Irina is a rural paramedic in some Russian region. She moved here alone. She likes these parts; her great-grandparents were from here. She moved into her ancestral home and restored it. Her parents were city people and didn’t approve of the move. They thought it was a foolish whim and a huge mistake. In one of the old drawers, Irina found a photograph of her great-grandma in a wedding headdress, a kika. Irina cleaned and restored the oven. She installed indoor plumbing and even a sewage system. She planted a small garden, without any flowers. Irina doesn’t like flowers.
At the end of a workday packed with old lady patients and one pregnant teen, a village teacher brings Irina a draft notice. Irina doesn’t touch the call-up paper, as if it’s radioactive. The school district instructed the teacher to deliver it. He leaves the notice on the table and rejoices a bit. He’s not afraid of Irina but he fears the draft notice, as though the bureaucratic violence of this piece of paper bears on him too. A few years back, when Irina had just moved here, she rejected his sexual advances. He has a small bald spot and three children. They are the reason he won’t get drafted. For now.
Here in the village, Irina is alone for a twenty-kilometer radius. Her nurse, sixty-seven-year-old Elena Romanovna, is also here. The teacher shrugs and says he has no other choice; he is just following orders. He leaves feeling slightly smug, as if he has fucked Irina’s fear.
Irina trains Elena Romanovna on how to do things in her absence. Elena Romanovna is no fool, she knows what’s going on. Irina is relieved she didn’t get a goat, a husband, a child. She packs a tent, a sleeping bag, jerky, grains, chocolate, loose-leaf tea, Turkish coffee, cigarettes, a portable stove, a small axe, a knife, a pot, some clothes, thermal underwear, a first aid kit, wet wipes, a bottle, a thermos mug, a shampoo bar, body soap, and a sewing kit into a backpack. At dawn, she turns off her phone and heads into the forest. A shuttle comes to pick her and two male draftees up, but it leaves with just one passenger; the other guy had skipped town back in March. None of the locals, including Elena Romanovna, know Irina’s whereabouts.
She makes her way deep into the forest. Pitches a tent. Sleeps a lot. Irina mostly subsists on jerky; she’s too lazy to cook. In this forest, she is unafraid. After all, there are no people here. The dark keeps watch over her. Irina, a city girl, never went on hikes growing up, but while in college, she hiked often with her first love. She still associates the smell of a tent with sex. Flashing back to those times, Irina smiles.
She gets water from reservoirs and boils it. She brews tea and coffee. Irina washes up from a bottle, mixing boiled water with filled-up water. She only uses wet wipes when it’s too cold to wash up. One day, she forages some beautiful mushrooms and simmers them. She eats them plain, adding only a dash of salt. A moose, adorned with a double universe of antlers, watches her awhile with pensive eyes. For some reason, Irina gives him a nod. The moose slowly walks away.
Irina smokes. She studies the paper map and wonders what she’ll do when she runs out of cigarettes, gas, food. She contemplates if she did the right thing refusing to work for the city clinic and coming here. She believes she did. This forest is vast, but it doesn’t border any other countries, just other regions.
Four days later, Irina goes out to the main road. She hides her backpack and tent under a downed tree’s roots, which look like unwashed hair. At the gas station, she buys cigarettes, chocolate, ramen, gas cylinders, and a five-liter jug of drinking water. They don’t sell jerky here, but she caves and picks up a can of stew; she is craving some fat. Irina even showers at the gas station. This is an expensive, shiny gas station with all the amenities and neatly stocked shelves, just like in American films. The space is light and airy, with the delectable smell of coffee and pastries wafting through the air. Irina pays for everything in cash. She sits at a table and eats a burrito, chasing it with delicious but scalding hot coffee. She burns her lips, tongue, and the roof of her mouth. She notices the letter Z on the coffee cup, along with some pro-war, triumphant propaganda message. She stuffs the burrito in her mouth, puts the lid on the coffee cup, puts the cup down on the table, picks up her water jug, and walks out.
This forest is deep, forbidden, rich with trees and herbs. During daylight hours, Irina bores deeper and deeper into the woods. She runs into mushroom pickers twice. Later, she sees a mixed-gender couple, red-faced, with an unhinged look in their eyes, drinking something murky as a puddle out of a plastic half-liter bottle. As for animals, Irina encounters a she-moose, a snake, a wood grouse, deer, squirrels, and mice. After a while, the humans run out. So do her cigarettes, but Irina decides to tough it out. She sprains her ankle and tightly wraps a scarf around her lower shin. Irina limps. She sets up camp on a small bald spot in the forest for a few days. She sleeps some more. Food-wise, she only has tea and couscous left. She fills a small pot with rainwater. The sides of her tent get flooded. To stay dry, Irina tries to lie squarely in the middle. On the third day, she goes out to forage for mushrooms, even though her leg is hurting much more now.
Irina can’t find any mushrooms, but the air smells of them, as though they’re hiding out and taunting her. Irina squats down to pee and realizes that she has gotten her period. She lets out some expletives. She only has three tampons left and she’s run out of wet wipes. She fetches some water from a swamp, boils it, washes up, and does some laundry. She dries her clothes on a rope, stretched between two trees. She cuts up a clean T-shirt with a knife, rolls it into a pad, and lines her underwear with it. Her leg is getting worse for some reason, thinning and yellowing, but it hurts a lot less.
Irina doesn’t worry about herself much, but she does think of her patients. She remembers watching some platitudinous American TV series about doctors when she was young and laughing at corny lines like “I am thinking about my patients.” Irina doesn’t know if she fears death, but she knows that she doesn’t want to support the war in any way. She doesn’t even want to help people who, like her, were called up against their will.
She’d always had a different war, much more complex, but her own chosen one. She battled to obtain gauze, HIV meds, and clean insulin. Not the domestic kind, and when only domestic insulin remained available, she fought to prescribe it in a way that would lessen a patient’s suffering. Then, she warred to urgently transport them to the nearest city hospital. She feels guilty for not thinking of her parents until now. She knows they’re probably being pestered with phone calls from the enlistment office. They must be worried sick about her. A moose visits the glade, and Irina is convinced it’s the same one she saw at the start of her journey. She gives him a nod.
The next day, Irina is woken up by a thud. For no apparent reason, a tree has fallen. Right in the meadow, at some distance from her tent. Inexplicably, the birch tree doesn’t look sick or old; it’s as if giant hands snapped it at the base like a pencil. There isn’t and wasn’t a hurricane. Irina methodically chops the tree into firewood. Her gas cylinders ran out a while back. As did her food. She boils some nettles and salts them. She’s no longer afraid someone will notice her from a distance. Does anything even exist in the distance?
The tree yields to her, like a carrot. The day after the moose’s visit, she comes out of her tent and sees a sea of multicolored mushroom heads, all tilting toward her. They have come and overrun the entire meadow surrounding her tent. Red boletes, birch mushrooms, yellow and black chanterelles, even honey mushrooms, which don’t just grow out of thin air, white mushrooms, and fly agaric mushrooms are all here. For the next few days, Irina cooks mushrooms in various ways, dries them, and eats them. She doesn’t eat the fly agarics but leaves them standing, for looks. Irina has lost a lot of weight; her injured leg is already half the size of her left leg. She limps a bit, but she’s used to it by now.
She goes out to the creek to fill up her five-liter jug and notices that outside of her glade, it’s already cold. She hasn’t been counting the days, but winter is probably coming. In her meadow, it’s warm, as warm as it was on the day that she arrived. Maybe slightly cooler. She worries that soon, her tent and sleeping bag won’t be enough to protect her from the cold.
Irina spots a rabbit. He’s hopping along the edge of the glade, sniffing around, nibbling on some blades of grass, hesitant to enter. He is carefully glancing at Irina. She looks down at her skinny arms. She hasn’t eaten any meat in quite some time. She beckons the rabbit with her index finger, her long fingernail black with dirt. Even though she has scissors, Irina stopped trimming her nails long ago; they grow out too fast to keep up with. The rabbit slowly and hesitantly semi-hops along the clearing toward Irina. He approaches her and sniffs her outstretched hand. Irina picks up the bunny, pets him, and presses his tiny body against her fleece chest. The rabbit sniffs the cord lock of her hoodie. Irina runs her clawed fingers between his soft ears. She clasps his head like a faucet, to rotate it and turn life off. But she withdraws her fingers. She puts the bunny down on the ground. He sniffs around the moss and grass and hops away. Irina has considered becoming a vegetarian for a while now. The time is ripe.
The next morning, she wakes up, goes out of her tent, and sees that her clearing has expanded. Trees along its perimeter, some birches, a few pines, even an oak, have fallen like dominoes and are lying with their sides touching, outlining the glade in a circle. Irina peels the bark off the trees. It yields like Hass avocado skin, which Irina used to peel back in the city. She limps up to her tent, looks it over, and takes it down for the first time in however many days.
Under the tent, she finds dried and flattened grass, moss, and a snake hole. It’s vipers. The bottom of the tent is faded, as if the sun shines from the earth’s center. The vipers braid their gray rope bodies together. Irina watches them. They lift their blindish faces toward her. One by one, they crawl out of the hole and slink from the clearing into the forest in a slither. Using a knife, Irina widens and deepens the snake hole. She puts her passport, smartphone, charger, wallet, compass clock, headphones, and, for some reason, her portable stove in it. She buries it all. She feels she has died, and that’s not a bad thing.
Irina fashions herself a jacket out of tent fabric. Keeps her backpack and fills it with mushrooms, snails, grass, and nuts. Retains her cooking pot and first aid kit. Calmly and methodically stacks logs on top of one another, having made notches in each one. Wood feathers from the logs fly into the air as she’s working. For some reason, the tree trunks are light. Irina remembers assembling an IKEA table out of wooden planks. She thinks back to restoring her great-grandma’s house, not with her own two hands, as she is now, but by supervising construction workers and learning how it’s done. She doesn’t think of her patients or her parents.
Even though Irina washes it every week, her hair clumps together and starts resembling locs. She does her laundry once a week, too. She changes her clothes every five days. Her underwear, every three days. Everything dirties quickly in the forest, but just from the outside. Irina’s bathroom is in the forest. All her bodily functions seem to have come to a halt. She eats once a day and doesn’t feel like eating more. She goes number one once a day and number two once every six days. Her periods stop entirely.
Some days go by. Irina’s right leg has dried out completely. Outside of her clearing, the first snow is falling. To secure her sneaker to her now child-sized leg, she ties it around the bottom of her foot with some rope. Irina lays the logs down as flooring and sprinkles some bark on top for evenness and insulation. It all settles into a thick, even carpet. She diligently sculpts the oven out of clay from the creek bed. It comes out looking exactly like the oven in her village house.
Irina sees her reflection in the creek; she looks older due to weight loss. The roof turns out to be the hardest part. Irina spends a long time figuring out how to build it. She constructs a ladder. She is low on animal protein. Irina remembers eating snails in Greece and France. She finds the local ones tasty, too. Irina is surprised that she’s yet to run out of salt. Finally, the roof is done. A brown pipe eyelet is sticking out of it. Irina decides that she’ll find some lime for the house in the summer.
Irina uses the remainder of the bark to build two doors. Another first snow begins to fall over the meadow. Outside its perimeter, it’s been winter for a while. Irina, hobbling across the snow in her tent jacket, hauls the five-liter jug she filled up in the creek, having hacked a hole through the ice. Her tracks, one sneaker track, and one round one, dragging along, disappear almost instantly.
Irina carries the water into the hut in a bottle that reads AQUA MINERALE. She closes the first and the second doors behind her. Snow falls. The meadow turns white, with green and orange veins. A creak breaks the silence. The hut stretches upwards and leaves the ground as though it wants to fly away. At its center, slightly closer to the entrance, under the bottom of the hut, two giant chicken legs appear, with peach-colored flesh and young pinkish nails.
The left leg lifts, shakes, stretches, wiggles its sole and toes, rolling them out, and comes back down to the ground. Then the right leg lifts, stretches its sole and knee, and dances a bit on its toes, practicing a grabbing motion. The hut creaks and slowly lowers back down. The legs squat and disappear under its belly, completing its transformation.
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