Secondhand Sorcery

“Okay, we’re here. Finally. A week on the road, two looted ATMs, one more stolen car, about twenty different scares and close calls, six or seven missed meals, and at this point I think you’ve pretty much used up all the guilt points I owe you for wasting a little turd who happened to be have some of your DNA, when you wouldn’t even let me try to bring him back. You ain’t even given me a clear reason why you wanna be here. But we’re here. All three of us. Together. So … what now?”

Nadia looked out of the window at a little clump of distant buildings on the horizon. “This isn’t Guryev.”

“The hell you say! We asked every—“

“They renamed it,” Nadia clarified, pointing at a sign that said Атырау, Atyrau. “Even the name is different now. They aren’t calling it Guryev anymore.”

“Okay. And that means what to me?”

“Fatima, please. We just got here. Give me a moment.” She’d been eight years old when Guryev burned. Old enough to have memories of the place, long enough ago that she couldn’t put them in order. Even if they’d rebuilt the city into an exact replica of the one Shum-Shum burnt, she wouldn’t know her way around. But of course they hadn’t. This was just another Kazakh city. The men who paid to repair it—and she didn’t see a bit of wreckage, everything was sparkling new—weren’t concerned with orphans’ nostalgia. They wanted to recover the oil fields, and the harbor on the Caspian Sea.

It wasn’t a very large city yet, more of a good-sized town; most of the old residents had died, and the survivors, she felt sure, had nothing left to keep them here. Nadia had nothing left anywhere else, either, and so came here anyway. “Drive us through town, please. I want to see more.”

“Morbid tourism,” Fatima griped, but put the car back into gear.

Why did it trouble her so much, that this was a different place than she remembered? It wasn’t part of her life anymore. This was only the point where her life had started to go wrong. It made sense—sort of—to retrace her steps, and find a new path from that old branch. She thought maybe that was why they were here. But it wasn’t the same place. There were no roots left to tap into.

Certainly she would never find any graves marked “Mikhail Voronin” or “Aleksandra Voronina.” The best she could hope for would be some kind of monument—if the Knyazya even permitted such a thing. Officially, Guryev had been destroyed after an uprising. It might have been judged better not to mention the matter at all.

Did any of the people here know the truth? She didn’t know if any of the people they drove past on the street had lived here before, or known anyone who had. Maybe the authorities had bussed in all new people to run the new oil wells and refineries, and told them what it pleased. Those people would know better than to ask the wrong kinds of question. Even if they passed on the truth in secret—if they cared enough to repeat a story that didn’t touch on their lives—the official version would become the real truth in time, and any story about a rogue American emissor and an unwisely unleashed primeval would be dismissed as a bizarre rumor, unsupported by any evidence—

“Wait! Stop.” They jerked to a halt, and Nadia pointed down the road. “What is that?”

Fatima squinted. “Looks like a church. Big one.”

“Of course it’s a church. But … I recognize it! Go there.”

Fatima shrugged and complied. “So, they rebuilt the old church?”

“Perfectly. This is exactly how I remembered it.” She remembered it as a big building, and it was. Pink brick walls traced with white trim, and a blue-and-green roof topped with seven brilliant gold onion domes. Really it wasn’t a very pretty building; the nineteenth-century style was fussy and overdone, to Nadia’s eye. It reminded her of a gigantic gingerbread house with all the gumdrops picked off and eaten. But then, it always had, even when she was a child. And somebody had seen fit to make an exact replica.

A sign by the door said it was the Cathedral of the Assumption of the Mother of God, and listed service times. A little plaque, a discreet distance away, told the world that the cathedral had been very badly damaged in a fire in 2008, and rebuilt through the generous contributions of such-and-such individuals, supplemented by state funds. They didn’t say what caused the fire, though.

“Wait here, would you?” To her surprise, the front door was open, and she heard singing inside. But it was Saturday. Was it normal to have services on Saturdays in Lent? She honestly couldn’t remember. It sounded right, though.

The inside was not so perfect a replica as the outside, she thought. She remembered very well the long hours she spent standing during services, looking at the dozens or hundreds of icons covering the walls. Many of them had been old, and not easily replaced. They hadn’t gone to the bother of hand-painting exact copies, only put in other icons, some of them plainly new. The massive four-tiered ikonostas screen in front of the altar was pretty close, though, and the equally overdone chandelier was at least very close to the one she’d been scared to walk under as a little girl, for fear of having it fall on her head and crush her.

It was late in the morning, and she recognized the tail end of a liturgy in progress. There were thirty or forty people standing on the polished floor; not many compared to what the building could hold, but then it was a Saturday. The priest came out of the altar area, and she squinted, but of course it wasn’t Father Fyodor. He was dead. This priest was a younger man, forty at most, with a red-brown beard.

They sang “Blessed be the Name of the Lord,” and she caught herself singing along—of course they hadn’t changed the tune. She couldn’t say she was feeling particularly blessed or thankful at the moment, but she kept singing anyway, in case it would make her feel better. It didn’t.

Then the priest moved over to a little table in front of the ikonostas, and began to sing the panikhida for the dead. Here, too, she sang along from the very back of the church, taking the parts of choir and priest alike because she sang softly and nobody would notice and it pleased her to be improper in this petty and meaningless way. She thought of the last time she’d sung this prayer, in the ruins of Sumela, when she’d thought she was singing it for Fatima. Ironically, Fatima was alive and whole now, when almost everyone else had died. Nadia barely felt alive herself. Maybe it was better to be Fatima, and survive everything unmoved.

When the priest got to the part where he named the individuals to be commemorated, instead of listing one or two people he got out a sheaf of papers and started reading a whole list of names off, very quickly. When he got to the end of one sheet he moved on to the next. More than a minute passed, and Nadia realized he was naming the departed for the whole church. She was sure to add, in her head, the names of Mikhail, Aleksandra, and Father Fyodor, her neighbor Ms. Belyaeva, the man at the grocery bakery whose name escaped her, and everyone else she was sure would be left out. God remembered, assuming He was there. Last of all she remembered Yuri. It felt obscene, but he needed mercy if anyone did, and if this was the last place her life had been right, it was also the last place where Yuri could be called a victim.

The service ended. The faithful streamed out of the church to eat the boiled wheat in remembrance of their dead. Nadia stayed behind, hidden in a corner, and nobody seemed to notice her. Everyone had their own problems. The altar boys took off their robes and left, and the deacon too, while the priest stayed behind to consume the last of the Eucharist. He did not notice Nadia until he took off his own deep-purple vestments and stepped out from behind the altar in a plain black cassock. Only then did Nadia come forward, walking much more quickly than she meant to with her fists clenched at her sides.

“What can I do for you, child?” the priest asked her.

Child. Just ‘child.’ “What is your name, Father?”

“My name is Arseny. Is everything all right?” He at least looked sincere.

How would she even answer that? “I have some questions for you, Father Arseny. How do you think this town was destroyed, four and a half years ago?”

At once his face hardened. “You should know that is not the kind of thing one talks about casually, young woman.”

“Well, what was it? Was it an uprising? A revolt? An insurrection?” He flinched, but nodded. “You know that’s a lie, don’t you? There was no revolt. The Knyazya only want you to believe that, when they did it themselves.” His expression changed again. “No, I’m not crazy, Father. It’s the truth. I was there, and I saw it myself!”

The priest looked towards the door, then back at her. “And why are you telling me this now?”

“Because you left a lot of names off your list.”

“This is a Saturday of Souls. All the dead are remembered today, whether we name them or not. God remembers.”

“Remembers, and does nothing.”

“Nothing visible,” he corrected her. “Is that what troubles you? What is your name, child?”

“Nadezhda Aleksandra Mikhailovna Voronina,” she told him, hoping to provoke a reaction of shock and fear. Evidently this priest was not very political, though, or else news traveled slowly in Kazakhstan these days, because his face didn’t change at all. So she went on, “I was here when this city burnt down, all those years ago.”

“But you are alive now,” he pointed out.

“That is debatable, Father, and in ways you don’t even know.” Again he glanced to the door. She got the impression he wasn’t afraid—he really did think she was just an angry child—only he had things to do, and he didn’t understand this conversation. She was making a mess of it. She hadn’t meant to say any of this nonsense. “I don’t want to take too much of your time, Father. Just tell me this: what happens to the dead, when they sin because of a familiar?”

“We are not told. There were no familiars when the Bible was written, or when the Councils were held. But the Fathers agree that the will of man is weak, and he is forever confounded by the lies of the demons. We cannot always perfectly control the things we do, or the choices we make. But there is a space, a little space of freedom which Satan cannot take away, however small, and the choices we make inside that space—those are what we are judged by, I think. How we used what freedom we had. What is the matter?”

She’d suddenly thought of Mila. She forced her face straight again. “What if the familiar is their own?”

At once Father Arseny’s face became more guarded again. “It is not for us to judge the officers of the state,” he said, as if he were reciting a slogan.

“The person I am thinking of was never an officer of any state. He was a child, barely older than me, and a mass murderer. Now he is dead. Will you tell me where he went?”

“I would never presume to say that of anyone. That is God’s choice, and none of mine.” That line came out easy too, but then he hesitated. “Who are you thinking of, Nadezhda Mikhailovna?”

“My brother Yuri,” she said. Now, at last, his face got a little more concerned. “We were the children—the slaves—of Titus Marshall, whom I killed. Then we were the tools of the Russian state, and then the American, and then I suppose the French, and along the way we killed one oprichnik and tried to kill two more, when we were not destroying the railway in the Crimea or killing random innocents who happened to get in our way. But none of that has anything to do with you.”

His face had gone perfectly white over the course of her speech, and at the end he sat down, rather hard, on the little dais of the soleya before the ikonostas, where he had just stood to offer up prayers for the dead. He looked at her and said nothing at all.

“Before all that happened, my brother Yuri and I lived in this city as private citizens of the Soviet, then the Russian, state. He was a good, cheerful, outgoing boy, and took very good care of me when Father worked and Mother was busy. Then, one day, an American scoundrel came into town with three children he had been exploiting—three children armed with emissors. And a Russian agent with a primeval came after him, to kill him or drive him from Russian land, they didn’t care which. None of that has anything to do with you either, or with me, but between them all they burnt Guryev to the ground, and this church is the only trace of it left, and it’s a fake. Are you listening to me, Father? Do you understand all this?”

Father Arseny nodded.

“It was only chance, or the will of God, that let us survive. My father was at work, and we were home with my mother when Shum-Shum attacked our neighborhood. We were all clapping and giggling together—because that is what Shum-Shum does—and didn’t stop laughing when my mother choked on the smoke and fell down unconscious. It was only chance, or the will of God, that Shum-Shum stopped just then, and we were sane again. Yuri was as frightened as I was, but he was older, and he couldn’t wake our mother up again. So he took me by the hand, and got me out of the apartment to safety before it could collapse. I think we survived because we were small, and most of the smoke rose over our heads.

“He got us down to the ground, and then because he didn’t know where else to go he took me to our school, but it was burning too, and then to this church, but I saw it fall down with my own eyes as we were running to take shelter. We kept looking for places where we would be safe, but there weren’t any. We got to a park, and even the trees were on fire, but it was the best we could find, and we couldn’t go any farther. We were both exhausted.

“Once we were done running, there was nothing else to do but cry. I’m absolutely certain that Yuri wanted to cry as much as I did. He was only a year and a half older than me. Still, he was the elder, and Father had taught him right, what a man ought to do, and his sister was scared. So this hapless, lost, and frightened orphan child, what did he do? He stood up in the middle of a burning city, with everyone he knew dead, and he started singing songs, because he thought it would cheer her up. Stupid songs, the kind that appeal to babies or very small children. He couldn’t think of anything else to do!

“He didn’t even know what Shum-Shum was. Our parents had tried to shelter us from all this. Certainly he didn’t know that familiars could adopt new hosts, provided they were young—all that was a state secret back then, before we came along. And of course neither of us could have known that Shum-Shum’s master had finally gotten his crazy self killed earlier in the day. All he was trying to do was cheer up his sister; he had no idea what was going on.

“It didn’t matter that it wasn’t working; I wasn’t even paying attention to him, just sitting in the dirt and sobbing hysterically. I didn’t notice when the monster came and found us. It was just another orphan looking for comfort and shelter by then. And Yuri … Yuri was acting like a kindred spirit. So Shum-Shum moved in.

“I noticed when that happened, because Yuri suddenly started laughing a lot harder. He laughed so hard he fell down, and nearly fell on me. I remember I screamed at him, but he didn’t pay attention because he was shaking on the ground, like he was having a seizure or something. So I hit him, a bunch of times. I might have saved our lives without knowing it, by hurting him so much he couldn’t accidentally call Shum-Shum back out.

“I don’t think he understood what had happened, but he knew something had happened, and it scared him. So he got me running again, because he didn’t feel safe. We went more than a day before we got to eat again, lapping dirty water out of puddles, and I whined at Yuri the whole time. At some point he figured out that he could call Shum-Shum; he did it in the middle of the night by accident, when he had a weird dream. Then he used him on purpose, a time or two, to drive away some scary men. Those men might have been innocent, I don’t know. We were both terrified.

“We didn’t know that the American had survived, and that he would be looking for someone like us. He took a couple of days to find us, but he controlled this part of Kazakhstan by then so he could take his time. By the time he cornered us, we were in no condition to refuse his offer of food and shelter and a place in his ‘family.’ And then it was all downhill; we were as good as slaves, and in a matter of months Yuri turned into a selfish murdering pervert.

“Where was our little bit of freedom in any of that? As far as I can tell, it was all a trap, from start to finish. We happened to be in the way, and the only way it could have gone different is if we’d done something slightly wrong and been killed instead. At best, we might have been picked up by the government, the same government that let Shum-Shum loose on the city in the first place.

“So let me ask you again: how does your God judge Yuri Mikhailovich Voronin? Is He judging the demon he became, or the good and scared boy who invited in the demon without even meaning to? Does God simply wind back time, and take away four years of wasted life, and make him forget who he was and what he did? I can’t think of any other way the boy I knew could stand to have been the boy who burnt a hundred cities just the same as his own. But that awful boy was real, no less real than the sweet golden child of Guryev. I remember him better, certainly. He buried half of the memories I had of the good Yuri, and poisoned the rest.

“How does even God dare to judge that boy? Well? How does He do it? I want you to answer me. I’m not leaving until you do.”

Father Arseny swallowed, and licked his lips, and looked at the door more than once.

“Come on. I’m not going to hurt you. But you are a priest of God. If you can’t answer this question, who can? Speak up.”

“These are deep questions,” he said, “and deeper than I am used to answering. You ask them suddenly. But if I must answer, I will say that we have very little insight into the mind of the living God. He does not explain Himself to anyone. But the epistle tells us it is the will of God that all should be saved, and come to the knowledge of the truth. I never met your brother. I will pray to God for both of you, and trust that He is merciful. There is nothing more I can do.”

“That isn’t very much.”

“I know it. I don’t know why any part of your story happened, Nadezhda Mikhailovna. But I don’t know why things happen in my life, either. We are all in the hands of God. We can have faith, or not.”

“Why should I have faith, when it has led me so far?”

“I don’t know you. I can’t say whether you have kept faith or not. But at the very least, you are alive. The path of repentance is open to you.”

“Repentance for what? All of this was a trap, I tell you. We were caught up in a disaster someone else made, and made new troubles for others, and it’s all part of a stupid and cruel story God is telling for His own amusement, if He is even there. Can you show me any different?”

“If that is what you want to believe, I cannot stop you. If it makes you happy to believe that, I am sure you will. But I don’t think it does.”

“What does that matter, if it’s the truth? I think we’re done here, Father Arseny. Thank you for your time, and have a blessed Fast.”

She got halfway to the door before he understood what she was doing. Then he got up to follow her, bleating excuses and offers of help. She turned around and motioned for him to stay, and at once he gave it up, recoiling from the gesture like he’d been scalded. Timid little mouse of a man. She’d given God a chance to answer her out of the whirlwind; Father Arseny might have been a good priest, very good at spooning out platitudes for his flock, but he made a sad substitute for a talking storm.

She found Fatima in the parking lot, leaning through the open door of the car do to help Ruslan do his leg stretches in the back seat. “There we go! Just two more, okay? You’re doing great, keep at it. That’s right! I gotta tell you, I’m just so proud of you right now. We done here, Nadia?”

“I think so. Sorry for keeping you so long.”

“You better be. Made us late for all the other important shit we got to do, you know?”

“What else do we—“

“It was a joke. Damn, child.” She stretched and rubbed her lower back. “Oof. This is still your show. Where to?”

Nadia got into the passenger seat. “I really don’t care.”

“You okay?” She grunted the words out as she helped Ruslan back into position and buckled him in.

“Fine.”

Fatima took the driver’s seat again. “You want to go get lunch? We’ve still got plenty of cash from the second ATM.”

“Whatever.” Fatima could take them all the way back to Afghanistan now, for all she cared. She’d been threatening to for the last thirty-six hours.

“… you want to talk about it?”

“No.” She stared at the catch of the glove compartment, framed between her raised knees as she slumped in the seat.

“Hey, there’s some dude poking his head out of the church. Red beard, black robe. Looking this way. He going to be a problem?”

Nadia didn’t even turn to look. “Ignore him. He’s nobody.”

“If you say so.” The key turned in the ignition, and the motor roared to life.