The old bus dropped him off at the fork in the road, near a leaning signpost, then groaned as its engine roared and sped away toward the main highway, splashing muddy March slush onto the roadside snowbank.
Egor was left completely alone.
He adjusted the strap of his worn canvas bag to make it more comfortable, fixed the collar of his dark gray jacket, and took a deep breath of the damp air, thick with the scent of decaying pine needles and river ice. The air of home. For eight years, he remembered that smell with every cell of his skin, counting the days from reveille to lights out behind the high fence of the maximum-security prison near Vorkuta.
Egor was thirty-eight. Before his sentence, he was the best carpenter and tractor driver in the village—cheerful, skilled, broad-shouldered. But he threw it all away in a terrible, drunken mistake. Eight years ago at the logging site, a fight broke out: some drifters from the city were causing trouble at the club, and one of them swung a crowbar at Egor’s younger brother, sixteen-year-old Pashka. Egor swooped in like a hawk, knocked the iron away, struck once, twice… The man fell, his temple hitting the cast iron edge of a track. Death was instant, the charge was intentional serious harm resulting in death, then the trial, the sentence, and the transfer.
While he was serving time, his mother died of a stroke within two years. His brother Pashka, unable to bear the gossip and the sidelong glances, went off to find work somewhere in the Far East and disappeared. The family house on the edge of the village sat with boarded-up windows, a sagging roofline, and a garden overgrown with weeds.
Egor started walking down the village street.
It was midday. Women with shopping bags stood by the store, while by the post office, the old chairman’s UAZ truck was idling, its engine running to warm up.
As soon as Egor’s tall, broad-shouldered silhouette appeared on the road, the conversation by the shop abruptly died. The women huddled closer together, exchanging glances, and demonstratively turned their backs, pretending to study the storefront. Uncle Misha, the former foreman who used to drink tea with Egor from the same canteen out in the woods before prison, quickly darted into his truck and slammed the door.
No one greeted him. No one nodded. The air around him felt icy and prickly, as if a plague was sweeping through the village.
“The convict is back. The killer,” was written in every squint from behind the curtains of the log houses.
In the village, memories last long, and fear lasts even longer. To them, he was no longer cheerful Egorka, the handyman. He had become a branded wolf, someone from whom children must be hidden and barns locked up tight.
Egor reached his parents’ house and struggled to break the rusty padlock off the gate. In the yard, the snow was waist-deep. The porch was rotting, and inside the house it smelled of deadly cold, mouse droppings, and long-standing dampness.
He didn’t complain about his fate. He took off his jacket, found an old shovel in the shed, and dug his way to the woodshed. The birch logs had decayed half-away over eight years, but there were still some dry splinters. By evening, a tentative flame crackled in the old stove, driving out decades of dampness.
Egor sat on the bench in the dark, staring at the embers, pondering what to do next. He had a passport in his pocket, a release certificate, and three thousand rubles of welfare money—that was his entire fortune. He knew the logging company wouldn’t give him a job: the boss, Stepan Ilyich, had yelled at the trial that murderers had no place in the forest.
There was a quiet, hesitant knock at the door.
Egor jolted. He stood up, walked over to the entryway, and slid back the heavy bolt.
Standing on the doorstep was Marya Voronova.
She wore a dark green winter jacket, a woolen scarf from which dark-blonde strands peeked out. In her hands, she held a birch-bark box covered with a clean linen towel. The box was giving off an intoxicating, hot aroma of freshly baked rye bread.
Egor froze, his hands hanging at his sides.
“What are you doing here, Marya? Maybe you’ve got the wrong place?”
Marya was thirty-six. They were neighbors, with their gardens side by side. Her life had been just as hard and bitter as his: five years ago, her husband, the local gamekeeper, drowned in the spring while saving a moose calf from the river’s ice. Marya was left alone with her four-year-old daughter, Polinka. She ran her household, worked as a nurse at the village clinic for pennies, never begged from anyone, and lived with dignity and integrity.
“I didn’t get the wrong place, Egor,” Marya answered quietly. Her voice was steady, without a trace of fear or disgust. “Welcome home. I know your house is empty. Here, I just took this bread out of the oven, some pork fat, and a pot of potatoes. Eat something after your journey.”
Egor didn’t move. The muscles in his weather-beaten, prison-scarred face twitched.
“Did you look out the window, Marya? The whole village shuns me like I’m a leper. If they see you coming here, they’ll drive you out. They’ll say you’re siding with a murderer.”
Marya looked him straight in the eyes—calm and deep, her clear gray eyes unwavering.
“People say what their fears make them see. But I remember, Egor, how you carried my father five miles out of the taiga in the winter of 2012 when a tree crushed his leg. And I also remember how you watched over your own Pashka, kept him out of trouble. No denying you have a grave sin on you, but you paid for it in full. But no one’s banned you from being a decent person. Take the box, or it’ll get cold.”
She shoved the warm birch-bark box into his hands, turned, and quickly made her way down the path through the snowdrifts to her own house.
Egor stood in the icy wind, hugging the warm bread to his chest, and for the first time in eight long, harsh years, a single hot tear rolled down his unshaven, hardened cheek.
The days dragged on, heavy and bleak.
No one wanted to hire Egor for work. The sawmill director wouldn’t even let him inside: “I don’t need criminals here, the men will revolt.” Egor didn’t argue. He took on any odd job: chopping wood for frail, lonely old ladies on the far edge of the village, patching up leaky roofs for a loaf of bread or a dozen eggs. He hardly ever took money—it made him ashamed.
The whole village kept their distance. The men would avert their eyes when passing him; the women would pull their kids indoors if he walked down the street with an axe at his belt.
Only Marya didn’t turn away. Sometimes she’d hand over a jar of milk over the fence, or simply ask, “How’s your health, Egor? Is the stove smoking?” And her nine-year-old daughter Polinka—a wild, shaggy-haired little thing—stopped being afraid of him altogether. She’d run up to the fence, slip a piece of candy into the pocket of his jacket, and laugh: “Uncle Egor, you still owe me a wooden whistle from the linden tree!”
He carved her whistles. For long nights, he would sit by the kerosene lamp, shaping birds, horses, and bears out of soft linden wood, pouring into each wooden figure all the tender love he’d stored up through years of emptiness.
But at the end of November, disaster struck.
Winter came early and violently in those lands. Temperatures plunged to thirty degrees below, and by nightfall, a hurricane-force wind swept in from the tundra, whipping heavy, wet snow through the air. The blizzard howled so fiercely that the ancient spruces at the edge of the village snapped like dry matches. Power lines were torn down within the very first hour, plunging the whole village into utter, howling darkness.
Egor was wide awake, sitting by the burning stove, listening as the old log house groaned and vibrated under the force of the wind.
Suddenly, through the roar of the storm, came a dull, drawn-out crack, followed by a terrifying, desperate child’s scream from the neighbor’s yard.
Egor dashed onto the porch wearing nothing but his shirt.
About fifty meters away, at Marya’s house, chaos had broken out. An old, giant pine tree growing on the border couldn’t withstand the fury of the storm and crashed straight onto the living quarters. The thick trunk smashed the roof above the bedroom, broke the rafters, and buried the extension. From the smashed windows, acrid gray smoke streamed out—the falling tree had knocked loose the brick stove pipe, and fire had started inside from smoldering soot.
“Marya!” Egor shouted, but the wind snatched his voice away, pelting his face with icy, stinging snow.
He rushed back into the hallway, grabbed his heavy carpenter’s axe, pulled on his jacket, and charged into the snowdrifts, sinking up to his waist.
The gate was buried under branches. Egor vaulted the fence, kicked down the crooked door into the entryway. Inside, acrid smoke filled the air.
On the kitchen floor lay Marya, pinned down by a fallen oak beam. She groaned, trying in vain to free her trapped leg, while from the hole in the bedroom ceiling, fiery orange tongues of flame were already licking hungrily at the dry roof boards.
“Egor…” she rasped, gasping for air. “Polinka… she’s there… she crawled under the bed… The wall shifted, door is stuck! Save my daughter!”
Egor rushed to the beam. Planting his broad shoulders, he howled from the inhuman effort—his neck veins bulged like ropes. Muscles toughened by years of hard labor in northern logging camps held firm. He lifted the half-ton beam and flung it aside.
“Crawl outside, Marya! Get out, go outside!”
He himself lunged for the bedroom door. It was wedged tightly by the fallen ceiling.
Egor raised his axe. One strike, then another—splinters flew everywhere. The door gave way. Flames roared in the room, burning coals rained from the ceiling. Beneath the old iron bed, curled in a tight ball, the nine-year-old girl gasped for air, nearly overcome by smoke.
He pulled the child from the fiery inferno, wrapped her in a ripped wool blanket, pressed her to his chest, and raced back out.
In that very moment, with a thunderous crash, a crossbeam from the ceiling collapsed above his head.
Egor instinctively shielded the little girl with his own body, curling over her in a protective arc. A flaming beam slammed onto his back, tearing through his jacket and sending a wave of unbearable pain through him. His teeth clenched tight, red spots danced before his eyes, but he refused to fall. Step by step, he forced himself forward, broke down the burning frame with his shoulder, and tumbled into the snowdrift with the child.
Behind them, with a deafening roar, the roof collapsed, shooting a fountain of sparks into the night sky.
Villagers were already running toward the blaze with buckets and shovels—someone had finally spotted the fire from the village. The chairman was first to arrive, right behind him came the men from the sawmill, and then the women.
They witnessed a heart-wrenching scene: Marya sat in the snow, clutching a living, unharmed Polinka to her chest, while nearby on a bloody, soot-blackened snowbank lay Egor, unconscious. The back of his jacket was burned away, revealing terrible burns, and his hands still gripped the handle of the axe with a deathlike hold.
“Is he alive?!” shouted Uncle Misha the foreman, dropping to his knees beside Egor. “Egor, can you hear me?! He’s breathing! Ladies, bring some blankets! Get him to the clinic, now! We’ll carry him!”
The men—the same ones who just yesterday had crossed the street to avoid him and spat at his back—now gently lifted Egor’s heavy body as if he were made of glass and carried him through the snowstorm.
He woke up three days later in the district hospital.
His back burned with pain, thickly wrapped in bandages. His mouth was parched. Egor managed to turn his head with difficulty.
Sitting by his bedside on a chair was Marya. Her face was pale, dark circles showing all those sleepless nights, and her leg was tightly bandaged. And there was Polinka too, perched on the edge of his mattress, gently stroking his bandaged, burnt hand with her tiny warm palm.
“You’re awake, my dear…” Marya whispered, tears streaming from her eyes. “Alive… Thank God…”
Awkward footsteps echoed in the doorway.
There stood the chairman of the village council and Stepan Ilyich, director of the sawmill. The director carried a big woven basket filled with city apples, sausage, and jars of honey.
The men approached the bed, removed their hats, and shifted nervously, avoiding his gaze. Finally, the sawmill director let out a heavy sigh, raised his eyes, and offered Egor his wide, calloused hand:
“Egor… please forgive us fools. We lost sight of the man because of his past. If it wasn’t for you, neither Marya nor the girl would be here today.”
He set a sealed envelope on the bedside table:
“The guys at the sawmill gathered what they could for your treatment. And once you’re discharged—come join us at the garage. We’ve got a brand-new tractor, wheel model with hydraulics. There’s no one else we trust but you. Everyone remembers your golden hands. And the house… we’ll help build Marya’s house with the whole village this spring. You’ll be in charge of the construction.”
Egor looked at the director’s outstretched hand, then at the apples in the basket, and finally at Marya, who was quietly crying.
Slowly, with his weak and bandaged hand, he firmly gripped the old foreman’s hand.
“Thank you, Stepan Ilyich. I’ll be there. By spring, I’ll definitely be there.”
Winter had already passed its midpoint.
In December, Egor was discharged from the hospital. There was no way to rebuild Marya’s house by spring, so the whole village came together to help fix up Egor’s spacious five-wall home: they brought firewood, installed double window frames, whitewashed the stove, and covered the floors with cozy, handmade rugs.
Marya and Polinka moved in with him. No one in the village dared whisper behind their backs anymore—every woman knew just how hard-won this roof over their heads had been.
In the mornings, the house was filled with the smell of fried potatoes and fresh tea made with currant leaves.
Egor sat at the smooth, freshly planed table in his dark blue flannel shirt. His back still ached a bit, but his hands were already itching to get back to real, heavy work. Polinka climbed onto his lap and placed on the table a brand-new linden bird he had just carved, its wings spread wide:
“Uncle Egor, will it learn to fly by spring?”
Egor looked at Marya, who was bustling around the stove, lifting out a cast-iron pot with the fire tongs. He caught her calm, bright, endlessly familiar gaze—and his face broke into a wide, easy smile, as if shaking off a centuries-old weight from his soul:
“It will, Polyushka. Of course it will. Everything takes flight in the spring, when the warmth returns.”
