“Where’s that cup of tea I was promised?” he asked, his voice rising in merriment as if he’d just delivered the punchline of a joke. He was feeling exactly the same way she was, feeling liberated, relieved, as joyful and rejuvenated as if he’d just won the lottery.
She poured them each a cup, but she wouldn’t sit down, taking hers to the cutting board, where she began to cube the pork and dice the vegetables and feed them into the pot. There were so many things to do, infinite things, and the funny part of it was that she didn’t feel tired at all, though she’d been up all night and walked those seven miles in the dark.
From the armchair, Leonid lifted his voice in supposition: “That’s the meat you brought along, isn’t it? And the vegetables?”
“What do you think — I shot a boar while you were snoring there in the chair? And sprouted a whole garden outside the window like in some fairy tale?” She turned to face him, hands on her hips, and here was where the doubt crept in, here was where she was glad to have him there with her if only to get a second opinion on the parameters of this tentative new world they were inhabiting. “But the rice in this jar? I’m going to use it, because we are going to have to eke out every bite till we can grow a garden and snare rabbits and catch fish from the river. The poison can’t invade glass, can it? Or tins?”
He was on his feet now, setting down the empty tea cup and taking up the broom, which he began to whisk across the floor in a running storm of dust and leaves. Had she really said “we”? As if it were already decided that he wouldn’t go home to his own cottage but stay on here with her?
“No,” he said, over his shoulder, “I don’t think so, not after three years. But anything you’ve canned, tomatoes, snap beans, we have to be careful if the seal’s broken, because then we’ll get the real poison, ptomaine or what have you—”
“Yes,” she said, cutting him off, “and die fast, right here tonight, instead of waiting for the radiation to do the job.”
She’d meant to be funny, or irreverent at any rate, but he didn’t laugh. He just went on sweeping till he threw open the door and swept all the litter out into the yard. Then he set the broom carefully aside and said, “I’d better get the saw from my place and cut that birch tree away from the eaves. We,” he said, emphasizing the pronoun, “wouldn’t want a leaky roof, now would we?”
*
That first night they slept together in her marriage bed, but not as lovers — more in the way of brother and sister, in the way of practicality, because where else would he sleep except between his own slimy sheets in his cottage three quarters of a mile away? In the morning they each had a bowl of soup fortified with rice and then he went out the door and vanished up the road while she busied herself with all manner of things, not the least of which was scrubbing the mold from the walls with the remains of an old jug of bleach. It was past noon, the sun high, birdsong like a symphony, deer nosing through the yard and the evicted weasel sunning itself atop the woodpile, when he returned, pushing a wheelbarrow filled with foodstuffs from his own larder, another set of bedsheets, a fur comforter, his rifle and fishing pole and a coil of rope for snares. And more: there was a dog trotting along behind him. It was no dog she’d ever seen before, not among the pets of her neighbors, or not that she could remember anyway. She regarded it dubiously, its ribs showing like stripes and the scrap of its tail wagging feebly over the scent of the soup drifting out the open door. It was of medium size, not big enough to be a proper watchdog, its coat the color of suet shading to a dark patch over one eye. “We can’t keep it,” she said flatly. “It’ll be a struggle just to feed ourselves.”
“Too late,” he said, grinning wide. “I’ve already named him.”
“As if that means anything.”
“Sobaka,” he called, appending a low whistle, and the dog came to him even as he set the wheelbarrow down in the high weeds.
“‘Dog’? You’ve named him ‘dog’? What kind of a name is that?”
He was on the doorstep now, proffering the fur, which smelled of ancient history. His ears shone. He was grinning through the gap in his beard, which seemed to have grown even thicker and grayer overnight. Then he took her in his arms, hard arms, lean and muscular, not an old man’s arms at all, and squeezed her to him. “What kind of name? The perfect name. Maybe, just maybe, if you behave yourself, Maryska Shyshylayeva, I’ll call you ‘woman.’ What do you think of that?”
And when night came and the lantern burned low, they slept together again, only this time there was no euphemism interposed between them.
*
Time went on. The days broadened. Her garden, planted from the seed packets she’d brought with her from Kiev, grew straight and true, as if it had arisen from virgin soil. Leonid put up wire fencing borrowed from a derelict field to discourage the rabbits and used his rifle on the hogs that stole in to dig up her potatoes, so that the smell of smoking meat hung thick over the yard and attracted a whole menagerie of fox, lynx, raccoon dog, bear and wolf. When the wolves came, and they came as much for the deer crowding the meadows as for the scent of Leonid’s meat, Sobaka kept close to the house, and in time he began to thicken around the ribs and haunches and his bark rang out in defiance of the interlopers. He was a superior mouser, better even than the big striped cat — Grusha, that was her name — she’d had to leave behind. Three years was an eon in a cat’s life. As soft and old as she’d become, the cat would have been an easy target for a fox or hawk or one of the big white-tailed eagles that had reappeared to soar over the Zone on motionless wings — or the poison, the poison would have gotten her by now, sure it would. Still, if this dog had survived, she couldn’t help thinking, maybe Grusha had too. Maybe one day she’d be there meowing at the door as if the calendar had stood still. And wouldn’t that be a miracle, among so many others?
The thing was — and she couldn’t put this out of her mind — the fact of the poison increasingly seemed less a liability than a benefit. The government that had collectivized all the big farms to the north and east of them and suppressed any notion of individual effort and freedom was gone, withdrawn to the safety of its eternal offices in all the sanitized regions of the country. And the people who for centuries had tamed and beaten and leached the land were gone too, while in their absence the animals had come back to thrive in all their abundance. Neither she nor Leonid had been sick a day — he was leaner now, his shoulders thrust back, his face tanned, and the work of the place had hardened her too so that she’d lost the excess flesh she’d put on in the apartments — and the dire warnings, the predictions of cancers and mutations and all the rest seemed nothing more than wives’ tales now. What more would she want? A cow, so they could have dairy. And Grusha returned to her. But she was content, and when she served Leonid a plate of dumplings or holubtsi, she saw nothing but love in his face. About his wife, he never spoke a word.
And then one morning as they were lingering over breakfast — porridge, a fresh loaf she’d baked the night before, strawberry preserves she’d put up all those years ago and a pot of the good rich China tea Leonid had discovered in an abandoned house on one of his jaunts through the woods — a strange terrible mechanical sound suddenly erupted out of nowhere and drove down the chatter of the birds and the symphony of the bees. At first she thought the reactor had blown again, thought they were doomed, but then the noise began to settle into a pattern she recognized from long ago: somebody was driving a vehicle down the forgotten street out front of the house.
In the next moment they were both on their feet. They moved as if entranced to the door that stood open to admit the breeze and saw a car there, a jeep with battered fenders and no top and a single man behind the wheel, turning that wheel now and pulling right on up to the door. They couldn’t have been more astonished if the premier himself had showed up — or a man from space. Her heart sank. They were going to be evicted, that was it, she was sure of it. But then she got a good look at the man behind the wheel and understood in a flash: it was Nikolai, his face flushed, his blond hair in a tangle, his eyes obscured behind a pair of dark glasses.
“Mama,” he said, stepping down from the jeep and coming to her embrace, holding her tight to him in a mad whirling hug. Then there was the awkward introduction to Leonid, whom he knew, of course, from his days here as a boy before he went off to the state school and never returned, and then he was handing her packages, gifts of food from the city and a book by William Faulkner, the American agrarian writer he was forever translating, though she’d told him years ago that the Bible and Chekhov were enough for her.
Oh, but he was fat! Ushering him to the table and fussing over the loaf and his tea, she couldn’t help noticing the girth of him that wouldn’t allow him to button his shirt around the midsection and the way his cheeks sagged with the weight of easy living. He was thirty-six years old. He was her son, the professor. And in all those days, weeks and months of the three years she was entombed in those apartments, he had visited her exactly once.
At first, they talked of the little things — the weather, the strikes and movements and tragedies of the outside world, the health of his fragile and childless wife — but then, within minutes of his stepping through the door, he started in on the subject he’d come expressly to address, or not simply to address, but to harangue her with: the poison. Did she know the danger she was exposing herself to? Did she understand? Could she imagine? His hands were like balls of butter, his eyes sunk to glittering blue slits in the reddened globe of his face. He pushed the bread aside. He wouldn’t touch the tea.
After a moment he snatched up the jar of honey — wild honey, honey they’d collected themselves, with the comb intact — and waved it in her face. “Do you have any idea how radioactive this is? You couldn’t poison yourself more thoroughly if you stirred arsenic into your tea. Bees collect pollen, don’t you know that? Every grain of it shot through with radionuclides — they concentrate it, Mama, don’t you understand?”
There was something attached to his belt, a little machine with a white plastic cover, and he took it up now, depressed the button on top and held it to the jar. Immediately, it began to release a quick breathless high-pitched chirp, as if a field of crickets were trapped inside. “Do you hear that?” he demanded, and he got up from the table to run the little machine across the walls, the plates, the food in the cupboard, and all the while it chirped and chirped again. “That,” he said, “is the sound of cancer, Mama, of disease. You’re getting it from the environment, from everything you touch, but more than that from the food, the meat, the vegetables in your garden. It’s suicide to be here, Mama, suicide, slow and sure.”
It was then that Leonid pushed himself up from the table with a sigh and ambled out the door, his bulky frame shimmering in the wash of golden summer light. She was left with her son, the professor, and his little white machine. He ran it over the antlers of the deer Leonid had hung on the wall above the sofa and it screeched out its insectoid warning—“Strontium-90, concentrated in the bones, Mama, in your bones too”—and then over the ashes in the bucket by the stove. “The worst,” he said, “the very worst, because the radionuclides are bound up in the wood and when you burn it they’re released all over again into the atmosphere. To breathe. For you to breathe. And Leonid. And your dog.”
She looked at him bitterly. What was he trying to do — terrify her? Ruin her life? Give her bad dreams so she couldn’t sleep at night?
“Mama,” he said, and he had his hand on her arm now, “I’ve come to take you back.”
And now she spoke for the first time since he’d brandished his little chirping machine: “I won’t go.”
“You will.”
Suddenly Leonid was back in the room, the dog at his side. He seemed to have something in his hand, an axe handle, as it turned out. Sobaka, who’d slunk away when the jeep approached, stood his ground now and showed his teeth. Leonid said: “You heard your mother.”