* * *
We never talk about it in the daytime. On some level this has always stung. On another, however, it is the result of the simple obviousness of our love: not that it is unexplainable but that it needs no explanation, any more than one would feel the need to explain a branch, a stone, a sea. In the moonlight, I gaze at Alla’s face as she sleeps: it is like a cracked terracotta vessel cradled by the earth until its excavation, lying in wait for the moment it will reach us with its tidings from the shores of a distant past.
* * *
At Chersonesus, we are busying ourselves with the changes that the priest (for that is what we call him, insistently, never by his name) has asked of us. The priest himself is rarely present, yet the influence of his appointment exerts itself on us, like a dark cloth hanging over everything we do.
I find our task dishearteningly simple: it is so easy to reroute and recast the mute events in our care. It is the same with Sevastopol itself: how quickly the cheery resort town air has papered over the insistent fact of occupation, how soon the sunshine bleached its marks into near-illegibility. And then there is the way that Sevastopol consumes its own histories like a snake eating its cast-off skin: the city limits that push and push until what were once the outlying areas of Chersonesus––ancient footpaths, wheatfields whose farmers were forbidden from trading their precious crops away to foreigners––are destroyed, the earth churned and purged of whatever it might have been holding for us.
* * *
When she was five years old, Alla was in a car accident that killed her older brother and sent a jag of metal slicing down her face, neck, and chest. She was in the hospital for so long that she would sometimes inadvertently call the nurses “mother.” Alla recounts the event with an eerie eye for detail: the odd beauty of the shattered glass on the road, the rhythmic hums and clicks of hospital ventilators, the suffocatingly strong smell of the perfume worn by the doctor who peeled off her bandages each day and cleaned her suppurating wounds. Yet as she tells this story her voice is flat. She regards her past as a discarded rag, the facts inert, the causes not worth excavating. There is a certain neatness about her philosophy that I admire, even if I cannot think this way myself. Sometimes in moments of deep affection I am moved to touch her scar, though I know she cannot feel it.