Two Cousins of Azov

‘Twenty-two.’

‘You’re not married?’

‘Married?’ Vlad’s curls shivered as he laughed through his nose. ‘No. Like I said, I have a girl, she’s really … I really … Her name is Polly. She’s beautiful. And she loves me. But marriage is not a priority.’

‘So what is, tell me?’

‘Well, you know: a car, an apartment, textbooks, travel. And I want to buy shares, get into investment, but I lack capital …’

‘How romantic. And the arts, Vlad?’

‘The arts?’

‘What makes your heart soar? What makes you shiver with delight? What fills you with angels’ breath? A painting, a piece of music, a modern ballet perhaps, you’re an athlete, after all—’

Vlad thought for a moment. ‘BMW.’

‘BM-what?’

He snorted with a smile. ‘It’s a make of car. Big engines, broad.’ His hands shaped the car in the air. ‘Leather seats; German engineering.’

‘German? I see.’ Anatoly Borisovich nodded and turned his gaze to the lone pine on the horizon. ‘Drawing is my particular love. I find it deeply calming. I can lose myself for days … I spent my life in illustration. They gave me a beautiful watch when I retired – a Poljot, the Soviet Union’s best. I believe it’s in here.’ He turned to open the drawer of the bedside cabinet but it jarred, the cabinet rocking on its feet as he tugged.

‘Don’t worry, Anatoly Borisovich, show me another time. We really should—’

‘I keep asking them for crayons and paper, Vlad. I know it would do me good. You know it would do me good. But they shrug and tell me maybe tomorrow … I need to get my thoughts straight. I am hoping to be discharged, you see, before the frosts set in. I might go south – the Caucasus, maybe, or further. Somewhere warm – Angola …’

‘Angola?’ Vlad stifled a laugh and glanced at his watch. ‘That’s as maybe. But Matron won’t refer you to the doctors for sign-out until she’s had “consistently good reports”, will she? Like at school, you remember? And at the moment your reports are not consistently good. So, that’s what we must work towards.’

‘Oh yes, I remember our little school. That’s lovely to remember! I received a rosette. Baba pinned it to the wall. She was very proud. And so was I. It was for drawing.’

‘Good. So, perhaps if you are ready … You were telling me on Tuesday, back in Siberia, you lived with your baba, that is, your grandmother …?’ Vlad referred to his notes lying in scratchy blue lines across the notepad and read as the old man began humming.

‘You were telling me about the thing that made you afraid. The boys at school told you to close your eyes and cross your fingers if you heard the moth boy at the window? Remember?’

‘Baba?’ the old man burped quietly. ‘Oh, I know what happened to Baba! I remember! It wasn’t my fault! It wasn’t me! Don’t blame me!’ His voice rose to a shriek and the feet under the covers began to kick.

‘I’m not! My dear Anatoly Borisovich, don’t get agitated! I’m sorry. I was just trying to move us along. I’ll say no more. Just let the words flow. As you want to tell it.’

The old man slurped from his cup, but said nothing.

‘Your grandmother told you that she’d seen something, or dreamt something … she talked of the shaman, and a boy going out into the forest …’

‘The moth boy and the moon!’ Anatoly Borisovich leant forward, coughing with the effort and scattering pryaniki crumbs over the bed. He wagged a short, fat finger in Vlad’s face, so close it grazed his nose. ‘It wasn’t just talk, it wasn’t a story. There was a creature – in the woods.’

‘Did you see it? What did it look like?’ The joints of the chair cracked like frosted wire as Vlad leant forward, and his pen wobbled the words ‘imagination, orhallucination – childhood psychosis?’ on his notepad. He forgot about drilling for facts. ‘Go ahead! Talk!’

Tolya’s favourite chore was sweeping the yard. Baba stood at the doorway watching him as he stumbled around, twig broom in hand, running after the blackened, soggy leaves, chuckling to himself as the wind threw them in the air around his head. He tried to catch them, as if they were butterflies and the broom a net, scattering gravel and laughter as he went. Lev followed at a slower pace, flicking his tail this way and that and occasionally mouthing a low woof. Baba clucked her tongue and left them to it.

The leaves danced around Tolya’s head and he dropped the broom, arms outstretched, pink fingers curling into the air, feeling the swell of the breeze pushing out of the pine forest across his corner of the earth. The world felt mysterious. How many thousands of kilometres had the wind come, and where was it going? What was it carrying, this rush of air: whose voices, animal or human? What smells were being swept around the pine trunks, over the streams and rocks, across the bed of brown needles and stumpy cones that covered the forest floor? Lev raised his head and sniffed the air, blind to all but the visions brought to him by his black, wet nose. Tolya did the same.

‘What is it, boy? A bear? A wolf? A wood spirit?’ Tolya crowned the dog with a handful of mashed leaves. ‘You and me, we are hunters.’ He imagined jumping over the fence into the trees, leaping from the branches onto that fragrant carpet of needles and tumbling into the wooded gloom, deeper into the forest, where the only sound was you and the crunch of twigs beneath your feet. He would hunt down the smells, the voices, the history. He would hunt down the shaman. He would track him to his hut hidden in the gloom and tell him about Stalin. No need for magic now, comrade shaman. We, you and me, we are Communism! We have the new magic, in Stalin’s word. It will cure our ills, and keep us safe. Your forest belongs to us all now. Tolya gripped the top of the gate and stared out into the trees, looking for movement.

‘Come on, Tolya!’ cried Baba from the porch, ‘there’s work to be done. Where’s your broom, eh? Forgotten on the ground, and Lev is going to chew it up – watch out!’

Tolya knew damage to the broom would be punished and jumped down from the gate to retrieve it. The trees sighed and waved. He was lucky he had trees to look at, and not some neighbour’s house. Take Comrade Goloshov, for example: if his house was opposite Comrade Goloshov’s, all he would see would be an old man with a red nose sitting by the window all winter and on his porch all summer. And his house smelled funny, like the inside of Lev’s ears.

He looked down the track towards the village. Smoke straggled from every crooked chimney. Chernovolets was little more than one road lined with wooden houses on each side, all higgledy-piggledy, not a straight line between them. To Tolya, it seemed a busy, people-filled place – after all, there was a school, and a shop, and a village hall, his auntie and uncle – even a doctor. The houses were ancient: indeed, not one was under fifty years old. The climate moulded the dwellings: the wooden walls and floors gradually bowed and buckled and sank in on themselves, producing façades as individual as the faces of the tenants. This was his village: four thousand kilometres east of Moscow, and home to five hundred and eighty-nine people, various chickens, some dogs, cats, rats, a few pigs, a riot of boys and girls, and a bucketful of stories and myths. Baba called his name. He leant the broom on the fence and joined her at the well.

‘When will Papa be back?’ he asked as they drew the water up.

‘Late. He’s busy.’ The words came out like whacks of an axe as she puffed. When they’d finished with the water she added, ‘Comrade Stalin needs more paper, to print more information, and for that the paper mill needs more trees, and for that Papa needs to work more, to make sure the trees are ready and the paper gets made. Otherwise he gets in trouble. It’s all in the plan, and we don’t want any trouble.’

‘Baba, will I work in the forest when I’m grown up? Is that in the plan?’

She laughed and wiped finger trails on her apron. ‘Well, Tolya, I don’t know. Maybe.’ Kind eyes crinkled under a frown.

‘That’s good. I like trees.’

‘Boy, it’s hard work. You’ve seen Papa when he gets home: he can hardly walk. You won’t have much time to like trees if you work in the forest. You’ll be cutting them up.’

‘But it’s good work, Baba?’

‘It’s work. But you … you’re different, Tolya. You’re not like your papa. With your drawing and your writing, and all that …’

‘But I could do it!’

‘I’m sure, I’m sure, my treasure,’ she said, smiling at him suddenly, the cracks in her face deepening. ‘But we’ll see. They’re moving people out here to help with the work. Outsiders, from Moscow, and out that way.’

‘Really? I’ve not seen any, Baba.’ Tolya was intrigued by the idea of outsiders: what did they look like? What did they smell like? What language did they speak? Would their children go to his school?

‘They don’t live in the villages. They are kept to themselves: they have their own camps.’

‘Our teacher told us about Pioneer camps, where children go for holidays if they’ve been very good. Are they like that?’

‘Something like that, son, something like that …’ Baba turned away and headed off back to the cottage, shaking her head. Tolya patted Lev on his soft, brown neck and tugged at his ears.

‘Hard work, Lev-chik, hard work is required! We will work hard, and Comrade Stalin will be pleased, and say thank you to us! We will make him proud. That’s what Papa does, and that’s what we will do.’ He looked around the yard with a critical eye. ‘Where’s the broom? There are leaves in the yard, and we must get them all! Every one! Not one leaf will be left!’ He grabbed the broom and darted around the yard, chasing down the leaves and pushing them into the black wooden bucket.

Dusk quilted the trees, blurring their outlines as Tolya waddled about, pretending the leaves were goats and he was herding them. Baba had lit a lamp and it glowed orange in the window, but still Tolya stayed out. He was bending down, talking to himself and stuffing handfuls of leaves into the bucket, when a crackling sound, close by in the trees, made him stop. Something heavy had moved. Between his legs, looking back towards the house, he could see Lev. The dog was no longer snuffling around the feed bin. Instead he stood rock still, ears clamped to his skull and tail tucked between his legs. He was staring past Tolya into the trees. The wind disappeared, and for a moment all there was in the world was silence, and the thud of his own heartbeat.

A snap shot into the air and the blood surged in Tolya’s veins. He swallowed and dropped the two fistfuls of leaves to the sodden earth. Lev churned out a growl. The wind blew a flapping sound into Tolya’s ears: like sheets on a line, or maybe wings.

With eyes squeezed shut he drew himself upright, fingers crossed like the boys had said. He began to pray to Stalin for help. Before he’d got a word out, Lev’s bark ricocheted off the trees, snapping Tolya’s eyes back open. He stared into the gloom, groping in the darkness, dreading to see, but unable to turn away. At any moment, he knew, moth boy, with the throbbing, hairy thorax and wavering antennae, would reach out for him. For a moment he saw nothing but leaves and clouds and shadows. Then, among the lower branches of the nearest pine, something stirred.

Floating in the darkness there was a face, sharp and pale, with black-ringed eyes that glowed like fireflies. A human face? Maybe … he could make out two arms, perhaps, or were they wings? They flapped against the figure’s sides as it hovered in the undergrowth. Tolya raised his chin. He should be brave. He should protect Baba. He was about to speak when he saw the figure was not looking at him at all: its eyes reflected the lamp, in the house. It was looking past him. It might not even have seen him. He took a step backwards, then another, and felt the wall of the well behind his heel. The creature did not react. He couldn’t go backwards all the way to the house. But if he turned and ran, it might give chase, swooping onto his neck with talons sharp as knives. What if it caught him, or worse, followed him in? He creased his eyes towards the cottage, face taut. The thing in the woods began flapping again, and a gurgle spewed from its mouth, somewhere between laughter and choking.

‘What are you?’ Tolya called out, his voice small and frightened against the wind.