“I can’t do that,” Vova says. “These are our business partners.”
“They’re our enemies.”
“They’re our counter party. But I do have some good news. You two have officially been declared dead.”
“How is that good news?” Kolya asks.
“Before you were listed as deserters.”
Kolya leads Vova a few meters from tear-streaked Danilo. “Don’t tell the unit about Danilo’s wife,” Kolya says and holds Vova’s gaze until he’s sure the weak-chinned Omskman will obey.
“Okay. And I’m sorry,” Vova says, frowning from Danilo to Kolya, unsure where to direct his condolences. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
Kolya and Danilo, widowers for all of three minutes, bow their heads and stare at the dirt.
REBELS arrive later that afternoon to pick up the new stock of munitions. Their voices, coming from the dacha long into the night, are still audible when Danilo announces his intent to escape. “I got to get back. My wife needs me,” he says.
A half-moon sits low in the star-buttoned sky. An ache relays down Kolya’s vertebrae as he sits up, from his neck to the base of his spine. “We need to prepare. Need a map, provisions. More than anything we need boots,” Kolya points out.
Danilo gives Kolya a deadened stare. “I’m leaving tonight.” Without further explanation, he begins filling his body bag with handfuls of dirt. When Danilo has filled it with a narrow body of soil, he stands and assesses his work. “Good enough. You should do the same, Kolya. They’ll think we’re just sleeping in tomorrow.”
Kolya is zipped in to his waist. He presses his head back against the white stone wall, draws meaningless shapes in the dirt floor. This well, this pit has become for him a burrow. He considers the endpoints of escape — reenlistment, death, home — and the happiest outcome he can envision is this, right here, recaptured and resentenced to work a peaceful plot of land. It’s as much as he can hope for right now. He’s lived longer than he ever expected, longer than he has any right to live, and he’s tired. His twenty-third birthday is still three weeks away.
“You’ll have to take this mission solo,” Kolya says. Danilo studies Kolya for a long moment, then pulls the photo of Kolya’s bikini-clad mother from his pocket and offers it. Kolya unfolds the two wrinkled wings where he and his brother stood, shirtless and swimsuited, arms locked around their mother’s pale, fleshy waist. He can’t remember who had taken the photo, or when, or where, or why. He can barely recall that little family, that three-citizen-republic bordered by the Polaroid frame. If he were to unbutton his pants right now, he wouldn’t feel the faintest twitch of shame.
“Don’t give that picture too much of a workout,” Danilo says. He pulls the fishing line rip cord with a dramatic flourish and the knotted yellow rope flops over the edge of the pit. Kolya folds the photo into a tight pellet and tosses it to Danilo when he reaches the top. “Send that to my brother. Tell him you’re the asshole who escaped.”
He keeps the mixtape, For Kolya, In Case of Emergency!!! Vol. 1, buttoned in his breast pocket. There’s still time, he tells himself, to hear what it has to say.
DANILO catches the folded photo, gives Kolya a half-cocked salute, and wades into the India-ink night with his shirt wrapped around his leg cuffs to muffle the clatter. His escape routes are limited. He could try the hill, and whatever lies beyond its crest, but it’s mined. He could try the stone path the rebels drove up on, but that would be the first place they’d search for him. The woods, he decides, are his best bet. He’s nearly reached them when something slashes from the ground into his right foot. Pain pulsates from the ball of his foot, up his leg, through his chest, exiting through his throat in an involuntary gasp. It must be a land mine, he thinks as he buckles into the grass. But there is no explosion, no flame, just silent agony enveloping his foot. He bites down on his wrist to steady his breathing and examines his foot. Blood spits from the wound and drips down a deeply lodged trowel blade. He takes the blade in both hands. With a terrific wrench, he withdraws the blade and the void fills with an agony so searing that white light flashes on the backs of his closed eyelids. Before his adrenaline expires, he crawls to the tree line.
Under a screen of floppy green leaves, Danilo collapses. His foot has been replaced with some awful instrument whose only purpose is to hurt. A breath rises from the cellar at the center of his chest and leaves his lips in a shrill, unfamiliar cry. He lifts his hands to the trees in surrender. “I give up,” he announces, no longer caring if the rebels hear him, no longer caring about anything. When did he begin telling people that his secondary school crush was his wife? There must have been a moment of deliberate deception, but his mind has been so jumbled for so long he can’t discern now. He can see his wedding so clearly. He wore a thirty-thousand-ruble suit. She couldn’t stop kissing him. They honeymooned in Moscow, posing for photographs in front of the Kremlin and Saint Basil’s and GUM. His father emerged from wherever he had disappeared to ten years earlier and shook Danilo’s hand saying, “I was wrong about you.”
The night is a sweat-slick fever dream. His wife stands at the well-scrubbed sink, wearing the paisley apron he bought her one spring day four and a half months after New Year’s and four and a half months before her birthday, the day of the year when she was farthest from presents, and thus, the day Danilo most wanted to give her one. She’s wearing the paisley apron that had made her flush with happiness when she unwrapped it from pink tissue paper, not that the paisley apron was itself responsible for the lovely glow within her cheeks, no apron wrapped in pink tissue paper has ever brought anything but disappointment to the recipient, rather Danilo was responsible for the lovely glow within her cheeks because he had counted the days from New Year’s and then counted the days to her birthday, and calculated the day in her annual orbit at which she was farthest from presents, and surprised her with a paisley apron that on New Year’s or her birthday would have disappointed her, but on that particular day, in that particular pink tissue paper, made her feel unbelievably loved. She’s wearing the paisley apron and she’s standing at the well-scrubbed sink and her back is to him so he cannot see her face. She’s standing at the sink in an apron and carving dark bruises from a potato with a paring knife. She carves away the dark bruises until so little potato remains it could fit in a teaspoon. “Even these rotten ones have a little good in them,” she says and tosses the nub into the boiling pot, standing at the well-scrubbed sink, her back to him so he cannot see her face, wearing the paisley apron all the while.
A single gunshot launches him from dreams of his wife and into stark morning light. His pulse leaps with jungle-cat acceleration. He’s just behind the tree line, where he passed out in the night. When he figures out that the gunfire isn’t directed toward him, he examines his foot. The wound has clotted into a black slit from toes to arch. Another spurt of gunfire. He drags himself until he can see a half-dozen rebels standing at the bottom of the mined hill. The spindly one angles his Kalashnikov skyward and fires another shot. Beside him, the old man smooths his rebellious mustache with one hand and holds a large, unwieldy book in the other. Marooned alone in the middle of the hill, thirty meters up, Kolya kneels.