THE FIRST SNOW of the season had a smell. It was as if the grass, touched by what would become a permanent frost, was exhaling the last sweet scent of summer on the steppe.
The snow came down wet and heavy, the flakes falling out of a gray sky banded yellow near the mountain peaks.
They had been moving all night in silence. Damira wondered what the others understood about what had happened. She had always felt a separation between them. She had always felt she knew what she needed to teach them, but did not know their minds—the limits of their understanding. They continued to surprise her, both with what they had in common with her, and what they did not.
But lately, that gap had been narrowing. Lately, she found she could better guess their wordless thoughts—thoughts that were more like shapes than sentences. She felt the state of her tribe, as they plodded through the darkness, like a vibration in her blood. Exhaustion. Fear. Sadness. Confusion.
Killing was something they were capable of, but it ran against the grain of them. They were peaceful animals. They did not know why they had been moved to kill, and kill repeatedly, and then moved to stop killing. They followed her as they had always done, drawn by the matriarchal bond. They went where she moved them, and they would do so until she stopped breathing. And she had moved them to kill. They did not understand it, and it hurt them and made them afraid. But she hoped it had been for the last time because she did not think she could do it again, either.
As they moved through the night, she found herself drifting in and out of the present.
She found herself once again in the kitchen of her home in Tomsk, eating rice and fish with her mother.
They ate silently, seated on stools across the table from one another in the kitchen. The room was stuffy, overheated though it was the dead of winter, claustrophobic and cramped although they were sitting in the middle of the largest forest on earth.
She was home from university, home from Moscow. She had taken the train for days. The cheapest berth on the train, the only one she could afford, in the wagons that stank of unwashed bodies, of stale alcohol and cheap food. Of cigarettes and the chemical and shit smell of the toilets.
She had suffered through it because she had been so eager to see her mother, after months of separation. But now, she found they had nothing to talk about.
Her mother had come to pick her up at the train station. They took the bus back, lumbering along streets made narrow by piles of dirty snow, the streetlights warping yellow in puddles of meltwater.
Her mother had asked her questions about her education, about the biology courses, about the other students. But she did not seem to listen to the answers.
After a while, Damira had realized what was wrong. It wasn’t that her mother wasn’t listening. It was that she didn’t understand any of it. She had no responses because she had never been to university, never been to Moscow.
She had never been anywhere. She had graduated from ninth grade and then gone to a technical school to become a cook. But when that didn’t work out, she started selling fish at the bazaar. And that was all she had done, for decades. When had she last left Tomsk? Damira didn’t know.
She looked at her mother’s red, chapped hands clutching the silverware. It wasn’t she who had changed—she did not change. So it must be Damira.
When Damira had been here last, she had simply been herself. But now, it felt like there were two of her—one sitting here with her mother, eating in silence. And another watching them eat. As if she had stepped out of her own life.
She felt like she was seeing her mother for the first time, from that strange outside position. And her mother was just a small, dark-haired woman who sold fish at the bazaar, her hands swollen and reddened by work. A woman who rarely laughed. A woman who had never told a joke. A woman who did not read, except for sometimes glancing at a newspaper. A woman who went to bed early to be at the market early. A woman abandoned by a man she never spoke of. A woman who had raised a daughter alone, providing for her without ever, really, knowing what was inside that daughter. Or knowing that she should want to know.
Damira realized what it was in that moment, as her fork scraped the bottom of her bowl. It was an effect of education. She was looking at everything. Analyzing it. Processing it. Her life wasn’t just how things were anymore—it was only one possible way for things to be. And there were other possibilities, now. She had ceased to be trapped here, in this stuffy room. Ceased to be trapped inside her life, yes, but she had also ceased to be able to live her life without analyzing it. Without taking everything apart to look inside.
Education had taken something from her. She could not just be anymore.
That was why it felt like there were two of her—one here, and the other watching. And they were both her, but the one that was here was slowly dying away, being replaced.
Her life in Tomsk had ended. And she realized she would never return here, and that she may never see her mother again.
Her mother looked up at her and said, “You’ve changed. But I’m so glad you’re making friends.”
“Maybe next time you’ll come to Moscow to visit.”
But Damira had known her mother would never come to Moscow. What she really meant was I am never coming home again.
Her mother had given her a strange look, then. It was a look Damira had not understood at the time. Later, she understood that it was the look of a mother realizing she had lost her daughter—a daughter she had never really known.
“I would like that.”
Of course, she never came. And Damira never saw Tomsk again. When they spoke, from then on, it was by phone—brief conversations that went nowhere, relating the surface details to one another of worlds they could not share.
The conversations were painless. Ending them would have been an admission that they shared nothing. Continuing them came at little cost.
Her mother had understood that she needed to push Damira away, hold her at a distance. That she needed to make sure nothing bound Damira to a life that would have smothered her, destroyed her. That was the way she expressed her love for her daughter.
Her mother outlived that human Damira by many years, but had now been dead for decades.
Memories looped into other memories. She found herself again in her bedroom with her uncle Timur. With the snow tapping against the windowpane, the sound of the wind hitting the old wooden house, whistling and moaning through the gaps.
Her mammoth mind had allowed her such perfect access to the past. But now, she knew, something had begun to change. She heard, outside, behind the warm contours of Timur’s voice, the mammoths walking past in the darkness. She knew that if she stood up and went to the window, there would be no streetlamps to see, no houses. There would be only the endless steppe, drowned in snow, and the shapes of her tribe as it moved, pushing away the snow to root out the frozen grass beneath, pausing and then moving on in an eternal pattern.
And she had begun, as well, to lose the thread of Timur’s words. Sometimes they were not words, but only sounds, a stream of sounds like the rumble of a mammoth as it pressed against her and told her that it cared for her.
Soon enough, she knew, the walls would fade away. The window would fall into nothingness. The house would dissipate into darkness. And the bed, and the rug nailed to the wall, and the abstract jungle of the wallpaper’s leaves, and her uncle’s voice.
There would only be the snow, the eternal movement of the group, the warmth of her fellow mammoths’ vibrations in the earth, rising through her bones.
And she would be only with them, and nowhere else. They would know her, and she would know them.
“I’ll build a hut,” the boy was saying, walking beside her. “I can last out the winter here, with you. I can help, if they return. We’ll get through it together.”
Gently—because he was so fragile, so easily broken—she lowered her head and pushed him away.
He did not understand at first. It took many pushes, and a few that were not so gentle. And still, for a long time, he trailed after the group, calling to her. Calling that name which had been hers, but that was ceasing to be.
She did not respond.
When he tried to join the group again, all of them took turns pushing him away.
He screamed, and stomped his feet. He walked behind them at a distance for days.
But eventually, just as Koyon had done a few summers before, the boy went his own way, moving farther and farther from the tribe, until his scent no longer traveled to them on the wind.