by T. C. Boyle
She wasn’t worried, or not particularly. Word had it that the Ministry of Emergencies was looking the other way and allowing a small number of people—old people, over fifty only—to return to their villages because they knew no other way of life and because they were expendable. The sooner they died, either from natural or unnatural causes, the sooner their pensions would be released to the state. There were rumors of criminals roaming the Zone, of looters dismantling machinery and mining the deserted apartment blocks of Pripyat, the city closest to the reactor, for television sets and stereos and the like, then smuggling them, radiant with poison, out into the larger world. She didn’t care. She peered past Leonid to where the driver was having a laugh with the guard and sharing something out of a bottle. Beyond them was night absolute, the black night of the primordial forest where there were no apartments or automobiles or shops. “I don’t like him,” she whispered. “I don’t like him and I don’t trust him.”
In the half-light of the car, Leonid’s hand, blocky and work-hardened, snaked its way between the front seats to rest ever so lightly on her knee, and that was a revelation to her, that was when she began to understand things in the way the peepers in their ditches understood. Leonid’s own bags lay at his feet, two dark humps that were his life compacted. “Everything,” he murmured, his voice gone thick in his throat, “is going to be all right.”
And then the hoodlum was back in the car and the gate swung aside as if by magic and they were on a road that was no longer a road, jostling and scraping, shrieking through the brush of the dried and dead plants from the years past, dodging fallen trees no one had bothered to cut because there was no one to bother. They hadn’t gone more than a mile when the hoodlum tugged violently at the wheel and the car spun round in an exaggerated loop and came to a stop, the motor still ratcheting beneath them. “This is as far as I go,” he said.
“But it’s still seven miles to the village,” Leonid protested. And then, a wheedling tone came into his voice, “Maryska Shyshylayeva is an old woman—don’t make her walk all that way. Not in the dark and the cold of night.”
Before she knew she was going to speak, the words were out: “I’m sixty-two years old and while I may be stout—I don’t deny it—I can out-walk you, Leonid Kovalenko, with your creaky knees and big fumbling feet.” She could picture the cabin she and Oleski had built of peeled logs cut from the forest and the thatch they’d laid across the roof that bloomed with wildflowers in the spring—and the stove, her pride, that had never gone cold a day in her life, until the order came to evacuate, that is. “And you too,” she said, turning to the black-jacketed driver and honing her voice, “whatever your name is.”
*
She hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight but Leonid had and that was a good thing because the night was moonless and the road she’d reconstructed in her dreams a hundred nights running all but invisible beneath her feet. It wasn’t cold for April, or not particularly, but her breath hung before her like a veil and she was glad of the sweater and cloth coat she was wearing. Out here, the peepers were louder, shrieking as if their lives were going out of them. There were other noises too—the irregular hooting of owls from their hidden perches, a furtive dash and rustle in the brush, and then, startlingly, a sudden rising open-throated cry she’d hadn’t heard even the faintest trace of since she was a girl. “Do you hear that?” she said, her feet driving on, the straps of the bags digging into her shoulders.
“Wolves,” he said, between breaths. She’d been walking long distances lately to build up her stamina and she didn’t feel winded or tired in the least, but after the first mile or so she had to adjust her pace so that he could keep up. He breathed hollowly through his smoker’s lungs and in that moment she found herself worrying for him: what if he couldn’t make it? What would she do then?
“So the rumors are true,” she said. “About the animals returning.”
His feet shuffled through the mat of dead grasses that had colonized the cracks of the road. “I’m told there are moose now,” he said, pausing to catch his breath. “Roe deer like flocks of sheep, boar, rabbits, squirrels. Like in the time of Adam. Or our grandparents anyway.”
She held that picture a moment, even as something scurried across the road ahead of them. She saw her cabin restored to what it was, the deer clustered round, the fields standing high and green, rabbits jumping out of their skins and right into the pot even as she set it on the stove to boil, but then the image dissolved. “What of the poison? They say you can’t eat a tomato from your own garden, let alone a rabbit that’s grazed here all along—”
“Ridiculous. Rumors, nonsense. They just want to have an excuse to keep us out. What do you think, the meat’s going to glow? Nobody can tell, nobody, and if you don’t think poachers are feasting on venison and rabbit and goose even now, then you’re crazy. We’ll eat it, you can bet we will. Just think of it, all that game, all the fish in the lakes and rivers no one’s touched in three years now.”
She wanted to agree with him, wanted to say that she didn’t care about radiation or anything else because we all have to die and the sooner the better, that all she cared about was the peace of the forest and her home where she’d buried her husband fourteen years ago, but she was afraid despite herself. She pictured rats with five legs, birds without wings, her own self sprouting a long furred tail beneath her skirts while the meat shone in the pan as if it were lit from within. The night deepened. Leonid huffed for air. She hurried on.
*
When the order came to evacuate, after the explosion that jolted people from their beds and combusted the sky in the dead hours of the night, after the preternaturally darkened days—nearly a week of them—in which rumors flew and everybody who wasn’t in the fields or milking or out in the orchards hovered over their radios, the government sent in troops to force compliance. The core of the reactor was heating up again—there could be a second explosion. It wasn’t safe. Everyone must board the buses that rolled through the villages, no exceptions made. Two bags only, that was what the radio said and it was reiterated by the loudspeakers blaring from the jeeps and army trucks that stopped outside each house. What of our things? people wanted to know. What of the livestock, our pets? The government reassured them, one and all, that they would be able to return in three days’ time, and that the livestock would be evacuated too. The dogs—and the government didn’t reveal this—were to be shot on sight, nearly ten thousand of them across Polissia, for fear of rabies. And the livestock, including her own milk cow, Rusalka, were ultimately to be slaughtered en masse and mixed with the flesh of uncontaminated animals for feeding to luckier dogs and cats living in places were there were no evacuations and life went on as usual.
She believed the voice of the radio. Believed the reports of the invisible poison. Believed what she was told. There was no alternative. She had electricity in the cabin, a loop of wire strung from a pole that connected to another pole and on and on ad infinitum, but no telephone, and so she went in that suspended week when no one knew anything to the cottage of the Melnychenkos to pay for the use of theirs. What had they heard? They’d heard that to the north of them the city of Pripyat stood deserted, all forty-nine thousand inhabitants shunted onto buses and whisked away; beyond that, they knew no more than she. She stood by the stove in the Melnychenkos’ front room, the log walls of which were decorated with ikons and pages torn from color magazines, just like her own, and placed a call to her son, Nikolai, the professor of language studies in Kharkov. He would know what to do. He would know the truth. Unfortunately, however, the receiver only gave back a buzz in her ear and when the bus came she carried her two bags up the steps and found a seat among her neighbors.
And so now, in the black hours of night in a haunted place that was the only place she’d ever wanted to be, she trudged up the overgrown road with Leonid Kovalenko, waiting for the light of dawn so that she could see what had become of her life. H
ad the looters been here? Or the animals? What of her sheets and comforter—her bed? Would there be a place to sleep even? Four walls? A roof? Her father used to say that if you ever wanted to get rid of a barn or a shed or even a house all you had to do was poke a hole in the roof and nature would bring it down for you. Her left shoe began to rub against the place where her toes fought the grip of the worn leather. Her ankles felt swollen and her shoulders burned under the weight of her bags.
Leonid had long since fallen silent, the shaft of his flashlight growing dimmer as they walked on, moving ever more slowly, to his pace. She wanted to leave him behind, maddened by his wheezing and shuffling—he was an old man, that was what he was—and it was all she could do to keep from snatching the flashlight away from him and rushing off into the night. She heard the wolves again, a sound like interference on the radio, starting low and tailing off in a high broken whine. There was a smell of bog and muck and fallow land. She was focusing on putting one foot in front of the other, all the while mentally sorting through her cupboards, the tinned goods there, the rice, flour and sugar she stored in jars on the highest shelf to frustrate the rodents, her spices, her crockery, her cookware, when the sky to the east began to grow pale and she saw the world as it once had been. Five minutes later, hurrying on, no thought for Leonid or his flashlight now, she was there, in her own yard with the spring flowers gone to riot and the apple tree she’d planted herself already in bloom and the dark horizontal lines of the cabin materializing from the grip of the shadows as if she’d never been away at all.
*
That first day was among the happiest of her life. She felt like a songbird caged all these years and suddenly set free, felt giddy, a girl all over again. And the house, the house was a miracle, everything as she’d left it, the smells awakening a thousand recollections, of Oleski, of the good times, the summer nights when the light seemed as if it would never fade, the snowbound winters when the two of them sat playing chess and checkers in front of the stove while the cat purred in her lap and the samovar steamed and the silence was so absolute you could wrap yourself in it. Her bed was still made, though the comforter was damp with mold and the pillowcase slick to the touch, but they could be washed, everything could be washed and no harm done. Of course, there was damage, she could see that at a glance. A pane of glass in the back window lay shattered on the carpet and a birch tree thick around as her waist had fallen against the roof. What had been her garden was now a forest of weeds and saplings, there were mice in the stove and birds nesting atop the cupboard, but the looters hadn’t come—they’d stuck to the cities, to Chernobyl and Pripyat—and if you could ignore the dust that lay over everything and the dirt of the spiders and mice and birds, there was nothing a broom and a mop and a good strong back couldn’t put to rights.
She was at the stove, arranging sticks of three-year-old kindling in the depths of the firebox, thinking the mice could look out for themselves, thinking she’d warm the place, dry it out, then tape newspaper over the broken pane, boil water to wash the sheets and scrub the tabletop and sink—and here, right at hand, was her sturdiest pot hanging on its hook where she’d left it, ready to receive the soup she would prepare from the pork, cabbage and potatoes she’d brought along and maybe something off the shelves of her larder too because unless the cans had burst they were good, weren’t they?—when she heard a noise behind her and turned to see Leonid there, his face drained of everything but exhaustion. He came forward heavily and sank into her armchair. “I just need to rest a moment,” he said, his breath leaving him in a thin wheeze that made her think of a child releasing a balloon.
“Rest,” she said, her smile blooming so that her cheeks felt flushed with it, “I’ll make us tea.” And then, because she couldn’t contain herself, she swept across the room to plant a kiss on his cheek. “Nobody’s been here,” she crowed, “nobody at all!”
It was at that precise moment that the hinges of the cupboard below the sink gave a short sharp groan and the slick head and labile shoulders of a weasel emerged, one paw arrested. The animal shot them an indignant look, its body a dun writhe of snakelike muscle flowing from the cabinet to the floor, before it vanished through a hole in the wall no wider around than a wind-drift apple. Leonid caught her eye, grinning himself now, and said, “Nobody?” before they both dissolved in laughter.
*
She fetched water from the well while he fell into a heavy sleep in the armchair, then filled all her pots and stoked the stove till the water came to a furious boil and the room began ever so gradually to take on warmth. Next, she washed her cutting board and knives and all the dishes she could lay hands on, just to remove any hint of grime from them—and the poison, the poison too—then stripped the sheets from the bed and washed them, along with the comforter, in her big tub. In the yard—it was so overgrown with weeds it was as if no one had lived here in a century—she discovered that her clothesline had been snapped in two by a fallen branch, the ends of the frayed rope lying sodden on the ground, but she was able to knot them and hang out the sheets and her comforter in the hope they’d dry by nightfall. When she came back through the door, she found Leonid awake and alert.
“Where’s that cup of tea I was promised?” he asked, his voice rising in merriment as if he’d just delivered the punchline of a joke. He was feeling exactly the same way she was, feeling liberated, relieved, as joyful and rejuvenated as if he’d just won the lottery.
She poured them each a cup, but she wouldn’t sit down, taking hers to the cutting board, where she began to cube the pork and dice the vegetables and feed them into the pot. There were so many things to do, infinite things, and the funny part of it was that she didn’t feel tired at all, though she’d been up all night and walked those seven miles in the dark.
From the armchair, Leonid lifted his voice in supposition: “That’s the meat you brought along, isn’t it? And the vegetables?”
“What do you think—I shot a boar while you were snoring there in the chair? And sprouted a whole garden outside the window like in some fairy tale?” She turned to face him, hands on her hips, and here was where the doubt crept in, here was where she was glad to have him there with her if only to get a second opinion on the parameters of this tentative new world they were inhabiting. “But the rice in this jar? I’m going to use it, because we are going to have to eke out every bite till we can grow a garden and snare rabbits and catch fish from the river. The poison can’t invade glass, can it? Or tins?”
He was on his feet now, setting down the empty tea cup and taking up the broom, which he began to whisk across the floor in a running storm of dust and leaves. Had she really said “we”? As if it were already decided that he wouldn’t go home to his own cottage but stay on here with her?
“No,” he said, over his shoulder, “I don’t think so, not after three years. But anything you’ve canned, tomatoes, snap beans, we have to be careful if the seal’s broken, because then we’ll get the real poison, ptomaine or what have you—”
“Yes,” she said, cutting him off, “and die fast, right here tonight, instead of waiting for the radiation to do the job.”
She’d meant to be funny, or irreverent at any rate, but he didn’t laugh. He just went on sweeping till he threw open the door and swept all the litter out into the yard. Then he set the broom carefully aside and said, “I’d better get the saw from my place and cut that birch tree away from the eaves. We,” he said, emphasizing the pronoun, “wouldn’t want a leaky roof, now would we?”
*
That first night they slept together in her marriage bed, but not as lovers—more in the way of brother and sister, in the way of practicality, because where else would he sleep except between his own slimy sheets in his cottage three quarters of a mile away? In the morning they each had a bowl of soup fortified with rice and then he went out the door and vanished up the road while she busied herself with all manner of things, not the least of which
was scrubbing the mold from the walls with the remains of an old jug of bleach. It was past noon, the sun high, birdsong like a symphony, deer nosing through the yard and the evicted weasel sunning itself atop the woodpile, when he returned, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with foodstuffs from his own larder, another set of bedsheets, a fur comforter, his rifle and fishing pole and a coil of rope for snares. And more: there was a dog trotting along behind him. It was no dog she’d ever seen before, not among the pets of her neighbors, or not that she could remember anyway. She regarded it dubiously, its ribs showing like stripes and the scrap of its tail wagging feebly over the scent of the soup drifting out the open door. It was of medium size, not big enough to be a proper watchdog, its coat the color of suet shading to a dark patch over one eye. “We can’t keep it,” she said flatly. “It’ll be a struggle just to feed ourselves.”
“Too late,” he said, grinning wide. “I’ve already named him.”
“As if that means anything.”
“Sobaka,” he called, appending a low whistle, and the dog came to him even as he set the wheelbarrow down in the high weeds.