Nadia Levchenko came back to the village under a sky that seemed to have thinned like paper. The highway had spat her out at the cracked stone marker and a guttering row of sycamores, and she drove the last mile slowly as if memory required a slower speed to arrive. She had not intended to stay more than the fragile hour the wake demanded — a duty measured in coffee and condolences — but the funeral had a weight that tethered her in the way only certain kinds of absence do: a gravity of objects, the way someone’s shirts still held heat, the stale sweetness of a kettle left on a hob. Her mother had been gone three days; the house smelled like old lace and lemon polish. Nadia knew every corner of that small living room by muscle and by muscle-memory, which felt, absurdly, like a different thing than remembering.
The bell tower sat at the center of the village like an unblinking eye. For as long as she could remember its belfry had been the voice that announced market mornings, funerals, the occasional emergency. People had spoken of it as a thing that kept boundaries — children dared one another to creep close at twilight and see what happened; old men on benches called its sound merely the sound of home. Now it stood quiet. The grass around its base grew a little taller than elsewhere, as if it had been left to its own attention.
At the wake, faces arranged under train of condolences looked strangely smoothed. Men she had played with on the lane had the same manners but there was a gap in the way they referred to days and names; a pronoun where a story should have been. ‘She used to—’ one neighbor began, then caught himself and laughed, voice small. Nadia felt that laugh as a slight knife. Tim, who met her at the door with the habitual practical embrace of a childhood friend, was the one who said finally what everyone else pretended not to notice.
"The bell isn't right, Nadya," he said, careful with the softened vowel he used when he spoke her name in private. "It stopped the night before your mother's funeral. I thought—well, it didn't feel like my bell. People forget things. Small things at first. Names. Where they left their keys. But it's getting worse."
She wanted to file the sentence away under grief: a thing the bereaved make of coincidence. Instead she watched Mr. Harlan from down the street pass by the house and later, when the kettle boiled again and someone mentioned that he had been to see a cousin in the next village 'yesterday'—the word that should have been simple—he blinked hard, and he said, "Who did I see?" as if the acting of the memory was another man’s work. Nadia's throat tightened. She picked up a small ceramic cup and felt the weight of a life she had not yet untied.