FINDING KATARINA M.

by Elisabeth Elo

  “I just don’t know what to do,” I said mournfully, letting my shoulders slump.

  “Let it go,” Duboff insisted, this time with a touch of sympathy for Misha’s distraught relation. “What are you so worried about anyway? You think he was murdered? There’s not a chance of that, if you ask me. We had him up here many nights to talk and drink and listen to music; I think we’d know if he was into some bad business that could get him killed. There was nothing like that. I tell you, Misha’s a good kid. Likes to laugh and tell stories—smart, too, very interested in politics. I’d be surprised if he had a single enemy.”

  It looked as though Misha had done a masterful job of keeping his cover with Bohdan and Tanya, just as he had with Ilmira. But what if they were the ones spinning lies right now, and I was the one being played?

  “Look,” Bohdan explained in his labored, pedantic way, “if Misha’s being held for ransom, your family would have heard from the kidnappers by now. But who would bother with a kid who doesn’t have two cents to his name? He might have died in a car crash, or drowned, or something like that—that would be very sad. But what would be the point in hunting for his body? There’s not much chance you’d find it if you don’t even know which direction he went in, and the snow will cover it up in a few months in any case. My advice is to bring his picture to the police, so that if they find his body, they’ll know who to call.”

  I filed away the fact that Bohdan was showing precious little concern for his missing friend. He continued, “What else is there? He got lost in the taiga? No way, too smart for that. He’s part Sakha—you can see it in him. They might live in villages now, but herding’s in their blood. Thousands of years of nomad life doesn’t go away in a few generations. So, in my opinion, there’s not much you can do to find your cousin. My guess is he doesn’t want to be found, which means you’re just wasting your time. But, like I said, he’s a good kid, and if he’s alive, he’ll turn up soon, if only to keep his mother from worrying.”

  Bohdan seemed quite satisfied with this airtight reasoning, and I sensed that any challenge would only lead to argument. The subject was closed for now.

  He gestured to Tanya, who obediently left the room and returned a moment later with a bottle of vodka and three shot glasses. Leaning forward, he splashed the vodka into the glasses, and lifted his glass to me, as if a toast were the only reasonable response to life’s insolvable problems and maddening mysteries. “Za vstrechu!” To our meeting!

  “Za vstrechu!” Tanya followed her boyfriend’s lead with a delighted smile, in which I detected a trace of relief. The vodka meant we were going to be friends.

  “Za vstrechu!” I added.

  We all downed the first shot. It was cheap stuff that burned my throat.

  Bohdan immediately poured another round and raised his glass again, calling out with equal gusto, “Vashe zrodovye!” To your health!

  “Vashe zrodovye!” Tanya chimed in.

  “Vashe zrodovye!” I held my glass aloft. The second one went down a little easier, given that the burn of the first one had anaesthetized my throat.

  No sooner had I plunked the empty glass on the table than Bohdan was refilling all three.

  “Oh, no. Wait a minute,” I protested with a polite laugh.

  But Bohdan pressed the third shot on me, at the same time magnanimously announcing, “To our American visitor!”

  “To Natalya!” Tanya added warmly, hoisting her glass in the air.

  “To new friends!” I obliged with a smile, only this time, when I put the glass down, I covered it with my hand. Refusing a toast was considered bad manners in Russia, but I felt that I’d done my duty as a guest. “I’m sorry. You’re being very kind, but I’m not used to this. I really can’t keep up.”

  “One more for now. Then I promise we’ll take a break,” Bohdan said reasonably.

  I removed my hand, and the fourth round was poured. This time, Bohdan nodded at me shrewdly and lowered his voice to a more intimate register. “To the beautiful woman who flew halfway around the world to search for her Siberian cousin.”

  “To Misha! May he return to us soon!” Tanya said with an odd giggle.

  I raised the glass containing what I fully intended would be my last few ounces of vodka that evening, and met Bohdan’s glinting eye. Was I imagining things, or did he suspect me? Or was he coming on to me?

  I said, “To happy endings. May we all find what we’re searching for.” I swallowed the vodka in a single gulp and coughed at the after-burn.

  Bohdan leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head, elbows spread wide—a classic dominant pose. Having worked among ambitious men for most of my career, I knew better than to let such body language go unchallenged. I adopted the same position, inhaling deeply to expand my chest, and did him one better by crossing one leg across the other, ankle to knee. We stared at each other for a few seconds longer than was comfortable, sizing each other up.

  “So. You are American,” he said in a studiously neutral tone that nonetheless contained a hint of challenge.

  So this is what he wants, I thought.

  I bluntly admitted my nationality and added a couple of provocative opinions, thereby launching the kind of interminable political discussion that Russians love. Over the next hour, the three of us thoroughly aired our ideological differences. We didn’t spare each other’s feelings, thus engendering trust, and took to raising our glasses each time one of us made an especially cogent point. Soon, we were being unbearably brilliant in our own and each other’s estimations, and the emptied bottle was replaced by another.

  The first four shots having worked their magic, I couldn’t recall why I’d so prudishly resisted vodka’s obvious charms. Vodka was nothing less than the national drink of Russia, the ax that broke down barriers and the glue that held the huge federation together. It was nourishment for the moody, oft-neglected Russian soul, as elemental as mother’s milk and as necessary as water. Russians let out their true warm-heartedness when they drank—their true opinions, too. With any luck, either Bohdan or Tanya would drop their guard just enough to let important information slip, if they had any.

  “In Russia, we have all the parts of a democracy—elections, parliament, laws—but it’s all big joke,” Tanya asserted. “Everyone knows we have an authoritarian system that doesn’t care about the citizens at all.”

  “As long as you have elections, you can change that,” I pointed out.

  “Bah, elections. They put the ballot box on the outside, while behind the scenes the votes are being destroyed,” Bohdan said disgustedly.

  Tanya added, “And even if you elect new politicians, it makes no difference. One’s the same as the other, and they’re all corrupt, especially Putin, the little madman. He’s been lining his pockets all along.”

  “There must be someone who can stand up for the people,” I said, my voice trailing off. My idealism was fading fast in the corrosive atmosphere of my hosts’ total political disillusionment.

  Bohdan wearily shook his head. “You Westerners don’t get it. If you want to truly understand Russia, you have to think of it in two parts: the government and the people. The two parts don’t speak to each other at all. They don’t have the same language; they don’t even like each other. The government acts the way it wants, and the people do the same. It’s always been that way. We have a saying in Russia, God is far up, and the Tsar is far away. The Kremlin thrashes around like a huge stupid ape with a stick up its ass. And what do the Russian people do? We endure.”

  The conversation wound through several more topics, and all the while the toasting didn’t let up. Apparently bent on displaying a wit that nature had not endowed him with, Bohdan was a font of shop-worn aphorisms. Teaching a fool is the same as treating a dead man. Little thieves are hanged, but great ones escape. He insisted on counting the shots and further insisted that even numbers were unlucky; we had to end each round on an odd.

  “But you’re only counting in even nu
mbers!” Tanya protested, covering a belch with the back of her very white hand.

  Bohdan leaned forward to look deeply into my eyes. “Dr. Natalie March, my very good friend from Washington, D.C., here we have an ancient saying: When a visitor leaves Siberia, he will dream of returning, but he will not know why.”

  I gave a sincere, if bemused, smile. The night had become so warm and comfortable for me that I believed it might be so. I’d started to like Bohdan and Tanya; their honest, uncompromising cynicism hinted at a rich core of unfailing idealism underneath. They wanted a better world—who could blame them for that? If they ever visited Washington, I would invite them to dinner at my condo. At which I’d be damn sure to serve something better than the crap-ass fermented potato water that was presently corroding my stomach and making my eyes cross.

  Vaguely aware that this natural impulse toward affection was dangerous, I dutifully reminded myself that Duboff and Karp were quite possibly my cousin’s abductors and enemies of the United States. But maintaining suspicion was an arduous task after so much friendly conversation and so many vodka shots. Thirteen maybe? An odd number, of course, and unlucky, to boot! Was that a sign? Was it all going wrong? And did anyone know what the hell to boot meant? Truth was, I’d always been a mushy, emotional drunk—in college, I once threw my arms around a dean who had unwisely appeared at a tailgate party, and gushed in his ear that he was a very great man before slobbering a kiss on his cheek. Sometimes it is just so much easier to love the ones you’re with.

  Russians have a word, nedoperepil, that describes having drunk more than you should have but less than you absolutely could have. An hour later, I was at the far edge of nedoperepil. My eyes kept drifting of their own accord to the surreal spectacle of the large multi-colored bird and his mechanically bobbing tufted head; to the ornate scrolls in the thick Turkish rug; to blurry brown stains under the window in the shape, I thought, of mating frogs. What had caused those unsightly blots? Water stains from a leaky roof? A splattering of wine or coffee? Blood? Were they a clue I ought to pay attention to? I mustn’t forget to be on the constant lookout for clues, I reminded myself. Maybe I should snap rapid-fire photos of the stains surreptitiously and send them off to a CIA lab for analysis. Then I’d be a very great spy! As if from a distance, I heard Tanya’s voice rise in an aggrieved lament.

  “Three- and four-year-old children complaining of pains in their legs! Why should little children have pains in their legs? Why?”

  The doctor in me came to a wobbly sort of attention. “What’s this, Tanya?”

  Bohdan’s thick eyebrows knitted together. “The process we use to decontaminate was never tested. The experts warned it wasn’t safe, but the Kremlin insisted we get the job done as fast as possible, so we were told to go ahead. Now the whole city is poisoned. There’s phosphorous in the water and plants—we can’t help but consume it. Almost every family has someone sick with cancer. And the little kids complain of pains in their legs.”

  “And how do you suppose the great Russian government has answered our complaints?” Tanya said, rising in fury from her seat. “Let me show you how!”

  She grabbed two bizarre-looking gas masks off hooks by the door and held them aloft. “We’re told to carry these with us to and from work each day; on the job, we’re supposed to keep them over our shoulders at all times in case of an ‘incident.’ Ha! They say incident, but what they mean is accident.”

  “Three men were killed by a gas leak a few years ago,” Bohdan said.

  “Here. Try it on,” Tanya insisted, shoving the mask in my face. The rusted zipper required some tugging, and I had to loosen and re-connect the stiff leather straps. Then I held up the grotesquely misshapen thing, puzzling over which way to put it on. Tanya helped, but the instant the mask covered my nose and mouth, I believed I could smell an acrid burning dust, so I whipped it off and dropped it on the floor.

  “See?” Tanya said. “The authorities brag they’ve given us protective gear, but these masks are a joke.”

  She and Bohdan began to talk over each other in their rush to describe just how bad things were.

  Bohdan said, “Mirny didn’t used to be this way. We had the mine; we had the chemical plant. We were a poor city, sure, but we were proud of the work we did before they converted the plant. Now the government says it’s going to close the plant for good once the decontamination work is done. That’s less than a year away. More than a thousand people will be out of work.”

  “How do they expect us to pay for our food if we don’t have jobs?” Tanya demanded in a red-eyed frenzy. “Do you think they’ll give us unemployment checks like they do in the United States? No way. We’ll just rot here with nothing to do, half starving like the old people! Yes, it’s true: we’re going to starve! First poisoned, then abandoned. The people of Mirny are no more than dirt under the government’s feet.” The purple cross at the base of her neck throbbed with her agitated breathing.

  Bohdan glanced over at his girlfriend and said, “Don’t excite yourself, Tanya. You know it won’t be like that for us.”

  “Not for us maybe. But everyone else will suffer, as if they haven’t done enough of that.” Tanya’s eyes flashed when she explained to me, “We’re leaving Mirny. Soon.” She glared defiantly at Bohdan, adding, “With my mother.”

  “Oh, your old mother,” he said gruffly. “Do we have to talk about that again? She’ll be fine here, just as she’s always been. I tell you, she comes here too much. You’re tied to her apron string.”

  “Really? Is that what you think?” Tanya retorted with an upward tilting chin. “Don’t you notice the cooking and cleaning she does? Do you want to do that work when we get to Batumi? Because I won’t do it all myself. And if we have children, shall we live on one less paycheck so I can stay home to take care of them when my mother would do it for free?”

  Bohdan had sunk a bit under the barrage. “All right, all right. Let’s not argue. Your mother can come, too.”

  The parrot squawked, and Tanya balled a wad of paper and threw it at the cage. “Not you. You are ugly and you smell.”

  Bohdan looked at me dolefully, in need of sympathy, which I obediently gave. At the same time, I was struggling to carve out some memory space in my alcohol-sodden brain. Batumi? Where was that? I’d never heard of the place before.

  “When are you leaving?” I asked—the most innocuous question I could think of.

  “As soon our stupid car is fixed,” Tanya said, her feistiness slightly subdued by Bohdan’s capitulation.

  “The mechanic is waiting for a part,” Bohdan said.

  Tanya rolled her eyes. “In Russia, we grow old waiting for parts.”

  By then I’d given the conversation about as much attention as my addled brain could manage. A couple of photos taped to a shelf of the bookcase were swaying before my eyes, coming in and out of focus. I rose and carefully traversed the short distance. One was of Tanya and Bohdan in bathing suits, standing ankle deep in the lacy waves and sinking wet sand of a beach. Other bathers in bright suits surrounded them. Further out on flat blue water, a woman in a bathing cap floated peacefully on her back.

  “Look at you two bathing beauties,” I teased.

  The parrot nodded and grunted.

  “Is that Batumi?” I asked.

  “No, Baku,” Bohdan said. “Batumi is in Georgia, near the Turkish border. It’s warm there, even in winter, full of beautiful birds and trees.”

  “Like nightingales and turtle doves. And green warblers, which are my favorite,” Tanya said excitedly. “And the trees? There are so many different kinds. They say the pink blossoms of cherry trees drop right onto the streets.” She sighed dreamily. “It’s on the Black Sea, very beautiful. We’re going to move there soon.”

  Then, glaring at Bohdan, she kicked ineffectively at the legs of his chair, and added in a fresh wave of dissatisfaction, “But first we have to drive nine thousand kilometers to Baku. And you said we’d never go back!”

  �
�This is the last trip, I promise,” Bohdan replied tersely.

  “I despise Baku,” Tanya confided to me. “The Muslims hate Russians, and we hate them back. We’re only going because we have to, because Bohdan says we have to, and of course we women are always expected to do just what the man says! What he does there is very secret. I only know that he leaves me to sit on the beach by myself for hours, and when the wind comes up in Baku, as it always will, the sand swirls in little cyclones and stings your eyes. You have to run indoors just to get out of it. Then Bohdan shows up and says, ‘Quick! Let’s go!’ and I’m expected to jump to my toes.”

  “Tanya. Enough,” Bohdan said in a low voice.

  A secret, I thought. Must keep them talking. “I hear Baku is a fascinating city. The cultural center of Azerbaijan with Western and Middle Eastern influences combining. I’d love to go there someday.”

  “Oh, do! You can meet us there. We’ll shop together on Nizami Street and go to the beach while Bohdan’s working. Who knows, you might meet a man!” Tanya gushed.

  Bohdan shot her a cold, hard stare. Their eyes locked for a few seconds until Tanya looked away.

  I said lightly, “I’m not sure about the man, but the rest sounds like fun.” What to say next? I decided on the direct approach. Keeping the light tone, I added, “Bohdan, what do you do in Baku?”

  “Nothing,” he answered woodenly.

  “Nothing? Is that why you’ve dragged me there twice already?” Tanya said with as much outrage as she dared.

  Again, that harsh, restraining look from Bohdan.

  I said, “Well, if I do visit Baku someday—can you recommend any good hotels or restaurants?”

  A few stony seconds passed while Bohdan and Tanya stared at each other pointedly, with Tanya seeming to hover in a confused place between defiance and submission. Not taking her eyes from his face, she said, “We like to stay at the—”