A Train to Moscow(19)
Then from the forest behind her, there is an explosion. The sound bounces off the trees and then hollows out. The explosion freezes her heart and she knows, even without her mother having to tell her, that she did the right thing by running away from danger. But all she feels is the opposite of right. Would Uncle Kolya have left his fellow soldiers to be killed or captured by the Germans because they were in danger? Would he have abandoned his friends when they needed him?
She turns around and runs back, following her own footsteps in the snow. The road back to danger seems much shorter than the road away from it, and a few minutes later, she is where the fire they built sputters little ribbons of flame, tired and spent, wheezing like an old smoker.
She sees Andrei pressing his hands to his ears, walking around in circles, stumbling like their neighbor Semyon when he is drunk. She sees Marik lying on his side, as if he were smelling the snow, a stupid thing to do, since everyone knows that snow has no smell.
“Marik!” she shouts, but he continues to smell the snow as if he hasn’t heard her, and there is a trickle of blood coming from his mouth.
“Andrei!” she shouts, but he is oblivious to her yelling, too. He is hitting his ears and jumping, as if his feet were on fire.
At least Andrei is moving, but Marik is not. She kneels next to him to do what her mother does when someone is sick, to wrap her fingers around his wrist and feel for a pulse. But the fire is still hissing, so she can’t feel any pulse, and she can’t hear anything, either, when she opens Marik’s coat and presses her ear to his chest.
“We have to get him to a hospital,” she yells as she gets up, but Andrei keeps lifting his legs in a frantic dance, rubbing his ears, as though trying to knead the sound back in. She thinks of a sled Grandpa made for her a few years ago, a sled still hanging on the wall of their shed back home, and she pulls Andrei by the sleeve of his coat toward a big fir tree, not far from where Marik lies on the snow. Together they tug at the lowest bough, up and down and right and left until it becomes loose and crunches off the trunk. The bough is thick and long, a little bigger than Marik’s height, and they pull him onto this fir sled, Andrei and Sasha, because Marik is heavy and limp and doesn’t help them at all.
It is no use asking Andrei what has happened. He has stopped jumping and beating his ears, and now he does nothing but twitch his shoulders in rhythmic shrugs.
They pull Marik out of the woods on this makeshift sled, trudging silently through the snow, like the tired dogs tugging at their load in a grainy film about the Arctic they all saw at school. When the forest ends, they walk across the field and onto a road that leads to the hospital where her mother works. It is harder to pull Marik over the rough surface of iced pebbles and frozen dirt, and Andrei is not much help, slapping his head as if he’d forgotten something, his shoulders still twitching. Sasha’s winter coat padded with cotton feels as hot on the inside as their black stove, and she unbuttons it, letting the wind gush onto her chest, something Grandma would be horrified to see, certain that Sasha will get pneumonia. They pass the tracks where the streetcar turns around to go back to town; they drag Marik past wooden houses squatting on the outskirts of town under roofs that have been ravaged by the winter; and finally, as her arms begin to quiver and she is afraid she won’t be able to take one more step, the hospital arranges itself in front of her, as if magically lowered from the pewter sky.
Two women in white gowns run out of the door from behind a counter and carefully transfer Marik onto a stretcher. They wave for Andrei and Sasha to follow them into the bowels of the hospital, into a room where a doctor with a thin neck and a pimply face plugs a stethoscope into his ears and bends over Marik. He pulls apart Marik’s eyelids, wraps his fingers around Marik’s wrist, and then tells the two women with the stretcher to take Sasha and Andrei out of the room and close the door.
“So what did you hooligans do?” demands the older woman, as thick and round as the pot warmer Grandma pulls over their teakettle.
“I didn’t do anything. And I’m not a hooligan,” she says, knowing that this makes Andrei the hooligan. As hooligans do, he crossed the threshold into danger, and now Marik is lying behind this door, and her mother is probably already on her way here because she works on the hospital ambulance on Sundays, and her medical institute is only two blocks away.
Andrei slaps his hands over his ears to show that he can’t hear what the pot-warmer woman is saying. She looks at him suspiciously, fists on her hips. “Sit here and wait,” she says and points to a bench.
They don’t even have time to sit down before she sees her mother running down the hallway, scooping her in her arms, moving her fingers over her head and shoulders as though checking to see that she is in one piece.
On the way home, they pass a babushka with a baked-apple face who is weeping on a bench next to a house made from brown logs, dabbing a white handkerchief at her eyes, and a stubbled man in a wool hat wiping his nose with his sleeve behind the liquor store where he usually waits for a drinking companion. They should indeed both be crying, Sasha thinks, although she doesn’t know how they could have found out that Marik is dead. No vital signs. This is what the doctor with the thin neck, who had probably been her mother’s student, said when she opened the door they were not allowed to open. No vital signs, he said, as if he were still in her class and this was a test. Sasha has been to the morgue before, so she knows what this means. It means that the shell Andrei handed to Marik exploded with such ferocious force that its fragments pierced Marik’s padded coat and made little holes in his belly and intestines. Only this time, her mother couldn’t save him, as she had saved the boy at the frontline hospital, because it took them too long to drag Marik through the woods back to town. Would Marik still be alive if she hadn’t left the two of them by the bonfire? Would he be alive if her heart hadn’t raced each time Andrei’s sleeve inadvertently brushed against hers?