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.”
*
She couldn’t sleep that night, imagining the poison in her bones, illuminating her from the inside out like in the X-rays they took of her lungs when she was in the apartments. The rot was working in her and she’d been fooling herself all along. Any day now she’d fall sick — or Leonid would, sinking into himself till the flesh dropped away and she would have to haul him out by his attenuated ankles and bury him beside Oleski. She saw that, saw him dead, even as he lay next to her, oblivious, stretched out like a fallen tree, snoring mightily. She listened to him in the dark and heard the creatures of the night rustling outside the window, and finally, near dawn, fell asleep to the ancient sound of the wolves on their hunt.
Next morning she was up as usual, working in the garden, and when she was done, she cooked, washed and cleaned, no different from any other day, but the heaviness stayed with her. Leonid was tentative around her, as if sensing her thoughts. He brought her a pair of rabbits he’d caught in his snares and then went about doing what he did best: repairing things. She tried to drive down her uneasiness, but it wasn’t till late in the day, the rabbits roasting on a bed of onions, carrots and potatoes and the breeze as sweet as a hand on your cheek, that she began to relax. She took a chair out into the yard and sat there in the sun with Leonid, sipping a glass of the zubrovka he’d very patiently distilled from bison grass, drop by drop, and thought about one of the stories he’d told her from his time when he’d slipped across the border into Turkey and gone to sea as a merchantman.
He’d had a shipmate from a place called Tobago, an island in a tropical sea, and this man — his skin as weathered and black as an old bicycle horn — had a disease called ciguatera. It came from eating certain reef fishes from his native waters, fishes that accumulated poison in them, and it attacked his nervous system so that he was always twitching and jerking about. All his teeth but one had fallen out and his eyes were affected too, so that he wore the thickest lenses just to see. One day, when they were all on shore leave in a tropical port, Leonid and another shipmate were strolling by a café and saw this man there, a beer in hand, a plate of barracuda set before him. “What are you doing, my friend?” Leonid said. “Don’t you realize that barra is the very fish that gives you the disease?” And the man just smiled at him, his mouth full now, and said, “Yes, this I know, but it’s de sweetest fish in de sea.”
That was it, exactly. And she glanced at Leonid, at his big ears and drooping stolid features, and raised her glass to him. His own glass rose to click the rim of hers and he gave her his broad toothy grin. “To your health,” she said.