The Summer Garden (64 page)

But the ancient ruins in the town remain on full display, and the myriad white onion-domed churches are magnificent even without the gold crosses on the crests. The river runs through the center of town, connected to Rurik’s wall and St. Sophia’s Church by a stone footbridge.

Tatiana loved to walk with Pasha and Marina through Novgorod’s cobbled streets, and on top of Rurik’s wall. This time, however, there were no excursions to the city from the dacha, just a short bus ride away. Pasha was not here, and Marina and Saika didn’t want to go. All they wanted to do was lie indolently near the lake and talk in lurid whispers, and if Tatiana came too close, they would say, go away, Tania, this conversation is not for you.

So Tatiana went away. Aunt Rita and Uncle Boris’s small dacha was nestled on a gentle slope leading to the lake, covered by a canopy of elms, blissfully isolated. Tatiana read, swam, and even went to Novgorod by herself once. Upon returning, she found the girls as she had left them, on their stomachs on the blanket, legs up at the knees, heads together, eyes toward the lake.

Tatiana noticed Aunt Rita and Uncle Boris were fighting more than usual. They had always clashed, but there had not been this constant stream of hostility through the sap-covered house. It wasn’t the fighting she didn’t understand. Her family fought too. It was the lack of loving that troubled her.

While inside Aunt Rita and Uncle Boris argued and outside Marina and Saika conspired, what Tatiana did was daydream. She sat with her back against the trees and daydreamed of Queen Margot and La Môle. What if Margot weren’t queen, married to a king? What if La Môle had been tortured but not beheaded? What if they escaped, ran away to the south of France perhaps, found an unnamed cobblestoned village and became lost? They married. They were alive. They were together. What bliss. What happiness. But what would a queen and a commoner’s grand passion look like in the everyday? Would it all be like this? Did even the most soaring love affair turn into Aunt Rita and Uncle Boris after a while?

That was so distasteful to Tatiana that the daydream instantly ended—as if the reel in the film broke. How intolerable. Better for La Môle to sweat blood and die on the rack. And as she climbed into her creaking cot and closed her eyes, the images in her head darkening, the images outside darkening, she thought, not another day like this one, please not one more day like this one.

The next day was not quite like this one.

“Tania, why don’t you come swim with us?”

“I already swam. See? My hair is wet.”

“Tania doesn’t want to swim!”

“She’s afraid of the lake.”

“She doesn’t like warm water.”

“No, Marina,” said Saika, “you know what it is, don’t you? She is embarrassed. She doesn’t want to get naked. Do you, Tania?”

“Tania, you’re not embarrassed, are you, that you have smaller breasts than Pasha?” And this was from Marina!

Tatiana didn’t look up from her book. Suddenly she found two naked, tittering, dripping girls, standing over her and Queen Margot.

“Come on, Tania,” said Saika, hands on her hips. “Want us to help you get undressed?”

“Yes, we’ll help.” Marina pulled on Tatiana’s vest.

Tatiana jumped up. “Don’t touch me,” she said, pressing her book to her chest.

“Tania is a chicken!”

“Tania, have you considered the possibility that you will never grow breasts, or hips or hair?”

“Tania,” Saika said, putting on a serious face. “Have you ever been kissed? I really want to know.”

Marina laughed. “You know she’s never been anythinged, Saika. She’s saving herself for some of that Queen Margot loooove.”

“Unlike you, Marina? Unlike you, Saika?” said Tatiana.

“Oooh! She’s in a fighting mood today,” Marina said merrily.

“This brings me to my point,” said Saika to Tatiana. “No boy is going to love you if you don’t grow some boobies. And even more important, and you and I talked about this, no one is going to want your unbloomed unopened flower, Tania.”

“Come in the water, Tania,” said Marina, tugging at her.

“Marina,” said Tatiana, yanking her arm away, “what do you think Pasha would say if he heard you?”

“Oh, like your brother doesn’t tease you!”

Tatiana cast her disapproving eyes on her cousin. She did not look at Saika at all. “Why didn’t you do this in front of him then?” she asked. “You waited until you got me where you think no one can see or hear you. But you’re forgetting—
I
can see and hear you.”

“Tania,” Saika said mock-seriously, “do you know what I heard in Azerbaijan? That if you’re unbloomed but touch the hair and breasts of a developed young woman, you will grow hair and breasts yourself.”

Tatiana kept stepping away and they kept following her, two wet girls stalking her through the clearing.

“Saika, is that true?” Marina said. “I never heard that.”

“Oh, yes. It’s true.” Saika paused. “Well?”

“Well, what?” Tatiana snapped. “Just go back in your water and continue whatever it was you were doing there.”

“Also the reverse is true,” Saika said quietly. “You don’t believe me. But it’s true. You will bloom if you’re touched by someone with a little bit of…savvy. It’s for your own good. Do you
want
to remain breast-less and unloved? In the interest of helping you, I’m willing to break, how shall I put it, um, your…
cover
.”

Tatiana nearly tripped and fell on the ground, staggering backwards.

“It won’t hurt,” Saika whispered. “I promise you, it won’t hurt.”

“Listen to Saika, Tania,” said Marina. “She is wise beyond her years.”

“Come on,” said Saika, reaching for her. “It’ll be so much better later. Let me touch you.”

Tatiana swiped Saika’s hand with the
Queen Margot
book, swirled around and ran away while the girls bounded back into the water, their laughing voices carrying in an echo across the lake.

“Tania, come swim with us,” Marina called. “We’re just joking with you.”

Tatiana sat under a pine and pined for her summer. That’s it, I’m going back to Luga, she decided. Blanca Davidovna can take care of me until Dasha comes back.

Marina and Saika were splashing each other, diving and giggling as Tatiana sat far away, grimly watching.

Marina was on the shore reaching for a towel when Tatiana heard Saika’s voice from the lake. The voice sounded not quite panicked but not quite calm either. Saika said, “Marina,” and there was a tense timbre that made Tatiana get up off her haunches to better see Saika, who remained in the lake up to her waist, muddy and covered with what looked like weeds.

“Marina!” Saika said once again.

Marina, who was bent over a towel, said, what, then turned around—and started to scream.

When Tatiana heard the screaming, she ran to the lake.

It wasn’t weeds on Saika’s body. It was leeches.

Tatiana knew the leeches that lived in the silt of Lake Ilmen—long, fat, black, with hundreds of minute teeth in their two circular jaws that sawed through the skin of the host. Painlessly they attached themselves with one clamp at their mouth and another at their anus. Then they relaxed their bodies and began to suck, emitting an enzyme that prevented the two wounds from clotting. The blood suckers were four to eight millimeters in length and another seven millimeters in their ringed diameter. Dozens, hundreds of these, covered Saika’s body. Each of them could drink twice their body weight in blood before it fell away bloated.

“AHHHHHH! AHHHHHHH!”

That was Marina—who knew something about the Ilmen leeches, having once been bitten by one so badly that she required a week in the hospital and intravenous sulfa drugs to battle the infection that had spread into her abdomen.

“Marina, could you…
stop
.” That was Tatiana. She took another step to the shore. The leeches were all over Saika. One was on her face. Tatiana had no doubt they were in Saika’s matted black hair. She didn’t want to think about it, but she was sure they were in
all
of Saika’s hair, the hair Saika not ten minutes ago had asked Tatiana to touch. Tatiana stood in her white vest and white underwear, wanting only to turn and run back to the house and put on more clothes to cover herself, while Marina in a palpitating panic was running up and down the clearing, shrieking, “Oh, no! Oh, no! MAMA!!! MAMA!!! What are we going to do?”

“God, Marina!” Tatiana said quietly.

“Tatiana,” Saika said quietly. “Can you help me?” She smiled. “Help me, Tania, please. I’m sorry about everything.”

Aunt Rita, having heard Marina’s screams—who hadn’t?—came running from the house, her eyes as panicked as Marina’s voice. But once Rita saw that Marina was all right, not only did she not offer help, she didn’t offer much sympathy either. Her face a mask of disgust, Aunt Rita backed away, and her expression did not escape Tatiana—or Saika.

To make matters worse, Marina used that moment to start retching and throwing up her lunch of eggs and fish. Aunt Rita did not make matters better by flying to Marina and crying, “Darling, are you all right? Poor thing, look at you, oh, darling, let me—”

“Aunt Rita,” Tatiana said, walking toward Saika, “I need some salt and matches right away. Also some iodine.” She did not ask for a response nor invite any. Aunt Rita hurried to the house with Marina securely in tow.

“Tatiana,” Saika whispered. “Will you please fucking hurry before they suck me dry?” She pulled one of them off her stomach. The worm hung on and when she threw it away, it left a pair of bleeding circles.

“Don’t pull them off like that,” Tatiana said. “You’ll scar.” For a moment, the girls’ eyes met on the word
scar
.

Tatiana took another step toward Saika. “Come out of the water and lie on the ground.” Saika did as she was told.

Opening the bag of salt as soon as Rita brought it to her, Tatiana poured the coarse crystals over Saika’s body. The girl twitched; the reaction of the slugs was also instantaneous. They jerked and shriveled, attempting to crawl away, crawling through more salt as they did so. In their death agony, their black elongated bodies began to drip out their slimy entrails onto Saika’s naked flesh, mixing with her blood and their own anti-coagulant protein, hirudin, a whitish, pus-like liquid. Where they had been sucking her, small, coin-like wounds remained, trickling blood.

Making Saika turn on her stomach, Tatiana poured the salt over her hair and back and buttocks and legs. There were many leeches that did not let go. For them, Tatiana needed matches. She had to burn them off.

Saika was quietly howling.

Tatiana lit a match and lowered it to a leech that was oozing from the salt, yet remained alive and vampirous. Lighting a wet, salted slick worm was harder than one imagined, the leech in damp self-preservation refusing to self-immolate. Saika twitched. “Tania, wait—”

But Tatiana couldn’t wait. She knew that the blood sucking did not stop until the teeth of the parasite were no longer in the host’s body. With a good few dozen of them still attached to Saika, the girl’s ability to remain conscious was diminishing, as was her blood supply. If each leech could drink twenty milliliters of blood every ten minutes, then…

Tatiana hurried. One leech would not come off Saika’s back; the match was burning Tatiana’s fingers. She threw it to the side and lit another one, bringing it even closer to Saika’s skin. Finally, the worm fell off, leaving an ashen singe behind. After taking twenty more leeches off the legs, Tatiana turned Saika over.

“Hurry up,” whispered Saika, “but stop burning my skin with your fingers.”

“It’s the fire.”

“Stop touching me. Press the match to the thing and then move on. Don’t touch my skin with your fingers.”

Unnerved but calm, her hands steady, Tatiana slowly burned off the leeches that refused to fall away; swollen, turning gray and writhing, they continued to feed on Saika. There had been only a few on Saika’s back. Must be because of the scars, thought Tatiana. Even leeches can’t attach themselves to dead skin. With so much salt in her open wounds, Saika’s body was beginning to swell, turn gray itself. She had stopped howling.

“Tania…” Saika’s mouth was sluggish, saturated with salt and water. “Between my legs, Tania…”

Tatiana was glad that Saika’s eyes were closed and the girl couldn’t see her revulsion. She would have liked to call Marina, Saika’s best friend, or Aunt Rita, an adult. She would have liked to call Uncle—

“Tania!” It was Uncle Boris. He was behind her, leaning over her. “What’s happened?”

“Leeches, Uncle Boris,” Tatiana breathed out. “I think I got most of them—”

“Look,” said Boris, pointing to Saika’s pubic hair.

“I know,” said Tatiana. “Those are the only ones left.” Tatiana didn’t know what to say or do next. Was it indelicate to ask her uncle for help? To do it herself was impossible. Tatiana couldn’t and, more importantly, wouldn’t touch Saika there. “I poured salt on her, but they’re just not releasing.”

“Tania, do something.” This was from Saika. “Don’t just sit and have a fucking conversation.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do, Saika? I can’t light a match to you, can I?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Saika. “Help me sit up, will you?”

Uncle Boris and Tatiana helped her. Saika reached between her legs, grabbed a leech and yanked. The leech came out with a chunkful of hair. She did it again to another one, wedged in a little further down, a little deeper. Tatiana looked away. She couldn’t help but notice that her uncle did not. Unlike the sickened eyes of his wife, Tatiana saw that in Uncle Boris, revulsion and sympathy mixed with something else, something even kindly Uncle Boris could not hide. A naked girl sat in front of him on the grass, covered with welts, leeches between her legs, bloodied and swollen and swampfilthy. But she was naked.

Intensely uncomfortable, Tatiana stood up and backed away, matches in hand. “Well, if you’re all right now, I think I’ll go inside,” she muttered. “Would you like some soap? Some iodine?”

“I’ll be fine,” Saika said, not moving.

Tatiana didn’t pursue it. Without iodine, the wounds would get infected, but it wasn’t her problem.