The bike roars off, and a great quiet descends. His mother walks towards him and holds him in her arms. Artyom can feel her hesitancy; she doesn’t want to impose anything on him, she’s aware that he needs to create his distance from her, the way he’s stepping into manhood. But he accepts her embrace. Because she asks so rarely. He knows she needs a touch, a reassurance.
She steps away and picks up a potato sack from the corner.
“Pack your things. Bring something warm. And if there’s anything really important to you, bring that too.”
“Okay. Where did we get these sacks?”
She inclines her head towards the window.
“Your father emptied them out.”
Artyom looks outside. The lid of their wooden storage crate lies on the grass and their stock of potatoes has been spilled out in piles.
He turns again to his mother. “We’re not coming back, are we?”
She flattens her lips and shakes her head.
They pack and they wait. Each minute is stretched out. They sit and long for the return of half of their family.
They hear engines, coming from the direction of the village. It’s not the bike, or helicopters. These sounds are mixed with dislocated speech. They walk outside. A mechanical voice carries through the air, words meshed into one another.
Military trucks with loudspeakers strapped to their frames can be seen over the hedgerows. As they near the village, the last ones in line stop and spread out into the various laneways.
“What do we do?”
“Let’s go back inside. We’re not leaving this house without them.”
A truck stops down the lane, probably outside the Scherbaks’. Footsteps walking towards them, voices getting louder.
Through the vacant doorframe, Artyom can see a soldier approach. He steps into the room.
“Into the truck. You are allowed one bag.”
He’s not so much older than Artyom. Tall and gangly. He has a hand on the gun that’s slung across his chest. Artyom could bundle him down the steps before he has time to point it anywhere. He looks over to his mother, anticipating a signal, but she has picked up her needle and is working on the trousers again, barely paying any attention to what’s going on, as if this happens all the time.
“Into the truck. Let’s go.”
The soldier is a little unsure. His order has now become a request.
Artyom’s mother looks up from her stitches.
“My husband is out, looking for my daughter. They’re coming back. But we’re not leaving without them.”
“You can wait for them in the truck.”
His mother puts down her work.
“I see.”
She says this deadpan, diluting the soldier’s order into merely one of a number of possibilities.
“We have orders to burn down the house of anyone who doesn’t cooperate.”
“Fine. But we’ll wait here while you do it.”
She provides no gestures or intonations that betray her fears. His mother has learned not to fear a pointed gun. This woman speaking is his mother. Yes, she has had a life before motherhood, before marriage, yet Artyom can’t reconcile his scant knowledge of her past with what is happening right now, in front of him.
Confused, the soldier turns to the boy. Artyom wishes he had something with which he could occupy himself. He half wonders if he should pick up a needle and thread.
His mother points to the sacks that sit by the door, still no urgency in her voice.
“We’re packed. We’re leaving. But not without my husband and daughter.”
The soldier looks at the four sacks with clothes peeping out the top of them. He leaves. They wait. He comes back.
“Okay. You can wait. But I am to stay with you. When the truck comes around again, you’ll have to get on it. We can use force.”
“I’m sure you can.”
The soldier pulls a chair from the table, then decides he probably should stand. They wait. Artyom can’t tell for how long. After some time the soldier sits. His mother keeps sewing.
Artyom walks to his room, and the soldier follows. He takes a tractor manual from under the bed and returns to his chair and sits. The soldier does the same.
Eventually they hear an engine, a higher pitch than the trucks. The bike passes the doorframe; Sofya is behind his father, her arms across his chest. His mother stops her darning for the first time. They walk in, and his mother engulfs his sister. Sofya lets out an even stream of breath, like a ball being deflated.
“They’re here,” his father says.
His mother directs her eyes towards the kitchen table.
His father follows his mother’s stare and turns to see the soldier. The soldier is embarrassed now, Artyom can tell. Time in the room has softened his resolve. He is occupying another man’s home, sitting in front of his family with a gun across his lap.
His father approaches the soldier. “Come with me, please.”
They walk outside, and Artyom can see his father gesturing, pointing back towards the house.
“You think he’ll let us stay?” Artyom says.
“That’s not what he’s asking,” his mother replies, seated again, still holding Sofya’s hand.
His father walks back inside and takes some raw carrots from under the sink and hands them around. Then he takes some bread from the cupboard, breaks it into three chunks, and gives it to them. Artyom moves the bread toward his mouth, but his father stops him.
“Save it until you have to eat it. It might be a while before you get a meal.”
Artyom notices his father hasn’t saved anything for himself.
The truck pulls up outside. and they take their sacks. Artyom carries two of them, because he can. He throws the sacks inside the truck and climbs up, using the lip of the hanging backboard to give himself a boost.
He knows most of the people inside: the Gavrilenkos, the Litvins, the Volchoks. They live further out from the village. There are some that he doesn’t recognize. He turns around to help his mother up, then Sofya. His father is standing by the truck, holding their door. Is he bringing the door? His father lifts it up to him, and Artyom grabs it and places it facedown, and his father slides it to the back as people lift their feet, some complaining, and Artyom understands this. What is his father thinking, bringing their door?
“No talking,” the soldier barks out, his authority renewed.
His father climbs on board and sits beside his mother, not making eye contact with anyone. Artyom sees him grasp his mother’s hand. Artyom has seen them do this countless times, but he has the sense that something about the image is different, without quite locating what it is. The soldier closes the backboard, slides the pin into position, and climbs aboard. No one helps him. A gold ring on the soldier’s little finger clinks against the metal frame of the covering. Artyom realises it as the truck moves off: his mother’s wedding ring.
Chapter 8
In Party headquarters Grigory listens to the presentation from the evacuation committee. He feels a thousand years old, the lack of sleep catching up with him, his body still carrying the vibrations from the helicopter. They’ve brought supplies during the night, and so he sips tea from a polystyrene cup, the sugar and heat bringing some consolation.
They have mobilized any available buses within a ten-hour drive. Two thousand four hundred and thirty buses will stop at a meeting point sixteen kilometres from the town and then arrive in four separate convoys to facilitate crowd supervision. The town has been divided into four sectors, with the specific evacuation routes highlighted.
There will be dosimetric checkpoints in each sector to assess isotopic composition. People will be categorized according to risk and given medical papers to enable hospitals to process them efficiently. Five categories, stark in their naming: absolute risk, excessive relative risk, relative risk, additional risk, spontaneous risk. Anyone in the first two categories will be loaded into ambulances; the rest will be sent on buses. They anticipate that the dosimetric tests will take some time.