The Cherepanova Sisters

The elder was Fyokla; the younger, Maria. Fyokla turned forty in January, but you’d never have guessed it from her appearance; Maria was twenty-two. The sisters were tall, bony, and freckled, as if they’d been sprinkled with fresh sawdust. In the brief northern summer, both burned to a crisp, and their skin peeled like a new potato’s; in winter, the sisters’ broad flat cheeks blazed with such a smart and joyful flush, you wished you could hang them on the New Year’s tree.

For all her health and comeliness, Fyokla had never married. The sisters’ father, old Sashka Cherepanov, had been a nearly mythical creature in the family. After he went to prison for a drunken brawl during which he’d inflicted some non-life-threatening injuries, he never did come back for real. He basically lived in prison, like a goblin in a swamp, showing up at home only occasionally, between sentences, frightening the children he already had with his watery red eyes and making more babies. Their mother, Vera Andreyevna, whom frequent childbirth had made resemble a sad and ailing kangaroo, died in the district clinic when the youngest, Mashka, was only beginning to walk on her chubby flannelled feet and taking apart and putting together old padlocks, which she liked better than real toys. After the children’s mother died, their father vanished for good, as if he could emerge from his barred oblivion only to see her, Vera, who had always had a clean shirt and a bottle of the viscous local homebrew waiting for him—and who wasn’t waiting anymore. Fyokla became a mama to little Mashka and her three younger brothers, Fedka, Lyoshka, and Kostik. The brothers grew up and vanished into thin air, like their father. A collective image remained in the house of all the Cherepanov men: a portrait that hung in the living room, small and dark, finely rendered in oil, of an angry muzhik with a reddish beard that grew like dog’s fur, his crude round buttons buttoned up to his beard, depicted against a flat river that might have been iron and dancing sunset clouds the colors of cinders. Little Mashka was afraid of the portrait, thinking that this was her absent papa watching her. Fyokla, who remembered their father better, assumed that the rabbity red eyes and long bracket-like mouth in the portrait were her father’s, but in fact they belonged to someone else—a grandfather or great-grandfather maybe.

The village of Medyanka, where the Cherepanova sisters were born and lived, consisted of four hard, humped streets, two-story brick houses smoked by time and festooned with iron lace, and outcroppings of hacked native granite right in the middle of the street. When wheels of any kind rolled over them, the streets broke into granite crumbs and sent up dust like lit firecrackers. Lanes and alleys split off from these high streets, as they were called, and meandered downhill, looping and crisscrossing. Dilapidated five-story prefab apartments, which looked more like factories than human habitations, were interspersed with rotting huts that had rooted themselves in their vegetable patches all the way up to their blue doorframes. Here the gray wood of the long sheds and slanting fences were the color of iron, whereas the iron, rusting, looked like gold, red, and green duckweed.

A swamp encircled the village, clinging to the granite hump on all four sides. Like a huge sleeping bear covered with a rough hide of vegetation, the swamp breathed, rustled, and stirred. Anyone who stepped across its tottery hummocks felt underfoot the deep bestial womb, which emitted a muffled intestinal gurgling from time to time. The swamp possessed an almost necromantic life force. There were bird’s nests hidden under all the hummocks, in the speckled low forest and saber-like reeds, from the meadow pipit’s fragile little nests, like embroidery hoops, to the bowls of chopped up rotting matter that belonged to the cranes; the eggs, big and small, were the color of the local green and...