“Leave him alone!” she yells at Andrei, whose mouth is a thin, straight line, as if carved in stone and who now almost looks like his father.
“Don’t!” she yells at Marik, who is clasping his fingers around the shell, his eyes white with rage, just as they were at the ice-skating pond last year. The piece of metal in his hand is dark and filled with death, but Marik doesn’t seem scared. He is cuddling it as if it were an egg, as if what he did with the shell might bring his father back.
She knows she shouldn’t be here. Whatever is going to happen belongs to the realm of danger her mother invokes so vividly when Grandpa pins her to the bench and flogs her. She’s not afraid of another flogging, even if it is with nettles. What she’s afraid of is being where she shouldn’t be, within the reach of danger. But she also knows something else, viscerally. She can smell it the same way she can smell Marik’s anger and Andrei’s contempt. She can feel in her bones that Andrei has dug his boots into the marshy ground and Marik is closing his fingers around the shell for the same reason, the reason she refuses to acknowledge, even to herself. She knows why they are fighting, but knowing the cause of this clash doesn’t help her know what to do.
“Stop!” she yells, but they don’t seem to hear her. They are frozen in their bitterness and in their battle. She knows she can’t make them stop because they have already abandoned the safe perimeter of common sense and crossed into a place from which they cannot turn back, so she starts running toward home, as fast as she can. Her felt valenki sink in the wet snow, and as she runs, snow gets into her boots and melts inside them. She tenses her feet to keep her valenki from falling off as her heels make slurping sounds inside the soaked felt, as fir branches whip her in the face. She runs and runs, with every second adding to the distance between rage and reason, between her and danger.
Then from the forest behind her, there is an explosion. The sound bounces off the trees and then hollows out. The explosion freezes her heart and she knows, even without her mother having to tell her, that she did the right thing by running away from danger. But all she feels is the opposite of right. Would Uncle Kolya have left his fellow soldiers to be killed or captured by the Germans because they were in danger? Would he have abandoned his friends when they needed him?
She turns around and runs back, following her own footsteps in the snow. The road back to danger seems much shorter than the road away from it, and a few minutes later, she is where the fire they built sputters little ribbons of flame, tired and spent, wheezing like an old smoker.
She sees Andrei pressing his hands to his ears, walking around in circles, stumbling like their neighbor Semyon when he is drunk. She sees Marik lying on his side, as if he were smelling the snow, a stupid thing to do, since everyone knows that snow has no smell.
“Marik!” she shouts, but he continues to smell the snow as if he hasn’t heard her, and there is a trickle of blood coming from his mouth.
“Andrei!” she shouts, but he is oblivious to her yelling, too. He is hitting his ears and jumping, as if his feet were on fire.
At least Andrei is moving, but Marik is not. She kneels next to him to do what her mother does when someone is sick, to wrap her fingers around his wrist and feel for a pulse. But the fire is still hissing, so she can’t feel any pulse, and she can’t hear anything, either, when she opens Marik’s coat and presses her ear to his chest.
“We have to get him to a hospital,” she yells as she gets up, but Andrei keeps lifting his legs in a frantic dance, rubbing his ears, as though trying to knead the sound back in. She thinks of a sled Grandpa made for her a few years ago, a sled still hanging on the wall of their shed back home, and she pulls Andrei by the sleeve of his coat toward a big fir tree, not far from where Marik lies on the snow. Together they tug at the lowest bough, up and down and right and left until it becomes loose and crunches off the trunk. The bough is thick and long, a little bigger than Marik’s height, and they pull him onto this fir sled, Andrei and Sasha, because Marik is heavy and limp and doesn’t help them at all.
It is no use asking Andrei what has happened. He has stopped jumping and beating his ears, and now he does nothing but twitch his shoulders in rhythmic shrugs.
They pull Marik out of the woods on this makeshift sled, trudging silently through the snow, like the tired dogs tugging at their load in a grainy film about the Arctic they all saw at school. When the forest ends, they walk across the field and onto a road that leads to the hospital where her mother works. It is harder to pull Marik over the rough surface of iced pebbles and frozen dirt, and Andrei is not much help, slapping his head as if he’d forgotten something, his shoulders still twitching. Sasha’s winter coat padded with cotton feels as hot on the inside as their black stove, and she unbuttons it, letting the wind gush onto her chest, something Grandma would be horrified to see, certain that Sasha will get pneumonia. They pass the tracks where the streetcar turns around to go back to town; they drag Marik past wooden houses squatting on the outskirts of town under roofs that have been ravaged by the winter; and finally, as her arms begin to quiver and she is afraid she won’t be able to take one more step, the hospital arranges itself in front of her, as if magically lowered from the pewter sky.