*
When the order came to evacuate, after the explosion that jolted people from their beds and combusted the sky in the dead hours of the night, after the preternaturally darkened days — nearly a week of them — in which rumors flew and everybody who wasn’t in the fields or milking or out in the orchards hovered over their radios, the government sent in troops to force compliance. The core of the reactor was heating up again — there could be a second explosion. It wasn’t safe. Everyone must board the buses that rolled through the villages, no exceptions made. Two bags only, that was what the radio said and it was reiterated by the loudspeakers blaring from the jeeps and army trucks that stopped outside each house. What of our things? people wanted to know. What of the livestock, our pets? The government reassured them, one and all, that they would be able to return in three days’ time, and that the livestock would be evacuated too. The dogs — and the government didn’t reveal this — were to be shot on sight, nearly ten thousand of them across Polissia, for fear of rabies. And the livestock, including her own milk cow, Rusalka, were ultimately to be slaughtered en masse and mixed with the flesh of uncontaminated animals for feeding to luckier dogs and cats living in places were there were no evacuations and life went on as usual.
She believed the voice of the radio. Believed the reports of the invisible poison. Believed what she was told. There was no alternative. She had electricity in the cabin, a loop of wire strung from a pole that connected to another pole and on and on ad infinitum, but no telephone, and so she went in that suspended week when no one knew anything to the cottage of the Melnychenkos to pay for the use of theirs. What had they heard? They’d heard that to the north of them the city of Pripyat stood deserted, all forty-nine thousand inhabitants shunted onto buses and whisked away; beyond that, they knew no more than she. She stood by the stove in the Melnychenkos’ front room, the log walls of which were decorated with ikons and pages torn from color magazines, just like her own, and placed a call to her son, Nikolai, the professor of language studies in Kharkov. He would know what to do. He would know the truth. Unfortunately, however, the receiver only gave back a buzz in her ear and when the bus came she carried her two bags up the steps and found a seat among her neighbors.
And so now, in the black hours of night in a haunted place that was the only place she’d ever wanted to be, she trudged up the overgrown road with Leonid Kovalenko, waiting for the light of dawn so that she could see what had become of her life. Had the looters been here? Or the animals? What of her sheets and comforter — her bed? Would there be a place to sleep even? Four walls? A roof? Her father used to say that if you ever wanted to get rid of a barn or a shed or even a house all you had to do was poke a hole in the roof and nature would bring it down for you. Her left shoe began to rub against the place where her toes fought the grip of the worn leather. Her ankles felt swollen and her shoulders burned under the weight of her bags.
Leonid had long since fallen silent, the shaft of his flashlight growing dimmer as they walked on, moving ever more slowly, to his pace. She wanted to leave him behind, maddened by his wheezing and shuffling — he was an old man, that was what he was — and it was all she could do to keep from snatching the flashlight away from him and rushing off into the night. She heard the wolves again, a sound like interference on the radio, starting low and tailing off in a high broken whine. There was a smell of bog and muck and fallow land. She was focusing on putting one foot in front of the other, all the while mentally sorting through her cupboards, the tinned goods there, the rice, flour and sugar she stored in jars on the highest shelf to frustrate the rodents, her spices, her crockery, her cookware, when the sky to the east began to grow pale and she saw the world as it once had been. Five minutes later, hurrying on, no thought for Leonid or his flashlight now, she was there, in her own yard with the spring flowers gone to riot and the apple tree she’d planted herself already in bloom and the dark horizontal lines of the cabin materializing from the grip of the shadows as if she’d never been away at all.
*
That first day was among the happiest of her life. She felt like a songbird caged all these years and suddenly set free, felt giddy, a girl all over again. And the house, the house was a miracle, everything as she’d left it, the smells awakening a thousand recollections, of Oleski, of the good times, the summer nights when the light seemed as if it would never fade, the snowbound winters when the two of them sat playing chess and checkers in front of the stove while the cat purred in her lap and the samovar steamed and the silence was so absolute you could wrap yourself in it. Her bed was still made, though the comforter was damp with mold and the pillowcase slick to the touch, but they could be washed, everything could be washed and no harm done. Of course, there was damage, she could see that at a glance. A pane of glass in the back window lay shattered on the carpet and a birch tree thick around as her waist had fallen against the roof. What had been her garden was now a forest of weeds and saplings, there were mice in the stove and birds nesting atop the cupboard, but the looters hadn’t come — they’d stuck to the cities, to Chernobyl and Pripyat — and if you could ignore the dust that lay over everything and the dirt of the spiders and mice and birds, there was nothing a broom and a mop and a good strong back couldn’t put to rights.
She was at the stove, arranging sticks of three-year-old kindling in the depths of the firebox, thinking the mice could look out for themselves, thinking she’d warm the place, dry it out, then tape newspaper over the broken pane, boil water to wash the sheets and scrub the tabletop and sink — and here, right at hand, was her sturdiest pot hanging on its hook where she’d left it, ready to receive the soup she would prepare from the pork, cabbage and potatoes she’d brought along and maybe something off the shelves of her larder too because unless the cans had burst they were good, weren’t they? — when she heard a noise behind her and turned to see Leonid there, his face drained of everything but exhaustion. He came forward heavily and sank into her armchair. “I just need to rest a moment,” he said, his breath leaving him in a thin wheeze that made her think of a child releasing a balloon.
“Rest,” she said, her smile blooming so that her cheeks felt flushed with it, “I’ll make us tea.” And then, because she couldn’t contain herself, she swept across the room to plant a kiss on his cheek. “Nobody’s been here,” she crowed, “nobody at all!”
It was at that precise moment that the hinges of the cupboard below the sink gave a short sharp groan and the slick head and labile shoulders of a weasel emerged, one paw arrested. The animal shot them an indignant look, its body a dun writhe of snakelike muscle flowing from the cabinet to the floor, before it vanished through a hole in the wall no wider around than a wind-drift apple. Leonid caught her eye, grinning himself now, and said, “Nobody?” before they both dissolved in laughter.
*
She fetched water from the well while he fell into a heavy sleep in the armchair, then filled all her pots and stoked the stove till the water came to a furious boil and the room began ever so gradually to take on warmth. Next, she washed her cutting board and knives and all the dishes she could lay hands on, just to remove any hint of grime from them — and the poison, the poison too — then stripped the sheets from the bed and washed them, along with the comforter, in her big tub. In the yard — it was so overgrown with weeds it was as if no one had lived here in a century — she discovered that her clothesline had been snapped in two by a fallen branch, the ends of the frayed rope lying sodden on the ground, but she was able to knot them and hang out the sheets and her comforter in the hope they’d dry by nightfall. When she came back through the door, she found Leonid awake and alert.