Arkady turned his head as slowly as possible and saw a row of yellow eyes behind the trees. The air grew heavy. Insects slowed in their spirals. Sweat ringed Arkady's neck and ran down his chest and spine. The next moment the deer bolted in an explosion of dust and flower heads, took the measure of the field in two bounds and crashed into the woods on the far side. Arkady looked back at the birches. The wolves had gone so silently that he thought he might have imagined them.
Alex unslung his rifle and ran to the birches. From a lower branch, he freed a tuft of gray fur that he carefully placed inside a plastic bag. When he had put the bag in a pocket and given the pocket a loving pat, he tore a strip of bark off the birch, placed the strip between his palms and blew a long, piercing whistle. 'Yes!' he said. 'Life is good!'
Eva Kazka had set up a card table and folding chairs in the middle of the village's only paved road. Her white coat said she was a doctor; otherwise, her manner suggested a weary mechanic, and she didn't tame her black hair back as much as subdue it.
On either side of this outdoor office, the village slumped in resignation. Window trim hung loose around broken panes, the memory of blue and green walls faded under the black advance of mildew. The yards were full of bikes, sawhorses and tubs pillowed in tall grass and bordered by picket fences that leaned in an infinitely slow collapse. All the same, set farther back from the main street were, here and there, repainted houses with windows and intricate trim intact, with a haze of wood smoke around the chimney and a goat cropping the yard.
A benchful of elderly women in versions of shawl-and-coat-and-rubber-boots waited while Eva looked down the throat of a round little woman with steel teeth.
'Alex Gerasimov is crazy, this is a well-known fact,' Eva said as an aside to Arkady. 'Him and his precious nature. He's a perfectionist. He is a man who would drive a car into a pole again and again until it was a perfect wreck. Close.'
The old woman closed her jaw firmly to signify nothing less then complete cooperation. Arkady doubted that, from the shawl tied tight around her head to her boots hanging clear of the ground, she was over a meter and a half tall. Her eyes were bright and dazzling, a true Ukrainian blue.
'Maria Fedorovna, you have the blood pressure and heart rate of a woman twenty years younger. However, I am concerned about the polyp in your throat. I would like to take it out.'
'I will discuss it with Roman.'
'Yes, where is Roman Romanovich? I expected to see your husband, too.'
Maria lifted her eyes to the top of the lane, where a gate swung open for a bent man in a cap and sweater, leading a black-and-white cow by a rope. Arkady didn't know which looked more exhausted.
'He's airing the cow,' Maria said.
The cow trudged dutifully behind. A milk cow was an asset precious enough to be displayed for visitors, Arkady thought. All attention was fixed on the animal's plodding circuit up and down the street. Its hooves made a sucking sound in the wet earth.
Eva's fingers played with a scarf tucked into the collar of her lab coat. She wasn't pretty in an orthodox way; the contrast of such white skin and black hair was too exotic and her eyes had, at least for Arkady, an unforgiving gaze.
'There's no house here you could use for more privacy?' Arkady asked.
'Privacy? This is their entertainment, their television, and this way they can all discuss their medical problems like experts. These people are in their seventies and eighties. I'm not going to operate on them except for something like a broken leg. The state doesn't have the money, instruments or clean blood to waste on people their age. I'm not even supposed to be making calls, and Maria would never go to a city, for fear they wouldn't let her return here.'
Arkady said, 'She's not supposed to be here anyway. This is the Zone.'
Eva turned toward the ladies on the bench. 'Only someone from Moscow could say something as stupid as that.' To judge by their expressions, they seemed to agree. 'The state turns a blind eye to the return of old people. It has given up trying to stop them,' Eva informed Arkady. 'It has also stopped sending doctors to see them. It demands they go to a clinic.'
Maria said, 'At our age, you go into the hospital, you don't come out.'
Eva asked Arkady, 'You've seen those television shows with the bathing beauties dropped off on a tropical island to see if they can survive?' She nodded to Maria and to her friends on the bench. 'These are the real survivors.'
The doctor introduced them: Olga had a corrugated face and filmy glasses; Nina leaned on a crutch; Klara had the angular features of a Viking, braids and all. Their leader was Maria.
'An investigator of what?' Maria asked.
Arkady said, 'A body of a man was found at the entrance of your village cemetery in the middle of May. I was hoping that one of you might have seen or heard someone, or noticed something odd or maybe a car.'
'May was rainy,' Maria said.
'Was it at night?' Olga asked. 'If it was at night and it was raining, who would even go outside?'
'Do any of you have dogs?'
'No dogs,' Klara said.
'Wolves eat dogs,' said Nina.
'So I hear. Do you know a family called Katamay? The son was in the militia here.'
The women shook their heads.
'Is the name Timofeyev familiar to you?' Arkady asked.
'I don't believe you,' Eva said. 'You act like a real detective, like you're in Moscow. This is a black village, and the people here are ghosts. Someone from Moscow died here? Good riddance. We owe Moscow nothing, they've done nothing for us.'
'Is the name Pasha Ivanov familiar to you?' Arkady asked the women.
Eva said, 'You're worse than Alex. He values animals above people, but you're worse. You're just a bureaucrat with a list of questions. These women have had their whole world taken away. Their children and grandchildren are allowed to visit one day a year. The Russians promised money, medicine, doctors. What do we get? Alex Gerasimov and you. At least he's doing research. Why did Moscow send you?'
'To get rid of me.'
'I can see why. And what have you found?'
'Not much.'
'How can that be? The death rate here is twice normal. How many people died from the accident? Some say eighty, some say eight thousand, some say half a million. Did you know that the cancer rate around Chornobyl is sixty-five times normal? Oh, you don't want to hear this. This is so tedious and depressing.'
Was he in a staring contest with her? This had to be like a falconer's dilemma, holding a not completely trained bird of prey on the wrist.
'I did want to ask you a few questions, maybe someplace else.'
'No, Maria and the other women can use a little amusement. We will all concentrate on one Russian stiff.' Eva opened a pack of cigarettes and shared them with her patients. 'Go on.'
'You do have drugs?' Arkady asked.
'Yes, we do have some medicine, not much, but some.'
'Some has to be refrigerated?'
'Yes.'
'And some frozen?'
'One or two.'
'Where?'
Eva Kazka took a deep draw on her cigarette. 'In a freezer, obviously.'
'Do you have one, or do you use the freezer at the cafeteria?'
'I have to admit, you have a single-mindedness that must be very useful in your profession.'
'Do you store medicine in the cafeteria freezer?'
'Yes.'
