her children. The world is not sentimental, but pitiless. I’ve given it to myself to know her mind. I flatter myself that I understand her a little. Maybe I’ve grown to resemble her. Only she’s going to go on for ever, and I won’t.
*
So it was getting close to October and I was travelling again. It always feels good to move, and this time I had a dose of hope in my soul.
Every now and again along the highway, I’d pass a tree tied with faded strips of cloth, glass beads and old coins round its base. That was a Tungus custom. Some trees and places are holy to them.
And back in the old days, when there was real traffic on this road, before people piled into their creaky buses for their long jarring drives, they’d fix swatches of fabric and drop pennies here for a safe return. Strange what survives of us. Beads, a random footprint, some papers. How would anyone make sense of it?
At Buktygachak, in the punishment cells, there were patches of writing scraped into the walls: dates, maybe a name, or curses, as if they needed to leave proof that they’d really lived.
I can’t recall that I ever travelled in a bus, but maybe it was fearful. Giving yourself up to it. Something else’s motion. Like me in that lake. What would anyone have found of me?
The road was good. I counted on ten or twelve days for the journey, but I could have halved the time if I pushed it. I was happy with the horses at a walk, covering fifteen or twenty miles a day. Sometimes I would doze as we went, slumped into the saddle, eyes half-shut. In that half-sleep, I’d see visions. It always went back to me as a child. What seems like a good time to you, you figure must be a good time for the world. But in those years that I remember as either lit with sunshine or the comforting crackle of split logs in winter, there were already shadows gathering.
When I was seven years old, I was drinking a soda with my father at the grocery shop that used to belong to Walter Perryman, who came from a very old Quaker family someplace. I look back at it as part of the good times, because I don’t recall going without anything. I remember us as all pretty contented and well fed, and houses still going up, and a general kind of orderliness to things.
It was a hot fly-blown summer day. Walter was wiping down the countertop and chatting to my father. Then they stopped talking and walked together out onto the porch.
I followed them out with my soda, which was in one of those bottles we used to have that close with a glass ball. Walter made different flavours, but the best one was flavoured with birch syrup.
Walter and my father were staring at a wraith, a stick-thin form in rags, in bare feet that were soft and spreading like caribou hooves.
Someone called to her, but she moved like a person in a trance, big glassy eyes unblinking. She must have been walking for weeks. Walter touched her shoulder and she crumpled into a heap at his feet, panting. My father carried her into Walter’s store and lay her on the counter. They propped her head up and tried to get her to eat something. Her head shook, and she pushed them away from her, her skinny shoulders heaving. Then her eyelids fluttered shut and she died right there in front of us.
She was the first. On the outskirts of town, they found her baby. They buried them in the town cemetery, under a plain wooden cross that said: Mother and Son, Known to God. But the ones that came after her were just too many in number to get the same treatment. It wasn’t lack of consideration. Some of the townsfolk who buried them ended up unburied themselves.
*
Snow started coming down towards the end of my first day on the road. I never minded riding through the weather, but the visibility had been cut down to no more than ten yards front and back. I liked to be able to see what was lying in wait for me, so the next chance I got, I ducked off the road to a clearing at one side behind a screen of trees. The snow
*
So it was getting close to October and I was travelling again. It always feels good to move, and this time I had a dose of hope in my soul.
Every now and again along the highway, I’d pass a tree tied with faded strips of cloth, glass beads and old coins round its base. That was a Tungus custom. Some trees and places are holy to them.
And back in the old days, when there was real traffic on this road, before people piled into their creaky buses for their long jarring drives, they’d fix swatches of fabric and drop pennies here for a safe return. Strange what survives of us. Beads, a random footprint, some papers. How would anyone make sense of it?
At Buktygachak, in the punishment cells, there were patches of writing scraped into the walls: dates, maybe a name, or curses, as if they needed to leave proof that they’d really lived.
I can’t recall that I ever travelled in a bus, but maybe it was fearful. Giving yourself up to it. Something else’s motion. Like me in that lake. What would anyone have found of me?
The road was good. I counted on ten or twelve days for the journey, but I could have halved the time if I pushed it. I was happy with the horses at a walk, covering fifteen or twenty miles a day. Sometimes I would doze as we went, slumped into the saddle, eyes half-shut. In that half-sleep, I’d see visions. It always went back to me as a child. What seems like a good time to you, you figure must be a good time for the world. But in those years that I remember as either lit with sunshine or the comforting crackle of split logs in winter, there were already shadows gathering.
When I was seven years old, I was drinking a soda with my father at the grocery shop that used to belong to Walter Perryman, who came from a very old Quaker family someplace. I look back at it as part of the good times, because I don’t recall going without anything. I remember us as all pretty contented and well fed, and houses still going up, and a general kind of orderliness to things.
It was a hot fly-blown summer day. Walter was wiping down the countertop and chatting to my father. Then they stopped talking and walked together out onto the porch.
I followed them out with my soda, which was in one of those bottles we used to have that close with a glass ball. Walter made different flavours, but the best one was flavoured with birch syrup.
Walter and my father were staring at a wraith, a stick-thin form in rags, in bare feet that were soft and spreading like caribou hooves.
Someone called to her, but she moved like a person in a trance, big glassy eyes unblinking. She must have been walking for weeks. Walter touched her shoulder and she crumpled into a heap at his feet, panting. My father carried her into Walter’s store and lay her on the counter. They propped her head up and tried to get her to eat something. Her head shook, and she pushed them away from her, her skinny shoulders heaving. Then her eyelids fluttered shut and she died right there in front of us.
She was the first. On the outskirts of town, they found her baby. They buried them in the town cemetery, under a plain wooden cross that said: Mother and Son, Known to God. But the ones that came after her were just too many in number to get the same treatment. It wasn’t lack of consideration. Some of the townsfolk who buried them ended up unburied themselves.
*
Snow started coming down towards the end of my first day on the road. I never minded riding through the weather, but the visibility had been cut down to no more than ten yards front and back. I liked to be able to see what was lying in wait for me, so the next chance I got, I ducked off the road to a clearing at one side behind a screen of trees. The snow
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