Eastbound

by Maylis de Kerangal

Aliocha holds his breath now, he’s no beggar, no victim, he’s just like her, he’s running away, that’s all. The woman looks the boy straight in the eye—a clearing opens, very green, in the dirty dawn—and bites her lip. Follow me.

Would she have even spoken to him if he hadn’t been the man from the forbidden country? Would she have even loved him if there hadn’t been, at the heart of all this, Russia—this country she is now fleeing?

country, he’s an archive of all the Russian wars—“the homeland our mother, the war our stepmother,”

The lake is alternately the inland sea and the sky inversed, the chasm and the sanctuary, the abyss and purity, tabernacle and diamond, it is the blue eye of the Earth, the beauty of the world,