Iosif nudges him and points to their right, another target for them. Artyom follows his finger and realizes he’s hearing the bike, he’s seeing their fathers trail along the road, stirring dust in their wake.
They fling the remaining nails into the bushes and lower themselves off the roof. They push open the door to the kitchen, and Iosif’s mother is still where they left her. The plates sit on the table.
“They’re coming back.”
“The helicopters?”
“No. Father.”
She rises, pushes her chair back, and paces towards the door in one concise motion.
They wait in the laneway. When the men approach, Iosif’s mother runs to meet them. The boys are tempted to run too, but they stay where they are. They don’t want to seem too eager. And they both think that the bike looks like a smooth ride.
Iosif’s father dismounts and talks animatedly with his mother. Artyom’s father turns the throttle and stops alongside the boys.
“Let’s go.”
He says this as an order. At first Artyom doesn’t understand: surely his first time on their bike, the bike they’ve worked so hard on, should be a moment of pride, of celebration. Then he looks to his right and sees Iosif’s father dragging his mother back to the house.
“Let’s go.”
Artyom’s father revs the engine violently, and Artyom jumps on.
“Are you holding the side handles?”
“Yes.”
They move off so quickly that Artyom’s head snaps back.
When they reach the house Artyom’s father drives up to the porch and dismounts before the bike has fully stopped. Artyom gets off too, and his father, holding the handlebars, lets the bike drop onto the grass and walks to their steps. Artyom tries to pick up the machine and put it on its kickstand, but his father barks at him.
“Leave it. Inside now!”
His father rarely raises his voice. Artyom is old enough to resent his father giving him orders, but not old enough to disobey. He isn’t certain if there is such an age.
Inside the house his mother is repairing his father’s spare trousers. She works the needle with her sharp, precise hands, teasing the thread out at different angles. She has great skill as a dressmaker. Everything the family wears has in some way been reshaped and remodelled by her. Artyom wears his sister’s old clothes, but no one can tell—with the buttons swapped over and the shoulders recut—that they’ve ever been worn by a girl. In the evenings when he can’t concentrate on his homework, he watches his mother’s fingers. They function as indicators of her mood. He thinks of them as being like antennae, showing how much her senses are engaged.
“The military will be here anytime,” says Artyom’s father. “They’re putting people in trucks. Pack a bag, we’ll need to sleep in the forest tonight.”
“What, the forest? What? I can’t walk that far. The forest?”
“They’re evacuating the area. There’s been a fire in the power plant.”
“So they’re evacuating the whole area?”
“Where’s Sofya?”
He turns to Artyom.
“Where’s Sofya?”
“I don’t know.”
Artyom’s mother continues. “I don’t understand. Why don’t they just put out the fire? It’s not going to spread this far.”
“It’s a nuclear plant. It’s dangerous.”
“How is it dangerous? It’s not as though there were bombs in there.”
“It’s dangerous, that’s all. Where’s Sofya?”
“I don’t know,” Artyom says again.
Artyom’s mother doesn’t know how to react. She does what she always does when she’s nervous, she busies herself. Artyom has seen it when people come over for dinner and she doesn’t know how to talk to them. Or when his father compliments her figure in front of their friends. She carefully winds up her thread, and makes sure her needles are ordered in their pouch according to size. Then she pours herself a cup of water from the jug that’s always on the counter. The one he has brought to and from the well a hundred thousand times.
“Go and find her,” his father says to him. “And no fucking around with that bike. We need to leave right now.”
Artyom walks outside, glad to be away from the house. Sofya is a walker, so she could be anywhere. His father knows this. How the hell is he supposed to find her? She walks. She likes to look at birds. She hates that they go shooting grouse, but she knows better than to say anything about it. Their father doesn’t have much time for himself outside of work. She doesn’t want her disapproval to sully the pleasure of one of his rare pastimes. And, besides, she eats the meat, doesn’t she?
Sofya was always the one who brought nature inside the izba. She collected beetles and birds’ nests when she was young. She’d keep the beetles in jam jars under her bed. Artyom hated them but would look at them nonetheless, see them trying to clamber up the glass sides and fall on their backs and struggle to right themselves.
He runs. He can understand his mother’s reaction. It’s only a fire, after all. But all of it is tied. He thinks of yesterday morning, what they saw. He thinks of the helicopters overhead. Something huge is happening.
Sofya’s not at their babushka’s grave. Artyom pauses for a few minutes in front of it. He can’t help looking around in case his father is watching, even though he’s far from sight. The rushnik that’s draped over the wooden cross is almost threadbare. The mound of earth is covered in green shoots. Soon it will be indistinguishable from the grass around it. One day the wooden cross will rot and crumble and people won’t know there’s a body underground, in a wooden box, his babushka. Already Artyom can’t remember what she sounds like, what kind of things she’d say. He remembers what she looked like. But the rest of it, the sensations are as frayed as the material on the cross.
He runs to Sofya’s tree: there’s a tree with a wide horizontal branch that she lies on sometimes with a view to the shop in the village where she watches the comings and goings. She watches the village and Artyom watches her. She’s only two years older than he is, but she knows so much more than him. Sometimes he says things and she just nods and smiles. The way his mother does.
He’s sweating from the running. He’s been running for half an hour. He calls into the Polovinkins’ to ask Nastya if she’s seen Sofya, but the place is empty. He runs to the back of their house and sees them, two fields away, driving their cattle towards the forest. Everyone is heading for the forest.
He returns home, panting, and walks through the front door, motions to put his hand on the handle, but realizes the door is lying on the table.
“I can’t find her.”
Why is the door on the table? Instinctively he puts his hand on the frame to make sure it’s empty.
His father is bundling their blankets into a sack.
“What?”
His father stops.
“Shit. Where can she be?”
“I don’t know.”
“You looked at the grave?”
“Yes.”
“You asked Nastya?”
“They’ve headed for the forest, they’re driving their cattle there. She isn’t with them. Maybe she’s already heard, maybe she’s gone ahead.”
“No.” His mother is shouting from their room. “She’d come back.”
His mother emerges from their bedroom. She runs her fingers through her hair, teasing the tangled strands out by jerking her fingers. An action that makes Artyom anxious just by looking at it.
“Andrei. You’ll have to find her.”
“I know.”
His father strides out, calling back as he leaves. “Do whatever your mother tells you. Make sure you don’t leave her alone.”