Island Has Ghosts

Chapter 11

Why is she so cold? Dark? Stuffy? Rina moved and almost screamed in horror, realizing that she couldn't move an arm or a leg. Something was pressing on her chest, her nose tickled from the dust that had accumulated in it. Rina sneezed loudly, and that reflex triggered the life in her. She jerked violently, and earth sprinkled from her exposed thigh. Not sand, but exactly earth - loose, wet, greasy. Where is it?! Rina floundered, tangled in the cloth covering her head, twisted, wriggling her body like a snake, kicked her legs, kicked her arms, fighting the stuffy cloth. When at last she was able to sit up, she pulled the thick cloth off her head and breathed in the clean air with pleasure. Then she wiped her itchy eyes and looked around.

There was an endless field. Behind and to the sides it was green with lush grass, and ahead it was black with bare earth and bristling with gray crosses. There could be no doubt: she was in a cemetery, sitting in a shallow, hastily dug hole, and behind her back was a cross with a gnarled inscription 'Rina'.

What kind of idiotic joke is this? She jumped to her feet, shook herself off, and eyed the pit warily. Who had decided to bury her alive and why? How did it happen? How had she ended up here? And where was everyone else? Her first impulse was to call for help, but Rina wisely kept silent: the cemetery silence did not inspire confidence. Just in time or not, Elvira's story came to mind. There was no doubt that this was the cemetery! Rina involuntarily backed away, looking in horror at her own grave and at the crosses on other people's graves. Her imagination immediately drew a picture of crosses loosening and falling like rotten teeth, and bony dead men groaning and groaning.

And though she did not scream, she whimpered with fear. She had been as scared as she was now only once - the day she, six-year-old Vita Naumova, had been brought to the orphanage.

Sixteen years had passed, and she still remembered everything down to the smallest detail: the huge hall with chairs arranged against the walls, the crack snaking along the plaster of the yellowed ceiling and the linoleum wiped down to white splotches. She was led into the hall by a social worker, whose face Vita didn't remember, and handed over to the principal. Ironically, the principal's nose was so huge that her already small features were lost against it. Someone successfully joked that the nose was the first to enter the room, and then, half an hour later, its mistress appeared. It was funny - later, but not that day. Then the principal left the new girl in the hall and went somewhere else. Vita stood there, staring at one of the spots, shaped like a turtle, and was horrified, unable to move. Everything in her life had changed overnight! She had not yet fully realized what had happened, but she knew that there was no going back.

"Why are you shivering, sa?" someone's gentle and kind voice pulled her out of the fog. Vita raised her head fearfully and met the gaze of dark eyes surrounded by rays of wrinkles.

"I'm Vita, not sa," she corrected the older woman in the blue robe. She stood leaning on the mop handle and smiled at her almost as affectionately as her mother.

"Sa is a bird," the woman explained and held out rough-skinned palm to the girl, "and I'm Nuliya"

"Nutria?" Vita asked in surprise. Is it possible to call such a pleasant woman with a gentle smile and kind eyes as a rodent?

"Nuliya!" woman laughed.

Later Vita learned that Nuliya was Korean, taken to the USSR together with other children as refugees. She was brought up in the same orphanage. When she grew up, she got a job in a textile factory, got married, had two children and did not return to her Korea. Having worked at the factory until her retirement, Nuliya returned to her native orphanage and got a job as a cleaner. Her grandchildren had grown up, and she was not used to sitting idle. Nuliya felt much better among the noise of the children and familiar orders than in the silence of her apartment.