Disappearing Earth

FEBRUARY

Revmira woke up knowing it was February 27. The date bore down on her. She dressed slowly, sadly, under its weight, and came out to the kitchen to find her husband boiling their coffee. “Good morning,” she said.

“Morning,” Artyom said, and she knew from the line of his shoulders over the stove that he knew what day it was, too.

She got out cheese and ham for breakfast. While she prepared two plates at the counter, he poured their cups. The teaspoon clinked as he mixed sugar into hers. They had been together twenty-six years, nearly half Revmira’s life, and still she was surprised by Artyom’s kindness. He was the easiest man she had ever known. But then she had only known two.

“How’d you sleep?” he asked.

She shrugged, put their breakfast sandwiches down, and took her seat. “Are you on call today?”

“Twelve to twelve.” Soon he would meet with the rest of his rescue team, stack their gear, get ready for any urgent flight to the mountains or the ice caves or the open water, but for now he was rumpled in his T-shirt. He had not yet shaved. Behind him, their kitchen window showed a clear sky.

She had slept heavy and dark the night before. She had not dreamed of Gleb. For years after the accident, she did—that Gleb visited her in her childhood home; treated her on her birthday; drove her down the bumpy road beyond the city limits to the ocean’s black sandy shore. “This is impossible,” she said in that one. “I know,” he said and shifted gears. She wanted in the dream to touch his hand but was afraid to distract him at the wheel.

“It’s going to be warm,” Artyom said.

She looked up from her plate. “Is that right?”

“Almost zero.”

“I’m not surprised,” she said. “You only give yourself the best shifts. You’ll probably spend all day picnicking.”

“Having ice cream in the snow. Sure. More like we’ll be called at noon on the dot for some novice getting sunburned off-piste.”

“Just be careful,” she said. He kept watching her.

“With weather like this, it could be a short winter,” he said. “Lieutenant Ryakhovsky texted this morning. They want our boats to search for the sisters in the bay once it thaws.”

The bread was dry in Revmira’s mouth. “He never got back to me.”

“I asked again about that. He didn’t respond.”

“He’s a jackass,” she said.

Artyom smiled at her from across the table. That look deepened the lines on his face.

“You told him about Alla’s daughter?”

“I told him everything,” Artyom said. “He’s all business: the major general wants approval from the ministry for another round of water searches.”

Revmira put her bread down. For months, Petropavlovsk’s rescue team had been helping the police organize search efforts for the Golosovskaya sisters. Artyom’s rescue work usually came in bursts—hikers unable to descend from volcanoes, snowmobilers cracking through thin lake ice, fishermen getting turned around at sea—but this case would not end. In the fall, Artyom had led civilians through the city to search for the missing girls; once the weather turned, he brought home occasional updates from officers.

How tidy of the police to throw all their efforts into looking for two small white bodies. That served as a good excuse to ignore the city’s other corruptions, its injustice, its drunk drivers or petty arsonists. Why should Ryakhovsky answer Artyom’s text messages about some northern teen? Preparing boats to drag a bay that was frozen must occupy all the lieutenant’s valuable time.

Over the winter holidays, Revmira’s second cousin, Alla, visiting from Esso, had said that her younger daughter was still missing. Alla had brought the subject up at the cross-country ski base’s café after what was supposed to be a pleasant morning together spent gliding over snow. Listening, Revmira cut a cottage-cheese pastry into three portions, while Alla rubbed her temple and talked, and Alla’s grown son watched those entering the base stomp their boots clean.

Revmira had never met this missing daughter. Alla came to the city only once a year, to see her grandchildren, and contacted Revmira with the same sadness each time. Their meetings came out of mutual obligation. After Revmira’s parents passed, Revmira had stopped visiting the village. There was nothing for her there. Her cousin’s gloomy annual updates were enough to confirm that choice.

“The authorities still have nothing to say about your girl?” Revmira had asked. Her cousin only shook her head. “Here the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Emergency Situations have been looking for these Russian sisters tirelessly.”

“It wasn’t that way with us.”

“I imagine not.”

“Natasha told me in the fall that the sisters were taken by someone,” Alla said. “When Lilia disappeared, I begged authorities to look for the person responsible. All Esso’s officers did then was spread rumors about Lilia’s boyfriends. She wasn’t…she had admirers, but that was exactly why…” Behind her glasses, Alla’s eyelids lowered. Her nostrils flared.

Revmira sat in quiet with her for a few moments. Meanwhile Alla’s son picked up his portion of their divided pastry. “Artyom could speak to the city police for you,” Revmira said eventually. “He knows people. They might open a case for her, at least. Keep a description on file.” Her cousin did not look hopeful.

Still, Revmira had collected a few details to pass forward. Lilia was small, too, and young, though not as young as the Golosovskaya sisters. Artyom had given Revmira the lieutenant’s number, then himself messaged the lieutenant with a graduation photo of the teen, but they heard nothing back. No great surprise. Lilia was three years missing, Even, the child of a nobody.

Revmira should never have suggested a city investigation to Alla. This was how it went: no end to grief. Her cousin’s cheeks had been hollowed out by absence. Revmira knew that expression too well.

“No shock Ryakhovsky didn’t respond,” Revmira said at the breakfast table. “Given the chance to assist an old native woman, our police would rather—” She stopped, turned her face from Artyom.

Rather die, she’d almost said. She had almost let herself forget what day it was.

“Well, he ought to try,” Artyom said. She shook her head. He went on: “He’s touchy these days about taking tips from civilians. He was reprimanded for it by the major general in the fall. But that’s their job. These officers are too young to understand what duty is.”

Revmira sipped the coffee. It tasted good. Sweet. She did not deserve it. Distracting herself, talking casually…even after all this time, it made no sense that she got to wake up and chatter and drink fresh coffee while Gleb could not.

She stood from the table. “Late, isn’t it?” she said. Artyom glanced at the clock on the stove.

She went to brush her teeth. In the mirror, she saw herself dressed for work.

Had she ever been as young as she was when she met Gleb? All her days back then felt bright. When, at seventeen, she moved to Petropavlovsk, the city was filled with scaffolding, soldiers, polished monuments. She came to her first day of university and saw Gleb. She was thinner then, tanner, an emissary from Esso’s Young Communist League, and he was as fair and glorious as a figure on a propaganda poster. His eyebrows furrowed under the classroom lights as he looked back.

What a lucky, stupid girl she had been in those years. Even the most difficult times she remembered from that age were nothing now. A month into her first semester, she received a package at her dormitory. The box was so light she thought at first it must be empty. She opened it to find dozens of dried pinecones; her father had gathered them to mail three hundred kilometers south to her. The box smelled like home. The forest, dirt, her parents’ scratchy clothes. She shook out the seeds, chewed them, and cried. At seventeen years old, that was her most desolate moment: missing the people who sent her packages.

And that same afternoon she was able to bring a pinecone to class and pass it across the aisle into Gleb’s hand. They were married before graduation. She had the whole world then, but she was only a child.

She applied her eyeliner. Revmira always took this date to repeat to herself Gleb’s qualities: his patience, his charm. He waited by her desk after class and she prolonged collecting her books to keep him there above her. Once, in the park with friends, he knelt down to tie her shoes. He was that indulgent. That surprising. His fingers a little longer and thinner than hers. The weekend she, finally his wife, moved in with him and his mother, he brought home a two-liter tub of red caviar to celebrate. They ate out of the tub with spoons. The saline pop of those eggs on their teeth. She would never forget.

In the other room, Artyom was clearing the dishes. They rang against the sink. Each year, Revmira’s recollections stayed the same—the tied shoe, the tub of caviar—while everything else, against her will, deepened, strengthened, grew. Gleb’s letters and records were in a suitcase on the floor of her closet. She wore a white uniform, and kept a tidy house he would not see, and had been married again for so long that people said to her, “Your husband,” without bothering to specify who.

She came back into the kitchen to give Artyom a kiss. “I’m off.”

Wiping his hands, he followed her to the hall. He stood in slippered feet while she pulled on her heels. When she was ready, he held out her coat, wool and thickly lined. “Lunch this afternoon?”

“If you’re not too busy,” she said. “You’ll let me know if you get called in?”

“Of course,” he said. He always did. She kissed him again. His mouth under hers was soft and warm and living. It was not fair that he should be so good to her today, when she attended least to him. None of this was fair.

As she drew away, she saw his eyes had stayed open. He saw, somewhere in there, the woman she was when they first met—that destroyed version of her.

Revmira pulled her purse up on her shoulder. “Are you all right?” he asked.

“Of course,” she said. She had to be.

All the same, she walked as though lost the four short blocks to the bus stop. The sky was washed blue. Melting ice broke under her shoes. Banks of snow propped up the buildings around her. The morning of the accident, Gleb’s mother, still in her nightgown, came into their room. Sunlight was filtering through the curtains. Gleb had left for work almost an hour before. Revmira sat up, then, so the futon swayed underneath her. The frame was hard as bones below the mattress. “What is it, Mama?” Revmira said. She always thought of that question afterward—another recollection played and replayed. She should not have asked. Vera Vasilievna’s expression already told her.

When Revmira found out, she screamed. Gleb’s side of the sheets still smelled like him, but that would only fade. His clothes hung in the closet. On the top of their dresser, there were his childish prizes, his medals from the All-Union Pioneers and his school certificates.

At the funeral, there were photographs of him. A shut box that tormented her with what it did or did not hold. Revmira was ten when her grandfather died; his body had stayed for three days on display in her childhood home, and she could touch his skin, stiff as cardboard, which scared her and soothed her at once to feel. But Gleb, who had not been wearing a seat belt, had to stay in the state morgue until the service. Pieces of him could be missing. She did not know. She never would. Picturing him that way made her think she might go mad.

Vera Vasilievna covered all the mirrors in the apartment, like Revmira’s family had in Esso—but Gleb was not an old man, he was twenty-two, he was immaculate. “You’re my child now,” Vera Vasilievna told her. “You’re all I have left.” Though when Gleb had first brought Revmira home his mother wept over his seeing a native girl. They threw fistfuls of dirt into his grave. It was impossible. His mother was shaking, and Revmira knew she should put an arm around the woman’s shoulders, and she could not. Instead Revmira stood with her dirty hands folded. Everything around her was just an imitation of what he had been.

Revmira moved to a room in a friend’s apartment. To keep herself sane, she had to keep going, so she gave away their wedding presents, the dishes they ate off, the clothes he saw her wear, until the only scraps left of their life together fit in one buckled bag. She finished her degree, found a job, paid her bills, made her dinners. She watched Gorbachev speak about openness and change on her television. And all the while she was screaming. She never stopped. In her mind, she was still twenty-one and ten months and two days, and it was just after seven in the morning, and Gleb had been lying next to her an hour before.

The bus delivered her to the hospital’s triage desk by eight. The nurse getting off shift briefed her: this many beds open, this many appointments to expect, this or that piece of gossip that had surfaced overnight. Revmira draped her coat over the back of the desk chair and nodded along. There were only two men sitting along the wall of the admission department, which was no more than a corridor, really, a narrow green-painted hall. Any sick people who could afford it bought themselves seats in the waiting room of a private clinic. After the other nurse left, Revmira called one man over to the triage desk so he could state his symptoms. He opened his mouth and the sickly smell of booze washed over her. “Sit down,” she said. She waved the other man up, reviewed his paperwork, and had him follow her upstairs for an exam.

Through the morning, patients came in clusters: brusque Valentina Nikolaevna for radiation therapy, a teenager whose appendix was near bursting, a snowboarder who broke his leg and was wheeled to the elevator with lines of snow on his jacket sleeves. Revmira assessed them all. She directed people for X-rays, for ultrasounds, and to the surgical floor. Doctors called down to manage prescriptions. Revmira called up about the patient flow. One man entered the admission department with a crossbow bolt through the meat of his right shoulder, and she had him fill out his papers with his left hand before she sent him forward.

As the hall thinned out to one or two again, she had time to tidy the top of the desk, lining up a stapler with the long edge of her notepad. She let her brain go neat and blank. Artyom texted her to say that he was being called in for a mountain rescue. She texted back good luck. Out the door, the street was sunny. The air was practically vernal. Eventually a trainee came down to cover her for lunch.

In the break room, Revmira picked up a magazine to read. Rather than attending to its pages, though, she held the magazine over her soup and recalled the summer day, before their last year of university, that she and Gleb got married. He in his suit and she in her plain little heels. Her hair braided over her shoulder. The way he held her after they said their vows—she had wanted to have his children that instant.

Good, probably, that they didn’t end up pregnant. If she had stood at his funeral with a baby in her arms—where would she have gone afterward? What would she have done?

When Artyom, years after, found out he couldn’t have children, Revmira had already lived too long for the news to surprise. That loss piled up with the rest. In any case, Kamchatka was no longer a place to raise a family. Just look at the hole in her cousin’s life where a daughter belonged. The communities Revmira grew up in had splintered, making them easy places to be forgotten, easy places to disappear. Revmira’s parents had raised her in a strong home, an idyllic village, a principled people, a living Even culture, a socialist nation of great achievement. That nation collapsed. Nothing was left in the place it had occupied.

Revmira stirred her cooling soup. Modern life had buried the lovers she and Gleb had been. She ended up back at the wedding registry office ten years later; though she and Artyom were married in the same building, they stood in a different room, before a different officiant, under the laws of a different state. All the spots she and Gleb went to as newlyweds—kissing each other before the Bering monument, at the city center, or on top of St. Nicholas Hill—were now covered in graffiti and trash. Even the university changed. Revmira had to stop by every fall to pick up student medical records. The first time, she went to the classroom where she met Gleb and found the space filled by strangers.

He died and the whole Soviet Union followed. Revmira’s country, her young face, the entire course of her life had changed. Since she started at the hospital, she had sat next to more than a hundred patients to help them go, so she now knew death well: the release of breath, the rattle, the calm. Her parents went the same way, one after the other. And she missed them. She had resigned herself a long time ago to missing all the people who left her. There were many, many. Vera Vasilievna, too. But Gleb was the only one who had been perfect. He was the one whose death shocked her, who kept shocking her year after year.

It would have been easier if she had died with him. Not better, necessarily, just…easier. If she was in the car, too. She had imagined it so many times.

Back at the triage desk, she thought of that. His car, the road, the icy dark before dawn that day. Their wedding, his arms around her, the little boy they could have had, the little girl. February 27. Even when Revmira was awake, she was dreaming.

Her cell phone vibrated. The screen showed the name of the wife of another man in Artyom’s crew. Revmira ducked her head to take the call. “Yes, Inna?”

There was a second of silence on the other end of the line. Inna said, “Something’s happened.”

Around Revmira, the people in the waiting room muttered and sighed and moaned. Under her forehead, the desk was smooth. Cold. Revmira kept her face down. She waited.

“They radioed in. They’ve been trying to reach us. Reach you. Artyom was hurt,” Inna said. “I’m sorry, Reva. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.” Her voice continued.

Inna said a rock. She said his head. She said knocked out. She said no pain. The team medic tried to revive him. He was already gone. It happened too fast, Inna said.

Folded in her chair, Revmira looked down at her scrubs. Her cotton-covered knees. “I don’t understand,” she said.

Inna said a rock. There had been a rescue, a lost skier. She said they found the skier. And then a rock fell. She said his head. No pain. An accident. His skull. The curve of his neck, his jaw, his face looking at her this morning with the window soft and white behind.

“I see. I see,” said Revmira.

She hung up. Someone came to the desk and she waved him away. She had forgotten to ask where Artyom was now. Should she call back? She unlocked the phone and looked at Inna’s name in her call list. This was crazy. She opened up a text to her husband. Her fingers moved slowly over the letters. She had to tell Artyom what this woman had said.

Artyom was hurt. Inna told her that. But Revmira would take him as an invalid. She would take him weak. Diminished. As long as he was living.

She looked up and Inna was in front of the desk. Revmira looked at the clock on her computer. Time had passed.

“I came to take you home,” Inna said. Her eyes were red. “They’re still in the mountains.”

“Okay,” said Revmira. “I understand.”

Inna went away. Someone touched Revmira’s shoulder. It was the trainee, saying she would take over. Inna was there again. Revmira made sure not to forget her coat. They went outside. Artyom was dead.

Revmira concentrated on buckling herself into Inna’s car. It was hard to do. Her hands were strange. She focused on her fingers, her bending knuckles. The parchment color of her nails against the seat belt.

Since Gleb’s accident, Revmira had hated cars. Now she had to hate rocks, too. Rocks. Snow. The sound of her cell phone ringing. Sugar stirred into her coffee. The smell of breakfast filling their kitchen. She had thought she was strong, but she was not. She was not. Not anymore, not without him.

In the driver’s seat, Inna started the engine and wiped her cheeks. She looked up through the windshield. Her jacket whispered as she moved. “It’s this weather,” Inna said. “Loose ice. Avalanche weather.”

Revmira folded her hands in her lap. She could not get control of them. Cold air blew on her from the vents. It was February 27.

“This is fate,” she said out loud.

Inna sniffed back tears at the steering wheel. “What?”

Revmira looked out the window at the heaps of blackened snow bordering the parking lot. Water trickled out onto the asphalt. The sun was high above them. She thought of the rock. His head. No pain. Last weekend napping on the couch in the afternoon, her legs pinned between his, their faces close together. His breath on her cheek. Once he woke up, he asked her if she was comfortable. They had talked about headlines, currency devaluations, parliamentary decisions, the Golosovskaya sisters. “If I were their kidnapper,” she told him, “I’d bring them north. No one watches the villages. You could bury bodies right on your property in daylight hours without anyone noticing.”

Artyom had kissed the creased skin below her eye. “My morbid, brilliant woman.”

She carried death into their marriage, brought death with her up to this day. Quietly, into the glass of the window, she said, “Our suffering is fated.” She should have expected this from the very beginning. She had met Artyom, that excellent man, and condemned him.

The parking lot rolled away, other cars gathered around them, city buses pulled over, traffic lights turned green. Inna took the long way home, past the cinema, and Revmira did not correct her. Snow piles rose and fell beside them like ocean waves. In front of her and Artyom’s building, Revmira took out her keys. Inna plucked them away to unlock the doors. I can do that, Revmira wanted to say. I know how to do all of this. I’ve done it before. Instead she followed Inna into her own apartment.

The younger woman went straight to put on the kettle. Inna had decided to be capable. It was easy for Inna; the man she loved was alive.

“Excuse me,” Revmira said. Her voice sounded so polite. She took her phone into the bathroom and called Artyom’s sister.

“Oh,” his sister said and started to weep. The sound of it, rhythmic, desperate, hurt. Revmira pressed the phone harder to her ear. She had not cried yet. She had to listen. “Have you seen him?” his sister asked.

“No,” Revmira said. She knew how searches worked. “No, they’re coming back from the mountains. It’s quite— It’s difficult. They bring the one they rescued first. It’ll be a few hours.”

“Maybe it’s not true.”

The bathroom sink was flecked with Artyom’s hair. He had shaved this morning after Revmira left. This world was built for people to suffer. “It’s true,” Revmira said, and the sister wept harder.

Inna waited in the kitchen, so Revmira, after getting off the phone, went into the bedroom and shut the door. At the top of their tugged-up blanket was Artyom’s pillow. Revmira touched it. Soft. On the bedside table, there was his book. His glass of water—she picked that up and drank it.

She put the empty glass on his side of the blanket, and the book there, too. They made little dents in the wool. Then she opened up the bedside drawer to find a pocketknife, his spare sunglasses, a bottle of vitamin D supplements. She put those on the bed. It was nice to see his things laid out. She could do that. She had nothing else to do. She went to their dresser and pulled out his sweaters, his pants, the white undershirts, the worn briefs. Artyom was in his house clothes when she last saw him. Navy athletic pants and an old T-shirt. She fetched those from the laundry basket. She did not know what he wore to work today, but she would find out soon enough.

She wanted to see his body.

The pile on the bed looked small. She went to the closet for more.

She should gather his things. She should stockpile memories. She met Artyom when she was twenty-nine, when her former classmates had already made themselves mothers and she, still young, had nothing but her job and her buried history. She frightened people. But Artyom was not disturbed. He was a friend of a friend; they were introduced at a party. He had trained as a biathlete outside Moscow and returned to Kamchatka after too many years of fruitless competition left him thin, fair-minded, strong.

They slept together sooner than a month after they met. In the blackness of Artyom’s bedroom, his parents out and his sister a wall away, Revmira peeled off his clothes. His knees and shoulders were bound up in muscles. She ran her fingers over their cords. When she explored his chest, she felt his heart, that athlete’s measured muscle, pounding. His breath was quick. His body betrayed him.

With her fingers tight on the closet rod, she began to cry. They last had sex on Wednesday. Today was Sunday.

How did Artyom want her, even then? How did he manage to survive for so long? For months after they were married, she appreciated him, his long legs, his service, and then all at once she fell in love. They were on the bus together. It was snowing the way it used to and never seemed to anymore, those flakes so dense that the driver followed the road not from sight but from habit. Three blocks from their stop, Artyom turned to Revmira, flipped up her collar, and pulled her jacket zipper to her chin. He tugged her hat down on her forehead and ran his fingers around her wrists to check the seal of her gloves. Then he took her hand and faced forward. Swaddled up, she felt herself—alive. Finally alive. The blood in her body was a rolling boil.

She had sat there warm and thrilled and terrified. She had believed new wonders waited. Her only bare skin was the strip around her eyes, and the world outside looked so fresh, so clean. So promising. After Gleb died, she was alone, alone, always alone, and suddenly, on a plastic seat in a crowded bus, she found that someone else was with her. She’d exhaled with joy into her jacket collar. Artyom.

Her husband. Her rescuer. He had done his duty. Now Revmira was supposed to keep going without him. She wiped her face and went into the kitchen. When she entered, Inna stood up, phone in her hand, and said, “They’re on their way.”

“All right,” Revmira said. She took his mug and plate from the drying rack.

In the bathroom, she grabbed his toothbrush, razor, cologne. The face lotion he used—she added it all to the pile.

For nearly all of the past twenty-six years, she had busied herself with Artyom’s kindness, their careers, the mealtime conversations, the assistance they offered others. She looked at the rest of the country falling apart but believed that she and Artyom could last. She was wrong. Artyom’s twelve-hour shifts, Revmira’s work at the hospital, their appeals to authorities—those were the acts of an earlier age. Those things were useless. In the end, they did not protect anyone.

She went back to the closet, pulled out Gleb’s suitcase, and heaved the case onto the blanket. Its bulk pressed on Artyom’s belongings. She opened the case, snaps biting into her fingers, and saw some objects she had forgotten, some others she could not forget. She needed to be with these things of her husband’s. All of it together was everything she had left. The letters he wrote her. Faded record sleeves. His winter hat, his civil passport. She emptied the old case out, then she put it down on the blanket and crawled onto the bed.

Boots, buckles, papers, and scarves. After Gleb’s accident, she thought she would die. She thought she had. This date took him and pulled her down after, grief determined as gravity. But now she would live. She had to. It was what she did: live while others could not. There was no pleasure in it.