by Liz Williams
He said nothing of his concerns to Elena, suspecting that she had worries of her own. The day before, when she had spoken to her sister, he had been able to feel the tension in her, like a thin steel wire under strain. He ducked under a spray of fir, sending a shower of raindrops to the wet earth. “Did your sister say whether she’d heard anything about the murders?”
“She said there was nothing on the news. And they’d had no word from the militzia.”
Ilya frowned. No move from the authorities was almost as ominous as a visit. He still did not entirely understand how the media worked, why certain stories were obsessively picked apart and others neglected. Some of it was political, clearly, yet to Ilya this did not explain the avid interest in actors and celebrities. Perhaps it was no more than the old need for fairy stories.
Elena went on, “If someone gets killed, it’s usually all over the news. It’s not all that common, even these days. Russia’s very violent, but it’s not the same here. I think the authorities prefer it if people feel unsafe.”
Ilya smiled. “You’re probably right. It justifies hard-line policing. It’s been the same since the first of the tsars.”
“They don’t need an excuse,” Elena said sourly. “But the papers—Karavan or Pravda—would all be investigating. Karavan has broken some real scandals, even though the authorities keep trying to close them down. Perhaps we can buy a newspaper when we reach the village. And we have to get some more boots.”
Ilya nodded. This sudden silence on the part of the authorities spoke to him of the rusalki and the volkh, of the old and buried secrets of the political past.
They had reached the end of the ridge now, and he could see the track running down through a bank of birches. New leaves shone green and some of the branches were decked with pieces of rag and cloth. A wishing tree. He remembered an old country code: a green ribbon for nature, blue for the sky, pink for the moon, yellow for the sun and the sisters of dawn. He had nothing to tie to the tree, but he tapped a branch as they passed, as if the luck might rub off on him.
They had now come some way along the slope. The peaks were receding against the morning sky, a pall of fumes marking the presence of the city below. Farther down, past a thick line of oaks and ash, he could see a roof.
“Maybe that’s the village,” he said, pointing.
Elena’s face looked pinched in the early morning cold. “I hope so. I’ve run out of cigarettes.” Realizing that he was not the only one with an addiction made Ilya feel less feeble.
“So have I,” he confessed. “Or I’d offer you one.”
“I ought to give it up. It costs me a fortune.”
“I don’t think this would be a good time.”
She smiled. “You’re probably right.”
The track led down through the woods and over a stream heavy with snowmelt and rain. Ilya crouched down by the bank and splashed his face with icy water, but it did little to dissipate the woolliness in his head. They came out onto a potholed curve of road and there was the village below, no more than a scatter of low houses with corrugated roofs and tilted porches, the gardens a tangle of cherry trees and old raspberry canes. Chickens picked along the roadside. There was no one to be seen.
“What should we do, knock on a door?” Elena asked.
“We’ll see if anyone’s about first,” Ilya said. He did not want to contact the milkman, the horse herder’s friend. Sooner or later, they would meet and perhaps talk. The stories would not add up, and in country districts people remembered such things, became suspicious. And if their descriptions were circulated at any point … It was not worth the risk.
“Look,” Elena said. “We can ask there.”
A kiosk stood by the side of the road and Ilya could see that the shutters were up. He followed Elena to the little booth and peered in. A teenage girl sat inside on a stool, reading a fashion magazine.
“Good morning,” Elena said. The girl grunted. “Ilya, what kind of cigarettes do you want?”
“All we’ve got are Polyot,” the girl said.
Ilya watched as Elena bought two packets. “Better than those American things. They give you cancer, you know.”
Ignoring this, Elena said to the girl, “We’re looking for someone with a car. We’re trying to get to Bishkek. We can pay.”
The girl stood so that her face was framed in the opening of the kiosk. She was Kazakh, with dark brows over green, Oriental eyes.
“I could ask my uncle. He’s got a car. He does taxi work sometimes.” She vanished through the back of the kiosk and reappeared a moment later, tottering on a pair of stiletto boots. Elena frowned.
“Why aren’t you in school?” she asked.
The girl looked at her as though she were mad. “It’s Saturday.”
“Of course it is,” Elena said faintly. It was the girl’s turn to frown.
“Why isn’t he wearing any shoes?”
“She’s wearing mine,” Ilya said. “I took her fishing. She broke a heel.” He looked pointedly at the girl’s boots, but her expression had changed to one of sympathy.
“I did that once,” she said.
How did women manage with these modern fashions? Ilya wondered, but he already knew. They found men
and borrowed their shoes. They followed the girl around the back of a house. Goats looked up mildly, demon-eyed, as they passed.
“Mama?” the girl called. “Some people need a lift.”
The mother appeared, dusting flour from her hands.
“Where to?”
“Bishkek.”
“That’s a long way. Four hours, at least.”
“We can pay.”
The woman shrugged. “Well, it’s up to you. If it was me, I’d catch the bus.” Mad Russians, her expression implied.
“My wife gets sick on the bus,” Ilya said before Elena could protest.
“I’ll phone my brother. I don’t know if he can do it, mind. But I’ll ask.”
“Ask him how much,” Elena called after her. They were left alone in the hallway with the ticking clock. It had an ominous sound to Ilya’s sensitive ears. He had never grown used to this method of marking off time, minute by minute, day by day. What was wrong with a glance at the sun, or the year’s rhythms? But it was progress, he supposed. Idly, he eavesdropped on the woman’s conversation.
“Yes, to Bishkek. Yes, today—no, I don’t know why; they didn’t say. Does it matter?”
A man’s voice, on the other end of the phone: “Can they pay up front? I’m not doing it otherwise. I told Sultanat I’d take her into town this morning.”
“It can wait, surely? Anyway, you’ll have to go through Almaty—why don’t you drop her off? She can find her own way back.”
“Her legs are bad.”
“Well, then she shouldn’t be walking round town. Has she seen the doctor yet?”
Ilya stifled his impatience as the conversation veered away into a morass of personal detail. At last, the woman returned.
“He’ll do it. He’s coming over. He wants ten dollars each way.”
Elena, despite the money resting in her handbag, managed to look suitably dubious. “It’s a lot,” she said. Ilya wondered how much she usually earned. He did not understand this foreign currency, this pegging of everything to the dollar. But then, he had never really gotten the hang of money in the first place. As long as you had what you needed, why worry? Perhaps, Ilya reflected, this was why he had found Communism relatively amenable. A pity it hadn’t worked.
“It’s that or nothing.” The woman was apologetic but firm. “He’s got the car to keep going; gas is expensive …”
“All right. We’ll pay.”
“He’ll be twenty minutes or so. He has to sort out the car. Come in, come in.”
She ushered them into a living room, almost buried beneath a horde of knickknacks. Elena vanished into the bathroom for what seemed like an eternity, and reappeared looking different. Ilya supposed that she had done something with her make
up, though he could not have said what.
They were given tea, bread, cakes, biscuits, sliced sausage, processed cheese: Kazakh hospitality, a holdover from the days when a visitor could have ridden days to reach you, when a guest was a gift from God. Ilya tried not to eat too ravenously as the woman interrogated Elena about their marriage, their children, their work. Elena lied with remarkable glibness, Ilya thought. He supplied hopefully corroborating details around mouthfuls of bread. It was strange to feel hungry again, to want food other than the sugar cravings of heroin. He heard footsteps in the garden; the woman went from the room.
“My cousin Nadia,” Elena said in response to his raised eyebrows. “Three kids, works as a secretary. I just pretended.”
“I wasn’t criticizing. It’s a useful skill.”
Elena lowered her voice. “Useful or not, I don’t like lying.”
“Of course you don’t.” Before he could stop himself, he touched her hand. “You’re a good person.” Elena looked startled, and Ilya stood up, to cover his embarrassment. “The driver is here.”
Three
KAZAKHSTAN, 21ST CENTURY
When Elena set eyes on the car, she wondered if it would even get them as far as Almaty, let alone the Kyrgyz border. It was an old Lada, rusty around the edges, and the seats had long since collapsed. The woman’s brother looked shifty to Elena; he had a long dour face. But perhaps it was better to have someone who was a little sly, who might not want to draw attention to himself.
“You want to go to Bishkek? My sister told you about the money?”
Ilya peeled off a ten dollar note from a thin handful and Elena saw the man’s eyes widen. She hoped Ilya had judged it correctly: too little, and he might think they couldn’t pay; too much, and the man might be tempted to robbery. Although there was something about Ilya, even ragged and shoeless as he was, that did not invite aggression.
“This is for the trip,” Ilya said. “I’ll give you the other ten when you drop us off.”
“Konechna, of course. Where in Bishkek?”
“Listen,” Ilya said, confidingly. He drew the man aside, beneath the bare branches of a cherry tree. “The thing is, it might not be a bad idea if you dropped us off before the border. You see, my friend doesn’t have proper papers. If they ask for documents, we might have a problem.”
“She doesn’t have papers,” the driver said, a flat, distrustful statement, inviting answers.
“No.” An awkward pause. “You see, I’m afraid we’ve been a little bit deceptive. This lady isn’t my wife. She’s someone else’s.”
Brilliant, thought Elena, in spite of the slur on her character. If it got them out of reach of the authorities, she did not care. Light dawned across the driver’s long face.
“Oh, I see. Everything is clear. But I’ll get you to Bishkek, don’t worry. I have papers for the car. And you can pay, yes? If they ask questions?”
“No problem.”
What if they’re looking for us? What if we’re recognized? Elena wondered. If she could get Ilya alone for a moment, she would ask. But it was already time to go. Ilya got in the front seat and she found herself oddly disappointed. Surprisingly, the car started at once. They pulled onto the road toward Almaty.
As they reached the outer suburbs, Elena tapped the driver on the shoulder.
“Would you mind if we made a couple of stops? I need to go to the market, very quickly. It’ll only take five minutes.”
The driver gave a bark of laughter. “Women! Running away from home and all they can think about is shopping.”
“I have to get some more shoes,” Elena snapped. “I broke a heel.”
“Well, in that case—what was the other stop?”
“It’s on Furmanova. I have to drop off a letter.” The post office would be closed on a Saturday. She would bundle the money up and drop it off at her aunt’s. There was the risk that someone was watching the place, but if she just went into the hallway and stuck it in the mailbox, it should be safe. The boxes were locked, after all.
Even at this time of the morning, the market was teeming. Elena leaped out of the car and bolted into the warren of stalls, deafened by Kazakh pop from the cassette decks and the hubbub of voices. She ran past the medical stalls selling bandages, medicines, and syringes. It made her think of the thing that had attacked her, and of Ilya. He had looked even more unwell this morning, and she felt a pang of warmth and pity.
She fled past electrical goods, and into the clothes section. She stopped at the first stall she came to, found a pair of boots in her size, and slapped down the money without even trying them on. She snatched a packet of underwear from a neighboring stall, paying with her handful of change. She was damned, she thought, if she’d go on the run with a strange man without taking spare underwear with her. Then she hurried back, fighting the sudden irrational fear that the car would not be there, and telling herself not to be so foolish.
The car was gone. Elena’s heart sank to her borrowed boots, until she realized that the driver had pulled along the block to avoid a bus, which was being cranked into action with a starting handle. Ilya’s wan face now stared at her from the backseat. It lit up when he caught sight of her.
“Do you want to sit in the front? It’s making me feel sick, watching the road,” he said, winding down the window.
“No, I don’t mind. I don’t like sitting in the front, either,” Elena said hastily, wanting his closeness. She slid in beside him.
“Furmanova?” the driver said over his shoulder.
“Please. Then Bishkek. The sooner we get out of Almaty, the happier I’ll be.”
“So, your husband. What does he do?”
“He’s a lawyer.” Everyone hated lawyers. The last thing she wanted to do was awake the driver’s masculine sympathies.
“No wonder you’re running away. You’d have no chance in a divorce settlement. My cousin, she was married to a lawyer, but he left her, went off with some tart from Akmenugorsk. Anyway, then—” The cousin’s woes lasted all the way down Zhibek Zholu, along Gogola, down Tolubaev, and into Furmanova. And Elena thought she’d had a hard life. The cousin’s problems would have graced a soap opera. The driver’s dour face and shifty manner were all a con, Elena decided. He was clearly a secret romantic.
She directed him to her aunt’s house, raced into the hallway, and stuffed the money into the mailbox. It took only a moment and then she was back in the car. No one seemed to be watching, but how to tell? They could be tailing her even now. She twisted in her seat, squinting through the back window of the car, but the only thing that appeared to be following was an ancient bus, hood propped open with a starting handle to prevent overheating. It was belching clouds of exhaust.
Elena sat back, thankful to be heading out of town. She finally admitted to herself that if the circumstances had not been so stressful, it might even have been exciting to be going into the unknown, leaving family tensions and her dull cleaning job behind. But she would rather have been heading for Canada, or Baikonur and her beloved work—but now there was Ilya.
She stole a glance at him. His head was resting against the window, his arms folded around himself as if to ward off the world. His eyes were closed and he looked gaunt, the lines beside his mouth carved into deep grooves. He needed a shave. What a difference from scrubbed, polished Yuri Golynski—but she longed to put her arms around Ilya, to take care of him.
She thought better of it. Best to leave him be. She turned her attention to the road ahead, taking them out toward the edges of town, past the concrete apartment blocks and the parks with their erratic fountains. High-rises appeared, the ornamental tiling on their sides starting to flake after the winter cold. The mountains reappeared, grew huge. Suburbs of smaller houses, like the ones of the driver’s own village, fell behind and they were at last out on the steppe, following the main road to Bishkek.
Here the land was grey and fawn, overlaid by a faint drift of green. Another few days, some more rain and sunlight, a
nd the steppe would be transformed into a sea of flowers. Thank God, Elena thought, it’s spring, at last. Rain was sweeping across the mountainsides, turning them to indigo before they vanished into the streamers of cloud, and she could enjoy the sight now that she was no longer out in it. Beside her, Ilya murmured something, and sank lower in his seat. The driver, moved perhaps by some delicacy of feeling, attached a pair of earphones and sang along beneath his breath. A herd of horses drifted across the road, dark against the grass. There was no other traffic. The city had fallen far behind. Ilya’s head slid down the back of the seat until it was resting on Elena’s shoulder. Not allowing herself to think, she nudged him awake. He came to with a start.
“Lie down. You’ll be more comfortable.” She patted her lap.
He looked surprised for a moment, but did not argue. He curled on the seat with his head on her knees, face buried in the rain-tangled fur of her once-best rabbit coat. Unable to stop herself, she stroked his hair from his forehead, finding that it was softer than it looked, a wolf’s thick pelt. He muttered something.
“What?”
“I said, you’re an angel.”
She felt warmth spreading through her. The last time she had felt like this had been at the cosmodrome, standing under that ocean of stars and realizing that Yuri had come outside in the cold to look for her.
“Ilya?” she whispered, but he was already asleep.
Four
KYRGYZSTAN, 21ST CENTURY
Ilya woke, briefly, to find that they were still traveling. He could see a pale square of sky through the window of the car. His head was resting in Elena’s lap. Her eyes were closed; perhaps she, too, slept. He supposed that he should sit up and find out where they were, but he did not want to wake her. He could smell the steppe, filtered through the gaps and cracks in the frame of the car: sweet grass, wet earth, the sage fragrance of saxaul scrub. He shut his eyes again and sank back into warm darkness.
He was next woken by Elena’s hand on his shoulder.
“Ilya?” Her face was taut and scared.
He struggled up, limbs cramped and stiff, longing for a cigarette.
