Part 4 (1/2)

Galina stares at the newspaper blankly.

'What?' she says. 'What about it? What?'

'The date.'

Galina makes an effort to squint at the stained print.

'It's a couple of months old.' She hands it back to Kamilova and wipes her fingers in the lap of her dress already splattered with the soldier's drying mess. 'It's greasy. It smells bad.'

Galina's eyes aren't focused properly. They stray back to the half-rotten corpse on the veranda boards.

'Not the month,' says Kamilova. 'The year.' She holds the paper up again for the girl to see. Galina stares at it for a while. Furrows her brow in confusion.

'It's a mistake,' she says. 'A printing error.'

'No,' said Kamilova. 'I talked to the men who brought it into the village. I asked them questions. It isn't a mistake.'

'What?' said Yeva. 'What are you talking about.'

Kamilova sat down beside them on the end of the couch. She felt suddenly exhausted. Not able to manage. Not able to lead the way, not at the moment, not any more. The strength in her legs, the straightness in her back, was gone. Yeva squeezed up to make room.

'What is it?' she said.

'I'm sorry,' said Eligiya Kamilova. 'I'm so sorry.'

'What?'

'We've been walking in the trees,' said Kamilova, 'and we've been living here in the village by the lake, and it's been seven months, nearly eighta long time but not quite eight monthsthat's all.' She takes the paper from where it lies in Galina's lap. 'Look at the date.'

Yeva reads the small print at the top of the page.

'But that's wrong.'

'No.'

'But it is wrong. It's five years wrong.'

'Five and a half. Five and half years gone.'

Kamilova has had longer than the girls to think it through.

The three of them roll the corpse of the twice-killed soldier onto a sheet, wrap it and drag it through the gra.s.s far away from the house. They dig a hole up near the woods. It takes all day and they are dumb with exhaustion and heat and stink, and the sun has gone and the fear is coming out of the woods. They go inside and light candles and put wood in the stove, and when the water is hot they wash in the kitchen in silence, the whole of their bodies from head to toe. It takes a long time to get the dirtiness off and they don't quite manage it even then.

Rank warm cheese and a stump of hard bread on the shelf. Oilcloth on the table. Candles burning. The house and the village and the lake. Some people cannot look at their memories, and some people cannot ever look away.

'Our mother thinks I'm sixteen,' says Yeva. 'Sixteen. Or dead. Either way she didn't find us. She never came.'

'I didn't know,' says Kamilova. 'There wasn't a way to know.'

'She couldn't have come,' says Galina. She looks at Eligiya Kamilova. 'But tomorrow we'll go home,'

'Home?' says Kamilova. 'What do you mean ”home”?'

'You don't have to come with us, Eligiya. You've done enough; you've done more than you needed to for us. You can have your life back; you can go where you want; you can go into the forest again, or stay here and live for ever. '

Galina's words lacerate Eligiya like the blades of knives.

'I...' she begins. The pain she feels is shame and guilt and love, inextricable trinity, hands held open to receive the price you had to pay. 'Everything will have changed,' she says. 'You have to think about that. She... Your mother might not even-'

'You don't have to come, Eligiya.'

'I will come,' says Eligiya Kamilova. 'Of course I will come.'

Chapter Three.

If you're afraid of wolves, stay out of the forest.

Josef Stalin (18781953)

1.

The rain came in long pulses, hard, warm and grey, and the noise of it in the trees was loud like a river. The galloping of rain-horses. Rain-bison. Rain-elk. Maroussia Shaumian followed the trail through rain and trees, splas.h.i.+ng through mud-thick rain-churned puddles, the bindings on her legs sodden and clagged to the knee, pus.h.i.+ng herself, back straight and face held high, into the future. Her clothes smelled of wet wool and woodsmoke and the warmth of her own body. Rain numbed her face and trickled down her chin and neck. It tasted of earth and nettles. Rain slicked and beaded on the ferns: tall fern canopies trembling under the rain, unfurling ferns, red fern spore. A boar snuffled and crashed in the fern thickets. His hot breath. The smell of it in the rain. There were side paths leading in under the thorns; mud ways trodden clear that pa.s.sed under low branches. The larger beasts were further off and elsewhere, under taller trees. Cave bear and wisent and the dagger-mouth smilodon.

The land rose and then fell away: not hills but a drifting swell that wasn't flatness. Coming down, the trail took her among broad shallow pools. Maroussia cut a staff and kept her head down and walked against the rain, churning knee-high through water, mud-heavy feet slipping and awkward. Most of the ground here was water. Roots and stumps and carca.s.ses of fallen trees reached up through the rain-disturbed surface, paused in arrested motion, waiting, balanced between worlds, and everything distant was lost in the rain.

Maroussia crouched to dip her hands in the water, letting the rain beat on her back. Rolling up her sleeves she reached right down to the bottom and ran her fingers through the gra.s.s there. It looked like hair and moved to her touch, dark green and beautiful. It was just gra.s.s. Her arms in the water looked pale and strange, not hers but arms in the shadow world as real as the one she was in. She cupped her hands and brought some water up into her world to drink, feeling the spill of it through her fingers and down her arms. The water tasted of cold earth and leaves and moss. She tasted the roots of all the trees that stood in it and the bark and wood of the fallen ones. She swallowed it, cool and sweet in her throat, and took more, still drinking long after she wasn't thirsty any more.

The forest is larger than the world, though those who live outside it think the opposite.

She was Maroussia Shaumian still. Nothing of that time was forgotten, nothing was lost, though she was more now, more and less and different and changed and far from home. Like the water in the rain she was fresh and new, and as old as the planet, both at once.

You don't know where home is until you're not there any more.

She waded out deeper into a wide pool loud under the rain to where a beech tree lay on its side, its rain-darkened bark smooth and wet to the touch. The beech had fallen but it wasn't dead; it was earth-rooted still, and its leaves under the water were green. She let her hands rest on it and felt the tree's life. She wished she could speak to it but she didn't have the words, and what would she say? Help me, perhaps. Help me to get home. But that wasn't right. It wasn't what you should ask, and no help would come.

Wolves plashed under tree-shadow, distant and silent and indistinct as moths. One turned his face towards her, wolf eyes in the rain, unhurried, considering. She returned his gaze and he looked away.