Alternatives

Chapter 3:Burials Part One

As they finally reached the shore, Alina turned around toward the young sailor boy and smiled at him with genuine gratitude. For a moment, Erik thought she looked like a little girl again.

„Thank you, Desmond. I will never forget this. You deserve all the happiness in the world."

The boy fumbled for a moment, blushing. Something about the scene gave Erik a bitter taste in his mouth. A memory floated to the surface, one he refused to think about, and he pushed it back down immediately.

Desmond threw the two bags toward them. „You need to hurry before you get caught. I'd be pissed if you wasted this chance, now that I've paddled your asses all the way here."

She was still laughing as they jumped to the shore, holding their bags and slipping on the wet sand. It shocked Erik to find out that the earth doesn't sway like the ship deck. It was incredibly strange to feel firm soil beneath his feet again; they both stumbled for a bit before finding balance again. Alina turned around to wave at the boy rowing back and Erik lifted his head to look at their surroundings.

The beach was very still and very, very quiet. The surrounding ground was covered in pristine, white snow, and the night sky above them was specked with clouds and stars. Further down there was a village, illuminated by moonlight and dim streetlamps. He could barely make out muffled voices in the distance. For all it was worth, it was a beautiful scene.

Alina seemed to notice that as well, as she silently stood next to Erik. The wind was blowing flyaway strands of hair around her now pale and frostbitten face.

„You know", she said quietly, „it's just occurred to me that I've never in fact been this far from home. We're completely alone here."

„You can go back if you wish." She's not exactly stuck here, unlike me. And I'm not forcing her to stay.

She gave him one of the sideways glares she liked to throw at him occasionally.

„Wasn't planning to."

„Your choice", he shrugged.

„My point was, Erik, that we know absolutely no one here except for each other. And now that we're here alive and free, you can see I do keep my promises. If we are to survive this crusty godforsaken dump of an island we'd be better off trusting each other at least a little and not running off randomly at the first sign of trouble, I think."

„Island?"

„Yes, well, according to what I know, this is Coney Island. Welcome to America."

„Hm." She was right, of course, he thought. She had done everything as she'd promised. Something prevented him from admitting it out loud. He hadn't yet decided if she was just much more manipulative than he had anticipated. Even if she wasn't, agreeing to trust her felt somewhat like… (defeat? compliance to a master? that's ridiculous), and was not about to grant her that kind of power.

Thankfully, she rolled her eyes and let the matter go.

„Let's find someplace warm. There's nothing to do here."

They started walking slowly, carefully towards the lights. The snow creaked beneath their boots, breaking the otherwise deafening silence. Alina looked ahead of her with a frown on her face, her shoulders slouching beneath her heavy bag.

For whatever reason, Erik suddenly changed his mind at that moment. Reaching out, he took the bag from her and put it on his own back; she gave him a confused look but allowed it anyway.

„You did keep your promise. Thank you", he said looking ahead of him.

The confused look spread slowly into a smile as they continued walking in silence.

ooo

Her idea of "someplace warm" seemed to be the small campfire with people huddled around it. They look just as lost as we are, Erik thought. They were refugees, he realized. Outcasts. He assumed they also arrived by unconventional means, judging by the worried faces, the old, dirty clothes, and the amount of visibly sick people.

"Absolutely not." He stopped, still at a safe distance from the light of the fire.

She stopped as well and turned to him. "Why?"

"I hate fire. And people."

"Yes, me too. But are you familiar with the phrase dying of exposure to the elements?" she spread out her arms in frustration.

"No."

"It's a fancy way of saying Mother Nature kicked you in the head, and you died."

"Ah."

"Seems even less appealing."

He thought about it. This was a smart choice of shelter. While they did have some means to survive, and could probably manage one night in a cheap room somewhere less crowded, they were probably least likely to be kicked out by other people who also shouldn't be there. He could maybe survive out in the cold for now, but he wasn't so sure about her. She squinted at him expectantly, probably guessing what he was thinking about.

I suppose she's right. I'll have to endure it. He put the hood of his cloak over his head as if that was going to make a goddamn difference.

"Alright."

She walked towards the crowd with feigned confidence and stepped into the circle of light illuminated by the fire. Everyone gawked at them, and Erik started panicking silently.

Alina bowed her head slightly and gave them a shy smile.

"Can we sit with you?"

They just kept staring. Someone said something in a language Erik couldn't understand, and he braced himself to start running, but her eyes suddenly widened, and she replied similarly.

"Dobro veče. Smijemo sjesti s vama?"

They relaxed visibly. Erik didn't. One of the men gestured for them to sit down and join them.

Alina looked around and picked a place on the ground, next to a very young, very tired-looking woman with a child that looked to be about two years old. Their hair was the same pale blonde color. Erik sat quietly to Alina's left.

The boy stopped his quiet whining to stare at them. Alina grimaced at him, and he opened his mouth in shock for a moment before starting to giggle.

Children make no sense to me sometimes, Erik thought to himself.

The mother started talking to Alina in that same language Erik didn't understand. Alina didn't fully understand it either, as their conversation was speckled with nervous laughter, a lot of gesturing, and head-scratching. But they seemed to understand each other well enough. These people were probably Russian, Erik realized. But Alina wasn't.

What did she tell them?

And why did all these people seem to understand each other? What was this pack mentality that they all had? If this was a huddle of Frenchmen, Erik was quite sure they would not have been so welcoming just because he spoke to them in something resembling French.

In any case, for the moment the danger had passed.

As Alina talked to the young Russian girl, Erik noticed his hands were still shaking, which he'd rather not let them see. The people around them were still throwing sideways glances at him when they thought he wouldn't notice. He needed something to occupy himself with.

He grabbed a small flat piece of wood, slowly took out his pocket knife, and started carving. They were on edge when they saw the knife, but no one said anything. Alina didn't notice, as she was busy talking to the traumatized-looking girl.

Alina smiled politely at the girl and asked her,

"Krasan dječak. Vaš sin?"

Yana didn't understand why the woman would tell her that her son is "red" so she chalked it up to translation errors. She meant 'lovely'. Oh. Yana didn't trust noblewomen, but she found herself talking to that strange woman who addressed her with the formal "you" for some reason. She hadn't had anyone to talk to in ages, she realized; seeing as she was naturally quiet and withdrawn, people usually talked at her and didn't ask her that many questions. This woman seemed interested with her eyes smiling with kindness. So she told her about herself.

ooo

Her whole life, Yana had been a good girl. She was born into a large family in a small village in Russia, a small, meek girl with pale eyes and even paler hair. When she was a little girl, the other villagers called her "rusalka", a water nymph. The small secluded village had kept its traditions and folklore and so the name came without the negative connotations; she thought it was rather fitting. She had always felt a kind of melancholy in her heart that made it easy for her to believe she had the soul of some unfortunate dead woman inside her. She was also, fittingly, very reluctant to leave the comfort of her habitat. She was the smallest, quietest girl, and she spent most of her time helping her mother. Other children played in the fields and took care of the animals, but her mother kept her close, claiming she was a gentle soul, afraid to let her come to any harm. It was painful for her to remember her mother these days.

When Yana grew up, she noticed village boys throwing glances at her. Maybe they were just curious, seeing as she was somewhat strange.

Her mother sat her down one day.

"Yana, you've become beautiful."

She tried to brush it off. These things didn't interest her.

"But they will interest you. And I think it's time I tell you this. You are a beautiful girl, and the boys will start flocking to you. You are kind and patient, and very skilled at cooking. You would make a good wife."

Did her mother want her to get married?

"Not yet. I am telling you this in the future. The boys will tell you nice things, and they will want some things from you. I'm telling you this, so you know: be smart, and patient, as you always have been. Keep your heart locked until you find a boy who deserves it. When you find a boy you can talk to the same way you talk to me, then you can unlock it."

That seemed unreasonable. The sooner she got married, the sooner her parents would have one less mouth to feed.

"Forget about that. You are not hard to feed. Do as I said."

So she did.

One day a new boy, Mikita, came to the village. With green eyes and dark hair, and long, gentle fingers. He was a musician, and the only thing of value he had was an old violin. He played it like it was an extension of his own heart, and something about him made Yana want to tell him all of her secrets. He played it under her window for many nights, quietly, until Yana's mother promptly shooed him off with a broom.

It was too late. Yana had already decided.

They got married properly, and even though her father looked concerned, her mother was smiling happily. Yana silently thanked her for her advice.

The boy kept smiling and playing the violin as they built a small house at the end of the village. He was gentle. He was kind. They both didn't talk much, but Yana didn't think that was a problem, as her childhood friends talked a great deal with their husbands but managed to say very little.

They were very happy for a time; Yana found out she was pregnant and several months later gave birth to a baby boy, healthy, with the same pale hair and sad eyes as hers. She called him Piotr, after her father. They now had more mouths to feed, so Mikita found honest work with the local noble, but still played violin every evening for her.

Yana paused. She didn't want to tell this part of the story, but the woman kept smiling and nodding at her with sympathetic eyes, asking questions about her husband and Russia, and Yana didn't want to give her the wrong idea and have to explain the whole story later in the future.

Piotr was still a baby when Mikita died. The sickness took away his lungs and then his life. The noble he worked for didn't pay for a doctor, but he paid for the funeral.

Yana buried him along with a part of her heart in the small cemetery behind the church, deciding to remember him as the boy with sparkling eyes and a violin, rather than the pale sweating shell he was by the end. As she went home, the house is suddenly silent, too silent, unbearably silent. She felt like she could explode. How was she going to live now? Mikita didn't leave much behind. She couldn't go back to her parents; they had too much on their minds and not enough on their plates. Everywhere she looked, all she could see was his face.

For the first time in her life, Yana decided not to be a good timid girl.

So she sold her house and everything she owned except for one bag of clothes and Mikita's old violin and decided to travel somewhere with Piotr where she would have enough to eat and where young strong men didn't die routinely of diseases they contracted doing nothing particularly dangerous.

The trip was hard. She'd rather not remember it. But she's always been good at hiding, and so she evaded whatever unnecessary hardships she could. She glossed over that part, and Alina didn't insist on any details, thankfully.

The conversation was turning more serious, Erik thought, judging by the looks on their faces. Alina spoke less and less and mostly nodded. Erik still couldn't understand anything, so he turned his attention to the piece of wood in his hands and after some time, it started to resemble a shape.

Yana had no money when she arrived and no papers, but the man on Ellis Island with a kind smile looked at her pretty face and happy boy and decided to let her in. He told her she reminded him of his daughter. So she settled in a Russian immigrant village on Coney Island, rather than going to the city itself. She preferred it that way. These people looked and sounded more familiar, and appreciated her cooking.

They were telling stories by the fire to keep their minds off of winter when the strange pair joined them. The woman was polite, and talked in a language that isn't complete nonsense; so they let them join. Yana decided not to ask them too much about them for now and kept her conclusions to herself.

The woman was dressed simple and smiling shyly, but she didn't fool Yana for one second. The way she kept her spine straight and her feet slightly apart gave away that she was used to having enough to eat and people who listened when she talked. The man behind her was a different story entirely. He wore a white mask and stood stiff as a board, and the men were unnerved when they saw him. Yana feared him because he looked like a criminal. But she could see in his eyes the same fear she saw when she looked at her reflection in the shop windows.

Yana noticed the strange man was slightly shaking the whole time; she felt bad for him. In an attempt to hide it, he took a piece of wood lying around the fire and started carving into it. She noticed his leather-covered hands looked surprisingly gentle, with long fingers that reminded her of Mikita.

They grew silent around the time Erik finished carving.

It's a very simple, but still recognizable figurine of a horse. Not exactly three-dimensional, but Erik wasn't aiming for artistry anyway. Piotr was staring at it with interest.

Erik extended his hand and offered the bear to him. Yana clutched him more tightly, but Piotr, who had always been the complete opposite of his mother when it comes to shyness reached out and grabbed it anyway, laughing with excitement.

Yana smiled and wanted to thank him as well, but the man didn't look at her. Instead, he cast a quick, barely noticeable glance towards the woman he came with. He was waiting to see her reaction but didn't want her to know that.

Alina looked at him as if he had just grown a halo and a pair of wings right before her eyes.

I could get used to that, he thought.

Something clicked in Yana's mind, and she decided to remember it for later.

ooo

As the night went on, the other villagers left the campfire to go to sleep – Erik noticed they did have roofs over their heads; tiny cottages and houses that sometimes held more people than he thought reasonable. The two of them had no place to sleep, so Alina asked the young woman what they could do, and she got up, walked over, and started talking to one of the men quietly. He frowned and looked at them with suspicion, but the woman stared at him quietly and stubbornly, repeating the same few sentences. He shrugged and waved his hand, giving her the international „do whatever you want" gesture, and she walked back over to them. She tried to explain to Alina what he said, but it took her a while. Erik felt exhausted, overwhelmed, and altogether eager to get out of there when Alina thanked the woman and turned to him.

„There is a cottage next to hers that nobody lives in. If we can fix it, they say we can stay there. For tonight, they'll give us some blankets, and we can sleep in her kitchen. That man said he would come by in the morning to check if everything was fine." Yana asked him to come by and check for her own sake more than theirs, but they didn't need to know that.

„Oh." This was a pleasant surprise for Erik. „Good."

„Do you know how to fix a roof and re-build a house?" she raised her eyebrows.

„Yes, of course, I do", he shrugged. It wasn't his first time. „Is that what she was saying to that man? She talked him into giving us a house?"

„From what I've gathered, yes", Alina nodded.

„How do I say thank you in Russian?" he asked. Alina turned to the woman automatically, opening her mouth, but he tapped her shoulder lightly with his finger to stop her. „Wait."

„Yes?" she turned back.

„Tell me how to say it, so I can tell her myself."

She blinked. „Alright. From what I've picked up, the word is spasiba."

He looked directly at her for the first time and repeated the word as closely as he could, and the woman nodded at him silently.

Later, as they lay wrapped in blankets on Yana's kitchen floor, Alina informed Erik about their names and what she managed to understand from Yana's story. They thanked him for the toy, she said.

"I thought you might want to know", she whispered, "What you did was nice. Her husband died back in Russia. She's all alone here with the boy. I felt bad, they've been through a lot", she told him with her eyes slightly glistening. She never really got used to tragedy after all these years; it still shook her to hear people's stories every time. She wondered if it might have been better if she had learned to toughen up.

"How do you get people to tell you such personal stories?"

"Uh... I find the ones who want to talk and ask them questions."

"Is that it?"

"No", Alina frowned, "I suppose that's not it. I don't ask too much, so they don't feel threatened. And I listen a lot. I try to show them I care for what they say. And I tell them things about me, too, so that they feel on equal ground."

Erik decided to remember that, just in case he felt the need to talk to someone for whatever reason. He was surprised she gave him an honest answer to that question - and, in retrospect, some of her behavior was starting to make sense.

"I thought you said you hate people?"

"No, I don't hate people", she admitted. "I wouldn't bother doing what I do otherwise. But people make me nervous. Afraid, sometimes. It makes me feel better to just curse and say I hate everything."

He could understand that, but it still bothered him.

"Why?"

"Why?" She repeated, surprised. "Don't you feel the same way?"

"I do, but-" Did I just admit that out loud? She's good.

"Well, that's why."

"It's not the same-"

"Yes, I know. But it feels similar, though probably much less intense. A lot of people feel that way."

She paused to look at him, suddenly alarmed when she realized what she'd said.

"I mean, I don't know what happened in your life, and I don't mean to diminish it, or say it's the same, by any means. I'm just saying we're all a bit messed up like that. I feel better when I know others are just as scared around me as I am around them."

It made him feel the opposite of better.

She looked even more alarmed as she realized it, her face red with embarrassment, and opened her mouth again. Erik decided to stop her before it had a chance to intensify further.

"It's fine, I understood."

Alina felt half relieved, half ready to throw herself off a cliff.

Erik enjoyed it just a bit. She seems less manipulative for a moment, and more relatable. Likable, even, for God's sake.

Deciding he had let her suffer long enough, he pulled a small wooden bear out of his pocket.

"You can give this one to Piotr as well."

ooo

A few days passed. They let them stay in their makeshift village as promised, in the tiny cottage next to Yana's. Nobody cared that they lived together in it; they just built houses and put people in them that could stand each other. Many people had started living together just because they had arrived together and knew no one else. Erik didn't care either, he was not in a position to argue and he just survived four weeks with Alina in a tight space; she wasn't all that bothered by his presence anymore. It didn't take him all that long to fix the roof and make the house good enough to live in, since he had no other job so far, unlike the other villagers. They moved in as soon as they could and agreed to make a wooden wall in the middle of the room to make a makeshift kitchen and two tiny separated spaces to sleep in because they could both agree that they'd need some privacy so they wouldn't strangle each other. They were both mostly out of the house during the day, sometimes doing chores around the village and sometimes walking together and trying to think of a plan to make money.

Alina asked the other villagers what they could do, and there was plenty to do, it turned out. She helped cook and take care of the children, and seemed to get along fine with the other women – and occasionally, they would both be asked to help with reading and writing letters or legal documents, which they obliged, and it significantly increased their social standing. The villagers were otherwise not too sure what to do about Erik and he wasn't too sure what to tell them. In the end, he settled for chopping wood and doing similar solitary tasks. He was fine with it, and no one was volunteering to join him, but he fixed some of the other houses which made people a little less wary around him. He didn't mind doing physical work as it took his mind off of things and no one seemed to bother him for a change. Alina kept giving him more books and occasionally would come to discuss them in the evenings. Days turned into surprisingly peaceful weeks. The villagers didn't have a lot of money, but they traded food, clothes, and various supplies for the work Erik and Alina did and it was enough to keep them going. So far, they still had all of their savings. Nobody knew about it; they lived modestly and the villagers seemed to respect Alina's help with the children and Erik's competence at constructing various things - so they kept out of their business and they were both, surprisingly, quite sheltered and safe for the time being. Alina still made sure not to leave the house alone after sundown. It seemed like a smart idea. Erik kept working on the cottage, adding isolation from the cold, bolts on the doors, and various other things.