To either side of her, electricity pylons march away across bare earth and dried yellow grass, level to the encircling blued horizon. Grey wooden sheds and grey corrugated-iron roofs. Dust and bone sunlight. The pylons carry no cables. The pylons are built, but the gangs that bring the cables have not yet come.
Kamilova notices none of this. Not any more. Every day the same. Nothing changes.
One step. One step.
She has done this walk every day for a week. Five miles out and five miles back. She wonders how much longer she can.
Her legs are so thin it frightens her. These fleshless wasted sticks are not hers; they are the legs of one who died long ago. How do they carry her without the shifting contour of muscle? Dried knots and tendons only, visibly working. Her knees are crude obtrusions, like the stones in the unmade road. Her own hands startle her: demonstration pieces of skeletal articulation for the instruction of anatomists.
My face is gone. I have transparent skin. I have forgotten how to be hungry.
All day Eligiya Kamilova has stood in line in Belatinsk, Galina’s ration card in her pocket. (Galina has found a job running messages at Lorschner’s. The wage is pitiful but the ration card is more valuable than platinum and silks.) She didn’t know what she was queuing for. People in line in Belatinsk hold tight to the belt of the one in front to keep their place. Too weak to stand alone, they lean against strangers and do not speak.
All day Kamilova’s line waited and did not move. In the afternoon the shopkeeper closed up.
‘Fuck off now,’ he screamed at them. ‘Fuck off. Fuck off. There’s nothing here.’
So Kamilova turned away and walked back out through the town.
Belatinsk was everywhere silent, subsided under dugouts, shacks and shanties of rusty iron, planks, cardboard, wire, glass and earth. There was no water, no electricity, no sewerage. Paved streets were dug up for scraggy allotments where nothing properly grew. Everything wood–benches, hoardings, fences, boardwalks–had been ripped up and burned. Vermin everywhere and no repairs to anything.
She passed a scrap of municipal garden behind iron railings. Sign on the gate: DIG NO GRAVES HERE.
No cars or trucks on the road out of Belatinsk to Forshin’s dacha. On the verge a mare had died, her body swollen hard. Black lips stretched off yellow teeth in a snarl. Black jewel flies were sipping at her eyes and crawling over the blue fatness of her tongue. Kamilova wanted to sit in the dust and lean against her like a couch, just for a while.
One step. One step. One step.
She does not know how many more days she can do this. Hunger is not the absence of food. It is a big black rock you carry that fills the sky. It crushes you while you sleep.
Yet things are better now at Forshin’s dacha than they were on the road.
The evening after they buried the twice-killed soldier, Kamilova stole a boat from the village at Yamelei. She still felt bad about the boat, but the village would survive and the girls could not walk. Not so far, not all the way. The equations of necessity.
So Kamilova had taken the boat, and in her they crossed the lake above the sunken city. Still purple waters at twilight and the sound of a distant bell.
The soul of the people is forever striving to behold the sunken city of Litvozh.
Kamilova knew boats. All night she let the chill wind take them west, and in the dawn they followed the shore to where the westward river flowed out.
‘What river is this?’ said Yeva.
‘I don’t know,’ said Kamilova, ‘but it’s going the right way.’
Low wooded hills and scraps of cool dawn mist. The girls slept under dewy blankets in the shelter of the gunwales, and the river took them into strange country. Unfamiliar hunting beasts called to one another across the water. Dark oily coils surged and rippled, and the backs of great silent fish broke the surface of the river. Kamilova sat in the stern with the gun across her knees and steered a course clear of the black bears that swam slow and strong and purposefully from shore to shore. They passed through a city ruined in the war. Nobody was there. Not anybody at all.
The end of day brought them across the sudden frontier out of slow memorious places into the hungerland.
In the deep past and in remoter places even now families and villages might fall into hunger and all of them die. That was one thing. In the towns and cities of the Vlast a wretched person sick and alone without a kopek might starve in a gutter. That was another thing. A ragged inconvenience. But when entire regions, millions of people, conurbations and suburbs and the penumbra of organised rural production, plunged into sudden and total desperate famine, that was something else. That was something never seen before.
That was the hungerland.
The boat came to a weir. A tremendous white-water fall. Nothing for it but to sleep and in the morning leave the boat and walk.
Kamilova, thinking the house on the edge of the nameless town empty, broke in the door. The family was gathered in darkness, curtains drawn against the day. The smell was bad. There were puddles of water on the floor.
Two chairs were pushed together, and across them lay the corpse of the boy. He might have been fourteen but starvation aged you. You couldn’t tell. The baby was propped in a pram, head to one side on the pillow, dead. The mother on the bed was dead. The daughter sat beside her on the stained counterpane, rubbing at the mother’s chest with a linen towel.
‘Where is your father?’ said Kamilova. ‘Did he go for help? For food?’
The girl glanced up at her without expression and carried on rubbing the dead woman’s chest. The smell of embrocation.
Kamilova took from her bag a piece of hard dry bread and a handful of potatoes brought from Yamelei and laid them on the bed. The girl didn’t look. The food just lay there on the counterpane.
When Kamilova reached the door she stopped and turned back, picked the food up again and put it back in her bag. The equations of necessity.
The girl didn’t glance up when Kamilova left the room.
Days rose dark in colourless sunshine and set in bleakness. The hungerland walk was one long unrelenting road. Aftermath, aftermath. Deadened days after the end of the world.
Slowly they realised how late they were. The distortions of slow time in the memorious zone. Here in the hungerland six years had passed, the war was over and this was Rizhin country now.
‘Mother will think we forgot her,’ Galina said. ‘She must think we are dead.’
‘She is waiting,’ said Yeva. ‘She would never stop waiting.’
‘I will take you home,’ said Kamilova. ‘I promise. We’re going there as quick as I can.’
The girls wrote letters and posted them when they came to towns. We are OK, Mother. We are alive and fine. Not long now. We’ll be with you soon.
Silence, horrible silence, settled across the hungerland. Livestock, cats and dogs, all dead. Birds and wild things all hunted or driven away. The only sound in the early morning was the soft breath of the dying. The footfalls of carrion eaters on patrol.
A woman in a garden held up her baby as they walked by.
‘Please. Take him, take him. I beg you take him. I cannot feed him. They will eat him when he dies.’
The child had an enormous wobbling head. A swollen pointed belly. He was already dead.
They studied starvation and became connoisseurs of hunger. Darkened faces and swollen legs were the symptomology of famishment. Corpse faces with wide and lifeless eyes, skin drawn skull-tight and glossy and covered with sores.