Юрий Мельников – Little Lily (страница 5)
Yuriko stopped, gazing at the gray surface. The stone reminded her of something – no, not reminded, but imparted – some unfamiliar sensation of warmth and the smell of wormwood under a desert sun. But there was no wormwood here, only moss, grass, and drops of dew.
“Why did you stop?” Miko asked softly from behind.
“Nothing,” Yuriko shook her head and walked on.
She did not look back and did not see that as soon as they left the clearing and the green thicket closed behind them, a small, brownish-gray lizard with a long, perfect tail crawled onto the center of the round stone. A solitary ray of sun that had broken through the dense jungle canopy fell precisely upon it. The stone began slowly absorbing that warmth, and the lizard drank the light – alive and indifferent to the war, to the grenades, and to the departing girls.
“We need food,” Miko said hollowly. “I can’t anymore. The emptiness makes me feel sick.”
Hunger had passed the stage of a simple craving for food. It was a deep, animal spasm of bones and muscles; Yuriko’s body was literally dismantling itself from within, burning its last resources for scraps of warmth. Her head spun constantly, the world tilted slightly, and the ground felt unstable, like thawing ice.
“Over the hill, there should be villages,” Yuriko pointed the direction with her left hand, without pulling it from her pocket. “Maehira or Arakaki. There might be abandoned vegetable gardens left. We’ll find sweet potatoes... anything at all.”
The word “sweet potato” acted like a spell – thick, viscous saliva gathered in her mouth, and her stomach responded with a painful cramp. They walked along the low ground, trying to stay within the dense bamboo thickets to avoid being spotted from strategic heights.
Soon the trail led them to a rough, cut-over clearing. The stumps around had managed to overgrow with white, poisonous fungus; some trunks were charred from old fires. But far ahead, at the very edge of the green expanse, Yuriko distinguished the outlines of a thatched roof and a lopsided fence. Most importantly, the air brought a scent.
It was not the gunpowder or sour smoke of war, but the homely, dry smoke of a hearth. The smoke of burning firewood, carrying a promise of food and heat. The smell made Yuriko’s stomach tighten so sharply that she froze.
Yet it was not the smoke that made her stop.
The feel of the forest behind them had changed. Ever since dawn, an itchy, clammy sense of a stranger’s gaze had lingered between Yuriko’s shoulder blades, but now it became dense, almost tangible. In the motionless, humid air, something shifted. It was not the snap of a fallen twig. It was a soft, careful, yet heavy sound – the way a creature shifts its body weight onto damp, yielding soil.
A single leaf on the lower branch of a breadfruit tree swayed.
From right to left. Slowly, smoothly. And then stopped. There was no wind in the jungle.
The hairs on Yuriko’s arms stood on end. The thread of tension pulled to its limit. The forest no longer felt indifferent – someone was following them step for step, breathing in time with their stumbling paces, stopping whenever they stopped. Someone was hiding in that impenetrable wall of ferns, watching the two exhausted girls from behind.
Yuriko slowly reached back and grabbed Miko’s shoulder in a vise-like grip, forcing her to stop. The fingers of her left hand inside the empty pocket clenched into a fist, digging her nails into the two mysterious crescents.
“Stop,” Yuriko whispered. The sound was barely louder than the pounding of her own heart in her ears.
Miko did not turn around. Instinctively, she leaned her back against Yuriko’s, pressing against her shoulder, seeking protection. Her lips trembled. She read everything from her friend’s tense back – Miko knew how to read Yuriko better than Yuriko knew herself.
“What is it?” Miko exhaled, barely audible.
Yuriko turned her head slowly, fraction of an inch by fraction of an inch, peering into the greenish gloom of the vines from where they had just emerged. The shadows there intertwined too neatly, forming a foreign, motionless silhouette.
“I think...” Yuriko swallowed the dry lump in her parched throat, without taking her eyes off the flickering shadow. “I think I saw someone.”
Chapter 3. The Sunflower
The shadow moved.
It moved with a jerk, a single, short, wet thrust – the way something that breathes and finally decides to show itself moves. It was completely unlike the way shadows usually move. It moved differently – not like the smooth and gradual crawl of a cloud's reflection drifting across the sun. This was something else. The fern – broad, scaly, with edges fringed in almost black – swayed, opening up like green fingers that want to look but are afraid of being seen. And in the resulting gap, against the backdrop of the chlorophyll gloom, a silhouette emerged.
Yuriko did not breathe. She didn't close her eyes – she was ready to meet death face-to-face. She didn't even blink. The fingers of her left hand inside her empty pocket dug into the two mystical crescents so hard that blood was about to burst from under her nails. She waited for the strike: with her whole body, every nerve, every hair on her forearms. Waited for a rifle barrel – black, round, indifferent. A long bayonet, if it was a Japanese soldier, or the broad, bread-knife-like snout of a Thompson, if it was an American. She waited for a stranger's voice, a stranger's order in either of the two languages that now meant the exact same thing – the end.
But the barrel did not appear. Out of the green twilight, a tiny, bare foot stepped onto the soggy soil of the path. Then a second. A creature stepped onto the path. Without a bayonet.
Small. Outside of time.
It was so caked in filth, so implausibly dirty, as if this very ancient, rotting forest had birthed it from the dusk, the moss, and the damp vapors. In height – barely above her waist. Wearing a torn cotton shirt with three buttons that had once been white, but had now become the color of reddish ash, the color of everything this creature had crawled through over the past few days. Below the waist, he was naked. His thin legs, covered in scratches, with cracked soles, resembled the fragile stems of a stubbornly living plant.
The dirt on his face was like a mask, a crust, a second face grown over the first: layer upon layer – first soot, then clay, then dried tears. And through this armor, only his eyes peeked out. Dark, round, wet eyes looked up from below. There was no fear in them, no tears – none of what should be in the eyes of a six-year-old boy in the middle of a war. In them was that pure, absolute, non-human attention with which only a child or a forest spirit looks: without judgment, just a gaze, just “I see you.”
Yuriko exhaled. The air left her lungs slowly, and with it went the tension of the last few days – the anticipation of the bullet, the bayonet, the end. In their place flooded an unbearable, overflowing relief: they wouldn't be killed.
Miko reacted first. Forgetting her weakness, she simply dropped to her knees right into the liquid mud before the boy. She lowered herself so quietly, as if afraid that at a loud sound this forest child would crumble into fern spores.
“Hello,” Miko said. Her voice had changed. Warm, soft – the way one speaks to a wounded bird or a thing that might shatter into pieces if you breathe too hard. “Hello, little one. We aren't scary. Our names are Yuriko and Miko. We are from the school... we are coming from there.”
The boy didn't blink. He examined their smeared blouses, scratched legs, wet hair. It wasn't childish curiosity, but rather a test: are they real? Are they alive? Is it safe to approach?
Miko held out her hand. After a second of hesitation, a small palm, rough with dirt, settled into hers. He didn't grip it tightly, but he didn't pull back either. He just decided to stand – nearby.
Yuriko watched them, and something inside her clenched and unfurled at the same time. Miko, who bowed to no one, had dropped down before this dirty child. And there was tenderness in her voice. But Yuriko knew: Miko's tenderness didn't belong to anyone in particular. It was her property, just as bark is the property of a tree, or moss of a stone. This tenderness poured out onto the boy simply because Miko couldn't do otherwise...
...The three of them walked, guided by the only unerring compass – the smell of smoke. It came unexpectedly: dry, domestic, smelling of firewood, and underneath it – something sweetish that scorched the nostrils. The smell of real food.
A hundred steps later, the jungle parted, exposing a scorched wound in the earth. The village was empty. Four or five peasant yards. All that remained of the houses were black, charred skeletons of beams sticking up into the sky like the ribs of a beached fish. The ground between them was covered in gray, damp ash. The war had passed through here like a blind giant, trampling everything, but leaving behind a glassy, absolute silence.
But in one of the yards, under a collapsed awning beam, a stone hearth had miraculously survived – a regular Okinawan