Radiant State Page 5

  Who knows what kink of imagination caused the people who once lived in the house in the grass to build such a place, a hemispherical glazed dome of white steel ribwork, an upturned glass bowl twenty feet high on the bed of the lake? The water that presses against the glass walls is a deep moss colour at floor level, fading to the palest, faintest green at the top. The steel framework is streaked and patched with rust, and on the other side of the glass is the dim movement of water vegetation and shadowy water creatures. Obscure larvae and gastropods. Muffled fishes. Over the course of the years the lake has rained a gentle silt upon the outside of the chamber, staining the glass yellow and flecking it with patches of muck. The underwater room is filled with dim subaqueous forest light, but when Galina arches her neck to look up she can see light and the undersides of ripples lapping in the breeze, and sometimes the underneath of a waterfowl disturbing the circle of visible surface.

  Down here in the underwater room the temperature is constant and cool. The room is furnished. Rugs, a sofa, an empty bookcase, a cupboard, a chair, a desk. A pot of earth stands in the centre of the circular floor, the remains of some long-dead, long-dried plant slumped across it. As Galina moves around, circling, touching, she surprises traces of cigar smoke. The smell of brandy and laudanum lingers in pockets of air.

  She has told no one about this place and brought no one here, not Eligiya Kamilova, not even Yeva. It is her own place, where she can come and be herself and think about what she should do. Eligiya Kamilova is not their mother. She has never been a mother to anyone at all. She stays with them and takes care of things, but she would travel further and faster without them; she would go even as far as the endless forest in the east. Eligiya has been in that forest, has travelled there, and it stains the air around her. Part of her is in the forest always and has never come away.

  Their mother is in Mirgorod.

  I have been too ill to do anything but follow where Eligiya Kamilova went, but that time is coming to an end. I must take Yeva back to Mirgorod. I am the older one, and it is my job to do that. Soon I will be as well and strong as I will ever be, and then I must do that.

  But I am not ready, not quite yet.

  The rusalka presses its chalky face, expressionless and pale, against the silt-flecked glass and stares in at Galina, watching her intently. It moves its hands through the water slowly as if it were waving. But it is not waving. It is only watching. The first time it came Galina mistook it for the reflection of her own face.

  The dead soldier Leonid Tarasenko follows Yeva out from under the trees into the emptiness of tall light. There is a tiny anguished hook of memory somewhere inside him, a diamond-hard strange survivor in the heart, a piece of disconnected understanding no larger than a single word, and the word is child.

  The dead man follows child. Child fills his heart with happiness and tears and need. In all the world of the dead man there is only child and follow and no other purpose at all, and the existence of even this one irreducible shard of purpose is a mystery more mysterious than the endless ever-faithful burning of the sun.

  But child (all unaware of the following) moves faster than the dead man can. The separation between them stretches and stretches.

  The dead man would call out after her if he could, but there is not enough wonder and mystery in the world to provide him with concepts like voice and call. He has been given only child and follow, and it is not enough.

  Child is gone.

  He moves on, following the line she took. Child is gone, but of following there is no end and nothing else to take its place.

  The line of his following brings him again to an edge of trees, different trees, but trees. Trees are familiar to him and the smell of earth is familiar beneath them, and that is a soothing ointment for his heart, but also not soothing at all; nothing takes away the happiness and the tears and the need for following child.

  Because trees are familiar to him the dead Leonid Taresenko follows his following in under the trees.

  Galina Cornelius stays a long while in the underwater room, but eventually it is time to return to the house because Yeva will soon be home from the woods. As Galina is crossing the plank over the black stream, the dead soldier steps out from a tree and comes towards her.

  She sees his open earth-filled mouth, the woodlice in the folds of his face and neck.

  She screams. It is blank terror.

  All the way to the house she runs, heart pounding, fear-blind, and at the veranda she stops and turns. The dead thing is following her, loping unsteadily through the waist-high grass.

  Galina screams again.

  ‘Yeva! Yeva!’

  The dead soldier is out of the high grass and coming up the path, coming towards her with fixed and needy dead black eyes, hand stretched out for companionship.

  Eligiya Kamilova’s gun is lying on the couch on the veranda.

  It could blow up in your eyes. Eligiya had said. Only use it if the other thing will be worse. But she had shown them how.

  Galina seizes the gun and swings the barrel up into the face of the dead soldier. His foot is already on the first veranda step when she pulls both triggers together and takes his head apart. The stock kicks back into her shoulder and knocks her down. She can’t hear her own screams any more for the appalling ringing of the double gunshot in her own ears.

  5

  Eligiya Kamilova finds the two girls sitting side by side outside the house, on the couch on the veranda, staring at the corpse of twice-killed Conscript Gunner K-1 Category Leonid Tarasenko, a good and simple man but not a lucky one. When she heard the shot she was already on the track up to the house, work abandoned halfway done, weightless, spun out of orbit by the kick of the newspaper in her hand.

  The girls look up at her in silence when she comes. Their faces are strained and pale, their eyes rimmed red and wide with shock. She knows that she should comfort them, but she doesn’t know how, she hasn’t got it in her; she searches but it isn’t there, the right thing to do to take that shock and pain away. She stands stiffly on the veranda, bitterly, emptily aware of the newspaper rolled and clutched by her side. The ineradicable, undeniable truth of it burns in her hand. She hasn’t anything to give them for comfort, not even news, not good news, only bad.

  There’s no good time to tell them what she knows. She is tempted to wait, but waiting will only make things worse, compounding fact with deceiving, and she has never told them less than truth. She cannot give them loving comfort but she can give them that and always does.

  She holds the newspaper out to Galina.

  ‘Look,’ she says. ‘Read it. Read the date.’

  Eligiya was down in the village working on the boats when the musicians came out of the east, walking in with their rangy dog: the gusli player with the long straggled hair and thick coal beard resting on his chest, one leg lost in the war, swinging along on crutches, and the tall old man in the long coat, drum like a cartwheel slung on his back. The drummer carried a newspaper stuffed in his pocket that nobody in the village could read. Kamilova bought it from him for a couple of kopeks.

  Galina stares at the newspaper blankly.

  ‘What?’ she says. ‘What about it? What?’

  ‘The date.’

  Galina makes an effort to squint at the stained print.

  ‘It’s a couple of months old.’ She hands it back to Kamilova and wipes her fingers in the lap of her dress already splattered with the soldier’s drying mess. ‘It’s greasy. It smells bad.’

  Galina’s eyes aren’t focused properly. They stray back to the half-rotten corpse on the veranda boards.

  ‘Not the month,’ says Kamilova. ‘The year.’ She holds the paper up again for the girl to see. Galina stares at it for a while. Furrows her brow in confusion.

  ‘It’s a mistake,’ she says. ‘A printing error.’

  ‘No,’ said Kamilova. ‘I talked to the men who brought it into the village. I asked them questions. It isn’t a mistake.’

  �
��What?’ said Yeva. ‘What are you talking about.’

  Kamilova sat down beside them on the end of the couch. She felt suddenly exhausted. Not able to manage. Not able to lead the way, not at the moment, not any more. The strength in her legs, the straightness in her back, was gone. Yeva squeezed up to make room.

  ‘What is it?’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Eligiya Kamilova. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We’ve been walking in the trees,’ said Kamilova, ‘and we’ve been living here in the village by the lake, and it’s been seven months, nearly eight–a long time but not quite eight months–that’s all.’ She takes the paper from where it lies in Galina’s lap. ‘Look at the date.’

  Yeva reads the small print at the top of the page.

  ‘But that’s wrong.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But it is wrong. It’s five years wrong.’

  ‘Five and a half. Five and half years gone.’

  Kamilova has had longer than the girls to think it through.

  The three of them roll the corpse of the twice-killed soldier onto a sheet, wrap it and drag it through the grass far away from the house. They dig a hole up near the woods. It takes all day and they are dumb with exhaustion and heat and stink, and the sun has gone and the fear is coming out of the woods. They go inside and light candles and put wood in the stove, and when the water is hot they wash in the kitchen in silence, the whole of their bodies from head to toe. It takes a long time to get the dirtiness off and they don’t quite manage it even then.

  Rank warm cheese and a stump of hard bread on the shelf. Oilcloth on the table. Candles burning. The house and the village and the lake. Some people cannot look at their memories, and some people cannot ever look away.

  ‘Our mother thinks I’m sixteen,’ says Yeva. ‘Sixteen. Or dead. Either way she didn’t find us. She never came.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ says Kamilova. ‘There wasn’t a way to know.’

  ‘She couldn’t have come,’ says Galina. She looks at Eligiya Kamilova. ‘But tomorrow we’ll go home,’

  ‘Home?’ says Kamilova. ‘What do you mean “home”?’

  ‘You don’t have to come with us, Eligiya. You’ve done enough; you’ve done more than you needed to for us. You can have your life back; you can go where you want; you can go into the forest again, or stay here and live for ever. ’

  Galina’s words lacerate Eligiya like the blades of knives.

  ‘I…’ she begins. The pain she feels is shame and guilt and love, inextricable trinity, hands held open to receive the price you had to pay. ‘Everything will have changed,’ she says. ‘You have to think about that. She… Your mother might not even—’

  ‘You don’t have to come, Eligiya.’

  ‘I will come,’ says Eligiya Kamilova. ‘Of course I will come.’

  Chapter Three

  If you’re afraid of wolves, stay out of the forest.

  Josef Stalin (1878–1953)

  1

  The rain came in long pulses, hard, warm and grey, and the noise of it in the trees was loud like a river. The galloping of rain-horses. Rain-bison. Rain-elk. Maroussia Shaumian followed the trail through rain and trees, splashing through mud-thick rain-churned puddles, the bindings on her legs sodden and clagged to the knee, pushing herself, back straight and face held high, into the future. Her clothes smelled of wet wool and woodsmoke and the warmth of her own body. Rain numbed her face and trickled down her chin and neck. It tasted of earth and nettles. Rain slicked and beaded on the ferns: tall fern canopies trembling under the rain, unfurling ferns, red fern spore. A boar snuffled and crashed in the fern thickets. His hot breath. The smell of it in the rain. There were side paths leading in under the thorns; mud ways trodden clear that passed under low branches. The larger beasts were further off and elsewhere, under taller trees. Cave bear and wisent and the dagger-mouth smilodon.

  The land rose and then fell away: not hills but a drifting swell that wasn’t flatness. Coming down, the trail took her among broad shallow pools. Maroussia cut a staff and kept her head down and walked against the rain, churning knee-high through water, mud-heavy feet slipping and awkward. Most of the ground here was water. Roots and stumps and carcasses of fallen trees reached up through the rain-disturbed surface, paused in arrested motion, waiting, balanced between worlds, and everything distant was lost in the rain.

  Maroussia crouched to dip her hands in the water, letting the rain beat on her back. Rolling up her sleeves she reached right down to the bottom and ran her fingers through the grass there. It looked like hair and moved to her touch, dark green and beautiful. It was just grass. Her arms in the water looked pale and strange, not hers but arms in the shadow world as real as the one she was in. She cupped her hands and brought some water up into her world to drink, feeling the spill of it through her fingers and down her arms. The water tasted of cold earth and leaves and moss. She tasted the roots of all the trees that stood in it and the bark and wood of the fallen ones. She swallowed it, cool and sweet in her throat, and took more, still drinking long after she wasn’t thirsty any more.

  The forest is larger than the world, though those who live outside it think the opposite.

  She was Maroussia Shaumian still. Nothing of that time was forgotten, nothing was lost, though she was more now, more and less and different and changed and far from home. Like the water in the rain she was fresh and new, and as old as the planet, both at once.

  You don’t know where home is until you’re not there any more.

  She waded out deeper into a wide pool loud under the rain to where a beech tree lay on its side, its rain-darkened bark smooth and wet to the touch. The beech had fallen but it wasn’t dead; it was earth-rooted still, and its leaves under the water were green. She let her hands rest on it and felt the tree’s life. She wished she could speak to it but she didn’t have the words, and what would she say? Help me, perhaps. Help me to get home. But that wasn’t right. It wasn’t what you should ask, and no help would come.

  Wolves plashed under tree-shadow, distant and silent and indistinct as moths. One turned his face towards her, wolf eyes in the rain, unhurried, considering. She returned his gaze and he looked away.

  Some while later she came on the wolf kill. It was an aurochs, huge and bull-like, lying on his side in a shallow pool of bloodied water, his rough fox-coloured hair matted with mud and rain-sodden. From a distance he looked drowned, but when she got close half of him was gone, a rain-washed hole of raw meat. Rain-glistening flies sipped at his eyes and crawled on the grey flopped rain-wet slab of his tongue. The noise of the rain beat in her ears like the rhythm of her own blood, too close and too ceaseless to attend to.

  Sudden and uncalled, the killing moment closed its grip on her and she was in it. It was still there, still happening, and she was the happening of it, not outside and watching, not remembering, but being there. She was aurochs not hearing the splashing charge of wolf above the rain, not seeing wolf behind him, not smelling wolf through rain and water and the rich scent of rain on leaf. She felt the appalling shock of the boulder-heavy collision and the clamp of the tearing mouth at her throat. Heard with the aurochs’ own strange clarity the small snap deep inside her neck. Felt the wordless sad dismay of ruminant beast, the surge of fear and panicked stumble, the attempted burly sweep of a neck that didn’t respond–delivered nothing, moved nothing, connected with nothing. The loneliness of that.

  She saw with hopeless aurochs eye the wolf that made the first charge turn and come splashing back through mud-swirled blood-swirled water. Then other wolves were on her back and she fell. Pain and the acceptance of pain. Aurochs could not rise and could not stand. Her leg wouldn’t go where she wanted it to go, her beautiful leg was lost. Aurochs grieved for it. Maroussia lived the last long moments when wolves ripped aurochs belly open and pulled the stuff there out and tore and swallowed bits from her beautiful twitching leg and slowly and softly minute after minute aurochs
grew tired and far away and died.

  And that wasn’t all.

  She was the death of aurochs but she was also the hunting of the wolves. She was salt on the wolf’s tongue and the dark hot taste of blood. She was the sour breath of the aurochs’ dying and the glad teeth in the neck of it. She was the crunch of the killing bite and the thirsty suck and tearing swallow of warm sweet flesh.

  And that wasn’t all.

  She was the life and growth and connected watchfulness of every tree and every leaf and every small creature and every water drop in the pool and the rain, its history and the possibilities of what was to come.

  And that wasn’t all.

  Nothing was all, because there was no end to the fullness of what she could perceive. Because this was what she had become, this overwhelming surprise of plenitude.

  She was Maroussia Shaumian still–Maroussia Shaumian, who had made her choice in Mirgorod and followed her path to its end in Novaya Zima–but she had been inside the Pollandore when the temporary star ignited around it. The Pollandore had imploded and exploded and changed and brought her here, and now it was gone. It was inside her now, if it was anywhere: inside her, new and strong, volatile and unaccommodated. The Pollandore and what she could be ran ahead of her and overwhelmed her until she hardly knew what was her and what was not, because sometimes she was everything.

  Time wasn’t a river; time was the sea, layered and fluid and malleable, what was past and what was possibly to come all intricately infolded and vividly present inside the rippling horizons of now. Nothing of Maroussia was lost, but she was more. She was changed and become this. All this.

  The seeing faded. (She called it seeing though it wasn’t that, but there was no word.) Seeing always came uncalled and surprised her. She suspected she could learn to call it up at will, but she was afraid of learning that. Once she went through that door, there would be no coming back, and she hadn’t chosen that and did not want it. She hadn’t chosen anything of this, not this, but here it was.