Egg Sisters: Chapter 2

CHAPTER TWO

Effy’s white hat was caught in an eddy. It had been spinning in circles in a small whirlpool on the edge of the creek for hours when a man’s hairy hand reached down and plucked it from the water. It was early in the morning. The sun was just beginning to rise.

“Eto shlyapa,” the hairy-handed man said to himself, and he gently inspected the hat. With a quick movement he smoothed its soggy feathers. He placed the wet hat on his head and walked to the edge of the woods, where his cart and dog stood waiting.  

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The dog was shaggy and black and hitched to the cart like a horse. The man, wearing Effy’s white, wet hat and a long fur coat, bent to kiss her on the head. He then stretched and yawned and lumbered off into the forest. The dog pulling the cart followed behind.

All morning the man and the dog walked. They were checking traps. The man had set dozens of them in those woods and the pair walked and walked, from one to the next, through thickets and glens, over hills, through creeks, and round a sparkling lake.

When the sun was high in the sky, the man stopped in a clearing by the sparkling lake and took off his fur coat.  “Vremya obeda,” he told the dog and unhitched her from the cart.

The dog lied down in the shade of a tree. The man took a leather sack from the cart and rummaged through it, removing a tattered envelope. From the envelope he removed a tattered letter. The man stood next to the cart at the edge of the sparkling lake and read the letter to himself. It was in Russian, because the man was Russian, but this is what it said in English:

My dear Gennady,

I beseech you do not leave Russia to seek your fortune in the west. You will find nothing there that you cannot have here. I know this because I am older than you and have experienced many things that you have not. We are poor but we can be happy. If you leave, my heart will break into a thousand fine pieces.

Signed,
Your mother

The man wiped a tear from his cheek, took a fishing pole from the cart and cast a line far out into the lake.

An hour later, the man was very nearly dozing next to the fire he had built to cook his lunch on. He lay atop his black fur coat with his head resting on a log and his hairy hands folded over his belly. Effy’s white hat, now dry, was on the ground by the fire, next to the charred skin of a fish and a small empty glass. Birds were singing in the trees and a warm wind rippled the surface of the sparkling lake. The man was telling himself to get up, to not fall asleep, to get up and start walking, to start walking and check more traps.

Suddenly the dog began to bark. The man leapt to his feet and spun around. There, ambling into the clearing, was a big, brown bear. When the bear saw the man, it rose up on its hind legs. It was much taller than the man and had claws like knives. The bear made an angry noise that shook the forest, dropped to all fours and barreled towards the man. A terrible fight ensued. They rolled and wrestled around the clearing: pulling, yelling, pinching, scratching, biting. They continued to fight and wrangle, rolling and wrestling right out of the clearing and into the woods. The dog followed them, yowling, as they rolled and wrestled out of sight.

To be continued

AUTHOR’S NOTE
I call myself a Russophile and that’s never been an uncomplicated identity for me. There’s always something going on in Russia to make me feel sheepish about / conflicted over / mortified by my love for that country. The current Russian invasion of Ukraine is so heinous that these days I feel almost secretive about it. It’s a complicated relationship and maybe I’ll devote more time to it here someday. For now I’ll just say: Russians and Russian themes - especially of a romanticized 19th century Russia - have been running through my work for decades and this is an example of that. It might feel a little thornier today in light of current events than when I wrote it 5 years ago.