Anthony Marra

The Wolves of Bilaya Forest

Fiction by undiscovered talent, the best writers you haven’t heard of yet.

The distant howls could be heard over the water boiling in the saucepan. Vera had sold her kettle three weeks earlier, along with a set of dull knives and all of her daughter’s clothes. She tilted the pan over two cups and hummed as the tea bags inflated and rose in the steaming water. Yelena, her friend from childhood, asked for three scoops of sugar, which Vera thought quite excessive. But she needed Yelena’s help, so she measured three half teaspoons into Yelena’s cup and took no sugar herself.

“This tea is bitter,” Yelena said, in the living room. Her eyebrows were plucked, thin sickles of hair that gave her the appearance of constant incredulity. She went to the salon once a month and flew first-class to Moscow twice a year to trawl the Arbat for the latest styles from Paris and New York.

“Yes,” Vera agreed. “Perhaps I let it steep too long.”

“So, you were telling me about the gas bill, Vera?” Yelena smiled, her lips curving as deliberately as her eyebrows. She felt satisfied witnessing her friend face poverty. For many years, she had been the one in need of Vera’s charity.

“I don’t know what to do,” Vera said. She did not want to grovel, especially not to Yelena. But she also did not want to starve. “My pension has again been halved.”

Yelena shook her head. “In the paper today I read that the economic shock treatment has hurt the weakest members of society — not just you, but also the illiterate and alcoholic.”

Vera glanced at the empty bookcase behind her. Pale rectangles against the pine where her books had stood. She had sold them along with the kettle.

“I was wondering if your son could help me.”

“Ivan?”

Vera nodded. Yelena had only one son, and she never passed up an opportunity to talk about him.

“Ivan is a very busy man. I wouldn’t want to bother him with something like this.”

“No, I suppose it wouldn’t be worth the bother.”

Yelena ran her finger around the rim of the teacup, making a dozen orbits before she spoke. “Ivan is coming for dinner this Sunday. Perhaps I can ask if he has any work.”

Vera nodded and asked her friend if she wanted more sugar in her tea. After Yelena left, Vera washed the dishes with water that had sat in the tub all day to reach room temperature. She said her evening prayers and crossed herself three times to ward off the devils. Beneath the covers, she listened to the cries of wolves. This wasn’t the first time wolves had returned to Bilaya Forest. The Red Army had hunted them to the point of extinction in the ’30s, when Vera was a child. Wolves were the capitalists of the animal kingdom, and the army went to considerable lengths to kill these politically dangerous predators. But they came back during the Great Patriotic War, when panzer divisions pushed the Red Army past the horizon. No one had enough to eat, and the entire town resorted to criminal entrepreneurialism to survive. Wages were paid in hunks of bread. Pensions disappeared. The power of the state collapsed, and Vera watched her parents and neighbors scavenge to survive. After the war, local Red Army units resumed killing wolves, and the forest returned to silence. But Vera, curled beneath heavy woolen blankets, remembered when the howls of wolves heralded the approach of hunger.

In the summer before the German occupation, Vera Pavlova had been extolled in schools and newspapers from Minsk to Vladivostok. She had unintentionally denounced her mother for hoarding food reserves, keeping it from the Soviet people and thereby collaborating with the fascist enemy. Three eggs and a kilogram of flour comprised the hoard. The collaboration was not with the fascist enemy, but with Vera herself, who had grown so emaciated that her shins were as thin as stool legs. In the propagandized version, Vera had caught her alcoholic mother breaking into the state grain supply, proclaiming Trotskyite slogans and stealing 100 kilograms of flour in a burlap sack. Vera immediately reported her mother’s treason to a local commissar, exclaiming, “My mother is an enemy of the state, and worse, she is an enemy of the people.” To which the commissar replied, “Though the state and the people are one and the same, you are a hero of both.”

The reality was that, despite swearing secrecy to her mother, Vera boasted to a friend at school about the loaf of bread her mother had baked. The one friend told several friends, and eventually the local commissar heard of the incident. Each telling had expanded the tale to the point at which a starving woman weighing 44 kilograms was perfectly capable of carrying 100 kilograms of flour.

“And you think I used all of that flour for a single loaf of bread?” her mother said in defense at her trial.

“Profligacy is one of the marked characteristics of a Fascist,” replied the commissar, who would die of pneumonia exacerbated by malnutrition five years later in the Arctic Solovki prison camp, where he’d been sent for failing to prevent the German occupation. One hundred kilograms of flour had in fact gone missing from the reserves over the course of several months, and had Vera investigated the town archives during glasnost, she might have learned that it had all gone to the commissar’s wife.

From pretrial through sentencing, Vera’s mother sent her letters from the courthouse cell. Each letter took more than a week to cross the eight blocks from the courthouse to Vera’s home. The envelopes were open when they fell through the mail slot, and the letters had been run through with the black marker of the censors. In the unedited portions of text, her mother wrote that she was lonely but unharmed, that as a political prisoner she was allowed better rations than she had received as a textile worker, that she missed her daughter and her husband and the taste of vodka. Years later, Vera came to understand that her mother’s life meant nothing to the commissar. When weighed against the future of the Soviet people and the progression toward a Leninist utopia, what could one life possibly be worth? But when her mother was convicted of treason and sentenced to 20 years of hard labor in Siberia, Vera could imagine no greater loss. Due to the war, trains to the gulag prisons no longer ran. Her mother was marched into Bilaya Forest and received her sentence from the barrel of a gun.

Vera’s father took her into the forest so that she might see what her words had caused. The tree trunks were white with frost, and the wind sang through the branches. The wolves had found her mother before she and her father had, and Vera ran from the body. Her father didn’t speak when he returned home that afternoon, just kicked the clumps of frozen dirt from the shovel. They didn’t speak for many years. A week later, Vera was looking at the party’s official commendation for service and sacrifice when she heard the clatter of the mail slot. She bounded to the door and found a letter from the courthouse jail. She opened it, her fingers trembling against the envelope flap. In her final letter, Vera’s mother wrote: I have been given twenty years in — — prison camp. Twenty years is not so long, only two decades, and when —— you will be a grown woman and you will have children and — ———. ———— will — you. Later in life, Vera spent more time thinking of the expurgated text than of the words that survived the censor. She wondered what type of man had in him the power to break her heart with the stroke of a black marker.

Pravda exalted Vera as the future face of Communism. She received awards from the Young Pioneers, Komsomol, and the electricians’ and ironworkers’ trade unions. She despised every honor, yet she refused none. She remembered her mother working 14-hour shifts at the textile factory, attaining levels of productivity that left her hands blistered. She remembered her mother returning long after sunset, falling into the divan cushions, and drinking until her father carried her to bed. One must do what one despises to survive. This is the only way. On account of her heroism in defense of the people, Vera was upgraded to a commissar’s rations. She did not worry about hunger for many years.

Yelena’s son was able to secure employment for Vera. The job was simple enough. Once a week Ivan’s men came to her flat, and she left for the day while they worked. The men wore golden rings and black leather, carried handguns, and smoked American cigarettes. They entered with nylon duffle bags and called her babushka and did not unzip the bags until she was gone. They left dirty dishes in the sink and an envelope of money on the kitchen table. At first Vera used the time to take care of errands. Stops at the town pharmacy for medication to soothe her arthritic hands, the post office for international postage to write her daughter in America, the pastry shop for no practical reason. But as winter approached, she crossed the field that stretched from her house to Bilaya Forest.

The black earth was packed tightly, and she would follow the tree line for several kilometers before her knees began to ache. The wind carried loose bits of dirt, occasional snow flurries, the day itself into the sunset. The wolves crooned to each other from deep in the woods. When her knees began to ache, she spread her shawl across the frozen ground and sat to write. She always brought a pad of paper and a pen with her and drafted letters to her daughter. Every sentence needed to be perfect. She invented stories, plagiarized anecdotes from town gossip. She lied about herself, telling Lidiya that her pension had been increased and that she was now able to afford a color television. She wrote of compensation. Some had called for reparations for the victims of state-sponsored terror, though no one really thought the survivors would receive a kopeck, and Vera wrote that she finally would be compensated for her loss. She reread the letter as the sun sank toward the horizon and hoped her daughter would believe it.

When she returned to her home, she often found white powder on the countertops. At first she thought it was flour, but the following week the men left boxes of powdered infant formula, quinine, and caffeine. She knew what they were making, but told herself that no respectable person would be harmed. Only the wicked were affected by her complicity. One evening she returned to find one of the men still sitting at her kitchen table.

“I’m sorry,” she said, wondering at the strangeness of apologizing for entering her own home unannounced. “Am I early?”

“No,” the man replied. He was young, in his early 30s, a year or two younger than her daughter. His eyes were watery. She touched him on the shoulder, and he did not flinch. She did not know why she expected him to. Men in leather jackets were not supposed to cry.

“Would you like tea?” Vera asked. “I have a lot of sugar.”

“I must go.”

“You must stay and have tea.”

The man nodded and sat back down, the stretch of black leather squeaking against the seat of the chair. He would never know why this babushka with eyes too large for her head and pens sticking from her pockets, a woman whose naive collusion reminded him of his own mother, showed him such insistent kindness that evening. And Vera would never know that 11 hours earlier, the man had walked in on his wife in bed with another man, or that he had beaten the other man until his knuckles looked like broken raspberries, and he still did not feel better.

“I think I have cake,” Vera said. She climbed a stool and rooted through the pantry while her new kettle boiled on the gas stove. The production was larger than was required, for the cake sat in plain view on an otherwise empty shelf. She cut more generous slices than she normally would and placed them on the porcelain plates she had received for a wedding present from her in-laws. She could have cut the cake with a spoon. It was all frosting.

“Is it good? Would you like more?” she asked the man. He shook his head, his mouth full. After swallowing he changed his mind. “Yes, more please.”

What kind manners, Vera thought, as she cut two more slices. She wanted to ask the man his name. To have a man for tea and cake without knowing his name didn’t seem proper.

“Do you have any children?” Vera asked.

“No.”

“Any pets?”

“I had a cat, when I was a boy.”

“And what was its name?”

“I don’t know. I just called it ‘cat.’ Do you have any pets?”

“No,” Vera said. “I have a child.”

They ate cake and talked for two hours, and though they said nothing of consequence, the conversation felt heavy with meaning. Later, she would close the blinds and scrape the frosting from the corners of the cardboard cake box with her index finger, and then she would realize why. Never before had she invited someone for tea without wanting more than company.

“Tell me about your cat,” Vera said.

“After you tell me about your child.”

“I haven’t seen her in two years. She lives in America. Her husband’s name is Gilbert. He is a piano tuner.”

The man nodded, impressed. Vera noted the change in the man’s demeanor, something between admiration and envy in the way he bit his upper lip and leaned forward. When asked about her daughter, Vera was usually inclined to deception. She recounted her daughter’s life in America just as she wrote of her own in the carefully constructed letters she mailed each month at the town post office. With aggrandizement. With half-truths and aspirations she knew would never see fruition. But she did not fear the judgment of this sad man sitting before her, licking frosting from the back of his fork. She decided to be honest.

“She was a mail-order bride,” Vera said.

“My wife was listed in one of those catalogs.”

“She was never bought?”

The man shook his head, remembering the pixilated photograph of his wife in the third row, fourth column, and 16th page of the Russian Model Brides catalog. “No,” he said. “I was the only one who wanted her. She grew up three floors below me in the communal flat off Lenin Square.”

“She must be beautiful,” Vera said. She thought of Lidiya’s head shot, taken by a wedding photographer, the background a glitter of purple starbursts.

“Yes, she was. Does your daughter like America?”

“I don’t know,” Vera admitted. “I’ve received only five letters from her in two years.”

“America is far away,” the man said. “Much is lost in the mail.”

“Of course,” Vera agreed. She had tried to convince herself of this before.

“Tell me about her husband. What sort of man is he?”

Vera laughed and shook her head. “Gilbert? What sort of man finds his wife in a mail-order catalog?”

“One who is lonesome.”

“One who is not a man.”

“Perhaps, but what sort of woman puts herself in a mail-order catalog to find her husband?” He knew the answer, of course, and tried not to think about her.

“We would need to switch from tea to vodka to answer that one,” Vera said. “Now, tell me about your cat.”

When the man left the house later that evening, he lit a cigarette. He’d wanted one for hours, but felt uncomfortable asking the babushka for an ashtray. Snow stretched across the streets, drifts darkened by soot and shadow. The cigarette ember was the closest thing to a working streetlight for kilometers. He was afraid of going home. He was not afraid of finding his wife with the other man, but of not finding her at all. His name was Sergey Fyodorovich, and some years later, after moving to Moscow, he would be shot six times in the chest. Each bullet would miss his vital organs and main arteries, but he would still die of blood loss on a frozen patch of grass 16 blocks from the brick walls of the Kremlin. As his wounds dyed the snow red, he would remember that, as a child, he had poured his father’s vodka into the cat’s water bowl and watched the cat stumble across the kitchen floor, unable to negotiate the legs of the oaken table and metal chairs. He would regret this, and then die.

The days grew shorter as they fell away, October turning to November. Sergey entered Vera’s house each week without a word, as glum and uncivil as his three associates. But when Vera returned, eight hours later, she found the kettle humming with steam, two teacups set on the kitchen table, and Sergey cutting thick slices of cake at the counter. He told her of his wife, their courtship prolonged by the possibility of her marriage to an American. He had proposed to her on the day she withdrew her ad from the catalog, in the grocery store, by the wicker tubs of brown onions and spotted potatoes, a twist tie for an engagement ring. She drank too much and embarrassed him in front of his friends. Once, while drunk, she threw a knife at him; it missed him and left a crack in the kitchen window. He had not seen his wife since the day he found her with the other man.

He confided in Vera. He told her about his childhood, his father, and his wedding, the six stacks of banded thousand-ruble notes he’d been saving to buy a house before his wife left. He told her about the heroin trade. The cultivation of poppy fields in Afghanistan, the refinement of opium, the overland transport through Turkmenistan, the fishing trawlers crossing the Caspian. His boss, Ivan, Yelena’s son, had police protection, a disregard for human life, and a collection of rare birds imported from Paraguay. He did not discuss what took place in the house while Vera was walking at the edge of the forest, and she did not want to ask.

Instead, she told him about her husband, who had died of a heart attack 10 years earlier, just after he finished brushing his teeth. He had broad cheeks and a nose that had healed crookedly after a swarm of wasps chased him face-first into the trunk of a pine tree. She missed her daughter and admitted that she wrote misleading letters partly in an effort to lure Lidiya home. She felt the unfairness of growing old, watching her body sag and lose shape like a snowman in the sun, not having relatives to give support and bear her grievances. When she thought of her mother, she felt something darker than longing, and this she did not confide to Sergey.

“I have heard stories of you as a child,” he said one afternoon.

“Everyone has stories from childhood,” Vera said. “You do too.” The snow had fallen early that year, and across the field from her kitchen window the dark branches of the forest were traced in ice. Sergey sat across the table and tapped his cigarette into a plastic ashtray.

“Yes,” he agreed. “But none of mine made it to the front page of Pravda.”

“I don’t want to discuss it,” Vera said. Sergey went to the living room and flipped the channels of the color television he had brought over from his flat the previous week. Of late, he’d been spending increasingly more time with Vera, refilling the kettle far past sunset and coming for dinner on his off days. As he scanned through the frequencies, the dubbed action films and low-budget crime dramas, he thought of his flat. The sheets had not been changed since his wife left. He ate from paper plates and no longer wiped the urine splatters from the rim of the toilet bowl. This was his loneliness.

Vera was at the stove, frying chicken thighs in a pan still greasy from the morning’s blini, when she heard the clatter of the mail slot. She turned down the heat and set the wooden spoon on a folded paper napkin before walking into the living room. The price of the international postage was illegible through the black ink of the cancellation marks. The edges of the envelope were worn, but the seal was unbroken. Five years earlier, a letter from America would have never made it through her mail slot without being read and noted by invisible men in distant offices.

“What is it?” Sergey asked. Vera sat beside him on the sofa. For some time, neither spoke. Finally, Sergey asked if he should leave.

“No,” Vera said. “Stay.”

She opened the envelope with a butter knife and held the letter close to her face and held her face close to the lamp. She read the letter twice through before passing it to Sergey, who was farsighted and had to hold the letter at arms length to decipher the crimped cursive script. He set it on the coffee table and neither spoke. Lidiya was being divorced by the piano tuner in Portland. She would return home in one month.

Before slipping between the sheets that night, Vera reached under her bed and pulled out a wooden cigar box. The cigar box held the letters from her daughter, the letters her mother had written from the courthouse cell, the money from Ivan’s men, and the newspaper clippings praising her denunciation. She flipped through faded newsprint because even in their dishonesty and propagandizing, the words proved something beautiful. She had once been young, and these yellowed slips of paper were her testimony. The cigar box lay open on the floor beside her as she kneeled and repeated the prayers her mother had taught her. She prayed for goodness and deliverance and the grace of God for all mankind in a formal and archaic language that after all these years still felt heavy on her tongue. Her knees ached, and she prayed for an undisturbed sleep.

When she finished, she ran her finger across the broken seal of her daughter’s new letter and placed it in the cigar box with the others. She was old enough to know that everything large enough to love eventually changes into something that causes pain. But the things small enough to fit into a cigar box, these stay as they are.

Lidiya arrived after five days of continuous travel, taking connecting flights from Portland to New York to London to St. Petersburg, then east by train to Bilaya. She returned with one suitcase, a knockoff designer handbag, and a coin purse heavy with pennies. She had lost two sweaters, a framed photograph of her parents, five and a half kilograms, and any illusions she once had about life in America. She had replaced them with gray hairs and a drinking problem. Her mother met her at the train station. It was snowing.

Vera hugged her daughter beside a kiosk selling bootlegged DVDs and Ukrainian cigarettes. Even through the down overcoat, she could tell her daughter had lost weight.

“You’re breaking me,” Lidiya muttered.

“I know,” Vera said, but did not release her.

When they returned home, Vera watched her daughter undress. A hat, scarf, and mittens. A winter coat with a detachable hood that hung from half its buttons. A bright yellow sweatshirt with the image of an elm tree. Jeans two sizes too tight. Her underwear was pink and made of cotton and polyester. Vera had bought her daughter none of these things.

“Where are my clothes?” Lidiya asked.

“In your suitcase, I assume.”

“No, the ones I left.”

Vera had feared this. She turned to the open closet, which contained nothing but hangers. “I had to sell them,” she said. Her daughter stood beside the closet, her bare shoulders the same pale white as the square on the wallpaper where the mirror once hung. “I needed money for the gas bill.”

Lidiya picked her clothes from the floor, the tight jeans, the yellow sweatshirt and its elm tree, and put them back on. She had worn the clothes for five days and 17,262 kilometers. She knew her mother’s tendency to embellish the truth, and she had not expected a change in her two-year absence. She had not expected wealth or prosperity. Neither had she expected her clothes to be sold for gas money.

“We will get you new clothes. Things are better now,” Vera said. Lidiya nodded and buttoned her jeans.

“You should brush your hair,” Vera added. “We’re having company after dinner.”

They ate in the kitchen, a stew of beets and cubed chicken breasts. Vera leaned over the sink, opened the window, and reached out. She pulled a bottle of vodka from the hanging garden planter, which held petunias in the summer months and frozen goods in winter. She poured two shots and handed one to her daughter, and they raised their glasses without proffering a toast. Neither was what the other had hoped for. She reached across the table and covered her daughter’s fingers with her palm.

“Tomorrow, you will sleep in.”

Lidiya nodded. She could not believe this was all she had to look forward to.

Three knocks at the door. Vera stood and walked into the living room, checking her hair in the mirror before going for the handle. On the other side of the door, Sergey watched the handle turn. He was clean-shaven and had scrubbed the scent of cigarettes from his scalp with two types of shampoo, one guaranteeing hair growth, the other promising a satin sheen. He had washed a blue button-down shirt and brown corduroys, the most formal clothes he owned. He had stopped by the floral section of the local supermarket and picked out a bright bouquet of artificial tulips wrapped in green tinfoil. His belt was the only article of black leather on his person. As the door opened, Sergey realized that he hadn’t made such efforts to be presentable since the early days of his marriage. He saw Vera and, behind her, a face from a Russian bride catalog, and in that moment, again, for the ten thousandth time, he felt his wife’s absence.

“This is my daughter, Lidiya,” Vera said, after Sergey had stepped inside, taken off his overcoat, and stomped the snow from the treads of his boots.

“I am Sergey Fyodorovich,” he said, and presented Lidiya with the plastic tulips. She was roughly the same age as his wife, same height and weight. But she did not wear makeup, made no attempt to hide the pimple on her left cheek, the dark crescents beneath her eyes. She wore a sweatshirt and blue jeans, and Sergey felt foolish. She did not know this was a date.

“What are these?” she asked, as if she had never before seen tulips.

“They are made of plastic,” Sergey said proudly. “They do not die.”

Vera brought the vodka bottle and shot glasses to the coffee table. She told everyone to sit where they wanted, then took the armchair so that Sergey had to sit next to her daughter on the divan.

“How do you like being back in Bilaya?” Sergey asked, after they toasted to health and prosperity.

“It’s nice, but I thought things would be better here,” Lidiya said. She looked at her mother. “You wrote in one of your letters that they were distributing compensation money.”

Vera nodded and tried to remember what she had written to Lidiya. It hadn’t been a lie, not entirely. In all the talk of privatization, of economic shock treatment and the parceling out of state industries, she’d heard whispers of individual compensation. Vera had read editorials in Novaya Gazeta penned by reform deputies in the state Duma. She’d followed their calls for reparations, their declarations that the country could not transcend its past without making amends. The hard-liners said reparations were impossible. Though they used terms like inflation and the prioritization of resources, she knew they really meant that the state could not print enough currency to repay all that it owed.

“The legislation didn’t pass,” she said.

Sergey wiped his mouth and turned to Lidiya. “Speaking of letters, your mother has not received many letters from you, and I told her how overseas mail is often lost.”

Lidiya glanced at her mother. “Yes. I wrote every week.”

“That’s what I thought,” Vera said. She smiled at Sergey, certain that in his heart he was a good man.

Minutes grew to hours, and Lidiya grew intoxicated. She had two, three shots for every one of Sergey’s. She slurred her words and told stories unbecoming of an honest woman. Vera watched anxiously as her own discomfort became Sergey’s. She knew he was thinking of his wife, who drank too much and embarrassed him in public, who was once listed in a mail-order bride catalog. She knew then, as Lidiya stumbled to the door to kiss him goodbye, that Sergey would never be her son-in-law.

That night, Vera was awakened by the retch and splash of someone drowning. In the bathroom, she found her daughter bathed in the green neon glow of the nightlight. Lidiya was on her knees before the toilet bowl, holding her hair in a loose fist behind her head.

Lidiya’s drinking increased as December approached and passed. The days contracted to a six-hour twilight as the sun skirted the horizon. For the appearance of moderation, she purchased her half-liter bottles of vodka in different stores on different days, never seeing the same cashier more than twice a week. She considered herself discreet, but no one was fooled. She wore her unhappiness like a tiara.

Each Wednesday, hangover or no, she left the house with her mother when the men arrived. Sergey nodded curtly, and she knew this peasant of a man was either too proud or too embarrassed to speak to her directly. Those ridiculous plastic flowers — who did he think he was to reject her? She knew immediately what the house was being used for and felt both hurt by her mother’s deceptions and ashamed of her willingness to believe them.

Unbeknownst to her mother, Lidiya also spent her Wednesday afternoons walking along the edge of Bilaya Forest. On the day they first came upon each other, Lidiya had been thinking of Gilbert’s piano-tuning kit. The brown leather case contained a gooseneck tuning hammer, nickel lever heads, and rubber mutes. A tuning fork gave a warm, round ring when she flicked it with her fingernail. A manual that Gilbert had ceased referring to years earlier, filled with terms like equal temperament, fundamental frequency, coincident harmonics, and unison. When she first arrived in America and joined Gilbert on calls to large suburban houses, she read through the manual. She could find none of the technical terms in her Russian-English pocket dictionary, and Gilbert had tried his best to explain them in simple language. She still had no idea what coincident harmonics meant. The tuning kit had been sitting on the coffee table when he returned home at 3:40 on a Friday afternoon, wiped the raindrops from his hair, and told her that he no longer loved her.

She continued walking at the edge of the forest, and the wolves howled from deep in the interior. She imagined them ravenous, with fierce eyes and gleaming fangs, a hole in their bellies that no prey could fill. A figure appeared ahead, a stenciled shadow against the setting sun. Lidiya took a sip from her half-liter bottle and looked at it in her palm before returning it to the inner pocket of her overcoat. She hated her hands for being so small.

The approaching figure was her mother. “We can go back soon,” her mother said.

“You know what they are doing in there, don’t you?”

Vera did not reply. In her pocket was a ballpoint pen clipped to a pad of paper. She had been writing a letter to her daughter as if Lidiya still lived in America. In it she described Sergey, how handsome and polite he was. How he would surely like Lidiya. She wrote of her own well-being, how, at the age of 61, her life had never been fuller.

“We have food on the table and heat in the furnace. Why isn’t that enough for you?”

“You’re from another world, Mama,” Lidiya said. “That peasant and his friends are cutting heroin on the kitchen table. You didn’t think to mention this in your dozens of letters.”

Vera could smell the liquor on her daughter’s breath and hear the recklessness of her words. For the first time in her life, she understood what Lidiya was capable of, and she feared her daughter.

“Be quiet,” she commanded. “You must be quiet.”

Lidiya laughed and spread her arms outward as if exposing herself. “Who’s going to hear? The wolves?”

Vera nodded, then turned and walked toward town. Lidiya fell in line behind her, and they walked the two kilometers in silence. When they reached home, the men were packing bundles of vials into a duffle bag. Vera looked away, embarrassed, as if she had walked in on them naked.

“We’re on our way out,” Sergey told Vera. He did not look at Lidiya. He no longer stayed after work, no longer spent his evenings with Vera, now that Lidiya had returned. The kitchen table had only two chairs.

The men left, and Lidiya pulled the half-liter bottle from her jacket. She finished it before the snow had melted from her boots. Vera watched from the kitchen table. She couldn’t account for her daughter’s misery. Lidiya had grown up in the party. She had spent her childhood in the thaw of Khrushchev, her adolescence in the placid years of Brezhnev. She had never felt hunger. Vera was careful to keep all evidence of the betrayal from her daughter. When Lidiya, at six years of age, asked how her grandmother died, Vera simply said she was a casualty of the times, a euphemism ascribed to those taken in the purges. Of course Lidiya knew, but they never spoke of it. Vera had done her best to instill in Lidiya a sense of morality that existed beyond the reach of the state, even as she emphasized the importance of obedience to that state. She taught her to chew with her mouth closed. She taught her to look both ways before crossing the street and never to talk with strange men. She taught her to pray and never to speak of this or anything that contradicted the party line. This is what she had done, and it had not been enough.

Lidiya left and returned three hours later with two half-liter bottles. One was full, the other empty. She mumbled about heroin, about leaving America to live with criminals and peasants.

“You must not say these things,” Vera said, but Lidiya would not listen.

The next week, the men did not show up. Vera glanced at her daughter, stretched out on the divan and facing the television that Sergey had left. Her face was bloated, her eyes red. Lidiya reminded Vera of her own mother, who before the war would drink beet samogon until she could not stand. The same glossy eyes, the same small hands. Vera paced the kitchen before settling at the cutting board, unable to quiet her head. Sergey and his associates had never been late before. She peeled potatoes, waiting just over three hours before going to Yelena’s house. At two in the afternoon, the sun was already setting.

Yelena nodded when she saw Vera at the door, as if she had been expecting her. She had. Two teacups sat on the coffee table, and the samovar was still warm in the kitchen.

Vera sat on the leather sofa, which Yelena never failed to mention came from Italy. Several furs hung from the coatrack. A pack of Benson & Hedges lay beside a silver ashtray.

“Sugar?” Yelena offered.

“The men haven’t arrived,” Vera said.

Yelena nodded and stirred three scoops of sugar into both cups of tea. She had a child to be proud of.

“It’s over,” she said. “Ivan called last night. He said the arrangement has ended.”

“But why?” Vera asked.

“Your daughter is indiscreet. She has been talking in town.”

Without asking, Vera reached across the table and took one of the cigarettes. This was why the wolves had returned. For her own daughter’s denunciation. For her. She drew on the cigarette, and the ember glowed with the inhalation. She imagined her body stretched out on the ground of Bilaya. Frozen fingers and blue shoulders. Skin that no man had touched since before perestroika. She knocked the ashes from the ember and looked at her hands. She couldn’t be legitimately faulted, much less punished. She had to pay the gas and the grocery bills, and at times, survival conflicted with the law. Wasn’t that obvious? Didn’t the state understand? This was her only life, and she did not want it to end.

“What will happen to me?” Prison, she thought, was the best possible outcome. But she expected something much worse. “Will I be arrested?”

The police have nothing to do with it, Yelena thought. She watched her old friend’s hands tremble. No, friend wasn’t the right word, but neither was enemy. She recalled how in school their teacher had applauded Vera for her courage, her self-sacrifice in the name of the people. How even during the famine of 1947, when Yelena’s sister died from malnutrition, Vera always had enough to eat. As she rubbed her hand across the leather sofa, Yelena knew that this was a just and righteous world, where one always received what one had earned.

“What will happen to me?” Vera asked again.

Yelena shook her head. “You? Nothing will happen to you.”

When Vera returned home, the front door was unlocked. An uncapped half-liter bottle sat on the coffee table, three fingers from full. A wide trail of footprints began at the back door, stretching like a perforated line across the snowy field to Bilaya Forest. Her knees ached as she followed the trail toward the trees. She did not stop to count the sets of footprints. She knew that one of them belonged to her daughter.

The moon was a sliver of pale light cut into the sky. Snow soaked into the lining of her boots, and wolves howled from the trees. She followed the footprints across the field, to the edge of the forest. When she was a child, when they had nothing to eat, she went into the forest with her mother. They hunted rabbits and birds with a slingshot, and they heard the howls. Their hunger, however, outweighed their fear. They never came across the wolves, only the carcasses of their prey.

In the shadows and undergrowth, she lost the trail. She found pinecones and animal droppings and snow, but no footprints. She turned around, and the tree trunks were long and emaciated, and they were frozen. She called her daughter’s name once and twice and again and again. She would never know that 45 minutes earlier and 50 meters away, her daughter had looked at the sky. Even through her confusion and fear, the trees of Bilaya Forest reminded Lidiya of Oregon, of the hike she went on with Gilbert the week after arriving in America, when she still could not speak English, when she still could not believe her luck. Two men walked in front of her, two behind. She did what they said. She was not wearing shoes, and her feet felt like two wooden blocks attached to her ankles. A hole appeared, an oval missing from the earth. Two shovels stood in the dirt. She fell to her knees and wept. Moonlight fell indifferently. The ground was hard and covered in snow, and she was afraid of it. She pleaded with Sergey, apologizing for her indiscretion. The men raised their guns and in the flashes was no thought, no final reflection, just the breath carried from her body on the back of a bullet.

No funeral was held, no body found to consecrate, but Vera still went to church. She repeated the prayers she had learned long ago, understanding for the first time why her mother had made her memorize them in spite of the political dangers. She stood at the front of the church, beside an icon of the Virgin and child. The great, golden God was helpless in his mother’s arms. Though she held him across her chest, the Virgin looked outward rather than at her child. How strange, Vera thought, not for the first time, that a mother can hold in her arms the savior of the world yet be unable to give the child her undivided attention. But this is what a mother is. She prayed for the blessing of the Virgin Mother and the Holy Ghost, the entreaties of every angel in heaven. Though she knew that faith could not exist without hope, she still prayed.

On her way home, she passed a young woman holding a clipboard. She had seen the young woman before, soliciting the signatures of pedestrians. The young woman’s eyes were clear. They still had years to witness. When asked if she had a moment to spare, Vera could not deny her.

“Would you sign this?” the young woman asked, and handed her the clipboard. “We are petitioning the Duma to turn Bilaya Forest into a nature preserve.”

Vera didn’t understand. “You want the wolves to stay?”

“We want to protect the forest from logging companies,” the young woman explained.

“Protection,” Vera repeated, thinking of Sergey sitting at her kitchen table, eating cake and explaining why Ivan did not fear the police. She dropped the clipboard to the ground. The concrete sidewalk stretched to the intersection, and how many times had she traveled it in silence? How many times had she censored herself, afraid of whom she might betray, afraid of whom she might lose? “Fuck protection,” she mumbled, her voice so low that the young woman leaned forward to hear her. She wanted to denounce Stalin and the state and Sergey and Yeltsin. Russia and America and Gilbert and Yelena and Ivan. Her primary-school teacher, who had given her high marks but did not teach her the multiplication tables. Her husband, who had claimed that cunnilingus was antirevolutionary. The commissar, whose hand she shook days after he sentenced her mother. She wanted all of Bilaya to hear her evidence. But her voice did not rise above a whisper. “Fuck protection,” she said over and over.

Vera’s reaction did not surprise the young woman, who had recently watched her own grandmother descend into dementia. The young woman’s grandmother had cursed the clouds, the sky, the names of loved ones whose faces she no longer recognized. The curses contained no malice, only confusion and fear. And here, before her, this babushka was cursing the proposal of a nature preserve. One must have patience and compassion for the bewildered elderly, the young woman thought, as she took hold of Vera’s hands and spoke in a comforting tone. They are from a different time. “Just breathe,” she said. “Everything is okay, grandmother. Everything is fine.”

Vera clutched the young woman’s hands. She would have fallen over without the young woman’s support. Until this moment, she had not realized that she would never be a grandmother.

A week later, a knock. Vera carefully approached the door and looked through the peephole. Sergey.

“I know you’re there,” he said after a moment. “I can see your shadow beneath the door.”

She did not respond. She knew better than to ever speak again.

“I’m sorry, Vera,” he said, and through the peephole his face looked round and wide. “I’m moving to Moscow next week.”

Vera watched Sergey pull an envelope from his jacket and bring it to the door. The mail slot lifted, then fell shut as the envelope dropped to the floor. She steadied herself against the wall, knowing what the envelope contained. It had to be true. It had happened before. A final letter from Lidiya, her last words transcribed by Sergey under the frozen branches of Bilaya. Her heart swelled with such hope that she was willing to forgive Sergey for one final message from her daughter, one last letter to love and hold and keep safe in the cigar box. She fumbled with the envelope, forcing her fingers against the flap. The envelope was thick, too heavy for a single letter. She tore through it. Inside was a stack of banded thousand-ruble notes. In black ink scrawled in cursive across the face of the first bill, a single word: compensation. She wanted to run after Sergey, wanted to throw the money at his feet so he would know that this loss could not be recompensed. But the winter still had months of life left. The gas bill was due, and she needed to eat. She went to her bedroom and pulled the cigar box from beneath the bed. The manila envelope would not fit inside, not with all the other envelopes. One by one, she withdrew the letters from her mother and the letters from her daughter and placed them on the bedspread. She unwound the rubber band from the stack. She spread the bills across the yellowed newspaper clippings, mixing them with what remained of the weekly payments, and closed the cigar box. Then she knelt and prayed.

Content

Anthony Marra
The Wolves of Bilaya Forest