Ghostlands

THIRTY-NINE

“Wake up, Viktor,” the sweet, soft voice said, and he felt a caress on his cheek. “You’ve been dreaming.”

It was only as he opened his eyes that Doc Lysenko realized she had been speaking Russian.

She filled his field of vision, she was that close, peering down at him lovingly, with him all the world to her.

That tangle of auburn hair was unmistakable, the long, long lashes, those incredible, unforgettable eyes, darkest green with flecks of gold in them, like sunlight casting through dense leaf cover onto a forest floor.

It was Yelena.

“This is not real,” Doc said in alarm, sitting up, throwing back the covers. He, too, was speaking Russian.

“Sh, sh, my love,” Yelena said, kissing his cheeks and brow, touching him with light fingers like a whisper. Oh God, it was familiar, so precisely right. He realized with a shock how much he had forgotten, and now remembered.

“Nurya…?” he whispered in a croak, the pain like an icicle from a Moscow winter thrust into his heart.

“In the other room, of course, asleep. It’s early.” She drew him out of the bed, enfolded him in the thick sable robe she had bought him in Odessa on their third anniversary. He saw that she was wearing the pale shift he so loved. She pulled her hair back into a ponytail-which only made her features all the more elegant and refined-and secured it with a band.

“Come,” she said, taking his hand. “Let’s step outside, to the beach.”

“No…” he protested weakly, and felt his own consciousness dimly, or rather as if everything that had come before was growing dim, retreating from him despite all his efforts to hold on to it.

He pulled away from her languorous grasp, stepped out of the bedroom into the common room, with its fireplace of the twelve massive stones quarried from near the Sea of Azov. He knew this place well, felt overwhelmed by the sensation of returning home, of nostalgia like a consuming wave.

This is what it is like to die, he thought, to be lost in an embrace.

Ignoring her whispered entreaties, he strode to the opposite bedroom and eased open the door. In the darkness within, a small figure lay bunched under the covers. Hesitantly, his breath held like a treasure within him, he approached the bedside and peered at the tiny form. Her face was pressed into the down pillows, and she wore a frown line between her brows as though concentrating on life’s deepest dilemma. But she still looked every bit an angel.

Yelena was behind him now, her gentling hands on his shoulders. “She’s fine, she’s perfectly well,” she assured him, her breath soft as memory in his ear. “Don’t you dare wake her.”

He turned to his wife, and she shimmered through the wetness of his eyes. “Goodness, Viktor, you act as if we’d been gone an eternity. Come, let’s see the dawn.”

He let her lead him then, to dress him in his summer clothes of linen, his soft hide sandals. The two of them emerged out onto the fine white sand, he and the woman who was his bride. The sun was warm even though it was the break of day, the wind mild and salt fragrant. They were alone on the beach, all the other gingerbread cottages closed up tight, the world at peace. He looked out at the sea that stretched forever, the gentle waves lapping like God welcoming a road-worn pilgrim, a prodigal son.

They were at the dacha on the shores of the Black Sea, their summer idyll when Yelena had persuaded him reluctantly to go on vacation, to set aside his crushing workload at the hospital in Kiev, to fob it off on other, equally competent (although not quite so gifted) doctors.

It was an impossible luxury for most physicians, he knew, but then Yelena’s father was high up in the Party, and it was the family retreat, had been since the days of Stalin and Molotov, before the Great Patriotic War and the frozen dead of Stalingrad.

A seabird called from on high, and he looked into the rosy, lightening sky to see the gull hovering overhead, could make out the perfection of its outstretched wings, the ordered rows of its feathers. It floated bobbing on the currents of air, then folded its wings and plunged like a spike driving down, crashing into the water, sending a spray flying upward as it speared a fish and gobbled it down.

I have seen that movement before, Doc thought, but it had been no bird and its prey no fish, but something of considerably more weight and moment.

He tried to call up the image of those dark forms and found them elusive, could not summon them in his mind’s eye. It filled him with dread closing on panic. But even as the feeling speared up within him, he felt it damped down and muffled, as if from some will outside his own.

Vague forms and structures moved within his mind, the towers of foreign buildings, faces he felt should be familiar but were alien and born of far lands.

Not now, but belonging to another time, one that was paradoxically both future and past, in a time beyond the horror that was to come. It was all receding from him, misting away. He felt a sense of desperate unreality, and suddenly did not know whether it was the present moment or the insistent call of memory that was unreal.

Yelena was studying him, the ocean breeze playing with her hair, and her smile was sympathetic and sad. “You look so weary, my love. It’s good you’ll be able to rest here.”

And, dear God, he felt that, too. So good to be here, to release the grief, the demand of duty, of obligation to others. To relax into ease and comfort and belonging, like floating on the warm, forgiving sea.

No, something inside proclaimed to him. You get your fucking ass out of there right now, Doc Lysenko.

It was a voice that spoke in his heart, an American voice, a woman’s voice.

Boi Baba…

“I cannot remain here,” he murmured to the exquisite, serene woman beside him. He began stumbling away, along the lip of the ocean, his sandals pressing into the damp sand as the foam retreated back from him into the waves.

Yelena moved quickly to overtake him, stood blocking his way. Her eyes were no less loving, but more firm as she held him in her gaze.

“You had a dream, Viktor,” she said, not unkindly, “and in your dream we died, Nurya and I, and you were a refugee washed up onto a distant shore, and the world died, too….”

“No,” he breathed, and could not have said whether he was denying that it was a dream or that it was so.

“Is that the world you want, Viktor? A world of corpses? Or this, to be with the living?”

But it hadn’t been just a world of the dead. There had been someone, someone who had brought him back to life, when he himself had been the walking dead.

Why could he not remember her name?

Yelena drew close to him, and he let her kiss him on the lips. He felt her living breath, felt the perfume of her, the promise with no hint of the grave.

“It is no accident that we are here,” she said, and the emphasis she put on the word “accident” made him shiver and called up a distant echo of tires shrieking as they lost their grip on a rain-sheened road, the roar of a stream that was too swift, too deep, and too hungry, of two bodies he once had forced himself to identify.

Her caress banished the phantoms. “We’re safe here,” she said. “No harm can come to us.”

“And why is that?” he said, a tremor of cold running through him despite the warmth on his skin.

“Maybe there is one who provides you sanctuary, whose name we cannot speak…but who wishes you well.”

Wish…?

Wishart.

The name blossomed in his mind but meant nothing to him, although he felt it should.

But named or not, that was how power worked, how it always worked. Without that protection, that favor, all you loved could be washed away as casually, as disdainfully as skid marks off a road.

Sanctuary…

He could stay here, wrap the sea about him like a winding sheet, entomb himself in safety within this eternal moment, embrace and become like these two he loved.

But then, that was hardly a new sensation, a fresh novelty. No, if anything, it was the state that long years had made familiar to him, a decision he had chosen before the earth on two graves had grown smooth and cold.

Before a young man and woman had sought him out to help a little girl, before they and a wild-eyed mystic had called him back from his torpor, back to an existence of uncertainty and hope and pain.

Wouldn’t you rather be with the living?

Yelena stroked his cheek and smiled again. “I’ll make you breakfast. We’ll rouse Nurya. Wouldn’t you like that?”

He made to speak, to voice a question, but suddenly there was a tearing sound, and he turned from her to look outward.

There was a woman there, clothed in scaly black leather garments, a black helmet crowning her. She held a machete, and a multiplicity of other weapons draped across her back and hung from belts and bandoliers. Behind her, a ragged tear in the sky was sealing up. He supposed she had done that with the machete.

She was standing on the ocean.

And in that moment, Viktor felt a door close in him, and it was a good closing, not a forgetting but definitely an ending. He let out his breath, a release, and felt himself relax into ease and comfort and belonging, like floating on the warm, forgiving sea.

“Time for me to go,” he said to Yelena, and it surprised him only a little how easy it was to make his decision.

He found that he himself could not walk on water, so he splashed out to the ludicrously armored woman in the warm surf. He grabbed her hand, and she hauled him up to her level.

Before she led him out of there, he felt a giddy urge to turn back to Yelena (who still stood there watching him, and had not yet changed into a Gorgon or the goddess Kali or any other improbable thing that was indisputably not Yelena) and shout back, This is my American girlfriend!

But he only had so much tolerance for the absurd.