“How much do you want?” she asked Leonid as they browsed among the inferior cabbages and pulpy potatoes at the market, rutabagas like wet cardboard, overpriced honey in a jar without the comb. “Because I have little.”
He shrugged, weighing a cabbage in one hand while rich people, the educated rich and the corrupt rich alike, went by on the street in their automobiles that roared and belched and gave back the sun in glistening sheets of light. “For you?” he mused, gazing at her appraisingly from beneath the overgrown hedges of his eyebrows. He was a hairy man, hair creeping out from beneath his collar and sleeves, curling out of his nostrils and the pits of his great flapping ears, nothing at all like Oleski, who was smooth as a baby till the day he died, but for his private hair and his beard that came in so sketchily it was barely there at all. “For you,” he repeated, as if the deal had already been struck, “a little is more than enough.”
*
The man with the car was young, in his thirties, she guessed, and he wore a leather jacket like a hoodlum. He smoked the whole time, lighting one cigarette off the other. In place of conversation he had the radio that thrummed and buzzed with a low-level static and snatches of what someone in Prague or Moscow might have called music but to her was just noise. She sat in back with her two bags of possessions while Leonid, his great wide shoulders sagging against the torn vinyl of the seat, sat up front with the driver. It was night. The road was rutted. From the ditches came the sounds of the spring peepers, awakening from the frost to glory in life and love and the spewing of their eggs that were like pale miniature grapes all bound up in transparent tissue. When they came to the checkpoint and the fence that enclosed the Zone of Alienation for thirty kilometers around, the young man got out and conferred with the guard while Leonid lit his first cigarette of the night and shifted in the seat to study her face in the dim light cast by the guard’s kiosk. “A small bribe,” he said. “Nothing to worry over.”
She wasn’t worried, or not particularly. Word had it that the Ministry of Emergencies was looking the other way and allowing a small number of people — old people, over fifty only — to return to their villages because they knew no other way of life and because they were expendable. The sooner they died, either from natural or unnatural causes, the sooner their pensions would be released to the state. There were rumors of criminals roaming the Zone, of looters dismantling machinery and mining the deserted apartment blocks of Pripyat, the city closest to the reactor, for television sets and stereos and the like, then smuggling them, radiant with poison, out into the larger world. She didn’t care. She peered past Leonid to where the driver was having a laugh with the guard and sharing something out of a bottle. Beyond them was night absolute, the black night of the primordial forest where there were no apartments or automobiles or shops. “I don’t like him,” she whispered. “I don’t like him and I don’t trust him.”
In the half-light of the car, Leonid’s hand, blocky and work-hardened, snaked its way between the front seats to rest ever so lightly on her knee, and that was a revelation to her, that was when she began to understand things in the way the peepers in their ditches understood. Leonid’s own bags lay at his feet, two dark humps that were his life compacted. “Everything,” he murmured, his voice gone thick in his throat, “is going to be all right.”
And then the hoodlum was back in the car and the gate swung aside as if by magic and they were on a road that was no longer a road, jostling and scraping, shrieking through the brush of the dried and dead plants from the years past, dodging fallen trees no one had bothered to cut because there was no one to bother. They hadn’t gone more than a mile when the hoodlum tugged violently at the wheel and the car spun round in an exaggerated loop and came to a stop, the motor still ratcheting beneath them. “This is as far as I go,” he said.
“But it’s still seven miles to the village,” Leonid protested. And then, a wheedling tone came into his voice, “Maryska Shyshylayeva is an old woman — don’t make her walk all that way. Not in the dark and the cold of night.”
Before she knew she was going to speak, the words were out: “I’m sixty-two years old and while I may be stout — I don’t deny it — I can out-walk you, Leonid Kovalenko, with your creaky knees and big fumbling feet.” She could picture the cabin she and Oleski had built of peeled logs cut from the forest and the thatch they’d laid across the roof that bloomed with wildflowers in the spring — and the stove, her pride, that had never gone cold a day in her life, until the order came to evacuate, that is. “And you too,” she said, turning to the black-jacketed driver and honing her voice, “whatever your name is.”
*
She hadn’t thought to bring a flashlight but Leonid had and that was a good thing because the night was moonless and the road she’d reconstructed in her dreams a hundred nights running all but invisible beneath her feet. It wasn’t cold for April, or not particularly, but her breath hung before her like a veil and she was glad of the sweater and cloth coat she was wearing. Out here, the peepers were louder, shrieking as if their lives were going out of them. There were other noises too — the irregular hooting of owls from their hidden perches, a furtive dash and rustle in the brush, and then, startlingly, a sudden rising open-throated cry she’d hadn’t heard even the faintest trace of since she was a girl. “Do you hear that?” she said, her feet driving on, the straps of the bags digging into her shoulders.
“Wolves,” he said, between breaths. She’d been walking long distances lately to build up her stamina and she didn’t feel winded or tired in the least, but after the first mile or so she had to adjust her pace so that he could keep up. He breathed hollowly through his smoker’s lungs and in that moment she found herself worrying for him: what if he couldn’t make it? What would she do then?
“So the rumors are true,” she said. “About the animals returning.”
His feet shuffled through the mat of dead grasses that had colonized the cracks of the road. “I’m told there are moose now,” he said, pausing to catch his breath. “Roe deer like flocks of sheep, boar, rabbits, squirrels. Like in the time of Adam. Or our grandparents anyway.”
She held that picture a moment, even as something scurried across the road ahead of them. She saw her cabin restored to what it was, the deer clustered round, the fields standing high and green, rabbits jumping out of their skins and right into the pot even as she set it on the stove to boil, but then the image dissolved. “What of the poison? They say you can’t eat a tomato from your own garden, let alone a rabbit that’s grazed here all along—”
“Ridiculous. Rumors, nonsense. They just want to have an excuse to keep us out. What do you think, the meat’s going to glow? Nobody can tell, nobody, and if you don’t think poachers are feasting on venison and rabbit and goose even now, then you’re crazy. We’ll eat it, you can bet we will. Just think of it, all that game, all the fish in the lakes and rivers no one’s touched in three years now.”
She wanted to agree with him, wanted to say that she didn’t care about radiation or anything else because we all have to die and the sooner the better, that all she cared about was the peace of the forest and her home where she’d buried her husband fourteen years ago, but she was afraid despite herself. She pictured rats with five legs, birds without wings, her own self sprouting a long furred tail beneath her skirts while the meat shone in the pan as if it were lit from within. The night deepened. Leonid huffed for air. She hurried on.