Grandfather sits on the deep velvet seat, his plastic hand rested on the tabletop. He watches the land pass them by through the window. Summer sears the vast fields and forests, the dirt roads and their intrepid denizens.
'Some things you have to do,' his granddaughter says, 'it doesn't mean you enjoy them.'
'Rubbish,' his grandson says. 'This is a beautiful country. You're just letting your politics get in the way.'
'My politics? That's rich. Wait, I shouldn't use that word.'
'Better back in your day, wasn't it, granddad?'
'Don't tell him about his day.'
'What? It was better then, granddad knows that.'
'Better?'
'Better system. Not perfect, but better.'
'Oh, please!'
'Sorry about them, father,' his son says. He sits across from grandfather, beside his children.
'There is no need for apology,' grandfather says.
'We're stopping at Yekaterinburg next,' his grandson says. 'That's where the Tsar and his family were executed.'
'You have been reading,' grandfather says.
'He has to read something,' his granddaughter says. 'Now there's no more Harry Potter books for him to look forward to.'
'Are you up to a walk, father?' his son asks.
'I must save my strength.'
He is looking at his plastic hand again. The stump itches.
At Yekaterinburg, the grandchildren alight to explore, while grandfather and his son leave their cabin to take lunch in the dining car.
'Do you really want to carry on?' the son asks. 'I can upgrade our tickets.'
'No.'
The son looks down. His face is dark now.
The train carriage is full of travellers, their many languages babbling. They laugh and eat caviar and cream, drink vodka and more after. Selyodka pod Shouboy herring followed by a stroganoff with roasted potatoes, finished by a tart.
His stomach churned and cramped, but he could not sit on the mud-crusted wooden floor of the carriage, for so many were packed in with him that he could barely breathe.
Grandfather shivers in the swelter. He knows he must eat.
'Would mother have let you do this?' his son asks.
Grandfather does not reply.
* * *
A rickety bus takes them from Omsk and heads north beside the wide, shallow water of the Ob, through green and yellow wilds of untillable land, past forests too thick to traverse, across rough roads hewn from sharp rock. The other passengers have hard faces, old clothes and filthy shoes.
'I miss the train' his granddaughter says.
'Do you think these people can afford that?' his grandson asks.
'I suppose we should just starve ourselves then. Fairness.'
'Siberia is a hard place,' grandfather says. 'There is nothing out here for the people.'
'Sorry, granddad,' his granddaughter says. 'I'm being flippant.'
'Bourgeois,' his grandson says.
'Idiot.'
Evening finds the final stop. Ust-Tym is a barren place. Its houses are small, drenched in rot, eroded by tundra winds. It has not changed, and grandfather recognises its smell of dry oats.
He leads them with their bags along the dusty dirt road between the houses. Eyes watch from windows without glass.
There is a house that is just as it was seventy five years before. The marks are still there in the wood. The same fence, the same smoothed stone amongst the grass.
His legs were sanded bones cracking into splinters of shattered rock, and the howling wind tore skin from his sodden form. A house sat before him, orange light cast from its shadows.
The door opens and a man stands there.
'Chto ty khochesh?' the man asks.
'Zabrat ottsa ili dedushku,' Grandfather says. 'Starik ne mozhet zhdat' tak dolgo.'
The man spreads his hands. His grey eyes become bright as he beams. Grandfather smiles.
In that bare and cluttered place, the wooden floors are covered by tattered rags, old blankets and sheets made of fur. Pelts hang from the wall. A woman and a boy help move the bags and fix bedding. A husky pup paws at the legs of the visitors. There is the smell of cooking meat, ox or beef. Grandfather thanks the man in their tongue.
'Try the stew before thanking me,' the man says.
After dinner the house falls silent, and lanterns light the sups. Grandfather and the man drink vodka at the kitchen table as their families sleep.
'You've been here before,' the man says. 'I don't remember you.'
'It was your father, I think. He had one eye.'
'Ah, yes. Why would you come back?'
'The past. I must face it.'
'Old wolves don't dig their own graves. They go to the forest and lie in the snow to die.'
'I'm not a wolf.'
'You came from the island? You're a wolf. All of you are. You won't find anything there.'
Grandfather does not reply. They each toss a measure of vodka on the wooden floor, and the man pours again. In silence they drink, and the night grows colder.
The vast river runs a deep red and the ice is a light purple. The shrieks echo through the night, from the mass at the blood's centre. It is a shadow, the very sight Medusa.
Morning is a blessed relief.
* * *
The family walk beside the Ob, along furrows dug by wanderers through long and wild grass, beyond many sternly rooted groves. They skirt fly-ridden marshes under branches of towering pines, seeing reindeer, wolverines and boars.
In the late afternoon, a large shadow moves through a forest edge, slinking past the treeline lazily. They stop and watch from a rising knoll. The spectre emerges from the wood and takes the form of a black bear, hunched and cramped, fur soiled crimson.
When night comes, they cook chicken and potatoes. Gravy drips from their chins. By the light of the camp fire, their faces are gaunt, the liquid a dark red. Grandfather shivers.
They settle into their sleeping bags inside their tents as the summer turns its back on the darkness. There comes the distant, baleful howl of wolves, following grandfather into slumber.
The wolves gather around the tree beyond the fire's edges and advance on the writhing figure lashed to its trunk who whimpers with a calloused voice.
Grandfather wakes weeping. On that second day he slouches through a numb haze. His knees seize and calves tighten. It is only just past dark when he collapses into his bedding.
From the dark the screams come. The island sits bleeding into the river, a black jewel eating life. The wails wrap round that impossible stone. The boats come, for the oarsmen have no eyes.
His son shakes grandfather awake.
'Father, this is going to kill you.'
'I should already be dead. This time is a gift.'
'It causes you so much pain.'
'Your mother is gone. I cannot face her again if I do not.'
The third day is hot and overcast, a sullen miasma of burgeoning grey heat. Grandfather leans into his son, who holds his arm, his steps tender. The river becomes familiar, the lie of the land found in his dreams. His stump itches.
They broach the top of a rise, where there is a clear view of the Nasino river as it joins the Ob. There is a mass of land at the mouth, a forested and bogged lump of earth.
He turned back, away from the thrashing snow, and saw behind him the choked island left behind, and heard cries in the howling wind. His soaked clothes weighed him into the white ash of the early spring and for a moment he could not go.
Grandfather gasps and turns away.
'Father?' his son asks.
'I am sorry,' he says.
Such a long way for one glimpse. It could not be, he knows. To reach the destination, to find the dreams from every night since, to see it fully, to see the truth of what lay behind.
He turns and looks at the island. It is not black nor even dark. There isn't a noise from it. Nor is there a bridge.
'What do we do now?' his son asks.
They sit on the hill and discuss how one might ford a quarter mile. It is a conversation as fruitless as the wizened trees around them. Then there is a new sound. A boat appears, old and small, its motor coughing.
'You are many,' the ferryman says aboard the rusted skiff. He is squat, his beard coated with filth. Beneath his forage cap are grey-blue eyes that move quickly.
'Tourists?' the son asks.
'They come see Nazino Island. Nobody come see them over but me. I for they, who hope to see bones.'
The skiff glides across the width of the Ob. His granddaughter crouches at the side of the boat to let the water run through her fingers. There is no ice to wound her. No plunge into its agony, its freezing fires.
'Mad the people, I think,' the ferryman says. 'Thinking dark and white. We are no special. We are no such evil. It is other who make Nazino, the big clean men.'
The skiff reaches the mossy sand and stops. The son reaches for a plastic packet in his bag, and from it hands the ferryman a stack of roubles.
The island is not two miles long, and not one across. It is masked by trees, old and silent witnesses. The ground sucks at their feet, and there are many deep footprints. Grandfather sees wilting flowers unconnected to the spoiled earth.
The snowfall was fresh, inches deep. There were no animals, no ground, the river a shimmering moat of fluid ice. The boats landed and soldiers shoved the settlers into the dead land. Bags were thrown after them, sacks of flour, sets of rusted sickles.
He holds his granddaughter's hand as they move through the trees and up an incline.
They lowered bowls of flour into the river water, then spooned the congealed slop into their mouths. Soon they squatted with trousers round their ankles, mewling at the hot pain, or curled into foetal balls, vomiting.
This land is empty but for four visitors fighting to resist the island's grip.
The people shivered as they watched the boats return. They saw escape, the soldiers on the opposite riverbank surely realising their mistake. As the boats got closer, the settlers wailed and screamed curses. The vessels were filled with more people, their eyes wide and hands empty.
They turn and walk along the northern bank.
Gunshots echoed like glories of the motherland. The freezing water splashed and the young swimmers ducked. Rifle rounds found them. They washed past the crying settlers on the bank. The soldiers on the other side shouted, but the words of the victors were lost in the howling wind.
His legs shake, every step one too far.
People became bodies by cold or hunger or disease. They festered alone. Men and women mobbed, and in hushed voices talked of survival, of nothing else. When morning came, another naked body had been stripped until it was just bones coated in gristle.
He sees a clearing where a larch stands alone.
The carcasses withered away. Pallid, skeletal figures stumbled through snow in search of grass or leafs to eat. The mob made no secret of their approach. A teenage boy followed when he knew he could not die.
He stands at the tree past the glow of the dead fire and sees the notches still in its trunk.
The woman was strong. She fought them with words, and then with hands, but bled and fell. She screamed, but was tied to the tree anyway. Even as those shrieks became shrill, the mob used their blunt trowels and scythes and took from her all that they could, and with a burning blade they sealed the wounds left behind, so the the supply could continue come morning.
Grandfather falls to his knees and his retching sobs force him to the wet ground.
'Forgive me,' he tells the shadow of the tree.
'When the boats came back, they only took those who could still work. I had one hand by then. They saw it. We were left behind, so I swam. I should have died. I was just a kulak, an undesirable.'
'How many people died here, granddad?'
'Thousands. Most. We were not meant to succeed. It was to save bullets.'
'We're just the worst thing in this world, father. What is this place? Proof. This whole species is worthless.'
'No, son. It is hope.'
'Why?'
'Because of your faces. Because I survived and I had a good son, and I had beautiful grandchildren who never stop asking questions. People come because this is a place where mankind went wrong. They recognise our evil. They come here because they never want to repeat it. They won't. As long as we can see what we have been, we will get better. It will never happen again.'
A grandson bites his tongue and looks away, down the river.
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