Part 7 (1/2)

'f.u.c.k off now,' he screamed at them. 'f.u.c.k off. f.u.c.k off. There's nothing here.'

So Kamilova turned away and walked back out through the town.

Belatinsk was everywhere silent, subsided under dugouts, shacks and shanties of rusty iron, planks, cardboard, wire, gla.s.s and earth. There was no water, no electricity, no sewerage. Paved streets were dug up for scraggy allotments where nothing properly grew. Everything woodbenches, h.o.a.rdings, fences, boardwalkshad been ripped up and burned. Vermin everywhere and no repairs to anything.

She pa.s.sed a sc.r.a.p of munic.i.p.al garden behind iron railings. Sign on the gate: DIG NO GRAVES HERE.

No cars or trucks on the road out of Belatinsk to Fors.h.i.+n's dacha. On the verge a mare had died, her body swollen hard. Black lips stretched off yellow teeth in a snarl. Black jewel flies were sipping at her eyes and crawling over the blue fatness of her tongue. Kamilova wanted to sit in the dust and lean against her like a couch, just for a while.

One step. One step. One step.

She does not know how many more days she can do this. Hunger is not the absence of food. It is a big black rock you carry that fills the sky. It crushes you while you sleep.

Yet things are better now at Fors.h.i.+n's dacha than they were on the road.

The evening after they buried the twice-killed soldier, Kamilova stole a boat from the village at Yamelei. She still felt bad about the boat, but the village would survive and the girls could not walk. Not so far, not all the way. The equations of necessity.

So Kamilova had taken the boat, and in her they crossed the lake above the sunken city. Still purple waters at twilight and the sound of a distant bell.

The soul of the people is forever striving to behold the sunken city of Litvozh.

Kamilova knew boats. All night she let the chill wind take them west, and in the dawn they followed the sh.o.r.e to where the westward river flowed out.

'What river is this?' said Yeva.

'I don't know,' said Kamilova, 'but it's going the right way.'

Low wooded hills and sc.r.a.ps of cool dawn mist. The girls slept under dewy blankets in the shelter of the gunwales, and the river took them into strange country. Unfamiliar hunting beasts called to one another across the water. Dark oily coils surged and rippled, and the backs of great silent fish broke the surface of the river. Kamilova sat in the stern with the gun across her knees and steered a course clear of the black bears that swam slow and strong and purposefully from sh.o.r.e to sh.o.r.e. They pa.s.sed through a city ruined in the war. n.o.body was there. Not anybody at all.

The end of day brought them across the sudden frontier out of slow memorious places into the hungerland.

In the deep past and in remoter places even now families and villages might fall into hunger and all of them die. That was one thing. In the towns and cities of the Vlast a wretched person sick and alone without a kopek might starve in a gutter. That was another thing. A ragged inconvenience. But when entire regions, millions of people, conurbations and suburbs and the penumbra of organised rural production, plunged into sudden and total desperate famine, that was something else. That was something never seen before.

That was the hungerland.

The boat came to a weir. A tremendous white-water fall. Nothing for it but to sleep and in the morning leave the boat and walk.

Kamilova, thinking the house on the edge of the nameless town empty, broke in the door. The family was gathered in darkness, curtains drawn against the day. The smell was bad. There were puddles of water on the floor.

Two chairs were pushed together, and across them lay the corpse of the boy. He might have been fourteen but starvation aged you. You couldn't tell. The baby was propped in a pram, head to one side on the pillow, dead. The mother on the bed was dead. The daughter sat beside her on the stained counterpane, rubbing at the mother's chest with a linen towel.

'Where is your father?' said Kamilova. 'Did he go for help? For food?'

The girl glanced up at her without expression and carried on rubbing the dead woman's chest. The smell of embrocation.

Kamilova took from her bag a piece of hard dry bread and a handful of potatoes brought from Yamelei and laid them on the bed. The girl didn't look. The food just lay there on the counterpane.

When Kamilova reached the door she stopped and turned back, picked the food up again and put it back in her bag. The equations of necessity.

The girl didn't glance up when Kamilova left the room.

Days rose dark in colourless suns.h.i.+ne and set in bleakness. The hungerland walk was one long unrelenting road. Aftermath, aftermath. Deadened days after the end of the world.

Slowly they realised how late they were. The distortions of slow time in the memorious zone. Here in the hungerland six years had pa.s.sed, the war was over and this was Rizhin country now.

'Mother will think we forgot her,' Galina said. 'She must think we are dead.'

'She is waiting,' said Yeva. 'She would never stop waiting.'

'I will take you home,' said Kamilova. 'I promise. We're going there as quick as I can.'

The girls wrote letters and posted them when they came to towns. We are OK, Mother. We are alive and fine. Not long now. We'll be with you soon.

Silence, horrible silence, settled across the hungerland. Livestock, cats and dogs, all dead. Birds and wild things all hunted or driven away. The only sound in the early morning was the soft breath of the dying. The footfalls of carrion eaters on patrol.

A woman in a garden held up her baby as they walked by.

'Please. Take him, take him. I beg you take him. I cannot feed him. They will eat him when he dies.'

The child had an enormous wobbling head. A swollen pointed belly. He was already dead.

They studied starvation and became connoisseurs of hunger. Darkened faces and swollen legs were the symptomology of famishment. Corpse faces with wide and lifeless eyes, skin drawn skull-tight and glossy and covered with sores.

First your limbs grew weak, then you lost all physical sensation. The body became a numb and burdensome sack. The circulation of the blood grew sluggish until the unnourished muscles of the heart, unable to s.h.i.+ft their own weight any more, simply failed to beat. By then you no longer had the energy to care.

People died working at their desks. They died as they walked the streets.

There was a shape to it, a pattern of progression. The speed of it surprised them. A few weeks was all it took before the people started dying. Those died who refused to steal or trade their bodies for food. Those died who shared their food with others. Parents who made sacrifices for their children died before them, and then their children died. Those died who refused to countenance the consumption of the most forbidden flesh. In the end it made no difference because everyone who didn't escape the hungerland died.

The hungerland was spreading westward, and Kamilova and the girls walked in the same direction. Sometimes they took a lift in a truck and sometimes they got ahead of the hungerland wave. Behind them the cannibal bands were coming. Mobile platoons of mechanised anthropophagi grinding their butchering knives.

Kamilova shot two men with her gun to save the girls. The equations of necessity. Five sh.e.l.ls left.

All three of them were growing weak. Kamilova knew the signs.

A cart brought them to Belatinsk one morning, and there they were stuck. Yeva and Galina could walk no more.

'How far to go to Mirgorod?' Kamilova enquired.

'Twelve hundred miles,' said the post office clerk. 'Fifteen maybe.'

The only way out was the railway.

'Sixty-five roubles,' said another clerk at another window. 'Third Cla.s.s. One way. Each.'