The car, a Renault, gave out and died about a hundred meters from the crest of a hill. The Translator, who was driving, muttered to himself in Russian, engaged the parking brake, and lit a cigarette. He sat smoking, arms akimbo, like a petulant boy.

“I’ll check the hill,” the Journalist, who was the passenger, said.

“We make top, we go for three, four kilometers,” the Translator said, his hand gliding gently, a rough facsimile of the imaginary car. “But we stopped.” His English was not good, but for the price, it was adequate.

Summer in Siberia was like a lead blanket. The Journalist climbed the hill slowly, smoking his own cigarette. They’d gone maybe a hundred kilometers since their last breakdown. How many miles was that? He struggled with the calculations. Maybe sixty miles. An hour of driving on the highway. How long had it taken them? Four, five hours. Time was difficult to discern here, its passage. Afternoons lingered for centuries. Russian seasons were monolithic.

At the hill’s crest was a rest stop, a loose amalgamation of picnic tables and an outhouse swarmed by flies. Garbage was everywhere, denser than grass. He kicked trash from a bench and sat down. Spread below was a series of low ridges that galloped lazily into the horizon. Pockets of fecund growth marked the sinewy transit of a creek. The terrain was not unfamiliar. It reminded him of Wisconsin, of the voluptuous glacial hills draped in corn.

He was nearly sixty. His left knee was scarred like a road map from multiple surgeries, and it ached with the humidity. He’d been stabbed, once, in the left shoulder, in a café in Juarez, Mexico. That scar resembled a coin slot and when his son had been a boy he sometimes ran his finger over the wound in disbelief and wonder.

There was a small village at the foot of the first ridge. It was more like a bruise on the landscape than an establishment, a collection of shambled buildings whose tin roofs sometimes caught stray slivers of muted sun and shone like jewels or silver. Smoke meandered against the pewter sky. Moving out on the dirt road from the village was a procession. He sat and watched. The air was vaguely fermented, its texture mucilaginous. There was no wind, and pestilences of mosquitoes swam like schools of minnows. The insects were plaque-caliber, interminable and huge and fearless.

He’d driven himself from every home he’d ever had, searching for some nameless thing. And now all he knew was wandering. He would probably die in some forlorn, far-flung shithole like this.

He returned to the car. The Translator had opened the hood and was sitting on the grill, smoking.

“What do you think it is?” the Journalist asked.

The Translator shrugged. “Everything. Not a thing.” He was comically built, tall and barrel-bellied. His face seemed to be the whole world’s intersection for comedy and tragedy. The Journalist still couldn’t tell if his smirk was imperceptibly sardonic or just perpetually miserable.

“No people. No phones. But some cigarettes,” the Journalist said, producing a half pack of smokes. The Translator perked up.

“There’s a town down there, too. At the bottom of the hill. Maybe we’ll find a mechanic there.”

The Translator frowned. “This country? No good, no good. There are, how do you say? Pirates. Many pirates in country here.”

“Pirates normally implies high seas and swashbuckling.”

“What?”

“Your English sucks.”

He shrugged. “Your Russian sucks most.”

They trudged up the hill together, laved like two quarter horses. The Translator surveyed the panorama, scrunching his large, porcine nose in concern. He gestured towards the ponderous party and waved his hand in disgust. He rummaged through the small universe of trash, digging through the cans up to his shoulder. They’d saved the Renault this way before.

On the road the party grew closer. They were nine, maybe ten. A stolid horse dragged a cart and kicked up a plume of dust.

The Translator took five mostly spent quarts of oil and dredged their bottoms, combing them to make maybe a quarter of a quart. They went back to the car and added the drecks but the Renault wouldn’t budge. The Translator resorted to pounding and, presumably, cursing. The results were much the same.

“What now?”

The Translator shrugged, his face contorted in befuddlement and stippled in sweat. “Wait.“

He’d told the Journalist, on the first day of their journey, matter of factly, that three of his sons were dead. One had been killed by a notorious serial killer in Moscow. One had died during a training mishap on a Navy submarine in the Arctic. The third had joined a Moscow street gang pushing drugs and guns, and had been shot somewhere outside of a bar. “That’s awful,” the Journalist had said. The Translator shrugged, “We are here, we die. Life, it is sad, no?”

They sat at a picnic table and smoked. The Journalist produced a flask of vodka that they shared. They heard first the rattle and roil of the horse cart, the plod of the horse, and then laughter that sliced ominously through the dour afternoon. The Translator shook his head ruefully.

“As boy, I sing in this country. Sing as show. My voice,” he pounded his chest, “famous in this country. At taverns I sing, me and two other boys. I win, always. But this country,” he shakes his head as if lamenting a disappointing relative. “Crooks. All crooks. The sons and sons of thieves and crooks.”

“Maybe they’re nice.”

“You like my young son. He think he tough. How you say? Tough guy?”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“He think he tough guy. Love mafia, the movies. He starts to friend mafia boys, think he is tough. Say, ‘dad, they nice.’ My son, he nice boy. Too nice, not tough. Come home, beaten and blood. I say, ‘you nice boy, stop. Please, stop.’ He say, ‘no, no.’ So they shoot him.”

The clop of the horse is like a metronome, marking time. The Journalist finished the vodka and the Translator rummaged through the trash until he had five pints of vodka and they dredged them like they’d dredged the oil. The Journalist recognized many American products. He remembered remote villages in the Andes, Incan outposts where the last remnants of the Shining Path had committed their final, ceremonial blood lets. And at the tavernas and cafes: Coca-Cola, bottled and icy. Young boys who spoke Quecha, not even a word of Spanish, calling like little song birds, Coke here, ice cold Coke here.

Each man carried ghosts, and sometimes they appeared at road side.

“How do you fight?” the Translator asked.

“Not well.”

Then the singing hit them, a deep minor song that could only have been a dirge. The women sang a verse and then the men. The Translator closed his eyes solemnly, murmuring something. The Journalist tried to discern whether they were song lyrics or words of prayer.

The cart was a hearse and on its back were two small coffins, children’s coffins.

“It’s a funeral,” the Journalist said.

“What?”

“A funeral. For the dead.”

The Translator squinted his eyes. The party climbed the wending road, maybe a quarter mile distant, their haunting melody announcing their presence when they disappeared into dells or hollows.

“No,” the Translator said. “No. A wedding. The bodies for, uh, for how do I say? For the young? For no more kids. No more young.”

The Journalist didn’t understand. The Translator thought best how to communicate and passed the Journalist the last of their scrounged vodka.

“The married have killed their child body.”

The Journalist understood. They waited and listened and the singing grew into a clear, plangent sound.

“Are you still worried?” the Journalist asked.

“Yes. Yes.”

The noise built and transfigured and soon the party was in front of them on the road. At their head was a priest in cassocks and carrying a bible, and behind him were the bride and groom. The Translator and the Journalist were still sitting, and the two parties looked another over. Between them was a trash-strewn distance of maybe ten yards. The Journalist imagined the old western films he liked as a boy, the stand offs and stare downs. The horse brayed uneasily, languidly flicking his tail at the incessant flies.

The groom was about to speak when the bride, who was barely a girl, put a hand on his chest and whispered to him. The boy was stern and stalk thin, his eyes like veined marble. The bride took a step forward and greeted them in a dialectic that sounded even stranger than Russian, glottal and ancient. Her eyes shone like the back of a leaping fish caught, for a glint of time, in the sun. She was short and young and her body was just beginning to show its curves.

The Journalist felt something nameless inside him swell and cascade forth, something he could barely keep from trembling out as tears. She was the young ghost of his first wife, the doppelganger of her childhood.

“She wants our names and business,” The Translator reported.

“Well, tell her.”

The two carried out a conversation, and then the bride smiled. It was slight, delicious. The Journalist envied the boy marrying her, envied him because it was not himself. He’d had a Wisconsin wedding. He’d been twenty, foolishly in love with a girl whose ambitions for life were far smaller than his own. He didn’t care; they loved one another, he was young and romantic. Love would be enough to sustain them. It had been July, adamantine and warm. The service was at her great-grandfather’s church, a small white-washed chapel situated at the crux of two sinuous roads. Cornfields and cows in all directions, soft cumulous clouds and towering lines of elms demarking one farm from another. The church was surrounded by raspberry bushes and the flower girls scampered about, their faces and fingers smeared luminously pink. The old women fanned themselves in church and their makeup streamed down their faces in runlets of sweat. Afterwards they walked across the street to a half acre graveyard nestled amongst maples and geologic hills, and they left flowers on her great-grandfather’s grave. They’d gone dancing that night at one of her cousin‘s barns. Lights were strung like garlands and food was served at a buffet and there was a bowl of punch, but everyone brought their own liquor, boxes of brandy and beer. The smell of sawdust and hay was everywhere, and the band played polka and big band songs that were twenty years out of date. He was happy, whatever that meant, and his life seemed immense and gilded, like his love for his new wife. Outside the sky was a cataract of stars.

The men of the wedding party agreed to help the Translator push the car to the crest of the hill. There was a boy in town who was good with machinery, and he would help them.

“You stay,” the Translator said to the Journalist. The bride sat down beside him now, and the rest of the party disappeared.

She sat with her hands clasped in her lap. He could smell her from this distance, the aroma of wild grasses and verdant earth. Also sweat, from the long procession, a tincture of bitterness. She hummed sweetly to herself, like the purling of water.

“I’m sorry I’m so old now,” the Journalist said. “And you’re so young. It makes sense we’d meet like this.”

She looked at him and smiled blithely. He wished she could understand. It was one of the strangest, most voluble desires of his life, to communicate with this girl, this little ghost. His first wife, before she’d died, had told him a story. He was visiting her in the hospital. They’d been apart for many years, living different lives. His had been full of women and wandering, hers full of quiet afternoons in her garden. Their love hadn’t died, but it hadn’t been nearly enough. How strange, he told her, that two people can love so much and yet fail so totally. He spent those last two weeks with her and his son. He would read on her front porch and the wind would labor beautifully through her wind chimes. She told him a story. A famous poet had escaped the Czech Republic before the Holocaust. He was a young man at the time, and he left behind a girl he loved very much. He assumed she had died. He built a life in New York, and he built a reputation by writing vainglorious, incredible poems about the ghost of his lost love. He dedicated his first two books to her. He became famous, wealthy, gluttonous. He forgot his home village, its streets and scents and sounds, but remembered the girl, but her memory became something not real, something corrupted by his sloth and wealth. He tried to save the memory but couldn’t, and he fell further and further into the easy excesses of New York. His fame and reputation were secure, he was lavished with awards. Then one day his phone rang and on the other end was the voice of a ghost. It was the girl, the one from his poems. She was visiting New York for the first time. The next morning they met at a café. He’d spent all morning in front of the mirror, grooming himself, trying on ever more expensive suits. He lamented that he’d let himself get so old, so fat, so lazy. He nearly cancelled. When he showed up, she was just as fat and old, her puerile loveliness only evident now in the way she moved her hands, and sometimes in the way her hair curled around her ear. He was sweating through his suit, ruining it. He talked quickly. He insisted on speaking English, to prove the totality of his assimilation. He told her all about his career, the awards he won, the big apartment on the Upper East Side, the vacation home in Quogue. He finally stopped for a moment to breathe. She looked so out of place and archaic. He realized he was embarrassed to be seen with her, that people were looking at them strangely. “It’s all because of you,” he then said, without knowing why. “All of that is because of you. I wrote for you.” The woman smiled kindly, and he relaxed, and ate his breakfast without incident, telling her stories about the famous men he’d met and the praise they’d lavished on him. She spoke sparingly, barely at all. When the meal was over, he paid, gave her a kiss on the cheek, and left feeling that the meeting had been a success. The woman, the ruined girl, sat in her chair for a long while, feeling very lost. She spoke only a few, rudimentary words of English. She hadn’t understood anything the famous poet had said. She smiled, the Journalist’s first wife, at the end of the story, and took his hand. The wires coming from her body reminded the Journalist of Medusa. “Where did you hear that?” he asked. “I don’t remember,” she said, “but I thought of you. Maybe I made it all up in a dream. I don’t know.”

“You look lovely,” the Journalist said to the bride. “So lovely, and you don’t even know. How remarkable that my whole life has transpired just to lead me to you, here, on your wedding day.”

The bride said something apologetically in her own tongue. She laughed easily. There was a flower behind her ear, and she removed it, twirled it between her fingers and gave it to the Journalist. He didn’t know what to do with it. The Renault lurched to the crest of the hill, the Translator barking instructions while the wedding party pushed. Some of them were on their knees, dirtying their pant legs. The groom was covered in debris, but he looked content, satisfied with his labor. The Journalist had traversed half the globe and loved dozens of women, lost them all. And he was jealous of this provincial boy with his new bride and his tattered suit. The bride, when she saw him, bounded over to him and tackled him, laughing, her joy unbridled. The men, including the priest, stood and watched with a mixture of pleasure and discomfort and melancholy.

“They ask us to drink,” the Translator said. “As one with party.”

“Yes, of course. Tell them I’m sorry we don’t have anything to offer them. They’ve done so much.”

They passed a milk bottle of homemade vodka between them, the Translator to the Journalist to the groom and finally the bride. The girl grimaced as she drank, then laughed and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Their lives would attenuate, of course. The day’s clarity would fade. They would grow old and die. The facts of a life. His wife, the Journalist’s, was now buried in the cemetery they visited on their wedding day. The Translator’s oldest son had been bludgeoned to death and dropped down a well. They were here, together, drinking vodka in the waning daylight with two newlyweds.

The procession began to rouse. The horse cart began to roll again. The priest blessed the space, the trash strewn patch of earth. The Journalist shook hands with the wild eyed groom, his face alight with lust and ownership. His life was about to end, perhaps. The bride lingered as the march started. The Journalist was standing in the vast Russian twilight, watching, an empty bottle of scavenged vodka in his hands. Then the girl whispered something to her groom, and scampered back. She put her hand on the Journalist’s cheek and kissed his forehead, then ran back to her new husband, nestling her head into his chest.

The two men watched them recede into the dusk. The party started singing again, and the men listened until they could hear no more. The Journalist gave the Renault a push, and they started to glide slowly towards the dim lights, the smoldering fires, of the town below. Somewhere on their descent, the Translator kicked the clutch into gear, and the engine spat, turned, and started.

“How far to Semeyinsk?” the Journalist asked.

The Translator shrugged, lighting a cigarette. “Three-thousand kilometers, maybe.”

“How old were they? The bride and groom.”

“Fourteen, fifteen. Very young.”

“Hm.”

“The boy, the little boy. He was my youngest son, I think. Or, the same look. Like a picture of my son,” the Translator said.

The flower she’d given the Journalist was in his pocket, wilting. That night he would put it into a book of poems. It was a book his son had written. The Journalist carried it everywhere with him, and when he couldn’t sleep he would open it and read and feel, for a time, like his life had not been wasted.

“Your son writes?” the Translator had asked him.

“Yes, he does. Very beautifully, too. So beautifully. I don’t know where it comes from. It’s a mystery to me.”

“You have one child?”

“No, I have a daughter, too. But she’s had a difficult life. She’s in jail, or maybe she’s out now. I don’t know. I suppose I’ve failed her.”

The Translator shrugged. “Daughters,” he snorted, as if that word contained a multitude of wisdom.

They overtook the wedding procession on the road. They were just a blur of muted color, of bodies, moving patiently against the night.

“We should stop,” the Journalist said.

“No, no. This car no good. Maybe they rob us.”

“Why would they rob us now? They could have robbed us earlier. They aren’t robbers.”

“Pirates work funny, very funny. Fate, we will not dare fate.”

They drove through the village. It was a grim place. Most of the homes were no more than huts. Gas lamps hung in the windows. Long scrolls of loose wire were draped like giant snakes over the narrow road. Televisions blinked like seers in the night, illuminating the interiors of the dreary homes. Many of the homes had small gardens, or pens where mangy goats and chickens roamed. The whole place was behind them in less than a minute.

Open night lay ahead of them. The Translator yawned and lit a cigarette. The Journalist took out his son’s poems and started to read by the light of a spectacular, gibbous moon. He soon fell asleep and in his dream was the scent of sawdust and a girl with raspberry fingers. And on they wandered, and on, into that countryside of ghosts.