Was this another curse? Pay attention now.
“If you should go,” he said at last, “I’d look after your mother until you get back. As best I could. But you are a better helpmeet to her than I could be. I can’t easily trot through muddy woods finding wild turnips or berries, if they even choose to come back this year. My bad leg is made of concrete. And my good leg gets tired of dragging the bad leg after it.”
She knew the doctor was apologizing for teasing her. She said, neutrally, “With all those stars in the sky, why isn’t there enough light for us to see by? We stumble like blinded sheep.”
“As you can see, it is clouding over. The stars can’t pierce that gloom; they just wait it out. That isn’t the stars’ fault. It is their custom to stay heavenly.”
“They should come down closer to the earth.”
“Well, ask them politely.”
He was humoring her. He thought her simple, a younger version of Grandmother Onna. He didn’t think she would ever have the courage to leave. She’d prove him wrong.
“Ah, now you’re not talking to me,” he said. “That’s all right. Sometimes there’s nothing left to say.”
They got as far as the fields of rotten rye. There they turned and, starting back, looked down on what was left of life. Miersk huddled under onrushing clouds. Miersk in an uncertain dawn.
In the center squatted the chapel. A pagoda in stained timber.
To one side, along the edge of the settlement, the station where trains had once stopped, long ago, but no longer bothered. A study in the science of decay.
The doctor’s house, with no more medicine. The schoolhouse where no one studied since there was no teacher. The shop where no goods waited to be bought. The henhouse where no hens clucked. Abandoned homes. Isn’t this depressing?
The clouds parted on cue, a certain stage business of the deity. A wedge of solar blue between scoops of cloud. Then a crack of thunder. The air felt green and filigreed with grit, plates of atmosphere scraping together.
As if the overlord of the heavens had a campaign against Miersk, the lightning that had threatened for days finally snipped across the clouds. It started out crosswise but arced earthward, to the north. Lord save the Rudetskys, out on that road, thought Elena.
“Run,” said the doctor companionably, and swatted her on the behind. She wouldn’t let go of his hand, and dragged at him to hurry, even with his bad leg.
Another sickle of lightning was readying itself. You can feel that kind of thing. This one meant business, as if there really is no such thing as mercy in the universe.
They were almost to the doctor’s house when the second bolt struck the top of the chapel steeple. A scorched note, a sound of wood ripping like paper. The bell in its wooden wheel dropped through the belfry, bringing with it most of the timber cladding of the front wall.
The bell thudded six feet away from their heels. They felt the vibration of overtones into their skulls. The roof of Saint Veronika’s began sparking, and the lightning crackled backward along the roof beam. Then the tortured javelin dove earthward and finished in the graveyard, turning the ground over as a giant mole might. Coffins and rot and sulfurous smells burst through the nap of ground-level pinks and whites.
Elena grabbed the doctor’s lapels. The sweat on his eyebrows was like jelly. In a moment Peter Petrovich opened his eyes.
“Is this heaven or hell?” he managed to say.
“You’re still alive,” she said.
“Hell,” he replied.
“And so am I,” she answered.
“Well, nearer to heaven, then, so I might as well sit up.” He tried to. “This is Second Chance Day, and I didn’t see it coming.”
“Second Chance Day? Good, another chance to suffer.”
Day after day in the season of disaster, it can be hard to recognize a change in fortune when it comes. Elena was untried at hope. Still, the doctor was right. It was Second Chance Day, and the chance was coming.
What a worthless trade, thought Elena. All those clouds brashing down the sky, bellowing their opinions and knocking down church steeples. And the only thing that matters to the people of Miersk? A sensible snowfall befitting the season?
Not a flake of it. Full of static and sizzle, the clouds swagger on toward the Urals. They drag the dry tails of their purple greatcoats behind them.
She spent that day hunting through the cupboards of the Rudestkys and the Popovs and other departing families, hoping to find something left behind by mistake. Only crumbs between floorboards, dust in the larder.
With nothing to offer her mother for supper, she stopped in to see how Peter Petrovich was faring.
His light was low. Conservation of lamp oil. The old man lay flat in his bed, raking his beard with a broken comb. Grandmother Onna was heating towels over his tiled stove and then trying to push them under his lower back with a poker. He had twisted the ropes of muscle that supported his spine. His hip wasn’t much better. His mood was nasty. “Doctors are supposed to help the sick, not lie around like women in the birthing bed,” he snarled.
Grandmother Onna replied, “They say a shoemaker has no shoes for himself. Doctor, you can’t help the sick until you recover. Lie still or this poker will do some interesting damage.”
“You’re trying to finish the job the lightning couldn’t manage. Oh, Elena, you’re here. Good. Hit that old woman over the head with a shovel.”
“Tell him to stop flirting,” said Grandmother Onna.
“Are you alive?” Elena asked the doctor.
“Do not ask for whom the bell tolls,” he replied. “The bell is broken. With no bell to chime the holy hours, we’re unclocked. Time itself can’t tell what time it is.”
“It’s time to eat,” said Elena, hoping they would have something to spare. The doctor spread both his hands, meaning empty left, empty right.
“Is that the rain I hear?” asked Grandmother Onna.
They stilled themselves to listen. This noise was more orderly than wind. More like muffled drums. “Our men come back, and all turned into soldiers already?” wondered the doctor.
“No.” Grandmother Onna wagged her forefinger, thinking. “I do believe it might be a train.”
A train. In all of Elena’s living memory, no train had ever come through. The Miersk line wasn’t much more than a siding. A little-used byway of the great Moscow–Saint Petersburg rail network, serving dachas and grain dispensaries on a capricious schedule. It was often abandoned for years at a time: Miersk wasn’t exactly a holiday destination.
“Help has come,” said the girl, though I think she had little reason to expect largesse from the world. “Food, maybe, and milk.” She ignored their protests, she bolted outside.
“A nice world you imagine. It’s fun to believe in magic, but help doesn’t travel by train,” called the doctor. “If I’m wrong, I’ll take five fresh eggs.”
Elena joined the few remaining village women, who had gathered in hope or curiosity as sounds grew distinct. A percussive huffing. A shrieking of metal upon metal. Then a steam whistle, which can sound like a piccolo being tortured unto death.
The engine emerged from behind fir trees. It drove ahead of it a tumble of saplings and bracken plowed down by its cowcatcher.
The older women remembered the train from their childhoods. They brassed up a high-pitched traditional greeting. They thought their folklore hello might be heard above the noise of industrial advance. They had no potatoes to sell or fresh baked bread, not like in the old days. They waved junk. Wooden spoons, nearly clean shawls, tin ikons torn from the holy corners of their huts. Anything for a trade, for a few pieces of fruit, for oats or black bread or maybe a wedge of bacon.
“Hello,” they cried. They looked like what they were: starving peasants in the outback of an endless country.
Don’t take my comment as criticism. Starving peasants can be attractive and well behaved. I believe they also sing nicely from time to time.
In any cas
e, the train paid them no attention. As it passed, it spun black lace curtains of sooty exhaust.
“Five eggs,” begged Elena, choking on indigestible hope. The younger children and the older women, expecting less, didn’t waste their tears. They turned away, muttering about the good old days.
“I’m not surprised it passed by,” said Peter Petrovich when Elena went back to tell him what had happened. “Though I do wonder why the service is being revived after all this time.”
“We’ll never know,” said Grandmother Onna.
In this, she was wrong. The train — the very same train — returned about an hour later, slowly backing up until the lighted windows of the final carriage lined up with the platform of the abandoned train station.
Fuss from the engine — mechanical farts and groans, the like. I’m not technical.
Look at it there for a moment. Ever since I lost an eye, I’ve loved to picture things clearly when I can. Winter dusk in Miersk comes hard and fast even when the winter is being irresolute. The wheels are lost in shadows all plum and black, like rising water. The light from behind drapes, an alluring rosy tangerine. Brass fixtures on windows and doors. There are only four cars to this train. It is a private experiment in luxury, perhaps. Someone important may be on this train. The Tsar himself? We could look closer and see. Shall we?
The doctor was the only man distinguished enough to greet travelers on the iron horse. But his back was a torment and his hip no better. So he wasn’t going to make formal inquiries as to the reason for its visit. He couldn’t get up.
Grandmother Onna had little interest in wrestling a train and trying to throw it down the well. She was too busy harrying the doctor.
At rest in the theater of the sickroom, behind the bed drapes of her own infirmary, Elena’s mother, frail Natasha Rudina, never heard the train arrive. She couldn’t forbid Elena to go find out what the commotion was about.
So the girl, alone of the villagers, ventured forth. As Elena drew nearer, she could see the train more clearly than I’ve described so far. Earlier, the iron-wheeled enterprise had been a smudge of speed and noise. Now, at rest, with steam clearing like mist on the rise, Elena caught glimpses of greasy pistons and twisting valves that resembled the architecture of a trumpet. Above the massive wheels, four separate carriages. The last one was grandiose with shiny finials, ornamentation like shoe buckles. Every window was cloaked with drapes.
The train seemed like a creature on its own accord; Elena half expected it to speak. She had a fanciful side, given to drifting in and out of reason. But she also had a no-nonsense grip on things. What can I say, the child is not a symbol: she’s a child with a messy mind.
A voice from the head of the train: “For the love of old Mother Russia! Is this place even alive?” Elena turned toward the sound, not sure if she should run away or stand her ground.
Before she could decide, a door swung open just behind her, and another man’s voice replied, “Temper, temper, my good man. Let us greet adversity with manners.”
The first speaker materialized in tendrils of steam. At the sight of Elena, he stood still. Shreds of steam clung and coiled to him. I imagine they looked like strips of detaching skin. At first Elena thought him a body exhumed from the bedeviled graveyard, or a ghost. The ghost she most wanted to see, were she ever to see one. He was the right shape and size. But his voice was too earthly and his accent not the local one. “A pint-pot of a girl, that’s the ambassador they send?” He pointed at Elena and frowned.
“At least they haven’t welcomed us with pitchforks and torches,” said the other speaker, the calmer one. Elena pivoted to watch this second man step down from the elegant carriage. He was the tidiest man Elena had ever seen, cleaner even than the absent báryn. This fellow’s beard wasn’t long and dense, like the doctor’s, but trimmed to fit his chin as neatly as a stocking fits a foot. His hair was clipped and silvered. Against the starched whiteness of his shirt climbed a row of ivory studs.
Elena knew at once that the visitor was the Tsar of All the Russias. He could be no other. She gave a curtsey as best she could.
“Up from your knees, child,” he ordered her. “Adoration only gives one splinters.” His accent was softly bruised, perhaps from a lifetime at court. She could but obey.
The ghostly conductor came no nearer. “Do you think the wretched of this village might be sending a mere daughter as a decoy and a diversion while they summon an ambush?”
Mere daughter, thought Elena. But what else was she?
Mere is an interesting word. A safe one. One can never be less than mere. It is someplace to start. For instance, I am a mere storyteller. But who knows what I might accomplish from such a humble platform?
The Tsar inched white gloves off whiter fingers. “Ambush? That would be ambitious of them. I doubt them capable of such a strategy. Though I have not made a study of the subject, I believe peasants come in two varieties. Either they are pokingly direct, or they disappear because they can’t find words to say what they want.”
Elena found her words just fine. “We have no men left to protest your arrival.” She curtseyed again to the Tsar and, for good measure, to the phantom conductor. “By your order, Your Highness, our men have all been hustled away like sheep to the cattle fair. Except for one smelly old man with a white beard.”
“By my order.” The Tsar, amused, was going to say more. The conductor interrupted him.
“Without help we’ll be here at least a few days, maybe a week.” As the conductor stamped his foot on the ground to make his point, several other men appeared, massing upon ladders and ledges at the front of the train. “Sure, we’re six able-bodied men. And we work as hard as any illiterate muzhiks. But it will take time.”
“We have time,” said the Tsar. “We have enough supplies to see us through. You will do whatever it takes.”
“I wasn’t hired on for this sort of labor,” began the conductor. The other attendants began to murmur in agreement.
“You would like an interview with Madame?” The Tsar used a tone that came close to sweetness.
No one answered him.
The conductor spat on the ground. The last of the steam dissolved around him. He was no ghost, just a working man in a blue coat with a dirty yellow kerchief around his neck. He swiveled his jaw as if trying to loosen a wodge of tobacco from under his tongue. Then he spat again. “Very well. But there’s nothing doing now, not till the sun is up. We’ll get a better look at the size of the job tomorrow.”
“It’s a blessing that it was still daylight as we approached that trestle bridge,” said the Tsar. “We’d all be dead at the bottom of the ravine if you hadn’t spied the damage. What’s a few days’ work with your axes? You are still alive to use them. Celebrate through labor.”
He twitched a finger without looking at Elena. “Bring us fresh water in the morning. If you’re lying, and if the men in the district are lurking to attack us in our distress, tell them that the Madame in her apartments would not appreciate such an entertainment.”
The Tsarina? “I couldn’t lie to the Tsar,” she told him.
“Admirable policy.” With this he retreated into the elegant carriage and pulled the door shut. Elena heard an ostentatious, well-oiled click and the turn of a key in the lock. A little bit of theater. She loved it.
The other men grumped among themselves. But now that the Tsar had given Elena a job for the morning, she knew that they wouldn’t dare harm her.
So she wandered toward the conductor. He groused; she listened. After the train had passed through Miersk, it had traveled some versts out of town. Then, slowing down with the effort of climbing a knoll, it had come to a gorge. The conductor had seen how the track curved onto a trestle bridge reduced to a henge of blackened timbers.
The bridge had been hit by lightning. He’d stopped the train just in time.
“Oh, yes,” said Elena. “That was this morning. That first bolt. I could tell it had struck something. You could fe
el the contact from here.”
About a third of the trestle was compromised. The supports could give way under strain. The bridge would have to be examined and its bad limbs replaced with new.
“The work starts tomorrow,” said the conductor. “If your village can supply a crew of woodsmen to fell trees and strip them, and oxen to haul them into place, we shall make easy work of it.”
“If the Tsar hadn’t already commandeered all our men, I’m sure they’d be happy to help,” replied Elena. “As for oxen, they’ve moved on to starve elsewhere.” This was as tart as she dared to be. The conductor spat once more, nearly in her direction.
The crew turned to caring for their halted iron steed. Elena picked her way along the platform. The carriage to her left was near enough that she could draw tracks with her fingers in the frosty soot, the sooty frost.
Her hand ran across the window frame and onto the glass. She thought she saw another hand on the other side of the glass. Maybe it was just her reflection. But didn’t the drape twitch, just now?
She ran to tell Grandmother Onna and Peter Petrovich that the Tsar and his retinue were spending the evening as their accidental guests.
Grandmother Onna wasn’t impressed. She’d just come back from scouring the Rudetsky house by lamplight, and her old eyes were sharper than Elena’s. She’d found a cupful of oat mash hidden in a tin matchbox, and she shared half with Elena. “The Tsar to his veal, and we to our meal,” she said, smacking her lips.
Elena had always felt like the center of her own world — who doesn’t? The world arranged itself around her like petals around the stem of a flower. This way the meadows, that way the woodland. Over here, the báryn’s estate, out there, the hills that hug the known world close and imply a world beyond.
Tonight — with the presence of the Tsar hardly a verst away — for the first time Elena felt what it meant to be a subject. To serve as a bit of rude local color, decoration on the edge of someone else’s amusing world.