There was a line of old paint pots sitting along the tin wall and, now that he could see them, he could also smell their biting chemicals. In the centre, there was a space large enough for them to lie down, and he could make out thick rolls of dense grey material, stiffer than cloth, which stood on end, dry to touch. It would be enough.
He stepped outside and beckoned his mother and sister, and when he saw Sofya wave back he ventured inside again and set about laying the material down on the metal floor.
When his mother arrived, she said the material was “undercarpet” and Artyom didn’t know what this was and when she explained Artyom found such a thing hard to comprehend, people who were rich enough to put carpet under more carpet.
He took the jacket from the door and put it on his mother. She tried to refuse, to give it back to him to wear instead, but Artyom and Sofya insisted and his mother didn’t have enough will to resist. They cleared their pockets of whatever food they had left—a few carrots and some ends of bread—and they ate quietly, a grim picnic, until Sofya said, “What is that smell?” and they scrunched their noses up and, it was true, there was a sickly sour smell. Like meat gone bad. Artyom’s mother lifted her armpits and smelled underneath them and folded her mouth in disgust and Artyom couldn’t help but laugh at this; his mother was always so insistent on cleanliness. There were so many nights after pig feeding that he came home and she sent him to the well and supervised from the window as he scrubbed himself. He laughed and Sofya laughed too and leaned into their mother and sniffed her armpits, like a runt looking for a nipple, exaggerating the action, and Artyom did the same and his mother laughed then too, and she wrapped her stinking arms around them, pressing their faces to her, and they giggled some more and then relaxed into her, disregarding the smell, feeling protected. Sleep came quickly.
When Artyom woke, the light was off and the door open, allowing in a vertical stripe of grey light from the morning sky. He saw a figure standing there and sat up suddenly and shook his mother, and the figure said, “Hello.”
His mother sat up too and the figure said, “I’m going to turn on the light. Don’t be shocked.”
Sofya woke with the light, pushing herself upwards unsteadily by her arms, the way Artyom had seen newborn calves assert themselves into the world.
It was a man older than his father, but not quite elderly. A comfortable, lined face, grey hair streaming from under a knitted black hat.
“You came on the buses last night?”
Artyom made to reply but held himself back, left space for his mother.
“Yes,” she said.
The man picked up two shovels near the door, put on a pair of gloves that hung by the hook.
“You’ll need to get food. There’s a truck coming to pick me up. I know where the shelter is.”
They stood and dusted themselves off. Sofya slapped her face to wake herself.
“I’m Maksim Vissarionovich.”
“Tatiana Aleksandrovna. These are my children, Artyom and Sofya.”
“Were you cold?”
“No. Yes. We used some things. I’m sorry.”
Artyom’s mother realized she was wearing the man’s coat. She began to take it off.
“Please. It stinks, I’m sorry. The sun hasn’t come up yet. Wear it until you get there.”
“Thank you, Maksim Vissarionovich.”
“Just Maksim. You slept in my coat, you know me well enough.”
The man had great, sweeping eyebrows as unruly as his hair.
“Then please call me Tanya.”
“Of course.”
Artyom rolled up the undercarpet, and Maksim pointed to their sacks of belongings.
“These are yours?”
“Yes,” Artyom replied, and Maksim grabbed all three in one hand and dipped and hefted them over his shoulder with a neat turn, and Artyom noticed the man’s wrists, the impressive width of them.
Artyom placed the undercarpet back with the other rolls.
“No, bring it.”
Artyom pointed to the roll, questioning, and Maksim repeated himself.
“Bring it. You might need it.”
A truck pulled up outside, a shrill whistle beckoning them out. A flatbed truck carrying five men, a shallow metal tub in their centre in which a fire burned, with logs sticking out and sparks crackling.
“We’ve a stop to make first,” Maksim said to the men, and then climbed in front with the driver, an anonymous figure hunched over the wheel.
Another vehicle. Another journey to somewhere. Artyom spread his hands in front of the fire and warmed them. The morning wasn’t so cold, and he suspected the men kept the fire out of habit, a luxury they afforded themselves to compensate for the early rise.
“You’re from the buses,” one of the men said.
“Yes,” Artyom’s mother replied.
“Have you come far?”
“From Gomel.”
“Far enough then.”
“Yes. I suppose.”
As the wood burned, lit splinters and sparks caught the trailing air and tailed behind them, darting and crackling in their wake.
Artyom could see his mother was running questions through her head. She looked upwards and chewed the inside of her lip, then addressed the men.
“People were wary of us last night. Can you tell us what you’ve heard?”
The one who replied had a face of dark stubble with a dusting of white tracing the line of his chin.
“I hear there’s militia guarding the hospitals.”
“Why would they do that?”
“They say that people are coming to the hospitals poisoned. They’re worried about it spreading.”
“Like a plague?”
“It’s just loose talk.”
“Are you not worried to have us share your truck with you?”
He looked around to his comrades. They were men of understatement. They pressed their bottom lips upwards, shaking their heads. One of the men spat into the fire, but the gob didn’t reach, hitting the side of the tub, where it sizzled and collapsed into a drip of brown sap. The man with the white chin had a bunch of keys, which he turned on his finger, the metal ringing as they flopped forwards and back.
“If you’re poisonous, why do they bring you to the city? To all of us? If you’re poisonous, they’d keep you out there, where there’s no people. You don’t look poisonous to me. You just look lost.”
“We feel lost.”
He directed his look to Artyom. “You know what we do?”
Artyom couldn’t answer. He had just accepted the fact that they were on their way to work.
“You collect rubbish,” Sofya piped in.
“That’s right.”
He turned and directed his conversation to her.
“You’d be surprised the things we pick up. Last week Pyotr here found a radio. You can’t tune it in but it crackles. So he brought it home and played it for the mice. They haven’t come back yet. That right, Pyotr?”
Pyotr smiled a mangled grin at Sofya. “I’ll keep it till someone throws out a cat.”
Sofya smiled back, equal to the man’s warmth.
“People get rid of things they don’t need. It doesn’t mean that they don’t have value, though. You just need to adapt them to a different use.”
He stopped twirling the keys and poked one of the logs further into the fire, causing a brief blaze of sparks that disappeared into their clothing.