Red Winter

3

A blinding white light of panic and fear exploded in my mind. A quick flash, a fraction of a second and then it was gone. After that, everything was instinct. The revolver lay on the floor beside my brother and was of no use to me now, so I launched myself at the figure, thinking to protect myself by attacking first. I had no idea who had come into my home, but in the fragment of time it took to make my first movement, I remembered that I had bolted the door. The windows were closed, and the door was locked, so it was impossible that anyone could have come in while I was asleep. The only way anybody could be inside the house was if they had already been here when I returned from searching the village. They had waited for me to fall asleep and they had emerged from their hiding place to do whatever it was they had done to the other villagers.

Three steps were all it took for me to cross the distance between us.

Three wide, quick steps.

My boots clicked on the wooden floor and the figure remained as it was. It made no attempt to move or defend itself and I barrelled into it with all my strength. My natural impulse was to use as much force as I could, to destroy this threat without delay. I had seen and suffered things that gave a man the inclination to destroy and kill before waiting for horrors to be committed upon himself. I had extinguished life before, and tonight I would do the same.

There was no resistance.

As soon as I put my arms round it and forced it to the ground, I knew the figure was thin and weak. It was well padded with clothing, but beneath the materials, bones protruded hard against flesh. Skin was old and dry. Muscle was weak. It made hardly a sound when it hit the floor and took my full weight as I came down on top of it. There was just an escape of air and a muffled grunt, and then I was astride the shape, pinning it to the floor. I put my hands out, finding the narrow throat and circling my fingers round it, pressing my thumbs into the soft hollow, squeezing the life out of it, crushing the cartilage.

The smell that issued from the bag of bones beneath me was hellish. The odour of damp earth and human waste filled my nostrils and clotted my throat. The stink of decay washed over this awful creature like a disease, making me gag, but I knew it was human. It had to be. I could feel its neck crushing in my grip.

It raised its hands to my face, touching me with bony fingers, long nails raking at my cheeks. Then, as life began to leave it and its body began to relax, it managed a word. It opened its mouth and spoke a single word, which came out in a long, hot breath.

‘Alek.’

And with that word, my senses returned to me. I was killing something I could not see. I might have been strangling my own wife on the floor of our home.

I released my grip and jumped back from the creature, crawling to where my brother lay. I ran my hands around the floorboards, searching for the revolver, and when my fingers stumbled on its cold metal, I snatched it up and pointed it at the shape that lay coughing in a heap. It had turned onto its front and was spluttering and hacking like an old hag.

‘Who are you?’ I asked, but the creature didn’t reply. It stayed as it was, fighting for life, drawing air into its lungs in short, wheezing gasps.

I waited, trying to keep the revolver steady in my shaking hands, the stink of the creature thick around me. And when its breathing eventually settled to a rhythmic rasp and whistle, it spoke again.

‘Alek?’ the creature said. ‘Is that you, Alek?’

‘Who are you?’ I asked for a second time, but I was almost too afraid to hear the answer. I knew this was no witch or spectre; this was a person who was looking for shelter and safety, just as I was. I also knew it was a woman – the voice told me that much – but I was afraid to know which woman. The thought that my wife might have become this creature was almost too much to bear.

When she didn’t answer, I raised my voice and asked once more, ‘Who are you? Speak now or I’ll shoot.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, Alek.’ She shifted on the floor and turned towards me. All I could make out in the darkness was the shape of her, but I saw she was holding a hand out to me. Whether she wanted me to take it or she was just trying to reach out to me, I didn’t know, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch her even if it was what she wanted. The way she smelled and the way she had felt in my fingers made my skin crawl.

‘Tell me your name,’ I said.

‘Is that you, Alek?’

‘No. It’s Kolya. Nikolai. Alek’s brother. Who are you?’

There was a moment of silence as if she were trying to remember.

‘Galina,’ she said. ‘Galina, Galina, Galina.’

Galina Ivanovna Petrova was a friend of my mother. At least, she had been until Mama died, the summer before the revolution. Mama went to the river to wash clothes one morning and didn’t return. When Alek and I went looking for her, we found the clothes but no sign of Mama, so we searched up and down the bank, finding nothing until we came to the lake where the water washed from the river. We swam there when the weather was warm. The lake was a good size, with a small, marshy island close to the far shore where my brother and I played as children. We had an old rowing boat with a tin for baling out the water that leaked through the joins in the wood. At its deepest point, the lake was deeper than any of us ever cared to find out. As children, we would dare each other to swim down and touch the bottom, but the darkness closed around you quickly in the murky water, and the weeds reached up to tangle your hands and feet. Nobody I knew had ever touched the bottom.

Mama was in the lake when we found her. She was floating face up, as if the river’s current had turned her to face the sky. Her skirt billowed around her, rippling with the surface water, and her headscarf had come loose so her hair was spread out in tendrils. A deep gash marred her forehead, cleaned by the current and the fish so that it was an empty, ragged scar.

We could only guess that she had slipped from the riverbank and hit her head on one of the many rocks. If the blow hadn’t killed her, it was the cold water that had taken her life, swirling about her, drowning her as she lay unconscious.

We never found Mama’s headscarf.

We buried her the next day, in the patch of land behind the small church. Papa had been there a long time already, and tomorrow morning, I would bury my brother beside them.

‘Galina Ivanovna?’ I said, pushing to my knees. I could hardly believe the creature that had risen from the darkness was the old woman I had known all my life. She was the woman who used to give Alek and me pampushki, still warm from the oven and laced with enough garlic to burn your tongue.

She was one of the women who had mourned at my mother’s funeral.

‘Alek. Thank God. Please. Help me.’

‘It’s Kolya,’ I said without thinking. I got to my feet and took a tentative step towards her. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Help me,’ she said again, and this time I went right to her, reeling at the stink as if coming against a barrier that I had to force myself through. I knelt beside her, feeling the loosened floorboards as I did so.

‘You were under the floor?’ I asked.

‘Always under,’ she said. ‘Hiding. It’s not safe when someone comes.’

I shivered when she touched my wrist. Her grip was stronger than I expected and she squeezed tight as she pulled herself up. Her skin was cold and damp.

‘When who comes, Galina Ivanovna?’

‘Anyone. So I hide and watch and I see everything.’

‘From under the floor?’

‘From under it and above it. From outside and in. From the forest. I saw you coming, riding your horse, and I knew you had come to help me.’

‘Help you how?’

‘Help me with the others, of course. You can take care of them now.’

‘The others? Where are they? I’ve been looking—’

‘Gone,’ she said. ‘All gone.’

With that single word, an icy fist punched through me and clawed its fingers round my heart. ‘Gone where?’

Galina Ivanovna kept her grip tight on my wrist, and her breathing wheezed in and out, in and out. ‘Is it over now?’ she asked. ‘The war? Is that why you came home?’

‘Where have they gone?’ I pulled my hand away, loath to feel her touch. ‘When?’

‘Hmm? Oh. A long time,’ she said. ‘Days, weeks. I don’t know.’

Judging by the way she smelled, I guessed it was weeks rather than days.

‘Can you remember what happened here, Galina Ivanovna? I can’t find anyone and it’s important that you tell me where everyone is. I want to help you.’ I wished I could tear the truth out of her, but she was confused and hardly seemed to know what she was saying.

Galina put her hand to her head and tapped it with the gnarled knuckle of one finger. ‘Remember,’ she said. ‘Remember, remember, remember. Oh.’ Her movement was sudden and she reached out to grab me once more. This time she grasped my forearm with one hand and reached up with the other to touch my cheek. She brought her face close to mine. ‘Don’t let him take me too.’

‘Who?’

She spoke with urgency, lowering her voice and putting her lips to my ear. ‘Don’t let him make me go with the others.’

‘Where did they go?’ I asked, trying to keep my voice calm despite the questions spinning in my head. ‘Who are you talking about?’

She loosened her grip on me and put a hand to her mouth. ‘Don’t let him take me.’

‘Who’s he? Can you remember? You have to tell me—’

‘Koschei,’ she said. ‘The Deathless One.’

She had lost her mind. I understood that as soon as she started whispering about Koschei the Deathless. Gaunt and cruel and brandishing his sword, Koschei was as much an embodiment of evil as Baba Yaga, the cruel witch who lived deep in the forest in a shabby house surrounded by a fence made from the bones of her victims. But Koschei was just a monster from the skazkas we told our children. He was no more real than the forest demons, and he couldn’t have been in our village, but something had happened here in Belev that had driven Galina Ivanovna out of her mind. Though she rambled like a lunatic and smelled like death, she was my kin of sorts and it was my responsibility to take care of her. And whatever she had survived, I needed to hear about it; I needed to know what had happened to my family. If I was to be of any use at all to my wife and children, I needed to know whatever Galina could tell me.

I calmed her and sat her in a chair at the table. A shaft of moonlight came through the side window to touch the far corner of the kitchen, dust motes dancing in its weak glow, but it was still too dark to see much. I could tell that Galina was bundled thick with clothes to keep out the weather, and when I touched her, her whole body trembled. Whether it was age or fear or just the deep cold that made her shiver, though, I couldn’t tell.

I had left the curtains open so I could see into the night, but now I pulled them across and Galina started to protest when I struck a match and put it to the fire I’d prepared in the pich.

‘It’s fine,’ I told her. ‘You’re safe. And this’ll make you more comfortable.’ I was prepared to risk it. The old woman, my mother’s friend, needed some warmth, and for me, it was an excuse to make the fire I had so wanted just a short while ago. Perhaps the flames would chase away some of the demons.

When the pich was lit, I boiled the last of the water from my canteen and poured it into two bowls, bringing them to the table. My hands shook as I placed the revolver close to me and put a match to the candle.

The light it shed was weak and orange, and it cast a strange hue across Galina’s face, but I immediately saw why she smelled so awful. Her skin was pale and lifeless, with the waxy pallor of the dead. Her grey hair would have once been groomed and tied beneath a headscarf, but now it hung damp and ragged, matted in twists and clumped with dirt. Her right eye reflected the flicker of the candle, but her left was missing. Where there should have been sight there was, instead, a moist and glistening wound.

I fought the urge to turn away.

Galina Ivanovna, once my mother’s friend, the woman who had been so smitten by my brother’s sweet smile, was dying, rotting while she still lived. She sat with me like One-Eyed Likho and I had a fleeting memory of the tale my mother used to tell me – the one Marianna had, in turn, told our children. I could see Marianna telling it now, sitting at the side of the bed while our children lay with the blankets pulled to their chin. In the heart of our home, the pich was burning and a fire crackled, while outside, the wind blew the snow across the field and the water froze thick on the lake.

Marianna would hush her voice and bring the candle close as she told of the two men, a tailor and a smith, on a swaggering journey to find evil. She always paused to swallow and look around before she explained how the two men stumbled upon a cabin where they found the hag known as One-Eyed Likho. Dressed in black, all skin and bone and blind in one eye, Likho made the men at home, put them at ease, and when they were relaxed, she cut open the tailor’s throat. Marianna would draw her finger across her neck when she recounted that part; both boys would giggle as she widened her eyes in mock terror and scraped her nail across her perfect skin. Pavel’s laughter, though, was never as genuine as his brother’s, and he cast glances at Misha and furrowed his brow when Marianna told how Likho cooked the tailor and picked his bones clean, just as Baba Yaga liked to do with the lost children she enticed into her shack.

When the tale was told, Marianna would brush the hair from Pavel’s brow and kiss his forehead before doing the same to our eldest, Misha, and we would sit in the outer room and drink tea if we had it and listen to them talking in whispers, sniggering at the horror of the old hags who inhabited the forest. And when their voices grew quiet and the night moved on, it was Pavel who would appear at the bedroom door, looking for reassurance that we were still there, sitting by the warmth of the fire.

I dismissed the image out of mind and forced myself to put my hand on Galina’s. ‘Tell me what happened.’

Galina shook her head and smiled, revealing broken teeth. ‘Alek, you were always a good boy. Do you remember how you used to come to me for blinis and pampushki?’

‘I’m Kolya,’ I said. ‘Alek’s little brother.’

‘Of course,’ she nodded. ‘Little Kolya.’ She looked about, growing more confused. ‘Where’s Alek? I thought I saw him. I have to show him something.’

I glanced across at where Alek lay propped against the wall. ‘Alek is dead,’ I told her.

‘Oh.’ She closed her eye and thought about that for a long time. She pursed her lips and raised her eyebrows, and when she opened her eye again, she looked at me. ‘Sasha is in the forest, Alek.’

‘Your husband Sasha?’ I started to stand up. ‘Can you take me to… ?’ I paused as the weight of realisation settled over me. ‘Is he all right?’

‘I tried to wake him. I tried to put him back together, but…’ She put a bony knuckle to her lips and closed her eye once more.

I eased back into the chair as the numbness worked through me. ‘What about the others?’

Galina shook her head.

‘I want you to show me.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes, now,’ I said.

‘But the forest is so dark. And Koschei is always watching.’

‘There is no Koschei,’ I said. ‘He’s just a story. I need to see now. Take me to see Sasha.’

‘He took all the children, you know. Into the forest.’

Another stab at my heart. ‘Why don’t you show me?’ My mouth was dry, and my stomach burned. I hadn’t eaten properly for days and now bile rose in my throat.

Galina put a hand to her face and rubbed her good eye before looking at me. For a moment a sparkle of lucidity came to her and there was recognition in her expression as she sat up straighter. ‘Kolya,’ she said. ‘Nikolai Levitsky.’

‘Yes, it’s me.’ I leaned closer, seeing a chance to learn something from her.

‘How long is it since I last saw you? You look older. The war has been…’ she started to say before her expression changed. ‘You have to help them,’ she said. ‘I think he took them away.’

‘Took them where? Do you know?’

She shook her head. ‘They called him Koschei, but he…’

‘He what?’

‘He took them all,’ she said, grief beginning to overwhelm her. She put a hand to her mouth as if she were reliving it again, remembering it as if it were new to her. ‘Oh. Yes.’ She tapped her forehead with her bony knuckle, as she had done before. ‘I was watching from the woods. Yes, that’s right. I was watching from the woods and I saw…’ She stopped tapping and put her hand over her mouth, muffling her words. ‘I saw what he did to Sasha. And then they saw me. I tried to stop them and they saw me and…’ She paused.

‘And what, Galina Ivanovna? What happened then?’

She looked up at me and the light went from her eye and I knew I had lost her once more. ‘Koschei,’ she whispered.

‘Can you show me now?’ I asked. ‘Take me to Sasha.’

‘But it’s dark.’

‘The moon is half full. We’ll see well enough.’

‘And there are things in the woods…’ She looked at the door. ‘Such things…’

‘You’ll be safe with me.’

The old woman took my hand and muttered to herself as we crossed the road and followed the riverbank. She hadn’t wanted to leave the izba, but now we were outside, she was eager to show me her secret.

‘The lake,’ she said. ‘The lake.’

She was unsteady and we moved slowly past the place where I had come across the water that afternoon, heading to the far end of the village, where a small footbridge spanned the river. It was a simple wooden construction that leaned to one side as if it were about to collapse into the water. Many of the crosspieces were long gone, leaving gaps in the bridge, and the ones that were still in place were now coated with the oncoming frost. Like a forgotten jewel-encrusted bridge from one world into another, it spanned the murmuring river from the hardening mud on this side to the dark forest beyond. The wind had died away and an ethereal mist had settled along the banks, flooding the trees and shrubs, drifting in the breeze, and I felt the same apprehension I had felt as I entered the silent village.

Galina hesitated and glanced at me.

‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’m here.’ But a chill settled over me as we went on, Galina still grasping my hand, and I looked ahead, afraid to find what was waiting for me.

I used my free hand to hold the bridge rail, but as soon as we reached the shadowy mouth of the path through the forest, I let it fall to rest against the revolver in my coat pocket. The trees were naked, withdrawn from life while they endured the onset of winter. Their damp bark was black in places, but in others it was dusted with frost, glistening in the moonlight that broke through twisted and crooked branches. When I glanced down at Galina’s fingers closed round my own, I saw a similarity in the way her swollen, arthritic knuckles bulged beneath old skin and once again I remembered One-Eyed Likho and how the smith had fled from her through the forest to avoid the tailor’s fate, eventually cutting away his own arm to escape her.

We shuffled along the narrowing path, besieged on all sides by the oak and sycamore and hornbeam. Roots rose and fell from the frozen ground; rotting autumn-flamed leaves shifted across the forest floor as the wind crawled and swirled among the trunks. Somewhere close by came the cawing of many crows. Stark, agitated calls to the night.

When I heard those black birds, I thought I knew what was lying in wait in the darkness. The civil war had cut through the country like the Reaper himself had swept across it, and everywhere he cast his glance he left the dead lying in the fields and villages and forests. And wherever the dead fell so the crows came, obscuring the grass, turning everything black.

My steps faltered and I felt Galina grip my hand harder so that now it was she who was leading me. I shook myself, trying to lose the sickening feeling that swelled in my chest, and told myself I had to go on. I had to see. In the back of my mind, though, a voice told me that I didn’t need to see. Knowing was enough. I didn’t need to see.

When we broke from the forest into the clearing before the lake, the stars looked down with indifference and the trees stood silent.

The crows rose into the sky as one when Galina stepped forward, shooing them away. Their raucous complaints shattered the quiet of the forest like screams in the night and I knew what must have brought them here in such numbers. While their presence in fields far from here indicated sights against which I had hardened my heart, the massing of carrion birds so close to home filled me with dread.

Moonlight fell across the clearing, reflecting from the paper-thin ice on the surface of the lake, washing the area in a silvery glow, but even in daylight I would not have been able to make out the features of the man who lay in the frozen grass.

‘Sasha,’ Galina said, falling to her knees beside him. ‘My Sasha.’ She put her hand on her husband’s face as if she didn’t notice what the crows had done to him. ‘I tried to make him whole again.’

The body was dressed in black trousers and a shirt that had once been white but was decorated now with a dark stain across the chest. The skin was marked from the attention of the crows, and there was a dark sore in the centre of his forehead. As I came closer, I saw that when she stroked her husband’s damaged cheek, his head rolled in an unnatural way, falling to face us and revealing the place where it had been separated from his neck.

I took an involuntary step back and reached a hand inside my pocket to find the reassurance of the revolver’s handle. I scanned the clearing, watching the dark shadows on the periphery, searching for any sign of who might have done this. I had seen bodies before, but not often like this, and I knew this man.

A coldness froze my stomach as unwanted images of the possible fate of my family invaded my thoughts.

‘What… what about the others?’ I asked. ‘Where’s everybody else?’

I knew she’d been alone too long, that this must have happened some time ago, judging by the marks the crows had left on him, but it was almost impossible to know how long unless she told me. There was no smell, meaning the body had decomposed almost not at all, so it could have been quite fresh, but the weather was cold and I had to allow that as a factor. This execution could have taken place two days or two weeks ago.

‘Are they dead too?’ I asked, looking for other shapes in the clearing before turning my attention to Galina once more.

She cut a sorry figure in the gentle mist that diffused the moonlight. Shabby and pitiful. Her clothes upon clothes were dirty and ragged, making her bigger than she really was. Her lank hair, muddied and unkempt, writhed about her head like a witch’s. And in her madness, she sat at her husband’s side believing his head could be returned to his shoulders and that he would get up and walk.

‘Someone saw them coming.’ As before, there was a sudden clarity in her voice, as if she might have stepped from her madness into a moment of sanity. ‘A week ago, perhaps a little more. It was early and I was in the forest looking for mushrooms, just coming back as they were sending the children across the river to hide in the woods. That’s what we always did when they came, to stop them from taking the boys and… and using the girls. But they knew. They must have seen. I waited in the woods and watched them order everyone out of their houses and across the bridge.’ She brushed a hand over her husband’s clotted hair. Her fingers trembled. ‘They lined up the men and made them kneel, and then he drew his sword and said he would kill them, one at a time, until the children came out.’

‘Who was it?’ I almost didn’t dare speak. Galina was like a sensitive switch that had settled on sanity for a moment and I feared that if I disturbed her now, she would slip back to the confusion and bewilderment she’d shown before.

‘The men shouted to the children, telling them to run, but they didn’t. They came out because they were so afraid and…’ She took her hand away from Sasha’s forehead as if realising for the first time that he was dead. ‘And then he killed my poor Sasha anyway. He swung his sword over and over and over, and the children were screaming, and there was so much blood, and…’ She hung her head and sobbed, and I had to resist my need to press her.

‘I had a knife,’ she said, but I could barely hear her voice now. ‘For the mushrooms. I came out of the woods behind him. I should have done it earlier, but I thought he would stop. I thought he would stop before he did this to my Sasha, but he didn’t and then I had… I had nothing to lose anymore. He took my Sasha, so I came out of the woods and stuck it in him, but it just made him angry. The knife went in and came out, and there was blood, but all it did was make him angry.’ She ran her fingers along her dead husband’s leg and I saw the pain she felt at his loss. I had felt it too, with the passing of my brother, Alek, and I faced it again with the disappearance of my family.

‘I couldn’t save anyone. He just took my knife and did this…’ She turned to me, raising a hand to touch the cheek beneath her empty socket, and with that action, and the way the darkness fell across her face, the injury was obscured so that she was no longer a hag. Now she was just a helpless and distraught old woman who was forced to mourn her husband.

‘I should have buried him,’ she said. ‘I should have… You’ll do it, won’t you, Alek? You’re a good man.’

‘Of course. But tell me about the others. What happened to everybody else? The women and the children?’

She turned to look at me, her brow wrinkling in puzzlement. ‘They must have thought I was dead. I heard him say, “Throw her in the lake,” but I couldn’t see. There was too much blood and pain, and I tried to tell them I was still alive, but I couldn’t speak. I might have screamed. There was screaming, I’m sure, but it’s like I was dead already and then their hands were on me and I felt the water and…’ Galina stopped. ‘Oh.’ She said. ‘The lake. The water.’

‘What then?’ I saw that I was losing her. The lucidity was leaving her. ‘What happened then, Galina?’

‘You have to look after them now,’ she said. ‘You have to take care of them. Bury Sasha and find the others. And find Koschei. Find his death.’

‘Where are they? Can you tell me any—’

‘Koschei took them.’

‘Where? Where did he take them?’ I wanted to rip the memories out of her.

‘Please,’ she said, reaching out to touch the pocket where she had seen me put the revolver. ‘Use it. Use your pistol and let me go to my husband. I’ve done what I had to. I’ve told you what happened. Now it’s up to you. Please, Alek, let me be with Sasha.’

‘No.’ I knocked her hand away. ‘Tell me about the others.’ I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her. ‘What happened to the others?’ I was losing control of myself, desperate to wrestle the answer out of her. I had been patient enough. I had waited long enough. I had earned my answers.

But Galina just dropped her head, saying, ‘No. No. No,’ and when I saw the blank expression in her eye, I knew I was only driving her madness deeper.

When I released her, Galina turned towards the lake without looking at me. I watched her approach the edge of the water. It was still early winter and the ice was only a thin crust, so it broke when she put the toes of her boots to it. Then she took another step, her foot crunching into the freezing water.

‘What are you doing?’ I called. ‘Galina?’

Before I could reach her, Galina had waded into the lake so she was knee deep in the water, fragments of broken ice floating about her, tangling with the skirt that spread about her on the surface.

I stopped at the edge and waited for her to turn round, but instead she began to take off her coat.

‘Galina?’

She dropped the coat to one side and unbuttoned her cardigan.

‘Galina.’ I waded into the water, but as soon as I touched her, she snatched away.

‘Leave me,’ she hissed. ‘Let me go.’

I tried to pull her back once more, but she resisted, trying to push me from her.

‘So much pain,’ she said. ‘Let it be gone. You’re here now. You can look after them. I can go.’

‘Don’t do this,’ I said, putting my arms around her from behind, preventing her from going any deeper.

‘Let me go, Alek,’ she cried. ‘Please.’

‘Tell me about the others,’ I shouted. ‘Where are they?’

‘They’re gone.’ Galina struggled. ‘All gone. Let me go too. Let me be with them.’

I held on to her, pleading with her until I knew it was useless. She had told me all she would – all she was able to – and she had made up her mind what she wanted. Something inside me didn’t blame her for wanting it, but there was something else too: a dirty thought telling me Galina would be a burden, that this way would be better for both of us. It was a notion that left a bitter taste in my mouth, but I had learned long ago to find priorities, to shut out emotion and put some thoughts and actions before others. There was nothing I could do for Galina now and nothing she could do for me. I had to think of Marianna and the boys. They were all that mattered. Everything I did had to be for them.

Perhaps this was better for both of us.

So, with a heavy heart, I released Galina and stood back, half expecting her to turn and curse me, but all she did was take off her cardigan and drop it into the water.

‘All of them gone.’ She was lost to the world now and moved deeper into the water, removing her clothing as she went, breaking through the wafer-thin layer of crust. ‘All gone.’

By the time she was waist deep, her upper body was naked. Her arms were thin, and her spine protruded from her back. There was almost nothing of her and I wondered how she could have survived alone.

She pushed out into the water and disappeared beneath the ice.

I waited a long time to see if she would resurface. Visions of my own mother in the water haunted me, her hair washing about her head.

But the lake settled, the ice came together, and Galina was gone.