*
The first frost arrived late that year and when it came to swab the trees with color and shrivel the leaves of her tomato plants, it was immediately succeeded by a brief return to summer, one of those autumn idylls that comes round every once in a lucky year. She was out in her garden under the full force of the sun, harvesting her squash and cucumbers and beans while the pots boiled away on the stove and Leonid gave up all his time to her and the canning that consumed their every waking moment, when she heard the sound of hooves on the road out front. She glanced up, expecting one of the moose or big strutting red deer that thronged the woods and gave her pleasure every time she saw one, but she was surprised. There was a man on the road, a young man in his twenties with the same look as the hoodlum who’d driven the car for them last spring, and for a moment she caught her breath, expecting trouble. But then she saw he was dressed in simple clothes — no boots and leather jacket — and that his face was shaded by the broad-brimmed felt hat of a farmer. Even more surprising — startling, amazing — he was leading two milk cows on a tether, both of them laden with his possessions wrapped up in burlap.
He started when he saw her there, rising from her knees and wiping her hands on her skirts, but then he called out a greeting and in the next moment he was in the yard, coming up the path to her. She didn’t know what to do. They’d seen no one since Nikolai, all sense of grace and propriety lost to her, and even as she called out a hello in response, her voice seemed out of practice.
He was no more than twenty feet from her, the cows lurching this way and that on their tether and finally dipping their heads to the grass, when she saw that he wasn’t alone. Coming round the bend in the road was a young woman hunched under the weight of a backpack, her blond hair wrapped high on her head and shining in the sun, and behind her were two children, lean and long-legged and striding right along, though they couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. “Hello,” the man called out again, and now Sobaka was there, barking and showing his teeth, and the figure of Leonid shadowed the doorway, his rifle in hand. “I didn’t know anyone was living out here now,” the man said, and if the dog intimidated him — or the sight of Leonid in the doorway — he didn’t let it show. In fact, he seemed so relaxed he might have been standing in his own yard, with his own dog, and she and Leonid the outsiders.
One of the children let out a cry and then both of them were running across the yard in a bright flash of bare knees and working arms as Sobaka danced round their heels and the young woman strode into the yard behind them to shrug out from under her backpack and set it down in the high grass. “Do you know if the Ilyenok place is still standing?” the woman asked, coming forward till she stood shoulder to shoulder with her husband.
“Ilyenok?” Maryska echoed stupidly, but she could feel something opening up inside her — the notion of what was going on here, what this promised, settling into her brain like a little bird winged down from the trees.
“Aren’t you Maryska Shyshylayeva?” the man said, but he was hardly a man — he was an overgrown boy, that was what he was. “I’m Sava, Sava Ilyenok — don’t you recognize me?”
In the next moment, Leonid was out of the house, the rifle forgotten, embracing this boy, son of deceased parents, son of the earth, son of the village, come home again. “Yes,” Leonid boomed, rocking back from the boy to take in the sight of the pretty young wife and the two children, who were frolicking with the dog now, “we know you, of course we know you, and welcome, welcome!”
And Maryska, coming back to herself, held out her hands in delight. “You must be exhausted,” she said. “Come, come in. I’ve got soup on the stove, hot tea, bread and jam for the children.” She paused to gaze longingly on the cows. “But no cheese, I’m afraid.”
Husband and wife exchanged a glance, then turned their faces to her. He was the one who spoke. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, “I think we can fix that.”
*
When the snow came, the first snow, it was light and wet, limning the bare branches of the poplars and bowing the evergreens. The stove ticked and hissed throughout the day. Everything was still. In the oven was the pheasant Leonid had shot that morning, which she planned to serve with potato dumplings and sour cream. She was reading, for the tenth time, the tenth time at least, the Chekhov story about the peasants and their miserable lives and how one misery propagates another, when she set the book aside and went out into the yard to smell the air and watch the heavy snowflakes whirl down out of the sky.
The trees stood sentinel, black lines etched against the accumulation of snow. A pair of squirrels were busy at the base of the apple tree, darkening the whiteness with their miniature digging. She wasn’t worried about herself any longer or about Leonid either, but she did worry for the children, for Ilya and Nadia Ilyenok, and what the days might bring them. What of their bones? What of the strontium-90 in the grass the cows chewed all day long? What would Nikolai say about it? He would say that they were crazy, suicidal, that to live in nature under the open sky and walk the earth that gave up everything, even its poisons, was somehow unnatural — as if the apartments, with their crush and stink of humanity, were some sort of heaven.
She was about to turn and go back into the house, to her roasting bird and Leonid and the zubrovka they would sip over the chessboard before dinner, when a movement beside the woodshed caught her eye. There was something there, small, compact, lithe, and at first she thought it was the weasel come back to them, but then she saw her mistake: it was a cat. Gray, striped, with a long fluff of hair and a tail tipped in white.
“Grusha,” she called softly, “can it really be you?” The cat — Grusha had been darker, hadn’t she? — gave her a long steady gaze before melting away behind the shed. She didn’t want to spook it, and so she moved forward very slowly, step by step, but by the time she got there, it was gone, nothing left but fading tracks in a wet snow.
(2010)
Los Gigantes
At first they kept us in cages like zoo animals, but that was too depressing. After a while we began to lose interest in what we’d been brought there to do. We didn’t think about it, or not much anyway. We were just depressed, that was all, and when they brought the women to us it was inevitable that we went about the business in a halfhearted way. In any case, it was soon over and then it was time for a meal, another meal. They fed us well, I’ll say that for them. No expense was spared. And the food was good, the best I’d ever tasted, prepared for us by a man who was rumored to have been first assistant to the pastry chef at the presidential palace before he was replaced by a Frenchman who didn’t speak a word of Spanish.
Originally we were ten, but one of our number was suspect and soon rooted out. It happened that a woman refused to go with him and when Corporal Carrera, who held the keys, wanted to know why, she said, Just look at him. And he did. We all did. (This was during the first week when we really hadn’t had a chance to get to know one another yet and no one had given the man much thought. Why would we? We were being fed. We had women. Life was good.) Anyway, once this woman had spoken up we all began to scrutinize him and saw what she meant: he was damaged goods. He was tall enough, three or four inches taller than me, in fact, and thick in the limbs, but his face was like an anvil and his eyes couldn’t seem to focus. And when he talked it was in disconnected monosyllables that seemed to dredge themselves up out of some deep fissure in his digestive tract. The man in the cage beside mine whispered, “Pituitary freak,” and in that instant I saw what I’d missed. Yes: damaged goods. No sense in wasting the stipend, the ex-assistant pastry chef’s culinary concoctions and all those prescribed women on him. I felt a sense of outrage that was as much about my own humiliation as anything else: whoever had chosen him had chosen me too, and what did that say about me?