SAND

восемь: 8

She barely missed being discovered by a group of young men headed down the seacoast to forage, in spots that hadn't been picked over by the girls. They carried packbaskets, dipnets, fish spears, and fishing rods. She'd emerged from a tank seconds earlier, and strode up to them, offering them some of the cloudberries from her morning pick, and wishing them luck. Each one took a handful and praised the taste: the polite thing to do. She hoped they wouldn't start asking one another why she came through the tank farm on her way home. She hadn't had to lie outright, yet, but she hated having to sneak.

She'd been pondering how to divide the hoard in a fair way. If she told everyone where it was, the quickest and the strongest would charge out there and take more than their decent share: she'd seen it happen more than once. She'd been telling herself it was just the starvation and the misery, the endless dark and cold of the winters. But the truth was that some people cared only for what they could grab, and felt nothing for others left to starve.

There were good people left, of course: her own family and that of Pyotr Ilyavich. The old women of the village were better, on the whole, than the old men. There were couples who supported the whole, like the pillars of a house. The young ones, who'd been through the Starve-out, were a difficult mix: some decent, like her sisters, and some heartless, like her brother Kirill. After he'd killed her little dog and stewed it up, one of her friends said he would do the same if he found a baby left unattended. It was hard to believe they shared the same blood.

The first step would be a census. She got a piece of paper out of the firewood box and used the blank back. She drew a box for every occupied house in the village. Then, on the left side of the boxes, she put down the number of persons in each house. On the right side, she put down the number of old people, adults, and children.

There were twenty-seven houses and one hundred and sixty-three persons: forty-nine elders, ninety-five adults, and nineteen children. She'd counted Mamoschka as old, with Irina, Nadya, and herself as adults. A house with seven inhabitants required a larger share than one with two. She also thought a child or a pregnant woman should get an extra half-share.

She looked at her diagram. We are dying, she thought. So few children, and only one born in the last three years. Someone said that if a woman doesn't have a certain amount of body fat, she can't conceive. I wonder if that's true? I can imagine marrying Pyotr and having a child. Keeping the hoard a secret would give us a future. But he's good. Decent. When he knew what I had done, to keep it hidden while others suffered, he would hate me for it.

≈ ≈ ≈

It was only a few days to the Cloudberry Festival, when women would rule the village for a day. The men were supposed to make breakfast and tea, and wash up, then make themselves scarce and keep indoors.

The women would dress up and gather at the village hall for a sobraniye, to recount how the year had gone. Then people could stand to air grievances, mostly against the men. Last year a woman had reported a still that her husband built to make vodka from potato peelings, and a group of older women had visited the house, given him a thumping, and dismantled it. They remembered the old days—the crazed actions of drunken men and the abuse that followed: rapes, fights, beatings. Strong drink was never a blessing to us women, she said.

After the assembly, the women and girls would walk the beach to the stone circle. Some of the older women sang hymns and carried icons of the female saints: Anna, Ekaterina, Elena, Irina, Olga, Sophia, Xenia, and Tatiana. To the east was a square of stone pavement, fitted blocks, with a carved head in the center, the upturned features softened by centuries of Arctic weather. A wig fashioned of green grass, rushes, and sedges covered the bald stone, and a crown of cloudberry leaves was put in place at the brow.

Everyone gathered aromatic herbs and late-summer blooms, to plait into crowns, which were placed on each head by a best friend, sister, mother, or daughter, while a song was sung by all, a very old one with strange words whose meanings were lost. Then we danced, first in pairs and then in threes and fours, each ring joining another, until all were hand-in-hand around the stone circle. Last year, we had to stretch to enclose it. Soon, there would not be enough women and girls to close the ring.

After the circle dance, we went to the sea, to wade and cast our crowns out as far as we could throw. Then came the feast. Fires were lit and griddles propped on stones, for the making of blini. In the old days, they were made of white flour and eggs, spread with butter, then drizzled with syrup or daubed with jam. But there was no flour, these days. The last bit had been hidden in Granny Golubtsova's house, in tins with tight lids, sealed with tape. She'd written a will saying that the flour was to be used for her burial cakes. Everyone came to her funeral, even those who disliked her.