The bus eased into the town as if reluctant to be anywhere but in transit. Arina Volkov sat by the window and watched avenues she had memorized as a child fold back into themselves — the low church with its flaking paint, the square with the empty fountain, the bell tower that had once been the town’s compass. The air tasted of late autumn: a hard metallic cool that smelled faintly of tar and last year’s leaves. Even before the bus hissed to a halt, the ordinary smallness of the place settled over her like a coat she had forgotten she owned.
She had not planned to stay long. The envelope from her father had been folded in a way that made its edges brittle; the handwriting was his in the way her mother’s had once been: decisive, without flourishes. Come, it read on the second line: Tower. Now. No more than three words, jagged and exact. There was a second line of ink below, almost washed out: I don’t know how to say it. She had let the bus take her anyway, because some messages are anchors and you do not argue with anchors.
The town had changed and remained the same. New tile on one roof, a glossy café sign where a hardware shop used to be, a stray dog with a limp comfortable at the bakery’s door. Faces moved with the slow, particular pace of people who trace the same routes for decades, and yet she felt like someone moving through a photograph slightly out of focus. Memory clung to everything here: the crooked bench by the post office where Anton and she had traded booties and nicknames, the willow on the river whose branches had once been strong enough to hide two children from inspection.
She thought about the bell tower more than she expected. It had been a presence in the town’s photos, in holiday cards, in whispered warnings. When she was a child her father took her once up the narrow stairs to the rope and let her touch the worn wood of the bell’s yoke. He said then that the bell did a job that nobody else could — that it was a keeper of endings. “You must be precise with endings,” he told her like a man appointing a duty. “Say the name cleanly, or it will linger.” It had sounded like common sense or superstition then. Now the memory came back like a bruise.
At the stop she swung a small bag over her shoulder and found the street a little emptier than she remembered. Shops that were always open hung paper signs with twilight hours; children had grown into holders of patience and broomed paths. She walked under the lean of the bell tower, which was not yet visible up close; its silhouette hung distant behind the roofs, a dark tooth against the sky. The town moved around it, and she felt as if she had stepped into the margin of an old book whose text had been altered.