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My mother and I over the summer had become rough peasants. Our fingers were hard, with tough thick nails, permanently blackened with earth, and most interesting of all was that at the base of our nails we’d developed some sort of calluses. I noticed that Anisya had the same thing on her fingers, as did Marfutka, who didn’t do anything, and even Tanya, our lady of leisure, a former nurse, had them too. Speaking of which, at this point Tanya’s most frequent visitor, Vera, the shepherdess, hung herself in the forest. She wasn’t actually a shepherdess anymore-all the sheep had been eaten long ago-and also she had a secret, which Anisya, who was very angry with Tanya, now told us: Vera always called for tea when she was coming into the village, but what Tanya gave Vera was some kind of medicine, which she couldn’t live without, and that’s why she hung herself: she had no money anymore for medicine. Vera left behind a little daughter. Anisya, who had contact with Tarutino, the neighboring village, told us that the girl was living with her grandmother, but then it emerged that the grandmother was another Marfutka, only with a drinking problem, and so the little girl, already half insane, was brought home the next day by our mother in an old baby stroller.

My mother always needed more than the rest of us, and my father was angry because the girl wet her bed and never said a word, licked her snot, didn’t understand anything, and cried at night for hours. Pretty soon none of us could live or sleep for these nighttime screams, and my father went off to live in the woods. There wasn’t much for it but to go and give the girl back to her failed grandmother, but just then this same grandmother, Faina, appeared and, swaying on her feet, began demanding money for the girl and the stroller. In reply my mother went inside and brought out Lena, combed, showered, barefoot but in a clean dress. At this point Lena suddenly threw herself at my mother’s feet, without a word, but like a grown-up, curling herself up in a ball and putting her arms around my mother’s bare ankles. Her grandmother began to cry and left without Lena and without the baby stroller-apparently, to die. She swayed on her feet as she walked and wiped her tears away with her fist-but she swayed not from drink but from hunger, as I later figured out. She didn’t have any supplies-after all her daughter Vera hadn’t earned anything for a long time. We ourselves mostly ate stewed grass in different forms, with plain mushroom soup being the most common.

Our little goats had been living for a while now with my father-it was safer there-and the trail to his house had almost disappeared, especially as my father never took the same path twice with his wheelbarrow, as a precaution, plotting for the future. Lena stayed with us. We would pour her off some milk, feed her berries and our mushroom soups. Everything became a lot more frightening when we thought of the coming winter. We had no flour and not a single grain of wheat; none of the farms in the area was operating-there hadn’t been any gasoline or spare parts in ages, and the horses had been eaten even earlier. My father walked through the abandoned fields, picked up some grain, but others had been by before him, and he found just a little, enough for a very small sack. He thought he’d figure out how to grow wheat under the snow on the little field near his house in the woods. He asked Anisya when he should plant and sow, and she promised to tell him. She said shovels were no good, and as there weren’t any plugs to be found anywhere, my father asked her to draw him a plug on a piece of paper and began, just like Robinson Crusoe, to bang together some kind of contraption. Anisya herself didn’t remember exactly how it worked, even though she’d had to walk behind a cow with a plug a few times, in the old days, but my father was all aflame with his new engineering ideas and sat down to reinvent this particular wheel. He was happy with his new fate and never pined for the life of the city, where he’d left behind a great many enemies, including his parents, my grandmother and grandfather, whom I’d seen only when I was very little and who’d since been buried under the rubble of the arguments over my mom and my grandfather’s apartment, may it rot, with its high ceilings and private bathroom and kitchen. We weren’t fated ever to live there, and now my grandparents were probably dead. We didn’t say anything to anyone when we left the city, though my father had been planning his escape for a long time. That’s how we managed to have so many sacks and boxes to take with us, because all of this stuff was cheap and, once upon a time, not subject to rationing, and over the course of several years my father, a farseeing man, collected it all. My father was a former athlete, a mountain climber, and a geologist. He’d hurt his hip in an accident, and he’d long ago dreamed of escape, and here the circumstances presented themselves, and so we did, we left, while the skies were still clear. “It’s a clear day in all of Spain,” my father would joke, literally every morning that it was sunny out.

The summer was beautiful. Everything was blossoming, flowering. Our Lena began to talk. She’d run after us into the forest, not to pick mushrooms but to follow my mother like she was tied to her, as if it were the main task of her young life. I taught her how to recognize edible mushrooms and berries, but it was useless-a little creature in that situation can’t possibly tear herself away from grown-ups. She is saving her skin every minute of the day, and so she ran after my mother everywhere, on her short little legs, with her puffed-out stomach. She called my mother “Nanny”-where she picked up that word we had no idea; we’d never taught it to her-and she called me that, too, which was very clever, actually.

One night we heard a noise outside our door like a cat meowing and went outside to find a newborn baby wrapped in an old, greasy coat. My father, who’d grown used to Lena and sometimes even came during the day to help around the house, now simply deflated. My mother didn’t like it either and immediately went over to Anisya to demand who could have done this-with the child, at night, accompanied by the quiet Lena, we marched over to Anisya’s. Anisya wasn’t sleeping; she had also heard the child’s cries and was very worried. She said that the first refugees had already arrived in Tarutino, and that soon they’d be coming to our village too, so we should expect more guests from here on out. The infant was squealing shrilly and without interruption; he had a hard, puffed-out stomach. We invited Tanya over in the morning to have a look, and without even touching him she said he wasn’t going to survive-he had the infant’s disease. The child suffered, yelled, and we didn’t even have a nipple for the bottle, much less any food for him. My mother dripped some water into his dried-out mouth, and he nearly choked on it. He looked like he was about four months old. My mother ran at a good clip to Tarutino, traded a precious bit of salt for a nipple, and returned full of energy, and the child drank a little bit of water from the bottle. My mother induced stool with some softening chamomile brew, and we all, including my father, darted around as fast as we could, heating the water, giving the child a warm compress. It was clear to everyone that we needed to leave the house, the plot, our whole functioning household, or else we’d be destroyed. But leaving the plot meant starving to death. At the family conference my father announced that we’d be moving to the house in the woods and that he’d stay behind for now with a rifle and the dog in the shack next door.