He gives Batyr food which he scavenges from the sacks of waste piled up at the back of the storehouse. There are always soldiers guarding the building, but Artyom made a point of introducing them to his two-legged friend. They knelt and rubbed Batyr behind the ears, patted him, ran their hands vigorously up and down his flanks, and when they did this Artyom saw a brightness in their eyes, the animal taking them away from routine, and he saw them then as brothers and sons, laughing at the dinner table, feeding scraps to their own dog as it looked at them pitifully with its head on their knee, imploring. Now they let Artyom poke away at the rubbish, as long as he promises he’ll tie the bags up afterwards, they need to keep the rats away.
At first Artyom was feeding Batyr from the clinic’s leftovers—the doctor arranged it that way—but after about a week the kitchen staff told him to look somewhere else. He could have gone back to the doctor, but the man is busy, he has more on his mind than where to get scraps for a dog.
Because Sofya is sick, she has a room to herself. Artyom sleeps in the same bed as his mother. His mother changes in this room, so he sees her naked from behind. Neither of them cares. What was important before is no longer important here. They sleep side by side, and his mother rises three or four times in the night to check on Sofya.
There are some mornings he wakes to find his mother has curled into him in her sleep. Such a thing doesn’t feel unnatural to him. He understands how the body seeks reassurance; he doesn’t resist because he needs it too.
Their hut doesn’t leak like a lot of the others. The adults hardly talk about anything else, a constant exchange and comparison of the physical status of their homes. Artyom thinks that this is maybe because they can do something about it, do some repairs; the huts can be fixed, the sickness can’t. Artyom’s thankful that their place doesn’t leak, at least not yet. If Sofya had to lie there in the cold, it would be worse.
Every hut has a kitchen-cum–living room and two bedrooms. There is no toilet or running water of any kind. They have an electric hob and the stove and an electric radiator in each bedroom. Some people have TVs or radio sets; their relatives have dropped them off at the reception hut, leaving nothing else but their names. No note. No one enters further than the reception hut. Artyom understands why.
Artyom is one of the oldest boys in the settlement. He’s seen a couple of others his age, but they were weaker than he is and who knows what kind of state they’re in now. He feels strong. His mother keeps asking if he’s getting enough rest, but he likes the air, he needs to be outside. It gives him a purpose.
He walks to the forest almost every day collecting wood, handing it around to their new neighbours. He never expects anything for it—it didn’t cost him anything—and from time to time his mother receives a kindness in recognition for his help. Last week a woman in sector 3A gave her a pair of her son’s boots for Artyom’s walks. The boy had died a few months before. And so now Artyom finds himself trudging along between the trees in a dead boy’s boots. But it doesn’t concern him in any way.
“I’m lucky to have a son like you, Artyom.”
“You’re not lucky, Mama.”
“There are people worse off.”
“That may be true, but not much. We’re not lucky.”
“No. You’re right. We’re not.”
GRIGORY SITS OUTSIDE, leaning on a metal table, dabbing his fingers in a pool of condensation at its lip. A spider dangles below, twirling languorously. He will soon begin surgical prep, inside for the rest of the day, so he takes in cool breaths while he can; watching water twist along the tendrils of ice that hang from the roof of the clinic, the one solid building in the whole settlement. Brick walls half a metre thick that mercifully retain heat. They speculated as to its use before they came here, an old barracks perhaps. A stubborn musty scent in the operating theatre despite the plastering, the painting, and the daily scrubbing.
People here are waiting, solemnly waiting. He watches them walk laps around the recreational area in the middle of the settlement. Walking and waiting.
An elderly man sits on a nearby bench, hands clamped under his armpits. Grigory feels no impulse to speak to him, nor to his own colleagues when he twists open the handle of the common room, puts his shoulder to the expanded door. Even in his break times he is unaccompanied, slow to welcome any intrusion into his guarded world. Four tables in the room and still he manages to stake out a private territory. He tells himself, has hinted to others, that his mind needs to recuperate, so many hours spent in total concentration—and this is true; sometimes it’s beyond him to make the few simple choices demanded of him in their small canteen. When they ask—tea or coffee? rice or potatoes?—he shifts listlessly, unable to mouth the correct words.
He can also recognize, when he has a will to, that these are the strategies of an only child: to create a world impervious to others, your passions sealed off, as contained as the canisters of oxygen the anaesthetist carts into the building. This is his ease.
How different would it be, he wonders as he pushes wearily off the chair, with Vasily here?
Out in the fields the snow is so deep that Artyom has to wade through it. He keeps his pelvis lower to the ground and leans into his steps. It takes so much effort that he doesn’t feel the cold. He reaches the first trees of the forest and trudges inside. These trees mark a border; time slows as you pass through the line of branchless trunks. The light that comes down has air inside, as if it’s been passed through a tea strainer, and the rays split into strands of drops as they fall onto the forest floor, landing silently like dancers, turning as they descend.
The sound of his own breath. Trickles from hidden streams. A branch struggling under its load. The air, too, somehow distilled. Smoky air. Strong air.
Tall trunks with no branches. A stoat slithers up one, twenty metres away, a white blur ascending.
Artyom walks and sits and walks again, looking for fallen branches. When he is thirsty he scoops snow into his mouth and looks up at the canopy far above him.
It was a forest, back there, that claimed his father, and in the silence Artyom can feel a connection amongst these tall trees, as if they are drawing him here. They sway nervously, confessing their remorse, creaking like a door forced open in the wind.
BACK IN MINSK, they had been in the emergency shelter for a month before they found his father. New people kept arriving. At the end of the first week, their floor space was cut in half, so they no longer had room to lie down flat. They were forced to sleep in shifts, there were so many of them bunched in under that roof. The whole place stank of sweat. People complained continuously of the smell. Babies were getting rashes from not being cleaned. Eventually, the militia set up a line of hoses at the back of the warehouse to deal with the problem. Everyone was given a plastic bag, and you queued up at the back door, and once you stepped outside you had to strip naked and put your clothes into the bag. You had to tie a knot in the bag and then, still holding your clothes, you’d stand in front of the wall, near a drain, and the militia would hose you down. Afterwards, you used your own clothes to dry yourself off, then put them back on and reentered the warehouse, with small puddles between your toes, your shirt and underwear sticking to you. For the first few days the militia guys would rate the women. The women would stand in a line, naked, holding their plastic bags in front of their genitals, and the guards would shout out a score between one and ten. If any woman complained, her bag would be sprayed until it was torn and her clothes soaked through, so she would have to walk back inside naked or sodden, the material sticking to her skin, under the watchful eyes of a thousand people.