"Endling"

[fiefoe]

Usually I'm wary of metafiction, but Maria Reva's deployment of this technique seems totally appropriate here.

• People don’t live history, they live their lives. History is a catastrophe that passes over them. —Chus Pato
• Beyond the fields, sky. A sturdy, solid blue, like a freshly painted ceiling.
• she’d notice the girl watching her intently, round blank face trained on her like a telescope dish.
• * All those earthly worries she used to have—mollusk conservation, romantic prospects, the Russian tanks amassing at the border and how no one believed anything would come of it except Yeva, who according to her family was always crying wolf and blowing everything out of proportion, prattling on about the collapse of this ecosystem or that, ruining all the fun, ruining, on behalf of barely there river turtles, the marriage agency’s balloon release over the Dnipro—blah blah blah. None of it mattered anymore. Even Yeva was tired of Yeva.
• The hotel: self-consciously second-tier, the faded carpet patterned with crowns and the letters VIP.
• In fact, the agency endorsed the practice: any gifts ordered by bachelors through the agency—gym membership, cooking class, customizable charm bracelet—could be redeemed by the brides for cash from the agency offices. And most reliably, the hourly interpreter fee had to be split with brides after each date (this, with a great condescending sigh from the interpreters, as if they were being charitable, as if they were doing all the work).
• * She did fine just by showing up, date after date, racking up hours like in any other job. <> Soon Yeva had refurbished her entire lab. New decontamination bath for foods introduced to the trailer, a backup generator, a solar panel for the summer months, upgraded software for alerting her phone whenever humidity, temperature, light levels rose or fell outside tolerance.
• How the many gastropod species have evolved to live anywhere on the planet, from deserts to deep ocean trenches. How they have gills to live in water, or have lungs to live on land—some, like the apple snail, possess one of each, to withstand both monsoons and droughts. <> How some species can survive extreme temperatures, unsuitable for human life, with their highly reflective shells and the insulating properties of their spirals.
• * How the giant tritons can grow to up to a foot and a half, while some types of dot snails can fit through the eye of a needle.
  How they represented, for the Mesoamericans, joy and rebirth, the shape of their shells the circle of life.
  How some can crawl upside down along the surface of water, grabbing onto ripples of their own slime, or make rafts out of bubbles.
• Nor were snails otters, which looked like plush toys made for mascots by aquariums, despite the fact that they lured dogs from beaches to drown and rape them.
• she witnessed just enough miracles to blind her with hope: two rare Tordionus bazilikae on an onion stalk sticking out of a dumpster, when she wasn’t looking for them. Another time, a cluster of newborns at the edge of a military range. These early successes had to be signs—she was destined for this rescue mission.
• It was a conservationist in Hawaii, extinction capital of the world, who’d helped her set up her lab.
• They joked about their monk-like lives, inseparable from their trailers as snails from their shells. They would die in those trailers, and the snails would crawl over their faces, but would not eat their faces,
• There were signs that Hawaii’s rosy wolfsnail population had peaked, was now cannibalizing itself. Ditto for humanity, the conservationist said. His and Yeva’s charges would prevail. They’d adapt to ever-scorching climes, droughts, floods. They just needed time to do so in peace, without people around. Snails were, by definition, slow.
• A time stamp. More precisely, a death stamp. The moment a species vanished.
• * She did not know how long she’d sat cradling the limp little body in her palm, paralyzed by an indescribable feeling, as if she was swelling and shrinking at the same time. A twinge of awe, to be the one to witness an evolutionary branch millions of years in refinement be snipped off; a twinge of power, to have played a hand in it just by having been born human. But mostly, she felt tiny and dumb and powerless.
• The first was a contaminated lettuce leaf... Each of the remaining 147 snails had to be quarantined in a separate jar, an impossible feat in her cramped trailer. Yeva sped to her parents’ apartment in Kharkiv, parked her trailer outside, enlisted every available canning jar in their building. She barely slept, checking on each snail for signs of infection.
• she wanted his voice again, for that voice to curl around her like snail shells curl around their soft, vulnerable bodies.
• Her own sister. The situation was worse than Yeva had thought. It was tragic, really, the trafficked girl now trafficking others. Yeva checked into her depths, probed herself for any ounce of caring left. None. A relief.
• the name Anastasia, they thought about Russian royalty—about the Duchesse who’d vanished by the time the White Army reached her family, having either been murdered or escaped. A Disney movie about her, and at least five women who’d cropped up in the West years after the disappearance, claiming to be her—the name meant “resurrection,” after all.
• Yet no one approached. The no-man’s-land between brides and bachelors held. <> At any moment, a side door would open for the interpreters, Sol among them.
• Modal verbs, deliberate vagueness, an avoidance of the present tense, the imperative practically taboo. Naturally blunt and low-voiced, the inexperienced Slavic woman trying to speak English is like a horse in a mouse maze.”
• But that threat seemed far away, unimaginable—the day of the invasion predicted by American counterintelligence kept getting pushed back, like an ill-fated wedding—while her mother’s imminent arrival felt concrete, inevitable.
• It was Sol who did all the talking—she had studied the language at the university, a supposedly softer version, found in Jane Austen or Emily Brontë novels
• * Sometimes Sol wouldn’t bother with translation, giving Nastia stage directions: “Look sad. His mother died of something degenerative.” “Play coy. He made a joke he thought was funny.” Sol was more ventriloquist than interpreter. She brought Nastia to life as Anastasia.
• Ukrainians have special name for their soil, chornozem. Chornozem has long been famous, black and fertile with loam and humus. Wars have waged over chornozem. Envisage fields of rippling gold wheat and melons bursting at the mosquito’s touch—Ukraine Woman is birthed of that same soil. Chornozem, bless you! Ukraine not only is a breadbasket, but a bride basket also.
• Often, it was Nastia or Sol who painted slogans onto the goose-fleshed skin of Komod protesters, in brutal black brushstrokes. A child’s handwriting, the women agreed, possessed a raw, untampered violence.
• * Every time the question of her trade secret came up she felt herself fill with pride, a sugary sense of camaraderie: the bride considered Nastia disfigured enough to ask. Nastia had become one of them.
  Most times, she made up a vague lie, how she’d turned to God. A knowing hum would pass among the brides, a communal nod, as if Nastia had said a code word for some illegal skinny drug or an underground bariatric surgeon. But today was the day her mother would return, and Nastia would never see these brides again, so she thought, to hell with it. She’d be honest.
  “I ran out of money for food.”
• The amount of money she’d left behind had been laughable—how had she expected them to get by? The romance tours felt familiar, the way one can know an enemy more intimately than a friend.
• The ends brushed the small of her back like a gentle hand, like she was always being ushered somewhere. A “glacial waterfall,” one bachelor would later call it. “Sheet metal in the sun,” said another. Nastia saw her reflection move forward without her. It took her a queasy moment to realize that she’d been looking at another blonde in line who was wearing a dress of the same color.
• That’s when Nastia tore the Putin protest photo off the wall. She held the photo between her hands, threatened to rip it apart, rip apart the younger, glorious version of Iolanta Cherno herself.
• Nastia had no idea what to say, how to stop her. It was one thing to see her mother naked in public, surrounded by crowds or encased in press photos, but like this? No stage makeup. No wreath. No war paint. Iolanta was shorter than Nastia—when had that happened? In that dim, cavernous apartment she looked pale and defenseless. A downy fuzz circled her belly button. Red marks gashed her stomach, not from the protests or the detainments, but from the two children she’d borne.
• * It was about the broader lesson. She herself hadn’t acquired the lab out of thin air. Oh, that German NGO had put her through the ringer. The endless paperwork, the grant proposals, the work plan to retrofit the trailer, the reference letters, the budget sheets calculated and recalculated and resubmitted, the extra hoops to jump through since Ukraine wasn’t an EU country, et cetera. The rounds of committees that waffled, stalled.
• Yeva was always the one asking, asking (begging!). There was something delicious about being on the other side, being a jury of one, holding the veto power. She already knew the verdict: hell no. Yeva would not participate in a kidnapping
• the administrators must’ve liked her look, which was that of a dusky-eyed catwalk model in withdrawal. Her ruin suited her, like crushed silk.
• But hadn’t Yeva herself once been this naïve? Hadn’t she thought she could drag twenty-three species back from the brink of extinction—easy. Other malacologists might rot in their offices, jump bureaucratic hoops for measly grants, but not Yeva. She’d go rogue, set out on the road, do what no one else could.
• “The air circulation couldn’t handle it. It’s not calibrated. They’d suffocate.”
  The girl rolled her eyes, as if Yeva had invented the pesky thing called mammalian respiration.
• * “Twelve has a nice ring to it, a Last Supper size. A number people can clearly imagine, no?” <> Yeva watched the girl’s face fall. Well, this was what growing up was all about. You had dreams, and you watched them get slowly whittled down. You had to learn to accept the hollowed remnants.
• * After the small bespeckled judge gave a speech about Canada’s multicultural fabric and the country’s tolerance of all creeds, his parents warned Pasha to be wary. If living under Soviet rule had taught them anything, it was not to trust official messaging, to always read between the lines. “Unlike the Chinese and the Africans,” his mother had whispered, nodding at the other newly minted Canadians in the courtroom’s lobby, “we can blend right in, stay undetected.”
• They didn’t want too many of their own kind here, bringing their failed empire problems with them like bedbugs latched on to suitcases. If it were up to Pasha’s parents, they would’ve shut Canadian borders to Slavs the moment they themselves had stepped through.
• Still, Pasha caught a hint of envy in his parents’ voices when they spoke of the Ukrainian-Canadian archive centers in the prairies, which, untouched by wars or occupations or famines or purges, were able to preserve heirloom paintings and rare books better than their compatriots back home.) With their painted egg societies and red-booted Cossack dance troupes and church pierogi sales, the diaspora had built their own folksy, utopian version of Ukraine that had little to do with the modern one.
• * To this ancient wave of émigrés, Pasha would realize later, new arrivals like his family must’ve seemed just as alien: a drably dressed, rootless, Godless, emotionally hobbled Homo sovieticus, who after decades of Pan-Slavism shoved down its throat had any sense of collectivism bred right out of it.
• “Which percentage do you award this?” They’d target the thinner teachers, believing them to be the most credible
• “It’s actually three cakes combined into one,” Sol continued. The first, simple vanilla baked with a thin spread of meringue on top; the second, vanilla marbled with chocolate; the third, chocolate mixed with poached cherries and nuts—the dough first made into balls to set in the freezer, then defrosted and rolled into wafers and baked, then frozen again, grated, sprinkled between the other cake layers. Then she’d soaked each layer in black currant syrup before covering it with a cream made of boiled condensed milk mixed with butter. The hard thing was to soak the layers through just enough while keeping the meringue layer crisp. “Took me three days to make,” she said
• “All that time I thought, if I just kept trying to make the perfect cake, she’d keep coming home after the protests or jail or wherever. Or even better, if I made her really, really fat, the cameras wouldn’t love her anymore, naked or clothed.” Sol let out a laugh.
• “I’m sick of not being implicated,” Sol yelled. “I’m sick of making goddamn cake.” She took a breath and closed her eyes, like she was about to set out barefoot onto a bed of hot coals. “Let me help you. Remember your humble interpreter?”
• Some distant, annoying version of Pasha warned him not to get in. But it was almost charming, this makeshift local version of the Escape Rooms he’d been to in the past, the fancy ones with codes and relics and puzzles he’d suffered through with his colleagues in the name of team building. Here was a quaint Ukrainian attempt at Western decadence, like the fancy restaurants here that sold both sushi and pizza. Trying so hard to catch up to the rotten late capitalist West.

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• Russian tanks and artillery were pummeling the place, trying to break through the eastern gateway into Kyiv. Take away the balconies, and the bombed building looks just like my cousins’. Lop it down to five stories, and it could be my grandfather’s Khrushchev-era apartment building in Kherson, another city under siege. Cruel, how Soviet apartment blocks look alike. I’ve been watching the same building get bombed, resurrected, bombed, over and over on my phone, laptop, on the TV screen at the corner store.
• He’d been preparing for these dark days his whole life. Like hell he’d leave now. His sister, for her part, can’t leave him. Nor can she leave the pansy-patterned tea set she inherited from their mother, the only heirlooms that survived Kherson’s first occupation, eighty-one years ago, by the Nazis, and survived the Bolshevik raids before that. My grandfather and his sister will surely keep the tiny estate safe—if not from a bombing, then from the Russian military. There were already Russian families moving into emptied apartments.
• He quotes the Famous Author again, his line about how one must conceptualize a novel as a mansion of interconnected yurts.
• I’d spent my childhood evenings on such playgrounds and now I watch as they are destroyed. Standing, gone. Standing, gone. The last few months have been a decade long, but they’ve also been the same few seconds, looping infinitely.
• My sister, who also lives in Vancouver, tells me that when she passes freshly dug mounds for flower beds, she sees mass graves. Sometimes I wonder if she and I are going insane, living two realities at once—the explosions peppering phone calls from Ukraine alongside the dinner parties in Vancouver with laughing, smiling friends in wrinkle-free fabrics who don’t mention the war.
• Unfamous Author: I tried building a different novel-yurt before, that one set in Ukraine, its structure large and sprawling, more mansion-like than my other set of yurts, but the Russians began bombing it. What right do I have to write about the war from my armchair? And to keep writing about the mail-order bride industry seems even worse. Dredge up that cliché? In these times? Anyway, am I even a real Ukrainian? I left the country as a child. I speak more Russian than Ukrainian, and neither that well.
• Now those same newspapers are calling me, asking me to write about Ukraine again, promising to actually publish this time, probably canning other writers’ pieces because now “my” cause is more important. I’m getting calls for magazine interviews, photo shoots, radio appearances I’d only dreamed of when my book first came out. I’m trying to be grateful. But why must a country be bombed before we care about it? <> Yurt Makers: The world is a whore.
• Commonwealth Arts Foundation (CAF) Application Form: My opus draws inspiration from the wellspring of narrative prowess exuded by Deb Olin Unferth’s canonical work, Barn 8, wherein the notions of abduction and social justice deftly intertwine, as well as the groundbreaking metafictional elements prominently displayed within the protonovelistic oeuvre of Salvador Plascencia’s People of Paper. Thus fortified by the literary beacons that have illuminated the path before me, Endling seeks to transcend the boundaries of conventionality while being grounded in the timeless questions of the human condition.

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• the lab’s retrofitted bathroom conveniently allows for long journeys without stops (since every stop risks encounters with Russian soldiers, many of whom have no qualms about shooting civilians). It turns out that Yeva’s earlier snail rescues were but rehearsals for the real thing, with people.
• * In the heart of a tree-lined plaza, the women spot a concrete pedestal from the old Lenin statue. Only his feet remain, big as bathtubs, rusty rebar curving from them like veins (note this powerful, original image, not in the least plagiarized in desperation from its creator’s first book).
• A chronology so detailed, authoritative, it was hard to tell which came first, the events themselves or the recording of the events. Grandfather must’ve been the one who’d designed the web of lives, all of them radiating from his drafting table.
• It was difficult, but he had to do it, to untether himself from the apartment at last. <> Just as during the previous occupations of Kherson (the Nazis, the Soviets), again the family line scatters, heirlooms and archives vanish. Again, a blank slate.
• an ASL translator translating your very important guest lecture right beside you. Everything a pandemic took away from you, a war now returns. Who could’ve known that your best publicist would be Mr. Putin himself.
• But ballet teachers didn’t think she was waifish enough to have any hope of making the Bolshoi. So after my mother had me, she put me into ballet lessons, and something worse happened: the teachers deemed I had Potential and were about to throw me into militaristic training. But all I wanted was to play the piano. Which, finally, in Canada, I did. My first visit back to Ukraine, when I played for him, he cried. It felt as though a family curse had finally lifted.

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• Meeting Minutes: .. A map of Ukraine circulating online showed what looked like two-thirds of its 6,900 km border glowing red, in danger, on fire.
  8. Decision to Record Meeting Minutes: Upon reviewing the above updates, Solomiya succumbed to distress.
• Today was a special day, the smooth female voice on the trailer’s PA system had informed the bachelors. Every year, Ukraine held a national fireworks competition. That’s what the men had heard three hours into their excursion—pyrotechnicians outdoing each other. All around the country, lovers were getting engaged under glittering skies. What could be more romantic?
• The naked terror in his voice made the others’ fear real, too, unleashed it there in the trailer like mustard gas that poisoned their softest tissues. They were all yelling now, slapping and pounding the steel walls, demanding to be let out,
• The men looked at one another in silence, each waiting to see what the others would do. How badly did they want to believe that smooth voice? Their belief had to be unanimous, or it wouldn’t work. Like a spell they had to cast together.


• How good it felt, the release! Like a painful boil bursting. How easily terror flips to laughter... Thirteen grown men! Well-educated men! Kidnapped! By three girls in animal masks! In a war!
• Ten thousand more Russian soldiers had crossed the border. A Kharkiv schoolteacher was fleeing in a car filled with sixteen abandoned cats. The sympathy Yeva felt upon hearing these reports was muted, dutiful, as if everything was happening in some faraway country.
• Pasha’s turn to tell a story. But anything worth recalling scuttled out of reach, his memory wiped clean, as if he had no history before the trailer. Every story existed only in his future, when real life would begin.
• Maybe it was the blunt force of exhaustion, or maybe the events of the last nineteen hours hadn’t settled under their skin yet. Did the dream world feel more familiar, more real now, and this waking world the nightmare?
• * “At its base, if you zoom in on the photo, you see the dry mucus seal, Yeva. C. surculus! In the wild! And you see the snail’s shell spirals left. Left. Yeva, do you hear me?” <> She had pulled over, turned off the engine. Lefty’s species. Lefty’s left whorl. A one in forty thousand chance. It was too much. Or, too little.
• Yeva took a deep breath and explained why Kherson, but Nastia could barely understand. Leave two girls and thirteen men alone in the dark, all for a glorified slug hundreds of miles away whose shell spiraled the wrong way? Or, the right way, apparently, for Yeva’s purposes. Nastia saw that she had misread Yeva, overestimated her moral compass. Or underestimated it?
• “I know what you were trying to do before we set off with the bachelors. The wedding dress you were looking for? I wouldn’t have pegged you for the superstitious type, worried about burial, but obviously you weren’t getting married. If we hadn’t met, if it weren’t for my plan, if it weren’t for me, you’d be dead.” <> Yeva recoiled in embarrassment, as if Nastia had caught her talking in her sleep.
• * “Don’t you see what’s happening here?” Bertrand went on, turning to the men. “The real war here is poverty. Inequality. They’ve skipped from Communism straight to the most rotten kind of late capitalism.” ... In between dates, I scouted your countrymen and women. I was going to give out jobs. Could’ve given each of you one, too. Teach a man to fish, that kind of thing. But what do you do?” His voice softened to a whisper, drew the other men closer. “You steal my fish.”

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• Fiction is slow to form, to rally its characters from room to room, city to city, to build causality even as real life rushes forward. As I write, Russians have occupied Kherson. And Ukrainians have taken it back. Russians, still in control of the marshy lands across the Dnipro, have by now shelled Kherson more than two thousand times
• The Russians have blown up the Kakhovka Dam. The massive reservoir, called Kakhovka Sea by locals because in some parts you can’t see the other side, has unleashed south, submerging towns and settlements, neighborhoods in Kherson. It churns up and redeposits land mines, some exploding en route while others remain dormant; it unsettles the bones of Nazi soldiers from World War II, churns up radioactive sediment from Chernobyl, washes away the Soviet-era polka-dot teacups of our dacha, uproots a charred acacia from its field. The past and present churn together, roil away. Civilians in motorboats rescue people from their rooftops as Russians continue to shoot and shell them.
• In the first year of the war, when I felt guilty for crying (I’m not the one being bombed!) and then guilty for not crying (Think of those being bombed!), I wondered, uselessly, who had a proper claim to grief. I knew expats who mourned dutifully
• * It’s February 23, 2022, and none of what I’ve written above has happened yet. The floodwaters stop, move upriver. The reservoir’s muddy bottom refills with water, and the fish twitch back to life. Every scattered piece of concrete and metal and particle implodes back into place, and once again the Kakhovka Dam holds firm, the Dnipro River’s great inheld breath. Missile and shell shrapnel dislodges itself from roads and sidewalks and buildings and from soft flesh, human and animal, and is sucked back up by the sky. The black loamy chornozem smooths itself over from the tank treads of the Ukrainians who recapture these lands, and finally from the Russians who captured them.
• Her next predator will come by land—a predator that was once close amphibious kin, and now, 400 million years later, a distant cousin. They still share similarities. The genetic mechanism that coils a snail’s shell just so also coils a human’s stomach and intestines, just so.

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• Pasha was supposed to be the rational one—he worked with rebar and concrete, substances he could see, touch with his hands—while Bertrand traded in air. Yet those damn otters had earned the man a house, a car, a body he had the time to sculpt and chisel. What did Pasha’s “rationality” get him? His childhood bedroom, that’s what. <> These days, Potter Otters might be the real deal, while a war was not. Who was Pasha to say otherwise?
• alcohol. Not for herself. She’d wet a patch of bark with beer as bait. Snails loved the smell of anything yeasty, decaying.
• As Pasha climbed onto Bertrand’s back, he felt his cheeks burn. Of course he had to go first. He was the smallest, having hardly grown since he was sixteen, but did the others have to make it so obvious? Couldn’t they have at least feigned deliberation? Had his fellow captives been sizing each other up all along, long ago putting him at the bottom? It was like gym class all over again.
• * “Yeva, yes. You told me about mason bee.” His face turned dark. “How she always lays the male eggs closer to the surface of nest, so any hungry bird that comes will massacre them first.” <> Sol shot Yeva a scandalized look. That was her icebreaker?
• Nastia said as the women huddled out of earshot from Pasha. “Did Masha say she needed all thirteen men back? She didn’t specify a number. We can afford to lose one.” <> Yeva told herself she should be pleased. Her little activist, who’d once dreamed of trapping one hundred men, now all grown up and finally thinking practically. Yet it almost made Yeva want to stuff the man back inside the trailer, resume the original kidnapping plan, just to see that childish hunger again in the girl’s eyes.
• Was he getting ahead of himself? But was it so wrong, to look for love in a time of war? The search wasn’t any easier in peacetime. <> The leader was marching toward them, her hard gaze flitting from Pasha to Solomiya. “What is this, a speed date? Romance tour’s over,”
• She clapped her hands together. “Excellent. Then you’ll go get weapons.” Machine guns were being handed out to civilians as defense, she explained.
  Pasha took a step back. The sky seemed to flick a notch darker. “Now? It’s almost night.”
  “Exactly. For the night.”
  He didn’t disagree with her plan. In theory. “Maybe it’s better I stay here,” he suggested. “Keep guard.”
  “Keep guard with what?” Her tone was weighted with a forced patience, like she knew he’d get the right answer eventually.
• Above her left ear, the beer-soaked rag hung pinned to the bark in the place, Yeva calculated, where the snail had originally photobombed the selfie of the boy with his pet rat.


• * she’d noted, with a pang of guilt, the increased liquid composition, the ill-formed stools. Signs of stress. Of course the bachelors were stressed, it didn’t take a genius to guess that, but this mammalian evidence saddened her. She’d recalled her time with the snails, how exacting she’d been when checking their excrement, this trove of information on well-being. The only window into their interior states.
• She rubbed her face, feeling another wave of exhaustion. “Get out there, Kevin. Get out of that trailer for once. Do normal things normal people do. Don’t wait around for me.” <> “It’s just you out there, for me. No one else. That’s what it feels like, like we’re the last of our kind. I love you, Yeva.”
• * the coupling habits of the Taiwanese giant wood roach?”... He recounted how even the driest scientific journals couldn’t help cooing about these bastions of monogamy. Some couples ate each other’s wings down to the nubs, never to fly again. Stuck together, dependent on each other, they burrowed themselves into the earth and spent the rest of their lives together raising their young, never straying.
• The chatter around him sounded higher and more pointed than the low, chesty Russian he’d heard from Khersonites, he realized. It dawned on him: these people were all from Russia, the newcomers lined up for food, the soldiers with rifles flung over their backs.
• He wondered if he’d been caught on camera, too, maybe by both the Russians and the Khersonites. How many versions of himself were jolting across the globe—a starving Ukrainian in line for grain, a phony Russian extra? A saboteur in a suit, loping around the streets.
• Then the thorn twitched. One tentacle drew out again, another, tasted the air. Lefty began dawdling upward. Stopped. Dawdled some more. An invisible string seemed to pull him forward. Went slack, pulled forward again. Yeva allowed herself a crack of hope.
• A ringing filled Yeva’s ears. She watched a rivulet of blood weave along the hardened earth, between yellow tufts of grass, past Nastia’s hand. The girl lay on her stomach watching it, too, her face frozen. The picture, if you ignored all else, of a child watching a glistening ant trail, as Yeva herself once did for whole afternoons many summers ago. But these ants pooled in a boot print, spilled over as a long dark finger pointing, in accusation, right at Yeva.
• * They weren’t “extras,” either, because the term implied a fictional film, which this one was not. The fact of their being paid to be witnessed by the cameras: beside the point. The point was the broader, truthier truth: even if these people weren’t Ukrainian, they would experience the act of liberation as any sane Ukrainian would if they knew what was good for them, thus the newcomers were just as Ukrainian, if not more so, than the confused Khersonites.
• Of course he’d cast the blank-faced, orphan-thin girl as the one who approaches the so-called liberators first. If you didn’t know her, you could project anything onto that face—a bottomless gratitude, for one thing. Already Yeva could see that face gracing the Russian state channels, churned into proof that Ukrainians welcomed the “Special Operation.” Across eleven time zones, Russian audiences would eat her up.
• Nastia drew a clattering breath. “Snails are basically blind anyway, so it doesn’t matter how dark it is. The metaphor’s moot.” <> Yeva had told the sisters about ocular tentacles while on the road, shortly after the attacks had begun, in what she’d assumed was a futile attempt at distraction. Nastia had been listening after all.
• Just a few steps away, the sun’s golden rays were setting the tips of the tree’s branches aflame. If she were a believer she would have seen God then, the shimmering presence pulsing through every crag and thorn.
  Instead, she saw them. As if they’d only been waiting for this very moment, waiting for their cue.
  Halfway up the acacia’s trunk, where there had been one twig, now there were two. A fist’s width apart. As their glistening bodies stretched toward each other, Yeva realized she had never seen two C. surculus at once. Dizziness overtook her. It didn’t seem possible—surely the doubling was a trick of her vision. Life teetered between annihilation and—could she dare think it?—hope.
• Nastia fingered the hem of her jacket. She considered her weapon, the only weapon she’d ever had, she realized grimly: her body. She saw this body from the outside, her gaze hovering above the field like a drone, the way her mother might see it. The staging was perfect: a row of soldiers about to meet a row of civilians. At their helm, the lithe girl would peel off her coat, sweater, shirt, bra in one swoop, as if she’d been bred for this moment. Collaborator no more, but saboteur—as any photos and videos from onlookers would prove. Her name would be cleared. Her mother would materialize beside her—yes, she and the rest of Komod really had been watching her these past eight months, waiting for her to finally come to fruition. Her mother would take Nastia in her arms, and for the briefest moment, before the soldiers converged on Nastia, life would go back to the way it was before the war, before Iolanta left.
  Nastia watched the director lower his last finger, slowly, into a fist.
  Nastia smiled at the fantasy, let it go. She reached for the bread.
• He and the protesters were three blocks from the field now. <> The Canadian hero Laura Secord came to his mind—she who’d waded thirty kilometers through forest and mud and mosquitoes two hundred years ago to warn the British colonies of an American attack, then become immortalized as a chocolate brand. A middling one
• In this great act of unity, no one was “acting.” No one thought about where their arms stretched, what their faces should or shouldn’t do. Instead, each mined their own circle of truth, which was actually a collective one, a circle as vast as the methane craters that pockmarked softening Siberian lands, this truth being that everyone, even the soldiers themselves, just needed a firm (presidential) hand to lead them to steady ground again, to save them. (This would be the documentary’s message postedit, to be approved by the Ministry of Culture before distribution within Russia and her province of Ukraine, for common enlightenment and contemplation, as well as for critical study in the West, where intrigue over the unknowable Russian soul remained strong, even stronger after the launch of her Special Operation.)
• * Of course, grand historical moments—like military liberations or works of art—couldn’t please everyone, the Peaceful Ones knew. In the months to come, they would shake their heads as they looked back on this moment. Many would reminisce from their hometowns back in Russia, while others would reminisce from where they’d set themselves up across the river, in the freshly emptied houses with watermelon patches. They’d shake their heads because the filmed liberation really had been so civilized. Until that moment. It had been so orderly yet soulful. And look what those fanatics brought upon themselves, look what they made the soldiers do. <> (In the commotion that followed, many of those who’d previously felt so Ukrainian did wonder: Why are the soldiers firing on us, too? Couldn’t they tell who was Russian and who was Ukrainian? That they were not in fact One?)
• He looks at me like I’m crazy. Certainly, the Russians wouldn’t bomb that. Do I want to take the stamp collection, too?
  “We’ll take anything you want,” I repeat.
  “We?” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”
• “She wouldn’t have actually married him.”
  “When they moved in together, they got a golden retriever,” Masha went on. “They named him Junior.”
  Surely this would have been just a play at domesticity, a farce. “She wouldn’t have left me and my sister for that kind of life,” said Nastia.
• * She told him about her deal with his granddaughter, the cold math of the agreement to exchange the remaining foreigners plus him, the grandfather, for her lost mother... “Sounds a lot like the novel my granddaughter’s been trying to cobble together. She mailed me a draft, fed through one of those internet translation machines. It’s about a girl who thinks she can get her activist mother back by kidnapping a bunch of men.”
• The grandfather shrugged. “Not the kind of book I’d usually read, to be honest. Must be a bad translation. There’s a grandfather in there, too, who refuses to leave Kherson. I think my granddaughter wrote the thing hoping that if I read it, I’d finally leave.” <> He disappeared into the apartment again, reappeared with a wooden stool he set across from Nastia. He gripped his knee, sat down with a sigh. They sat for what felt like two years, three, waiting for another, more amenable grandfather to emerge from the apartment. Green collared shirt, suitcase in hand.
• A tenth would agree with the ninth: We closed the jar and put it back, but then came all the military checkpoints, the soldiers with guns who ordered us in, out, in, out, in, out of the trailer, yelled at us and strip-searched us, and we’d thought this torture, real or staged, would go on forever, in, out, in, out, so we took the jar out again, knowing that for the tape to stop glitching and looping, we had to drink from the jar. It was a kind of mystical belief.
• a sense of dislocation. They’d float above the daily grind of their days, as if they had died in that trailer. They were numb to the kind of beauty that once stirred them: flawless lawns, perfectly raked clouds, quartz countertops white as fondant, gleaming watery skyscrapers, the way the seam between road and sky shimmered in the distance, about to come undone. Now, it all seemed suspect. They couldn’t shake the urge to snag a corner and peel it away, this illusory peace, see what lurked underneath.
• Yurt Makers: And yet that is where we found you, at long last. What one might call, though one might not be completely accurate, a “theater tent.” You, the loose thread of the so-called mansion of interconnected yurts. The Persian rug makers advised us not to look for you. Leave in one flaw, they said, because only Allah can create perfection. We are not of the same opinion. An imperfect rug poses little hazard, but a yurt? Let one thread loose and the entire structure might collapse, generations of families might perish.
• It’s out of love, really. Valik says that these people, actually they’re our brothers. Our little brothers who lost their way. Stuck their noses out, thought themselves better, and so they got themselves their European cars and vitamins and wicker furniture sets (sarang! That’s it, it’s called sarang) until their souls got corrupted. <> One blown-out tire, and they’ll become brothers again.
• In a future where all C. surculus are left-coiling, Yeva will live on in their synapses, pass through generations. They will have a predilection for stale coffee, for sunburnt hair, the cloying taste of latex gloves.
• She knew these two truths precisely because her hand, the one that gripped Yeva’s, did not reach for the phone. Nastia could do it, could let go for a moment—she had no illusion that just by stroking Yeva’s hand she was sending some primal signal, keeping her alive, but the very fact that Nastia could afford the missed call, afford the possibility of never speaking to her mother again, was a signal.
• * Rotten logs, cradles of new life, now in shorter and shorter supply: an obsession of Yeva’s. Something about nutrient cycling, calcium carried from log to snail shell to bird stomach back to saplings. Nastia had to keep remembering the wondrous things Yeva had told her about the world, keep this knowledge coursing between her and Yeva’s body like shared blood.

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__ The most debased of the fantasies: all this happened so that I could write about it.
__ * Here I am again, trying to make use of another cataclysm. <> Am I no better than a snail, sniffing out the softest, most rotten part of a log to feast on? At least a snail digests the rot and excretes nutrients, useful.
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__ Constantine Tereshchenko, a local visual artist: “Culture is the thinnest layer of moss on the body of human existence. It was shaved off with a bulldozer, now there’s an enormous wound.”