First Cosmic Velocity

by Zach Powers

  “It looks like we replaced one hole with another,” said the younger Leonid.

  “Better a hole that will keep out the cold,” said Mrs. Tarasenko.

  She offered them tea, but the boys declined. Neither drank tea, and certainly not the stuff that passed for tea anymore. When she opened the door, Mr. Tarasenko shouted his thanks from inside. The door slammed shut, shuddering the whole cottage. The Leonids worried that their work would fall apart as soon as they had completed it, but the cottage held together, like it always had.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE LEONIDS WALKED home down the dirt path from the village. A dry scent kicked up with the dust. The route was not the most direct—it was a much quicker jaunt through the forest, where a trail had been worn by years of the twins’ shortcutting. The village had been as quiet as the forest this morning, everyone holed up indoors. Maybe a few out trying their hand at hunting, up the mountain in the thicker forest, hoping to snare a dinner of stringy squirrel meat.

  A long, low whistle came from the direction of the pass, rising in pitch throughout its duration. The train. It had been months since it last came. The older Leonid had almost forgotten the sound. As if choreographed, villagers emerged from their homes, tugging light coats over disheveled shirts. Gathering barrows, slings, and carts, they formed a line and marched in the direction of the station. The Leonids joined the procession next to Oksana. She carried a basket large enough for one of them to fit inside. Her face bore a wide scar on the cheek, a mark that the older Leonid did not remember from before.

  The screech of the train’s brakes carried over the trees, the pitch short and high. The twins knew this meant there was not much cargo. When it used to arrive fully laden, the sound of the brakes was more of a moan, as if the mountain itself griped against holding up the train’s weight. The villagers ahead of them picked up their pace.

  Shouts came from the station as soon as the brakes silenced. The voices were too far away to make out what was said. A few words carried through the trees, but still did not make any sense. Russian. The Leonids had learned some of the language before the teacher was taken away, but the words they heard now they did not know. The shouting stopped, followed by a series of pops, the sound like punctuation.

  Oksana pulled the twins to the side of the road.

  “Go back to your home,” she said. “Go inside and stay there, and if anyone comes, let them in.”

  “Who’s coming?” asked the older Leonid.

  “Go now. Run.”

  From around the bend several figures came into view. In some places they seemed to sprout extra limbs. Rifles. These were soldiers, like the ones the Leonids remembered from years ago, like how their father had looked in his uniform, buried in the middle of all that equipment. The twins turned and ran, jutting off the main road onto the path through the woods.

  Grandmother waited for them on the front step, wringing a cloth in her hands. When they made it to the door, she ushered them inside and had them sit at the table.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “The train arrived,” said the younger Leonid, “but soldiers got off. They fired their guns before we got close to the station. Oksana told us to run home, so we did.”

  “Good, good. You’re to stay at this table. Even if a soldier comes to the cottage, stay seated. If they tell you to do something, do it. Do not raise a single word in protest.”

  “What’s happening?” asked the older Leonid.

  “All will be well. We just have to wait for the soldiers to leave.”

  Grandmother joined the twins at the table. Minutes passed and then time stretched into a blur. Grandmother fetched three cups of water, but no one drank.

  Usually, the older Leonid could only sit still for so long. The energy pent up inside him would build and build until he could not contain it. Grandmother would be scolding him to stop fidgeting before he even realized he had begun. Sometimes he excused himself outside if only to run, to release the feeling of being trapped inside himself. But this type of sitting was different. Instead of filling him with energy, it drained him. He stretched his hearing as far as it could go, searching for the faintest noise in the distance, trying to deduce what was happening in the rest of the village by variations in the wind. Whenever he noticed his own body, all the muscles were tensed. He forced himself to relax, only to tense again as soon as his mind returned to listening. Even breathing became difficult, like when the air was thick and soupy in summer. But it was not summer.

  The younger Leonid’s posture betrayed no tension at all. The only sign that he was even alive was a nervous tapping of his foot. No matter how often Grandmother scolded him to stop, he could not still the tapping. Right then, she did not even comment on it. Her own fingers rapped out the same agitation atop the table.

  It must have been hours. No one approached the cottage. The older Leonid felt his body unclench, muscles loosening. He took the water from the table and sipped it. It tasted of metal and sulfur. The same as it had always tasted, the only water he had ever known. He wondered why he noticed these flavors now. He sighed, and then his grandmother sighed. The younger Leonid kept tapping his foot. And then he stopped.

  “Did you hear that?” he asked.

  The older Leonid realized he had stopped listening for the approach of the soldiers. He forced the invisible arms of his ears out farther, past the walls and the surrounding forest. He heard nothing, though, except the ambient wind. “I hear noth—” he began, but then the sound reached him, a noise carried barely above the wind. One quick pop. It was fainter, but Leonid recognized the sound from before. A shot fired from a Russian rifle.

  “Stay here,” said Grandmother.

  She went to the door and cracked it open, leaning her ear to the gap. She closed the door.

  “They’re coming,” she said.

  “But the sound was far away,” said the older Leonid.

  “Then there is more than one group of them. I heard steps coming from the path.”

  The older Leonid was not sure whether to believe her. Sometimes she had trouble hearing him speak from across the cottage. Outside, on windy days, she would often ask him to repeat himself two or three times before she finally understood what he said. She might have just heard the rustle of branches in the breeze.

  A knock came on the door.

  “Come in,” said Grandmother.

  The door opened, and the barrel of a gun jutted through, followed by the soldier who held it. After him came another gun followed by another soldier. The first soldier kept an eye on the table while the other used her rifle to poke through the items on the shelf beside the stove. There was not much there to see.

  “Does anyone else live here?” asked the second soldier. She spoke in broken Ukrainian, with an accent that made her difficult to understand.

  “Just the three of us,” said Grandmother.

  The soldier pointed to the twins. “Father?”

  “He died in the war.”

  The soldiers looked at each other and nodded. They lowered their weapons.

  The second soldier stepped toward the table and looked closely at the boys. She said a word in Russian.

  “I don’t understand,” said Grandmother.

  “The word, I do not know it. Two people who are the same.”

  “Twins,” said Grandmother.

  “Yes, twins.”

  The first soldier pulled out a notepad from one of his uniform’s many pockets and wrote something down. The second soldier pointed to one of the full cups of water on the table.

  “May I?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Grandmother.

  The soldier took the cup and gulped down half its contents. Water glistened on her upper lip. She licked it away. She returned the cup, making an extra effort to set it in the exact same spot from which
it had been taken.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  The soldiers left and shut the door behind them. Grandmother rose from the table, and refilled her cup from the urn. She downed the water in gulps even greater than those of the soldier. She tried to hide a burp behind her hand, but the boys heard it anyway. Resting one hand high on the wall and leaning forward, she sucked in deep, deliberate breaths. Even on the worst day, the Leonids had never seen her look so tired.

  She returned to the table, and the three of them listened again for noises that might let them know what was happening in the rest of the village. But no noise came until the train whistle sounded, followed by the faint chugging as the train climbed the mountain back up the pass.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE VILLAGE SAT silent and listless as the Leonids followed Grandmother down the main path. A few of the cottage doors gaped, swaying in the breeze, but no one could be seen inside, no voices were heard. Squirrels sometimes chittered from a tree branch, but the squirrels were few. Grandmother knocked on the door to the Shvetses’ cottage. No answer. It was as if the train had taken everyone when it departed.

  A little farther on, soft murmurs intruded on the silence. At first they sounded far away, but then through an overhang of trees the speakers became visible, a knot of them outside the Tarasenkos’ cottage. Everyone who was missing from their own homes seemed to be gathered there. Beyond them, the hole in the wall, fixed not hours before, was back, the new boards pried away and missing.

  “Why would they take the boards?” asked the younger Leonid.

  Grandmother did not answer, edging toward the cottage with short steps. The other villagers watched her approach. She pushed through them to the wall and peered into the hole. She held her hand to her mouth as if to stifle a yawn. The Leonids peeked around her.

  Mr. Tarasenko lay flat on his back on the floor, unmoving. His dingy shirt now sported three crimson blossoms, two over his stomach and one on his chest. The same color was dripped on the table, on one of the chairs, and in streaks across the floor. Red footprints surrounded the body like the steps to a frantic dance.

  Grandmother pulled the Leonids away. The younger, though, wrenched himself free of her grip and leaned his head all the way through the hole. Grandmother released the older Leonid, and he gazed through the hole from a few steps away. One of the villagers sat with Mrs. Tarasenko on the straw-stuffed bed in the corner. Mrs. Tarasenko’s hands were red, and her fingers choked a blood-soaked rag.

  The older Leonid placed his hand on his brother’s shoulder and drew him away from the hole.

  “Careful, or you’ll fall through,” said the older Leonid.

  They stood at the edge of the clustered villagers as Mrs. Kharms explained that the soldiers had seen the fresh wood on the wall and decided to take it. No one knew why. Mr. Tarasenko had risen to protest, but with his bad back stumbled forward instead, directly into one of the soldiers. The soldier reacted by releasing two shots into Mr. Tarasenko’s stomach from only centimeters away.

  “How do you know all this?” asked Grandmother.

  “Mrs. Tarasenko was strangely calm when we arrived,” said Mrs. Kharms. “In shock, I suppose. She told us the details as if she was talking about cooking.”

  She continued, explaining how Mr. Tarasenko had collapsed back onto the floor, like he was now, but still breathing, rubbing at his stomach like scratching an itch. That was how Mrs. Tarasenko described it, like an itch. He might as well have already been dead, two bullets in him and no doctor. The first soldier, the one who had fired, backed away, bumping into the door. Tears were in his eyes but he wasn’t exactly crying. The other soldier, a higher rank, knelt over Mr. Tarasenko, lifting up his shirt to inspect the wound. He apologized several times. There was nothing he could do. He stood, sighted his rifle, and fired one shot into Mr. Tarasenko’s chest.

  “Mrs. Tarasenko talked about the expression on her husband’s face,” said Mrs. Kharms, “but I’m not sure I should say it with the children here.”

  “They’re old enough,” said Grandmother. “If they were not before today, then they certainly are now.”

  “Mrs. Tarasenko said it was the face he used to make, when they were younger and they used to . . .”

  One of the young men of the village failed to stifle a laugh. A round of chuckles passed through the small crowd, Grandmother included.

  “Then the soldiers gathered the two boards and left,” said Mrs. Kharms. “All this over some crude hunks of wood.”

  “It’s never as simple as that,” said Grandmother.

  “The boards were all they took from this cottage, but before you arrived, we were trying to inventory everything that was taken. All the carts we hauled to the train station. The plows from our fields. The goats. A few sacks of grain. If they had brought more sacks, I suspect they would have taken it all. We may not know everything that was taken for days yet, not until we go to look for something and it’s not there.”

  “She can’t stay here tonight,” said Grandmother, pointing through the hole in the wall.

  “Mrs. Shvets already offered her home. They have room for one more.”

  “It seems as if we are always making room,” said Grandmother. “Come, boys.”

  She walked away, not down the path, but up into the forest, where the ground was bedded with leaves and the sun shone down in specks.

  * * *

  • • •

  “I THOUGHT SOLDIERS were supposed to be heroes,” said the older Leonid. They were deep enough in the forest that the Tarasenko cottage was out of sight. “Father was a soldier, and you always tell us how brave he was, but what’s brave about shooting Mr. Tarasenko? Is that what Father did in other villages?”

  “Your father never did such a thing,” said Grandmother. “His enemy came with guns and tanks and planes, and if not for men like your father, they would’ve destroyed everything in their path. One of the villagers who returned from the war had been in Stalingrad. It was not even a city anymore after the battle there, just a pile of stones that used to be buildings. That’s what your father fought against. If he ever killed a man, then it was a man who also wished to kill him.”

  “Stalingrad’s far away. Why did Father have to go there, and why do soldiers from there come here?”

  Grandmother slipped on a mound of brown leaves, stumbling up the slope. The younger Leonid reached out to steady her.

  “Have I ever told you about the man our village was named after?” asked Grandmother.

  Neither brother responded.

  “After the Battle of Cecora, Bohdan Zinoviy Mykhaylovych Khmelnytsky was captured by the Ottomans. He was sold to an Ottoman admiral as a slave, set to work on the oars of the admiral’s boat. Forty oars, each manned by two slaves. The wound on his chest had healed, but on cold nights it ached, and it ached when he thought of his father. There were many cold nights. He lay awake on the wooden bench, an infinity of stars above him. When waves rocked the boat, they slid him to and fro, slivering splinters into his back. Each morning, the slaves pinched the splinters from each other’s skin.

  “Khmelnytsky was one of the few Cossacks, and they were forbidden from speaking to each other. How dizzying it must be to be surrounded by people but to still be alone. Instead of speaking, Khmelnytsky listened, picking up the Turks’ language a word at a time, practicing the shape of the words in his mouth even as he rowed and rowed and rowed. Years of Khmelnytsky’s life passed like this, uncountable splashes of the oar against the Black Sea. His skin darkened and his muscles turned to ropes like the ones used to moor the boat.

  “The Ottomans were not a people to know peace. As often as not, Khmelnytsky rowed toward battle, archers arrayed along the sides of the boat, bows drawn, like statuary around a church. The old churches in large cities used to have statues of angels and saints. Khmelnytsky had seen these in
his youth, not knowing that one day the statues would be of him.

  “The admiral commanded his boat and dozens of others, and he usually led them to easy victories, overwhelming the small boats that seaside villages sent out in futile defense.

  “It was early morning, the Black Sea as calm as a pond. The Ottoman fleet sailed straight for a small village, barely more than a fishing camp. It seemed like it would be a short battle and an easy victory. Two dozen skiffs launched from the village. The smaller boats weaved so quickly through the Ottoman fleet that the archers missed target after target, their arrows sliding like sleek divers into the water. The skiffs carried archers of their own, and the tall, proud Ottomans proved to be easy targets. The first archer felled on Khmelnytsky’s boat collapsed across his lap, and he shucked the body overboard. More archers fell. The boat lurched, and then turned hard to port, carving a circle in the water. The rudder-man had been killed, his body left leaning hard against the tiller. More archers fell. All around, the Ottoman fleet scattered in different directions.

  “Khmelnytsky bounded to the back of the boat, running in spite of the shackles around his ankles, and hauled the rudder-man out of the way. He gestured to the oarsman in back, just a boy, all long limbs and sinew, to take up the post. The boat straightened out, facing away from shore. The admiral, at the prow, screamed orders to his men and waved signals to the other boats. The admiral was a formidable military man himself and managed to regroup his boats into a defensive posture even as arrows slashed the air around him. He was about to organize a retreat when Khmelnytsky spoke, his voice ringing loud and deep. Months in the sun had creased the corners of his eyes. His hair, after the battle where he’d watched his father die, had gained early streaks of silver. It was impossible not to listen. He told the admiral to sail toward the beachhead, as fast as the oarsmen could manage, grouping bowmen at the stern to fire at the enemy skiffs. The admiral obeyed. By the time the Ottomans landed, the enemy boats were far behind, the bulk of the village’s men on them. A small contingent took the village while the Ottoman archers held the beach, decimating the small boats long before they got close to shore.