‘Are we going to stay here?’ said Galina. ‘For a while?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Eligiya Kamilova.
Yeva knew that Galina needed to rest, to stop moving for a long while, to be strong again.
Eligiya Kamilova hadn’t give them any choice when she opened the door of the train and took them away into the trees and made them walk. It all happened too quickly to even think about until after it was done. But if they’d stayed on the train and gone where it was taking them, their mother would have known where they were and she could have come there to get them. Eligiya said the train was going to a bad place, a cruel terrible place, and no one ever came home from there, but she didn’t even know what the terrible place was called, and Yeva wasn’t scared of being in terrible places.
Every day she remembered the bomb. It always jumped her when she was thinking of something else. It wasn’t like a memory. Memories change until you don’t remember the actual thing any more; you remember the remembering. But of the time when the bomb fell nothing was forgotten and nothing was changed. When it jumped her it was like opening the same page of a book again and again, and the words were always all there, and always the same: Yeva’s life hammered open like a bomb-broken building, the insides scattered and left exposed to ruinous elemental fire and rain.
Part of her stopped moving forward when the bomb came. Part of her got stuck in that piece of time for ever, always back there, always smelling the dust and burning, always looking down at Aunt Lyudmila squashed flat, always going down the stairs that used to be inside but were outside now, with nothing to hold on to. Part of her stayed back there, and only part of her was left to carry on. Now was a shadow remnant life of numbed and lesser feeling. Now was only aftermath. Aftermath.
That day when they first found the yellow house in the grass they didn’t stay there but after looking it over they walked on down the stony dry track into the village. Long before they reached the village fields, Yeva could taste the tang of raw damp earth and animal dung in the air. Rooks chattered, squabbled and wheeled across the wide flatness of black soil just turned, thick and heavy and gleaming blue like metal. In the distance women were stooping and crouching at their work. They wore long red or green skirts, and their hair was wrapped in lengths of white cloth.
The village was a collection of ramshackle dwellings under heavy mounds of thatch, and beyond it was the lake and a line of tall pale trees on the shore, blue and dusty and far away. They walked in among skinny chickens and wary, resentful dogs, grey wood barns, grey corrugated-iron roofs. Scrawny cattle browsed in the dust behind a low fence of woven branches. A tractor leaned, abandoned, its axle propped on a rock.
‘What’s the name of this place?’ said Eligiya Kamilova to the knot of men who gathered to meet them.
‘Yamelei,’ they said. ‘This is Yamelei.’
Women from the nearest field came to join them, treading heavily over the upturned mud in rag-made shoes. Eligiya showed them the intricate brown patterns on her dark sinewed arms, and their eyes opened wider at that. A big old fellow with a ragged beard scoured the skyline behind them.
‘There are no men with you?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘A mother and daughters, then.’
‘I am not their mother.’
‘Grandmother?’
‘No,’ said Eligiya. ‘Who lives in the big yellow house?’
‘They left,’ a woman said.
‘How long ago?’
The woman pursed her lips. It was a question without an answer. Seasons rolled, and once in a while a new thing happened.
‘And no one lives there now?’ said Eligiya.
While Eligiya was talking to them Yeva watched the people of the village, their broad flattened faces, flattened noses, narrow dark curious eyes in crinkled skin. The men wore linen shirts and sleeveless jackets of animal hide, the pattern of the cows’ backs on them yet, and shoes of woven bark that looked like slippers. They had knotted hands and swollen knuckles and their teeth were bad. They were looking at her, and she was looking at them, but the space between her and them was like thousands of miles and hundreds of years. She couldn’t feel what they were thinking. They talked the same words but it was a different language.
Eligiya Kamilova told the people of Yamelei she would fix the tractor and make their boats stronger and steadier for the lake, and it was agreed that she and the two girls could stay at the yellow house for a while.
‘Whose house is it?’ said Galina as they walked back. ‘It must be somebody’s.’
‘Small house,’ said Eligiya Kamilova. ‘Small aristocracy, long gone now.’
‘Why doesn’t someone from the village go and live there?’
‘If someone did that,’ said Eligiya, ‘the others would have to resent them, and it would lead to trouble.’
They took water from the stream to drink and cook and wash in. Eligiya Kamilova trapped things in the woods. Pigeons and hares. Yeva didn’t mind the plucking and the skinning and pulling the inside parts out. Galina wouldn’t do it, but it gave Yeva no bad feelings at all.
There was a place behind the house closed in by a high wall of horizontal weathered planking between tall solid uprights. Inside the wall was a mass of ragged foliage, a general green flood: shoulder-high umbellifers and banks of trailing thorn. Week by week Eligiya and the girls cleared it away and found useful things still growing there: cabbage and onion and currant canes and lichenous old fruit trees. On a high shelf in a tool shed Eligiya found a rust-seized shotgun and a half-carton of shells. She fixed the gun up with tractor oil and it seemed like it would work, but she didn’t want to try it out because the noise would reach the village and the men would come.
When summer came the walled yard was gravid with acrid ripeness. Lizards sunned themselves on the planking and wasps crawled on sun-warmed fruit. Eligiya Kamilova and the girls went into the garden and ate berries hurriedly, greedily, three at a time, bursting the sharp sweet purple taste with their tongues against the roofs of their mouths, staining their fingers with the blue-black juice.
Every day Eligiya Kamilova went down to Yamelei to work. Yeva was glad when she was gone and the sisters were on their own together without her. Then there were long afternoons of slow lazy time when few words were said or remembered, only the smells and colours and the day-flying moths in the house and the feeling of the long grass against their skin. Yeva would lie on her back by the overgrown stream and shut her eyes and look through closed lids at the bright oranges and soft, swirling, pulsing reds and browns. There were rhythms there, like the rhythms of her breathing. A plenitude of time. Galina got stronger, and in the evenings the sisters swam together in the big deep pond where the stream was dammed, until the air streamed with night-borne scents and the first stars rained tiny flakes of light that brushed their faces and settled on their arms. Then the night fears started to come out of the trees and across the grass, and Galina said it was time to get dressed and go into the house. Galina was getting better, but she still went silent sometimes and far away as if she was looking up at Yeva from under water.
In the evenings, before she went to sleep, Yeva would empty her pockets onto the shelves in the bookless emptied library and pick through the collection of the day. Feathers, empty dappled eggshells, twigs and leaves and moss, stones and fragments of knotty root. The best of them she put out by the stove for the domovoi.