Galina left the pub, her feet leading her restlessly away. She just could not bear the thought of wasting another day, and instead decided to find by herself either Berendey or any of the old ones Sovin and David mentioned. How large could this place be?
It turned out to be quite large. She got lost in the labyrinth of convoluted streets-they were clearly not planned, and wound back and forth, often doubling on themselves and petering out in unexpected dead ends. These streets had been built with little forethought as the town grew, and she quickly lost any idea of where she was. There were people in the streets, but she didn't feel quite ready to ask for directions.
She looked for an opening between houses that would lead her to a wooded area; her feet were starting to hurt by the time she found a road that didn't turn around abruptly, but instead led her out of the crisscrossing streets, straight and true. The houses soon disappeared, and the path grew paler, as if from disuse, and often got lost in the tall pallid grass and the uncertain flickering of the glowtrees.
The air smelled of mud and river, and the path soon led her to a swamp. Black trunks of fallen trees rose from dark pools of water like dead fingers, and the hummocks seemed too uncertain to step on. She turned around to find another way.
Someone was there-a tall woman in a long shirt of unbleached linen stood on the path. Her face was hidden by long ragged locks, darkened with water.
"Hello,” Galina said. “You're a rusalka, aren't you?"
The woman did not answer, just bobbed her head-the motion was so quick and slight that Galina wasn't sure if it was a twitch or a sign of agreement.
"Can you tell me how to find Berendey?” she asked. She tried really hard not to think that the woman in front of her was a ghost, a soul of a drowned girl.
Another quick movement, this time in the negative.
"Do you know someone who will?” She thought of the mythical beings one might find in a forest. “A leshy, perhaps?"
The girl nodded again, and beckoned Galina to follow her.
She sighed. These creatures, as far as she remembered, were not to be trusted; they stole children and tickled men to death. To her relief, she could not remember any stories of rusalki attacking or harming women. Leshys, however, were indiscriminate, happily confusing and turning around any traveler. Galina was starting to regret her request, when the rusalka took a side path, and led her through a grove of weeping trees-tears rolled down their bark in a constant stream-and a small calm lake with water as black as pitch.
"Where are we?” Galina asked.
The rusalka pointed at the small pavilion rising at the far end of the lake, and Galina sighed. The pavilion was covered with ornate woodcuts and tracery of vines, and did not look like a dark forest where one would expect to find a nature deity who could answer questions about people turning into birds. She was about to ask the rusalka about who lived there, but the woman gave her an impatient shove and dove into the dark waters that closed over her without a ripple or sound.
Galina approached the pavilion, her feet sinking into the rich loose soil of the path. The irises and the cattails fringing the lake nodded at her, and she was surprised to see that their stems and leaves were not completely white but pale green.
The latticed walls of the pavilion allowed her a glimpse inside, and she saw a woman-a young woman in a black evening dress-reclining on a low wicker chaise, reading a book and smoking a long cigarette, the mother-of-pearl cigarette holder wedged between her white teeth.
The woman looked up and smiled at Galina. “Come on in,” she said. “I'm Countess Vygotskaya. New here?"
Galina found the entrance-just a simple arch-and sat on the proffered stool.
The woman reached for the ashtray and stubbed out her cigarette, still exhaling long twin snakes of smoke through her narrow nostrils, exquisite like the rest of her. The black strap of her dress slid off her too-white shoulder, and her black curls seemed too black, almost blue. Galina felt intimidated by this woman-not just the aristocratic roots or her beauty, but the way she carried herself. The air around her grew cold and clear, studded with tiny ice crystals, and Galina's breath caught, as if in the middle of a January night. “You've heard about me, of course,” the woman said.
"No,” Galina admitted in a quiet guilty voice. “But I'm sure that-"
"Of course you have,” the woman said. “The Decembrists’ wives. I was one of them."
Galina nodded. “I hadn't realized."
"Neither had I,” the woman said mysteriously. And added, noting Galina's perplexed look, “How difficult it is to be an icon."
Galina thought of the story. The Decembrists’ Revolt left her cold in high school, when they covered that part of Russian history; the Byronic appeal and the misguided liberalism of their useless gesture never quite did it for her. But now she supposed she had a reluctant admiration for the young officers who rode into the Senate Square of St Petersburg to challenge Czar Nicholas and the absolute monarchy, and were greeted by cannon fire. On the back of her mind she always wondered what happened to the soldiers under their command-dead, she supposed, cannon fodder. Only the officers were important enough to secure a place in the history books. They were exiled to Siberia except the five executed outright. Galina dimly remembered something about ropes that gave and broke, and the unprecedented second hanging.
And this is where their wives came in-she imagined them often, those beautiful rich ladies who abandoned everything to follow their husbands into the frozen woods and summers ringing with mosquitoes, to the place away from civilization and any semblance of everything they knew.
It occurred to her only later in life that the women were held up as an example of selfless devotion and obedience-at first, she could not realize why they went. She had been too young for the notions of love and tragedy inextricably linked to it then. Now she was too skeptical of both. In that she differed from her classmates who usually listened to the stories of the revolt and the Decembrists’ wives with an expression of almost religious fervor.
"Did you ever regret going to Siberia?” Galina asked.
The woman lit a new cigarette and breathed a slow bitter laugh. “Me? I never went. That is, I went to Moscow. The shame was too much.” The gaze of her large dark blue eyes lingered on Galina's face. “But you wouldn't know shame, would you?"
"I do,” Galina started. “I-"
"Guilt is not the same thing,” the Decembrist's Wife interrupted her again. “Shame is something that is done to you from the outside."
"Why didn't you go then?"
The woman shrugged her shoulder. Voluptuous, Galina thought, that's the word they used to describe women like her. “Because they expected me to, I suppose. Because I was just an appendage. Because it didn't matter what I wanted. The men always ask me, ‘Didn't you love your husband?’ Women never do-fancy that."
Her languid eyes fixed on Galina for a moment before looking away, at the burning tip of her cigarette. “What do you think?"
"It's not about love,” Galina tried to explain and stopped, short of words.
"Those who went abandoned everything,” the woman said. “Those who stayed abandoned their husbands. I had abandoned both. A friend of mine went, and she could never write to her family. She left her children behind, and her family loathed her for it. Mine loathed me because I didn't."
Her name was Elena, and she ran away from her home in St Petersburg suddenly filled with empty echoes after her husband was put in stocks and shipped somewhere unimaginable. She realized that she could not win. No matter what she did she would be either a bad daughter to her father, the widowed Count Klyazmensky, or a bad wife to her husband Dmitri. The truth was, she was tired of both men in her life, and she packed two modest trunks with clothes and knick-knacks she couldn't quite dispose of yet, handed the keys to her house on the Neva embankment to her housekeeper, and told her coachman to take her to Moscow. Everyone assumed that she was going shopping, and out of the corner of her eye she saw people-even servants!-shaking their heads with disapproval.
In truth, she wasn't sure what she wanted to do in Moscow. She could visit some remote relatives, but her heart wasn't in it. She could take rooms and cloister herself from the world. Instead, she wandered down to the Moscow River embankment and watched the frozen river, green with crusted ice, with black cracks showing the sluggish black water underneath. She shivered in her furs and wondered if the water was as cold as the air that clouded her breath as soon as it left her lips. She stayed there until the stars came out.
The night had a different color here-farther south, the blue of the sky had grown deeper, more saturated, and the stars had become large and yellow, not the white pinpricks she remembered from St Petersburg. She missed the aurora borealis.
A movement on the ice caught her attention-she squinted at the dark shapes, worried that some clueless peasant children had wandered onto the ice, thick but liable to split open every time a smallest child set a lightest foot on it. She was about to call out, to tell them to get back, when her breath stopped fogging the air; she forgot to breathe. The shapes crawled out from under the embankment on which she stood, covered in mud and raw sewage, and they were not children at all but grown women. Pale filthy women, dressed in nothing but thin linen shirts.
They crawled on all fours like animals, until they reached the first patch of open black water. They slid into it, one by one, noiseless as seals. Before Elena could break her stupor or call for help, they re-emerged, sleek and clean, the linen clinging to their young bodies, their wet hair plastered to their faces and necks. As she watched, they gathered on the ice where it seemed more solid and held hands, forming a circle like peasant girls did at weddings. And they started dancing-moving around in a circle, faster and faster, until Elena felt dizzy. And then their bare feet left the ice, and the women danced in the air, water on their shirts and faces frozen. They looked like ice sculptures come magically to life.
Elena leaned over the embankment, her heart racing. In the back of her mind she knew who these women were-rusalki, spirits of drowned girls, but she wanted nothing more than to join them. There was nobody around, and she climbed over the parapet, awkward in her heavy skirts and coat, but eager. She could not remember the last time she had such a longing to join people.
She stepped onto the ice; the women seemed oblivious to her approach. She skirted far around the black dizzying splotches of open water. The ice creaked under her shoes. She was close to them now. Just as if someone had given a signal, all of the faces turned toward her, and she heard a thundering, roaring noise as the ice cracked under her feet, opening a black rift across the river. Her feet slid from under her, and the black water reached up, seizing her chest in its icy embrace. It flooded her mouth opened in a scream, washed over her eyes, twined her hair around her neck. She felt hands on her shoulders and arms, and grabbed at them. But instead of pulling her to safety, the women laughed and pushed her down, down, deep down into the black water where even the wan starlight could not reach.
Her lungs burned and her chest heaved, rebelling against the dead heavy embrace of the ice-cold water. She swallowed and breathed water, feeling it churn in her stomach, waiting for the inevitable darkness. She felt hands dragging her along, under ice, where the starlight did not reach and where she could not hope to reach the surface.
Her skin was so numb from the cold that it took her a while to notice a change in temperature-the water had turned balmy, and the glow on the surface signaled escape. She lunged toward it and did not believe her senses when her head emerged into musty stale air and her lungs convulsed, expelling the ice-cold water of Moscow River into the unknown warm lake. The girls that dragged her there surfaced too, laughing and lisping gentle nonsense. She didn't know where she was, but she knew that her former concerns had fallen away, like crust from the eyes of a cured blind man.
"It's all the same with everyone here, isn't it?” Galina said. “You wanted so badly to escape."
"And we didn't fit in anywhere else,” Elena said.
Galina nodded. “You know, I always hoped that there was a place for me, a promised land-and I could never find it, until someone I love disappeared."
"You know,” Elena said and took a long drag on her cigarette, “people are notoriously bad at discerning what it is they really want. Besides, this is really no promised land-funny you would think that once you stick all the misfits into one place, it would somehow magically become a paradise."
"It seems like one,” Galina said.
Loud splashing and cries turned her attention to the lake, and even Elena stood up and looked over, squinting. The rusalki, several of them at once, wept and cried, and shied away from something in their midst.
"What are they doing?” Galina said.
"No idea.” Elena carefully picked up the hem of her dress, exposing a pair of small but sturdy combat boots. “Let's go see."
The rusalki left the water, and stood on the shore, dripping wet, fear in their eyes that showed no whites. Elena moved among them as if she were at a party, working her way toward the plates with canapés, and Galina followed in her wake. On the bank, they both stopped, looking.
Galina could not quite understand it at first-dark fabric flapped in the water, concealing the outline of its contents, until she saw a hand. And like in a brainteaser where one was supposed to find a hidden figure, everything fell into place-there were two hands and a leg, and a pale face with wide open eyes. She was about to call to the man bobbing in the waves when she realized that his hands were lashed together with blue electrical tape, and that the deep blue shadow around his eye was a bruise, spreading slowly over the left half of his face. A dark smear at the corner of his mouth was undoubtedly blood, but at this point Galina did not need any confirmation of the man's dead state. “Who is it?” she asked Elena, unable to look away from the corpse that neared the bank on which they stood, certain as death. “Why is he here?"
"I don't know.” Elena bent down to tear out a long and stout cattail stem, and reached out, pulling the body closer. “Never seen him before. And his clothes-do they look familiar?"
Galina looked over the sodden leather jacket and track pants, at the buzz cut. “He's a thug,” she said. “What they call a racketeer. There're plenty of them on the surface now."
"I see.” Elena grabbed the lapels of the dead man's jacket, and heaved the body ashore. “Never seen a corpse making it here.” She turned to the rusalki, still huddling in a disturbed clump, like deer. “Did you drag him here?"
They all shook their heads in unison and cried, wringing their hands-it almost looked like ritual mourning, Galina thought.
"Now, this is really strange,” Elena said, looking over the man at her feet thoughtfully. “What, the surfacers don't think they're good enough for us and dump their garbage here?"
"They don't even know about this place,” Galina reminded her.
Elena sighed. “I know. I just don't understand."
"There have been strange things happening on the surface too.” Galina told her about the birds and her sister.
"This is strange,” Elena agreed. “There's magic on the surface and corpses down here-it shouldn't happen. I think someone's breaching the barrier. We better talk to one of the old ones."
"I was looking for Berendey when the rusalka led me here,” Galina said. “Do you know where we could find him?"
Elena snorted. “Berendey? To be sure, he makes things grow; he even steals sunlight from the surface for my plants-see how green they are? But he wouldn't do something like that; he couldn't if he wanted to. Nor Father Frost, no any of the others-they have a link to the surface, but it is subtle. No, we need someone who actually knows what this is all about."
"And who would that be?"
"The Celestial Cow Zemun,” Elena said seriously. “Don't even think of laughing."
Galina didn't feel like laughing, with a dead body almost touching her sneakers. “Can we talk to my friends first? One of them is a cop, and maybe he would know something about this body."
"What is there to know? He's dead.” Elena prodded the corpse with the toe of her boot. “But suit yourself. Go get your cop and come back here as soon as you can."
Galina found Yakov in the back room of the Pub. She paused on the threshold, breathing in its sweet smell of pipe tobacco and fresh sawdust. Yakov and David talked in quiet voices, the silences often stretching between them like clouds of smoke.
Galina hated to interfere with their conversation-she could not make out the words, but the obvious comfort between them clung with the warm air of familiarity, and she sighed to think that she wasn't a part of anything like that. She cleared her throat. “Yakov, there's something I want you to see."
He startled with a guilty look on his face. “I'm sorry,” he told David. “I guess I better go-we did come here for a reason."
"It's quite all right,” David said, and smiled at Galina. “Did you find Berendey?"
"No,” Galina said. “Just a corpse."
Elena waited for them by the lake. On the way, Galina explained the situation to Yakov, and he kneeled by the body, examining it. It struck her that this policeman who always seemed so unsure and so defeated actually knew what he was doing-he examined the cuts and bruises on the face and wrists of the body, and turned out the pockets of the leather jacket.
The passport was sodden and unreadable, but there was also an address book and a wallet with a laminated library card. Yakov grunted and placed his hands behind the corpse's ears. The muscles on his arms tensed, and Galina stepped back instinctively-Yakov's usually placid demeanor had prevented any thought that he was capable of violence. Now, as she watched him wrench the corpse's lower jaw, she grew worried. “What are you doing?” she asked.
"Trying to get his mouth open.” Yakov pointed at the dry trace of blood staining the corner of the dead man's lips and smearing his chin. “He was tortured, I think, and I'm looking for bite marks on his tongue and cheeks, and maybe some broken teeth. Those usually occur with torture."
Galina looked away as the face under Yakov's hands crunched and collapsed. She stared at the calm black water, at the rusalki who still minced at the edge of the lake, at the rustling cattails. Anywhere but where Yakov was doing something to a dead man, something wrong. Galina understood the necessity of such procedures in the surface world, but here it felt almost sacrilegious. Then again, she thought, this was what people did. No matter how remote and magical a place was, there would always be corpses and brutish people with ropy arms messing it all up. No matter how beautiful the view from a rooftop was, there would always be empty bottles and squashed cigarette filters, dirty rags and smells of sweat.
"It's all right,” Elena whispered to her. “He's almost done."
"It's not all right,” Galina said. “You know how they say the grass is always greener on the other side? It is greener, because you're not there. And if you go you'll trample it and leave dirty footprints and probably spill something poisonous."
Elena smiled. “I don't think that's how they mean it."
"I know. Only they're wrong."
She tried not to listen to the awful creaking and slurping sounds, the wet swish of fabric, the soft give of something organic and formerly human. And then a soft tinkling that inexplicably reminded her of the New Year tree ornaments and the long silvery strings of tinsel.
"What on earth is this?” Yakov said behind her.
Elena kneeled next to him. “I have no idea.” Her voice held a quiet awe, and Galina turned.
The two of them looked at the dead man's face, his mouth open and his lower jaw jutting out at an unnatural angle. They stared at something in his mouth, and Galina looked, too.
A small object, the size of a sparrow's egg, bright metallic blue, lay under the swollen purple tongue as if that were a monstrous nest. Yakov reached out and touched it, and the blue sphere tinkled and sang. Galina drew a sharp breath through her clenched teeth, trying to ignore the ruined body around the shining blue gem.
Elena nudged Yakov aside, and plucked the object from its gruesome resting place. It rolled on her palm, still singing, sending icy sparks into the air that suddenly felt fresher, cooler. “I don't know what it is,” Elena said, “but it certainly did not belong on the surface, just as this corpse does not belong here."
"What do you mean?” Yakov asked. He seemed to have noticed Elena for the first time and stared at her, wide-eyed, as if she was a greater miracle than the blue gem.
"Underground used to be more isolated than it is now,” Elena said. “And I don't like that."
"Why not?” Yakov said. “Wouldn't it be great if people on the surface learned about this place, if they could visit here?"
"No,” Galina said. “It wouldn't be great at all. It will become just like the surface if that happens."
Elena rolled her eyes. “Look at you two. You just got here and you already presume to decide for us. Now, can we go see Zemun?"
"Who's Zemun?” Yakov whispered in Galina's ear.
She moved away. “The Celestial Cow,” she said. “Don't ask. That's all I know."
"I like cows,” Yakov said. “But what's a celestial cow doing underground?"
"Like all of us, she's in exile,” Elena said. She led them around the lake and through another labyrinth of twisty wooden streets. Galina surmised that there were no true boundaries to the city-it spread in rivulets between long stretches of woods and meadows and pulled in open plains, spreading with each new arrival. She did not want to think whether underground had a limit, or whether a day would come when the woods would have to go and the deep swamps would be drained to give way to more people. She did not want to consider what would happen to the rusalki and the forest spirits when there would be no more water or forests. She did not want to envision the underground world a darker, dustier copy of what lay above it. And yet, it was all she could think about.