“Why aren’t you drinking?”
“I’m not thirsty.”
“How can you not be thirsty? We haven’t drunk in two days!”
“So? Camels don’t drink every day.”
“Yes,” Marina said impatiently. “But you’re not a camel.”
“I don’t need to drink every day, obsessively like you,” said Saika. “Besides, the blueberries I ate yesterday have water in them. And lastly, look at you, you’re getting soaked.”
Once Marina became wet and stayed wet without hope of warmth or of drying off, without hope of food, or rescue, she became so dispirited that she stopped walking and lay down in the wet leaves. “That’s it,” she said. “You go. Maybe if you find the lake and get across, come back for me. Try to remember my spot, will you, the way you remembered Tatiana’s.”
“Come on.” Saika pulled on her. “It’s just rain. It’s not the end of the world.”
“Oh, it is,” said Marina. “It most certainly is.”
Wiping her mouth constantly, Saika sat down on the ground and stayed close by Marina’s side.
“Why are you wiping your mouth like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like that.” Marina pointed. “All the time.”
“I just don’t want to drink, that’s all.”
“Are you afraid of rain water?”
“What the fuck are you talking about, afraid? Who’s afraid, miss? Unlike you, I go into a cave by myself. I’m not afraid. I’m just not thirsty.”
Marina had the feeling that if Saika knew the way out, and where the lake was, she would not hesitate to leave Marina in the woods. But Saika herself had nowhere to go. Marina hated her. She wished Saika would leave her alone, the way they had both left Tatiana, thinking the lake was just a couple of kilometers that way.
This is my punishment, Marina thought, closing her eyes, turning away from Saika. “My just punishment,” she whispered, “for following you.”
“And who is punishing you?” Saika laughed lightly.
“I betrayed my flesh and blood,” said Marina. “I lied to her, I turned my back on her, and now what goes around comes around. Serves me right.” She started to cry.
“But why am I being punished? I owe Tatiana nothing.”
“You’re not punished. Why would you be?” Marina said. “You’re living in your own world. In your world there is no wrong, so how can there be punishment? In your world you thought your father was overreacting to your little childhood games. If you didn’t feel remorse for Sabir, certainly you aren’t going to feel remorse for my Tatiana. But you know what I think?” Marina jumped up. The thought was too terrible to contemplate in a position of even fraudulent rest. “I think you did this on purpose. I think you wanted to lose Tania, you wanted her to be lost. You removed the pebbles deliberately, you led us another way, off the trail, deliberately, so we couldn’t find her, and she wouldn’t be able to find us.”
“You think so?” Saika said casually.
“I think so now. But this—being lost yourself—that didn’t figure in your plans, did it?” Marina laughed a little. “You sure make a lot of plans, Saika, for someone who can’t control a single minuscule thing, or as Tania would say, when you can’t change a single black hair on your own damned head.”
“You’re delirious. I want to control nothing. I want to change nothing. I just want to get out of here.”
“You’re not getting out of here. Get it through your head. Even if someone did come looking for us—it’s the deepest woods. No one will ever find us. Tell me—was that part of your grand plan?”
“Oh, shut up already, it’s getting so old.”
“You’re such a freak.”
Marina fell silent. There was no more bedrock, no water table, no caves. The remains of the day’s rain were dripping off the soggy leaves onto the sodden girls. Saika kept her head down as she sat against a tree; she would not lie down and would not raise her head. Marina had noticed that Saika too had become quieter. Her incessant pointless chattering had stopped.
It fell dark again, their third night in the woods. The light had left Marina’s world, which now consisted of damp and gray cover and a pervasive blackness next to her heart, walking step in step with her, her guide, too.
Marina listened to Saika’s breathing. The girl was holding her breath. She would hold it for a few moments, then breathe, then hold it again.
“What are you doing?”
“Nothing.”
“Why are you fooling around with your breathing?”
“I’m not fooling around. I’m trying not to swallow,” replied Saika.
“By not breathing?”
“Yes.”
“Why are you trying not to swallow?”
“My throat hurts. I think I’m getting sick.”
“Do you have a fever?”
“How should I know? Do you want to touch me and see?”
Marina did not. “Is that why you haven’t been drinking? Because of your throat?”
“I told you already,” said Saika. “I haven’t been drinking because I’m not thirsty.”
Marina thought about something. “You stopped eating the blueberries.”
“So did you. I’m sick of blueberries.”
“You’re not thirsty, you’re not hungry.”
“I’m getting sick, I told you.”
“Does anything else hurt?”
“No.”
In the middle of the night, Marina, who had drooped on her side, woke up; rather she was woken up by Saika, who was fidgeting as she lay next to her. Marina said nothing at first, waiting for Saika to quieten down, but minutes passed during which Saika rubbed her back against the ground, and scratched her head, and tossed from one side to another, and finally Marina couldn’t take it anymore; she moved away. And though she had finally managed to fall asleep, the sleep was restless and disturbed by the awareness of an uncalm and unquiet body shuddering close by.
T
It wasn’t the rain in the morning that worried Tatiana. What worried her was knowing how impossible it would now be to smell fresh water coming from Lake Ilmen. What worried her was another day eventually turning into night again and her not having shelter, or food, or fire, or protection, or a way home again. Throwing the wet broken branches behind her, Tatiana resumed her trek. The ground was covered with twigs and rocks. It wasn’t easily going to reveal her tracks if someone were looking for her. Though she didn’t have a knife, she thought of making a mark on the trees, leaving her tracks on them. After judiciously looking, she found a rock with a sharp corner and managed to etch a small fine line in the tree bark, one small purposeful line to let another human being know she was here. And while it was easier than breaking branches, it was also harder to spot. Someone would have to be looking for the small scratch. Should she draw a ring around the whole tree?
Tatiana drew one. It took too long.
Though she certainly had the time.
Time.
It was just a human invention. Like numbers. Like measuring things. Just something humans invented to make life a little easier, to order life into manageable blocks, to ease their minds around unmanageable things, to help them with infinity. A minute, an hour, a day, a year, half a century, a millennium, two millennia since the dawn of man, five thousand years since the drawings in the caves, and fourteen years of a young girl’s life. All divided neatly into little blocks. Tatiana went to school for nine months of the year, including Saturdays. She went to her Luga dacha for the other three. She lit the Bengal lights every New Year’s Eve, at one minute to midnight, and counted down, and then counted up into another year, three hundred and sixty-five days of organization. And regardless of what Tatiana was doing, the sun relentlessly moved from east to west 360˚ in 24 hours, 15˚ an hour, a quarter of a degree a minute. Sun moved, man named. Degrees, hours, minutes, all to help himself to decode the workings of the universe. But what if you couldn’t see the sun? What if you didn’
t have a man-made watch, or had no milk to get from the cows after pasture, and no potatoes to peel for dinner, and no dentist’s office to be at by 9, and no Saturday night public bath to go to at 7? What if the libraries didn’t close at 5, and the sun didn’t set at a man-made-up 9:30? What if all of that fell away into chasms? What was left?
Infinite space left.
Tatiana kept time in the woods. She laughed at herself counting, and thought, I’m counting now in my desperate minutes to remind myself I’m a human being and not a beast. I’m counting to make sense of the nonsensical. To make order, so it’s a little easier, even for me.
Oh, but this was perfect, just perfect for the girl who couldn’t keep time, who didn’t know the time to anything! Not when it was time to wake up, or stop reading, or milk the cow, or get ready to set the table for dinner. Tatiana didn’t know what time the libraries closed, she didn’t know when the cows came home. In Luga, in childhood, time had no meaning for Tatiana. She never counted, indifferently looking up at the cycles of the moon, at the arcs of the sun. She just did what she did until she started doing something else, or until someone yelled at her. To live as a child in a world without time—not in infinity, but in eternity, what joy. To never count your minutes. To just be—in the eternal present. What bliss.
And now she was counting—and growing up. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty. Was it one hundred and eighty, or one thousand and eighty, or one hundred thousand and eighty? How many blocks of her dying childhood did Tatiana count her third day in the woods?
It had rained all day and she had been unable to dry off.
I haven’t been leaving enough of a wake behind me, she kept thinking as she etched Ts around the trees. She stopped with the rings long ago and now left her initial behind. A purposeful man-made line in the sand. A symbol for herself. Like time was a symbol for order. T for Tatiana. Still walking, still hoping, still believing, still living.
What to do? Stay in one place? Build a shelter? Can’t start a fire without the sun and with the branches all soggy. There was nowhere to wash, nothing to wash with. Could she make soap from ash? Ash and what else? The ashes from the fire and a bit of...lard?
I’ll make soap and clean myself with the ashes, and walk on, live on, fly on, covered with soot, unclean, unfound, just a speck in the woods, and soon I’ll be so lost that I won’t even find myself.
She called out feebly, Dasha, Dasha. She cried to heaven. You who brought me here, bring me out, no other guide I seek. She thrust out her arms in the coming darkness, she waited for a sound, she made one herself, she put down her hands and lay in the leaves to rest a while, covered with twigs, hoping she did not smell like a live thing that other live things could prey on.
Was this what Blanca Davidovna meant when she told Tatiana that her three main lines in the hand—her heart, her head, her life all beginning from one common root—were a harbinger for tragedy? Shavtala saw it, too; was this what she meant?
Tatiana didn’t think so. They didn’t say short life. They said irrevocable trauma. Meaning: struggling, suffering, agony—all values presupposing the requisite life.
Blanca didn’t say death. She said the crown and the cross. The crown— the very best. The cross—the very worst.
Tatiana wished she had known nothing, nothing at all from the lines in her hand, from the leaves in her tea, from the Saturn line of fate that was etched like grief down the center of her palm.
Night was coming again, the third night.
What to do?
I was slain by false smiles.
One thing remained clear as the rainy twilight fell. Saika abandoned Tatiana in the woods to die. And Marina, blindly or willfully, followed her. Saika was Marina’s guide. This wasn’t lightning, or floods, or frostbite, or freak sledding accidents on the Neva. No. This was deliberate destruction.
Tatiana had been walking through the densest taiga-like forest for over two days trying to find the way out; she was emptied of strength. The truths about Marina and Saika had left her bereft.
The universe in which this was possible could make other things possible: the waiting with rifles on the outskirts of fields to kill men who stole wheat for their families. Keeping indecent company with your own closest blood relative without shuddering at the world. Moving from place to place, not just because the job demanded it, but because your own safety demanded it. Living a life in which you made only temporary arrangements lest the people you inflamed decided to take your life, because you took away all they had to lose. In comparison, being willfully forsaken in the woods to die was almost trivial.
Was that Tatiana’s choice? If she survived and became an adult, would she have to live amid this random chaos of malice? Wasn’t it better to have lived out her blissful but brief and ordered life and die rather than exist in the abyss of the other world?
She curled up more and more into herself. Then she got up and continued walking through the pathless forest.
No, Tatiana thought. Unbelievably—no. She wanted to live, that was all.
T
The Hole in the Ground
Tatiana had found a small clearing at deep dusk when she saw him. The woods were slowly emptying of light; the woods were emptying of color, too, the green leaves and brown trunks gray. All dark gray and the ground was brown-black, and Tatiana’s hair was black, too, from mud and grime. She had come to a small natural clearing in the forest and as she was walking around looking for something to eat besides blueberries, maybe blackberries, or cranberries—though she knew that cranberries grew in meadows not forests—she stepped on a pile of leaves and branches that suddenly sank into the ground beneath her foot. Only her innate sense of balance kept her from stepping down with both feet. Tatiana wavered, tottered, spread her arms, and did not put a second foot down on the branches. After regaining her composure, she stepped away and examined the ground. The branches were strewn with a strange, haphazard purpose over an area about three meters square, much like the wake of branches she herself had left behind. She pushed with her foot. The branches gave way. Tatiana pushed them harder; they gave way some more. Tatiana found a long stick and prodded the leaves and the twigs until the lot of them fell into a deep hole below.
At first she thought it might be an uncovered grave. The branches had fallen deep into the ground. If there was something there, it was now covered with forest matter. She smelled the hole. A few times she had found decomposed rabbits in the woods, but this hole did not smell of putrescence like that. It smelled of grass and dirt and leaves and wood and pine cones. Whoever dug the hole out, took the dirt with them. Why? Then she saw— next to the edge, on top of the branches, berries were laid out: overripe, rotting blackberries, blueberries, pieces of apple. Cut pieces of apple.
It was a trap!
A trap for a very large animal, an animal that could fall into the hole and break something, and not be able to get back out.
But what kind of animal would be this big in these parts of the country? She couldn’t think. A deer?
And it was then that she heard a noise behind her, and she was surprised at the noise, because it wasn’t just a howl or a hoot. It was a respiratory noise. A noise of someone, of something breathing in... and then slowly breathing out.
Someone big.
She turned around.
Twenty meters away from her at the edge of the clearing stood a large, dark brown bear on his four legs. His head was tilted to her, his small eyes were unblinking, intensely alert.
Tatiana froze. She had never seen a bear. She didn’t know bears lived in these woods. She couldn’t remember if they were carnivores, if they were peaceful, if you needed to make overtures or stand at attention, if you needed to offer them a piece of something, which they would come and eat out of your hand. She didn’t know. She thought any animal that was that wide, that hairy, that four-legged, and that watchful, could not be coming to eat out of her hand. Could a bear outrun her? A bear was not a tiger; could a bear even run? He looked so c
lumsy and immobile. And he was immobile. He was just standing flat-footed on all fours, his small head raised, his small eyes unblinking.
Tatiana smiled. She breathed though her open terrified mouth. Her heart was thundering. The bear breathed too, she could hear him. She didn’t want to do anything to scare him, do anything that might be perceived as threatening. She didn’t want to raise her hands, she didn’t want to step back—or step forward, certainly. She did the only thing she could think of, the only thing she ever did when she didn’t know how to make things better but when she wanted to calm, to comfort, to bring impossible things down to possible. She stood motionlessly and very slowly opened her hands, palms out, as if to say, it’s all right. Why such a fuss? Shh. Please.
Bear-baiting. In Shakespeare somewhere she had read about dogs being loosed on bears, on a stage? In a cage? They were loosed until one or other perished. How many dogs, a pack? How many bears, one? Here, there was one matted brown bear and one matted blonde Tatiana.
She glanced sideways at the trees nearby. They were pines, with no low branches. Did bears scale trees? Why hadn’t she read more about bears? Why did all her reading not once lead her to a bear? The pines were so useless! There wasn’t even one suitable for climbing.
And so they stood in the middle of the woods, just Tatiana and a hairy (carnivorous?) four-legged, flat-footed giant mammal. There was a small startling cluster of sound from behind her, a twig falling under the weight of a bird. The bear seemed to smell her well, because he took a slow step forward. Tatiana took a slow step back. She was between the bear and the trap. Could she long-jump over a three-meter-wide hole in the ground? She didn’t think so. Could the bear? She thought so.
“Easy, bear,” she said softly.
The bear breathed. “Honey bear.”