Anthony Marra - The Wolves of Bilaya Forest

The days grew shorter as they fell away, October turning to November. Sergey entered Vera’s house each week without a word, as glum and uncivil as his three associates. But when Vera returned, eight hours later, she found the kettle humming with steam, two teacups set on the kitchen table, and Sergey cutting thick slices of cake at the counter. He told her of his wife, their courtship prolonged by the possibility of her marriage to an American. He had proposed to her on the day she withdrew her ad from the catalog, in the grocery store, by the wicker tubs of brown onions and spotted potatoes, a twist tie for an engagement ring. She drank too much and embarrassed him in front of his friends. Once, while drunk, she threw a knife at him; it missed him and left a crack in the kitchen window. He had not seen his wife since the day he found her with the other man.

He confided in Vera. He told her about his childhood, his father, and his wedding, the six stacks of banded thousand-ruble notes he’d been saving to buy a house before his wife left. He told her about the heroin trade. The cultivation of poppy fields in Afghanistan, the refinement of opium, the overland transport through Turkmenistan, the fishing trawlers crossing the Caspian. His boss, Ivan, Yelena’s son, had police protection, a disregard for human life, and a collection of rare birds imported from Paraguay. He did not discuss what took place in the house while Vera was walking at the edge of the forest, and she did not want to ask.

Instead, she told him about her husband, who had died of a heart attack 10 years earlier, just after he finished brushing his teeth. He had broad cheeks and a nose that had healed crookedly after a swarm of wasps chased him face-first into the trunk of a pine tree. She missed her daughter and admitted that she wrote misleading letters partly in an effort to lure Lidiya home. She felt the unfairness of growing old, watching her body sag and lose shape like a snowman in the sun, not having relatives to give support and bear her grievances. When she thought of her mother, she felt something darker than longing, and this she did not confide to Sergey.

“I have heard stories of you as a child,” he said one afternoon.

“Everyone has stories from childhood,” Vera said. “You do too.” The snow had fallen early that year, and across the field from her kitchen window the dark branches of the forest were traced in ice. Sergey sat across the table and tapped his cigarette into a plastic ashtray.

“Yes,” he agreed. “But none of mine made it to the front page of Pravda .”

“I don’t want to discuss it,” Vera said. Sergey went to the living room and flipped the channels of the color television he had brought over from his flat the previous week. Of late, he’d been spending increasingly more time with Vera, refilling the kettle far past sunset and coming for dinner on his off days. As he scanned through the frequencies, the dubbed action films and low-budget crime dramas, he thought of his flat. The sheets had not been changed since his wife left. He ate from paper plates and no longer wiped the urine splatters from the rim of the toilet bowl. This was his loneliness.

Vera was at the stove, frying chicken thighs in a pan still greasy from the morning’s blini, when she heard the clatter of the mail slot. She turned down the heat and set the wooden spoon on a folded paper napkin before walking into the living room. The price of the international postage was illegible through the black ink of the cancellation marks. The edges of the envelope were worn, but the seal was unbroken. Five years earlier, a letter from America would have never made it through her mail slot without being read and noted by invisible men in distant offices.

“What is it?” Sergey asked. Vera sat beside him on the sofa. For some time, neither spoke. Finally, Sergey asked if he should leave.

“No,” Vera said. “Stay.”

She opened the envelope with a butter knife and held the letter close to her face and held her face close to the lamp. She read the letter twice through before passing it to Sergey, who was farsighted and had to hold the letter at arms length to decipher the crimped cursive script. He set it on the coffee table and neither spoke. Lidiya was being divorced by the piano tuner in Portland. She would return home in one month.

Before slipping between the sheets that night, Vera reached under her bed and pulled out a wooden cigar box. The cigar box held the letters from her daughter, the letters her mother had written from the courthouse cell, the money from Ivan’s men, and the newspaper clippings praising her denunciation. She flipped through faded newsprint because even in their dishonesty and propagandizing, the words proved something beautiful. She had once been young, and these yellowed slips of paper were her testimony. The cigar box lay open on the floor beside her as she kneeled and repeated the prayers her mother had taught her. She prayed for goodness and deliverance and the grace of God for all mankind in a formal and archaic language that after all these years still felt heavy on her tongue. Her knees ached, and she prayed for an undisturbed sleep.

When she finished, she ran her finger across the broken seal of her daughter’s new letter and placed it in the cigar box with the others. She was old enough to know that everything large enough to love eventually changes into something that causes pain. But the things small enough to fit into a cigar box, these stay as they are.

Lidiya arrived after five days of continuous travel, taking connecting flights from Portland to New York to London to St. Petersburg, then east by train to Bilaya. She returned with one suitcase, a knockoff designer handbag, and a coin purse heavy with pennies. She had lost two sweaters, a framed photograph of her parents, five and a half kilograms, and any illusions she once had about life in America. She had replaced them with gray hairs and a drinking problem. Her mother met her at the train station. It was snowing.

Vera hugged her daughter beside a kiosk selling bootlegged DVDs and Ukrainian cigarettes. Even through the down overcoat, she could tell her daughter had lost weight.

“You’re breaking me,” Lidiya muttered.

“I know,” Vera said, but did not release her.

When they returned home, Vera watched her daughter undress. A hat, scarf, and mittens. A winter coat with a detachable hood that hung from half its buttons. A bright yellow sweatshirt with the image of an elm tree. Jeans two sizes too tight. Her underwear was pink and made of cotton and polyester. Vera had bought her daughter none of these things.

“Where are my clothes?” Lidiya asked.

“In your suitcase, I assume.”

“No, the ones I left.”

Vera had feared this. She turned to the open closet, which contained nothing but hangers. “I had to sell them,” she said. Her daughter stood beside the closet, her bare shoulders the same pale white as the square on the wallpaper where the mirror once hung. “I needed money for the gas bill.”

Lidiya picked her clothes from the floor, the tight jeans, the yellow sweatshirt and its elm tree, and put them back on. She had worn the clothes for five days and 17,262 kilometers. She knew her mother’s tendency to embellish the truth, and she had not expected a change in her two-year absence. She had not expected wealth or prosperity. Neither had she expected her clothes to be sold for gas money.

“We will get you new clothes. Things are better now,” Vera said. Lidiya nodded and buttoned her jeans.

“You should brush your hair,” Vera added. “We’re having company after dinner.”

They ate in the kitchen, a stew of beets and cubed chicken breasts. Vera leaned over the sink, opened the window, and reached out. She pulled a bottle of vodka from the hanging garden planter, which held petunias in the summer months and frozen goods in winter. She poured two shots and handed one to her daughter, and they raised their glasses without proffering a toast. Neither was what the other had hoped for. She reached across the table and covered her daughter’s fingers with her palm.