Probably Monsters

by Ray Cluley

  As she eats she wonders about the thunder that has changed his mind and hopes that it was her.

  S

  As Ana is the only woman in the group she’s given a shelter to herself. It’s unnecessary but she appreciates it; it means she has a surprisingly large sagging canvas bed that sits off the ground on an iron frame. Roped timbers and boughs that still have their bark form the walls, each draped with dark tarpaulin and natural foliage. One “wall” is only wire, open to the camp, but she’s able to hang blankets on it for privacy.

  She lies fully clothed in her sleeping bag under several other blankets, her arms wrapped around her stomach, shivering. It will take her a while to adapt again to Russia’s weather. She thinks of the little one she knows is inside her. Adapting. Russia will make her strong. This time it will be different. It doesn’t matter what the doctors said, the doctors are wrong. That whole country had been wrong. None of it would have ever happened if she’d stayed in Russia. She thinks of how many times she’s woken with an ache in her breasts, her nightshirt wet with the smell of her own milk, and tries not to think of such things.

  The roof of her shelter is mostly branches but a sheet of corrugated iron rests directly above her bed. Rust has eaten holes into the metal and she catches glimpses of stars when the dark clouds shift. They’re clear and bright. She thinks of how they had looked reflected in Kurilskoye Lake. Aleks had taken her all that way to show her the bears.

  “I’ve seen a bear,” she’d told him, gently mocking his poor excuse to get her away but appreciating the effort. She’d always wanted to see the lake. She may have even said as much, which was all the more reason to appreciate his effort.

  “You’ve seen a bear,” Aleks repeated.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to show you lots of bears.”

  And he had. Brown bears were usually solitary animals but at Kurilskoye Lake Ana had seen groups of them clawing fish from the water.

  “The salmon brings them together,” Aleksandr said. She’d thought it deliberately romantic but then he handed her some flares, saying, “In case they get too close.” She still has them somewhere, like treasured love letters.

  “Have you really come back?”

  Ana raises herself onto her elbows and looks at Aleks, backlit in the doorway by the dying embers of the fire outside. He’s little more than a silhouette, speaking as if in a dream, but if he’s sleepwalking then he’s doing it fully dressed, boots on, hat pulled down against the cold.

  “I don’t know,” Ana says.

  Aleksandr steps into the shelter. He comes up to her bed and puts a hand to her hair. She’d let it grow while in America but before returning she’d cut it back to the length Aleks remembers.

  “It feels like you have,” Aleks says.

  Ana turns back the blankets. “Hungry?”

  Aleks pulls at the zipper of her sleeping bag for his answer and joins her.

  S

  “Are you all right?” Aleks asks afterwards. There’s enough light from the moon and stars that Ana can see the way his skin glistens with sweat. He can probably still taste the salt of hers on his lips. It had felt more like coming home than anything else, but . . .

  “Ana?”

  “I don’t know.” She doesn’t know anything any more. “I’m pregnant,” she says.

  Aleksandr laughs. He does it as quietly as they’d made love. “You can’t know that already,” he says, smiling. He strokes her hair and meets her eyes and she sees in his face more than she had ever seen before, things that make her wish she’d never left. Then she sees his realization. His hurt. His anger. He rolls away from her, as much as he is able.

  “Aleks—”

  “We’ll sleep,” he says. “Talk in the morning.”

  Ana doubts both, but with Aleks beside her the first comes easily.

  S

  She wakes from a bad dream. She immediately knows where she is, and she knows Aleksandr is gone before the grey morning light can show her, but the residue of her nightmare is still strong with her so she tosses the blankets aside, yanks the sleeping bag open without fumbling for the zip, and checks between her legs. In her dream she had birthed a warm gush of ruby-red eggs, thousands and thousands of them. The tide of roe had flooded her sleeping bag until it was full and somehow she had drowned in it. Awake, she fears the dream was an interpretation of a miscarriage.

  Her hands are wet at her thighs, and sticky, but not with blood, and not with eggs. Some of Aleks is still with her. Inside her, swimming to a place they can never reach.

  Ana’s relief is only momentary: she remembers more of the dream. This time she pulls at the jumper she’d put on in the sleepy hours. She tugs it up to her chest, exposing her belly, but sees nothing of the scales she’d dreamt were there. No gleaming silver. No red flush. Only the scar.

  Physically it’s healing well; a long river of pink puckering her skin, tiny dots either side where the stitches had been. But even as it heals she feels her baby girl growing behind it. The baby they had taken from her, cut from a womb she couldn’t push her from. They had taken her body, her tiny body (small enough to fit in the palm of your hand) but Ana didn’t need expensive American scans to know that her little girl is still there, and she doesn’t need anyone to believe her either. “They come back,” she’d told Tom, reminding him of his own words, but when he’d said it he’d only meant the fish. “She’s come back.”

  Ana strokes her scar. “We’re home now,” she tells her stomach. “The mother country.”

  She settles back into bed thinking of her dream and thinking of Khantai. He’d spoken to her, but she doesn’t understand his message.

  S

  As she dresses, Ana is struck by the quiet. The early morning is almost silent. She hears men moving around, occasionally exchanging a word or two, but mostly all she hears is the river.

  Outside, some of the men are dismantling the tents and setting equipment beside the boat and tank-tracked vehicle. One man is making breakfast, which smells like burnt porridge. Another, dressed only in his long-legged underwear, exercises with a dumbbell made of engine parts set at either end of a metal bar. He smiles good morning and strikes a foolish pose and Ana smiles, though she finds it difficult.

  Aleks is standing at one of the rusted drums. He barely looks at her when she approaches but he says, “Good morning, Anastasia.” He’s dismantling his rifle, setting the pieces on the corroded barrel top.

  “He seems to be struggling,” Ana says, nodding to the man with his engine weights.

  Aleks shrugs. “He’s managing.”

  Ana takes a deep breath of crisp morning air, rich with the aroma of hot oats and trees and soil, and underneath it all . . . the river. “Smells good.”

  “Porridge. Unless you want fish heads?”

  “Why would I want—”

  But she remembers. During a conversation about the Itelmen he’d told her how they fermented fish heads in a barrel. The heads were rich in vitamins and were used to clear out the stomach. Ana can’t tell if he’s thinking of her health, or the baby that will eventually make her stomach swell.

  “You sound like him now,” Aleks says.

  “Who?”

  “You have an accent. A different accent. And sometimes you use English words.” He glances at her, daring her to ask when. She remembers when.

  “I’m the same woman.”

  Aleks says nothing. The only expression on his face is one of concentration as he cleans his rifle, pushing a dirty rag into the barrel.

  “I’m still Ana.”

  “So you’ll leave again?”

  Ana returns his own stoic expression but he doesn’t see, only hears her silence.

  “Will he come back for you?”

  “Will you care? Will you do anything thi
s time?”

  Aleks busies himself reassembling his rifle.

  “Aleks, please. Do you need to do that?”

  He levers the bolt action back and tests the firing mechanism. “Yes.” He looks at her. “We treat poachers differently now.”

  S

  Among the rest of the group, Aleksandr is all business. He explains to Ana how the Bolshaya has become even easier to get to since the new pipeline. The pipeline takes gas to Petropavlovsk and crosses many rivers, even the protected Kol. The roads that came with it means the rivers are easily plundered. In recent years, resources had been increased to put a stop to poaching but it only means the poachers have become more desperate.

  “Some of them even come here, to protected land. Not poor men, doing what they need to, but organized criminals. And so . . .” Aleksandr hefts the rifle slung over his shoulder to make his point.

  We treat poachers differently now.

  Ana looks away, only to see the tracked vehicle belch fumes as it grumbles into life, engine warming as the men prepare to move out.

  “It gets stuck,” Sergei tells her, leaning close and speaking quietly. “We won’t go with that group.”

  The team is dividing. Ana is to go with Aleks and Sergei and two others. She had been introduced to them as an employee of the American WSC rather than the Russian WFBF and she had nodded, though she works for neither organization now. She has returned for more personal reasons.

  Ana says, “This cannot pay as much.”

  Aleksandr glances up from loading the johnboat, grunts as he hefts another canvas bag. “Ne v dengah schastye.”

  She had said the same thing to him many times, trying to persuade him to stop poaching. Money is not the key to happiness. “So what is?”

  He stops stowing the equipment and looks upriver. Downriver. Finally he looks at her. “I don’t know anymore,” he says. “Do you?”

  Ana thinks she does but says nothing. She bends to grab one of the crates but Sergei takes it from her before she can lift it. He casts a look at her stomach and she puts a hand over it, feeling only the coolness of her waterproof jacket and the soft padding of layered clothing beneath. She doesn’t need to feel anything else.

  “What was it like?” Sergei asks. “You know, over in the great United States?” He probably only means to give her something to do, but she wishes he hadn’t brought it up. Aleksandr, though, acts like he hasn’t heard. He takes the offered boxes and bags, puts them down, takes more, all without looking at her.

  “It was very different,” she says.

  “Better?”

  Instead of answering with a yes or no, Ana explains that most of her work had involved touring hatcheries to ensure they were limiting their numbers. The salmon produced in hatcheries were competing with the wild salmon and the wild salmon were losing out to the more predatory and aggressive hatchery-reared fish.

  “There are lots of fish, but not the right kind.”

  “Poachers?” Sergei asks.

  “Some. Not like here.”

  “Dull,” says Sergei.

  He’s joking, but it’s true. “Yes,” she says. Some of the salmon in her district had even been landlocked, stuck in lakes and reservoirs. They were safe, secure, but they were prisoners.

  Aleks starts the boat. “Come on,” he says, “let’s go.”

  “Where are we going?” Ana asks.

  Sergei points. “Upriver.”

  “Like the salmon.”

  Aleks gives her a single nod, “Yes,” and then they’re moving.

  Ana looks behind and watches their wake, thinking of how wide it spreads from a single point. She wonders how it affects the fish.

  Many people romanticize the salmon’s journey, their noble efforts against the current, their determination in the face of adversity, but to Ana their struggle is tragic. They face so many challenges both in leaving the place of their birth and in returning to it, particularly these salmon, Pacific salmon, which survive several perils only to breed once and then die. It’s difficult to appreciate the miracle of birth, Ana thinks, considering the cruel swift finality of death that follows. She thinks of her own little one, the way she had slipped from her body all bloody and silent and tiny, unable to even breathe, drowning in the air. Put her back, she had told them. She isn’t ready. But they had taken her anyway.

  “Ana?”

  She looks away from the river to see Sergei, frowning. She smiles, or tries to, then turns from him before he can ask anything more.

  There are two other men with them in the boat and they stand talking, sharing a cigarette. They had been introduced to her only by surname, Osipov and Zaporotsky, and she can no longer remember which is which. Both have the same lean build and angular faces. Had she not known their surnames she would suppose them brothers.

  One of them notices her looking and asks, “Why are you here?”

  Because it will be different this time, Ana thinks.

  The other soldier laughs and slaps his friend across the head. “This is Yuri Osipov and he has no manners.”

  “We don’t see many women on the river, even from the foundation,” Osipov explains.

  Zaporotsky apologizes. “We’re glad you’re here.”

  Ana looks at Aleksandr. He’s focusing on the river, navigating their slow course with more concentration than is necessary.

  “Ana once caught a notorious poacher single-handed,” Sergei says. He puts his hand on her shoulder and winks at her. “Nobody else had ever managed it.”

  “What happened?” Osipov asks, reaching for his turn with the cigarette.

  Ana says, “I let him go,” then, “He got away.”

  “Well, which is it?”

  “Enough talk,” Aleks says.

  For a few moments the thrum of the outboard is the only sound, but Ana answers anyway. “I don’t know,” she says to Osipov. “Perhaps both.”

  Sergei inhales from his cigarette. “Doesn’t matter now,” he says, and uses the release of his smoke to signal an end to that conversation. “These are military men,” he explains to Ana. One of them, Osipov, salutes her. “They are more interested in poachers than fish.”

  Ana nods.

  “Did you know,” Sergei says to the soldiers, “salmon change their colour? They start silver in the freshwater, but when circumstances force them to, they adapt.”

  Ana can tell that Aleks is listening, though he only stares ahead. She thinks Sergei’s analogy is clumsy but the soldiers won’t know.

  “They adapt?”

  “They have to. They lose the silver, become darker. Stronger, too.”

  Aleks nods. Ana doubts anyone else notices.

  “And when they are ready to spawn, they come home,” Sergei finishes. Ana flushes with embarrassment, or maybe shame, but Sergei only nods. “And they become a deep red colour,” he adds, smiling.

  “A proper Russian fish,” says Osipov.

  “A Soviet fish,” Aleks says. “A thing of the past.”

  “They are not gone yet,” says Sergei. He points to where a short run of rapids feeds into the river, water frothing over rocks, and all but Aleks turn to see salmon leaping, throwing themselves without mercy against the current. Their bodies arc and flap and twist, bright and beautiful, but they make little progress. Another evolutionary test.

  “We need to protect them,” Sergei says, “right, comrade?”

  The soldiers laugh and Ana smiles. She had missed Sergei.

  “Aleksandr?” Sergei says.

  Aleks says, “Yes,” but it sounds like a question.

  Zaporotsky crushes his cigarette out against the side of the boat and sees something in the water. “Look.”

  A salmon passes them downriver. Floating. It’s been folded open, though plenty
of its meat remains. Another passes them, and another, and Aleks slows the boat to look himself. There are so many. Silver ghosts, turning, vanishing, passing beneath them. One bumps against the boat and flattens into a cubist perspective that shows Ana both sides of the fish at once. It stares at her for a moment with two dead eyes before rolling over to show its open vacant belly and sinking, gone before the water can close the wound.

  Aleks kills the engine and steers the boat to the riverbank. It’s suddenly very quiet.

  “Ana? Are you all right?”

  She wants to clutch her stomach but she’s too afraid of what she might not feel.

  “I’ll be fine,” she says, and wonders if it will ever be true.

  S

  The poachers are easy to find. There’s only two of them, but Aleks is cautious. He signals for Osipov and Zaporotsky to take flanking positions and as they circle the camp, fast and quiet, he whispers for Ana to, “Wait.”

  Ana nods. She has no authority here, and no rifle even had she wanted one. She does have a baby. She does. That’s all the reason she needs to wait.

  Sergei puts a cigarette in his mouth but does not light it.

  The two men are manoeuvring a couple of plastic drums, rolling them in tight upright circles towards a tree that leans out over the river almost horizontally, an easy marker to find later. The site has been cleared, meadowsweet cut and trampled flat where tents might have been, though now only two large backpacks and a prepared campfire occupy the space. Ana can see no weapons but that doesn’t mean the men aren’t armed. Both are large and muscular. One has short brown hair and a dark beard that does not grow well. The other wears a furred hat with flaps over his ears. It looks new. There is no sign of a boat. Maybe it’s hidden further upriver.

  Aleks nods at Sergei and stands from cover. “My name is Aleksandr Khalilov,” he announces, approaching. Sergei follows.

  The poachers stop and look up, clearly startled. They look at Aleks, then at Sergei, and back to Aleks. Aleks has his rifle in front of him but only holds it with one hand against his body to stop it swinging on its strap. With the other he gestures, “This is Sergei Sakharovskaya.”