Tatiana had hoped that things would return to normal, but right after her grandparents left for Pelkino, poor Dasha for some mysterious, grown-up, tear-stained reason had to quickly return to Leningrad. She didn’t say how long she’d be gone, but because there was now no one to take care of Pasha and Tatiana, Dasha arranged for Pasha to be sent a week early to the boys camp in Tolmachevo, and for Tatiana to be sent fifty kilometers east to Novgorod to stay with Marina’s parents on their dacha on Lake Ilmen.
Though Tatiana loved going with Marina to Lake Ilmen, her joy was short-lived indeed when Marina said, “Tania, my mother said I could bring Saika, too! Isn’t that great?”
Everything was so fine in Luga once, but recently there had been nothing but unbounded chaos. What did Blanca Davidovna rasp to Marina, just before the girls left? “He will wile away, and he will chip away, and he will erode your goodwill and your strength, gram by gram, grain by grain, and the glass that was once round will become jagged with his ministrations. He will not rest until he has you in his clutches, because you are susceptible, because you can be swayed.” Marina said she didn’t know whose tea leaves Blanca was talking about, because while she was saying this to Marina, Blanca was gripping Tatiana’s hands. But Tatiana knew. And she knew because of only one thing. Tatiana knew that like Deda, she could not be swayed.
Swimming on a Summer Afternoon
Lake Ilmen is an immense twenty-seven-mile-long lake, shaped like a dolphin and surrounded by flat shores and tall elms. The lake is shallow, thirty feet deep at most, its many low-lying areas silt and swamp. Because of this, the lake is warm to swim in. A hundred rivers and streams feed into Lake Ilmen, but only one flows out—the Volkhov River, which flows north to Lake Ladoga. On the shores of the Volkhov River and Lake Ilmen stands a nine-hundred-year-old city: Novgorod, or “New City,” the oldest city in Russia. Novgorod was ideally placed along the trade route from the East to the West, and flourished and grew in its wattle and daub splendor until Moscow overtook it in importance in the fifteenth century and St. Petersburg, the new capital of Russia, further diminished its glory from 1703 onward.
But the ancient ruins in the town remain on full display, and the myriad white onion-domed churches are magnificent even without the gold crosses on the crests. The river runs through the center of town, connected to Rurik’s wall and St. Sophia’s Church by a stone footbridge.
Tatiana loved to walk with Pasha and Marina through Novgorod’s cobbled streets, and on top of Rurik’s wall. This time, however, there were no excursions to the city from the dacha, just a short bus ride away. Pasha was not here, and Marina and Saika didn’t want to go. All they wanted to do was lie indolently near the lake and talk in lurid whispers, and if Tatiana came too close, they would say, go away, Tania, this conversation is not for you.
So Tatiana went away. Aunt Rita and Uncle Boris’s small dacha was nestled on a gentle slope leading to the lake, covered by a canopy of elms, blissfully isolated. Tatiana read, swam, and even went to Novgorod by herself once. Upon returning, she found the girls as she had left them, on their stomachs on the blanket, legs up at the knees, heads together, eyes toward the lake.
Tatiana noticed Aunt Rita and Uncle Boris were fighting more than usual. They had always clashed, but there had not been this constant stream of hostility through the sap-covered house. It wasn’t the fighting she didn’t understand. Her family fought too. It was the lack of loving that troubled her.
While inside Aunt Rita and Uncle Boris argued and outside Marina and Saika conspired, what Tatiana did was daydream. She sat with her back against the trees and daydreamed of Queen Margot and La Môle. What if Margot weren’t queen, married to a king? What if La Môle had been tortured but not beheaded? What if they escaped, ran away to the south of France perhaps, found an unnamed cobblestoned village and became lost? They married. They were alive. They were together. What bliss. What happiness. But what would a queen and a commoner’s grand passion look like in the everyday? Would it all be like this? Did even the most soaring love affair turn into Aunt Rita and Uncle Boris after a while?
That was so distasteful to Tatiana that the daydream instantly ended—as if the reel in the film broke. How intolerable. Better for La Môle to sweat blood and die on the rack. And as she climbed into her creaking cot and closed her eyes, the images in her head darkening, the images outside darkening, she thought, not another day like this one, please not one more day like this one.
The next day was not quite like this one.
“Tania, why don’t you come swim with us?”
“I already swam. See? My hair is wet.”
“Tania doesn’t want to swim!”
“She’s afraid of the lake.”
“She doesn’t like warm water.”
“No, Marina,” said Saika, “you know what it is, don’t you? She is embarrassed. She doesn’t want to get naked. Do you, Tania?”
“Tania, you’re not embarrassed, are you, that you have smaller breasts than Pasha?” And this was from Marina!
Tatiana didn’t look up from her book. Suddenly she found two naked, tittering, dripping girls, standing over her and Queen Margot.
“Come on, Tania,” said Saika, hands on her hips. “Want us to help you get undressed?”
“Yes, we’ll help.” Marina pulled on Tatiana’s vest.
Tatiana jumped up. “Don’t touch me,” she said, pressing her book to her chest.
“Tania is a chicken!”
“Tania, have you considered the possibility that you will never grow breasts, or hips or hair?”
“Tania,” Saika said, putting on a serious face. “Have you ever been kissed? I really want to know.”
Marina laughed. “You know she’s never been anythinged, Saika. She’s saving herself for some of that Queen Margot loooove.”
“Unlike you, Marina? Unlike you, Saika?” said Tatiana.
“Oooh! She’s in a fighting mood today,” Marina said merrily.
“This brings me to my point,” said Saika to Tatiana. “No boy is going to love you if you don’t grow some boobies. And even more important, and you and I talked about this, no one is going to want your unbloomed unopened flower, Tania.”
“Come in the water, Tania,” said Marina, tugging at her.
“Marina,” said Tatiana, yanking her arm away, “what do you think Pasha would say if he heard you?”
“Oh, like your brother doesn’t tease you!”
Tatiana cast her disapproving eyes on her cousin. She did not look at Saika at all. “Why didn’t you do this in front of him then?” she asked. “You waited until you got me where you think no one can see or hear you. But you’re forgetting—I can see and hear you.”
“Tania,” Saika said mock-seriously, “do you know what I heard in Azerbaijan? That if you’re unbloomed but touch the hair and breasts of a developed young woman, you will grow hair and breasts yourself.”
Tatiana kept stepping away and they kept following her, two wet girls stalking her through the clearing.
“Saika, is that true?” Marina said. “I never heard that.”
“Oh, yes. It’s true.” Saika paused. “Well?”
“Well, what?” Tatiana snapped. “Just go back in your water and continue whatever it was you were doing there.”
“Also the reverse is true,” Saika said quietly. “You don’t believe me. But it’s true. You will bloom if you’re touched by someone with a little bit of…savvy. It’s for your own good. Do you want to remain breast-less and unloved? In the interest of helping you, I’m willing to break, how shall I put it, um, your…cover.”
Tatiana nearly tripped and fell on the ground, staggering backwards.
“It won’t hurt,” Saika whispered. “I promise you, it won’t hurt.”
“Listen to Saika, Tania,” said Marina. “She is wise beyond her years.”
“Come on,” said Saika, reaching for her. “It’ll be so much better later. Let me touch you.”
Tatiana swiped Saika’s hand with the Queen Margot book, swirled around and ran away while the girls bounded back into the water, their laughing voices carrying in an echo across the lake.
“Tania, come swim with us,” Marina called. “We’re just joking with you.”
Tatiana sat under a pine and pined for her summer. That’s it, I’m going back to Luga, she decided. Blanca Davidovna can take care of me until Dasha comes back.
Marina and Saika were splashing each other, diving and giggling as Tatiana sat far away, grimly watching.
Marina was on the shore reaching for a towel when Tatiana heard Saika’s voice from the lake. The voice sounded not quite panicked but not quite calm either. Saika said, “Marina,” and there was a tense timbre that made Tatiana get up off her haunches to better see Saika, who remained in the lake up to her waist, muddy and covered with what looked like weeds.
“Marina!” Saika said once again.
Marina, who was bent over a towel, said, what, then turned around—and started to scream.
When Tatiana heard the screaming, she ran to the lake.
It wasn’t weeds on Saika’s body. It was leeches.
Tatiana knew the leeches that lived in the silt of Lake Ilmen—long, fat, black, with hundreds of minute teeth in their two circular jaws that sawed through the skin of the host. Painlessly they attached themselves with one clamp at their mouth and another at their anus. Then they relaxed their bodies and began to suck, emitting an enzyme that prevented the two wounds from clotting. The blood suckers were four to eight millimeters in length and another seven millimeters in their ringed diameter. Dozens, hundreds of these, covered Saika’s body. Each of them could drink twice their body weight in blood before it fell away bloated.
“AHHHHHH! AHHHHHHH!”
That was Marina—who knew something about the Ilmen leeches, having once been bitten by one so badly that she required a week in the hospital and intravenous sulfa drugs to battle the infection that had spread into her abdomen.
“Marina, could you…stop.” That was Tatiana. She took another step to the shore. The leeches were all over Saika. One was on her face. Tatiana had no doubt they were in Saika’s matted black hair. She didn’t want to think about it, but she was sure they were in all of Saika’s hair, the hair Saika not ten minutes ago had asked Tatiana to touch. Tatiana stood in her white vest and white underwear, wanting only to turn and run back to the house and put on more clothes to cover herself, while Marina in a palpitating panic was running up and down the clearing, shrieking, “Oh, no! Oh, no! MAMA!!! MAMA!!! What are we going to do?”
“God, Marina!” Tatiana said quietly.
“Tatiana,” Saika said quietly. “Can you help me?” She smiled. “Help me, Tania, please. I’m sorry about everything.”
Aunt Rita, having heard Marina’s screams—who hadn’t?—came running from the house, her eyes as panicked as Marina’s voice. But once Rita saw that Marina was all right, not only did she not offer help, she didn’t offer much sympathy either. Her face a mask of disgust, Aunt Rita backed away, and her expression did not escape Tatiana—or Saika.
To make matters worse, Marina used that moment to start retching and throwing up her lunch of eggs and fish. Aunt Rita did not make matters better by flying to Marina and crying, “Darling, are you all right? Poor thing, look at you, oh, darling, let me—”
“Aunt Rita,” Tatiana said, walking toward Saika, “I need some salt and matches right away. Also some iodine.” She did not ask for a response nor invite any. Aunt Rita hurried to the house with Marina securely in tow.
“Tatiana,” Saika whispered. “Will you please f*cking hurry before they suck me dry?” She pulled one of them off her stomach. The worm hung on and when she threw it away, it left a pair of bleeding circles.
“Don’t pull them off like that,” Tatiana said. “You’ll scar.” For a moment, the girls’ eyes met on the word scar.
Tatiana took another step toward Saika. “Come out of the water and lie on the ground.” Saika did as she was told.
Opening the bag of salt as soon as Rita brought it to her, Tatiana poured the coarse crystals over Saika’s body. The girl twitched; the reaction of the slugs was also instantaneous. They jerked and shriveled, attempting to crawl away, crawling through more salt as they did so. In their death agony, their black elongated bodies began to drip out their slimy entrails onto Saika’s naked flesh, mixing with her blood and their own anti-coagulant protein, hirudin, a whitish, pus-like liquid. Where they had been sucking her, small, coin-like wounds remained, trickling blood.
Making Saika turn on her stomach, Tatiana poured the salt over her hair and back and buttocks and legs. There were many leeches that did not let go. For them, Tatiana needed matches. She had to burn them off.
Saika was quietly howling.
Tatiana lit a match and lowered it to a leech that was oozing from the salt, yet remained alive and vampirous. Lighting a wet, salted slick worm was harder than one imagined, the leech in damp self-preservation refusing to self-immolate. Saika twitched. “Tania, wait—”
But Tatiana couldn’t wait. She knew that the blood sucking did not stop until the teeth of the parasite were no longer in the host’s body. With a good few dozen of them still attached to Saika, the girl’s ability to remain conscious was diminishing, as was her blood supply. If each leech could drink twenty milliliters of blood every ten minutes, then…
Tatiana hurried. One leech would not come off Saika’s back; the match was burning Tatiana’s fingers. She threw it to the side and lit another one, bringing it even closer to Saika’s skin. Finally, the worm fell off, leaving an ashen singe behind. After taking twenty more leeches off the legs, Tatiana turned Saika over.
“Hurry up,” whispered Saika, “but stop burning my skin with your fingers.”
“It’s the fire.”
“Stop touching me. Press the match to the thing and then move on. Don’t touch my skin with your fingers.”
Unnerved but calm, her hands steady, Tatiana slowly burned off the leeches that refused to fall away; swollen, turning gray and writhing, they continued to feed on Saika. There had been only a few on Saika’s back. Must be because of the scars, thought Tatiana. Even leeches can’t attach themselves to dead skin. With so much salt in her open wounds, Saika’s body was beginning to swell, turn gray itself. She had stopped howling.
“Tania…” Saika’s mouth was sluggish, saturated with salt and water. “Between my legs, Tania…”
Tatiana was glad that Saika’s eyes were closed and the girl couldn’t see her revulsion. She would have liked to call Marina, Saika’s best friend, or Aunt Rita, an adult. She would have liked to call Uncle—
“Tania!” It was Uncle Boris. He was behind her, leaning over her. “What’s happened?”
“Leeches, Uncle Boris,” Tatiana breathed out. “I think I got most of them—”
“Look,” said Boris, pointing to Saika’s pubic hair.
“I know,” said Tatiana. “Those are the only ones left.” Tatiana didn’t know what to say or do next. Was it indelicate to ask her uncle for help? To do it herself was impossible. Tatiana couldn’t and, more importantly, wouldn’t touch Saika there. “I poured salt on her, but they’re just not releasing.”
“Tania, do something.” This was from Saika. “Don’t just sit and have a f*cking conversation.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do, Saika? I can’t light a match to you, can I?”
“Oh, for f*ck’s sake,” said Saika. “Help me sit up, will you?”
Uncle Boris and Tatiana helped her. Saika reached between her legs, grabbed a leech and yanked. The leech came out with a chunkful of hair. She did it again to another one, wedged in a little further down, a little deeper. Tatiana looked away. She couldn’t help but notice that her uncle did not. Unlike the sickened eyes of his wife, Tatiana saw that in Uncle Boris, revulsion and sympathy mixed with something else, something even kindly Uncle Boris could not hide. A naked girl sat in front of him on the grass, covered with welts, leeches between her legs, bloodied and swollen and swampfilthy. But she was naked.
Intensely uncomfortable, Tatiana stood up and backed away, matches in hand. “Well, if you’re all right now, I think I’ll go inside,” she muttered. “Would you like some soap? Some iodine?”
“I’ll be fine,” Saika said, not moving.
Tatiana didn’t pursue it. Without iodine, the wounds would get infected, but it wasn’t her problem.
Aunt Rita was standing by the window. “What’s your uncle doing?” she demanded of Tatiana.
“I don’t know.” Tatiana went to the basin and picked up the industrial soap. It was neither a lie nor an equivocation. She really did not know what her uncle was doing.
The answer did not satisfy Aunt Rita, who went to the screen door and screamed, “Boris! What are you doing?”
She had to scream it three times, and still he did not come. Opening the door, Rita descended down the steps. “Boris!”
When Rita was ten meters away, Boris stood up. Marina and Tatiana watched them from the window.
“Tania, I don’t know how you did that,” Marina said. “I would’ve thought you’d faint.”
“Why would you think that, Marinka?”
“Because I would’ve.”
“Am I you?”
“I’ve never seen so many leeches in one place,” said Marina, lowering her voice. “How could she have not known they were on her? I was bitten by one leech, I noticed right away.”
“They’re supposed to be painless,” said Tatiana. “Otherwise they’d be extinct. Also I think, her threshold for pain has been raised because of her back.”
They watched Saika limp to the lake to wash the blood off herself.
“I can’t believe she is going in again,” Marina said. “I’d never go in the water after something like that.”
“I have a feeling that if Saika applied that sentiment to her life,” Tatiana said, “there would be many things she would never do again, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Tania,” replied Marina, averting her gaze and moving away.
Tatiana went to the door to close it because she didn’t want to hear the bitter words that were being exchanged between an incensed Aunt Rita and a quieter but defenseless Uncle Boris.
“The child is fifteen and was just attacked by leeches!” he said.
“What does that have to do with anything? What does that have to do with you not walking away?”
“I was trying to help her.”
“I bet you were!”
“She couldn’t get up.”
“Why would she need to when her favorite position seems to be on her back!”
“Rita!”
Tatiana closed the door with a sigh.
Strife followed the girl wherever she went. Into the village, into the woods, into the road, into the river, into the lake. Tea leaves, palms, rowan trees, sugar, bicycles, old, young, willing, reluctant, every step she walked on this earth, strife walked with her.
The Weeder’s Daughter
And then it rained, and it kept coming down.
The three of them were sitting on the porch. The rain was pounding. “I heard you go every year after it rains across the lake to pick mushrooms and blueberries in the woods,” said Saika. “Can we go this year?” Her face was swollen; her body she covered in Marina’s clothes and blankets.
“If you want,” said Marina.
“I want, I want.” Saika looked across the expanse of the lake. “How do we get there?”
Marina said with a tinge of pride, “Tania rows us.”
“Not all the way there? It looks like two kilometers across.”
“Two and a half to the densest part of the forest, which is where the best mushrooms are. She rows the whole way. She is the Queen of Lake Ilmen, aren’t you, Tanechka?”
Tatiana usually blushed with pride at her rowing, but today she had lost her happy thoughts. “It’s only two lousy kilometers,” she said.
“One time I had to walk almost seventy kilometers,” Saika said. “You rowed two, I walked seventy.”
“That’s a long way, Saika,” Tatiana said. “Where were you going?”
“I was running away.”
“By yourself?”
Saika was quiet. “How do you do that?” she said at last. “Out of all the damn questions to ask me, how is it you always manage to ask the one I don’t want to answer? Is it your special gift?”
They were sitting on two small porch couches, all played out.
“You ask too many questions,” Saika said. “Rather, you ask the wrong kinds of questions.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But Tatiana didn’t look puzzled. “Where were you headed? Is that a better question?”
“Iran,” Saika replied. “We lived only a hundred kilometers from the border then.”
Tatiana was listening to the nuance of her voice, between the lines, trying to catch, hoping to catch, failing to catch. “When was this?”
“A few years ago.”
Saika was fifteen now.
“We were doomed, Tania. If you knew what I was talking about, you’d understand. I can’t explain it to you. Marina understands.”
“I understand,” said Marina. “I want to feel that doomed.”
Doomed at thirteen? “So what happened?”
“Well, you know what happened,” Saika said. “My father caught us.”
Marina rubbed Saika’s arm. “Let’s not talk about it, Saika, dear. Let’s talk about something happy instead—like going across Lake Ilmen!”
“Yes, yes, let’s talk about that,” said Saika. “Do Aunt Rita and Uncle Boris come, too?”
“Of course,” said Marina. “Nobody lets children go into the woods alone.”
“Hmm,” Saika said. “We’re not children anymore. Even Tania is fourteen. She’s practically a young woman.” Saika cleared her throat. “And your parents, Marina, they’ve been getting along so poorly. Perhaps they’d enjoy one day by themselves. Without us kids around. To do adult things.” She smiled.
“Oh, they’ll never let us go by ourselves!” said Marina, her face lighting up. “But how delightful that would be!”
“Let’s ask them,” Saika said. “The worst they’ll do is say no. Right, Tania?”
“I have no idea,” Tatiana said indifferently. “Because I’m going home tomorrow. So you girls do what you like.”
“You’re going home? Why?” Marina said, all high-pitched. “Does Mama know?”
“She’ll know tomorrow,” said Tatiana.
“No, no. Don’t go. Why are you going?”
Tatiana stared at Marina and said nothing.
“Oh, come on!” Marina exclaimed. “We were just playing with you, right Saika? It’s all water under the bridge now.”
“That water under the bridge is getting quite full,” said Tatiana. “It’s rising above the banks.”
“It’s me,” Saika said suddenly and coldly. “She’s never liked me, Marina. I told you that and you didn’t believe me. I tried to be her friend, I tried to talk, to play. Nothing I ever did was right.”
“Tania, tell Saika that’s not true!”
“This isn’t about me,” said Tatiana, deflecting with the best of them.
“Admit it—you’ve never liked me,” said Saika.
“It has nothing to do with you either,” Tatiana said. “I’m going home because I want to be with my family.”
“No, you’re judging me,” said Saika.
“This is getting so tiresome.”
“You’ve judged me from the beginning,” Saika went on, her voice rising. “You judged me for my scars, you judged me for my forward manner. You even judge me for my developed body! You judge me now for taking up with a boy too young. You. Just. Judge. Me.”
Tatiana said nothing at first. Then, “Well, tell me, what happened to the boy you took up with? We know what you got, but what did he get?” She was so quiet when she spoke, yet her words were like clanging cymbals on the quiet porch as the rain kept falling.
“I told you about Azeri justice,” said Saika. “And I don’t want to talk about it with you. Because everything I say, you use against me.”
There was almost no sound from Tatiana, just an inflective breathing out. “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks,” she whispered.
“You see, Marina!” Saika jumped up, blankets off, shoulders heaving, eyes blazing, face red. Tatiana, smaller, unheaving, face pale, slowly stood up. Her hands were at her sides.
“Tatiana, honestly, what’s got into you?” Marina exclaimed, rising herself. “Saika is our guest!”
“Oh, shut up, Marina,” said Tatiana. “She’s not my guest. I haven’t invited her in.”
Saika stepped away. “Tania, Tania, Tania,” she said. “How simpleminded your view of the world. The world is such a complex place, so many wants and needs and desires all crashing against one another. We try to make sense of it, we all do the best we can, and then comes along a primitive like you.” She shook her black head. “Who knows nothing. Who understands nothing.”
Tatiana was quiet. She could have walked away right then and there. She would have walked away right then and there. But she felt this wasn’t an entirely pointless discussion. Not when Marina was involved, Marina with her good but weak heart.
“Okay, I know nothing,” Tatiana said. “So what do you care what I think? Even if I don’t like you, so what? For the sake of argument, let’s say I don’t. Just for the sake of argument. Let’s say I don’t want to play with you or talk to you. I don’t like your secrets, I don’t like your world of twisted soothsaying fraud—this is all hypothetical, Saika. I’m just laying it on to make my point. So what, even if I don’t? In Luga you got all the other kids to play with you. And here you have Marina. My point is, you can’t win over everybody,” Tatiana said. “What do you care what I think of you?”
“I don’t care what you think of me,” said Saika. “You’re just jealous your friends played with me instead of you, jealous your brother played with me. That’s why you don’t like me. Maybe if you were more interesting, Tania, you’d be able to keep your friends.”
“Maybe. But there you go again, pretending it’s about me. Why aren’t you thrilled you got them all to play with you? Why isn’t that enough? Why isn’t Marina enough?”
“Girls, stop it,” Marina said, going to Tatiana. “Tania, stop it.”
Tatiana put out her arm to stop Marina from getting any closer.
“You have no right to judge me, Tatiana,” said Saika.
“That was never my intention,” Tatiana said. “My point was always this and remains this: it is your choice whether or not you come and play with me. It has always been your choice. But if you choose to play with me, you play with me on my terms, not on yours. That’s all.”
“And what are those terms, Tatiana?”
“You know them well,” Tatiana said. “First of all, I don’t like to be mocked or ridiculed. I don’t like to be told things I don’t want to hear, or things that aren’t true. I don’t like to be constantly and underhandedly subverted.”
“This is what I mean! You’re judging me even now!”
Tatiana didn’t reply to that, saying instead, “I’ve never bothered you in any way. I didn’t seek you out, I never called on you. I didn’t come to your door. I helped you when I could—and you’re welcome by the way.”
“Oh, like I’m going to thank you for that!” Saika exclaimed. “You think I deserved those leeches. I know how you think, you and your f*cking Newton. You think I was mean to you and got what was coming to me.”
At this point Tatiana could have protested. A feeble denial perhaps.
But what a calm Tatiana said was, “And by what mechanism do the Yezidi think the universe rights itself in this manner?”
Marina gasped. “Tania!”
“What do you want with me, Saika?” asked Tatiana. “As you keep telling Marina and anyone who will listen, I’m just a barely educated simpleton. Why is your struggle for my approval so overwrought? Why are you always tugging on me to come join your circle? Not content to leave me alone, are you?”
Saika stepped suddenly closer.
Without backing away, without taking her eyes off the girl, and without opening her hands, Tatiana said, coldly quiet, “Be grateful.”
“Grateful for what?”
“Be grateful it was just the leeches that got you in the lake.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It could have been worse,” said Tatiana in a low voice. “It could have been the bloodworms.”
“The what?” Now Saika backed away, her eyes darkening.
“Haven’t heard of them? Oh, yes. They’re the real bottom dwellers in this lake. Red bloodworms. Glycera species of the segmented worm. The worm’s nose is twenty percent the length of its body. It’s got four fangs at the tip of it. Each fang is attached to a venom gland. And the bloodworm bites. Imagine thousands of them on you.”
“You’re sick,” said Saika, paling, backing away another step until she was nearly at the door.
“I’m sick and tired of you,” said Tatiana, stepping forward and whispering, “I know who you are.”
“Get your hands away from me!” Saika cried. “Being touched by you is worse than being sucked dry by those leeches. Don’t touch me again. You’re like a bloodworm.”
It had stopped raining when Tatiana told Aunt Rita she was leaving.
Uncle Boris stared wearily at his wife, at his daughter. “Marina, why does Tania want to go home? What are you doing to make Tania want to leave us?”
“She is not going!” cried Rita. “My brother will never forgive me if I don’t take care of his daughter the way he takes care of ours every August. We might need him to take care of Marina again in the future. What if we need his help? Tania’s not going!”
“Why don’t you treat her a little better,” Boris yelled, “and maybe she won’t want to leave your house! How many times do I have to tell you?”
“Another thousand before I listen to you!” cried Rita, and off they went, slamming screen doors, into dark trees, screaming through the echoes of the damp night that carried their voices across the water, their shouting returned to them unsoftened even by the serenity of the lake amid the tinny din of the mosquitoes that were too displeased by the racket to sting them.
Late that night, Marina crept to Tatiana’s cot in the hall. “Tanechka,” she whispered, putting her hands on Tatiana. “Saika says she is sorry. I’m sorry, too. Please don’t go back to Luga. Please. Come with us tomorrow. It rained so well today, the mushrooms will cover the forest. Come on. It’s our annual Lake Ilmen trip. We always go, you, me, Pasha.”
“You don’t notice my brother here, do you?”
“Mama wants our blueberries and mushrooms. Yours too. We’ll have the best soup, the best pie. Your Dasha is waiting for the mushrooms. You know how she loves them. Come on, think of her. I’m sorry if I upset you.”
“You did upset me,” said Tatiana.
“I’m just playing. You know that. Stop being so sensitive. Please come. I won’t do it again, I promise. Come on, you’ll be happy to row without Pasha.”
“I’m not happy doing anything without Pasha,” said Tatiana. “Look, what do you need from me? I’m tired.”
Marina touched Tania’s hand. “I just don’t understand why you don’t like Saika, Tania. She’s so funny and worldly—”
“How can she be worldly, Marina? She grew up on collectives in the middle of Transcaucasus. She’s been with unclean goats her whole life. Even her pores smell of goat. Where did she get her worldliness from, you think? And why does she talk to me like that, say those unbelievable things to me and you stand and snicker?”
“She is just being funny. You don’t understand her.” Marina chuckled. “It’s child’s play.”
“The children are sure growing up fast under Saika’s eye,” said Tatiana. “She would’ve touched me if I let her,” she whispered, shuddering. “That’s child’s play? Have you seen her back? Is that child’s play?” She fell back on her bed. “And mark my words, there is something she’s not telling us.”
“Forget it, it’s got nothing to do with us,” said Marina.
“All right, so go with her. What do you need me for? Go with her, go into the woods, pick your mushrooms, pick your berries.”
“I don’t want to go without you. Please, Tania.”
Tatiana rubbed her eyes, lying in bed, wanting to be asleep, or back home, or somewhere else, unattainable.
“Please don’t be angry with me,” Marina said. “Please come. It’ll be such fun! Mama and Papa are letting the three of us go alone! Isn’t that incredible?”
Tatiana grunted.
“So you’ll come? And you’ll be nice?”
Tatiana crossed her arms on her chest. “I’ll come,” she said. “But I’m not going to be nice.”
Flying through the Stars
Tatiana slept. And before the next morning when they set off just the three of them for the woods across Lake Ilmen, she dreamt of lying on her back, looking out onto the sky, and the stars kept coming closer and shining brighter and she wanted to close her eyes and look away but could not, and suddenly she realized that it wasn’t the stars that were coming closer to her, it was she who was flying to them, right under them, arms stretched out over her head, her face light and her heart full under every star of night, and all the while Blanca Davidovna’s whispering voice echoed inside her head. “The crown and the cross are in your tea cup, Tatiana.”