Rubizhne
by Val Votrin
part 1
Shortly before the assault, another batch of conscripts came in. Among them was Maksim Serotetto, a quiet lad from somewhere far to the north.
They arrived hunched on the floor of a supply truck, wedged between crates of tinned meat and boxes of surplus boots. No one spoke during the ride, except for the driver who swore alternately at the gearbox and the frost as though each were to blame for the other.
When the truck stopped at last, a sergeant called out numbers instead of names. One by one they climbed down, blinking into the flat white glare. The cold went straight up their sleeves.
Rubizhne was close: two kilometres, if the old road sign was to be believed. The sign itself still stood by the track, its Ukrainian name pierced through with bullet holes. They could taste it on the air: cordite, scorched plastic and something worse, something harder to name.
There was no immediate need for the men. The forms had not caught up. Perhaps someone had signed them, perhaps not; it made no difference. They were told to wait.
The others curled up where they could: on mattresses stuffed with shredded uniforms, on folded coats, on nothing at all. They smoked, scratched, whispered. One man wept openly. Nobody said a word about it.
Maksim stayed by the doorway, parka drawn to his chin. He did not speak, he listened.
The shelling had become a kind of weather, always there, easy to stop noticing. Maksim no longer heard the blasts themselves. What reached him was what lay underneath: a dry murmur like snow shifting far under ice.
At first he thought it was the wind. Or rats. But it had a pattern. It moved carefully, curling round the walls, brushing past the stove, then sliding down through the floorboards as if to whisper to something waiting below.
None of the others stirred. One man snored with short, wet bursts. Another muttered nonsense in his sleep.
Maksim sat very still.
The murmur thickened and turned into distinct voices:
‘Wait,’ said one. ‘They’ll bring more.’
‘He’s too young,’ came another, ‘or too old. Who cares?’
‘He’s from Yamal,’ said a third, softer than the others. ‘That’s a long way to die.’
Maksim had heard voices like these before. There are places in the tundra where the wind hangs still and the snow refuses to melt. The air is so thin, so clear that you can almost see the ones who speak. So he sat very still and kept listening.
Later they dragged in a man from the line. He was half-dressed, his trousers stiff with ice, one boot gone. His head lolled to one side but his legs twitched as though still walking. A medic glanced at him, shrugged and walked away.
The man began to speak. At first it sounded like choking. Then came the words sticky with blood. ‘They lied to us,’ he said. ‘Said the trench was ours. Said go, go take it.’
He coughed and everyone thought he would never stop. But he stopped and said, ‘No map. No cover. Whole platoon gone.’
Another cough, deeper now. Blood slipped from the corner of his mouth. He started speaking again. ‘I saw that he was smiling. The commander. Smiling like he knew. Said Rubizhne was ours already. Said it was secure.’
No one replied. Someone turned over under a grey blanket. The stove clunked faintly as the heat shifted in its belly.
Maksim did not move. His face was as still as a wooden mask, only his eyes were alive.
The man’s voice fell to a whisper. ‘There was a boy,’ he said. ‘I saw him. Not ours. Not theirs. No gun. No helmet. Walked straight into the shelling. Looked right at me. Like he knew me. He kept walking.’
His breath snagged on something. When he spoke again, it was almost a sigh.
‘He never looked back.’
The words hung there for a moment, then slipped away with the last of his breath. His head rolled sideways and the twitching in his legs stilled.
* * *
Maksim closed his eyes, and the barracks immediately fell away. There is a ridge. A low rise carved into the snow, dogs pulling at their lines, eyes fixed on a horizon that holds too still. Maksim is eight years old again. His grandfather is walking ahead, staff in hand. The wind scrapes, dry and thin, drawing long ribs into the crusted snow as though something buried beneath it were breathing.
His grandfather stops and presses the end of his staff into the drift, drawing one more line. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘do you see? This is a rubezh.’
‘A line?’ Maksim asks.
His grandfather shakes his head fiercely. ‘Not a line. A boundary between who you are and what waits if you forget.’
Maksim stares across it. He sees nothing. There is only snow, the same snow there. ‘What’s over there, Grandpa?’
The old man’s voice drops. ‘Nothing. Or things that talk as if they were something, but they are not. They wait for you to step out of yourself. That is when they take you.’
Maksim feels the dogs shift uneasily. Their ears pricked, their breath sharp. The snow itself seems to lean closer, as though listening.
* * *
And then it was gone: the ridge, the staff, the dogs, his grandfather’s voice.
Maksim opened his eyes. Morning had come. The wounded man was gone, carried out, perhaps, while he slept. No trace remained but the space where he had lain.
The sky was low, a sodden grey, the colour of cardboard left too long in the rain. There was that impossible silence as if the air made a room for one single but very important sound: the dull, halting thuds that rose from beyond the trees.
They queued for tea. The steam was thin, metallic as if drawn from rusted pipes. A sergeant, eyes emptied of sleep, read from his clipboard in a voice that carried no weight. No one spoke of the night before.
Maksim crouched beside a fire barrel. The flames were a rumour more than a sight, yet he rubbed his hands as though heat might be coaxed out. The cold had moved inward, stitched itself to his skin.
An older man leaned against a crumbled wall nearby. Broad-shouldered, ink on his fingers, gaps of lost teeth. His face was set for bad news. ‘Where d’you come from?’ he asked without turning.
‘Yamal.’
‘God,’ said the man. ‘What did you do wrong?’
Maksim shrugged. ‘Nothing. Got conscripted, that’s all.’
The man gave him a long look and shrugged. ‘Fair enough. Got to be mad to be here one way or another.’
They shared silence broken only by the hiss of wind over brick.
Then Maksim said, ‘What line are we holding? Do you know?’
The man gave a laugh or something like one. ‘That’s rich,’ he said. ‘Line? There is no bloody line, mate. Just mud and broken bits, whatever’s left.’
‘But they said Rubizhne is a strategic rubezh.’
‘They say all sorts,’ said the man. ‘Said we took it, didn’t they? Then sent us back in to die for it again. Don’t listen to any of it.’ He rubbed his hands together and added, ‘This place. Not a line at all. It’s a hole, that’s what it is.’
Maksim did not reply but the word clung to him: rubezh.
He had known such borders before. Out on the tundra where the herds crossed the earth like breath over glass led by winds older than memory. The snow was different there; it was crisper, honest. His grandfather would stop the sled and say, ‘This is where the land forgets your name.’
That had been a border. A living one. And this was something else.
Later that morning, Maksim was told to fetch snow for the tea barrel. He climbed the slope behind the latrine, boots cracking frost with every step. The trench lines twisted nearby like veins exposed to the cold: empty and silent.
At the top, he paused by a crater half-filled with frozen slush. The snow was stained with a dull pink, the colour of old rust. For a moment he thought it was clay. Then he saw the corner of a field-dressing trapped in the ice, stiff as dead skin. He looked away, suddenly sickened.
The wind shifted. It came low, not across the snow but under it, curling round his ankles, humming up through the soles of his boots. This was not a Yamal wind. This one had no direction, moving in slow, murmuring loops, feeling things carefully, all things living and dead.
Maksim stopped. The wood at the edge seemed farther away than before. The trench behind him had vanished behind a drift. The sky had sunk lower and now was the colour of tin.
He listened. There was a weight in the air. Not presence exactly but the pressure of it like thunder waiting or blood once spilled. Nothing moved. Then, at his feet, the snow opened a little. Beneath lay a row of stones, half-swallowed, too straight to be chance, too forgotten to be new. A line.
He stepped back. The feeling passed.
He returned with the sack of snow. As he walked back to the barracks, one of the unburied, frozen bodies in the trenches turned its head towards him.
That night, he did not sleep again.
The others slumped where they landed, boots still on, eyes to the wall. One of them murmured in his sleep. Someone else gave a low groan, then rolled over and went quiet again. The stove gave a dry tick, its metal cooling too fast.
Maksim stayed upright. He was not listening to those around him. What he heard lay beneath the clatter and the snoring, beneath the boards and the frost and the packed snow.
The voices came slowly like smoke through gaps in a log cabin:
‘We want to go home, brother.’
‘What are we doing here? What is this for?’
‘They said it was a line, a frontier... I only saw mud.’
The words were barely air, they were not spoken with breath or teeth. Maksim sat upright; he was alert but did not respond. He knew better. When the dead spoke, one had to listen, because they were confessing.
Another voice, closer, more fragile: ‘My girl turned five the day I left. She had a cough. I did not want to come. They told me it would be over in two weeks.’ A pause. ‘Can’t feel my hands.’
Maksim remembered something his grandfather had once said, years ago by the reindeer ridge: ‘The rubezh is behind you, not ahead. You’ve crossed it when you stop feeling the cold.’
It had made little sense at the time. Now it made even less.
* * *
And without effort, without transition, the barracks fell away. That ridge again; a still day, the kind when the wind holds its breath. Maksim and his grandfather have travelled far from the encampment, past the grazing lines where the dogs refused to go any farther and no one built fires.
‘Stay by me,’ his grandfather says. ‘Don’t speak loud. This land listens.’
The khalmer stands alone on its stilts. Not as a grave as southerners understand it but as a skyward house. It is a long wooden box divided in two: the back half holds the body sitting upright; the front half is packed with the dead man’s belongings: a fur coat, a kettle, a fishing net.
A horéy pole — a herder’s staff — rises from one end. It is tall and weathered, which marks it as a man’s. Maksim knows that shape from the migrations: a reindeer herder’s staff now pointing to another realm.
The box has warped in the sun and cold. There are cracks along the planks. Through one, he glimpses the white gleam of bone.
Ropes clink faintly in the air, and small iron bells ring from the corners of the grave. Maksim reaches toward them, but his grandfather stops him. ‘Not yet,’ he says. ‘Five strikes, no more. Only when you call him to the table.’
‘What table?’ Maksim whispers.
His grandfather does not answer right away. He is pouring tea into the snow, a ritual libation. Nearby, the sled has been unhitched, and the reindeer are standing very still. One of them shivers, not from cold but from something deeper.
‘It’s here,’ his grandfather says at last. ‘You can’t see it, but he can. He’s not gone. Just quiet.’
Maksim feels the weight of that silence, how it presses into his ears. As if the snow itself has ears of its own. And he feels something else. A nearness. He who is always close. The bells tremble faintly, though no one has touched them.
* * *
Back in the grey light of morning, Maksim rubbed his hands near the fire barrel. But the khalmer stayed with him. And though no bells rang, he could still hear them somewhere in the marrow of his ears.
He had not planned to go. There had been no talk of war in his settlement, only of diesel, dogs and whether the snow would come early. Maksim had never seen a NATO soldier, or thought about Ukraine. He barely knew who the president was. The name existed in the background like the ticking of a steady, unquestioned clock in another room.
Putin’s face hung in the local shop beside a torn poster of a mammoth skeleton and a calendar from 2012. Once, a cousin came back drunk from Salekhard and called Putin the Father of the North. No one laughed.
Maksim had not hated him. He had not admired him. He thought about him the way he thought about frozen ground. It had been always there, heavy, not likely to thaw. A short man, any Nenets herder would have stood taller. But swollen with something dense and foul like a tundra mosquito engorged with blood. One could feel it even from a distance.
But then, in the last months, the cold had changed. It was not the ordinary cold of the tundra anymore. It was the deeper cold, the wrong cold, the kind that pulls at your breath and makes dogs refuse to bark.
Young men from his settlement began to see dreams. There were no people, or huts, or sled tracks in those dreams. Overhead, there was no sky, just a pale silence that did not belong to any season they knew. At the centre of it, something waited.
Young men from his settlement knew its name: it was Nga, the old death-spirit of the tundra.
Copyright © 2025 by Val Votrin
