Crimson Tide

The boats came back on the third morning, which was two days after anyone had expected them. The whole island had been watching the headland since the first missed check-in, because on Vransk you watched the sea the way you watched a difficult neighbour — constantly, without seeming to, cataloguing every departure from normal behaviour. Six boats. Eleven men. They came in on the morning tide without radio contact, moving at the reduced pace of exhausted engines, and the harbour was crowded with waiting families by the time they reached the dock.

Marta was there because her grandfather had been on the Stribog, his boat for forty years, the one he refused to sell or modernize because some habits calcified into identity. She watched him come down the gangplank and thought, for a moment, that he was ill — he moved with the exaggerated care of someone navigating extreme pain or extreme disorientation, each step placed very deliberately, his attention focused entirely on the act of walking. Then he looked up and saw her, and the expression on his face was not the expression of a man who had been ill. It was the expression of a man who had seen something.

He would not speak at the dock. He would not speak in the car. He spoke, finally, in the kitchen of the house where she had grown up, after she had made tea that he did not drink, sitting at the table with his hands flat on thesurface and his eyes on the window, even though the curtains were drawn.

Don't let them near the water, he said. Whatever they tell you about where they went, don't ask for details. And don't let anyone go to the place where we were. She asked him where they had been. He was quiet for a long time. Below, he said at last. She thought he meant beneath the surface, and she was about to clarify when she understood from his face that he meant something different by below — something that was not a direction but a state. She did not ask again.