The bus slowed as it drove through the town and Anyuta woke up and rubbed her eyes. They stopped in front of the shoe factory. Margarita put her arm around her shoulders and squeezed her.
“I’ll see you tonight,” said Margarita. The lie came so easily. Anyuta seemed suddenly quite vulnerable.
Anyuta shifted away and for a moment studied Margarita with a frown as if unable to recognize her. Then she leaned toward her—Margarita thought to share some secret or observation—but instead she kissed Margarita full on the mouth. She saw only the blur of her face in front of her. The girl’s lips moved with intention as if this was something she’d imagined doing before. Margarita pulled away and the girl sat back. Margarita felt the continued pressure on her mouth.
“I’ll never forget you,” said Anyuta in a shallow whisper. She stared at Margarita’s lips.
Margarita stood quickly. “Tonight then,” she said, alarmed. She tried to sound both cheerful and resigned. A compliant prisoner. Klavdia had already turned to the whitewashed window.
Margarita felt them both at her back as she walked the short aisle. Anyuta would be looking at her new shirt, brushing her fingers again over the embroidery. Klavdia would be watching Anyuta now. After a moment she’d move to the empty seat. Put a breath of time between Margarita and herself. She had time. She had the rest of the ride, the rest of the day. She would smile at the distracted Anyuta. Simple Anyuta. She would touch the colored threads of the girl’s sleeve. She would admire them.
The bus door opened to release Margarita. She could leave Anyuta to that monster.
The cold sharp air touched her face. She stepped onto the uneven ground. There was the sliding squeal of metal against metal as the door closed behind her. The groan of the engine, the crunch of snow, a momentary breeze across her back as the bus moved away. The yard was white; the morning was quiet and lovely. They had let her go.
Later, as Vera had instructed and minutes after the noon hour, Margarita opened the apartment door. It was the same sunny room it had always been. She was wearing the blue dress. Ilya stood near the table, motionless, facing her. His hair was longer and he was dressed more simply than before. He held his hat. It turned slightly as though his hands were eager to move, anxious perhaps. She closed the door, and locked it with the key. She left it in its place and turned around.
She could see from his face he was overwhelmed by her appearance. Her shoulder blades brushed against the door.
“Are you happy to see me?” he asked. She didn’t answer and his expression changed as if some amount of his confidence had fled him.
He set his hat on the table. She touched his arm; she would urge him to wait. He brushed it away in a gentle motion, and gathered her face in his hands and kissed her, and it was as though he’d waited long enough, his lifetime in fact, guarding against all other trespasses and dalliances in order to spend that one moment here. Any disinclination on her part would be dealt with later.
He was then practical. “We should go.”
He went to the bed and stripped its pillows of their cases. He held one extended to her. They would pillage the apartment for supplies they might need.
“They know about us,” she said.
He didn’t ask who specifically. Perhaps he knew better than she did. His arm dropped a little. “Have you changed your mind?”
There was a glint of light from the windowsill; the pincushion sat like a ripening tomato.
Margarita imagined Vera’s expression, her tapping knock unanswered, her initial wonderment as she opened the door. Taking in the disassembled room, trying to make sense of it: the coverlet gone, the blanket that had been folded on top vanished as well. Half-open drawers in the kitchen area, their contents spilled on the floor. The meal, so carefully prepared and laid out on the table, untouched. The blue dress, crumpled in a pile at the foot of the screen. She would sit on the bed. The sheet resting beneath her hand would ball into her fist; her fingers would ache from its grip. There would be a new physical awareness, the sense of being acutely exposed as though her blouse had been stripped away. She would raise her hand to her chest to see if this were true.
They left by a back door and crossed the adjacent field along its perimeter where the snow had melted and their tracks would not show. Ilya had left the car less than a kilometer away. They didn’t speak. There was only the sound of their feet trudging; occasionally a branch would snap. The whole time she thought: I can undo this.
The trees thinned and they crossed a road. Miles away, past other fields and other roads there was the camp. The guards would take out their rage on Anyuta. Their rage and their boredom. She saw them in the twilight prison yard, clustered around her. She heard their words. She heard Anyuta speak. At first, then she would quiet.
I can go back.
The car was there and they got into it. The engine turned over. Ilya set it in gear, then turned the steering wheel and the car eased onto the road. Trees and fields drifted past the windows, gathering speed.
Margarita awoke in the passenger seat wrapped in a fur lining Ilya had produced the night before. He’d driven into the early morning hours, finally pulling along an abandoned track into a stand of trees. He’d told her they’d be safe there; that was the last thing she remembered. Beside her now, he slept. A thin sheet of ice had formed on the inner pane of glass such that the outside world was a haze of dim blue light. She scraped her fingernail across its surface. The icy edges lifted and folded away in tiny pleats. She fully expected to see them surrounded by a regiment of police, their rifles trained on the automobile.
Outside, the dark grey timbers stood in peaceful guard as if they were truly safe. As if the world had shrunk to this tiny bite of land and sky. As if the rest didn’t matter or could be forgotten. Or rather, as if their sleep had encompassed not hours but years such that those things that had mattered once were so distant and small in the enormity of time that they were no longer relevant and indeed one could indulge in the imagining that they’d never really existed. One could believe that one’s actions hadn’t diminished the lives of others.
Klavdia awoke in her bunk that morning, the dull pressure in her abdomen gone. The night before, after the one-armed girl was taken away, she had been escorted to a separate building for further questioning. Such was the ploy they had provided. There, in a windowless room, she had been given a meal of a grey-colored meat, turnips, and herring, similar to that received each night by the resident guards. She stared at the wall in front of her as she chewed each bite, rolling the food from cheek to cheek and over her tongue again. There was a crack in the wall; it ran from the ceiling in a ragged slope to a point about waist height. She studied the way the paint had separated on either side of the fault. When she was finished, she washed her skin and mouth in the latrine before going back to the barracks so the other women wouldn’t smell the food. Still, she kept apart and said little when others speculated of Anyuta’s fate. This they would discover the next day as they boarded the bus. Just past the latrine, the girl’s body had been tied to the perimeter fence. She’d been stripped bare from the waist down; brown blood streaked her thighs. An eye had been gouged out. Her blouse had been tied around her neck, the rest stuffed in her mouth. She’d been shot once in the center of her forehead. A large crow sat on the single coil of barbed wire that stretched along the top of the fence. It cawed at the women. Perhaps telling them to hurry along. Or to take their time. The women stared as they waited, shuffling forward until, in their turn, each stepped onto the bus’s lowest stair. No one spoke. Klavdia took her regular seat. No one sat beside her. She looked toward the painted window as though she could see beyond its whiteness. As though the spectacle of the countryside was hers to enjoy.