Sin

Sin

He was seventeen, and he carried his body nervously.

His body consisted of an Adam’s apple, sturdy bones, long arms, absentminded eyes, and an overheated brain.

In the evenings, when he lay down to sleep in his hut, he listened to the words spinning around in his head and he died… he… died…

He tried to imagine how someone would cry, and how his cousin, whom he youthfully, brokenly, strangely loved, would scream. He is lying there dead, and she is screaming.

Somewhere in the hazy heat of his brain he already understood that he would never kill himself; he lived so gently and passionately, he was of a different constitution, he had warm blood, which was destined to flow easily in its course around his body, and wouldn’t escape through a vein, or a slit throat, or a punctured chest.

He listened to the inner pulsing he died… died, and he drifted off, alive, with outstretched arms. That’s how you sleep when you’re condemned to happiness, to the gentleness of others, accessible and light to the taste.

Sometimes rats would run along the wooden flooring.

Grandma poisoned the rats, sprinkling something white in the corners. They ate it at night, cursing and squeaking.

In the mornings he washed himself in the yard, listening to the morning talk: the timid goat, the lively pig, the pushy rooster. And once he forgot to close the door to the hut. He stepped in to find the stupid chickens bustling about near the poison.

He shooed them away, clucking as they went (the stern rooster in the yard answered them). Hopping, shedding feathers, and unable to find the door (the rooster crowing constantly in the yard, the feather-brained poser), the hens finally darted out into the yard.

For a long time, probably for several hours, he was worried that that the chickens would grow melancholy, just as every animal does before death, and then croak: Grandma would be upset. But the chickens survived — maybe they hadn’t eaten much, or more likely, their bird brains were too tiny to understand that they had been poisoned.

The rats survived too, but they began moving much slower, as if they were perpetually lost in thought and no longer in a hurry to go anywhere.

One night, frightened by some rustling, he tuned on the light in the hut. It seemed that the rat was running, but it just couldn’t cross the room. Looking at the unexpected light, it lost its way, and took a strange ring-shaped route, as if it were in the circus.

He grabbed the poker, stretched out his skinny body with its skinny muscles, and hit the rat across the back, and again, and again.

Squatting down, he looked at the sly, half-closed eye, the repugnant tail. He lifted the dead body with the poker, took it out to the yard, and stood, barefoot, looking at the stars with the dead rat.

Since then, he stopped saying at night …he… died…

When he woke up, he would close the squeaky door to the hut where he spent his days and nights, not bothering anyone, reading, looking at the ceiling, and fooling around, and went into the house, where Grandma had gotten up a long time ago to milk the goat, let the hens out, shoo the ducks to the river, and make breakfast. Grandpa would sit at the table with his rimless spectacles on his nose, fixing something and breathing loudly.

He would glance into the large room, see Grandpa’s back, and immediately disappear without a sound, afraid that he might be asked to help. He could take things apart, but putting them back together again… the details lost their meaning, even though just a few minutes ago it had seemed that the pattern was simple and clear. The only thing left then was to sweep away the metal trifles with his hand and irrevocably throw it all into another trash bin, ashamed of himself and smiling stupidly.

“You’re up?” Grandma would say affably, moving quietly, never fussing over the stove.

He would sit down at the table in the small kitchen, watching the winged trajectories of the flies. Then he would get up and grab a swatter — a wooden stick with a black rubber triangle on top, which crushed the flies into pulp with a loud whack.

Killing the flies was an amusement, maybe even a game. The time when he used to play games was not far away at all, he could still reach it. Sometimes in the attic, where he would go searching for old, dusty (and thus even more desirable) books, he would find metal cars without wheels, and was tortured with the desire to take them to his hut, if not to drive them around the floor, at least to admire them.

Grandma was good at keeping silent, and her silence did not require a response.

The potatoes fried, crackling and firing salutes, when she lifted the lid and stirred them.

The salted cucumbers limply lay on the plate, swimming in their weak brine. The lard gathered warmth, softening and spreading its aroma after the coldness from which it had been removed.

He would wave the flies away from the table, and suddenly look with interest at the swatter, at the thin, sturdy, wooden stick that cut into the black triangle.

Dropping the swatter, he would wrinkle his face in disgust, wiping his hand on his shorts and sucking in his belly. There was a pain in his chest as if he had drunk a class of ice-cold water (but there was no remaining taste of moisture, just an oppressive pain).

Why am I given this… Why are we all given this… Couldn’t it somehow be otherwise?

“Is Grandpa going to eat breakfast?” Grandma would ask, turning off the burner.

“Of course he is,” the grandson would answer cheerfully, glad to be distracted from himself. He knew Grandpa never sat down at the table without him.

He would go into the room and loudly shout:

“Grandma says to come and eat!”

“Eat?” Grandpa would reply pensively. “I don’t really want to… well, alright, let’s go sit down.” He would take off his glasses, carefully laying down the screwdriver and the pliers, and stand up with a grunt. His slippers slapped across the floor.

Calmly, with a light, gooselike movement, he would bow his head in the doorway and enter the kitchen. With the passing glance of a proprietor he looked the table over, as if checking to see if something was missing. But everything was always in its place, and seemed to have been there for decades.

“You wouldn’t like a drink, Zakharka?” he would ask with well-concealed craftiness.

“No, not in the morning,” the grandson would answer briskly.

Grandpa would give a barely perceptible nod: a good answer. He ate with dignity, with the occasional stern glance at Grandma. He asked about some household matter.

“Sit where you are!” Grandma would reply. “As if I wouldn’t know what to feed the chickens if you weren’t around…”

An almost undetectable expression crossed grandfather’s face: …foolish woman… always been foolish… he seemed to be saying. But it ended there.

The old couple never argued. Zakharka loved them with all his heart.

“I think I’ll go visit my cousins”, he said to Grandma, after finishing his breakfast.

“Go on,” Grandma quickly answered. “And bring them back for lunch.”

His cousins lived right here in the village, two houses away. The younger one, Ksyusha, was short and pretty, with crafty eyes. She had just reached adulthood. The older one, with the gentle eyes, was the dark-haired Katya, five years her sister’s senior.

Ksyusha would go to the dance hall on the other side of the village, and return at four in the morning. But she didn’t sleep much, and always woke up discontented, examining herself for a long time in a hand mirror, sitting next to the window so the daylight would fall on her face.

By noon she would be in a good mood, and looking attentively into the eyes of her visiting cousin, flirting with him, asking personal questions and desiring to hear honest answers.

Her cousin, who has come for the summer, understood that Ksyusha had just recently experienced something important, something female, and that she was glad of it. She felt more self-confident, as if she had gained one more interesting support in life.

Her cousin ducked the questions, and was happily sidetracked by a bare-legged kid, Katya’s three-year-old son Rodik.

The older sister’s husband was serving his second year in the army.

Rodik spoke very little, although it was high time that he did. He tenderly referred to himself as “Odik,” with a tiny, barely audible “k” on the end. He understood everything, but did not remember his papa.

Zakharka played with him, sitting him on his shoulders, and they wandered around the neighborhood, this suntanned young man and the white child with puffy hair.

Katya sometimes came out of the house to respond to Ksyusha. Zakharka heard: Well, of course you’re the smartest one of us in the room… or: I don’t care what else you do, but you’re going to peel some potatoes!

Her severity wasn’t very serious.

She came out and watched intently as Zakharka, with Rodik on his shoulders, walked slowly towards the house.

“Stones,” said Zakharka.

“Tones,” Rodik repeated.

“Stones,”, Zakharka repeated.

“Tones,” Rodik agreed.

They were walking over gravel.

Zakharka understood that Katya was thinking about something important while watching them. But he didn’t take any time to consider what that might be. He liked to take it easy, lazing in the sun, never thinking about anything too seriously.

“I suppose you merry-makers are hungry?”, said Katya in a clear chesty voice, smiling.

“Grandma invited us to eat with them,” answered Zakharka, without smiling.

“Oh well, fine. Miss Priss refuses to do any work in the kitchen anyway.”

“My name is Ksyusha”, her sister answered with all the seriousness of a sixteen-year-old, walking out of the house. She had already fastened on a skirt, carefree in the wind, flitted into a pair of little shoes, and had on a t-shirt that invariably exposed her belly. Her face remarkably reflected two emotions at once: vexation with her sister, and intrigue at the presence of her cousin.

See how stupid she is, Zakharka! said her entire look.

But look how cute my tummy is, and everything else… Zakharka seemed to read, but he wasn’t completely sure if he understood correctly. Just in case, he turned away.

“In the meantime we’ll go eat some apples, right, Rodik?” he said to the boy sitting on his shoulders.

“I’ll go with you too,” Katya attached herself.

“Le’s go” Rodik replied belatedly, to Katya’s delight. It was the first time she had heard him use the phrase.

They walked through the orchard, looking at apples which were still green and heavy, and the yellow sort, and then headed towards the apple tree which bore fruit that was already good and sweet in July.

“Apples,” repeated Zakharka distinctly.

“Apoos,” Rodik agreed.

Katya was overcome with youthful, bright, rich motherly laughter.

When Zakharka took a bite of a firm apple plucked from the branch, it occurred to him that Katya’s laughter resembled that moist, fresh, crisp whiteness.

“Us little ones, we can’t reach the branches,” joked Katya, picking up the fruits that had fallen overnight. She liked them softer, redder.

They took turns feeding small pieces of apple to Rodik, who had been placed on the ground (Zakharka was afraid that the branches in the orchard might accidentally scratch the boy).

Sometimes, without noticing, they both fed him a piece of apple at the same time: the compliant Rodik stuffed his mouth with both pieces and chewed, staring raptly.

“Ooh”, he said, pointing to an apple that had not yet been picked from the branch.

“You want me to pick that one too? What a little… carnivore,” answered Zakharka sternly; he liked being somewhat stern and a bit morose when inside everything was bubbling from joy and the irrepressible charm of life. When else could you be a little morose, if not at seventeen? And especially at the sight of women.

A little later Ksyusha showed up in the orchard: she was bored at home by herself. Plus there was her cousin…

“Did you peel the potatoes?” asked Katya.

“I told you, I just painted my nails, I can’t. What, do I have to repeat it ten times?”

“You can tell Father about your nails. He’ll cut them for you.”

Ksyusha picked an apple from another tree — not the one that her older sister liked. She didn’t want to follow her example in any way. She ate grudgingly, all the while looking at her cousin.

“Are the green ones tasty?”, asked Katya with charming spite, sqinting her eyes to look at Ksyusha.

“Are yours full of worms?” asked the younger sister.

At lunch time they went to the old people. The sisters immediately made peace when the discussion turned to village gossip.

“Alka’s with Seryoga,” Katya claimed.

“No way. He and Galka were going to get married. The matchmakers already made their rounds,” Katya said in disbelief.

“I’m telling you! They rode by on a motorcycle yesterday.”

“Maybe he was just taking her somewhere.”

“At three in the morning,” Ksyusha replied mockingly. “Across the bridges…”

Across the bridges meant the cozy fields where young villagers in love drove on motorcycles or walked to in pairs.

Zakharka looked at the sisters and thought that both Katya and Ksyusha had been “across the bridges.” He imagined for one painful moment the lifted skirts, hot mouths and heavy breathing, and shook his head, driving away the distraction, such a sweet distraction that it was almost unbearable.

He held back a bit, looking at the ankles and calf muscles of the sisters. He saw the frog-like, tanned ankles of Ksyusha, and through Katya’s dress full of sunlight, her hips, which only looked better since she had given birth.

He wished that the river were closer, just a few paces away. He would run and dive in and not come up to the surface for a long time, moving very slowly, touching the sandy bed, seeing elusive fishes in the cloudy semidarkness.

“Why aren’t you keeping up?” asked Ksyusha, turning around.

Zakharka wished that Katya had asked this question.

Katya was talking to Rodik.

“Shall we go swimming?” he suggested, instead of answering.

“Will you carry Rodik there?” asked Katya, turning around. She took a few steps backward along the street, smiling at her cousin.

Zakharka broke into a smile, against his morose will.

“No. Pro. Blem.” he answered, looking Katya in the eye.

Rodik, copying his mother, also turned around and started walking backwards, but turning around every second he immediately got tangled in his own legs and fell over. Everyone laughed.

There were too many of them to fit in the kitchen, and they ate in the big room, at a long table covered with a flowered plastic tablecloth which had been accidentally cut with a knife here and there, and also had a half-moon burned into it from the edge of a hot frying pan.

The sisters crunched on crisp cucumbers.

Zakharka liked their wonderful appetite.

It was very sunny.

Katya put some potatoes on a small plate for Rodik. He began poking and pushing them around with his fingers, all covered in lard and butter, and constantly spilled potatoes in his lap. Katya gathered the potato off her child’s leg and ate it, beaming.

Zakharka sat across from them, gazing at them, and silently rubbed the sole of his foot against Katya’s leg. She didn’t move her leg, seemingly paying no attention to her cousin at all. She kept goading her little sister, listened to her grandmother relate something about the neighbor, and didn’t neglect to admire Rodik. But she didn’t look at Zakharka at all.

But he didn’t take his eyes off her.

Ksyusha noticed, jealously.

The bread tasted very good. The potatoes were amazingly sweet.

They ate from a common frying pan, huge, reliable, and scarred with burn marks.

“Tomorrow Grandpa’s going to kill the pig,” said Grandma.

“Oh, I’m glad you reminded me,” said Katya.

“Why?” asked Grandma.

“I won’t come over tomorrow. I can’t watch that.”

“Who’s forcing you, don’t go out into the yard and don’t watch,” Grandma laughed.

“I’m not coming over either,” said Ksyusha, agreeing for the first time with her sister.

The sisters helped clear the table. While they were doing so, Zakharka was outside making a bow, more for himself than for Rodik. What good would a bow be to Rodik anyway. How could he handle one?

The boy, however, steadily watched as Zakharka worked: as he found and cut down a suitable bough, and bending it wound some twine around it, held in place by notches he had cut beforehand.

“Bow”, said Zakharka clearly. “Bo-ow!”

“Ow,” repeated Rodik.

“You’ll get him talking soon”, said Katya, who had come out.

“Going hunting?” asked Ksyusha, who soon followed her sister. “Can I go? Rodik, will you take me?”

Rodik looked at Ksyusha without blinking. Zakharka looked at Katya without blinking.

“In any case you still have to peel the potatoes,” said Katya, “before we go swimming. Or Papa will have nothing to eat…”

They dropped by the sisters’ house. Katya set a bucket of water, the bucket with the potatoes, and a pot on the floor. Everyone sat down, and Katya handed out knives. To Ksyusha she gave the smallest, irreparably blunt. Ksyusha, cursing, went to get a different knife.

The three of them peeled the potatoes, laughing about something or other. Rodik ran among them. Katya fed him pieces of raw potato.

Ksyusha admonished her:

“What are you doing? Some mother you are! How did they trust you with a child…”

“Just make sure they don’t trust you with one,” answered Katya, blowing a fallen strand of hair from her face and then pushing it back in place with the wrist of the hand holding the knife.

Zakharka was enjoying himself and tried not to look at the sisters’ knees: Ksyusha’s were tanned, while Katya’s were whiter. Katya’s were round, while Ksyusha’s bones jutted out daintily, like some tall-legged creature, perhaps a deer…

Also, Katya was sitting a bit farther away from the bucket of potatoes, and when she bent over…

My God, why are you pestering me with this…

Zakharka went outside. The chickens were slowly wandering about, stupid from the heat.

“Akhaka!” laughed Katya from inside the house, her voice coming nearer. “Did you hear what he said? ‘Ere Akhaka?’ Here’s your Akhaka, Rodik! Here he is.”

Rodik ran out on his staggering legs, with his sunny eyelashes and ears covered in fluffy hair.

It was ten minutes’ walk to the river. Zakharka took off his shorts and with a running jump threw himself in the water, so as not to see the sisters getting undressed. I wish I didn’t have to see them at all… he thought joyfully, and immediately turned towards the sound of their voices.

“How’s the water?” the sisters asked at the same time, looked at each other angrily at first, as if suspecting mockery, but then laughed.

They didn’t argue any more that day.

Katya had brought some apples with her. Lying on the bank, wriggling their feet in the sand, they ate the rosy fruit. Zakharka threw the core into the water.

“Why’d you do that?” said Ksyusha, with mild disgust.

“The fish will eat it.”

Katya sat up every minute or so and yelled:

“Rodik, don’t go in too deep! There are fish there! Hey!”

“There?” asked Rodik, pointing to the middle of the river, and inspired, walking in further.

“Zakharka, tell him, he’ll only listen to you.”

Gnawing on an apple core, her cousin was looking at how a few black curls had fought their way out of Katya’s bathing suit, clinging to her white, damp leg covered in shimmering golden drops.

“Rodik!” he yelled, loud enough even to surprise himself, and the boy jumped.

“Lord, why are you yelling like that?” said a startled Katya, quickly rising from the sand.

“I’ll go, you lie back down…” Zakharka went out to Rodik. “Shall we pick some cattails?” he suggested. “We already have a bow. Now we need some arrows.”

“Le’s go”, answered Rodik readily, and climbed out of the water.

The walked along the bank, the small, innocent little paw in the youthful hand with its strange line of fate and deep life line.

They returned with cattail stalks broken for arrows. Along the way, Zakharka found a cord and wound it around one of the stalks.

“Well, froggies, have you found your bridegroom?” he asked, pulling on the bow string.

The sisters turned around, smiling languidly. He raised the bow in the air and shot a cattail stalk, which flew unexpectedly high.

Rodik immediately lost sight of the arrow, and not understanding where it could have gone, looked around in surprise.

He was awoken by the squealing of the pig.

“They’re slaughtering it already! Damn, I missed it.”

He jumped up from the bed and pulled on his shorts, almost falling over.

But the pig had only been tied up: with tightly pulled ropes cutting into its fatty hide, it stood in the darkness of the barn and started squealing every time it saw a human.

Zakharka watched it, standing in the doorway with his eyes only slightly pried open, without having yet washed his face, smiling.

There was not a single thought in his head, but somewhere underneath his heart he felt quietly pusling into his blood the strange sweet taste of the death of another, even an animal.

Screaming, pig? You want to live? Something was quivering in the dark and secret convolution of his brain.

Although reason, clear human reason, told him: you should feel pity, how can you not feel pity?

It’s a shame, he agreed easily..

And in fact it was hard to stand the squealing for long.

He slammed the door shut and approached his grandfather, who was sitting on a stump. Grandpa was sharpening an already sinister knife, constantly reflecting sunlight off its long blade.

Grandpa sternly refused to look at Zakharka.

“How does it know it’s going to be slaughtered?” asked Zakharka loudly, as soon as the squealing died down.

For a second, Grandpa raised his small and, Zakharka thought, for some reason unfriendly eyes. He stood up, and wandered over to his workshop.

He didn’t hear me, thought Zakharka.

“An animal knows everything,” said Grandpa softly, almost to himself, not addressing anyone.

In a minute he returned, and Zakharka understood that he had been wrong to think Grandpa was in a bad mood.

“You’ve never seen a pig being slaughtered?” Grandpa asked simply.

“No,” Zakharka replied happily.

Grandpa nodded. It was unclear what that meant: well, today you will, or good thing you haven’t.

Grandma appeared, clanging metal basins, of which she had managed to bring six at once.

She looked at Grandpa slowly puttering about, but she didn’t hurry him, although she had no desire to listen to the incessant squealing.

Zakharka hovered for a minute and decided to go to the outhouse.

The welcoming wooden hut covered on the inside with old wallpaper stood near the garden. On his way there, Zakharka always looked at the rows of watermelons.

The watermelons were insultingly small and green.

They won’t ripen before I leave. They won’t, Zakharka thought as usual, dejected.

It was dark inside the outhouse, but the sunlight came in through the spaces between the boards. There were always one or two heavy flies flying about. They never sat still for more than a few seconds. Again they would start their furious buzzing.

There was an old “Rural Mechanics Journal” hanging on a nail. Zakharka looked through it for the umpteenth time, understanding nothing. In this incomprehension, the lazy skimming of dusty pages, the sunny cracks, the wayward flies, the closeness of the wooden walls, the yellowed wallpaper peeling here and there, the rusty bolt, the ceiling covered in tarred black roofing paper so it wouldn’t leak — in everything there was a quiet, almost unattainable lyrical beneficence.

The pig’s cries were becoming eerier, more frightening, more detached. Zakharka hurried.

The squealing was cut off before he got there. He had to let Grandma pass too: she was hurrying somewhere, and by the look of her — a bit agitated but calmer at the same time (…it’s all over, thank God… ) — Zakharka understood that the pig had been slaughtered.

With his red hands, Grandpa slowly untied (he could have cut them, but didn’t, in order to preserve the rope) the knots that were holding the pig to the drainpipe of the barn.

Did he intentionally not wait for me?… or was it unintentional? thought Zakharka, and could not figure out the answer.

First the pig’s backside started sagging as it was freed, but the pig was still held up, still tied by its huge neck to the pipe. Grandpa moved the basin, full of the blood that had poured from the slit throat, and undid the knot around the neck. The pig fell with a soft sound.

Zakharka went closer, looking with interest at the now-silent animal. An ordinary pig, just dead. With an even slit across the throat and a lot of white fat.

“I can’t seem to find the knife,” Grandpa, looked around. “Zakharka, look for it.”

The knife had been stuck into the barn wall. Its handle was warm, and the blade was covered in drying blood.

He gave Grandpa the knife, holding it by the sharp end. He got his fingers smeared, and later he looked at them.

They sliced open the pig’s stomach. It lay there, fallen open, exposed, red, raw. The insides were warm; you could warm your hands in them. If you squinted at them through a lightheaded haze, they might look like a bouquet of flowers. A warm bouquet of living, fleshy, bestial flowers.

Grandpa confidently removed the heart, kidneys, and liver, and threw them in basins. The contents of the large intestine he squeezed out by hand.

The living being that sullenly greeted Zakharka in the mornings, that rubbed its sides on the barn wall, that excitedly snorted upon seeing a bucket with slop, that was capable, in the end, of screaming with such unexpected power — that being turned out to be insignificant, worthless. You could slice it open, dismember it, and take out parts of it.

And here it was already, lying there cut off, the stupid pig head, with its snout up in the air, mouth open. It seemed as if the pig wanted to scream, that it was just about to let out a squeal.

And seeing that head, even the chickens were a bit stupefied, and the rooster avoided walking near, and the goat looked out from the dark with suffering Judaic eyes.

Zakharka went inside. Grandmother, hurrying to meet him with a rag in her hand, said:

“Eat, I left some food in there…”

But he didn’t. And not because he had lost his appetite at the sight of the slaughtered pig. He couldn’t wait to go to his cousins. Everything that was alive, that was glutted with life in its most real, primitive form, and was completely deprived of a soul — everything with those bright, colored, fragrant insides, with legs spread wide apart, with a senselessly turned up head, and with the clean smell of fresh blood, hindered him from staying in the same place, pulled him, diverted him, seethed inside him.

That same onerous pain, as if from ice water, that had been torturing him, was unexpectedly replaced with a feeling of delightful anticipatory heat. The heat was in his hands, his heart, his kidneys, his lungs: Zakharka saw his organs clearly, and they looked exactly the same as those that were steaming in front of him a minute ago. And from this realization of his own warm animal nature Zakharka felt his heart contracting, with particular passion and without pain, his real, fleshy heart, pumping blood to his arms, to his hot palms, and to his head, scalding his brain, and below, to his belly, where everything was… proud with the realization of eternal youth.

For some reason he grabbed the bow that was lying near the house, and started off with a feeling as if he had just killed an animal. And he didn’t find himself ridiculous at all.

He saw Rodik first, scaring off the chickens which were already afraid of him anyway. He was hardly able to keep himself from telling Rodik what it had been like. He even let a few syllables slip, and then cut himself off, idly moving his awkward lips.

Ksyusha came out. Katya followed her.

“Well, have they killed the pig?” asked Katya, widening her eyes, and with a look as if the dead pig was going to show up right there, snorting and squelching about with its slit throat.

Ksyusha also looked frightened:

“We could hear the squealing from here. Katya and I closed all the doors and windows,” she said.

Zakharka looked at the sisters, his happy eyes moving from one pretty face to the other — it was wonderful, and he looked for the word that he should start with to explain about his heart, his throat, his blood… but then in a second, he suddenly understood that he had nothing to say.

“Do you have any empty cans?” he asked.

“Yes,” answered Ksyusha, shrugging her shoulders. “I think there were some over there in the trash.”

Zakharka cut the lids off of three cans. He cut each of the lids in half with big scissors. With some flat-nosed pliers he curled them around yesterday’s cattails and hammered the resulting spike.

The sisters went off to attend to their affairs, and only Rodik was left pattering around, repeating sometimes “Ow!” and responding to Zakharka’s “Arrows! Say: arrows!” with a long, doubtful silence.

“Ah-ah.”

“Exactly”, agreed Zakharka.

He stretched the bow string, and released the arrow. It soared swiftly, then it seemed to pause for a moment in the air, and gently fell down, sticking into the ground.

“Wow,” said Ksyusha, coming out on to the porch with a mop. “That’s beautiful.”

Swaying in the breeze, the arrow stuck up into the air.

“It’s standing up,” Ksyusha added dreamily.

She’s in a good mood today, Zakharka thought. She’s washing the floors.

He couldn’t resist, and asked:

“Why are you doing the dirty work?”

“We’re starting renovations today. Our Ksyusha is so eager to paint her room orange that she’s prepared to make any sacrifice,” Katya replied for Ksyusha.

Ksyusha, offended by her sister and cousin, squeezed the dirty water out of the mop.

Zakharka wandered around the garden, reluctantly munching on an apple.

He carried Rodik around on his shoulders, and then the boy was sent off to nap. Zakharka, in order not to get in the way of the energetically tidying sisters, went back to his room.

In the yard, Grandma had already wiped away the blood, and nothing was left of the pig: only meat in basins.

He entered the hut, creaking open the door.

It was stuffy inside. He pulled off his shorts, and climbed, somewhat disheveled, out of his t-shirt. He fell on the bed, bouncing on its springs. He turned over on his side, and reached out for an old book with a tattered cover and missing many pages, but did not take it up. He rested his cheek against the pillow, and lay still. He suddenly remembered that he hadn’t had enough sleep, and closed his eyes, immediately seeing Katya, nothing but Katya…

He lay there, remembering the sound of squealing in the morning, the flight of the arrow, the black water from the mop, the taste of the apple, the apple tree is shaking and swaying, the bark is near, the dark bark, the rough bark, the bark, the bark…

The door squeaked, and he woke up instantly. Katya, his heart skipped a beat.

Ksyusha came in, wearing a funny bathing suit: all string ties and bows.

Prying open his eyes, Zakharka looked at her.

“Did I wake you up, were you asleep?” she asked quickly.

He didn’t answer, and stretched.

“We were going swimming,” Ksyusha added, sitting on the bed so that her hip touched her cousin’s hip. “The paint is giving us a headache: we started painting. The doors.”

Zakharka nodded and stretched again.

“Why don’t you say anything?” Ksyusha asked. “Why are you always silent?” she repeated more cheerfully, and at a higher pitch — in the voice that usually precedes action. And it did: Ksyusha lightly threw her left leg over Zakharka and sat on his legs, firmly resting her hands on his knees, pressing them lightly. She looked as if she was getting ready to jump.

I didn’t think I was silent… Zakharka thought, looking his cousin over with interest.

From time to time he felt her cold, firm buttocks with the soles of his feet, she rocked gently from side to side on her bottom, and suddenly sat higher, unacceptably higher — she pressed her legs against his hips and gently tickled Zakharka under his armpits.

“Are you ticklish?” she asked, and without a pause: “You’ve got such a hairy chest… Like a sailor. Where are you going to serve in the army? Will you join the sailors? They’ll take you.”

Ksyusha looked completely calm, as if nothing unusual was happening.

But while she moved and wriggled on top of him, Zakharka clearly felt that under the fabric of her funny outfit, all in bows, there was something alive, very alive…

This continued just until both of them realized that it couldn’t go on like this anymore, that they needed to do something else, something impossible.

Ksyusha looked down at him with calm and clear eyes.

“I don’t feel comfortable like this,” Zakharka suddenly said. He made Ksyusha get off and sat opposite her, pressing his knees to his chest.

They talked for another two minutes, and Ksyusha left.

“Well, shall we go swimming?” she asked when she was outside, turning around.

“Sure, let’s go,” Zakharka replied, accompanying her to the door.

“Then I’ll call Katya. And we’ll come by to get you.” With a wag of her bows, Ksyusha went out of the yard.

“I’ll call Katya…” he repeated meaninglessly, like an echo.

He went to the wash basin, which resembled an upside-down German helmet. An iron rod stuck out of a hole in the center of the basin. If you raised it, water flowed out.

Zakharka stood motionless, closely looking over the wash basin, running the end of his tongue over the back of his teeth. He raised the iron rod it little: it gave a weak jangle. There was no water. He pulled the rod down.

Unexpectedly, he noticed a dried bloodstain on it.

“Grandpa probably tried to wash his hands when he slaughtered the pig…” he guessed.

In the evening Ksyusha went out dancing, and Katya and Rodik came to stay the night with Grandma and Grandpa, so the little boy wouldn’t get ill from the strong smells of the renovations.

The meal lasted a long time. Lethargic from the food, they talked tenderly. The votive light by the icon flickered. Zakharka, having drunk three half shot glasses with Grandpa, looked at the icon for a long time, sometimes seeing Katya’s features in the female face, only to lose them again. Rodik did not resemble the baby at all.

He had already been sent to bed several times, but he screamed loudly in protest.

Zakharka didn’t want to go to his hut, delighting in his relatives, who were somehow especially wonderful on this evening.

He suddenly had a warm and cheerful premonition of himself as an adult, perhaps even an unshaven man, with a definite smell of of tobacco, although Zakharka himself didn’t smoke yet.

And there he is, unshaven, with tobacco crumbs on his lips, and Katya is his wife. And they are sitting together, and Zakharka gazes at her lovingly.

He has just arrived on a big boat, which he has rowed with one oar, bringing fish, let’s say, and has taken off his tall black boots in the entry. She had wanted to help him, but he said sternly: I’ll manage myself…

Zakharka suddenly laughed at his stupid thoughts, and Katya, who was talking animatedly with Grandma, gave him a brief look, a look that was calm and understanding, as if she knew what he was thinking, and even seemed to nod slightly: …Well, do it yourself then… Just don’t leave them in the corner like last time: they won’t dry out…

Zakharka loudly ate a pickle, to return to his senses.

Grandpa, who had got up from the table a long time ago to listen to the evening news, walked past them from the second room to go outside, talking as if to himself as usual, without malice:

“Still sitting there? As if we’d only just seen each other, just arrived…”

The conversation happened to turn to the pig that had been slaughtered earlier. Katya waved her hands to show that she didn’t want to hear anything about it, and Grandma, who was unusually talkative, suddenly told a story about how a witch had lived nearby in her youth. She was ugly, bony and perpetually bareheaded, which was not the custom in the village. She dried herbs, or sometimes even mice, rats’ tails, and various bones of other animals.

Among other things, people said of the old woman that she turned into a pig at night. Naughty village boys decided to find out if this rumor was true, and sneaked into the old woman’s yard at night, to the pig barn, and cut off the pig’s ear.

Early the next morning, the old woman, who was hurrying to the river to get water at sunrise, was seen for the first time wearing a head scarf, and even under the black scarf it could be seen that her head was wrapped in a rag on one side.

Katya sat quietly, never taking her eyes off Grandma. Zakharka was looking over Katya’s shoulder, out the window, and suddenly whispered:

“Katya, what’s that at the window? Is it the pig looking in?”

Katya jumped up with a squeal. Grandma laughed, covering her beautiful mouth with the end of a handkerchief. Katya gasped, running from the window to the other end of the table, not completely seriously. But then she started scolding Zakharka quite sincerely:

“You idiot! I’m scared of all that stuff…”

They laughed a little more.

“Now you’ll go to your hut, and the pig will bite you,” Katya said quietly.

For some reason, Zakharka thought that the pig would bite him in a specific place, and that this was what Katya was talking about. Again, his heart skipped a beat, but he did not find anything to reply about the pig, because he was thinking about something quite different.

“You can sleep here,” Grandma said to Zakharka, half-joking, half-serious, as if really worried that an evil spirit would bite her grandson; Grandma herself had never been scared of anything. “There’s enough space, we’ll make beds for everyone,” she added.

“It’s a big hut — there’s enough room to go riding in it,” Grandpa said, coming back from outside. Usually, he was half-deaf, but sometimes he unexpectedly heard things that were said quietly, and not even addressed to him.

Everyone laughed again, and even Rodik crooked his pink lips.

Grandpa had long considered his hut to be the largest, if not in the whole village, then certainly one of the largest.

If he went to visit someone, for example to a wedding, he would come back and say:

“Our hut’s bigger, mother. It was kind of crowded there.”

“They have four rooms, what are you talking about?” Grandma would say. “And there were forty-three guests.”

“You call those rooms…” Grandpa would mumble in a bass voice. “Dog kennels, more like it.”

“We had eighteen people living here, when my father was alive,” he would inform Zakharka for the hundreth time, if he happened to be near. “Six sons, all with wives, mother, father, children… There were benches along every wall, we slept on them. And now she finds it crowded here with just the two of us,” he would complain about Grandma.

This time he didn’t mention the eighteen people, but walked past, pretending not to hear or see the laughter. He turned up the television in the other room — so that the hubbub could probably be heard in the house next door, where the alcoholic Gavrila lived, who did not have any electrical appliances.

Katya helped Grandma clear the table. Zakharka depicted a battle with forks for Rodik until the forks were also taken away from him, and put with the rest of the dirty dishes.

They went into the room, to the pillows and sheets, which always had a barely detectable, but pleasant, sour scent of mustiness: from the large chests and the pile of fabric that had lain in stuffy, close quarters for a long time.

Zakharka got the couch. He waited until the light was turned out, quickly got undressed and lay down, wrapping himself in the blanket, although it was quite warm.

Grandpa lay on his bed, and Grandma on hers. Katya and Rodik got the low bed that stood in the corner of the room, opposite Zakharka.

Zakharka lay there and listened to Katya, her breathing, her movements, her voice, when she tried to talk some sense into Rodik in a stern whisper.

As if afraid that she would see his gaze in the darkness, Zakharka did not look in Katya’s direction.

Rodik refused to calm down, he was unaccustomed to being in a new place. He sat up, banged his feet on the floor, and tried to make his mother laugh, squirming on the bed. When he crawled under the blanket yet again, getting caught up in the blanket cover, Katya suddenly sat up, and there was a crack and a crash: something had broken in the wooden bed.

Rodik got a slap on his head, set up a whine, and went running to Grandma’s bed.

They turned on the night lamp: the bed had collapsed on its side and could no longer be slept on.

“Go sleep with your cousin,” Grandma said simply.

Zakharka moved to the edge of the sofa, his arms alongside his body, eyes on the ceiling; but he still noticed the flash of a white triangular piece of fabric. Katya lay by the wall.

They both lay there without breathing. Zakharka knew that Katya was not asleep. He didn’t feel her warmth, he didn’t touch his cousin with a single millimeter of his body, but something inexplicable that emanated from her he could sense keenly, physically, with all his being.

They didn’t move, and Zakharka could hear the blinking of Katya’s eyelashes. Then in the darkness came the almost inaudible sound of slightly dry lips opening, and Zakharka realized that she was breathing through her mouth. He repeated this movement, and felt the air moving against his teeth, and he knew that she was feeling the same thing: the same air, the same inhalation…

Rodik lay still for about ten minutes, and it seemed that he had fallen asleep. But suddenly his voice was heard clearly:

“Mama.”

“Sleep,” said Grandma.

“Mama,” he said insistently.

“Do you want your mama?”

“Yes. Mama,” Rodik repeated clearly.

Katya didn’t respond. But Rodik had already clambered over his Grandma, and guessing his way in the darkness, he reached the couch.

Zakharka picked him up and put him between himself and Katya. The boy laughed happily and with his raised legs began playing a lively game with the blanket. Especially as he felt cramped on the sofa, and his sharp elbows pressed into both his mama’s and Zakharka’s sides.

“No, we won’t get any sleep like this,” Zakharka said.

Quickly, before anyone could say anything, he went out, picking his shorts up off the floor, and saying amiably as he left:

“I’ll go and pay the pig a visit. You sleep.”

In the corridor, he stepped into his flip-flops, put his shorts on, cursing, and walked out the door. Outside, the night was starry, cool and joyful.

“The pig won’t bite,” he repeated, smiling to himself, not thinking about any pig. “It won’t bite, it won’t betray you, it won’t eat you.”

In his hut, he sat down on the bed, and swung his legs, looking as if he had found an activity to keep him occupied all night. He looked out the small window, where there was the moon and a cloud.

In the early fresh morning, Zakharka was happily painting the doors and window frames in his cousins’ house.

It was slowly getting warm.

When Katya appeared in a white shirt, with the ends tied up around her waist, and in an old pair of leggings turned up at the knees, which suited her very well, he realized that he wouldn’t have slept for a second if he had stayed next to her.

He laughed a lot, teasing his cousins about little things, and felt that he had become more confident and stronger, though when this had happened remained inexplicable.

Ksyusha made a few feeble brush strokes and went away somewhere.

Katya talked merrily about her sister: what she was like as a child, and how this childhood ended one summer. And she talked about herself, about the strange things she did when she was young. And even when she wasn’t young.

“Idiot,” Zakharka said in response to something trivial.

“What did you say?” she asked in surprise.

“You’re an idiot, I said.”

Katya fell silent, and went away to mix the paint. She concentrated as she stirred a stick in the can, lifting it up and watching the thick paint slowly dripping off it.

About three hours later, they were sitting on the steps of the house. Katya was peeling potatoes, and Zakharka was chewing pumpkin seeds, feeding some of them to the chickens.

“You’re the first man to call me an idiot,” Katya informed him seriously.

Zakharka didn’t reply. He looked at her quickly and kept chewing the seeds.

“What do you think about that?” Katya asked.

“I only called you that because of something you did,” he replied.

“And the worst thing is that I wasn’t offended at you.”

Zakharka shrugged.

“No, say something at least,” Katya insisted. “…about that…”

“Would you have been offended at your beloved husband?” Zakharka asked, just for the sake of asking something.

“I love you more than I love my husband,” Katya replied simply, and cut the last piece of skin off the potato.

With a gentle splash, the potato, naked like a baby, fell into the bucket.

Zakharka looked at how many seeds were left in his hand.

“What else are we going to do today?” he asked, after a silence.

Katya looked somewhere past him through clear, thoughtful eyes.

In the house, Rodik woke up and lifted his voice.

They rushed to him, almost competing, each one with their own tenderness, which was so abundant that Rodik shrank away in surprise: what’s up with you?

“Shall we go for a walk?” Katya suggested. “I’m sick of working”.

Along a faint path, which Zakharka had never walked on, they quietly wandered around the back of the village, with Rodik on Zakharka’s shoulders, as always.

They walked through shady bushes, sometimes along a creek, and then along a quiet dusty road uphill slightly, towards the sun.

Unexpectedly for Zakharka, they reached an iron fence, and iron gates with a cross on them.

“The old cemetery,” Katya said quietly.

Rodik didn’t care where they were, and he ran between the graves and rusty fences, chattering in his own language.

Katya and Zakharka walked together, reading the old Russian names, calculating the years of life, delighting in the long lifespans and wondering at the short ones. They found entire families buried in the same patch of ground, old people, those who died on the day they were born, brave soldiers and young girls. They tried to guess how, and for what reason, and where it had happened.

At a grave without photos or dates, they stood pointlessly, and looked at it. Katya was in front, Zakharka was behind her, close to her, feeling the warmth of her hair and with all his hot body feeling how warm she would be, how flexible and intolerable if he embraced her… right now…

Katya stood there motionless, without saying anything, although they had just been joking incessantly.

Suddenly, Rodik came running out at them, as if from out of a hiding place, and they all livened up — initially quite randomly, pronouncing strange words, as if they were testing their throats. But then everything became better, much better, quite good indeed.

They returned feeling quite revived, as if they had just been in a very fine and welcoming place.

They took up the brushes with pleasure once more.

All that day, with its smells of paint, the unnaturally bright colors, the quick lunch — spring onions, radishes and the first young tomatoes — and then sheets of wallpaper, intoxicating glue, Rodik getting underfoot, already smeared with everything possible — in the end he was taken to Grandma — and a still ill-tempered Ksyusha (“…she had an argument with her boyfriend…” Katya whispered), and their hands, washed with gasoline in the pale summer twilight — all of this, when Zakharka finally went to bed at night, for some reason transformed into a very bright carousel, a whirligig, on which he was spinning, and wide-eyed faces flashed past, looking fixedly, but then the chairs on the long chains were taken a long way away, and only the colors remained: green, blue, green.

And only by morning, with the distant singing of birds, came an unexpected stillness, — transparent and gentle, like at the cemetery.

…Every one of my sins… Zakharka thought sleepily, every one of my sins will torment me… And the good that I have done — it’s lighter than fluff. It will be blown away by any draft of wind…

The following summer days, which had begun so long and slow, suddenly started to slip by unnoticeably, like the almost even circle of a whirligig, identically happy to such extent that their pattern faded.

On the last morning, already packed, wearing jeans, a sturdy shirt, and shoes that surprised his feet, Zakharka wandered around the yard.

He wondered what else to do. He couldn’t think of anything.

He found the bow and the last arrow for it. He stretched the bow string and let it go. The arrow fell in the dust, a pink feather on its end.

Like a fool, he said to himself happily. You’re behaving like a fool.

He kissed Grandma, hugged Grandpa, and walked away, so as not to see their tears. Strong and weightless, he almost flew to the highway — the name given to the asphalt road outside the village, where a bus drove past at six in the morning.

He didn’t go to say goodbye to the sisters, what was the point of waking them up.

How the starlings are screeching, he noticed on the way.

And he also thought: The burdock is aromatic.

He rode in the bus with a clear heart.

How right everything is, my God, he repeated serenely. How right, my God. What a long life lies ahead. There’ll be another summer, and it will be warm again, and flowers in our arms…

But there was never another summer.