Sergey Gerasimov
Now his main concern was to find water.
He knew he couldn’t survive long without water. Once he saw a heavy cloud with gray, swollen teats hanging down from its belly, but it soon dissipated without rain. In early mornings, when the air was icy cold, columns of fog walked between tree trunks. But still, the forest around him was as dry as tinder.
Vlas felt at home in the forest. So many years had passed, but city streets still felt foreign to him. Born in a taiga village, nursed by the taiga, he was in love with its mysterious twilight; he loved its echoless silence and the comforting crunch of pine needles underfoot. Being here, in the world of towering pines, he felt peace and tranquility as if he had found his real home at last. But now, he had to do something about water.
When it got dark, he used a trick his father had taught him once: he raised his head to the sky and howled, imitating the wolf’s call.
He listened, and listened, and listened. The air was quiet, without a hint of breeze. Then somewhere, very far away, at the edge of hearing, a dog’s barking answered him. Dogs meant people. Probably it was a remote settlement of Tunguses. Or, who knows, a labor camp zone, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by shepherd dogs. Searchlights. Guards with tommy guns, sitting in their nests like black storks. Sleeping and dying people who mumble and wheeze on their wooden bunks, with paralyzing fear in their skulls instead of dreams.
Tilting his head back, he imitated another long howl and waited again. No, the barking he heard wasn’t the voice of brainless shepherd dogs guarding a camp. Only watchdogs could bark like that. They guarded a house and the kind, peaceful people who lived in it. At least, it was what he wished to believe.
* * *
The house built of logs sat in the forest of dead and dying pines, which seemed transparent like a lump of orange glass. There were three dogs: two of them chained, and the third one, muscular and tough-looking like a wild boar walked freely. It came to Vlas, poked its warty nose at his leg, snorted, shook its hind leg with contempt, and walked away, but neither growled nor tried to bite. The other two were strangely silent. Vlas saw a mossy stones of the well, and thirst dried his throat. He came to the well and drank from the rusty pail. Some clay pots hung on the old fence. He saw a pigsty and a pig at its door, which lay hugging a pumpkin and squinting its myopic eyes at the stranger. A barn, or probably a stable, was nestled under the orange candle of a big maple shedding leaves.
He could hear a song coming from the window. A young female voice sang:
I’ll be nice to my dear guests,
I’ll make for them some mushroom scones.
They will eat a hearty dinner,
and I’ll make a coffin for their bones.
A broad-shouldered man with a graying beard opened the door. He was a boulder of a man, with large hands, arms, and chest, with a white scar curling below his right cheekbone. He looked the stranger over from head to toe, and let him in.
“Now tell me who you are,” he said. “And show me your papers.”
“I’m a geologist,” said Vlas, trying to sound convincing. “I don’t have to show my papers to you. I’ll show them to a militia squad, if it’s necessary.”
“Hmm . . . Excuse my questions, stranger, but no one can be trusted now. There are too many enemies of people around . . . Geologists never travel alone.”
“It depends on what they are looking for.”
“You’re probably right,” the bearded man agreed. “Then, where are your tools? Have you lost them in the forest? Do you have a compass or a map? Where is your geological hummer? Or your microscope? I think you’re lying, man. You must be a zek escaping from Rudnik.”
“Of course, I’m lying,” Vlas said. “You’d better put some vodka and a loaf of bread on the table if you want to hear the truth.”
The man called his wife to the room. Vlas saw a young, rather tall woman, with nervous lips and somewhat mannered gestures. She brought water, a bottle of moonshine, a loaf of bread, and some mushroom scones. He was surprised to see that the woman’s hair was tied up in a perfect ballet bun. He sat down to a clean wooden table, but decided not to eat the scones.
“I used to live in this area long ago,” said Vlas to the bearded man who was watching him with an unblinking stare. “I lived in Anatamka and then in Kyerka. It’s about two hundred miles to the north from here.”
“Yeah, I know where it is,” the man said. He had already emptied a glass of moonshine, and his cheeks and his veiny neck were red. “Now you’re telling the truth. I can feel it in your voice.”
“But I wasn’t there for twenty years,” Vlas continued. “When I returned, I didn’t recognize my village. The taiga has changed and people have changed as well. I’m a city-dweller now, a philologist and a writer. I decided to write a book about people who were turning the Yenisei to the north.”
The man lit a Kazbek cigarette and shoved it into the gray froth of his beard.
“A writer, you say? Right. Do you write about the taiga?”
“I’m mostly interested in stories people tell. Maybe you can also tell me something worth hearing, and I’ll put your story in the book.”
“Something interesting, you say, eh? I don’t know. Life is simple out here. There used to be a lot of animals in the taiga before. In early spring, bears broke into the windows when my mother, God bless her soul, was cooking salted meat. So many boars walked around that you could catch them with your bare hands. Pikes in our river, the Tazz, were so big that it took three men to drag them out of the water. But that was very long ago. When the Yenisei started turning north, the water spread wide, and the taiga around here turned into a swamp. It didn’t last long. The swamp disappeared in a year or two, and we’ve been having a great drought since then. The big river turned into a brook. All the pikes in it died, and only roach survived. This year, the brook is going to dry up as well. But there are no mosquitoes anymore.”
“Has the Yelloguy dried up too?
“No, the Yelloguy is still running, but it’s sixty miles away from here. You should know geography better. Don’t interrupt me, philologist. When fish and animals died, people left this place. Only the old Pherrapont and I decided to stay. His old log hut is over there, behind that hill. We stayed because of our wells. To the very Yelloguy you can’t find any water around. My hut here is the last oasis in the desert. So I live and give water to strangers who happen to walk by: to geologists and all kinds of philologists like you.”
The man laughed unkindly.
“Tell me about Pherrapont. Is he still living in his log hut?” said Vlas.
“His well was better and bigger than mine. And his character was more cheerful. And his moonshine was sweeter. So all the travelers went for water to Pherrapont, and not to me. I didn’t like it. Who would? One day I tried to throw some poison into his well, but his dogs didn’t let me do it. So I invented a clever trick: I started to swear his well in mat words.”
“In mat words? But mat is just profanity, a filthy language. How can it help?” asked Vlas, surprised.
“You philologists know nothing about words! My mother who was from a family of Tungus shamans, often said that Russian mat words are the last remains of pagan fertility cult, so they still have magic power. I remember her swearing in mat over her dough, and the dough rose much faster then, just before my eyes. When she matted milk, it immediately turned sour. One day she matted my father so severely that a bear broke his neck just a few hours later. There was a shaman’s power in her words, and probably is in mine because the same blood flows in my veins. So imitating my mother’s example, I started going out at dawn and curse Pherrapont’s well in mat for a whole hour, every day. And you know what? His well dried up some months later. Pherrapont died from grief and from drinking too much soon.”
The man emptied another glass, turned it upside down, and smelled a crust of bread. Vlas did the same.
Night was approaching, and the woman started making up a bed for Vlas, on an old sofa, outside the bedroom.
“How old are you?” Vlas asked her.
“Twenty three.” She shook a blanket, then patted the pillow to show how soft it was, all in precise, quick, but at the same time unhurried motions as if she were a professional dancer performing in a musical show. Her neck was impossibly long and slender.
“And how old is your husband?”
“Fifty-seven. But he isn’t really my husband. He is my master. I’m a slave here.”
Saying that, she turned to Vlas, and he felt her warm breath, and suddenly her eyes got incredibly, almost kingfisher blue and, for a fraction of a moment, he felt he could fly without wings. He was sure her eyes had momentarily changed their color. Now they were water reflecting summer sky. Two tiny magic lakes, with currents flowing deep, and full of underwater life. He was too stunned to say anything.
“Time’s pressing,” she said. “I’ve got only a couple of minutes. You should know that my husband and master gets paid for catching such escapers from the camps as you. That’s what he gets paid for. He gets seven hundred roubles for every enemy of people he has caught. He didn’t believe your story. No one would. His dogs are trained to catch people. They let everyone in, but don’t let anyone out. They can easily hunt you down in the forest, if by any chance you try to run away. He caught me one day too, but didn’t hand me over to the militia. He let me stay with him as a wife and slave. I have no other choice than to serve him faithfully, or else I’ll die in labor camps. I’m three months pregnant, so if you decide to kill him, please, don’t kill me and my baby. There is a double-barreled gun in the pantry. It’s always loaded. You must kill him if you want to live. There is no other way. He has a horse, so you can escape after killing him. And he has a telephone in the back room, to report the convicts who escaped from the camps. Now do something! Are you a man or what?”
Now her face was as white as chalk.
“I feel dizzy,” she said. “I’d better go and drink some water.”
She walked out of the room, carrying the future in her body.
* * *
An orange mist of the late afternoon rays poured through the window. Looking out, Vlas saw that the dogs were unchained now. They lay at the porch steps, watching the door, listening, counting each step behind it, lifting their muzzles again and again.
The bearded man came into the room and patriotically crossed himself in front of the blackened portraits of Stalin, the Father of the Peoples, and Marx, the Author of the One and Only True Theory.
“What’s happened to you?” he asked Vlas. “You look terrible. What’s wrong?”
“Your wife is three months pregnant,” Vlas said, surprised at the hoarse sound of his own voice.
“How do you know about that?”
“I was a physician in the past. I understand such things. She felt bad just a minute ago.”
“Such things happen to women,” the bearded man said. “She’s going to be all right.”
“No,” said Vlas. “She needs a doctor immediately, or else she’ll die. Now, they have a new medicine that can save her and your baby as well. It’s called antibiotic. Without it, she’s going to die in a week, at most. You can buy that medicine for seven hundred roubles.”
“Seven hundred roubles is big money,” the man said, and his scarred fingers clenched into a fist.
“Penicillin antibiotic. And a doctor.”
“Wait for me here, I’ll be back soon, after I telephone to the city.”
He shuffled off without haste.
Soon after the man left the room, Vlas followed him. He opened the door to the corridor, quietly. He could see two doors now: one led to a summer veranda, the other one to the pantry, where the man kept his gun. There was a heavy padlock on it. He didn’t know what to do about that. He couldn’t think clearly. It wasn’t panic yet, but the damp, nibbling fear he felt made him sick.
The door to the veranda creaked. He was sure someone was standing there, watching him. The door creaked again, sending widening concentric circles of fear through his soul. Drops of perspiration trickled from his forehead.
The door opened slowly and the woman came out of the veranda. The sun shone through her dress, and Vlass could see how skinny or even emaciated she was. Her belly and breasts were almost non-existent. She held a stack of fresh towels in her hands. She measured Vlas with her eyes.
“You are scared, man,” she said.
“Yes, I am.”
“It’s disgusting!”
“No, not at all. Some people are made of steel, some are made of stone, but some people are made of glass. I’m made of glass. I’m fragile, but it’s not bad. You can’t build a house of steel and stone, without any glass.”
“Oh, you’ll never do it, philologist,” she said. “You’d better not even try.”
“Open the pantry door.”
“No. I’ve changed my mind. You can’t kill him. You’ll just destroy me and yourself.”
“When escaping from the camp,” he said, “I killed a guard.”
“So what? Give yourself a Gold Star of the Hero of the Soviet Union for it.”
“Now I don’t care if I have to kill anyone else. Open the door!”
They both were speaking in a half-whisper, afraid to alert the master of the house.
Her face tautened.
“I don’t believe you,” she said. “You’ve never killed anyone in your life. You are a rotten intellectual. You have no proper violence in you. I could take your eyes out with my bare fingers, if I wanted it.”
Still, she opened the door, came into the pantry, and put the towels on the lid of a barrel, carefully. “What’s now?” asked her eyes.
He followed her. She lit a candle, and two commas of golden light started dancing in her eyes. He didn’t know what it was, but he was sure she was going to say something extraordinary now.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Jadwiga,” she said. “But he calls me Jaga, the forest witch. I remind him of his mother, who was really a witch everyone around was afraid of. She could cast spells. He believes I have the same psychic powers his mother did. He believes I’m a witch too.”
“Are you?”
“No, I don’t think so. I’m just a naïve city girl. In the past, I went to a ballet school in Moscow. People said I was really talented. Hoped to dance in the Bolshoi Theatre. And here… Here no one even knows how toilet paper looks.”
“Then what are you doing here?”
“It’s better than pushing up the daisies. Or rather, pushing up the moss and pine needles… He is a kind of Bluebeard. You know, I’m his seventh wife, and the ghosts of all his previous wives speak to me at night. When he is drunk, he plays his accordion and makes me dance to the music. You know, the Dying Swan, Giselle, and the like. He keeps me always hungry, so I am in good dancing shape. He insists on it . . . Unlike you, he isn’t fragile.”
Suddenly he knew he would live. Live a very long life, a personal forever. Just because he had seen all this and many other terrible things like this. That was a sufficient reason for living long. He had been walking through his life, holding his attentiveness in front of himself like a small oil lamp, never judging, never intruding much, making visible this and that, and remembering, always remembering. If he died, so many things he ‘d been a witness to would disappear. The ultimate force ruling the universe would never allow that to happen.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m so sorry . . . “
“Don’t speak too much,” she interrupted him curtly, “or you’ll faint from hyperventilation. Take the gun and do something!”
She handed him the gun. The barrels looked bronzed in the candle light.
“I’m going to lock you in the pantry,” he said. “Give me the keys.” He took them, and when their fingers touched, she startled and pulled her hand away, like a frightened child. He felt touched. “Be as quiet as a mouse here. I’m not going to kill anyone yet, but who knows?”
She looked at him with disdain. Her lashes trembled, and he was sure she was about to cry, but instead, she opened her mouth so wide that he could see all her molars, even in the darkness, and let out a hysterical scream ringing in his ears.
Vlas jumped out of the pantry, locked the door. Jadwiga still screamed and yelled like mad. The next moment, the outer door flung open, and Vlas saw the bearded man with a sharpened axe in his hand. The blade glittered. A huge dog jumped out from behind the man’s back and attacked Vlas. He shot point-blank. The dog gulped the bullet, its eyes expectant and uncomprehending; its head jerked back and burst into a bloody horror, into an open pomegranate. Vlas pushed the heavy body away. Seeing that, the man stopped in his tracks. The other two dogs were barking outside.
“Put the axe down on the floor,” Vlas said, and the man dropped the axe down, then ripped open the cross-stitched collar of his shirt and breathed loudly through his nose like a bull. “Now turn to the wall, get on your knees, and place your hands behind your back.”
The gun was cold and heavy under his fingers. It felt alive and having its own will. A metal snake about to strike out and bite.
The man did what he was told to do.
“Just don’t hit my wife in the stomach,” he said to Vlas.
“What?”
“Don’t kill my baby, please.”
“You surprise me,” Vlas said. “I thought you were as unable to love as a fir tree.”
“If I take a mature fir cone that has already begun to open,” the man said, “and plant it under a big tree, it will never grow. But if I plant it in the shade of its parent tree, it’ll become a seedling, even without full sunlight. It just goes to prove that even trees can love their babies. If you promise not to kill her and not to hit her in the stomach, I’ll tell you where I hide my money. Seven thousand roubles.”
“I don’t need your money.”
“I hid it in the pigsty.”
“I don’t need your money,” said Vlas again, and the man howled softly, rocking back and forth. Vlas tied his hands behind his back with a lacy curtain he tore from the window. All the time Jadwiga was shouting and banging on the wall of the pantry.
Vlas tied the man’s legs too, then he dragged him to the bedroom, shoved a gag into his mouth, and tied him to the heavy wooden bed. The man arched his back, flopped like freshly caught fish, in attempts to free himself, and tried to drag the bed behind him like oxen drag a plough stuck in the middle of a furrow. Vlas started searching the house. First of all, he cut the telephone wire, then took two big knives, a whetstone, salt, two lumps of sugar, a sack of flour, and seven boxes of matches in the kitchen. Drew new pants on: his old ones were drenched in the dog’s blood, which was still wet and had the consistence of yolk. Found a razor and shaved accurately. Drank chilly water from a metal pail. Washed his hands. All the time he could hear the man cursing, his voice muffled by the gag.
Then he let the woman out.
“Why did you scream and bang?” he asked her.
“You never know how things are going to turn out, right?” she said. “If Pantelei, my husband, had been lucky enough, you know, to kill you, he’d have asked me then, ‘why didn’t you shout for help, bitch?’ What would I have said to that? So I shouted for help. I have a baby in me to protect. And besides . . . “
“What?”
She started to cry. “I just wanted to make you angrier,” she sobbed out.
“What for?”
“To make you kill this brute, of course! But you didn’t, and now I’ll have to live with him on and on until he decides to find someone younger. I’d kill him myself, but I can’t.”
“Sorry, neither can I.”
“What should we do then?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Pity you’re not a witch, or you could curse him as he cursed Pherrapont’s well.”
“Do you think it is going to help?”
“Curse him in mats, as hard as you can. With soul. You might as well try.”
“With soul? Right.”
Then Jadwiga breathed in deeply and let out the longest and wildest hurricane of mats Vlas had ever heard. Being a philologist, he knew that the dictionary or Russian mat contained six thousand mat words derived from only four obscene roots, using the inexhaustible arsenal of suffixes, prefixes and phonetically similar words, but it was surely just the icing on the cake: the real number of mat words was infinite. Mat words could be any part of speech, except a personal pronoun. So you could use just personal pronouns, those four roots and their derivatives to build a complete language in itself, capable of expressing any emotions and ideas, including the subtlest ones.
Jadwiga was uttering her curse practically without stopping, taking just brief pauses to catch her breath, and then again, new and new curses exploded from her lips. Suddenly, pots jumped up on the old fence, the mirror above a dilapidated washstand cracked, and dust rose from the ground. Pine needles started swirling in a flimsy vortex around her.
Vlas knew that the official record of mat phrases belonged to tzar Peter the Great, who had managed to say seventy-four mat words in one sentence. The record sentence containing only one mat root and its derivatives but nothing else was twenty-four words long. But what he heard now was a linguistic miracle. Jadwiga still spoke, pronouncing her curse, and her eyes were sightless, unfocused, looking into nothing, but full of dark fire. A terrible thing to see. Then she tilted her head to the sky, as if cursing angels, or maybe, persistent communist rockets that pierced the stratosphere and beyond, bringing Marxists ideology to angels, moons, planets, and stars.
At last, she stopped.
“Oh, you’re really a forest witch!” Vlas said. The last words of her curse still rippled through his mind, travelling back and forth. “That was an epic symphony.”
She just smiled. Then she blushed, flattered.
She pulled the dogs on the chain.
He took the gun and cartridges and everything else and was ready to go. Jadwiga appeared on the porch.
“The Bluebeard has swallowed the gag and died!” she said, a note of undisguised triumph sounding in her voice. She came close to him and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you for your advice, enemy of people. Good luck to you. You’ll find water six miles to the west, in the old bed of the Tazz. It’s so shallow now that you can wade across it without the water getting higher than you waist. Then just let the horse go and she will find her way home. She always does.”
“Are you going to labor and birth alone?” he asked. “In the middle of the forest, like an animal?”
“Why not? I like being alone. I’m introspective.”
“But . . . “
“You know quite well you can’t stay. You don’t have your papers. You’ll be caught and sent back to the camp, and the communists will break you with tortures as they break anyone. Don’t worry about me. I’m strong. I’m made of steel. Have a nice journey, enemy of people.”
He saddled the horse, mounted, and rode away at a hurried pace into the infinite cathedral of pines and night shadows. He was going to look back and glance at her for the last time, but the next minute he already had to maneuver among the outcrops of boulders—the remains of ancient mountains that still tried to strangle the forest with granite fingers—and he didn’t.
So he didn’t look back. And a minute later, she became a memory.
SERGEY GERASIMOV lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine. His stories written in English have appeared in Adbusters, Clarkesworld Magazine, Strange Horizons, J Journal, Fantasy Magazine, Oceans of the Mind, and other venues. Also, he is the author of several novels and more than a hundred short stories published in Russian. Translator of Russian poetry and prose.