The winter of ’45, the last war year, was mild in these parts, but the Epiphany frosts took their toll, dropping the temperature, as usual, to forty below zero. Tempered over a week, the rime frost fell from the trees, and the forest seemed completely lifeless, the snow crunched and crumbled underfoot, and the hard, brittle air made breathing difficult in the morning. Then the cold let up, and then let up some more, and in open areas the snow crusted earlier than usual.
During the frosts, there was a disappearance in the Guskov bathhouse, which was situated in the lower fields by the banks of the Angara River, close to the water: Mikheyich’s good carpenter’s ax was gone. From time immemorial, whenever something had to be hidden from strangers’ eyes, it was shoved under the unattached floorboard to the side of the stone oven, and old man Guskov, who had been chopping up tobacco the day before, was sure that he had put his ax there. The next day he noticed that the ax was gone. He searched everywhere—it was gone, vanished into thin air. And, while crawling over the bathhouse inch by inch, Mikheyich discovered that the ax was not his only loss: someone, making himself at home, had also grabbed a good half of the home-grown tobacco from the shelf and had taken a liking to the old hunting skis in the anteroom. Then and there old man Guskov realized that the thief had come from afar and that he would never see his ax again, because the village locals would never have taken the skis. Nastyona learned about the loss in the evening, after work. Mikheyich had not gotten over it during the day: where could he possibly find an ax like that now in wartime? You can’t find any ax at all, and this one was a joy—light, sharp, and it fit his hand perfectly.
Nastyona listened to her father-in-law rant and thought tiredly: why get so excited over a scrap of metal when everything else has been topsy-turvy for so long? And only later in bed, when the body aches slightly before sinking into oblivion, Nastyona’s heart jumped: no stranger would ever think of looking under that floorboard. That thought, popping into her mind out of nowhere, almost took her breath away, her sleepiness disappeared, and she lay in the dark for a long time with her eyes open, afraid to betray her terrible deduction, chasing it away and then gathering its fragile, tearing ends closer to herself. Nastyona got no sleep that night, and in the morning before daybreak she decided to take a look at the bathhouse for herself. She did not go past the calf-house, where there was a path through the snow, but went down toward the Angara along the village road and then turned right, from where she could see, above a steep ravine, the bath’s roof jutting over the fence. She stood for a while and then slowly went up the icy steps, climbed over the gate so it wouldn’t squeak, waited outside, afraid to go in right away, and then pulled the door toward her. But the door was stuck and she had to pull with all her might. That meant that there was no one there—of course, there couldn’t be. It was dark in the bathhouse, and the tiny window that opened onto the Angara, westward, was only beginning to show the pale, half-dead light. Nastyona sat on the bench by the window and like an animal sniffed the air, trying to find new, unusual, but once familiar smells, but she couldn’t detect anything but the acrid odor of frozen mold. “Making things up, you fool,” rebuked herself and got up, not quite understanding why she had come here and what she had hoped to find.