Alena resisted to the very end the idea of taking her eighteen-month-old son to an old folk healer out in the country. Arsen had simply been too easy a child—he never cried at night, never demanded much attention, and lately he had started looking straight through people with a blank, glassy stare. The doctors said to give it time, but her mother-in-law insisted.
When the elderly woman calmly took the boy from his mother’s arms, Alena braced herself for strange rituals or whispered prayers. But the woman did neither. She simply bent her head toward the child’s neck and drew in a slow breath.
Right in front of the stunned parents, all the color drained from her face, as if she had run into something truly awful. In the little house, which smelled of dried mint and old wood, a heavy silence settled over the room until they could hear the low hum of the stove. The healer slowly lowered herself onto a bench, still holding the boy close, while he kept staring at the same fixed point.
Alena’s breath caught, and her husband instinctively stepped forward, torn between grabbing his son back and trying to understand what on earth was happening. They stood in the middle of a stranger’s home, frozen, feeling a sticky, primitive fear tighten in their throats. They waited for the woman to speak, not knowing that the sentence she was about to say would upend the life they thought they knew.
Rumynovka woke the way it always did—at first light. One rooster started somewhere behind the Zaitsevs’ yard, another answered from farther down the road, and between them began the same pointless argument they seemed to have every morning. Fog lay over the garden beds thick as cream, and the first rays of April sun seemed less like they were burning it off than politely asking it to move along.
The air smelled of wood smoke, last year’s leaves, and thawing earth—the kind of smells Rumynovka produced in bulk and free of charge. In the Vorobyev house, it was quiet. Alena sat on the nursery floor pulling a sweater over Arsen’s head, the one with the tiny check pattern that always seemed determined to turn itself inside out.
Arsen let her dress him with the same expression a well-mannered cat might wear: no resistance, but no participation either. He stared out the window, where the fog drifted between the apple trees, and nothing in his face suggested he noticed another person in the room. Alena asked him for his arm, but he didn’t respond.
She took his little hand herself, guided it through the sleeve, and straightened the cuff. It was a familiar motion by now, practiced over eighteen months. Then she stood to grab the metal bowl sitting on the windowsill and accidentally knocked it with her elbow.
The bowl hit the wood floor with a crash that echoed through the room and probably all the way to the next yard. Arsen didn’t even flinch. Alena stood there holding the bowl and staring at her son….
