Юрий Мельников – Little Lily (страница 6)
Yuriko dropped to her knees. She found a dry stick and began raking away the ash. The stick hit something hard. Out from under the gray flakes rolled rounded, flattened, black lumps.
Sweet potatoes. A whole dozen. Someone had put them in the ashes to bake but never had the time to eat them.
An intoxicating smell of caramelized sugar, honey, and hot earth wafted from them. Yuriko's head spun from a pure, animal desire to eat. Forgetting caution, she snatched a hot tuber from the embers with her bare fingers. The skin on her fingertips burned instantly, but she felt no pain, tossing the black lump from palm to palm and blowing her breath on it.
They sat right on the ground around the hearth, forming their own secret circle. Yuriko pressed her thumbs into the charred crust. The potato split in half with a dry, brittle crunch. Thick steam billowed up.
Beneath the dead, burnt crust hid a blinding, moist, golden flesh. It was so bright it seemed all the sun their island had now lost was hidden inside this root. This was not food. This was communion.
They didn't fall upon the potatoes with greed, even though their stomachs were cramping. Yuriko broke off a tiny piece – no bigger than a fingernail, so as not to harm the starving child – and brought it to the boy's lips. He opened his mouth like a baby bird. He placed the piece on his tongue and froze. His eyes widened, his jaws began to move uncertainly, remembering how it was done. And his lips were smeared with gold.
And the boy smiled.
It was a true blossoming. The mask-like face suddenly came to life, his eyes narrowed, and between his dirtied lips milk teeth appeared – so implausibly white and clean amidst the ash, as if they glowed from within.
Yuriko broke open a second sweet potato and handed half to Miko. Their fingers touched for half a moment, and in that there was more than in all unspoken words: “take,” “eat,” “we are together.”
Miko took a bite. The hot, honeyed juice ran down her chin. Yuriko watched her chew with her eyes closed. On Miko's chapped lips, the black ash mixed with the amber juice of the sweet potato. These two spots – gold and ash, sweetness and death, life and war – made Yuriko's heart ache. In that moment, Miko's face turned toward the warmth, as if she found herself in a place where there were no more caves and grenades.
Yuriko watched and couldn't eat. Her throat caught from the impossible, silent contemplation: she was sitting in the middle of a ruined world, watching the one she loved eat. And this moment was the most honest in her entire life.
“Eat, Yuriko,” Miko said quietly, opening her eyes.
And Yuriko ate. The sweet potato burned her mouth, stuck to the roof of her palate, smelled of earth and smoke. It was the sweetness of what had survived when everything around had burned. The golden flesh fell into her empty stomach, her body shuddered, accepting the warmth, and from this painful, unbearable joy, Yuriko's head spun.
When the potatoes were finished, the boy licked his fingers, looked at Miko, and suddenly spoke. His voice was thin, but flat, like paper from which pencil drawings had been erased.
“I am Hinata,” he said simply.
“What a good name,” Miko gently reached out and wiped a golden crumb from his chin. It left a clean spot, like a moon breaking through clouds. “A place in the sun. Like a flower. Like a sunflower... Tell us, Hinata, where is your mother?”
The boy frowned, piecing together the scattered pictures of his memory.
“We were walking on the road. It was dark. Mom was holding my hand tight-tight,” he clenched his little fist to show it. “And then it got very loud. Bang! And fire. The ground started jumping. Mom fell and let go of my hand. And everybody ran into the grass. I ran too. I ran, I ran... I lost my sandal in the mud. I looked for it, and then Mom was already gone.”
He spoke about it without tears, like a fact of the weather. His mind hadn't yet found the words for the childish pain.
“And your dad?” Yuriko asked softly.
“Dad is far away. In the north. Mom said – in the north. I slept in the jungle under a big leaf. It was cold. And yesterday I saw you. You were walking ahead, and I was behind you. But I was afraid to come close. You were big. And I thought... you would scold me. I thought you would chase me away. I'm dirty. I lost my pants.”
Yuriko's nose stung, and she turned away to the hearth. This child, who had lost everything in the fiery meat grinder, was most afraid that the older girls would scold him for being untidy.
At that moment, a drop fell on Yuriko's cheek. Then a second. The air grew thicker, the sky descended, and a tropical downpour poured from everywhere at once. It fell in a solid sheer wall, washing away the scorch, pinning the foul smoke of burned villages to the ground, and cooling the red-hot island.
“Over there!” Yuriko jumped up, scooping Hinata into her arms. The boy turned out to be unexpectedly light, like a bird made of thin bones and feathers.
At the edge of the yard stood a half-ruined shed – a former goat pen. One of its walls had collapsed, but the sloping thatched roof was still holding. They flew under the overhang the second the downpour turned into a roaring waterfall. Inside, it smelled of musty straw, wool, and a rescuing, enveloping dryness. In the corner lay a pile of old mats. The girls pushed them together, building a warm semblance of a nest.
It went dark instantly, as if someone simply turned off the light in the world. But they weren't afraid. The noise of the water on the roof cut them off from the rest of the earth, muffled the artillery cannonade from the coast, and locked them in an impenetrable, cozy cocoon.
Hinata fell asleep almost immediately. He curled up into a ball, tucking his knees to his chin – the way children accustomed to sleeping alone in the dark curl up. Even in his sleep, traces remained on his lips: gold and ash.
Yuriko lay on her back, listening to the water. The jungle around them was changing the mathematics of their existence.
When you are running ahead of fear, and there is no one behind you, the world is a tunnel, and you dash through it, expecting a bullet. But now a child was sleeping behind them, and Miko was beside her. Their world ceased to be a tunnel. Three points formed a triangle. Three legs make a stool that won't fall. And in its center, a circle was formed. And in a circle, one can finally breathe.
In the dark, Yuriko carefully, blindly, reached out and found Miko's fingers. Miko was not asleep. She squeezed her hand in return – tightly, interlacing their fingers.
Under the roof of the old shed, in the middle of a bleeding island, it was dark and damp. But for Yuriko, this place was now the brightest on earth. Her stomach no longer howled with hunger, filled with the warm sweetness of the sweet potato. There were three of them. They were full. And they were alive.
She looked at Hinata – sleeping, curled in a ball, with the golden spot on his lower lip – and thought that if the world were to end right now, right this second – if the rain flooded everything, and the jungle closed in, and the earth opened up – the last thing she would feel would be Miko's hand and the boy's breathing in the dark. And that would be enough.
Chapter 4. The Anatomy of Pain
The first thing she felt was a hand.
Not a familiar one. Not the palm she knew better than anything in the world – thin, dry, hot – not Miko’s hand. This hand was different: large, heavy, in a thick cotton glove. It moved methodically, professionally, without hesitation and without pity: along her ribs, over her hips, across the folds of her dirty school skirt. The movements were functional. The hand was checking. The hand was searching for a hidden threat – ceramic death, a steel sphere. It didn't care what the body beneath it felt. It had a task.
Yuriko threw her eyes open, preparing to scream, but the air stuck in her throat.
Above her, a couple of handspans away, a face loomed. And it was black. Not just swarthy or tanned – it was a deep, impenetrable black, gleaming with a violet bronze tint. The face was crowned with a netted steel helmet, from under which stiff curls escaped. The whites of his eyes against this skin seemed unbearably, frighteningly white. They looked at Yuriko with a calm, military attention.
Yuriko froze like a butterfly on a pin. The black man stopped searching the pockets of her
Quiet.
This gesture, ancient and universal, understood before the invention of the Tower of Babel, crossed the ocean between them. A finger to the lips meant “be quiet,” and “be quiet” right now meant “you are still alive.”
The soldier turned his head toward the exit of the shed and said hollowly in a guttural, barking language: “She’s clean too.”
Yuriko sat up slowly. Her hands went up on their own – palms open, fingers spread and trembling finely.
In the far corner of the shed, huddled against each other, sat Miko and Hinata. Miko was hugging the boy, hiding his face against her chest, her eyes empty from extreme tension. Around them stood three more men in green helmets. Their rifles pointed at the ground, but their figures alone filled the shed with a suffocating weight. Yuriko looked at their faces – young, pale, with beads of sweat on the bridges of their noses. And through her shock, she saw the main thing: the devils were afraid. Their shoulders were tense; they peered into the darkness of the corners as hunted as the girls themselves.