Enchantment (27 page)

Katerina’s nakedness might be somewhat covered, but her appearance would certainly excite comment if she were seen. Besides, her feet were bare, and the road, so smooth to the tires of a car or the soles of Ivan’s American running shoes, would be rough to feet more accustomed to meadows or the leafmeal forest floor. So they stayed in the woods, within sight of the road, except where they had to cross a stream or avoid a steep hill.

Katerina said nothing—never asked for help, and her breath never grew labored—so he had to glance back to be sure she was still with him. Only now, when her body was covered, did he allow himself to think of the sight of her body, of the electric mo-ments when his hand brushed against her. My wife, he thought. By right, the woman whose body I should know, the woman who should know me. Each glance at her, dressed loosely in his shirt, the cloth sliding across her skin as she moved, filled his imagination and fed his desire for her.

It also fed the bitterness in his heart. Of course she was being unfair to him. What difference did that make? In games of love there is no umpire to call foul. By twentieth-century standards he wasn’t a bad guy, but Katerina had no way of knowing that. He could see her beauty and wit and nobility, while easily forgiving the flaws that came from her culture; but she could see only his flaws and forgave nothing, and that was that.

He had no business loving her in the first place. It was Ruth he was engaged to, Ruth he should have married. How was he going to explain this to Ruth? Something came up when I was vacationing in the ninth century, and I married this girl who hates me. In 1992 we’ll celebrate our eleven-hundred-and-second anniversary. Oh, and she doesn’t speak any language now spoken on earth, and I had to become a Christian to marry her, and . . . you understand, don’t you, Ruth?

The marriage hadn’t been consummated. It could still be annulled, couldn’t it?

Of course it couldn’t. Baba Yaga still threatened Taina, and was held at bay only by the fact that Ivan was married to Katerina.

Only now, walking alongside this modern road, Taina already seemed less real. How could something he did now in the twentieth century have any effect on the distant past?

He glanced back again. She was still behind him. Still beautiful. Still the woman whom he had come to admire and love. Without him, whom would she speak to? Where would she go? The only merciful thing would be to annul the marriage and take her back to the pedestal and leave her where he found her. You cross your bridge, baby, and I’ll cross mine. Status quo ante. Have a nice life.

Only it wouldn’t be a nice life, if she went back to Taina without a husband.

I’m stuck.

He heard a truck engine, the indescribable rattling noises that can only be produced by Soviet-made vehicles. It was coming up the road toward them, the wrong direction for him to ask for a lift.

He glanced back again and, for the first time since he had known her, saw Katerina frozen with fear.

“She’s coming for us,” said Katerina.

“What?”

“The Pretender,” she said.

“She can’t make a noise like that. It’s only a . . . truck.” He had no choice but to use the modern Russian word,
gruzovik;
there was no proto-Slavonic equivalent.

His use of a strange word didn’t help much, but his utter lack of apprehension did seem to have a calming affect. He took her shoulder and led her off into the brush by the side of the road. By the time the truck came along, they were invisible to the driver. Ivan kept his arm around Katerina, and she stayed close to him. It was sweet to have her body beside his, to feel her—well, technically, his—shirt pressed against his bare chest. He wondered fleetingly if Dimitri would stand so calmly in the face of the hideous monster now coming up the road. But that was a cheap thought, and he despised himself for thinking it. He was not brave to face the coming of the truck. He knew there was no danger. But a druzhinnik showed courage in the face of enemies that Ivan could never dream of fighting off.

When the truck rattled by, she put an arm around his waist and retreated deeper into the crook of his arm. Let there be a hundred such trucks, he thought.

“You saw the man inside,” he said. “It’s like a wagon, but instead of horses or oxen to pull it, there’s a . . . fire inside. An oven. Not for cooking. An oven that makes the wagon roll.”

“It was rolling uphill, and nothing pulled,” she said. “Why did you lie to me?”

“Lie? When did I lie?”

“You said there was no magic in your world.”

“This isn’t magic. This is . . . a tool. Like a scythe or a basket. A tool for doing work. The truck carries the man and whatever load he needs to bear. Just like a wagon. Only faster, and bigger loads, and the truck doesn’t need to rest as often as a horse.”

She put her free hand to her face, the fingers touching her forehead. Not covering her eyes, really. Just . . . hiding.

“It’s gone now,” he said. “There’s nothing to fear.”

She shook her head. “I’m ashamed,” she said.

“Of what?”

“You were so foolish in our world,” she said. “But now I see that I’m a fool in yours.”

Well. This is progress. “Not a fool,” he answered. “I learned as quickly as I could, and you’ll do the same.”

“I know of no spell to make a wagon move by itself. It would take the Widow herself to do such a thing.”

“The Widow wouldn’t want to make a truck like
that
,” he said, even though he knew she wouldn’t understand the joke.

“Gruzovik,” she said, using the Russian word he had used for the truck.

“That’s good,” he said. “A new word.”

“How many new words are there?” she asked.

“A lot,” he answered.

“A hundred?”

Let’s see, he thought. Toilet, vaccine, magazine, movie, television, bank, automatic teller machine—a triple threat!—hamburger, ice cream, pizza, shampoo, tampon . . . No, it was not his job to explain
that
to her.

Whose job was it, then? What woman who spoke proto-Slavonic would be able to instruct her on how to unwrap it and insert it and . . .

If
he
had to explain it, she was going to learn about sanitary napkins. It’s not like she was going to wear a bikini any-time soon.

What am I doing? What am I in for?

She stirred under his arm. “We should go on before it gets dark,” she said.

“Yes, of course,” he replied. “I’m sorry, I . . . I don’t know how to begin teaching you the new words. I’m not even sure I should try, because if you go home with me to my family’s house, most people don’t speak Russian.”

She snorted at the mention of the Scandinavian Rus’.

“I mean the language of the word
gruzovik
. They speak another language there, and a gruzovik is called ‘truck.’ ”

“Truck,” she said. She could not shape the English word very well.

“Never mind,” he said. “Plenty of time.”

But as they continued to walk toward Cousin Marek’s house, he began to realize how impossible everything was going to be. He couldn’t take her to America for the simple reason that she had no passport and no way to get one. There were no birth certificates in the ninth century, and it wouldn’t matter if there were, no one would believe the date on it anyway. She did not exist, in fact. And the moment she opened her mouth, she would be branded as foreign, from some unidentifiable Slavic country, definitely in Ukraine illegally. However people in Taina might have regarded him with suspicion, they didn’t assume he was a criminal because he talked strangely and arrived naked. It helped that it was the daughter of the head of state who led him into the village, of course, but . . . modern life was complicated.

If she couldn’t go to America, neither could he stay here. His visa was not forever.

His visa.

How long had he been in Taina? Weeks, anyway. But when Katerina was asleep on that pedestal, a few months in Taina were eleven hundred years on this side of the chasm. Had he just pulled a Rip van Winkle stunt? Gone for a walk in the woods, and when he came back, twenty years had passed? A hundred?

No way could a Soviet-made gruzovik still be running after twenty years, let alone a hundred.

But even if he had disappeared for only the weeks that he was aware of having lived through, it must have caused terrible consternation here. Cousin Marek would have become alarmed by nightfall, and the next day there would have been a search. By now the search would be over, everyone convinced that he was dead somewhere in the forest. Mother and Father must be grieving, and Ruth. Would Ruth grieve? Of course she would, what a thing to doubt!

I have to explain. Gone for weeks, and when I come back, I have a girl with me who happens to be wearing nothing but my shirt.

Don’t borrow trouble, he told himself. We have no choice but to go to Cousin Marek’s house, and once we’re there, with clothing, food, shelter, we’ll figure out what to do next.

The sun was setting red behind them when they made the last turn and Cousin Marek’s farm spread out before them like a Grant Wood painting. Ivan stopped for a moment, drinking in the familiar view. It had not been twenty years, that was certain, for nothing was changed.

“Taina,” whispered Katerina.

She misses her home, thought Ivan.

“What have they done to Taina?”

“Taina is another time and place,” he started to explain.

Then he looked again, as if with her eyes, and realized what had never crossed his mind until now: Cousin Marek’s farm was on exactly the site of the village of Taina. His house was on the same spot as King Matfei’s house.

In fact, estimating the positions of the two houses, Ivan realized that he had slept in about the same place in both. How could that happen? Mere coincidence? No one in Taina could have known where he slept in Cousin Marek’s house. And yet they led him to the very spot.

It could not be. Impossible. And even if it was true, it was meaningless.

Ivan looked around for the high ground where the fort had been, with the practice field where he had been trained—or was it tortured?—by Dimitri. No building stood there now; it was a stand of trees, newish growth with lots of underbrush. But amid the clutter, were the outlines of the walls still there?

“Taina is gone,” she said. “We failed. My people are destroyed.” She was weeping.

“No, no,” he said, pulling her to him and comforting her like a child, letting her cry against his chest. “Eleven centuries have passed. Cities rise and fall, and villages come and go, but it doesn’t mean that the Pretender defeated your father, I promise you. If we went back and crossed the bridges, we’d see that nothing was changed. When I went to Taina, all of this disappeared and was replaced by your village. But it was still here when I crossed the bridge. Do you understand?”

She nodded, pulled away from him. “You understand these things,” she said. “But to see the land with my father’s house gone, replaced by this great castle.”

“It’s not a castle, it’s just a house. We build taller houses in our time. Warmer ones, too. Let’s go inside.”

“This is your house?”

“My cousin’s house. But Marek and Sophia have always made me as welcome as if I had been born here.”

“Where is the village?”

“A long way from here, if you’re walking. But not far by gruzovik.”

“The servants live there?” She pointed.

“No, they keep birds there.” Chicken wasn’t part of the regular diet in Taina, and Ivan had never learned the word, if they even had one. “Like geese, only they don’t roam free.”

“To keep them safe from the foxes?”

“Yes,” said Ivan. It occurred to him that the new henhouse Marek had shown him so proudly stood exactly where the church had been until it burned down yesterday.

No, it wasn’t yesterday, it was this morning. His wedding morning. All of this in a single day? No wonder he was tired and hungry.

They came to the door and Ivan knocked.

The door was flung open so immediately that Ivan was momentarily frightened. Had Marek been watching at the window?

No, it was Sophia. “Vanya’s back!” she called over her shoulder. Then she turned back to face Ivan, radiant with joy at seeing him. She opened her arms and was about to embrace him when she saw Katerina.

“What’s this? What are you wearing? You must be freezing! And Itzak, you foolish boy, where is your—oh, she’s wearing it. What was she wearing
before
she was wearing your—never mind, come in, get warm, get warm, time for stories in the kitchen, are you hungry? I have a big soup, I made plenty of borscht today, as if I knew you were coming, and cold, come in, don’t dawdle.”

Laughing, relieved at the welcome, Ivan ushered Katerina into the house. How much of Sophia’s torrent of words did Katerina understand? She stayed close to him, her arm around him, as she looked around her at the wonders of the house.

He tried to see the room through her eyes. Dimly lighted by the setting sun through the windows, it was a mass of shadowy shapes, hummocky furniture, and vaguely reflective frames on the walls. A fireplace. A rug on the wooden floor. How did that feel on her bare feet, the varnished wood? Or maybe she was merely looking for the fire that was keeping this room so warm.

They came into the kitchen, and Katerina blinked against the brightness of the electric light.

“You keep a fire on the air,” she said in awe.

Sophia stopped cold. “What accent is
that
?” she asked. “I can’t place it.”

“It’s not an accent,” said Ivan. “It’s another language . . . you understood her?”

Sophia ignored his question. “It’s not a fire, child, it’s an electric light,” she said to Katerina.

The word made no sense to the princess. She reached up toward the dangling light.

“Don’t touch it,” said Ivan. “It can burn your hand.”

“But it’s not a fire,” said Katerina. “It’s like a single drop of water, alive with light, and larger than any water droplet ever was.”

Ivan could not resist impressing her further. He reached for the light switch, toggled it off. The room went almost fully dark, for the kitchen window faced east, the direction of darkness in the evening.