Don't Answer

When a voice outside the clinic calls medic Vera by her dead brother's childhood nickname, she must decide whether to open the door—or heed the taiga warning: never answer. Then the footprints appear.

The village of Kedrovy Log stood on the edge of the taiga as if someone had once unloaded it from a sled and forgotten it. A hundred houses, a logging camp, a blackened pier on the river; beyond the last vegetable gardens began Gnilaya Pad, and farther up, on a knoll, an abandoned weather station jutted up with its peeling tower. A diesel generator supplied power until midnight; only the district policeman Stepan Gurov had a signal, and even that came through every other time.

For Vera Somova, this was her first winter in Kedrovy Log. She had come from the city with a suitcase, a white coat, and a habit of waking at every rustle. The medical station smelled of alcohol, stove smoke, and dried herbs that the old women brought her in little bundles, certain that without them the medic would be lost.

Vera didn’t talk about her past. Only at night, when the wind scraped at the shutters, she heard the hospital corridor, the rubber squeak of soles, and the voice of her younger brother Dima. Two years ago she hadn’t been able to save him, and since then the word “home” had become heavy, like a wet overcoat.

Grandpa Yefim came to have a bandage changed at the beginning of December. His face was dry as birch bark, his beard smelled of makhorka, and he held out his cut palm as if he had come not to be treated but to check out the new city girl.

“Caught it on the ax,” Grandpa Yefim said. “Don’t be cross, Vera Sergeevna. Old age is in a hurry, and the hands can’t keep up.”

Vera washed the wound and applied a bandage. Yefim was silent, looking out the window, where blue-gray smoke drifted between the houses, and beyond the smoke the forest was already turning dark.

“Remember one thing,” he said suddenly. “If someone calls you by name from the forest at night, don’t answer. Even if it’s your own mother calling.”

Vera smiled and pulled the knot tight.

“Is that your local safety rule?”

Grandpa Yefim didn’t smile.

“It’s the taiga’s rule. The one who laughs is the first to answer for it.”

A week later, a blizzard covered Kedrovy Log from evening on. People hurried home, the windows at the logging camp went dark early, and the dogs howled briefly and angrily. The diesel generator behind the club coughed, the light in the medical station flickered, and exactly at midnight everything dropped at once into darkness.

Vera lit the lantern, checked the stove and the bolt. The reception log lay on the table, and beside it tea was cooling in a faceted glass. She was just about to lie down on the narrow couch when someone knocked at the door.

Three short knocks.

Vera froze.

“Who’s there?” she asked.

Behind the door there was a pause, then a thin, achingly familiar voice answered:

“Vera… open up. I’m freezing.”

The lantern jerked in her hand. Only Dima had called her that when he was little and afraid of the dark. Vera stepped toward the door, not feeling the floor beneath her felt boots.

“Who is this?” she repeated, but her voice broke.

“It’s me, Dima. Remember, you used to call me little mosquito? And I called you Owl. Vera the Owl, open up, I’m cold.”

No one in Kedrovy Log knew those nicknames. No one had heard how Dima drew out “Owl,” as if hooting into cupped hands. Vera took off the hook. Only the bolt remained.

Behind the door, someone gave a quiet sob.

“I walked a long way. You’re the medic. You let everyone in.”

She put her hand on the bolt. And then the lantern lit the gap at the bottom of the door. There was no shadow on the porch. No dark patch from feet, no movement. The snow at the threshold lay in an even white ridge and did not melt from the light or from breath.

Vera remembered Grandpa Yefim’s face and his dry voice. She bit her lip and didn’t say a word.

“Vera, come on…” someone whispered behind the door. “I’ll come again tomorrow.”

Until dawn she sat on the floor with her back pressed against the wall, keeping her palm on the bolt as if it might slide back by itself. The voice called her, then whispered children’s counting rhymes, then simply breathed through the crack. At dawn everything broke off.

In the morning the district policeman Stepan Gurov came, tall, broad-shouldered, with a weather-beaten face and tired eyes. He listened to Vera without questions, then went out onto the porch.

Bare feet had left prints in the snow. Small, human. The tracks led from the black strip of forest straight to the door. They did not lead back.

Stepan looked at them for a long time, then raised his eyes to Vera.

“A bear,” he said evenly. “That’s what we’ll write down.”

And he rubbed out the tracks with his felt boot, as if erasing chalk from a blackboard.

That day Vera barely spoke. By evening she locked the door with the hook, the bolt, and even propped a stool against it. The diesel went out at midnight, but there was no knock.

Before bed, Vera opened the log to write down a lumberjack with a cold. On the clean line where there had been nothing that morning, neat letters stood in her handwriting: “Dima. Complaints: cold. Come tomorrow.”