Tatsiana Zamirovskaya is a writer from Belarus, who moved to Brooklyn in 2015. She writes metaphysical and socially charged fiction about memory, ghosts, hybrid identities, and borders between empires and languages. Tatsiana is the author of 3 short story collections and a novel about digital resurrection, The Deadnet, which was published in 2021 in Moscow, receiving great critical acclaim. She is also a journalist and essayist, writing about art, traumatic memories, dictatorships and dreams.
Born in Moscow, Julia Meitov Hersey moved to Boston at the age of nineteen and has been straddling the two cultures ever since. She spends her days juggling a full-time job and her beloved translation projects. Julia is a recipient of the Rosetta Science Fiction and Fantasy Award for Best Translated Work, long form (2021).
***
A terrible rumbling noise woke us up at nine in the morning.
It was the field—our field.
We took off as soon as we heard it, obviously, because it was our field. Everything that happened there was ours, and only ours. That’s where Nielle and I met the brown earthen witch in her mushroom apothecary cap. That’s where, breathless with terror, I summoned the White Dog on the fifth moonrise, and the Dog came, and brought us ten-day-old pups in a basket, just for cuddles. Every day these pups, blind and sweetly hairless like dandelions after a storm, grew thinner, their skin more pink and transparent, until on the tenth day they morphed into a pile of quietly wiggling skin bubbles, and then the White Dog came and took them back into her womb. That’s where Nielle dug a grave for the forest devil and did such a great job that, when the forest devil died, he came and lay in his new grave because he had no other refuge, no other place to go. That’s where we searched for the meat fern flower on a July night, and eventually we found it and put it under Uncle Volodya’s pillow. The next morning he won the lottery—a three-room apartment somewhere on the outskirts of our town. He stays in that apartment drinking day and night, and now we know we should have put that flower under his ex-wife’s pillow, not his. It was our field, our feral, bloody, boggy, alive land, and our hair sat within it, and the amber half moons of our nails, our incantations, and the summer rhymes we composed for Death. (It was Nielle’s idea to write special verses for Death so She would stop by the edge of the field and listen for a moment. The verses were to have these special white spots, flickering agony, arrhythmical Cheyne-Stokes rattle, pools of cloudy morning water in lamb hooves, an attentive stare of a bewitched snipe at sundown—we couldn’t break the spell, but at least we tried.)
And now this field burned, rumbled, and rolled back and forth as if God was trying to wrap it like a tortilla. Horrified, I stared out of the window, my hands pressed against my ears, and Nielle jumped up and down, screeching:
“Ourfieldourfieldourfield!
“Justasecondago, literallyjustthismoment!”
None of the grown-ups were home. Everyone had gone to an air show in town, and a fighter jet had just crashed on our field.
Lelya and Katerina came down the stairs.
“It’s a fighter jet,” Katerina said. “I know all about fighter jets. I saw it crashing down, burning. I felt a little bit like I made it crash, just by looking at it.”
Still blinking sleepily, Lelya pulled on her tennis shoes and put her soft baby-bird puppy weight against the door.
We ran to our field to see what was left of it. The field hummed and burned, and not a piece of it was left unharmed. The adults hadn’t returned yet. We were there first. Lelya proposed getting closer to look for survivors; she had seen this on the news—planes would go down and people would simply lie on the field like little puddles, but what if on our field they would turn up alive? Katerina said that if it really were a fighter jet, there would be only one person, the pilot. No passengers. Then Nielle proposed to look for the pilot and we walked over to the fire, super-super close. It was really hot, even a few hundred feet away from this burning strudel, but still we decided to come closer.
On our way we found a handful of strange objects: a piece of parchment with a leather fringe, empty bottles (shells or bombs?), an armchair, unbroken, the color of fresh grass, and a stuffed teddy bear (Lelya wanted to pick it up, but Nielle grabbed her by her small pudgy elbow, hurting her and making her drop the toy).
At first, we figured the pilot catapulted himself, but he hadn’t. Instead, he was lying inside the catapult itself, tightly buttoned inside some sort of a leather cocoon, and when Nielle undid the buttons and looked inside, she said immediately:
“This is for us.”
We peeked inside the cocoon and knew right away: yes, it was definitely meant for us.
The pilot was covered in blood, milk, and some kind of melting roots; he was artistically arranged inside the cocoon like a scrumptious restaurant dish.
We could see the grown-ups gathering in the distance; somewhere very far a helicopter made an efficient military noise. Any minute now they would all descend upon our field and start taking care of things.
“Let Lelya take the cocoon, it probably provides nutritional support,” Nielle ordered, freeing up the pilot and grabbing him by the leg. Katerina took his other leg, and I picked up his round head, coarse like a dog’s, and wrapped it in his jacket to hide his face. The pilot was light and dry like a bag of burned grass, and yet, as we dragged him along, he left a trail, slippery and limpid, like a giant water slug.
“To the cellar!” Nielle shouted when we made it back home. I let go of his head; it knocked dully against a dirt step, and the pilot said, “Ah.”
“He’s hurt,” Nielle said. “But it’s all right, the most important thing is to get him in, then we can bandage whatever it is.”
We slammed the cellar door shut and arranged the pilot among the jars of grandma’s pickles and jellies from 2006. Little Lelya spread the cocoon that immediately turned plaid like a blanket; everything happened too fast, literally in five minutes, and no one had a chance to understand anything or to get scared.
“Well,” Katerina said, exhaling. “I am going upstairs, the fire engines have arrived.”
Nielle began to move her hands around the pilot’s midsection: that’s where she expected to find a regeneration device and a black box that recorded everything that happened to the pilot before the crash. She explained to us that after the crash everything was erased because in this situation no one cares about the life before.
Locating the slippery box covered in something like egg yolk, Nielle wiped it on the hem of Lelya’s dress, making her squeal, and twisted off the lid. Ten seconds later she was already plunging a sonorous steel miniature syringe into the pilot’s forearm.
“That’s how they always do it,” she explained to Lelya and me. “He might come to eventually. We also need milk, but only after the cat drinks it, make sure the cat drinks a bit of it first. Lelya, why don’t you run upstairs.”
Lelya and I ran upstairs together. When we peeked out the window, a large crowd had already gathered at the crash site. An emergency aircraft carrier trudged along the narrow country road, groaning and snagging on the rusty fences with its chrome levers. A black cloud of oily smoke stretched as far as the river. The sun was high. It was a perfect day for swimming.
Lelya’s daddy came home with a bag of cold morning fish. He forbade us to leave the house. He said things were all topsy-turvy, everything was on fire, the accident was horrible, don’t go anywhere, stay home. Lelya took the bag of fish from him and asked when the rest of the grown-ups were coming home, but he flapped his arms in response: go, go to your rooms, all the roads are still blocked, no one can get home, it’s unbelievable, such a terrible event, we’re lucky he didn’t crash on top of our house, they say he tried to lead it as far away as possible, and he managed to lead it away, but he himself didn’t make it.
Lelya was picking the quietest and most obedient fish from the bag; still holding the fish in her hand, she suddenly froze and opened her lips to object—he did make it! He did!—but out of nowhere Nielle’s slender fingers closed on the thin mouth of the fish, and Lelya’s teeth seemed to clamp up.
“If we can’t go outside, we’ll play in the cellar,” Nielle said smiling. Meanwhile, from under the table, I watched the cat lap up the milk—slowly, as if in a trance. After two endless minutes, I pushed the cat away with a slipper, picked up the bowl of milk, and stepped toward the stairs. Outside our window, shells exploded, and currant bushes went up in smoke, and the rescue helicopter rumbled, destined for failure—on our field no one has ever managed to save anyone, ever.
Except for us, and to be honest, not from us either.
For the first three days, the pilot didn’t feel all that great: he wallowed in different corners of the cellar simultaneously, a few times he appeared to be a mound of construction foam, no trace of his face at all, but Nielle assured us that it could be seen while he was drinking his milk through a straw. He still had no lips, that accident was pretty horrible, but we inserted a straw into one of the holes in his skull, and the milk disappeared, and that meant the pilot was drinking it.
Having returned from the town, the grown-ups drank wine and watched television, lamenting the terrible tragedy, and talking about how he barely managed to lead the plane away from the village, and how no one really knew what happened, some sort of an explosion, such an awful thing to have occurred, he was so young, only thirty three, and if he had jumped out, he would have crashed on top of the houses, and everyone would have died, literally everyone, he saved the children, such a saint, a real saint for sure.
Smirking, we drank our milk. Because in reality, it was us who saved him.
Outside the window, our scorched field gaped in black, and the mild marsh birds would mourn their unborn sons in the night, swaying on the charred bushes. Katerina would put aside her glass of wine (at fourteen, she was allowed an occasional drink with the grown-ups), and with a bored look on her face, would go to the cellar “for the jellies.”
Of course we should have told our parents that we saved the pilot, but the pilot was still in pretty bad shape, he must have spoiled a bit while he was falling, and we had decided we were going to wait until he gets better, and then we’d tell them, we’d definitely tell them right away. If the grown-ups found out we stole the pilot from the field, we’d be in a lot of trouble. If he had been in decent shape to begin with, we’d tell them immediately. But we knew that the grown-ups would think he was like this because of us. We simply had to nurse him back to health.
In the night, Nielle and I went to the scorched field and sniffed the black grass, looking for the one that would give the pilot back his memory of flying into our field like a boiling meteorite. Little Lelya took sugar lumps to the little village cemetery where giant black ants lived. She placed the sugar on the rocks and waited until the ants filled the sweet lumps with their revitalizing earthen acid. That was the only candy the pilot could eat. I summoned the White Dog with grandma’s kerchief, a duck egg, and a snake skin, and the White Dog came and let me milk her. I got a half a cup of grayish, opaque liquid tinted mother-of-pearl, from which Nielle made a tiny wheel of cheese. The pilot ate the cheese and moaned, and blood poured out of his eyes and lips, and that’s how we got to see his mouth, full of strong bone teeth, and his eyes, greenish-brown like autumn rocks.
Lelya dug up tiny secret treasures with last year’s flowers and dried up insects pressed under pieces of glass, and we placed them onto the pilot’s forehead, the soil side down. As the soil sunk in, the flowers would wake up and begin to bloom around his face, and his forehead would revive, too, and skin would go from waxy parchment to luminous honey. We used the leftover glass to draw blood from our arms and leave messages on the floor, because when the pilot’s eyes bled, he could only see and read what was written in red.
“The field you crashed on belongs to us. That means you belong to us, too,” Nielle wrote.
“I am Lelya,” that’s what little Lelya carved right on her wrist with a shard of glass, wincing from her very first cognizant pain.
“How old were you?” Katerina wrote.
I used my blood to draw a plane on my left palm.
He grabbed my hand and pressed it to his cheek. It was so unexpected that I burst out crying and couldn’t stop crying all night, and the grown-ups said it was because of that terrible crash, because we saw everything with our own eyes, and how horrible it was, and how they wished that someone would clean the debris already and figure out what actually happened. I was given hot milk with some calming herbs, and as I drank it, burning and scorching my insides, I noticed how coldly Lelya was staring at me; Lelya who had to wear a long-sleeved blouse on a hot summer day to hide the cuts on her arms.
The grown-ups keep talking about how frightening it was, about conducting the investigation, about both engines failing at once—how could it have happened? They fall silent, nervously looking at us, then insincerely jumping to other topics: paper doilies, newspaper dailies, and jams and jellies … Wait, what? Jellies?
“We set up a clubhouse in the cellar, but we’re going to clean it up after,” Nielle says, pressing her foot onto mine. “If you need some of that stupid strawberry stuff, I’ll bring it up.”
A clubhouse is a sacred thing. That’s how it works: if we set up a clubhouse, grown-ups avoid the space, and we clean everything up once we’re done. That’s how it was with the attic and with the mice kingdom; they trust us, we never lie, and we wouldn’t have lied about the pilot either, if only he was getting better, at least a little bit, because how could we show them this, there is nothing to show just yet.
Meanwhile, the pilot is getting his face back: it’s all scarred, pitted with hoof prints, marsh water melting in tiny grooves. For the groove to heal, you need live flesh. To revive the flesh, you need to get a little bit of mutton from the pilaf, take it to the field, find a suitable lamb hoof print with morning water and put the lamb inside (yesterday’s water won’t do, so you’ve got to go right after it rains), summon the White Dog with three duck eggs and a piece of Grasshopper candy and ask her to pee into the hoof print. The lamb will grow into the hoof print and then you can cut it out carefully, just don’t cut the soil around it; you can cut the meat, but not the earth. And only then you can place it whenever the pilot is missing pieces. When it takes, the pilot stops moaning, and sometimes he even tries to sit up or say something. When it doesn’t take, we have to cut it out immediately and put it back into the pilaf. The pilaf doesn’t care, and the grown-ups will be fine, nothing will happen to them, because all the meat in the pilaf is the meat that didn’t take.
To ensure the pilot manifests as a man, not as a woman, Nielle wraps him into dirty shirts stolen from Uncle Volodya’s; but first, she soaks them in the extract of cat fur. We have plenty of fur because the cat regularly vomits gray fur balls. The pilot absorbs the shirts completely—as they soak with sweat, they become something like his new post-burn skin, and five or six shirts later, the pilot no longer looks terrifying, his burns fade away, and this is almost like a real body, and it’s almost like a real life, but it’s still too early for the grown-ups.
In the evenings Nielle reads to the pilot from her “Elves of the Silver River” series. We had been a bit overwhelmed by her rampant graphorrhea, and so at first we rejoiced that all those splendid battle scenes were now directed toward the pilot, but then we realized—when he started talking—that he now drew his vocabulary from Nielle’s epic. We figured this out one evening when he—for the first time!—picked up a cup of tisane made with dried fruit and ephemerid fireflies whose limpid bodies covered the cellar floor. We collected them on the tenth moon day. It was Lelya who brought him the tisane, and when he drank it all by himself, she got all discombobulated, dropped the cup, and laughed awkwardly, and that’s when he said:
“The power you are given is not the power you are using.”
It was his first coherent sentence. Lelya was thrilled that this sentence was addressed to her, but the contents were clearly Nielle’s influence. We immediately banned her from reading her elven stories to the pilot, especially since he’d already declared that his name was Sillemalle of the Valley of Steel Thorns, which was pure nonsense, obviously, it wasn’t his name, but what it actually was—that was a good question. For that, we needed to resurrect the pilot’s memory.
We’d resurrect his memory, and then tell the grown-ups right away—that’s what we had decided. Until then, we’d drag these heavy glass jars of jellies up and down the stairs by ourselves.
We put another padlock on the cellar door and took shifts every night. He had to be fed at night, on schedule, like a baby bird. His food had to be alive so we resurrected some tiny fish flies, and the double yolks of our biggest Friday eggs, and one time we even managed to reanimate a whole fish.
Eating all this live food made the pilot feel better. He now looked like someone who was recovering from an illness the name of which none of us ever mentioned but all of us knew, of course. Different stuff happened during different shifts. Nielle told us that when she went into the cellar, she saw a hedgehog sitting on his chest. Cats sit where it hurts, and hedgehogs sit where it doesn’t hurt, everyone knows that. Did that mean his soul didn’t hurt? Lelya assured us he did feel some sort of longing: he asked her for a piece of paper to write a letter to his family, but he couldn’t recall his first or last name, or what happened to him, or any of his relatives. All he could come up with was “a letter to his family.” He moaned—all these terrible sounds, “nnnn, me-me-mine,”—and beat his head against the three-liter glass jar of pickles from last September, and the jar rang out like a church bell. He asked me for a cake of red flour so he could go home. That was exactly what he said: this is for me so I can go home. Where his home was, he couldn’t say.
Of course, we went to our field and gathered some red wheat, but the investigators chased us away. They are combing through the field with their dogs, looking for some boxes, some evidence. They won’t find anything. We only got a little of the red wheat, a matchbox’s worth of it, and Nielle said we shouldn’t bake anything yet, he might remember stuff without it. And when he does remember, we’ll tell the grown-ups, and they will take him home, and to think of how happy everyone would be, they must be really missing him.
To make him remember, we sent a shell-less slug back and forth across his body three times; we made a memory pudding (the last time we made it for Katerina’s grandmother when she started confusing our names, and it worked even though we used regular cow fat, not the elk one). We summoned the Hare Queen right there in the cellar (three empty quail eggs, a toad dried in the summer sun, the Gomel Girl candy bar, two playing cards, both of clubs, all woven together with a green thread), and the Queen interviewed him and even got some answers, but never gave us the recording. She walked away with the recorder, crashing the shells with her steel hooves on her way out.
He couldn’t get up just yet but was already crawling around the cellar; Katerina called him Joseph, which annoyed us to no end. Once when we were giving him the six-mile water to awaken his memory, as dry as an old tree, he suddenly recalled that Joseph situation and said he didn’t want Katerina to take any more night shifts.
Katerina cried in her room all the following week, and I took her shifts. The pilot and I tried to draw pictures to figure out who he really was. I took his hand into mine and moved the knife across the paper in the shape of a triangular roof: was that a house? The pilot ripped the paper and growled like a wounded animal: not house, not house! I asked, what shall we draw then? A balloon? A plane? A plane?
Every time I mentioned a plane, he’d start crying. His tears, salty and pungent like jars of pickles that served as his bed and his shelter, smelled of rain and sea, and Katerina would catch that sharp, savory scent, recoil, and hide in her room. After a while she simply stopped talking to me. The grown-ups whispered to each other, depression, challenging age, probably in love, it’s about time, she’s a teenager after all.
Lelya was the next one to fall in love. After one of her night shifts, she came back to the nursery shaking, pale-faced, scarlet spots on her cheeks—as if she were sprayed with blood, as if someone was beheaded right in front of her with a generous sweep of a steel blade.
“He … he asked,” she said indignantly and began to weep, so desperately and so lustily that anyone would be heartbroken, and only our cynical Noelle wouldn’t stop bugging her, jerking her, pinching her plump little elbow, and hissing: “Come on, tell us, tell us, what did he ask for, what?”
“He asked me to write a letter,” Lelya sniffled, still trembling and still wailing. “A letter to his wife … he asked me to write a letter to his wife! That’s what he wanted! That’s what it is! He has a wife!”
Freeing herself from Nielle’s pinching, vicious embrace, Lelya collapsed on her enormous pink, pony-covered pillow.
Nielle looked at me in despair. “Who could have thought the baby would be so impressionable,” her eyes said to me. “We shouldn’t have let her scratch her arms with a shard of glass,” my eyes responded. Nielle and I did not need words to communicate. And now staring into each other’s eyes, we felt Lelya’s pink pillow fill to the brim with her watery tears, pungent and translucent like rose water.
Lelya was so upset that she flatly refused to attend to any of her shifts, so we ended up pulling Katerina back in. By then the pilot had forgotten how she had offended him, and they became fast friends. When the pilot asked Katerina to write a letter to his wife and tell her not to worry about him, Katerina would raise an eyebrow in agreement and walk away, her skirt rustling. She’d bring back some rough packing paper, lick the tip of her pencil, and gaze at the pilot questioningly: well? What’s her name? Anya? Lena? Yulia? Dasha? Perhaps, Irina?
“I don’t remember,” the pilot wept, his tears thick and oily, like candle fat (these were his special Katerina tears, he had a different kind for each of us). “I remember—darling but who? My sweet little bunny but why? A person but how? I had a wife, I remember the wife.”
“Kapitolina?” Katerina asked, smirking. “Vasilisa?”
The pilot smeared tears and grease over his fresh, beardless baby face. Katerina smelled like grease all the time now, and eventually she began smelling of alcohol: the pilot asked for a drink, and she stole the grown-ups’ alcohol, as if she were under his spell, and later she began drinking with him to help him remember. And he did remember, at least some war stories, not that any of them were relevant. In time they managed to write about five letters to the pilot’s wives, but then it turned out those were the wrong wives, or rather the wrong lives because the pilot kept recalling something not quite right. Like an old broken radio, he kept catching someone else’s epochs, some foreign times, tuning into the soft false rattle of something long lived-through and long forgotten by his secret teachers who went up in flames a good hundred years before he himself was set on fire.
He didn’t remember burning this time either. All the previous occasions had been more or less recollected and analyzed, but not this one. Alcohol did not help, and neither did Nielle’s soft herbal spells, even though the clever girl quickly realized that the memory revival process took our new friend down the wrong path. The spells did not help, and even our inconspicuous, almost secret friendship—and I am sure it was friendship and nothing more—led nowhere but to failure, an empty bottomless chasm.
“I remember the funeral,” he said. “The military orchestra was playing, and people tossed candy everywhere, like at a wedding. All three wives followed the casket, as if it were a parade. But only one of them pinned the medals when it was time, only one fell face first into the medals, when the music ended, only one. What was her name? Galya? Galina?”
“Don’t force the memory,” I told him. “It’s not the right one, it’s not yours. It happened to me, too. I was buried a thousand times, with music and without. Once they simply wrapped me in a white shirt and sent me along the river. And once they burned me with the cats at a white stake. But I don’t recall any of this, none of the names of those whose souls had burned in my last fire, I don’t want to remember any of that because in this life my name is Nadya, and I’ve only been around for thirteen years, and all I remember is our field, our games, and I remember the plane, I do remember the plane. The plane.”
Every time I mention the plane, he grabs my hand and trembles, weeping desperately. Maybe that’s why I talk about the plane so often. Especially since my entire life has been condensed to that plane—there was nothing before the plane, and everything that happened after the plane is no one’s business, except him and me.
However, Nielle was convinced it was her business as well. That Sunday I saw her playing with those wooden dragons the pilot had carved for her (I saw wood shavings in the cellar), I got so mad as if she wasn’t my sister, a princess, a battle witch, and my best friend.
“It’s nothing,” she bristled when she detected anger in my gaze. “He simply wanted to please me.”
I said the pilot had to get better, not waste his time pleasing us. Then she said I myself have forgotten why we brought him here, and that she saw me caressing his face with my fingers, and she questioned my motives. Then I told her she should have a chat with Katerina about it because those two get wasted every night in the cellar, and who knows what really is going on there, and Katerina is walking around like a storm cloud, not talking to anyone and not answering any questions. Then Nielle said that I should pay more attention to Lelya, because none of us had actually seen Lelya in a while, and where was she, anyway? Did she walk to the field and grow into meat grass? Turn herself into a white heron? Because Lelya’s heart was broken, by the way.
It turned out that Lelya and her broken heart went into town with the grown-ups, that’s why we hadn’t seen her in a few days. She came back on the weekend, looking older and slimmer, with trembling lips, and said to me and Nielle:
“I read the newspapers. And I know his name. I know what he used to be called. His name. But I won’t tell you.”
We shrugged. If she didn’t want to tell us, it was her business.
Lelya then went down to the cellar; we assumed she told the pilot his name after all. It must have been her own tiny personal moment of triumph, the final victory of love over common sense. Upon hearing his name, the pilot tried to get up, as if someone called him from the distant shore. He twitched, collapsed, and hit his head on a gallon jar of tomato paste. That forced us into a unified front for a few hours while we ran back and forth with rags, towels, bandages, and crushed penicillin (since the pilot was nearly alive by then, we knew we’d better treat him with pills for regular live humans). But then it started up again: Katerina refused to tell us anything about drinking wine with the pilot two nights in a row. Stealing Nielle’s CD player and all her Radiohead CDs, Lelya ran off to the river to cry. Nielle herself suddenly confessed to me that she’d never had a true soulmate, only the pilot and his goddamn dragons. She was no longer interested in our field; the dragons whispered different stories into her ear, different plots, and in the evenings she’d spend hours writing something secret and passionate in her green notebook, something that was meant strictly for those who fell to earth from the sky, and no one else.
When all four of us went into the cellar to ask which one of us would be his wife, the pilot covered his head with his hands as if during shellfire and screamed. We got scared the grown-ups would hear the noise and ran out of the cellar.
After that we could only visit him one at a time. Gradually we realized that without these visits, our lives and our summer would soon turn into a never-ending absence and heart-wrenching nightmare. But for now, bloodthirsty mosquitoes still sang their tinny shanties, and grown-ups laughed on the veranda, shooing away bats, and my tipsy Daddy paddled around the toad pool, and neighborhood children shouted “Witch! Witch!” at Nielle when she went to buy bread at the mobile canteen. For now, she still squinted and pretended to shoot them from her index finger, each one directly into the left eye, and three years later they would know why, but by then it would be too late.
The pilot ate everything we brought, drank all the milk, and licked the lamb bones clean. Every now and then he’d moan and attempt to recall his name that he managed to forget once and for all for the second time when he hit his head on the jar of tomato paste. We wrote the letters he dictated to some non-existent relatives of his, and then we hid them from each other so vehemently as if we were these future relatives, five, ten, fifteen years later. Occasionally we’d mention him to each other: “Did he recall his name? No? Great, he really can’t. If he ever recalls his name, we’re all dead, summer’s over.” Since little Lelya knew his name and could cause some trouble, we simply banned her from the cellar by taking away her personal key with its cute purple owl keychain, no matter how much she howled and scratched like a wild beastie caught in a trap.
As the summer was winding down, his wife came to our field. She placed some flowers on the ground and walked back and forth, taking deep breaths. Then she simply stood there, sniffing the air like an animal, her nostrils trembling. All the metal scraps had by then been taken away, and all that remained were holes in the ground and scorched soil. We stood nearby quietly, trying not to give ourselves away. The wife fell onto the red soil and rolled around on it like a flame fox; she’d pick up the soil and eat it. We watched her in silence.
“So sad, how very sad,” the grown-ups whispered, leading her away.
Walking by us, the wife stops, grabs Nielle’s chin with her bloody soil-covered fingers, and says:
“Give him back to me.”
Nielle shrieks, jerks herself free, and gallops toward the forest like a fawn.
“She’s mad with grief,” the grown-ups tell us. “Please don’t be afraid. It’s so very sad, he was burned alive, because he wanted you to live, because he led the plane away from your house, do you understand? Don’t cry, please don’t cry.”
Lelya cries and refuses to calm down. Mom puts her arms around her and leads her back in. Lelya is a sly fox. She does not weep out of pity for this woman; she weeps because we took her key.
When I go down to the cellar, the pilot is lying down, reading The Two Captains.
“If I told you that up there, in the real world, there is a woman who insists that you are her husband, would that change anything for you?” I ask.
“I had a wife, but I don’t remember anything,” the pilot says. “So what’s the difference—it can be anyone, anyone at all.”
“Does it mean you’ll stay here with us forever?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “I am strong enough now. When I feel that I can stand firmly on my own two feet, I will have to leave. I need to go home. I want to go home.”
“You’re still too weak,” I say, and my voice breaks.
“I need a cake baked with red flour,” he insists.
We don’t want to let him go, but he keeps asking for that bloody cake and says he wants to go home.
*
That same evening his wife came to our house. Katerina opened the door, and his wife attacked her, pulling Katerina’s hair and screaming: you slept with him, you slept with him!
Somehow the grown-ups managed to pull her off. They keep apologizing: she’s mad, just think of how tragic it is, forgive her, have pity on her, she came to the place where he died, she’s clearly lost it, so very sad, she’s leaving soon.
But his wife didn’t leave. The very next morning she was back, pale and calm, and offered her apology. She asked the grown-ups to leave the room. I want to talk with your children, tell them something important, she said.
“I know you have him,” she told us. “Don’t ask me how I know. Where are you hiding him? Please give him back to me. He’s mine. You may think he belongs to you, and that’s perfectly normal. It happens. But it’s not true. The one that belongs to you hasn’t happened yet. Yours will happen someday. Give me mine and go on.”
“You are sick in the head,” Katerina said, sniffling. “You need a doctor.”
“You shouldn’t call people ‘mine’ or ‘yours,’” Lelya babbled. “It’s just wrong, it’s arrogant, and it has nothing to do with age. What’s the difference if you’re a grown-up and we’re still children? No one belongs to anyone. How do you know who’s yours and who’s not yours? And what if before you showed up, I thought someone is mine and only later I found out he’s yours—what does that really change?”
“Lelya needs a head doctor, too,” Nielle said smiling. “But you don’t, not really. You’re just tired. You had a terrible thing happen, and I am really sorry. I realize that you believe that we’re guilty of something, since we were there first, and we saw everything. Perhaps you think that if he didn’t try to lead his plane away from the houses to the field, he’d have time to catapult himself and then he’d still be alive—and perhaps it seems unfair to you that we survived, that we’re living instead of him. But we can’t change anything, don’t you see? We are so grateful to him, I mean if it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t be here right now. And that’s why you think he’s with us, as if we were hiding him somewhere. His life turned into four of ours—he’s inside each one of us. We can’t give him back to you, just like we can’t give you our lives or our souls. Perhaps, there is a tiny part of his soul in each one of us.”
At that moment I realized how much I admired her.
Nielle stepped closer to our pilot’s wife and embraced her. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. His wife cried a little on Nielle’s shoulder, then lifted her head and said, her voice unexpectedly spiteful:
“So where is he? Are you going to give him back to me?”
Our eyes met, and I felt uneasy. Somehow she knew everything, damn her, she just knew.
When the grown-ups returned, we told them that the pilot’s wife was truly mad, and that, aside from everything else, she had insulted our little Lelya, told her all sorts of mean things. This explained why Lelya looked puffy with tears all the time. The pilot’s wife was taken away in a special white automobile. Nielle and I waited until midnight, then went down to the cellar to bring the pilot freshly baked buns and a pitcher of milk.
He drank and ate greedily, like a prisoner of war, and then he sat up, stretched, cracked his joints, and got up very slowly.
“Not bad!” he said. “A little light-headed, but otherwise not bad at all. I can go now. I remember where I’m flying to now. I’m flying home. It’s time. It’s almost autumn.”
“But you don’t even remember your own name,” I said.
“I don’t,” he agreed. “But I remember where my home is now. That’s where I’m going before it’s too late. It’s fine now, I can make it. It won’t be like the last time.”
“What happened last time?” I asked.
Nielle hissed into my ear: “Idiot, we happened last time!”
Shortly after three in the morning, at sunrise, we led him out of the cellar, tiptoed through the sleeping house, and closed the squeaky front door, without shutting it all the way.
A tiny new plane was waiting in the middle of the field. The plane reminded me of something, either films or dreams.
“You didn’t say goodbye to Katerina and Lelya,” Nielle said sternly. “That’s not right.”
The pilot considered her words.
“Katerina would try to make me stay,” he said. “It’s probably for the best. And Lelya is still too little.”
“We’re little, too, so what?” Nielle said angrily. “But we saved you, all of us together. It’s not fair.”
The pilot did not respond. Perhaps, we simply didn’t know everything.
At the edge of the field he took us into his arms, first her, then me. I’ve never been embraced by a man before, and so I tried to commit it to memory, every little detail, but I did not remember anything at all, because I didn’t know if it had really happened.
“That’s it, you cannot go any further,” he said and walked toward the smoky, luminous, sunrise plane.
We stood still, watching him leave, knowing that neither one of us would ever admit to anything.
“Freshly baked buns to go with the milk, huh?” I asked, when, soaked up to our waists with dew and tears, we approached the house.
“Mmhmm,” Nielle said. “That red wheat in a matchbox I always carried with me. I couldn’t bear it any longer. I felt so sorry for him.”
“But not sorry for me? And what about you, aren’t you sorry for yourself? We gave him everything, we saved him, we practically sewed him together from tiny little pieces! Don’t you feel sorry about all the time we wasted on him? Don’t you feel sorry about this summer?”
“I feel sorry for everyone,” Nielle said. “And for the summer. But there will be others who will come for us. Others will be coming for us. And we’ll have another summer. And here—I mean, you saw it yourself. And maybe there won’t be anything else. Either way, we had to let him go.”
Katerina and Lelya had been waiting for us, two grim, pensive figures on the porch. Nielle took a deep breath and put on her special samurai face. We had to explain everything to them somehow, although what could we possibly have said? He simply got better and flew away.
A few days later, the grown-ups whispered among themselves and announced that the pilot’s wife had left with him. They must have flown away together.
The grown-ups begged us not to be sad and not to take it personally. But there was nothing to be taken personally. She wanted us to let him go, and we let him go, and she, in some clever and well-executed way, joined him immediately. This artful escape into happiness had nothing to do with us. A personal tragedy seethed and gurgled inside each one of us, impossible, enormous, and quivering, like a parachute that failed to open. I experienced the loss of my only and possibly last best friend. Katerina mourned the memories of a perfect man. Little Lelya wept over her first true love. Meanwhile, Nielle perched on the windowsill amidst thick volumes and wooden dragons, scratching away in her notebooks.
“He’s never going to read any of it,” Katerina said, trying to get back at Nielle for baking that stupid cake.
“If I don’t write it down, he might,” Nielle said. “That’s why I’m writing. It’s the only way to get rid of him.”
But by then it was clear we’d never get rid of him. The summer was almost over. We never went back to our field, not that summer, and not the next one. We knew that our boggy summer sorcery would never work again; growing up was that unpleasant price we had to pay for something we never managed to name with any of the existing words.
Plus, it was no longer our field.
Copyright © by Tatsiana Zamirovskaya. Translation copyright © 2023 by Julia Meitov Hersey.