Rubizhne
by Val Votrin
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
Maksim had dreamed that, too, though he didn’t remember falling asleep. But Nga was there, always there, an evil herder wanting more reindeer on his dark pastures.
Nga was hard to explain to those who had not lived in the tundra. He was neither a god nor a ghost. He was a weight, a silence. He waited under the khalmer, where the dead sat upright in their boxes with bells rusting through a thousand winters.
His grandfather once whispered, careful that the wind did not carry it: ‘Nga doesn’t chase. He doesn’t call. He waits. And when the herd moves, he opens his hand.’
And now the herd was moving. Boys from Maksim’s settlement did not speak of their dreams aloud but, when dawn came, each knew what the other had seen.
That was how Nga worked: through inevitability. They heard that their sacred land was in danger, that the enemy was at the gate. that each man must rise and defend the rubezhi. One boy went, then another. And, with each who left, the silence for those who stayed grew heavier. To stay behind was already to mark yourself, to be less than human.
So, Maksim went, too. Not because he hated or admired anything. He went the way reindeer go when the lead doe turns: without thought, carried by the weight of all the others.
And here, far from home, Nga had only changed his mask. He wore uniforms; spoke with voices from television; issued numbers, made lists. But Maksim knew the pasture when he saw it. The line had been laid out, and the herd was driven over it. Maksim had not crossed the line yet, but he had followed this far.
When the train pulled away from Labytnangi, he did not cry. That night, back home, the dogs had howled in one note, rising like wind from the wrong direction.
The order came from a corporal. He read from a slip of paper while chewing sunflower seeds and spitting the husks into his palm. They had to advance to Position Seven immediately, to reinforce it.
No one asked what Position Seven was. They gathered what gear they had and moved off down the track past the birch stumps.
Maksim understood he had to go with them. They moved in single file, rifles slung low, boots cracking the crust of frost. Ahead lay a line of trees stripped bare by shrapnel. Behind them, there was nothing, just the world they’d left.
About fifty steps in, Maksim began to hear something. Something like a weight behind the wind, or a song half-remembered from sleep. He slowed. The others passed him by.
Then came a word, thin as breath against his cheek: ‘Left, boy.’
Maksim blinked. The path turned slightly downhill. The others veered right, towards a trench where the snow had melted to black crust. But the whisper came again: ‘No. Left. Not with them.’
He hesitated, heart drumming. Then he obeyed and stepped aside, enough to slide behind the carcass of an armoured truck, its turret blown open like a peeled fruit. He crouched there.
Moments later, the world folded inwards. A low, shuddering roar split the air. Then came the second shell, then the third. Snow leapt upwards like smoke. Men screamed. The sound of bodies hitting frozen earth was louder than anything else.
Maksim pressed his face into his elbow and waited for the ground to stop shaking.
That shaking took ages. When it stopped, he lifted his head slowly. The trench to which the others had gone was gone, too. There was nothing left but scattered gear and steam rising from torn coats.
He waited a long time before standing. When he did, he just said, not looking around, ‘Thank you.’
The dugout stank of wet wool and unwashed men. Smoke curled from a rusted pipe and coiled against the ceiling. Someone had nailed a crucifix to a beam. It hung sideways, black with soot.
Maksim sat between a boy with a bandaged foot and a man whose helmet bore a cracked ‘Z’. Outside, the guns paused. Inside, boots steamed and silence gathered like mildew.
‘You’re new,’ said the man with the helmet. His accent was southern, maybe Rostov, maybe further. ‘Or just slow at dying?’
A few grinned. The boy with the bad foot coughed and swore under his breath.
Maksim said nothing. He kept his shoulders low, his eyes on the stove.
‘Don’t worry,’ the man said. ‘They’ll send you forward soon enough. They always do. New meat gets the edge of the blade.’
A kettle hissed. A tin mug changed hands.
‘He looks like a reindeer herder,’ someone choked.
‘He smells like one.’
‘You seen real snow, tundra boy? Not this puke.’
The laughter was short and died quickly.
Then a voice from the dark corner: ‘My brother was on the first train out. January. They told them they’d be guarding fuel depots. He came back a torso.’
‘Fuck them cunts,’ someone said. ‘Fuck them all up there.’
‘Careful,’ said a younger man. ‘You say that back home, you vanish.’
‘We’re not home,’ the man shrugged. ‘Ghosts, we are. What can they do? Hang us twice?’
Maksim took the flask when it was offered. The liquid was sharp, chemical. It could have been vodka, or fuel, or something between.
‘So, why’d you come?’ asked the man with the cracked helmet.
Maskim thought for a moment. ‘Didn’t plan to. They called. I went.’
That earned a few nods.
Maksim drank again. The stuff burned all the way down, then settled.
No one spoke after that.
Sleep came as he had fallen through snow, and he heard bells. Struck one after another, deliberate and slow. A dry, high-pitched, wrong sound.
Maksim was in the open again. Before him stood the khalmer, a cemetery.
But this time, it was not as he remembered. The box was enormous, taller than any man, its legs too long, its shadows cast at angles that did not match the sky. Something inside it shifted, and the bells, strung from its corners, began to move. They swayed once, then stopped, as if waiting.
He looked down. The staff was already in his hand. He knew at once what was asked of him. The sixth strike.
His hand rose. He did not think or hesitate. Once. Twice. The air thickened. Thrice. Four times.
The snow seemed to fold back from the box, as though the khalmer itself was drawing breath.
A fifth strike.
His heart beat hard like hooves striking ice. He felt the urge rise in him. It was not his own urge. This urge was pressed into him heavily, insistently. Strike again. Let me herd you.
His hand trembled. He could hear it, almost feel it, the sixth note waiting, ready to split the air.
But he did not bring the staff down. ‘I called the man, not you,’ he said loudly. ‘You have no place here.’
Nothing stirred inside the khalmer. The box remained sealed, the bells unmoving. But something beside him had changed.
He felt a presence. Just near him, close. He could not see it, was afraid to look, yet he knew it was watching, curiously, judgingly.
Maksim woke with a start. The dugout was dark. The stove had gone out. Someone was snoring softly. Another coughed in his sleep.
Maksim did not remember what he’d seen, only the bell and the sense that something had heard him.
He was wet with sweat beneath his coat.
Outside, snow fell again.
Another morning, and still the same sky, chalked-over grey, indifferent and low. It might have been dawn or dusk, no matter. The sergeant walked the line, knocking the toe of his boot against men’s soles until they stirred.
Maksim stood with the rest. A shuffle toward the lip of the trench. Someone passed him a magazine. Another tugged a scarf tighter round his neck. The man with the cracked helmet muttered something about how the frost had gone soft, and it would be a wet death today.
They climbed out. The field before them lay pale and sickly, cut in uneven lines by shell craters and broken scrub. The wind had dropped. Or perhaps it had gone into hiding.
Ten steps. Then fifteen. Then the world broke open. Machine-gun fire tore sideways. Men dropped. Maksim fell to one knee and crawled, fingers buried in frozen ruts, the smell of scorched soil thick in his throat.
Maksim rolled into a shallow pit, slick with ice and old blood. A body was already there, eyes half-open, lips torn in surprise. He did not look twice.
And then the air thickened, became heavier as if a ceiling had been lowered a little closer to the ground.
He looked up. There was no shape to speak of. But something was there, above them, behind the snow, across the slate-coloured sky. It was vast, watching, moving slowly like a thundercloud.
Nga.
Long arms like rivers of ash swept the edge of vision. And wherever its gaze fell, the dead stirred. A hand still clutching a bent rifle. A knee swinging free of sinew. Men who had died with curses still caught behind their teeth now following Nga. Being herded.
Maksim pressed his cheek to the frozen ground, trying not to move.
But somewhere in the whiteness, Nga saw him. Their eyes did not meet — Nga had no eyes — but Maksim felt the regard.
There was no sense hiding. He lifted his head. ‘Are you waiting for me?’ he asked the thing above him.
And from somewhere that was not a voice came the answer: ‘You’ll make a fine reindeer.’
These words, unspoken but clear, moved something in him. And, lying there, in a pit, under the bullets, having just heard a judgment pronounced upon him, he came to a decision.
‘No, Death. I will not cross. I will not kill. I will not become that thing of yours, a herded and mute calf, a creature without choice. Let the others follow. I will not.’
Not far off, a voice shouted through the gunfire, ‘Borya, you asshole! Where are you, Borya?’ Another volley. A scream cut short.
Then suddenly, the gunfire faded. Or Maksim stopped listening.
When the darkness settled, he stayed where he was. The pit was shallow, but its walls kept the wind from him, and the snow that drifted over his legs soon crusted into a kind of blanket. Somewhere in the blackness out there, men groaned, cursed and fell silent one by one.
Now and then the guns barked again. Maksim kept still. He felt the snow stiffen his sleeves, the damp creep beneath his coat.
He did not sleep. There were moments when his eyes closed, and he thought of the ridge and the line his grandfather once marked in the snow.
By dawn the pit had lost its shape. He pushed himself upright, joints slow to obey. The others would be back at the trench or gone to whatever came next. No one had come looking for him.
He stepped out into the pale light. The trees thinned. Birch and pine gave way to scrub and ash saplings, spindly things leaning whichever way the wind last pushed them. Maksim walked without haste, rifle slung, one glove tucked beneath his belt. No one called after him.
He passed the last bunker. It was a metal drum with no lid. A pair of boots, empty, half-buried. Then nothing but crusted ground and smoke blown sideways.
The line was close now.
Maksim recognised it, though not from this place nor from this war. He had seen it once before, in another season, traced across a drift of snow by the end of his grandfather’s staff. It had looked so slight then, nothing more than a scratch in the crust, yet the old man had said it marked the boundary between remembering who you are and stepping into the emptiness that awaits when you forget.
The ground before him dipped into a shallow gully, its edges broken by shell-blasts and winter storms. A plank lay skewed across it, half-buried, no sturdier than a bone left too long in the open. Beyond, there was only white, a pale stillness like a question awaiting an answer.
He stood at the edge and looked. On the far side, a figure emerged from the smoke and frost. A lad, no older than himself, his coat stiff with mud, his rifle raised more in reflex than in intent.
Maksim looked at him in surprise. This was the first Ukrainian he had ever seen.
The boy’s mouth opened, as though to call out, but the word never came. He hesitated.
Maksim did not move either. His own weapon hung loose, its weight suddenly unfamiliar in his hands. They watched one another across the gap. This lasted longer than it should have.
Suddenly behind Maksim, the voices began. At first muffled, then sharp, jagged with cold and fury. ‘Shoot him, you!’
Maksim did not turn. He kept his gaze on the soldier across the ditch. He thought of his grandfather’s words, of the rubezh that divided men from what waited beyond. He kept looking when the soldier had already moved out of his sight.
Snow crunched. Boots stumbled nearer. ‘What the hell’s wrong with you? Why didn’t you waste the Uke, you squint-eyed bastard?’
Maksim did not answer. There was no need to answer. He did not even turn.
‘Zero him!’
The shot struck from behind, sudden and hard, just beneath the ribs. The world lurched. His breath caught and would not come. For an instant, he remained upright, his body crooked like the horéy pole his grandfather once raised beside the khalmer, trembling in the wind, pointing nowhere.
Then he sank slowly into the snow. The earth received him without sound. He felt no pain, only that strange quiet that falls when something has ended but nothing else has yet truly begun.
As he lay on the back looking at the pale sky, he thought of the fifth bell and the silence that should follow it. He thought of the line he had not crossed. And he thought, too, of the reindeer that sometimes pause before the ridge, refusing the path that others take and turn instead into the open tundra.
Copyright © 2025 by Val Votrin
