Their mother is in Mirgorod.
I have been too ill to do anything but follow where Eligiya Kamilova went, but that time is coming to an end. I must take Yeva back to Mirgorod. I am the older one, and it is my job to do that. Soon I will be as well and strong as I will ever be, and then I must do that.
But I am not ready, not quite yet.
The rusalka presses its chalky face, expressionless and pale, against the silt-flecked glass and stares in at Galina, watching her intently. It moves its hands through the water slowly as if it were waving. But it is not waving. It is only watching. The first time it came Galina mistook it for the reflection of her own face.
The dead soldier Leonid Tarasenko follows Yeva out from under the trees into the emptiness of tall light. There is a tiny anguished hook of memory somewhere inside him, a diamond-hard strange survivor in the heart, a piece of disconnected understanding no larger than a single word, and the word is child.
The dead man follows child. Child fills his heart with happiness and tears and need. In all the world of the dead man there is only child and follow and no other purpose at all, and the existence of even this one irreducible shard of purpose is a mystery more mysterious than the endless ever-faithful burning of the sun.
But child (all unaware of the following) moves faster than the dead man can. The separation between them stretches and stretches.
The dead man would call out after her if he could, but there is not enough wonder and mystery in the world to provide him with concepts like voice and call. He has been given only child and follow, and it is not enough.
Child is gone.
He moves on, following the line she took. Child is gone, but of following there is no end and nothing else to take its place.
The line of his following brings him again to an edge of trees, different trees, but trees. Trees are familiar to him and the smell of earth is familiar beneath them, and that is a soothing ointment for his heart, but also not soothing at all; nothing takes away the happiness and the tears and the need for following child.
Because trees are familiar to him the dead Leonid Taresenko follows his following in under the trees.
Galina Cornelius stays a long while in the underwater room, but eventually it is time to return to the house because Yeva will soon be home from the woods. As Galina is crossing the plank over the black stream, the dead soldier steps out from a tree and comes towards her.
She sees his open earth-filled mouth, the woodlice in the folds of his face and neck.
She screams. It is blank terror.
All the way to the house she runs, heart pounding, fear-blind, and at the veranda she stops and turns. The dead thing is following her, loping unsteadily through the waist-high grass.
Galina screams again.
‘Yeva! Yeva!’
The dead soldier is out of the high grass and coming up the path, coming towards her with fixed and needy dead black eyes, hand stretched out for companionship.
Eligiya Kamilova’s gun is lying on the couch on the veranda.
It could blow up in your eyes. Eligiya had said. Only use it if the other thing will be worse. But she had shown them how.
Galina seizes the gun and swings the barrel up into the face of the dead soldier. His foot is already on the first veranda step when she pulls both triggers together and takes his head apart. The stock kicks back into her shoulder and knocks her down. She can’t hear her own screams any more for the appalling ringing of the double gunshot in her own ears.
5
Eligiya Kamilova finds the two girls sitting side by side outside the house, on the couch on the veranda, staring at the corpse of twice-killed Conscript Gunner K-1 Category Leonid Tarasenko, a good and simple man but not a lucky one. When she heard the shot she was already on the track up to the house, work abandoned halfway done, weightless, spun out of orbit by the kick of the newspaper in her hand.
The girls look up at her in silence when she comes. Their faces are strained and pale, their eyes rimmed red and wide with shock. She knows that she should comfort them, but she doesn’t know how, she hasn’t got it in her; she searches but it isn’t there, the right thing to do to take that shock and pain away. She stands stiffly on the veranda, bitterly, emptily aware of the newspaper rolled and clutched by her side. The ineradicable, undeniable truth of it burns in her hand. She hasn’t anything to give them for comfort, not even news, not good news, only bad.
There’s no good time to tell them what she knows. She is tempted to wait, but waiting will only make things worse, compounding fact with deceiving, and she has never told them less than truth. She cannot give them loving comfort but she can give them that and always does.
She holds the newspaper out to Galina.
‘Look,’ she says. ‘Read it. Read the date.’
Eligiya was down in the village working on the boats when the musicians came out of the east, walking in with their rangy dog: the gusli player with the long straggled hair and thick coal beard resting on his chest, one leg lost in the war, swinging along on crutches, and the tall old man in the long coat, drum like a cartwheel slung on his back. The drummer carried a newspaper stuffed in his pocket that nobody in the village could read. Kamilova bought it from him for a couple of kopeks.
Galina stares at the newspaper blankly.
‘What?’ she says. ‘What about it? What?’
‘The date.’
Galina makes an effort to squint at the stained print.
‘It’s a couple of months old.’ She hands it back to Kamilova and wipes her fingers in the lap of her dress already splattered with the soldier’s drying mess. ‘It’s greasy. It smells bad.’
Galina’s eyes aren’t focused properly. They stray back to the half-rotten corpse on the veranda boards.
‘Not the month,’ says Kamilova. ‘The year.’ She holds the paper up again for the girl to see. Galina stares at it for a while. Furrows her brow in confusion.
‘It’s a mistake,’ she says. ‘A printing error.’
‘No,’ said Kamilova. ‘I talked to the men who brought it into the village. I asked them questions. It isn’t a mistake.’
‘What?’ said Yeva. ‘What are you talking about.’
Kamilova sat down beside them on the end of the couch. She felt suddenly exhausted. Not able to manage. Not able to lead the way, not at the moment, not any more. The strength in her legs, the straightness in her back, was gone. Yeva squeezed up to make room.
‘What is it?’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Eligiya Kamilova. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘What?’
‘We’ve been walking in the trees,’ said Kamilova, ‘and we’ve been living here in the village by the lake, and it’s been seven months, nearly eight–a long time but not quite eight months–that’s all.’ She takes the paper from where it lies in Galina’s lap. ‘Look at the date.’
Yeva reads the small print at the top of the page.
‘But that’s wrong.’
‘No.’
‘But it is wrong. It’s five years wrong.’
‘Five and a half. Five and half years gone.’
Kamilova has had longer than the girls to think it through.
The three of them roll the corpse of the twice-killed soldier onto a sheet, wrap it and drag it through the grass far away from the house. They dig a hole up near the woods. It takes all day and they are dumb with exhaustion and heat and stink, and the sun has gone and the fear is coming out of the woods. They go inside and light candles and put wood in the stove, and when the water is hot they wash in the kitchen in silence, the whole of their bodies from head to toe. It takes a long time to get the dirtiness off and they don’t quite manage it even then.