Deathless

A voice came. It called consolingly:

“Co

me here,

Leave your deaf and sinful country.

Leave Russia forever.

The blood from your hands I will wash

The black shame from your heart I will release

I will soothe the pain of defeats and insults

With the balm of a new name.”

But calmly, with cool blood,

I clenched my ears with my fist …

—ANNA AKHMATOVA

29

Every One Written on Your Belly

The major-general watched Tkachuk, the crippled boy, run across the shorn wheat of Mikhaylovka, tripping, limping away from them. Beside her, the staff sergeant sighed.

“You always let them go. It defies the purpose of arresting them to begin with.”

“What do I want with a dead child, Comrade Ushanka?” said Marya Morevna, passing a hand over her eyes. She was so tired these days. Even her blood could not be bothered with redness. It was all too much work.

“I do not serve your personal issues, Morevna. I serve the People, and the People will have crimes against their body answered. You fought at Leningrad. So did I. Why should he be spared?”

“Someone ought to be.” And it will not be me. I have survived, but I have not been spared.

The major-general slid her hand into the pocket of her uniform. She drew out, as casually as a handkerchief, a ball of red yarn. Marya Morevna could not think why she had waited so long to do this. Perhaps it had just hurt too much before. Perhaps she thought by staying she could be called loyal. She could be forgiven.

The major-general set her ball of yarn down on the dusty earth, the cut wheat, the flecks of ash, and pushed it gently. It rocked back and forth, and then rolled swiftly forward, off into the east, threading a path between stunted trees and dried-up vines. The two women folded up their tribunal table into a long black car with neither chicken legs nor an empty driver’s seat, but simply a car, with a petulant engine and a phlegmatic muffler. Marya Morevna shifted the thing into gear, following the yarn as it unspooled toward the dusk.

In this way they traveled across thrice nine kingdoms, the whole of the world. Ushanka insisted they make the stops they had been assigned, no matter how much Marya did not care, did not even want to look at the starving deserters they were supposed to be shooting. Besides, who was she to judge them?

“I am a deserter myself,” she confessed to her sergeant one night, in a barracks near Irkutsk. “Nineteen forty-two, Leningrad. Just like an old friend of mine promised I would be. If your precious records were any good you’d know that.”

“I do know that, Morevna,” whispered Ushanka in her long, thin bed. “But you came back. You may think I have the heart of a rat, but I believe that the coming back makes up the difference.”

And so they went. They followed the red yarn, an idiosyncrasy which Marya marveled at Ushanka never questioning, even once. She knew nothing of the sergeant, who no longer wore a blue ribbon. But she had suspicions. We shot all the colors in the war, the officer liked to joke, but Marya did not laugh. She never laughed, really, but especially not at Ushanka’s jokes. Between them they carried little but their mutual suspicions, and never, never did they discuss the strange coincidence of their having met before the war. But the coincidence occupied space at their table, ate its own ration of bread and wine and grinned at Marya’s discomfort.

On and on the yarn spun.

Sometime in July they passed through a tangle of underbrush: snarls of blackberry, broken larch branches, ferns like old oars. They got out of the car to clear a path, for the yarn ran right underneath the deadfall. Marya sweated under her cap as she tugged at the limbs and grasses and glimpsed, here and there, the bleached, sun-stripped skulls of some small creatures—voles or hedgehogs, rabbits, perhaps. A bit of antler; a bit of horn. Something about it disturbed Marya, made her hackles rise. She frowned deeply and shut herself back into the car, her hands white on the wheel. Ushanka climbed in beside her, wiping her hands on her skirt, smiling her secretive little smile.

Beyond the wreckage wall a village sprawled out before them. Not much of a village—but then, none of them were much of anything. Not Mikhaylovka, not Schirokoye, or Baburka, or whatever this miserable place was called. A broad road ran down the middle of it, dividing one row of houses from the other. Marya saw a tavern—there was always a tavern. A butcher’s shop, a dressmaker. The road seemed to lead to a fairly large building in the distance, painted black, half ruined by storm and years. An old munitions factory, perhaps. Or some reclaimed estate, from the days when estates could be borne.

The red yarn finally spooled itself out. The frayed end lay at Marya’s feet, caked in dust. It pointed at the broken black building. Marya’s heart roused itself like an old wolf, nosing at the air, at a familiar scent.

“Will you have a drink with me, Comrade Ushanka? I believe I am thirsty,” she said at last. She felt strangely at home here. The village tickled at her, like a cough in her throat. She wanted a drink and a rest, and to put off whatever tribunal Ushanka would insist on performing. The other officer nodded, her expression as severe as ever.