Disappearing Earth

by Julia Phillips

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2019 by Julia K. B. Phillips, Inc.

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Several chapters in this novel were originally published, in different form, in the following publications: “August” first appeared as “Disappearing Earth” in Confrontation Magazine (Fall 2016); “September” first appeared as “Anya” in The Toast (January 2016); “November” first appeared as “Valentina” in Vol. 1 Brooklyn (May 2015); “February” first appeared as “Galya” in The Antioch Review (Winter 2016); “March” first appeared as “Nadia” in Glimmer Train (May 2016); “April” first appeared as “Nina” in The Brooklyn Quarterly (Fall 2015); and “May” first appeared as “Lera” in The Rumpus (August 2015).

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Phillips, Julia, author.

  Title: Disappearing Earth : a novel / by Julia Phillips.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018030958 (print) | LCCN 2018032011 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525520412 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525520429 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525520429 (open market)

  Classification: LCC PS3616.H4585 (ebook) | LCC PS3616.H4585 D57 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018030958

  Ebook ISBN 9780525520429

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Map on this page by Jeffrey L. Ward

  Cover images: Kamchatka Peninsula at sunrise, Russia, by Ignacio Palacios / Lonely Planet / Getty Images; (figures) Michael Ormerod / Millennium Images, UK

  Cover design by Janet Hansen

  v5.4

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Principal Characters

  Map

  August

  September

  October

  November

  December

  New Year’s

  January

  February

  March

  April

  May

  June

  July

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  To Alex, my dar, my Дap

  PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS

  THE GOLOSOVSKY FAMILY

  Marina Alexandrovna, a journalist in the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky

  Alyona, her older daughter

  Sophia, her younger daughter

  THE SOLODIKOV FAMILY

  Alla Innokentevna, head of a cultural center in the village of Esso

  Natalia, called Natasha, her oldest daughter

  Denis, her middle child and only son

  Lilia, her youngest daughter

  Revmira, her second cousin, a nurse

  Lev and Yulia, called Yulka, Natasha’s children

  THE ADUKANOV FAMILY

  Ksenia, called Ksyusha, a university student

  Sergei, called Chegga, her brother, a photographer

  Ruslan, Ksyusha’s boyfriend

  Nadezhda, called Nadia, Chegga’s girlfriend

  Ludmila, called Mila, Nadia’s daughter

  THE RYAKHOVSKY FAMILY

  Nikolai Danilovich, called Kolya, a police detective

  Zoya, his wife, on maternity leave from her work at a national park

  Alexandra, called Sasha, their baby

  Oksana, a researcher at the volcanological institute

  Maxim, called Max, a researcher at the volcanological institute

  Ekaterina, called Katya, a customs officer for the city’s maritime container port

  Yevgeny Pavlovich Kulik, the major general of the Kamchatka police force

  Anfisa, an administrative assistant for the police

  Valentina Nikolaevna, an office administrator for a city elementary school

  Diana, Valentina Nikolaevna’s daughter

  Lada, a receptionist at a city hotel

  Olga, called Olya, a schoolgirl

  AUGUST

  Sophia, sandals off, was standing at the water’s edge. The bay snuck up to swallow her toes. Gray salt water over bright skin. “Don’t go out any farther,” Alyona said.

  The water receded. Alyona could see, under her sister’s feet, the pebbles breaking the curves of Sophia’s arches, the sweep of grit left by little waves. Sophia bent to roll up her pant legs, and her ponytail flipped over the top of her head. Her calves showed flaking streaks of blood from scratched mosquito bites. Alyona knew from the firm line of her sister’s spine that Sophia was refusing to listen.

  “You better not,” Alyona said.

  Sophia stood to face the water. It was calm, barely touched by ripples that made the bay look like a sheet of hammered tin. The current got stronger as it pulled into the Pacific, leaving Russia behind for open ocean, but here it was domesticated. It belonged to them. Hands propped on narrow hips, Sophia surveyed it, the width of the bay, the mountains on the horizon, the white lights of the military installation on the opposite shore.

  The gravel under the sisters was made of chips from bigger stones. Alyona leaned against a block the size of a hiking backpack, and a meter behind her was the crumbling cliff face of St. Nicholas Hill. Water on one side, rock wall on the other, they had walked along the coast this afternoon until they found this patch, free of bottles or feathers, to settle. When seagulls landed nearby, Alyona chased them away with a wave of her arm. The whole summer had been cool, drizzly, but this August afternoon was warm enough to wear short sleeves.

  Sophia took a step out, and her heel went under.

  Alyona sat up. “Soph, I said no!” Her sister backed up. A gull flew over. “Why do you have to be such a brat?”

  “I’m not.”

  “You are. You always are.”

  “No,” Sophia said, turning around. Her tipped-up eyes, thin lips, sharp jaw, even the point of her nose annoyed Alyona. At eight years old, Sophia still looked six. Alyona, three years older, was short for her age, but Sophia was tiny all over, from waist to wrists, and sometimes acted like a kindergartener: she kept a row of stuffed animals at the foot of her bed, played pretend that she was a world-famous ballerina, couldn’t fall asleep at night if she caught even one scene of a horror movie on the television. Their mother indulged her. Being born second had given Sophia the privilege of staying a baby all her life.

  Gaze fixed on a spot on the cliff far above Alyona’s head, Sophia lifted one foot out of the water, pointed wet toes, and raised her arms to fifth position. She tipped and caught herself. Alyona shifted her seat on the stones. Their mother always tried to get Alyona to take her sister along to classmates’ apartments, but these little misdeeds were
exactly why she would not.

  Instead they had spent their summer vacation alone with each other. Alyona had taught Sophia how to do a back walkover in the damp parking lot behind their building. In July, they took the bus forty minutes to the municipal zoo, where they fed candy through the cage to a greedy black goat. Its slitted pupils swiveled in its head. Later that afternoon, Alyona pushed an unwrapped milk caramel through a chain-link fence to a lynx, which hissed at the sisters until they backed away. The caramel sat on the cement floor. So much for the zoo. When Alyona and Sophia’s mother left them money in the mornings before work, the sisters went to the cinema, and split a banana and chocolate crepe afterward at the café on its second floor. Most days, though, they hung around the city, watching rain clouds gather and the sunlight stretch out. Their faces tanned gradually. They took walks, or rode their bikes, or came here.

  While Sophia balanced, Alyona looked along the shore. A man was picking his way over the rocks. “Someone’s coming,” Alyona said. Her sister splashed one leg down and lifted the other. Sophia might not care who saw her act like an idiot, but Alyona, her forced companion, did. “Stop,” Alyona said. More loudly. Heating up in her mouth—“STOP.”

  Sophia stopped.

  Down the line of the water, the man was gone. He must have found some clean place to sit. All the frustration that had been rising inside Alyona seeped out like a bath when the drain was unplugged.

  “I’m bored,” said Sophia.

  Alyona lay back. The rock was hard on her shoulders, cold on her head. “Come here,” she said, and Sophia stepped out of the bay, picked her way over, and squirmed next to Alyona. The smallest stones crunched together. The breeze had left Sophia’s body as cool as the ground. “Want me to tell you a story?” Alyona asked.

  “Yes.”

  Alyona checked her phone. They had to be home in time for dinner, but it wasn’t even four o’clock. “Do you know about the town that washed away?”

  “No.” For someone who never obeyed, Sophia could be very attentive. Her chin lifted and her mouth pinched shut in concentration.

  Alyona pointed down the shore at the most distant cliffs. To the girls’ right was the city center, from where they had walked this afternoon; to the left, marking the mouth of the bay, were those black hulks. “It used to be there.”

  “In Zavoyko?”

  “Past Zavoyko.” They sat under the peak of St. Nicholas Hill. If they had kept walking along the shoreline today, they would have seen the stony side of the hill eventually lower, exposing the stacked squares of a neighborhood overhead. Five-story Soviet apartment buildings covered in patchwork concrete. The wooden frames of collapsed houses. A mirrored high-rise, pink and yellow, with a banner advertising business space for rent. Zavoyko was kilometers past all that, making it the last district of their city, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the last bit of land before sea. “It was at the edge of the cliff where the ocean meets the bay.”

  “Was it a big town?”

  “It was like a settlement. Like a village. Just fifty wooden houses, filled with soldiers, wives, and babies. This was years ago. After the Great Patriotic War.”

  Sophia thought about it. “Was there a school?”

  “Yes. A market, a pharmacy. Everything. A post office.” Alyona pictured it: stacked logs, carved window frames, doors painted turquoise. “It looked like a fairy tale. And there was a flagpole in the middle of town, and a square where people parked their old-fashioned cars.”

  “Okay,” Sophia said.

  “Okay. So one morning, the townspeople are making their breakfasts, feeding their cats, getting dressed for work, and the cliff starts to shake. It’s an earthquake. They’ve never felt such a strong one before. Walls are swaying, cups are smashing, furniture is—”

  Here Alyona looked to the gravel beside her but there was no washed-up branch for her to snap—

  “Furniture is breaking. The babies are crying in their cribs and their mothers can’t reach them. They can’t even stand up. It’s the biggest earthquake the peninsula has ever had.”

  “Their houses fall on them?” Sophia guessed.

  Alyona shook her head. The rock she leaned against pressed into her skull. “Just listen. After five minutes, the quake stops. It feels like forever to them. The babies keep crying but the people are so happy. They crawl toward each other to hug. Maybe some sidewalks split, some wires snapped, but they made it—they lived. They’re lying there holding each other and then, through the holes where their windows used to be, they see this shadow.”

  Sophia was unblinking.

  “It’s a wave. Twice as high as their houses.”

  “Over Zavoyko?” said Sophia. “That’s not possible. It’s too high.”

  “Past Zavoyko, I told you. This earthquake was that powerful. People felt it in Hawaii. People way off in Australia were asking their friends, ‘Did you bump into me?’ because something was making them rock on their feet. That’s how strong the quake was.”

  Her sister didn’t say anything.

  “It shook the whole ocean,” Alyona said. “It sent up a wave two hundred meters high. And it just…” She held her hand out in front of them, lined it up with the flat water of the bay, and swept it across the horizon.

  The air brushed cold on their bare arms. Somewhere nearby, birds were calling.

  “What happened to them?” Sophia finally asked.

  “No one knows. Everyone in the city was too distracted by the quake. Even in Zavoyko, they didn’t notice how the sky had gotten darker; they were busy sweeping up, checking in on their next-door neighbors, making repairs. When ocean water came down their streets, they just figured some pipes had burst uphill. But later, when the electricity came back on, somebody realized there were no lights coming from the edge of the cliff. The place where that town had been was empty.”

  The ripples in the bay made a quiet rhythm behind her words. Shh, shh. Shh, shh.

  “They went to look and found nothing. No people, no buildings, no traffic lights, no roads. No trees. No grass. It looked like the moon.”

  “Where’d they go?”

  “Washed away. The wave picked them up right where they lay, like this.” She propped herself on one elbow and gripped Sophia’s shoulder, its bones shifting under her palm. “That’s how tight the water was around their bodies. It locked them up inside their houses. It lifted the whole town and took it out to the Pacific. No one ever saw a sign of them again.”

  In the shadow of the hill, Sophia’s face was dark. Her lips were parted to show the ridged bottoms of her front teeth. Alyona liked, every so often, to bring her sister to a place where she looked blank with fear.

  “That’s not true,” Sophia said.

  “Yes, it is. I heard it at school.”

  The water, opaque in the afternoon light, was keeping its pace. It looked silver. The rocks Sophia had been standing on appeared and disappeared.

  “Can we go home?” Sophia asked.

  “It’s early.”

  “Still.”

  “Did I scare you?”

  “No.”

  In the center of the bay, a trawler pushed south, heading for whatever waited out there—Chukotka, Alaska, Japan. The sisters had never left the Kamchatka Peninsula. One day, their mother said, they would visit Moscow, but that was a nine-hour flight away, a whole continent’s distance, and would require them to cross above the mountains and seas and fault lines that isolated Kamchatka. They had never known a big earthquake, but their mother told them what one was like. She described how 1997 felt in their apartment: the kitchen light swinging high enough on its cord to smash against the ceiling, the cabinet doors swinging so jars of preserves could dance out, the eggy smell of leaking gas that made her head ache. On the street afterward, their mother said, she saw cars ground into one another and the asphalt opened up.

/>   Looking for this spot to sit, the sisters had walked far enough along the base of the hill to leave almost all signs of civilization behind. Only the ship, and the occasional pieces of litter—two-liter beer bottles dragging their labels, peeled-back can tops that once covered oiled herring, soggy cardboard cake circles—floating by. If a quake hit now, there would be no doorway for the two of them to stand in. Boulders would fall from the wall above. And then a wave would bear their bodies away.

  Alyona got up. “All right, come on,” she said.

  Sophia slipped back into her sandals. Her pants were still scrunched up to the knees. Together, they climbed over the biggest rocks and back toward the city center. Alyona slapped mosquitoes out of their way. Though they had eaten lunch at home before coming here, she was getting hungry again. “You’re growing,” their mother had said, mixed caution and surprise, when Alyona took a second fish patty at dinner earlier in the week. But she wasn’t getting any taller; she remained one of the smallest girls in her class, stuck in a child’s body, a container around a limitless appetite.

  Between the gull calls came the sounds of people shouting and occasional car horns. Wet gravel rolled under the sisters’ feet. Hopping up on a knee-high boulder, Alyona saw their path curve ahead. Soon the stony wall at their side would descend. They would emerge onto a rock beach that was busy on one end with food vendors, blocked off at the other with a ship repair yard, and teeming with the summer’s crowds. Once the two of them got there, they could turn away from the bay to look onto the beaten grass of the city’s main pedestrian square. Past that, and the lines of traffic, were a statue of Lenin, a sign for Gazprom, and a broad government building topped with flags. Alyona and Sophia would be standing in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky’s heart, and seeing on either side the swing of the city’s hills, its long ribs. A volcano’s blue top beyond.