I looked into the bland, vacant eyes of my grandmother, and tried to control my disappointment. In all this time, it had never crossed my mind that Katarina Melnikova would be incapable of welcoming me and reaching out to my mother. I thought back to what Saldana had said when I asked about Katarina’s health: She has the problems old people have. I’d been willing to leave it at that because, unconsciously, I’d already started writing the story of a happy family reunion, of my mother at last receiving a measure of the love she’d lived so long without.
Lena was ladling small fish the length of my hand out of the boiling pot, and arranging them on a serving plate. The entire fish, including head and tail.
She brought the plate and a bowl of cooked pasta to the table.
“These little fish come out of our shallow lakes and streams that are fed by rains, which filter through the meadows. They’re very mild; I think you’ll like them. But you have to watch out for the bones.” She pulled the body of a fish apart with her fingers. The flesh fell away easily, exposing a tiny skeleton and dozens of nearly translucent filaments. She picked out a fleshy piece and sucked the meat off a needle of cartilage. She smiled at me. “You try.”
I did. The fish was soft and sweet.
“Now,” she said conspiratorially. “You won’t be a real Siberian until you’ve eaten the tongue.”
I tried to look interested as she dug her fingers into the head, pushing out the little eyeballs and then, with a slight grimace, hooking her finger around something that she yanked out with a flourish—a small pink muscle the size of a fingernail.
“This one’s for you,” she said generously.
“No, please. You go first.”
She popped it in her mouth and started the same operation on another fish head. In a few seconds, I was given my very own tongue. I pinched it gingerly between two fingers and held it up to the light. It had a little crease down its center, just like a human tongue. “Bottoms up,” I said, and dropped it into my mouth.
It was actually quite tasty.
“Good, isn’t it?” Lena prompted.
“Very.”
“You want another?”
“Sure.”
She smiled. “We were raised on these fish, along with fresh milk and meat from our cows, and, if you don’t mind me bragging a little, we don’t have anywhere near the rates of illness you have in the West.”
“And we’re getting sicker all the time, I’m afraid.”
“Whenever I come back to the village, the purity of the air and water just astounds me,” Lena said.
She began cutting pieces of fish, pasta, and tomato into bite-size pieces on a separate plate, and scooted over to be closer to her mother. “I used to feed her first, but my hunger would make me impatient. Now I eat a little first, so I can take my time with her.” She held out one small spoonful after another. Katarina’s mouth opened and closed like a baby bird’s.
I watched the domestic ritual in wonder. Was the old woman in the rocking chair really my grandmother? I wanted to know everything about her, but her stories were locked inside her. Or more likely, given the advanced stage of her disease, they weren’t there at all anymore. Her past, gone; her memories, vanished or sketchy at best; she herself only a shadow of what she’d been. It hardly seemed fair that the jaunty young wife in the belted jacket, who’d once cradled the infant Vera in her arms, who’d suffered so terribly and survived by risking all, who’d bravely made a life in this foreign place, should have come to this. I wanted her to have a clear victory, a sweet revenge, a happy ending—to be surrounded for just one perfect moment by people who understood the enormity of her struggle and the magnitude of her success. I wanted her to feel unique and powerful, and deeply loved. To know in her heart that her humble, painful life had been the most exquisite paean to beauty and truth. That, despite outward appearances, she’d been part goddess all along.
That was what I wanted. But fate hadn’t stopped to inquire about my wishes. If it had, I probably wouldn’t have lobbied only for Katarina, but would have made the same request for Vera—and everyone else in the world, for that matter. Even myself. Why not? Why shouldn’t we all have grace in abundance?
Katarina’s plate was clean. Suddenly, she frowned. “Where are the berries?” she asked in a querulous voice.
“I’ll get them for you.” Lena stood up and took a plastic container out of the refrigerator. “She loves these,” she said over her shoulder. “We pick bushels of them in the summer and have them all year long.” She dished some small red berries into a bowl and added a splash of thick cream.
Katarina smiled with delight when the bowl appeared in front of her.
“She had a hard life,” Lena said later, as we sat by the living room fire, sipping wine she’d kept for a special occasion. Katarina was in a rocking chair between us, the afghan covering her lap. “She spent two years in that camp. Escape was practically unheard of; it took a lot of courage for her to try. She was found not far from here just about this time of year, early winter, with a head wound she’d packed in snow—so frozen she could barely walk. A hunter from the village found her and carried her back in his arms.”
Katarina’s presence in the village had been controversial, Lena explained. If the Soviets found out that an escaped prisoner was being harbored in a village, men, women, and children were taken out of their houses and shot. If the villagers turned the prisoner in, they got a reward. So when word got out that there was a convict in the hunter’s house, a lot of people demanded that she be surrendered right away, while others mocked them for believing the Russians’ promise. They said that Russians weren’t likely to give money to the Sakha, whom they despised, and that if they did, the sum would be so small it would be an insult. After some discussion, an uneasy compromise was reached: the European woman would not be turned over to the Soviets, but she wouldn’t be allowed to stay in Cherkeh either. She’d be given clothes and food and sent on her way, to fend for herself.
“People would have known in their hearts that this solution was actually a death sentence,” Lena said. “Because if the coming winter didn’t kill her, the Russians eventually would. Escaping from the gulag was high treason; Stalin’s henchmen were known to spend years tracking down escapees. Even if she managed to make it out of Siberia, she wouldn’t be able to return to her home and family without eventually being re-arrested and probably shot.”
“So they changed their minds and let her stay here after all?” I asked hopefully.
Lena gave a deep sigh. “Not exactly. Mother couldn’t say where she’d come from or how far she’d travelled. All she knew was that one day when she was being driven to the camp director’s house—apparently, it had been built outside the prison grounds—she suddenly got up the nerve to grab the driver’s gun and shoot him with it. She pushed his body out of the car and drove south on dirt roads as far as she could before the gas ran out. She pushed the car into the woods and tried to cover it with brush, but everyone knew it was only a matter of time until the vehicle was discovered and soldiers fanned out across the area. Finally, someone suggested that the best way to solve the problem was to bring the search for her to an end.”
“So what happened?”
Lena leaned over and lifted the afghan off Katarina’s lap. Katarina’s right hand was intact; her left one was missing. There was only a stump.
I recoiled. “I don’t understand.”
“The Soviets had a long-standing agreement with herders across Siberia. If they found the body of an escaped prisoner in the taiga, they were to cut off the left hand and bring it to the authorities for a reward. Once the hand was turned in, the search was called off.” Lena let the afghan fall across Katarina’s lap.
Katarina had become agitated: her eyes roamed from my face to Lena’s.
“It’s all right, Mother,” Lena whispered to her gently.
“So they…” I said with dread.
“The option of losing her hand was offered to her,
and she took it. After the hand was frozen in the snow, it was presented at Camp 34, the only prison camp within the distance she’d presumably travelled, and the herders were given their reward.”
We were silent for a while. Night had fallen and, with it, the temperature. The windows were covered by an insulating clear plastic, yet a sharp cold emanated from them nonetheless, as well as from the entire outer wall of the living room. At the same time, waves of heat radiated from the low fire burning in the hearth. Fire and ice—each force deadly in itself. We occupied a tiny circle of safety in a vast, potentially lethal environment. How fragile and tenuous our position was.
Finally, I asked, “Was she happy here?”
“She tried to be, I think. My parents had affection for each other, but there was always a gap between them they couldn’t cross. I don’t think Mother ever felt safe in the village either: anyone might have turned her in. She tended to stay home, sent me to the store for her as soon as I was old enough. She had a kind husband, a child, and books and art supplies my father brought back from his trips to Yakutsk.”
“Art supplies?”
“Mmm. She loved to paint. But even that wasn’t enough. How could it be? She’d been raised in a modern European city with education, music, museums. She’d lost everyone she ever loved: her parents, her first husband, a baby daughter. And her life in the gulag—if you can call it that—had been unspeakable. I remember waking in the night to her screams. She would startle at anything—a mouse running across the floor. Her face would have such a look of horror—I’ll never forget it. It was clear that the memories tormented her. I don’t believe I ever saw her truly happy. I did my best when I was a little girl; I loved her very much, and all I wanted was to see her smile. But I know now that there wasn’t much I could have done for her.”
Lena leaned over and tenderly stroked her mother’s cheek. Katarina’s eyes were closed. She’d fallen asleep by the fire.
“In a way, this disease is a blessing. It’s taken away the bad memories. I like to think she’s found contentment at last.”
I thought of Vera. What would I tell her? Your mother is alive, but she doesn’t remember anything. She doesn’t remember you.
“Do you see that picture over the mantel?” Lena said.
It was a watercolor of two children running in a bright snowy meadow, a sense of motion in their flapping coats and wind-whipped hair, a frozen stream in the foreground and ponies in the distance. I easily recognized Saldana and Misha.
“Mother did that,” Lena said in a tone of pleased reverence.
“It’s lovely.”
“Come. I’ll show you some others.”
She led me to a small room on the other side of the house, where there was a washer and dryer, household cleaners on plastic shelving, and a side door that went out to the barn. Propped between the washer and the wall were dozens of canvasses stretched on wooden frames, and on a high shelf that went the length of the room there were stacks of rolled watercolors.
She began to pull out the canvasses. Most were children at various ages, caught in natural poses. “That’s me,” Lena said, pointing to a girl with long black hair and bangs cut straight across her forehead. I recognized Lena’s square face and sturdy stance in the child she used to be.
“And that one?” I asked, pointing to a taller willowy girl with a long nose and a curl in her dark hair.
“That’s Vera,” Lena said. “Mother painted her almost as often as she painted me. Of course, she could only imagine what Vera would look like. Can you tell if she was far off?”
With a lump in my throat, I studied the various paintings. Vera at five years old, at ten, at fifteen. “It does look like her,” I said finally.
“Mother is religious, you know—or was. That’s unusual around here. I grew up saying secretly, God bless Father, Mother, and Vera. I dreamed of meeting my older sister someday.”
“Why didn’t you try to find her?”
“We did. But my uncle had moved, leaving no forwarding address.”
“They were still there, still in Kiev. That’s where Vera grew up!” I spoke urgently, as if the mix-up could be solved at last, and the reunion could still happen.
Lena shrugged sadly. “Mother couldn’t find him. And he wouldn’t have been expecting to hear from her. People didn’t return from the gulag.” Lena slid the canvasses back into place beside the washing machine. “And soon, she had me to think about. And my father, of course. She talked a few times about going to Kiev, but we didn’t have money for trips like that.”
So Katarina had tried to find my mother. And when she couldn’t, she’d painted her alongside Lena—two sisters playing together. The older one with paler skin and curling hair.
Grateful tears stung the backs of my eyelids. “My mother has to know this. You’ve no idea how much this will mean to her.”
Lena smiled, flicking off the light to the laundry room. “Oh, I think I do. Never fear. We’ll make a video for her. I have some nice pictures of Mother when she was younger, and a couple of videos taken before she became ill. The kids have tons of pictures and videos, of course. Mother was usually in the background of those.” She looked over her shoulder as she led me back to the kitchen. “You’ll take some of her paintings home with you. Yes?”
“That would be wonderful,” I said. A few of Katarina’s paintings, and the story of how she’d tried and failed to find her abandoned daughter, would be enough to show Vera that she’d been loved.
I woke the next morning with the terrible conviction that I’d slept too long and missed my chance—that my rescuers had arrived in the village and departed, unable to find me, or that the entire village had packed up during the night and moved away, reverting to their nomadic ways.
I ran to the door of the babarnya and opened it, expecting to see a deserted land, but there were the pretty Sakha ponies, scattered as usual across the snow-blanketed meadow. Smoke was curling lazily from the chimney of a distant house, and the sky was a pale blue wash of innocence. I must have slept a long time for the sky to be this bright.
They won’t find you here, Lena had assured me the night before. They don’t know this place exists. But what made her so sure? If I could get to Cherkeh, anyone could.
I breathed the frigid outdoor air, sucked it down into my lungs, trying to expel the ghostly filaments of panic the dream had left behind.
The fire inside was down to ashes and smoldering embers. I piled wood into the pit and waited, shivering, until the licking flames coalesced into a blaze. The outhouse was too far away, so I pulled on Lena’s borrowed boots, trekked to the point where the clearing met the woods, and peed in the snow.
Then I wandered further into the forest, into a cathedral of hushed, soaring pines, and it was as if I’d crossed into another world. The sunlight filtered down in distinct white-gold spears, and the air was immaculate, soothing to my lungs. Frozen crystals on the branches were as bright and sharp as diamonds. Toadstools had a second, perfect downy cap. It was so silent that, when I stepped on a twig, the crack resounded. I came across a trail of animal tracks, and knelt to examine them. Fox, I thought. The rounded indentations of the pads, the delicate piercings of the claws. I wasn’t alone out here.
Back in the cabin, with a blanket draped over my shoulders, I drank water made from melted snow, munched crackers and cheese, and watched the friendly, dancing spits of flame for a long time. The forest had calmed me with its beauty and order, and now the fire was lulling me into a peaceful trance. By degrees, a strange euphoria came over me. What if Lena was right, and I was safe? I just might make it home.
Lena’s kitchen was bright with sunshine; the old conical clay stove radiated heat, quickly dispelling the blast of frigid air that had accompanied me through the door. There was bread on the table, with the deep-hued berries Katarina loved, and cream so thick that the wooden serving spoon stood straight up in the bowl. Lena told me to help myself. She said that Katarina was at the community center whe
re there were activities and exercises for the elderly. A woman from the village took her over there most mornings, stayed with her for a few hours, and brought her back. The arrangement gave Lena a few hours to herself.
Lena poured coffee that she’d brewed especially for me and sat down across the table. It dawned on me that she’d heard every detail of my awful story, but I hadn’t asked about her ordeal.
“How have you been with…everything that’s happened?” I said kindly.
She dropped her eyes to the table self-consciously and began fiddling with the salt shaker. She seemed to sense that I was offering her an opening—caring for the caretaker. It clearly made her uncomfortable, but she took the opportunity.
“It was awful when Misha went missing. I was in agony. I couldn’t bear to think what might be happening to him, and then there was the possibility that Saldana could be in danger, too. I found a cultural exchange opportunity online, and bribed her dance company to send her to New York. I even bribed a government official to get her visa approved. I can tell you that when I put Saldana on that plane, my broken heart was breaking one more time. The only way I could bear the pain was to convince myself that Misha would return, and that we’d join Saldana in America, where we’d be a family again, safe. I promised Saldana it would happen. I could tell she didn’t believe me, but she sensed my desperation and was willing to do what I asked.”
She looked so sorrowful and defeated that I placed my hand gently on top of hers.
“She was always good that way,” Lena said softly. She went to the sink and ran the water, and I knew that was the most she could say.
That afternoon, Misha stopped by the babarnya. We embraced warmly. I was very happy that he’d made it to the village from the herders’ camp, just as he was greatly relieved to see me. But he admitted to feeling restless. He couldn’t return to Yakutsk or Mirny or, for that matter, go anywhere in Russia as long as he was a wanted man. He was relatively safe in Cherkeh, but the thought of spending years there doing odd jobs and farm work depressed him mightily. It felt as though his life was over before it had begun.
FINDING KATARINA M. Page 31
