FINDING KATARINA M.

by Elisabeth Elo

  Saldana grabbed my forearm with fingers strong as talons. “I only agreed to come because I could see how much it meant to her, and because I thought she might be telling the truth—maybe she and Misha really would come to America! Now I’m sure I made a terrible mistake. It was wrong for me to leave the country when they might be in trouble. What if they need my help? But now I’m here, so far away, and I don’t dare go back because my mother worked so hard to get me here—she used all her money to pay a bribe for my visa—and if I go back it will ruin everything she tried to do. Maybe this really is what she wants for me—to be happy in America. But how can I be happy if she and Misha aren’t with me? I don’t want to be here alone!”

  She broke down into unfettered tears, her thin body wracked by more sorrow and confusion than I could readily imagine. I succeeded in putting my arm around her quaking shoulders, murmuring “I’m so sorry” several times. Eventually, she quieted, rubbing her reddened cheeks roughly with the heels of her hands like children do.

  My mind was racing with questions, sympathy, fear. I had no idea how to respond or what to do. “I wish I could help,” I murmured, as much to myself as to her.

  “You can! Let me stay with you for a little while after the ballet, just until I get settled here.”

  I didn’t have the heart to deny her again, but I was still a long way from saying yes. Playing for time, I said, “Come on, let’s walk some more.”

  We glided like two ghosts toward the next exhibit, as if just the talk of defection had made us both a little shadowy. Through a set of glass doors fogged with humidity, we emerged into the Orchid Room, moist and dim and thick with vegetation. Hundreds of vivid pink, purple, and orange flowers clung parasitically to the tangled limbs and trunks of their unwitting arboreal hosts, and sprouted impossibly from the crevices of mossy rocks.

  Too preoccupied to pay attention to the beauty, I led Saldana silently to the next exhibit room, where the dry heat of the desert accosted us. Rows of paddle-armed cacti rose stiffly from the drained, monochromatic landscape, giving testament to the stunning adaptability of lifeforms.

  I was painfully aware of the tiny dancer trailing behind me, of her terrible hope and profound vulnerability. I feared that she was already doomed, like a patient with a fatal illness who didn’t feel sick yet but whose days were numbered nonetheless. I knew I had to honestly describe the risks and the probable course of events to her, just as if she were a patient facing tough choices and tougher odds. But what did I know about immigration, really—either legal or illegal? It wasn’t my specialty. There were experts out there who were in a much better position to advise her. I realized with a relieved sigh that I had no business counseling her until I’d checked with them and ascertained the facts. A second opinion, if you will.

  In the medicinal plant section, we sat down again. The species arrayed around us were mostly small, each one tidy and unique and a little odd. The light was clean and white; the air held a subtle astringent bitterness. Saldana was fidgety, awaiting my verdict.

  “Saldana,” I began, “I think that before we go any further with this, we should talk to someone who knows the ins and outs, the loopholes, of the whole immigration process. An immigration lawyer, for example. There’s got to be a way for you to get what you want legally.”

  She looked frightened and completely skeptical.

  “We have to give it a shot,” I urged. “What if there’s a solution that neither of us knows right now? Don’t you see? This whole thing could be simpler than we think.”

  “I don’t know,” she said fretfully. “What if they turn me in?”

  “They won’t. Everything you say to a lawyer is held in the strictest confidence. They’re not allowed to share your information with anyone else or do anything against your will. They’re just there to lay out the facts and give you the best advice.”

  “You know people who do that?”

  “Not personally, but I can find someone. Just give me a few days. Your name won’t be mentioned, I promise.”

  Her face was pale, and she was twisting her silver ring back and forth erratically. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

  “You won’t.”

  “I should talk to my mother first.”

  “Yes, good idea. Call her, and tell her what I said. Tell her I want to help you, but I don’t want to break the law, and I can cover your legal fees. Do you want me to talk to her, too?”

  She was biting her lower lip. “Maybe later. I’ll let you know.”

  “You have my card, right?”

  She patted her small purse. “Right here.”

  “All right, so I’ll come up to New York next weekend for your performance—I’d love to see it. By then I should have some answers for you, and we can talk about everything again and decide what to do.”

  She let out a sigh of capitulation, but her eyes remained clouded with anxiety.

  I reached for her small hand and gently squeezed it. “Please don’t worry. You have three weeks before your visa is up. That’s plenty of time for us to figure this out.” I was starting to convince myself.

  “And if we don’t?”

  “Let’s take one thing at a time.”

  “Natalie, please. I need to know the truth. What if I can’t stay legally?”

  “First things first,” I replied evenly, putting her off again. Her face fell in disappointment, but she seemed resigned.

  After lunch at a little restaurant near the Capitol, we picked up her bag at her hotel and walked over to Union Station in time for her four o’clock departure. She was quiet as we stood side-by-side in the cavernous, echoing hall, in a thick press of travelers. When the loudspeaker announced that the New York train was boarding, and passengers began thronging toward the designated track, she turned to me and said quietly, “Please hurry. There’s not much time.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll see you soon.”

  We kissed three times on the cheek—left, right, left—as Russian women sometimes did, and she dashed off to join the jostling queue. I watched her disappear into the crowd of busy Americans, just as she hoped to do.

  I turned away with troubled thoughts. No part of me wanted to break the law by harboring an illegal alien. But Saldana clearly had no intention of returning to Russia. She would be alone and vulnerable in New York City or wherever she chose to go. How could I justify not offering her help? But if I did decide to help her, it wouldn’t be as simple and straightforward as she seemed to think. There would be many challenges that neither of us could foresee. It would be cruel to go only part of the way with her and then let her fall. I’d have to be willing to stand by her for as long as she needed me to.

  I was in what seemed an impossible quandary. The best I could do was hope that I discovered a way to resolve it before I saw her again.

  MY MOTHER WAS waiting in her wheelchair inside the glass doors of the Arborway Rehabilitation Center. She parked herself in that spot at ten a.m. every Sunday, her keen eyes scanning the parking lot. The instant she caught sight of me, she waved eagerly, looking like a disabled child about to be rescued from a dull week at boarding school. Multiple sclerosis had put her there—first in the rehab, then in the chair. For most people, the disease was capricious: it ebbed and flowed, responded to some treatments and not others, according to its mysterious whim. Vera March’s MS was—so far—remarkably predictable. It didn’t rush or lag, surprise or devastate—it just kept fulfilling its promises at a steady rate. First, numbness, weakness, muscle spasms; then deteriorating coordination and balance, followed by speech and vision problems, unstable mood, respiratory weakness, and so on.

  She’d arrived at the center a year ago when difficulty swallowing made it dangerous for her to be alone. Medicare partly covered her private room; I made up the rest. She knew she probably wouldn’t go home, and didn’t fight it. My companionship—two hours every Sunday—was what she lived for now.

  That, and the changing of the seasons. At the end of her lif
e, Vera March had become a nature lover, had learned the flora and fauna of the bucolic Maryland suburb in which the center was located. There were binoculars on her windowsill through which she occasionally spied hawks. Sometimes deer grazed in the meadow outside her window. Sightings of fawns last spring had been a special delight.

  I leaned down and kissed her cheek. “Morning, Mom.”

  “Sweetheart. So good to see you.”

  Heat was bad for multiple sclerosis patients—Uhthoff’s phenomenon, medically unexplained—but nothing short of Armageddon could dissuade my mother from her weekly jaunt. I ducked into her room to put the flowers I’d brought in a vase of water, and to deposit my other gifts: Toblerone bars and a couple of new mysteries and thrillers. Then, recapturing a bit of the enterprising spirit we used to share in the old days, we ventured outside, where the heat hit us with force and the manicured grounds offered not a single shade-bearing tree.

  A concrete walkway skirted the parking lot and looped back, a twenty-minute walk if we were slow. We stopped, as usual, at the point farthest from the rehab center, where there was a wooden bench next to a desiccated sapling tethered to a stake. I sat down and pulled the wheelchair close. We always discussed my life first, because talking about her world was too hard at the beginning of the visit. I had decided not to mention Katarina Melnikova until later. For now, I wanted it to be just the two of us, re-bonding after a week apart.

  Cicadas droned in the hot, heavy air as we finished catching up. I stood and pushed the wheelchair again, stopping one more time at what Vera called “the garden,” currently nothing more than a rectangle of scorched marigolds in dried clumps of dirt. A bead of perspiration rolled out of her hairline and meandered down the side of her pink, overheated face, and I was glad when she agreed to be wheeled back to the air-conditioned center.

  The common room was furnished with couches and a piano no one played. My mother always chose to conclude our visits there instead of her room because she preferred to be “out and about.” We arranged ourselves in a corner for private conversation, though at the moment no one else was in the room.

  “You’ll never guess what happened,” I began. “A young Russian woman named Saldana Tarasova came to my office. She said we’re cousins.”

  “Really? How astonishing. I wonder who it could be. Your father had two siblings, so I suppose it’s possible. But he didn’t keep in touch. How on earth did she find you?”

  “She wasn’t from his side, Mom. She was from yours.”

  My mother frowned, trying to assemble the possibilities. Her mind was often foggy. “Let’s see…on my mother’s side, there was only Uncle Sergei, who didn’t have children of his own. Maybe someone from my father’s side? It’s been so long, I can’t remember.”

  “Well, this will come as a shock, Mom. But it turns out that your mother, Katarina Melnikova…”

  Vera startled a bit at the sound of the name.

  “…is alive and living in Siberia. In a little village on the Tatta River. Not that I know where that is.” I paused to let the information sink in, took my mother’s hand. “Apparently, Katarina survived the camps. Escaped, actually. She married and had a daughter, Lena Tarasova, and it was Lena’s daughter, Saldana, who came to see me.”

  Vera’s face had turned completely white. I pressed her hand—cold and limp—between my own. She gazed fixedly into the middle of the room, as if witnessing the bizarre spectacle of her mother’s buried ghost struggling back to life. I started to say something, but she shook her head.

  “I just need a moment,” she whispered.

  Across the room, there was a banquet table covered with snacks and water bottles and a plastic dispenser filled with watery lemonade. I brought back two cups of lemonade and handed one to her. She held the cup unsteadily. Before she could drop it, I gently took it away. In a few minutes, when she was more composed, I’d hold the cup to her lips so she could sip the drink.

  Minutes ticked by. Footsteps and voices echoed from the hallway through the open door. A cart of metal lunch trays rolled past, pushed by a worker in green scrubs. I wondered, too late, whether telling her had been a terrible mistake.

  “You did the right thing,” she said, reaching out to touch my knee.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I always want to know the truth. I’m too old to be afraid of it.”

  I took her hand again, felt the weak pressure of her squeezing back.

  “I love you, Mom.”

  She nodded, wobbled a smile. “Well, of all things to happen at my age…I never expected this.”

  “Saldana’s in New York now, but I could probably arrange to have her visit, if you want.”

  She was still a bit dazed.

  “We need to think a bit about what we want to do. It’s perfectly okay to do nothing for now. Maybe just let all this sink in. You might decide to contact Katarina Melnikova eventually, maybe even meet her at some point. It’s entirely up to you. If you want to get in touch, sooner might be better than later, as she’s in her late eighties.”

  “She’s eighty-nine,” Vera answered. “I do the math every year on her birthday.” She gave a girlish laugh. “Her birthday is in June. June fifth. I never told you that.”

  “Mom…”

  “I used to dream about her—what color hair she had, what her voice sounded like. I knew she was probably dead, but that didn’t make a difference. I kept believing we’d meet some day when I least expected it. That she would phone, or send me a letter, or simply walk up and sit down beside me and say, Look, after everything, I’m here. It’s funny, but that dream never left me. I still carry it, right here.” She tapped her chest with her fingertips. “When you were born, it was stronger than ever. I wanted so badly to share you with her.”

  “Mom, please…”

  “I want to meet her, Natalie. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.”

  “Are you sure?” A trip with her would be difficult, but not impossible, if it was carefully planned.

  “I’ve never been surer of anything.” Her eyes were shining with joy and hope.

  With some alarm, I realized she had automatically assumed that Katarina Melnikova was reaching out to her in love. I knew the situation was more complicated than that: Saldana wasn’t acting as Katarina’s emissary; she’d had a far less exalted motive for making contact. Who knew what Katarina’s place in all this really was?

  I should have told my mother the truth right then and there, but the smile on her face was so beautiful, almost transcendent, that I couldn’t bear to disappoint her. It was easy to imagine what this news meant to her. It probably felt as if her life had come full circle, in a sort of muted triumph, as if a small part of everything she’d so painfully lost—her parents, her past, her own identity—was being magically restored.

  “I’ll talk to Saldana and see if it can be arranged,” I said, smiling despite my misgivings. “I trust that Katarina and your half-sister, Lena, will want to meet us; at least I hope they will.”

  “Not us,” she said. “You.”

  “Me? You just said—”

  “Oh, for goodness sake. I can’t go. You see me sitting in this chair, don’t you?”

  “That’s not a problem, Mom. The airlines make allowances for wheelchairs.”

  “Please. Let’s not kid ourselves. I can’t travel anymore. Lately—I wasn’t going to mention this—lately I’m incontinent.”

  I balked at this latest indignity, but managed to keep my expression smooth. “We could bring a health worker along.”

  “Out of the question. It would be humiliating for me. It’s bad enough that I have to have my bottom scrubbed, that some days I can’t hold a spoon. The last thing I want is for my mother to see me like this.” She pressed my hand between hers. “I want her to meet you instead. You’re strong and healthy; you’re the best thing I’ve ever done.”

  “Mom. What would be the point? You’re the one who wants to meet her.”

  “I can’t go, Natalie.
How often do I have to say it?”

  I sighed. Vera was unbending when she wanted to be, and in this case, she was probably right. She was far too proud to play the role of invalid publicly. And there was no telling what travel and accommodations were like in northeastern Siberia. Probably not superhighways and Holiday Inns. But the thought of going by myself cast the trip in an entirely different light, and cut my enthusiasm down by half. I was suddenly conscious of my packed work schedule and an upcoming medical conference I’d pledged to attend.

  “You should contact them right away,” Vera was insisting. “If there’s any possibility you can go, I want you to take it. It’s rather miraculous, when you think about it. All those years.” Her eyes shone with happy excitement. “Take a lot of pictures, will you? You can bring pictures of me, too. But not the way I am now—when I was younger. My wedding picture perhaps. And write down everything that happens, everything she says. Take a tape recorder—that’s a good idea. I want to know every last detail when you come back.” She smiled broadly, imagining her dream coming true.

  “I don’t know, Mom. It might be hard for me to get away from work. Maybe we can arrange for them to come here.”

  “No excuses, Natalie. This is for me, okay?”

  “But my patients…”

  “No, no, no!” she cut me off with sudden anger. “Your patients don’t need you. They need a doctor, but it doesn’t have to be you. It’s time you got off your treadmill, Natalie. Your career has been entirely too important to you—too demanding, too consuming. It’s not healthy for you, and never was. You’re almost forty years old, for god’s sake. You’ve reached your goal; there’s nowhere higher to climb. How much success does one person need?”