenchingly known and beloved; now, at this distance, she suddenly felt how much it had always been part of her life, how close it had always been, how frighteningly close. She untangled her legs from the sleeping bag and unlocked the door. She was trembling all over when she opened the door; her hand trembled, her arms and her legs trembled. She stood in front of him, he was still staring at her, and they took each other’s hands and then held each other hard, very hard.
With her mouth against his shoulder, she said:
“You wrote to me. Why?”
“Sometimes it feels like we’re getting old. I’ve thought about you, Mart. These last few years. I didn’t want to die without seeing you again.”
She opened her eyes. The sun was bright outside but Kosti wasn’t there. She was still bundled up in the car. Before her thoughts caught up with her, sleep pulled her into its arms again and she continued dreaming about Kosti. She was on a train and stepped off at a small, rural train station, one of those stations in the middle of nowhere under an open sky. Kosti stood at a distance. He raised his hand and waved to her. This time, he was beardless and his hair wasn’t gray. He now looked like the Kosti she had carried with her throughout her life. They weren’t in Mervas either, but on some big country estate in Russia. All around them, the freshly plowed earth shone brown, and the fields were endless.
III
June 17
I awoke from my dreams covered in sweat. The air inside the car was humid and dense, as if I were inside a big mouth, inside my own mouth, and I was inhaling the air I had just exhaled. Even so, I remained still. I didn’t crack the window. The best thing was to just lie still. I felt ashamed of my dreams, my head full of Kosti. I also had a vague and simultaneously persistent feeling of insecurity and infinity. I didn’t know for certain what I’d experienced during the night, wasn’t sure what had happened and what hadn’t. I felt pulled back and forth between dream and reality, and as the boundaries of the two worlds blurred, I couldn’t determine where one ended and the other began. The bearded man with gray-speckled hair who’d watched me at dawn, was he part of the dream? I lay remembering the way he’d gazed at me, and something wasn’t right, something about him ran against what I’d seen in my dreams; it was as if he were made of a different matter, rough and resistant. Perhaps it had been a dream, but I’d seen him stand there crying; he’d appeared grave, yet his presence had been almost ridiculously real.
Maybe I had actually seen him; it wasn’t impossible. For a fraction of a second, in a moment of clarity, I could’ve seen him, only to tumble back into my uneasy dreams again, holding him in my arms, the image of him in my embrace. I must have dreamt the rest; that I stepped out of the car and we held each other, held everything that would never come true. I was hopelessly stupid, blinded by delusion. Oh, why do I always have to be ashamed of myself? I had the unpleasant feeling that Kosti knew the rest of my dream, that he stood hidden from view and laughed at me, laughed at my image of us together, holding each other close.