Looking at the window Enna thought she recognised her own child-size hand prints in the dirt on the pane. Darkness was finally settling on the surrounding forest and the first star blinked into life behind translucent cloud. The view was alien and familiar, like this room where she and Tamar had slept as children. Down in the yard a chicken scuttled into the coop. Soon Tamar would come out and lock the animals away.
The thought of returning to Rulini alone didn’t trouble her. She had no fear of the dark and was always surprised that others did. Wasn’t it obvious that the only thing changed by darkness was the ability to see? As a child she’d never shivered at stories of ghosts or werewolves; other children had shivered at her, or their parents had. Stories and fables had been part of her life then, her own and other people’s. Her mother had been a great teller of stories, mostly about Leonid Petrovich who’d never talked about himself. Zuria’s favourite tale was about a woman she’d never known:
‘And then the tanks came down the street, dozens of them. Imagine it: tanks in the middle of
Enna had never seen a military tank, so she’d pictured the great water cistern across the yard crushing her grandmother to death. She’d known, without knowing how she knew, that there was something innately ridiculous, even funny, in this particular story which she’d heard more times that she could count. She was seven years old and had wanted to giggle. Instead she’d restrained herself and felt the first intimations that she had no place in these histories.
When she was eight her father began taking her deep into the forest to teach her trapping and skinning. On one of those trips he’d told her that his mother had been crushed by a
One hand resting on the glass in front of her, Enna tried to remember exactly how long it would take her to reach Iveri’s tower in the dark. With a pang of guilt she thought of his promise to protect her. Gazing out at the darkness of the forest she wondered if he were already watching the house.
About to turn away from the window she saw a movement on the edge of the trees and instinctively hid behind the window’s warped shutters. She’d avoided thinking of Leonid Petrovich since entering the house. The thought of coming face to face with him appealed to all her instincts for violence while simultaneously making her feel sick.
A mandrake figure, misshapen and lumpy moved along the edge of the forest. It clung to the darkness as though reluctant to step into the yellow beam of light from the kitchen window. Leonid Petrovich Serpukhov. Despite the darkness she recognised his height and angular movement and froze, immobilised by a forgotten sense of disgust. She considered her father’s stooping, altered gait and quickly assessed his age. Seventy-four. Seventy-four was old, very old. She’d imagined him suspended, like the farm, in the limbo of her absence. As light touched an edge of him she saw the animal carcass slung over his shoulders and felt a stab of disappointment. He wasn’t the hunched, shambling creature he’d first appeared. She stepped back again from the window, angry with herself. She should have remembered that nothing about Leonid Petrovich was ever how it seemed. Still, he was old; that much at least was true.
The figure vanished abruptly. Straining her eyes Enna made out a faint movement between trees, then nothing. She was immediately alert; he saw something, why else hide? Maybe Iveri? In the yard below, light shifted as the back door opened and Tamar appeared carrying a bucket of feed. Looking down at her sister’s flowered headscarf, Enna experienced a déjà vu of standing on a stool at this same window, observing Zuria doing the same chores a quarter of a century ago. She closed her eyes and breathed out slowly before opening them again.
From behind the shutters she saw the moon rise, knowing that among the trees at least one man waited and watched. But for what? Nothing was going to happen here. The normal, intelligent, part of her mind rejected her dream, refused to accept that what she saw had any basis in reality. So why was she staring out of a filthy window and thinking of the past? Any moment she would turn, walk back down the stairs and out of the house, away from the women below, away from Leonid Serpukhov hiding in the trees. She would never come here again. She knew that as surely as she knew anything. Was that why she hesitated at this window, suspended between a past that included her life here and future that would not? She shook herself, then scanned the yard for movement. Everything was still.
A few minutes more and Tamar emerged from the chicken shed, bucket swinging lightly. She glanced inside the goat pen, dropped a bar down over the door then walked back across the yard, shoulders hunched. A man stepped from the shadow of the building into her sister’s path. Enna saw her sister’s head snap up and her body go rigid as she notices the gun.
Right on cue, Tamar screamed the word she’d been taught to repeat, ‘Russ
As if watching in slow motion Enna saw a large hand clamp her sister’s throat and shake her like a dog shakes a rabbit. Tamar seemed to be fighting for breath, arms jerking and waving. More figures moved into the yard. The kitchen door opened suddenly and Zuria appeared directly below the window, yellow light streaming around her. Enna looked once towards the place in the trees where Leonid Petrovich vanished moments earlier, then she was breathing hard staring in anguish and disbelief at a partial view of her mother’s grey, dishevelled head as Zuria shouted ‘Leave her, leave her be!’, at the man holding Tamar.
Enna saw the man throw Tamar aside before moving to hit Zuria twice in the head with the butt of his rifle. She didn’t witness her mother falling to the ground because she was already moving, running, down the stairs, then down the older stone steps and into the cellar where it was dark and smelt of damp and her father. Her skin shrank, tightening around her as her mother and sister’s screams echoed in her head. She turned on all the lights and pushing aside disused animal harness and outdated tools, flung open the gun cabinet. She remembered everything, where each weapon was kept and how it felt to her touch.
No sound reached in from the outside world as she took a heavy bore shotgun and a handful of cartridges. Loading as she walked, Enna moved to the back of the cellar and disappeared behind a heap of rubble.
The underground exit from the cellar had been built by Leonid Petrovich himself soon after he’d married and moved into this house. Enna had been told this by Zuria, but like most of her mother’s stories about her father she’d believed only a part of it. The short tunnel had always seemed very old, almost ancient to Enna, not something made by Leonid.
The trapdoor from the cellar opened among trees at the forests’ edge. Shoving upward against it with both hands Enna found it swollen and warped from disuse. With the strength of desperation she forced until her neck and shoulders crackled, but it barely moved. Opening from below had never been easy, even when the mechanism was regularly cleaned and oiled. She had a sudden picture of Leonid Petrovich stripping and cleaning pieces of metal. She remembered how he would spend hours and days perfecting the movement of a hinge or the bolt action of a handgun.
She wanted none of these memories and pushing them away stepped up onto an old milking-stool and heaved. The ground above start to shift and using the shotgun barrel as a lever she finally pushed the heavy wooden square firmly upwards.
Soil parted like water under her fingers as she pulled herself up into the air. With the shotgun tight in both hands she wove through the tree-line toward the noises wrenching at her gut. She rounded a corner of the house, jaws clamped hard together to stop her teeth chattering.
The scene in the yard almost brought her to her knees. Here it was then, her dream; realising the fact of that was almost as horrifying as what was happening now, before her eyes. By the light spilling from the kitchen she saw men knotted around the unmoving Tamar, their weapons lying on the ground beside them. There was no sign of Zuria. The soldiers didn’t look up as she stepped forward and fired one barrel directly at them. The noise was deafening; the recoil threw her back a step and two men fell screaming as she reloaded.
She walked forward, ‘Move away from your weapons.’
The three men still standing stared at her in shock.
‘Move away from your weapons and move away from her.’ She jerked the gun towards Tamar then towards the men on the ground, neither of whom moved. ‘Go. Take those two with you.’
The men continued to gaze in horrified amazement.
She chambered another cartridge with shaking hands, ‘Do it. Now!’ She felt the trigger under her finger and with effort controlled the urge to squeeze it again and again. Some part of her wanted more than anything to do that.
Hesitantly they moved to pick up the fallen men. One groaned as he was touched, the other had a ragged hole in the side of his head and his left arm hung crooked from the shoulder; he was almost certainly dead and she felt nothing about that. They crossed to the edge of the yard and huddled there. She continued to watch them as she moved forward and bent over Tamar. Her sister’s skin felt warm and soft and there was the faintest pulse. She straightened, the gun pressed against her hip.
‘Go!’ she said more loudly, jerking her head towards the trees. But the men seemed hesitant, as if fearful of being shot in the back. Seeing one glance at his weapon only metres away she walked fast towards them shotgun raised, though her hands were shaking from the force of her grip. ‘Get away from here now,’ she screamed, ‘or I will kill you.’ Fleetingly she thought of Iveri, wished he was beside her now.
The men backed away, hands half-raised.
Then Enna saw Zuria heaped untidily on the ground outside the kitchen door. Gun still on the retreating men she moved to crouch beside her mother and felt again for a pulse.
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