Red Lakes (Excerpt)
By Joshua Harding
Chapter 1: October
The blood would be thick that day.
A front had crept out of the east the night before, leaving the air frosty and still. Not a cloud, save a few shreds near the horizon, crossed the sky. The morning light that shone down upon Sergei Aleksandrevich Terninko’s farm seemed distant and indifferent. The cold was like a hunter—cornering the warmth into crevices and windbreaks. Sergei stood beside the northernmost of his fifty above-ground swimming pools and sniffed the cold air that made his nose hairs stand on end. He turned his face sunward in an attempt to warm himself. Winter was being resurrected, like a cold phoenix rising out of the ashes of the summer. The ritual of resurrection was slow this year, but the sublime reverence remained the same. In Ukraine, winter was a force not to be taken lightly. Soon the temperature would drop like a cinderblock, numbing fingers and toes. The snows would follow, wrapping the landscape in a winding sheet of blinding, pure white.
Beneath a gray worker’s cap, Sergei’s eyes were a deep blue. They were kind and thoughtful but had an arresting intensity. Their surfaces reflected the swimming pools, the farmhouse, and the eastern steppe. The swimming pools were round tubs of turquoise plastic paneled with faux wood grain and brimming with blood. A trellis of copper piping and electrical conduit threaded between each pool and the rusty storage tanks to the west. The farmhouse was a patchwork quilt of cobbled together outbuildings, handmade additions, and haphazard repairs. It sat nestled in the black earth of the gently sloping hills. That same earth, which only a few months ago had been so sodden from the spring melt, was now hardening like set concrete with crests of white frost here and there. Power lines stretched between weathered poles that leaned obliquely in the soil. Birches, ablaze in their autumn yellow, lined the edge of the old potato field. The eastern steppe contained no trees and had started to turn its autumn color over a month earlier, leaving a dry scalp of beige on the horizon.
Sergei had a strong chin that showed a few days’ stubble on it. Above this his cheeks were slightly hollowed and his cheekbones were high. His forehead was furrowed a little from hard, honest work, making him look slightly older than he was. Sergei was twenty-four and he absorbed life like a sponge, keeping it soaked up inside and thinking hard on it, reflecting on everything. Sergei was blond and his skin was ruddy from working in the sun. He usually tanned well in the summers, though seemingly not as dark this year. Sergei’s large, expressive hands were gloved and his narrow hips were swathed in threadbare trousers behind a well-used rubber apron. His blue work shirt draped loosely over his shoulders and hung low off of his neck. Sergei had always had difficulty finding clothes that fit him.
The rounded back of Sergei’s father, Aleksandr Ilyich, faced him from the easternmost of the pools. He was wearing a workman’s cap, shirt, trousers, and rubber apron similar to his son’s. Aleksandr stood flanked by Sergei’s mother, Ksinya, as well as Sergei’s wife, Natasha, and his old Babushka. The three women wore simple polyester floral print dresses and button-front sweaters, which fit snugly around their ample chests, thick arms, and Natasha’s second trimester abdomen. Folded kerchiefs, tied at the nape, covered the tops of their hair. Sergei’s grandfather was still back at the house, drunk again, no doubt.
“Be careful for the snares, papochka,” Sergei called to his father. “I just set them last night for the jackals.”
“You’re the one who needs to be careful,” replied Aleksandr, without turning around. It was a lighthearted, but not uncritical, jab at Sergei. It was subtle, but the meaning was lost on no one there.
Aleksandr gripped the DermaTarp that was fastened like a drum to the top of the pool nearest him and began to pull it pack from the rim. Ksinya, Natasha, and Babushka did the same at the adjacent pools. They moved in unison, the only sound was the rippling of the blood against the walls of the pools, which sounded like tinkling coins. Their arms were soon stained with blood up to the elbows. The brilliant red glinted in the early morning light and stood in shocking contrast to the monochromatic background of the autumn landscape. This was how, when Sergei was younger, he had given the farm its name: Red Lakes.
Sergei was tall and he slouched. He slouched in an apologetic way just as a child who has been held back in school does to try and hide the fact that he is a year older and taller than his classmates. But it was not his height that Sergei was trying to conceal. He was a lone thin man in the land of the obese—a fry among burgers. While millions of his countrymen lived out their lives in sleek corpulence, Sergei rubbed the picket fence of his ribs. Everyone he knew was fat. His father was a mountain of a man, his stomach a rolling countryside hillock. His mother was a plump thing, sitting in the great pillow of herself with her hands continually clasped over her expansive bosom. His uncle Pietr (before he was arrested), his grandmother and grandfather—even his own wife, Natasha—all outweighed Sergei by several kilos. Everywhere he looked people stared back at him from eyes sunken in chubby faces and children pointed at him with flabby arms. The world was a sea of flesh, undulating on rounded waves of portly humanity.
Sergei’s family never spoke about his weight. But his teachers and neighbors, however, told him he needed to fatten up. “Eat more,” they would say, pressing him with helping upon helping of burgers, cola, and fries. “Sergei, you might be seen as an enemy of the state, an anorexic—or worse, a blasphemer.” Indeed, for any man to even appear to refuse the sustenance that was offered with motherly benevolence to all Russians would be a slap in the face to the New Soviet Socialist Republic and the Holy Savior. Just as there was men’s hunger, there was the Holy Menu. Each was as eternal as the stars. If you were hungry, you ate. Sergei himself was a cog in the huge machine of the great State that fed every man, woman, and child in all of Russia. His own meat farm was one of many collectives that contributed to feeding the people. Not since before the famines that followed the Great War had people eaten so well and so often. It was Sergei’s duty as a citizen to eat well and become stout in body and spirit from it—why was he so slim? Was it a medical condition, or did Sergei hunger for something that even he himself couldn’t identify?
Did he hunger from somewhere other than his stomach?
Sergei chewed on a white plastic coffee stirrer left over from the morning’s breakfast of egg sandwiches, hash browns, and coffee. Aleksandr woke early each morning to make the eight-kilometer trip to the Menu stand—the stahlovahyah—for the family’s food allotment. Each morning it was the same meal. It sat in Sergei’s stomach like a wad of plaster. He had memorized the taste of every mouthful: the egg sandwiches, the potato cakes, the burgers, the fries, the cola. It was as familiar to him as air and almost as appetizing. Every meal had the same flavor, the same portions, and the same caloric and nutritional value. He was detached from his meals, as if the act of eating was an unpleasant bodily necessity like urinating or shaving, something to be done as rapidly and efficiently as possible. Eating was something people did to live, nothing more.
Sergei hefted the three-meter pool skimmer that he held in his left hand and stepped to the pool in front of him. He climbed the wooden steps and began rolling back the DermaTarp from the top of the pool. He secured it in place and stuck his pool skimmer into the deep, crimson liquid. He broke up the film that scabbed on the blood overnight and skimmed it off. This was the morning routine: after the National Anthem woke the family at five a.m., they rose, dressed, Aleksandr returned from the Menu stahlovahyah with their food, they ate, and then tended to the steaks.
Red Lakes sat upon half a sloping hectare on the edge of the Ukrainian steppe. Thirty thousand steaks were its average annual crop yield. Even so, its output barely filled the two freezer cars that bore the steaks by train to the processing plant in Zhytomyr. Each quarter they would receive a letter from the local Soviet’s Rayakroc Party chairman thanking them for their contribution.
One of Sergei’s constant worries was that they would fail to come across with their food deliveries. If they were ever short on the harvest, they could be arrested for “Conscious failure to carry out defined duties or intentionally careless execution of same” under section 58-14 of the Criminal Code.
Sergei moved the skimmer in a gentle figure-eight pattern, his arms rotating as if they followed a track. The blood at the bottom needed vitamin D from the sunlight and as Sergei stirred, his arms became drenched in red. When it was fully stirred, Sergei set aside his skimmer and flipped a series of switches in a small panel on the side of the pool. All one hundred and forty-four steaks began undulating in steady waves as the electricity coursed through them, contracting and relaxing them, making them appear like rows of beating hearts. After five minutes, Sergei switched them off and started the amino pumps. When the steaks were bathed, exercised, and fed, he secured the tarp back in place, picked up the skimmer, and moved to the next pool.
He noticed a loose board in the steps to the second pool. On a farm there was always something that needed fixing. Sergei wished there were projects he could get around to doing like fixing the roof or replacing the rusty lines that probably wouldn’t last another season. They were hard to prioritize with everything else to do and the setbacks from the attacks only made matters worse.
Three attacks in the past six weeks, Sergei thought. Three! Eleven of the pools had been breached or firebombed, destroying the precious steaks and leaving them painfully short on this quarter’s harvest. Damn the Vegeterrorists! Damn them and their incomprehensible agenda! Every steak now in the pools would need to grow to maturity and be harvested if they were to make their quota and survive this year. Why this particular farm, he thought. Why our livelihood? We Terninkos never hurt anyone in our lives; what could possibly have brought the wrath of the terrorists down upon us? This was Sergei’s family’s farm. He had worked it day in and day out, side-by-side with his family. The blood was in his blood.
Sergei stooped and patted one of the mottled hounds (an earlier security measure against the terrorists that Sergei begrudgingly kept beyond its usefulness) that sat panting nearby. He stepped to the next pool and plunged the pool skimmer deep into the blood as he folded the frustrating thought over in his mind. What did the Vegeterrorists have to gain from destroying a lonely meat farm in this neglected corner of Ukraine? Didn’t they have bigger targets in Moscow or Pachenckopol—the larger, State farms that harvested in one quarter what Sergei’s family could barely produce in a whole year and by a hundredfold? And what of the huge meat processing plants or the potato labs? What statement were they trying to make here?
A year earlier the Vegeterrorists had indeed made a statement. On November the Seventh, Bloody Sunday—a day no red-blooded Rayakroc Party member could forget—they struck a strategic blow against the NSSR. Following what must have been months or years of planning, twenty trucks laden with high explosives destroyed Khasbulatov Plant, the largest meat processing plant in Minsk. The attack killed three thousand people and left no doubt that the Vegeterrorists were a force to be reckoned with.
Pravda and Izvestiya simultaneously called for the blood of those responsible, condemning the attacks as cowardly. But no longer were the terrorists regarded as the mad, half-starved vegans who ate only plants that died of natural causes as the Party made them out to be. Their name evoked real panic in the hearts of the Russian people. And as they continued to circulate their ranting propaganda, flooded the black market with contraband beets and turnips and other ‘street food,’ and waged their campaign of fear through random car and roadside bombs, no one knew when they would strike next and with how much devastation.
During the weeks that followed the attack, no burgers were produced in Minsk or in the surrounding suburbs or countryside. Widespread famine and riots followed; there were even rumors that people had resorted to cannibalism. Premier MigLenin introduced the November the Seventh Decree, which passed unanimously in the Soviet. He declared an indefinite period of mourning and remembrance for the innocent souls killed in this cowardly act. During this time, there would be no celebrations, weddings, or babies conceived. In this time of low birth rates, the Russian people would make a sublime sacrifice to honor the fallen. Not even the birthday of the NSSR’s Glorious Founder, Viktor Pachencko, would be celebrated at the Kremlin. There would be no parades in Red Square with rows and rows of tanks; and no Premier MigLenin saluting from the rostrum atop Pachencko’s mausoleum in the shadow of the Savior’s Tower outside of the Kremlin wall.
Where were the MAKs when they were needed? thought Sergei. The Main Authoritative Komitet—known as the MAKs—were the State security operatives. Squads of twelve men, in scarlet body armor with Kalashnikov rifles and masked helmets prowled the land. They were thin and agile from their intense training—an intimidating contrast to the average, plump Russian. Their sleek black trucks were always looming somewhere in back streets and under bridges. They were hulking things with reinforced tires, galvanized steel armor plates, bulletproof windows, and gun turrets. In their primary function, the MAKs benignly brought Menu items to the elderly or bedridden who could not travel to the stahlovahyahs. They delivered the foodstuffs out of their trucks with a charitable serenity. The most vulnerable citizens in all of Russia depended on them for sustenance.
But they also served another, more sinister purpose. The unsleeping MAKs were sent out through the corpse of night to haul off enemies of the State. Breaking down doors, they trampled through houses, flats, and nurseries with hobnailed jackboots. They overturned dressers and desks in search of anything incriminating or subversive—turnips, carrots, onions, or leaflets of counter-revolutionaries. The MAKs were benevolent at one moment but, without warning, an armed squad of them could burst out of the back of their truck and raid the home of a suspected dissident or criminal. Why couldn’t they be as reliable when it came to security against the terrorists? Natasha could have been killed or our house destroyed during this latest attack! The injustice of it stoked a bitter fire in Sergei’s gut.
And Natasha wasn’t alone. That is, there was now another person Sergei worried about protecting from the Vegeterrorists. The pregnancy had been a certainty. It was foolish to think they could prevent it. The draw of the two newlyweds to each other and their deep, primitive, biological need was stronger than any decree from some distant Politburo. They knew it was illegal, but somewhere in the deep recesses of each other’s eyes, they seemed to have forgotten it was important.
It wasn’t a topic the rest of the family chose to discuss. They pretended, for the most part, that there was no pregnancy. Just as they pretended what the newspapers said was true. Just as they pretended that the MAKs weren’t watching them. Just as they pretended to enjoy their food. Except when Aleksandr alluded to Sergei’s carelessness or joked about putting on his socks before his shoes, the subject never came up. Sergei’s mind was bent on how they were going to deliver the baby when the time came. Sergei’s mother was out of the question; he wondered if she even considered the baby—her own grandchild—a reality, her denial was so palpable. Babushka might be a possibility, but her eyes were bad. Sergei doubted he had enough money to pay a black market midwife.
He had to come up with something.
What were a man and wife supposed to do anyway? It wasn’t right to prevent a child from coming into the world. Sergei felt, on some level, that he hadn’t made a mistake deciding to become a father.
Sergei, like the rest of his family, was a Catholic.
He was a very spiritual man, though he was often confused as to where his true faith should lie. There was Rahnuldinism, the State-approved religion that infused itself into every crevice of their lives. Everything from the election of Rayakroc Party members in the Supreme Soviet to the food they ate was related to the Rahnuldic tradition. Vladimir MigLenin, the Premier of the NSSR and clone of Viktor Pachencko, was genetically enhanced to emulate the appearance of Rahnuld MigDahnuld, the beloved Savoir, in the ultimate linking of church and state. From an early age Sergei was indoctrinated to Rahnuldinism, as was everyone else. He could list all of the Holy Menu items and name all of the Saints and their patronages. The rituals and symbols of Rahnuldinism were so ingrained in him as to be second nature.
Then there was Christianity, the forbidden sect that Sergei’s family had passed down from generation to generation, from long before the Great War. They held masses in basements and abandoned buildings in complete secrecy. Sergei’s father would recite stories to Sergei that were very different than the stories he heard in Rahnuld School. The stories were about a man named Christ who could walk on water and put severed ears back on. There was one where he took a basket with a few pieces of bread and some fish and fed a crowd of hundreds with it. The story reminded Sergei of something Rahnuld would do, though how anyone could eat fish was beyond Sergei’s understanding.
To be caught by the authorities holding non-Rahnuldic services was almost surely a death sentence. Who knew how many poor souls the MAKs had hauled away to the Gulags of Chernobyl or Kamchatka for swallowing a dry communion wafer? To place your beliefs in another church and be so bold as to eat food not offered on the Holy Menu were two of the State’s highest crimes. Having spent all his life covertly practicing one faith, while on the outside, swearing undying allegiance to another had formed a cleft in Sergei’s heart. He often had difficulty keeping his parables straight. Was it Rahnuld who spoke of the prodigal son? Or was it Christ whose proverb stated, ‘Let thy victuals stop thy mouth’? This, coupled with his discordant weight, ensured that Sergei felt like a complete outsider.
“It’s so still,” Natasha said, pausing at her stirring in the next row of pools, “so peaceful.” Her hands were glistening with the blood and she scratched an itch on her cheek by rubbing it against her shoulder. It was a habit of hers that endeared her to Sergei. He responded in kind with the gesture—it was their private signal for when they were thinking, “I love you, sweetheart.”
“Maybe the terrorists have taken a holiday,” Sergei replied, delicately moving the skimmer in between the young steaks.
“Don’t complain,” said Ksinya without looking up from her stirring. “We don’t cherish what we have, then cry when we lose it.” Her fatalistic proverbs were so engrained in Sergei he could recite them by rote.
Red Lakes sat at the end of a long dirt road. The road curved off into the distance connecting the farm like an umbilical cord to the rest of the world. Sergei would often find himself staring down the road, thinking. Where had the MAKs ambushed his Uncle Pietr? (Surely that had been his fate. He left for the stahlovahyah one pale morning and never returned. He was always so open about his taste for non-Menu food, flouting the State. It was only a matter of time.) Was he in Zhytomyr when he was taken? In nearby Berdychiv? Or even closer, at the end of the access road?
When would the MAKs come for him and Natasha? Sergei wondered. It was bound to happen sooner or later. Either for the illegal pregnancy or for the fact that the MAKs always came for the family, friends, and loved ones of the criminal they’d just arrested. Association was just as bad as the crime. The warrants probably sat upon the local Commissar’s desk right now, just waiting to be signed. With each new terrorist attack Sergei worried about Natasha’s safety. With each new attack, the harvest became increasingly meager. Sergei felt besieged on all sides—the Vegeterrorists on one side and the law on the other. The waiting for that inevitable arrest was worse than even the torture and incarceration to follow—waiting for the mallet to strike. Every distant sound from the road could be the MAK trucks arriving; every creak of the old house could be their jackboots upon the step. His troubled mind twisted the threat of attacks and the threat of arrest in to a snarled braid of worry.
There was the sound of motors from the dirt road to the south. Sergei looked and could see two—no three trucks approaching. His brow creased. The heavy black forms of the trucks stood out against the flat, pale sky. A vortex of dust and exhaust coiled up along the road behind them. Aleksandr turned around and met Sergei’s eyes, which widened as a realization congealed itself in his mind like ice.
They were MAK Trucks.
“Father,” Sergei said as he propped his skimmer against a nearby pool, “take Natasha and go back to the house.” He was wearing a thick mask of outer calm. Aleksandr could see through the mask and see the strength it took his son not to break down into a childlike panic or a dead run.
“Why should we go to the house?” Aleksandr asked. “We are working the pools, like good farmers. You forget: this is the third time the MAKs have visited the farm. They come in the daytime with food. They arrest at night.”
“They will accuse us of trying to run if we stay here,” Sergei replied. “Isn’t that what happened the first time uncle Pietr was arrested?”
Aleksandr calmly draped his apron on his skimmer where it leaned against a pool. “Ksinya, mamochka, come with me,” he said. “Sergei, take Natasha and go.”
Sergei’s fear was as palpable as the rocks he tripped over in his haste to lead Natasha to the farmhouse with the two dogs yelping at their heels. Why today, of all days, did they have to be at the northernmost end of the farm? The ground between them and the house yawned wide in what seemed an endless expanse. Stumbling, they passed row upon row of pools. Natasha hazarded a glance at Sergei with a look so fraught with dread, Sergei had to look away. Sergei gasped a hurried, pleading prayer as they neared the house. He tallied in his head all the possible reasons the MAKs might be coming to the farm. Was it the instances when he had drifted from the true faith—his occasional turnings to Christ that the MAKs were coming for? No. It wasn’t any minor infraction that Sergei could squirrel away in the dark recesses of his heart. Was it his association with his uncle—a convicted criminal? For certain, it was the little entity growing quietly in Natasha’s womb—the tiny inevitability that prodded its little feet against Sergei’s willing hand each night as he and Natasha sprawled languid and longingly close to heaven in their bed. Would they be shot on site? Gunned down like dogs, both he and his pregnant bride? Would they be carted away in separate trucks to separate camps in the Gulags far away from each other? Would there be torture? Of course there would! How would Natasha in her fragile state hold up under whatever horrors they were going to subject her to?
The two of them burst through the flimsy kitchen door of the farmhouse. Two Styrofoam sandwich containers rattled to the floor from the kitchen table as the door swung back on its hinges. Sergei’s grandfather looked up from where he was staring intently at the kitchen table, a bottle of homemade vodka in front of him. Aleksandr and Ksinya entered the door close behind. Babushka came at her own pace.
“Put that thing away, Dedushka!” Ksinya pleaded with her father-in-law. “MAKs are coming up the drive! Do you want us all to get arrested?” She grabbed the bottle but Dedushka held it tightly in his knobby fist. A short, pathetic tug-of-war ensued before Ksinya gave it up and left the old man to his drink.
“Quiet!” Aleksandr hissed. Natasha’s eyes were as wide and hollow as exit wounds in her sweet, round face. Above his throbbing chest, Sergei could hear the truck tires grating the pebbles of the drive just outside the door.
Then there was silence.
Vodka sloshed in the bottle as Dedushka took a swig. A chorus of slamming doors and footsteps followed. The dogs began barking furiously and dashed for their small door cut into the wall against the woodstove. Sergei glanced for a moment at the obligatory icon of Rahnuld hanging on the wall. It was an oil painting full of rich reds with gold inlay at the edges. It showed Rahnuld staring forlornly into heaven and making the sign of the Holy Trinity: the Father, the Clone, and the Holy Menu. It was flanked by an icon of Saint Stroganov, the patron saint of beef, and Ksinya’s heirloom afghan. Sergei also thought of the leather bound book with the stories of Christ hidden down in the cellar.
Which one of you will save us now? Sergei thought.
Sergei peered furtively through the curtains. The nearest of the trucks was parked at an angle to the front of the house. It was black and gleamed in the sun. About a dozen MAKs had left their vehicles and were slowly making their way towards the front door, eyeing the growling dogs with a patronizing caution. Sergei had never seen MAKs up close. They were masked and clad in their typical crimson uniforms. They also had on their body armor and each had a rifle slung over his shoulder.
One of the MAKs mounted the steps to the porch; his heavy boots thudded hollowly on the wood. The dogs were yelping and jumping madly. Two clear shots rang out making every member of the family jump and Sergei count the seconds until his heart beat again. The dogs lay silent and twisted at the feet of the MAK nearest the drive. His flowing red coat rustled in the silence that followed. A determined fist banged loudly and urgently on the door. The door seemed like balsawood ready to shatter to splinters under the MAK’s hand. Sergei felt needle pricks of cold sweat form under his arms and between his shoulder blades.
Aleksandr opened the door.
Through the door emerged a scarlet mask beneath a wheeled service cap. The mask was trapezoidal in shape and colored a brilliant, glossy red. Sergei could hear the man behind it breathing through the slats near the chin and see his own white, terrified face reflected in the mirrored lenses of the eyeholes. The material of his long, red wool coat whispered in silence and his boot thudded on the floorboards so that they could practically hear each nail in the hard leather soles. Sergei could see every angle of the pressed metal of the Kalashnikov rifle that he held. It had small holes in the muzzle for heat to escape. Sergei thought of heat escaping the rifle like the breath of a panting, predatory animal.
“Sergei Terninko?” the MAK asked. Four more had followed him through the door. The first was wearing shoulder boards, while the others were not. He seemed to be the commissar—the one in charge.
Sergei’s pulse roared in his ears. “I am he.”
The MAK reached within his coat and withdrew a sheaf of papers that he whipped flat one-handed with a flick of his wrist. Reading from the paper he said, “Sergei Terninko, you stand accused of violating the November the Seventh Decree. You willfully impregnated Natasha Nikolaiva. Under Article 58-14 of the Criminal Code, as amended, you are both under arrest.” Over his shoulder he added to his fellows, “Search the house using the usual protocols.”
The other four MAKs stepped through the house, overturning furniture, rifling through drawers, and digging through cabinets.
“Both of us?” Sergei asked. “But there must be some mistake! Natasha has done nothing. It was my idea!”
At this, Natasha said from behind Sergei, “No, Seriozhka…”
“What have we here?” boomed one of the MAKs as he loomed over Dedushka. He brandished the vodka bottle like he was about to break it over the old man’s head. “I see we have a loafing drunk living among the criminals, too.”
Dedushka peered up at the MAK, sizing him up. “Better drunk and honest than sober and a liar,” he said, slurring his words.
The MAK brought the bottle down hard on the table, centimeters from Dedushka’s fingers. “You there,” he called to his comrade closest to him, “come with me to the cellar. Vodka isn’t made from steaks. We’ll find enough to arrest the whole family down there you can bet.”
Two MAKs were leading Sergei and Natasha bodily towards the front door and outside. Ksinya stood trembling with tears in her eyes. Aleksandr opened his mouth to say something, but only opened and closed his lips silently like a fish.
“Potatoes!” shouted one of the MAKs as he ascended from the seeping darkness of the cellar. He clutched several knobbed, brown tubers in his fists and threw them indignantly on the table in front of Dedushka. “How can you eat these things? They grow in the dirt—they grow in shit—they even look like turds. You like to eat turds, old man?”
“Please,” said Aleksandr quietly from the corner, “he’s just an old man. He doesn’t know any better.”
“Well, maybe he should go to an institution if he’s senile,” replied the MAK, wheeling on Aleksandr. “You should look after him better.”
“They all need to watch their family members better,” added another. “A potato eater and two fornicators under one roof! And Pietr Terninko, the known criminal, lived here for a time, didn’t he?”
“That’s enough,” said the commissar. “Take the vodka and let’s go.”
The MAK handling Natasha pushed her in front of him with a shove. Caught off balance, she lurched forward and almost fell into the doorframe. “Enough of that!” called the commissar but he was interrupted. Sergei lunged at the MAK who looked to shove Natasha a second time. Sergei’s hands were at the MAK’s neck before anyone—least of all Sergei—recognized the assault for what it was. The MAK stumbled under Sergei’s grasp. His hands were still coated with drying blood from his work and it smeared on the MAK’s lapels.
“Sergei! Don’t!” cried Aleksandr who had regained his tongue.
“Get him off,” said the commissar languidly as two other MAKs went to help their comrade. Sergei had pressed the MAK up against the kitchen wall. The man was clearly struggling with a force he hadn’t reckoned with.
Sergei hadn’t reckoned with the force either. He had never lifted his hand against another human being in his life. He felt a sudden surge of unexpected strength and fury that seemed as if it were about to percolate out of his collar. A threshold had been crossed—the threats and stresses of the quotas and the terrorists and the Decree had pushed him to the limit. Sergei thought to himself that he had been so careful to protect Natasha; he’d worked so hard, set up everything so perfectly. He kept Natasha cooped up at the house, bought her bulky clothes, even informed on someone to deflect suspicion. Why had it come to this? Why can’t we have a secure life, free of threats and stresses? The two MAKs who had joined the fray were finding it impossible to break Sergei’s grip. They struggled with him as the flailing of the MAK he was choking started to subside.
“Sergei!” Aleksandr continued. “It will only make things worse!” Natasha watched the frightening tableau with an open-mouthed combination of awe and terror. Awe at the fact that her husband was single handedly fighting three men in her defense—something heroes in storybooks did for their women. Then terror at this outburst of violence (and seemingly hidden, superhuman strength) from the tender man who had never behaved so aggressively before. Terror at what further punishments this outburst would surely cost them later.
Seeing that his men were having difficulty subduing their quarry, the commissar stepped briskly towards them. The butt of a rifle hit Sergei squarely in the back of the head and he knew no more.
The back doors of two separate trucks yawed wide as Sergei and Natasha were dragged into the waiting compartments. “We will write to the Party offices!” called Ksinya. “They must be lenient!”
“Yes! We’ll go to the holding station and petition for you!” added Aleksandr.
“No, you won’t,” said the commissar without turning around as he crossed the drive and headed for the waiting truck. “You are confined to your farm under house arrest. None of you are to leave for any reason. You’ll be watched to make sure you complete your harvest...and don’t harbor any more criminals.” He mounted the passenger side of the cab. There was a chorus of slamming doors and two of the trucks pulled away. A paper burger wrapper drifted lazily and rolled across the porch, making a faint scratching noise as it went. The wind gusted suddenly and the paper flitted away.