Vostok — Unmapped Settlement, Eastern Siberia | August 9, 2011 | Dawn
The girl was twelve and she was breaking surface ice with a stick the way her grandmother had shown her, which was with two sharp strikes at the same point rather than trying to cover the whole surface at once.
Her name was Anya, like her grandmother, and she had the specific patience of someone who had grown up in a place where impatience was not a useful quality. Vostok was a village that did not appear on Russian Federation administrative maps, had never had electricity connected, and received its news approximately six months after the events it described. The people here had adapted themselves to the conditions that existed rather than waiting for conditions to change, which was a reasonable adaptation to a place that had not changed in three hundred years.
She saw the shape on the gravel bank downstream and stopped breaking ice.
It was large. Dark. It had the quality of something that had been put there by the river rather than something that had arrived under its own authority. She went closer, which was not the cautious choice but was the twelve-year-old choice, and then she saw the hand.
She ran.
* * *
Baba Anya — the elder, her grandmother's generation, the one whose opinion settled disputes and whose knowledge of the river was the oldest in the village — directed the recovery operation the way she directed everything: with the economy of someone who had been making necessary decisions in difficult circumstances for seventy-three years and had stopped explaining herself sometime in the 1980s.
The two men who carried him — Piotr, the miller's son, built like the work he did; Ivan, older, who had once had a life in Krasnoyarsk before circumstances had redirected him — did not ask questions. In Vostok, when Baba Anya directed something, you directed yourself in the same direction.
They laid him on the table in the largest cabin.
Piotr cut the tactical vest straps with his hunting knife and stopped when he felt the material. He turned it in his hands, frowning at the construction, the lamination, the weight of it. "This isn't military gear, Mama," he said. "Military I know. This is something else."
"Then it's none of our business what it is," Baba Anya said, and pressed her ear to the stranger's chest.
She listened.
A long quiet. Then: a beat. A pause longer than it should have been. Another beat.
"He lives," she said. She straightened up and looked around at the seven people crowded into her cabin's main room. "Somebody boil water. And somebody go find my sage."
* * *
For ten days, he was not present in any meaningful sense.
Baba Anya had seen fever before — the river took people sometimes, and cold took them, and sickness moved through the settlement every winter with the particular patience of something that had nowhere else to be. She had not seen a fever like this one. The man's temperature spiked to the edge of what was survivable and stayed there, his body locked in a biological argument she could not see and could not influence except with cool water, broth, and the patience she had been accumulating for seven decades.
He talked in his sleep. Not coherently — names, mostly. One name several times:
Jessica.
Another that sounded English. A third that he said differently, the way people said a name they were angry at.
She recognized the pattern. She had seen it in men who came back from wars. The fever was partly physical and partly not, and the not-physical part was the harder part to treat, and you could not treat it directly, you could only provide the conditions in which it might resolve on its own.
She kept him warm. She kept him fed when he could take anything. She watched the impossible thing happen to his body — the wounds she had seen when she cut his gear away, the bullet scars and the blade marks of a man who had been doing dangerous work for a long time, the fresh damage from whatever the river had done to him — and she watched his body deal with all of it at a pace that she did not have a medical framework for, because she was not a doctor, but she was a woman who had been watching human bodies for seventy-three years and she knew what healing looked like and this was different from that.
She did not mention this to anyone. In her experience, the things you couldn't explain were best observed quietly.
On the tenth day, his fever broke. She was there when it happened. She put a cool cloth on his forehead and looked at his face — pale, too young for what it had been through, the eyes closed — and said: "Not today, synok."
He did not respond. But his breathing changed.
END OF CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Chapter Thirty-Seven follows...