Anthony Marra - The Wolves of Bilaya Forest

“Tomorrow, you will sleep in.”

Lidiya nodded. She could not believe this was all she had to look forward to.

Three knocks at the door. Vera stood and walked into the living room, checking her hair in the mirror before going for the handle. On the other side of the door, Sergey watched the handle turn. He was clean-shaven and had scrubbed the scent of cigarettes from his scalp with two types of shampoo, one guaranteeing hair growth, the other promising a satin sheen. He had washed a blue button-down shirt and brown corduroys, the most formal clothes he owned. He had stopped by the floral section of the local supermarket and picked out a bright bouquet of artificial tulips wrapped in green tinfoil. His belt was the only article of black leather on his person. As the door opened, Sergey realized that he hadn’t made such efforts to be presentable since the early days of his marriage. He saw Vera and, behind her, a face from a Russian bride catalog, and in that moment, again, for the ten thousandth time, he felt his wife’s absence.

“This is my daughter, Lidiya,” Vera said, after Sergey had stepped inside, taken off his overcoat, and stomped the snow from the treads of his boots.

“I am Sergey Fyodorovich,” he said, and presented Lidiya with the plastic tulips. She was roughly the same age as his wife, same height and weight. But she did not wear makeup, made no attempt to hide the pimple on her left cheek, the dark crescents beneath her eyes. She wore a sweatshirt and blue jeans, and Sergey felt foolish. She did not know this was a date.

“What are these?” she asked, as if she had never before seen tulips.

“They are made of plastic,” Sergey said proudly. “They do not die.”

Vera brought the vodka bottle and shot glasses to the coffee table. She told everyone to sit where they wanted, then took the armchair so that Sergey had to sit next to her daughter on the divan.

“How do you like being back in Bilaya?” Sergey asked, after they toasted to health and prosperity.

“It’s nice, but I thought things would be better here,” Lidiya said. She looked at her mother. “You wrote in one of your letters that they were distributing compensation money.”

Vera nodded and tried to remember what she had written to Lidiya. It hadn’t been a lie, not entirely. In all the talk of privatization, of economic shock treatment and the parceling out of state industries, she’d heard whispers of individual compensation. Vera had read editorials in Novaya Gazeta penned by reform deputies in the state Duma. She’d followed their calls for reparations, their declarations that the country could not transcend its past without making amends. The hard-liners said reparations were impossible. Though they used terms like inflation and the prioritization of resources , she knew they really meant that the state could not print enough currency to repay all that it owed.

“The legislation didn’t pass,” she said.

Sergey wiped his mouth and turned to Lidiya. “Speaking of letters, your mother has not received many letters from you, and I told her how overseas mail is often lost.”

Lidiya glanced at her mother. “Yes. I wrote every week.”

“That’s what I thought,” Vera said. She smiled at Sergey, certain that in his heart he was a good man.

Minutes grew to hours, and Lidiya grew intoxicated. She had two, three shots for every one of Sergey’s. She slurred her words and told stories unbecoming of an honest woman. Vera watched anxiously as her own discomfort became Sergey’s. She knew he was thinking of his wife, who drank too much and embarrassed him in public, who was once listed in a mail-order bride catalog. She knew then, as Lidiya stumbled to the door to kiss him goodbye, that Sergey would never be her son-in-law.

That night, Vera was awakened by the retch and splash of someone drowning. In the bathroom, she found her daughter bathed in the green neon glow of the nightlight. Lidiya was on her knees before the toilet bowl, holding her hair in a loose fist behind her head.

Lidiya’s drinking increased as December approached and passed. The days contracted to a six-hour twilight as the sun skirted the horizon. For the appearance of moderation, she purchased her half-liter bottles of vodka in different stores on different days, never seeing the same cashier more than twice a week. She considered herself discreet, but no one was fooled. She wore her unhappiness like a tiara.

Each Wednesday, hangover or no, she left the house with her mother when the men arrived. Sergey nodded curtly, and she knew this peasant of a man was either too proud or too embarrassed to speak to her directly. Those ridiculous plastic flowers — who did he think he was to reject her? She knew immediately what the house was being used for and felt both hurt by her mother’s deceptions and ashamed of her willingness to believe them.

Unbeknownst to her mother, Lidiya also spent her Wednesday afternoons walking along the edge of Bilaya Forest. On the day they first came upon each other, Lidiya had been thinking of Gilbert’s piano-tuning kit. The brown leather case contained a gooseneck tuning hammer, nickel lever heads, and rubber mutes. A tuning fork gave a warm, round ring when she flicked it with her fingernail. A manual that Gilbert had ceased referring to years earlier, filled with terms like equal temperament, fundamental frequency, coincident harmonics , and unison . When she first arrived in America and joined Gilbert on calls to large suburban houses, she read through the manual. She could find none of the technical terms in her Russian-English pocket dictionary, and Gilbert had tried his best to explain them in simple language. She still had no idea what coincident harmonics meant. The tuning kit had been sitting on the coffee table when he returned home at 3:40 on a Friday afternoon, wiped the raindrops from his hair, and told her that he no longer loved her.

She continued walking at the edge of the forest, and the wolves howled from deep in the interior. She imagined them ravenous, with fierce eyes and gleaming fangs, a hole in their bellies that no prey could fill. A figure appeared ahead, a stenciled shadow against the setting sun. Lidiya took a sip from her half-liter bottle and looked at it in her palm before returning it to the inner pocket of her overcoat. She hated her hands for being so small.

The approaching figure was her mother. “We can go back soon,” her mother said.

“You know what they are doing in there, don’t you?”

Vera did not reply. In her pocket was a ballpoint pen clipped to a pad of paper. She had been writing a letter to her daughter as if Lidiya still lived in America. In it she described Sergey, how handsome and polite he was. How he would surely like Lidiya. She wrote of her own well-being, how, at the age of 61, her life had never been fuller.

“We have food on the table and heat in the furnace. Why isn’t that enough for you?”

“You’re from another world, Mama,” Lidiya said. “That peasant and his friends are cutting heroin on the kitchen table. You didn’t think to mention this in your dozens of letters.”

Vera could smell the liquor on her daughter’s breath and hear the recklessness of her words. For the first time in her life, she understood what Lidiya was capable of, and she feared her daughter.

“Be quiet,” she commanded. “You must be quiet.”

Lidiya laughed and spread her arms outward as if exposing herself. “Who’s going to hear? The wolves?”

Vera nodded, then turned and walked toward town. Lidiya fell in line behind her, and they walked the two kilometers in silence. When they reached home, the men were packing bundles of vials into a duffle bag. Vera looked away, embarrassed, as if she had walked in on them naked.