cruel acts
Three times this summer, Veronika has found wolves beneath her porch. They crouch down in the crawl space, sneezing and coughing and whining at each other in a pitch barely audible to human ears. Must be something dead under there, she thinks, because the only other time they'll come so close is winter, when snow barricades the land and the plants leave, followed by the herbivores.
This time of year, she doesn't like to go outside. The pollen turns the air an unhealthy yellow color, and it makes her nose bleed. When she whistles to call her dog in, the blood bubbles and sprays across the porch, and the dog doesn't come. She sees the hunched backs of the wolves between the floorboards, and understands. There is a shot gun in the umbrella stand by the front door. She lets out a muffled yell, contained in her mouth, then stomps against the porch with her heel.
There are four of them. They come scuttling out of the crawl space, tripping over each other before heading towards the tree-line. They sun is directly above them - they are not accompanied by shadows. She fires once, out of anger, and because tears are pressed over her eyes like old contact lenses and she does not believe she will hit. There is a yelp, cut off too soon, but when the wolves disappear behind the forest edge, they still have all their numbers.
She buries the dog in the yard. She does not cry, but there is a lightness in her head, a bubble full of helium, and every thought weighs exactly nothing. She walks out across the property and finds a trail of blood, unabsorbed by soil. Her nose is plugged up with cotton, so she knows it is not her own.
That night, she breaks a plate. Sweeps her arm across the table and sends it crashing into the wall. The pieces ricochet off the floorboards. When she finally brings herself to get up and clean, she finds shards of porcelain as far as the hallway.
There is a German family staying on the second floor. After hearing the noise, they appear on the staircase, arranged in descending height - father, mother, sister, small brother - a repeating pattern of blond and blue. "What happened?," the boy asks, in Russian. It is always the children who miraculously inherit languages upon touching down in the airport, while the adults struggle to find their luggage. When they speak about their own countries, they talk in terms of half-demolished walls, acts of terrorism. Veronika asks when the birds migrate, and no one knows.
"Nothing," she says. She pats her knee. "Just an accident."
And later, the Socialist from the third floor will corner her into a congenial political conversation in the kitchen. Congenial, because she nods in agreement to everything he says - his hands frighten her, large and clumsy, a gold ring nearly hidden beneath the hair of his knuckles. She is to her elbows in dish soap; in the summer, the water spits out lukewarm and flecked with rust.
She looks up and there is the framed photograph in the windowsill. For a moment, she isn't sure whether she is seeing the streak of grey across the dog's muzzle or just remembering it. The uneasiness of realizing that this thing will only live on in her mind, from now on. She crushes a glass in her hand. The pieces disappear beneath a layer of foam.
The Socialist bandages the cut; she is superstitious about seeing doctors. Thick black hairs stick to the tape. "Women can be so clumsy," he says.
Nobody asks her what has happened to the dog.
She wears a khaki shirts and jeans, and she has plain, functional features. A thin mouth, a nose peppered by freckles, eyes that are always too wet in the summer and too dry in the winter. If it wasn't for her braid, which touches her tailbone, she could be mistaken for a boy.
("All right, you," she'd told it once, in front of the bathroom mirror, scissors poised just below the elastic band holding her ponytail. But the thought of her hair popping and cackling in a fire, like the soundtrack of an old film, and she had been unable to carry through.)
She prefers winter to summer. In summer, the plainsong of insects interrupts every conversation, and the leaves are inevitably duller than she'd imagined they would be, through those snow months. Plenty of time for imagining, for thinking, then - hard as it is to keep the rooms rented out. The travelogues are as dishonest as they are about everything. Winter, she thinks, is the perfect time. A landscape with no foreground, no focal point, white as alleluia. Sometimes the wail of a loon or a bark in the distance, but rarely. All that background, receding into the edges of the world, and going out to chop wood with the husky at her side, telling it things which do not hinge on whether or not anyone remembers them.
The house had been her grandfather's, and there are cattle pens in the back that have always been empty. A blue pickup truck in the lawn that has never been used, although there are maps and a pair of sunglasses on the dashboard, like a journey preemptively interrupted. The house had been built by miserable city-immigrants, come to mine gold under Stalin, and this sadness is imprinted into the architecture itself; the drooping awning, the plastic lining on the windows to imitate stained glass, the narrow corners so suitable for cobwebs that Veronika is constantly dismantling them with the back end of a broom. They just keep coming back. Who's sorrow can she trust? The past's or the present's?
The woman appears two weeks later.
"I'd like a room."
Veronika looks out into the porch. The Socialist is frying butter in the kitchen. The slices sizzle and evaporate, and the air inside the house tastes like animal fat. "There's an opening on the second floor. How did you get here?"
"I took the train."
"The station is fifty kilometers away."
"I was dropped off."
There are no tire tracks on the lawn, and the roads are not maintained; Veronika had cracked a tooth on a ride to the station, and that had been the last. The woman's hair is very short, her complexion odd - the skin is too loose, too elastic, sagging off of her cheekbones and the bridge of her nose. "I'd like a room," she says again. "For one week."
Eight eyes, Germanic blue, watching from the stairwell. The Socialist makes a sound in his throat. The woman enters, lets her duffle bag sag to the floor besides her feet, then pulls a stack of folded rubles from her back pocket. "I pay you, yes?"
She (Eva, Eva, Veronika has to keep reminding herself) does everything with the door open. The Germans catch her squatting on the toilet in the shared bathroom on the second floor. She scrapes the tarter off her teeth with her nails. There are thick hairs trapped against the soap. "Don't blame me," the Socialist says, "I use the bathroom up on third."
Veronika sees Eva herself, floating out of her room in the night. It is very late, and she is up reading her father's old hunting journals. Ten years ago, animals entered the house piece by piece - a heart in a plastic bucket with ice, a pelt folded in her backpack. Eva is watching her from the railing. Veronika looks up, startled. "Are you sleep walking?"
Eva has three deep puckers on her stomach, one on her left breast. Her nipples are very dark. Veronika is wearing an oversized t-shirt and no bra. She crosses her arms over her chest, suddenly self-concious.
"No, I just wanted to - look."
"You should go back to bed."
The woman nods, touches her sternum absently, then disappears. Through the window, the moon looks soft - three-quarters full - velvety and loose. The sight of it breaks Veronika's heart, in a pleasant sort of way.
She goes out to the place where she buried the dog, and wonders what it's like down there, with no air and no light. She knows there are creatures that will take one bite after another, until there is nothing left but bone. A whole subterranean civilization, built upon the husky's degrading muscles, on the gases expanding in its stomach. Wonders: is there is any tissue that retains the memory of biting at snow in December?
"I hate summer."
Eva. Behind her, grinding the sole of her foot into the carpet of blue hepatica. She hadn't even realized the woman was there. Her heart gives one strange, illicit beat; like blood is getting sucked the wrong way up the valves.
"Me too. Why? I mean, why do you?"
"Easy survival and terrible boredom. It drives us to cruel acts."
Veronika stares down at the loose black soil. She doesn't understand.
He'd fought in a war, though he never specifies which. The same secrecy surrounds his nationality. He speaks unaccented Russian, appears to converse easily with the Germans, and once, she had heard him speaking on the phone in what was certainly Japanese. He wears a military-issue coat with a hem to his knees, but the patches have either been torn or cut off. Now, there are just outlined rectangles of sewing thread. He is overweight and constantly short of breath, but the books he leaves in the living room are always survival manuals, revolutionary ideologies, and American political thrillers. The German boy tries to photograph him, and he refuses; he is afraid his image will go public, in some way.
The Socialist has files on every tenet in the house, which he keeps in manila folders. Normally, the filing cabinet in his room is locked, but age has made the mechanisms unreliable. Veronika had backed into the cabinet while cleaning, and discovered her file was the thinnest in the stack.
FAMILY HISTORY
Q: Where is your mother?
A: Moscow. She visits for Christmas, now and again.
Q: And your father?
A: Dead. (Subject cannot make eye-contact.)
Q: How did he die?
A: I don't know. (Evasive, pupils move to the left.)
Q: You don't know?
A: A crack in the ice. He drowned. I'm going to make some pasta for dinner. How would you like some pasta?
The Germans, on the other hand, had been happy to answer every question in detail, believing - through miscommunication - that they were participating in some manner of Russian census.
The Socialist spends most of his time in the kitchen because this is the nexus of most activity. "Eva," he tells her, "Can't answer my questions."
Veronika is doing dishes. Sometimes, she thinks her life is doing dishes, interrupted by brief periods of cooking. The brillo pad feels good against that thin skin, comforting; she has a layer of rust on her fingertips. "Your questions are unsettling," she says. "Just because someone doesn't want to answer, doesn't mean they can't."
He scratches the back of his neck. Hair and dried skin sloughing off. So that's what she has been dusting off the counters. "Men disappear into those woods every year. Hunters, loggers. Clever men. Men who know these forests."
She drops the plate she has been scrubbing into the sink. It does not break, but the dirty water splashes into her mouth and nose. The Socialist says, "I'm going to have one of my connections look into it."
Veronika's energy is unbearable. She cuts the flower stalks around the porch with a pair of kitchen shears, feeling too eager to watch the petals waver, attempt to regain their balance before falling. It drives us to cruel acts. She cuts until a blister forms on her thumb, then cuts until the blister bursts and fills the lines in her palm with puss. Her braid itches the bundle of nerves at the base of her spine.
Eva is watching through a hole she has wiped clean in the glass of the kitchen window. Veronika leaves the grime there, or else it is a hassle to gather the dead birds that collect around the lawn. That same unsettling smile. Veronika's father had taught her how to load a shotgun, how to gut a rabbit, how to walk on snow. Never how to grab a woman by the shoulders and tell her to fuck off.
(The moonlight takes an easily traceable path; down from the sky, into the ice, then up again, unto the fur lining on her father's coat. It reflects blue. Veronika can't wear that coat without locking the muscles in her legs, it is so heavy. Wolf's pelt that smells like bean soup, canned vegetables.)
"We've had enough," the Germans say, lined up like Russian nesting dolls, each one smaller than the last and paired with proportionally appropriate luggage. In the living room, the Socialist is watching television on mute, his torso swiveled around to stare. "We're going back to Moscow. This wilderness, by God. It's this wilderness."
Veronika's bare foot touches one of Eva's underpants, twisted and left on the living room floor. She eats and eats. Sausages wrapped in tinfoil, wiping the grease from her fingers unto the curtains. She pulls their chicken bones out of the trash to suck off the last traces of meat. She is up through the night, then falls into paralytic sleep during the day - in the bathtub, on the sofa, in the rocking chair on the front porch.
Veronika looks at the cigarette in her hand as if she's never seen one before. What a novel idea, to wrap a pinch of crushed tobacco in a piece of paper. The Germans file out, their steps choreographed.
Eva is watching from the stairwell, smiling.
"You have to go."
"No."
"You're scaring all my tenants away."
"I only want to stay for four more days."
She takes Veronika by the wrist. Her hand is very strong.
"Four more days."
In the night, Eva has no outline; no sharp edge that defines where Eva-darkness ends and Siberia-darkness begins. Veronika wakes and Eva has pinned her down with her arms and knees. She touches Veronika's lips with her tongue - tastes bad, like bile or hormones or stomach acid. Veronika tries to push away, but only for a moment, and then she is shoving down her pajamas, and Eva's mouth is on her nipple and Eva's sweat feels like oil against her skin.
Veronika runs a hand down the disks of Eva's spine. Eva slips her index finger into Veronika's belly button, and then lower, pushing inside of her, feeling brittle and frail. They say nothing, but later - when Veronika sinks between Eva's knees, her mouth forms words Veronika can't hear. And the strangest memory, then, to accompany the sourness and the heat.
(Her and her father crouched behind a wall of wild hedge - a gunshot - a brief scamper of hooves and then, nothing. A buck suspended in mud. Flowers of blood that do not dissolve in water.)
"Just three more nights," Eva says, after. They are both watching the fan revolve. The muscles in Veronika's thighs and abdomen feel too soft, but whenever there is a creek in the floor, Eva's tense against her.
"All right," Veronika says and forgets to ask about the scabs on Eva's calf - when they touch her skin, they make her itch.
The Socialist seems preoccupied with the British student who has replaced the Germans on the second floor, but on Sunday, she catches him hanging bulbs of garlic in the kitchen. To compensate, he is wearing too much aftershave. "What is this?," she says. "What are you doing?"
"Nothing. Nothing."
Once he has gone, Veronika considers taking them down, but doesn't.
"You're leaving tomorrow."
"I'm leaving tomorrow."
"I'll have a car come and pick you up."
"I've already made arrangements."
It is noon and Eva is straddling her hips. They've been in the lawn together, and both their cheeks are pink and their hair smells like chicory. Veronika can taste blood in the back of her throat, from when Eva had made her tilt her head back and wiped away the mess on her upper lip.
She grinds their pelvises together. Veronika feels her mouth open, pushes her skull back into the pillow. The wound on Eva's leg is purple, bruised. "No," she hears herself saying. "No."
(Her father walks out into the ice, and she says, "You shouldn't."
He flexes his knees, experiments with his weight. "It's fine. It's fine."
Veronika is too afraid to argue with him.)
The Socialist says: "She walked out into the woods an hour ago. Completely naked. What a body, let me tell you. Too bad about that other thing."
The woods are full of fog; when it touches her skin, it hisses and liquifies. She feels heavy and her boots make a suction noise when separating from the ground. It impedes her progress. In this light, the forest abandons all sense of scale - the trees dribble off into outer-space. "Eva," she calls. She has her shotgun strapped across her back. An elongated footprint in the soil. A clump of hair in a low-lying branch. "Eva."
(Her father and his husky, following these same trails in weak autumnal sunlight.)
It's not a surprise to find her on the bank of the stream the runs from the mountains, her head flung back, her throat exposed, her pulse tapping gently at the vein - what an ingenious simulation of a human being. It is too dark to determine the color of her eyes, but they look like flashlight bulbs, winking on and off.
(Her father, tracking a pack in the summer, gnats buzzing around his face. His hand suspended over a pile of feces, still warm.)
Eva takes a step back. Veronika can see three narrow faces in her peripheral vision. Ears flattened, eyes rimmed by absurdly thick lashes. A series of deep concussions. An intense white shadow behind her pupils. What is that? Is she falling?
It drives us to cruel acts.
It drives us to cruel acts.