FINDING KATARINA M.

by Elisabeth Elo

  “Make sure it’s turned on,” she said, indicating a tiny switch on the side.

  I turned it on. The display lit up and 83 mSv appeared against a green background.

  “A few hours’ exposure at the lower levels isn’t dangerous. Just stay out of the danger and critical zones,” she said.

  I wasn’t sure I believed her, but I wasn’t turning back.

  It took about an hour of hiking across uneven terrain to reach the camp’s perimeter. Three small buildings, about the size of cabins, lay scattered across the lower valley. Through the gaping doors and partially collapsed roofs, I could see that vegetation had invaded them. I decided to bypass them and go on about another half mile to the largest building, which occupied a higher plateau at the valley’s eastern end.

  All along the Geiger counter had been bleating a slow rhythm. As I came abreast of two heavily rusted fifty-five-gallon drums at the side of the trail, the beeping turned frantic, and the digital display jumped to 530. Danger. I raced past the barrels and didn’t slow down until the Geiger counter did.

  An enormous hawk swooped down in front of me, blasting a loud, shrill caw. I was already unnerved by the Geiger counter, by the place, by just being there at all—and my heart raced as wildly as if the large bird had knocked me down. The hawk flew up and away, cresting the hill on wide, crooked wings. I looked around to see if there were others. There were none. In fact, I saw no signs of birds or animals—not so much as a fallen feather or dried scat. The place was eerily quiet, sunk in a thousand-year radioactive sleep, in the cool, bright air of a perfect day.

  The large building abutted a steep, rocky hill dotted with the puckered black mouths of the mines. It was an imposing ruin—four stories tall, constructed of massive stones. Rusted metal grillwork still covered some of the windows, so I took it to be the barracks where the prisoners had been housed.

  All furniture had been removed from the first floor, and large portions of the outer walls were gone as well. Piles of rubble and fallen concrete rafters claimed the long open space, which was protected from rain and snow by the upper levels. A fine yellow dust had sifted through the broken windows and accumulated thickly on the floor. Here, at last, were signs of life. A mother bear and her cub had made a circuit of the room, leaving clover-shaped footprints behind.

  I ascended a flight of stairs on the eastern wall. The second floor was bisected by a long corridor with small rooms along each side. The floor was damp and buckled; I didn’t venture far for fear it would collapse. Golden shafts of sunlight pouring through gaps in the ceiling gave the place an ethereal air.

  The steps leading to the third floor were rotted. Startling blue sky hung at the top of the stairwell, indicating that the stairway to the fourth floor and the eastern portion of the roof had given way. I’d gone as far as I dared.

  From where I was standing, I could look through a blasted window onto a pond of thick yellow water at the base of the hill. The pond was circled by a wide band of hard-packed, sulphurish dirt, which had somehow managed to bubble up in places, creating low moguls of a uniform size. At regular intervals, man-made holes about four feet across, lined with what appeared to be tin, dotted the sand. Together, the moguls and holes looked like swelling pustules and ingrown blackheads in a case of terrestrial acne.

  After passing the radioactive drums, I’d slipped the Geiger counter into my jacket pocket to muffle the beeps, reasoning that if I started checking the instrument every time there was a mild fluctuation, I’d soon be a basket case. I was here in Death Valley now—whether it had been a wise or foolish decision to come remained to be seen—and I needed to focus on what I was doing without being distracted by fear. But, of course, I’d been listening to the beeps nonetheless, and had been aware of their steadily rising rhythm as I ascended the low hill and entered the barracks. Now I took out the instrument and checked the display: 750. Danger.

  Time to go.

  As I turned away from the window, something caught my eye in the clay-like sand around the golden pond. Shallow indentations in the roughly oval shape of…footprints. Could that be? Yes, there was a vague memory of footprints in the bank. Blurred by rain showers, but not completely washed away.

  I sprinted down the stairs, crawled through an opening in the eastern wall, and found the place where the footprints began. Death Valley’s human visitor had been wearing boots with a hi-tech rubberized tread. Larger than mine, but not by much. I tracked the prints as they approached the yellow sludge, hoping that the person had dropped something or left some other clue. About one hundred meters from the water, the Geiger counter went completely crazy. The beeps came so fast that they were one continuous screech. I glanced in panic at the instrument in my hand. The digital display was bright red. Critical. I turned and ran faster than I’d ever run before.

  I didn’t stop until I was at the bottom of the rocky slope, and the Geiger counter was bleating as weakly as a half-dead lamb. Doubled over and gasping for breath, I asked myself what the hell I was doing there and why I hadn’t gone home when I had the chance. An image of Misha’s closet rose unbidden in my mind. The boots on the floor, the yellow dirt. Were those his footprints circling the pond? Could their traces have survived since his likely early summer excursion? Or had he been here more recently?

  I had to figure out my next move. The helicopter was more than an hour’s hike away. The sky had faded from its former brilliant blue to a gunmetal gray, and fumes of frigid air seemed to be seeping out of the ground and flowing down the hillside from the darkening ridge. When days got shorter in the arctic autumn, they did so quickly. But there was still time to investigate the crumbling outbuildings that lay in the lower valley.

  I followed the rocky remnants of a path to the first structure, made of timber—a single square room about fifteen feet by fifteen feet. The roof was completely gone, and there was nothing left to suggest what the building’s purpose had been. A rotted wooden floor plank broke under my foot. I snapped some pictures and headed to the next building, half hoping there would be nothing there either so I could start hiking back.

  The way was strewn with rocks and rubble. Shadows were lengthening, so at first I didn’t realize that the whiter, oddly shaped stones were actually bones. Human bones. Shins, ribs, clavicles, tibias, spines. Small finger bones, pelvic dishes, discs of vertebrae. Thousands of bones littered an area the size of half a football field. All detached and mixed together with dirt and dry weeds in a vast open graveyard that I was inadvertently walking upon. The cold had made the bones brittle so that they crunched like seashells under my feet.

  Was this what Misha had discovered and reported? Radioactive contamination, mass graves? These things were certainly disturbing. But it was a well-known fact that the Soviets had processed uranium and conducted hundreds of nuclear tests across Siberia. And that for over seventy years, forced labor camps had brutalized and murdered millions. Death Valley, for all its horror, was just another link in the gulag chain.

  I was walking quickly now, skirting the open cemetery as best I could, eager to finish my job and get out of there. But something small was bothering me—a niggling little observation that kept slithering away.

  The roof of the next building was collapsed in one corner, the stone wall under it tumbled down, and the inner concrete wall turned to dust. Where the roof had held up, the interior was intact: a long metal table in the center; a sink and counter along one wall; several tin buckets in a corner; spread out on the counter, an array of knives, vices, and saws. I primly told myself that this building was nothing more than a tool shed, but a moment later I was flooded with a dread so powerful it nearly buckled my knees. I’d suddenly realized what I’d seen—or not seen—in the bone field: there were very few skulls.

  I crossed the makeshift surgery to a back door, wide open to a vista of darkening hills and lowering sky. The skulls had been thrown in an enormous ditch. They’d been sawed cleanly in half. The rounded top parts had landed either face up, like wh
ite bowls supplicating for rice or rain, or face down, like smooth, gently cracked bike helmets one might pick up and wear. The bottom halves were gawky configurations in comparison—just a mash of jaws and teeth and mandibles severed at the joint.

  Back at the museum, Emmie had talked about the Evenki belief that souls haunted the places where they died. If that were true, then the air over this pit must be crowded with ghosts, and for a few hallucinatory moments, I felt the victims of Death Valley circling me feverishly, passing through my solid body with their non-substantial forms, clutching at me desperately, begging for justice or revenge. What did I have to give them? What could I do? I held out my hands to show my emptiness and grief.

  Had they been alive when the experiments took place? When the scalp was peeled off the skull like a useless husk? And who had done this work? Sixty years ago, what monster in the guise of a doctor had been standing where I now stood?

  I circled the pit slowly, snapping photos the whole time. Inside, I photographically recorded every wall and corner of the operating room, and every implement in it. Finally, I headed back the way I’d come, picking my way carefully along the rim of the graveyard, taking pictures intermittently, feeling nothing in particular, just a gaping hole in my body big enough for the wind to blow through. I knew myself then to be naked and defenseless, and realized that I’d always been this way. Only vanity had made me imagine otherwise. All my life I’d coasted along on the pumped-up self-esteem that came from living in an environment that I could, for the most part, control. While in reality, just the thinnest of veils—of time, space, luck—separated me from the victims whose desiccated bones were cracking under my heels. Their protests had no doubt been loud and clear; their tactics, resourceful; their hearts, brave and strong. But when madmen come to power, none of that matters. Flocks of demons fly out of their hiding places, and humans by the thousands, by the millions, end up bull-dozed into cadaver piles.

  Roxana was in the clearing, hacking slender branches into firewood with a small ax. I ran up from the trail head and breathlessly insisted that we needed to get away from there immediately and find another place to pass the night. Pausing in her work, she coolly replied that flying at night was unwise: too easy to get lost. Morning would come soon enough. Then she instructed me to gather underbrush for kindling, to strip any leaves and stack the shorn branches in a pile, next to the two-person tent she’d set up while I was gone.

  Night happened swiftly, and with it, the temperature dropped. We ate in silence in our coats, faces scalded by blasts of heat from the burning wood. Bread, butter, sardines, canned stew, and vodka. The flames writhed and stretched, turned pink and livid orange. The smell of smoldering flesh seemed to rise into my nostrils with the smoke. The massed flames danced a ritual of death.

  Roxana handed over a tin mug of hot tea, jarring me out of my morbid reveries. “What did you find?”

  “High levels of radioactivity, an open mass grave, evidence of medical experimentation. Traces of footprints approaching…I don’t know what to call it…a pool of uranium sludge.”

  “Belonging to the person you’re searching for?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You say the footprints approached the pool. Did they return?”

  “I didn’t see that.”

  “A suicide?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said quickly. But it was only horror at such a death that made me deny the possibility.

  “Maybe the footprints went another way,” she said reasonably, sweeping the idea away for now. Pulling a pair of reading glasses from her pocket and settling them on her nose, she said, “Let’s see the pictures.”

  I handed over my phone, and she carefully studied each of the more than fifty photographs I’d taken. No comment, no perceptible emotion. She sat quietly for a few moments before telling me a story.

  “A few days before I was born, the sky turned red and stayed that way for hours. A gray snow fell to the ground but didn’t melt—a fine, light snow, like dust. The children played in it all day. Later, their skin blistered where the snow had touched their bodies. Many of them died soon after, my older brother among them. We thought that angry spirits from the Below World had killed them. It wasn’t until the 1980s that we learned the truth: the Soviets had been testing atomic bombs, and the snow was radioactive fallout.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, staring hollow-eyed into the fire.

  She seemed about to say more, fell silent instead.

  The hills and valley beyond the circle of firelight were silent as well—a cold, inhuman silence. A burning log collapsed, disintegrated to red hot cinders.

  Roxana turned her ruddy face toward mine, and for a moment we looked into each other’s eyes. She said, “There are only seventeen thousand Evenki left in the world. We’re going extinct.”

  Extinct. A word that described animals.

  There was nothing I could say in response, nothing in my experience that gave me the right to comment. Even my compassion, to the extent that it was useless, had no meaning here. Voicing it would be nothing more than a comfortable arrogance I would be using to distance myself.

  “For four thousand years we had a way of life that gave us what we needed and took nothing from the land. Then the Soviets came and killed the shamans, forced men and women to work apart from each other, and snatched children from their parents to go to boarding schools faraway. Our traditions were outlawed. It wasn’t long until we depended on the state for everything, as it required. When the Soviet Union fell, we were left without the support they’d forced us to rely on, and tried to return to a way of life that had been practically destroyed.” She recited the history matter-of-factly, hardship itself having become the Evenki way of life. “Cancer rates are high among our people, but that’s the least of our problems.”

  I prodded the charred embers with a stick, setting off a cascade of sparks and a whoosh of combusting wood. The incited flames strained skyward, shrunk back; a flare of heat reached my face and receded. The fire was engaged in its own demise, having consumed what it could.

  “Do you have children?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “A husband?”

  “No.”

  “You still have time.”

  I almost laughed bitterly, remembering Vera’s admonition. Had I really come halfway around the world to be reminded once again that eggs grew foggy and forgetful long before their hosts? Was Roxana trying on a maternal role? I was no child. And what business was it of hers anyway?

  “Not every woman needs to be a mother,” I said, imagining the ghosts in the valley, how they’d been children once.

  She didn’t reply, and after a while I worried that I might have pushed her away, which was the last thing I wanted to do in this lonely place. “You? Do you have children?”

  “Three daughters. Five grandchildren.” She pulled a crisp photo out of her wallet and handed it over. A swaddled newborn cradled in the arms of a smiling, bleary-eyed woman. “That’s Vitaliy. Vitya, we call him. Three months old.”

  The infant’s face was wrinkled and squint-eyed. “Ah, lovely. Blessings on Vitya.” I hardly knew what I was saying. I gave her back the picture, and got up to drag some underbrush over to feed the languishing flames.

  “Who exactly are you looking for, and why do you want to find him so badly?” Roxana asked when I sat down.

  I told the story of my missing cousin, the magazine article, and the two men who had come to the apartment.

  “Secret police,” she said.

  “Yes, probably.” She’d jumped to the same conclusion as Ilmira, but for completely different reasons. Moisture in the cut branches sizzled and popped in the fire, and there was a deep, sweet smell of burning sap.

  “What are you going to do with the photos from the camp?”

  “When I get back in the States, I’ll turn them over to someone who’ll know what to do—catalog or publicize them, whatever. It will be a way of honoring my cousin, I suppo
se.”

  “So you think he’s dead?”

  “I don’t know. Until I learn otherwise, I’m going to assume he’s alive.” I flashed on an image of the footprints in the yellow sand. None had returned from the sickening pool. But they might not have been Misha’s.

  I paused, decided to risk more. “Roxana, you might as well know that I need to keep a low profile right now.”

  “Trouble with the police?”

  “Yes. I believe they suspect me of something very bad. Falsely. But there it is.”

  “In Russia, it makes no difference what’s true or false. Just ask the skeletons down there.”

  She began gathering up the dishes and containers of food. “Your cousin could only have come here the way you did—with a guide in a rented helicopter or plane. If an Evenki took him, I can find out who it was. I’ll have an answer for you soon.”

  Roxana called around on her radio to the pilots she knew who ran supplies out to the herders. There was one who remembered ferrying a young man out to the brigade of a man named Ivan Nikolayevich on July thirteenth. A huge weight fell from my shoulders with the news. There was a good chance Misha was alive, and if he’d remained with the herders he might even be safe. Early the next morning, the M1-8 rose into a temperate blue sky, banking away from the stone ruins and bone fields of Death Valley. Below, the sparkling Sakhandja River curved through thick taiga that swelled and dipped over the earth’s crust like a green undulating sea. The river would lead us north toward its source in the snow-capped peaks ahead.

  Roxana had to shout to be heard over the whine of the rotor blades: “Ivan Nikolayevich and his family guide their herds through these mountains all year long. They tend to follow the rivers—moving upstream in spring, back to lower ground in fall. They make, oh, maybe twenty or thirty camps a year. During the summer, the herd is feeding constantly, so they have to change camps every two or three days. Right about now, late August, they’re probably at the highest point of the migration, or maybe they’re already coming back down through one of the passes. The reindeer will be fattened up and moving slowly. The trick for us is to follow their route up the river until we find them.”