“That’s right. You’re Pete Ackerman, right?” He extended his hand.
“Thought I’d tell you. Your brother-in-law has arrived from America — I just saw him over at the hotel asking for your address.”
“Thanks,” Paul said automatically, gazing into space.
“Sure.”
Paul pulled out of his trance. “Thanks again,” he said, “I’ll be seeing you.”
He parked the pickup outside the hotel, found Betty at the desk. He and Amy had stayed there while they were rebuilding the farmhouse; their daughter, Elisabeth, had been born there. Betty and her husband, Jim, had been the first real friends they’d made in New Zealand.
“Hello, Paul—”
“Is Amy’s brother here?”
“No… what’s the matter?”
“Where did he go?”
“He drove out to your place, about fifteen minutes ago—”
He was gone, accelerating up the street, praying he wouldn’t be too late.
Kuznetsky drove slowly up the valley, savoring the countryside. He liked New Zealand’s South Island, there was a touch of Siberia’s wild emptiness about it, a place for beginnings, not endings. And at this time of the day, as the falling sun lit the tops of the trees, the valleys seemed like darkened paths in a never-ending forest.
He turned off onto a side road that wound upward alongside a narrow rushing stream. After half a mile the valley suddenly widened, and at its farthest end he could see the house, surrounded by tall trees and sheltered by a steep hillside. He’d told her the ends of the earth, and here they were.
He stopped the car, lit a cigarette, and watched. The lights were on in the house, smoke curling from the chimney into the twilight sky. It was not the kind of house in which the landlord settles down. He felt pleased for them, absurdly pleased.
He’d spent almost a year searching for Nadezhda, pestering every committee he could think of, cashing in every favor he’d ever earned. She’d vanished off the face of the earth. And then one day he’d been buying a ticket at Belorussia Station and recognized Yakovenko in a group of men drinking tea in the office next door. Yakovenko told him she had been killed, had been dead even before he left for America, cut down by a group of retreating Germans who’d blundered into their forest hideaway.
The news had stunned him; he knew that now. The body still worked, even his knee after a fashion, the brain still worked, but everything else in him was dead. There was a generation of Nadezhdas, and for that he was grateful — his life had not been wasted. But they were not for him; the new world had a right to be free of the terror that had made it possible.
He got out of the car, gun in hand, remembering the sad look on Sheslakov’s face at their last meeting. The old proverb — you can bring a horse to water but you can’t make it drink — crossed his mind. He smiled grimly and began walking toward the house.
Amy saw the car pull up under the trees, the sudden spark as the driver lit a cigarette, and she knew who it was. She’d known he would come one day, known it in her bones.
She took Elisabeth out of the cot, praying that she wouldn’t wake up, and carried her into their bedroom. “Ssssh,” she said to the sleeping baby, as her mother had said to her all those years before.
Back in the front room, she turned off the lights and peered out through the crack between curtain and frame. He was walking, limping, up the dirt road toward the house. She sat back in the chair and waited, listening to his feet crossing the yard and climbing the steps up onto the porch. There he stopped, and in the silence she could hear Paul’s pickup hurtling up the valley.
He heard it too. He knew she was behind the door in the corner — that’s where he would be. He smiled to himself and walked across the threshold, slowly, deliberately, his gun pointing down at the floor. He never saw Amy sitting in the shadows, or the shotgun that scattered his life away, only a flashing vision of a forest split by sunbeams rushing into night.