by Kathy Parks
* * *
Yes, it invites skepticism and outright disbelief:
How could a family keep themselves alive in winters that plunge to -30 degrees Fahrenheit?
How could they eat, farm, clothe themselves?
How could they navigate a wild river, with a small child, in a dugout canoe to begin with?
And yet, I am convinced that this family not only made it to this remote wilderness in Northern Siberia. I believe that their relatives are telling the truth when they describe the route the parents took up the river. I believe that the artifacts we uncovered— tools, rotted shoes, belts, and dishes—belonged to the Osinovs.
And I believe Yuri Androv.
Dr. Daniel Westin
New York Times article
* * *
Five
Lyubov and Viktor set up to do some filming of my stepfather. Viktor wipes the lens. Dan speaks into the camera. He’s got his professor’s hat on, so his gestures are more contained, his voice less excitable.
“This is our third river trip in eight years on the trail of the Osinovs. We plan to go farther into Siberia than we ever have before. We know that they can’t live far from the river or its tributaries, as it would be difficult to have to hike to a water source every day for their vital needs. . . .”
I am trying to get down as many details about the magical landscape as I can to add color to my article. Gray and towering cliffs. The trees are enormous, reaching the sky, where their spreading foliage darkens my face. An eagle soars out of the clouds and swoops down low above us. I speak softly into my recorder: This place is like the Boulder mountains on steroids. Even in the summer, there’s a certain ominous—
“Adrienne!” Dan’s voice cuts through me, and I look over, startled. The crew has stopped filming. Dan looks impatient. “Adrienne, can you please not speak when I am speaking? We’re trying to film a documentary here.”
“Sorry,” I say, embarrassed. I put away my recorder. Sergei shoots me a glance, puts a finger to his lips, and smiles.
“Oh, shut up.” I hit him in the arm.
Dan begins again. “The river is stronger this time. The currents more unpredictable. It amazes me, every time I travel this river, to think of the Osinovs negotiating it up here, so long ago, in what their cousin has claimed was a dugout canoe. Of course, that was thirty years ago, and a river changes over time. . . .”
I gaze out into the trees. Dan is so boring. I thought he was going to mention the good stuff: how rumors have circulated that the Osinovs are cannibals, sorcerers, murderers. My article needs some danger. A little atmosphere and tension so I can get the reader to actually think maybe the family exists before, like Dan, they find it was all an illusion.
“Sergei.” I say his name softly, so that I won’t disturb Dan’s fascinating commentary. “Did you ever hear of anyone eaten by bears out here?”
“Of course,” Sergei says. “Bears eat meat, and humans are meat.”
“Stop coming on to me and answer the question.”
He looks at me quizzically.
“That was a joke,” I say.
“Ah.”
“The bears,” I prompt, holding out my Dictaphone.
“Yes. Well, there was a moose hunter from the settlement of Qualiq whose wife ran away with another man. He said he no longer wanted to live. He was going to offer himself to the bears. He walked into the forest and never came out again. They found only his shoes with his feet still in them.”
“That showed her,” I said.
“Bears are no laughing matter. They are terrifying.”
“I saw a black bear once. I was camping with my father.”
At the word father, Sergei glances at Dan.
“No,” I say. “My real father.”
“Oh,” he says. “Where does he live?”
“He doesn’t,” I say.
“Doesn’t?”
“Doesn’t live.”
Sergei smiles. “The bear ate him?”
I look at him evenly. “Some things,” I tell him, “just aren’t funny.” Sergei’s smile fades. I turn off my Dictaphone and look upriver. It’s not like my father has ever really left my mind these past seven years. But the farther we journey up the river, the more I think of him. Maybe it’s because this trip—not the crazy quest but the scenery and the adventure—would have been right up his alley. Maybe because this is the first step to becoming something he’d be proud of. Maybe because he was taken from me so quickly and so young. I don’t know the reasons, but I feel his presence here, somehow. Maybe when you die you get frequent flier miles everywhere the universe goes.
In the late afternoon, we pass the last remnants of civilization: the settlement of Qualiq. About a dozen small wood-frame houses and what looks to be a central lodge are gathered by the river. As we pass, we hear the howling of dogs. It’s different from the dog howls I’ve heard before. It’s clear and unearthly, some kind of warning or regret.
“The old people believe a dog’s howl means death,” Sergei says.
“In my world,” I counter, “it means someone needs to shut up their fucking dog before the angry neighbors call the police.” It’s gotten colder as the sun moves lower in the sky, and I put my fleece jacket back on. I mumble into my phone: dogs, death, omen.
We have lunch at fifteen knots. No slowing down. I eat cold Stroganoff out of a pouch and wash it down with water from a canteen. Sergei steals my recorder and speaks into it in a high sweet voice that I guess is supposed to be mine.
“We are not yet a full day on the river, but already I am falling for the Russian. As he guides the boat, I see his muscles ripple, and my heart beats faster. How can I speak of my feelings? I am burning with des—”
I grab the recorder away from him and speak into it quickly. “The weakling Russian is quickly proving himself the least popular member of the crew. There is talk of throwing him overboard. Tensions are rising—”
“Hey,” Dan interrupts. “We’re talking over here.”
As we go deeper into the wilderness, the cliffs loom higher around us, sometimes blocking out the sun and immersing us in shadows. I watch Lyubov and Viktor filming. Dan’s right. They are total pros when it’s time to work. They don’t joke around. They speak in low voices. Whenever a rapid approaches, Sergei squints his eyes and looks intense, the crew members hold on to their cameras, and all conversation dies until the rapid releases us and the water smooths.
I realize that my article so far is kind of all over the place. Notes on everything from how bright the flowers look to how crystal-blue the sky, to my flirtation with Sergei to Lyubov’s Fifty Shades of Grey obsession. It’s all very interesting, but Sydney Declay would ask, What is the backbone?
I glance over at Dan. He’s talking about the first encampment they found, about the sole of the men’s Newfield shoe found there. “Size ten,” he says meaningfully. “Grigoriy Osinov’s size.” (Or, as Sydney Declay pointed out, the size of twenty million other Russian men.) The water is gentle in this stretch—so Dan’s not interrupted by the sudden roil of current. He’s gotten so excited, he’s ditched the serious professor demeanor and is talking faster and faster. Gesturing with his hands. He’d be rising up on his Birkenstocks if he weren’t in a boat. His eyes have that strange sort of light in them I’ve seen before when he goes off at the dinner table.
Dan believes. Dan has taken a few artifacts, some rumors, and some interviews and diary entries and made them into a certainty. Maybe I’m jealous of him. I remember the last time I truly believed I could make contact with my father.
After he died, my mother found two grief support groups, one for adults and one for kids, that met at the YMCA. I didn’t have much to say in my group. Everyone had lost a brother or a sibling or a mother or a father. One small girl with wild red hair was there because she’d lost her grandmother, which I didn’t think really measured up. Everyone loses their grandparents. She made up for her low Grief Quotient by having more memories and d
etails of her dead relative than anyone else: the incredibly fluffy biscuits she’d made before she took the recipe to her grave, the flowered dresses she’d wear, the scent of lavender, her habit of giving Christmas gifts in cold-cream boxes, her country expressions like “long in the tooth” and “going to hell in a handbasket,” the old untuned piano in the house she kept spotless, her specific prayer for good fishing weather . . . and on and on and on. Dumb Red-Haired Girl and her grief dominated the group through sheer volume, taking up so much time, the group leader had to continually warn her to wrap it up.
The only interesting thing about the endless grandmother tale was that the old lady had died from a fall down the stairs, not pneumonia or cancer or other old lady things. She’d slipped one day, and they found her at the bottom of the staircase, although Red-Haired Girl dragged out the fall itself with her imagined play-by-play, every flail and cartwheel, even mentioning the shattered ceramic coffee mug found beneath her body.
I said as little as possible. My grief was my own, and I would strictly guard it. The world had fumbled away my father and punished the wrong people for it and buried his story and put a new one in its place: the story of a blond girl who really didn’t mean to hurt anyone.
My father couldn’t be nowhere. He had to be somewhere. He had to be. Maybe he was in the wilderness, living wild; in a cloud, weightless and transparent; or hovering nearby, moving closer when I spoke to him.
One day I had a brainstorm.
Once, while exploring our attic, I came upon a treasure trove of old board games that had apparently belonged to one of my parents as a kid: Operation, Mouse Trap, Battleship, Domino Rally . . . and a Ouija board.
I made a secret pact with Red-Haired Girl that during the break in the next grief support meeting, where normally we attacked the jelly donuts, we’d sneak away and try to contact my father and (I added this incentive) her beloved grandmother.
That day, I brought in the Ouija board in a colorful red Macy’s Christmas bag I found in my mother’s closet. During the first half of the session, a shy boy with dark, expressive eyebrows finally spoke up about his baby brother, who had come into the world stillborn, and Red-Haired Girl interrupted him with a tale of the cat finding her grandmother’s wig on a counter and dragging it into the garden. By break time I was annoyed with her even more than I usually was, but I needed her, although I made a mental note to replace her with Shy Boy if the attempt to contact the Great Beyond was unsuccessful.
We found an empty room with a conference table and plastic chairs, cracked out the board and a candle I had thoughtfully included, and got straight to work.
“I’ll light the candle,” said pushy, grandma-dominant Red-Haired Girl, and I indulged her, handing her the strike-anywhere matches and enduring a quick though terribly dull tale about how the girl always lit her own birthday candles, as though that was something very special.
After the flame got going, we set up the game and turned off the lights, and positioned our fingers lightly on the planchette. Red-Haired Girl’s face was cloaked in shadow, only the tip of her upturned nose in light. Our knuckles glowed a faint orange.
“Speakkkkkk to meeee, Grammyyyyyyyy,” she said, bullying right in with her spooky voice before I could say anything.
“Speak to me, Daddy,” I shot back.
“No,” she said, looking at me with irritation. “You have to say it in a special voice, like Speakkkkk to me, Daddyyyyyyy.”
I’d had just about enough of Red-Haired Girl. “Listen,” I snapped, “I think I know how to talk to my own —”
Just then the planchette started moving.
“Oh my God,” Red-Haired Girl breathed. “There it goes!”
The planchette moved right over to “Good Bye.”
I glared at her. “Look what you did. You annoyed everyone into going away.”
“I did not! They left because you weren’t following the rules!”
“Just shut up and let’s try again. We’re running out of time.” I really felt like punching Red-Haired Girl. I was beginning to suspect her grandmother threw herself down the stairs to get away from her.
We moved the planchette back to the center.
“Grammmmmmyyy—” she began.
“Shut up.”
The planchette began to move.
E—M—I . . .
“It’s spelling out my name!” Red-Haired Girl insisted.
“No it isn’t. You’re moving it yourself.”
“Am not!”
Forcibly, I pulled it back the other way as it headed to the L. She clamped down with her fingertips and pulled back.
“Stop it!” she shrieked.
“You stop it!”
“Grammy! She’s being unfair!”
Just then the door flew open, spilling light, and our group leader stood in the doorway.
“What are you two doing in here?” she demanded.
“Nothing,” we said, the Ouija board right there in front of us, cold and shocked into ghostlessness by the sudden light.
After that I gave up believing my father could be found again. At least Dan can imagine his family is still in this world.
We stop for the night to camp on the gray gravel banks of the river. There’s a great flurry of activity as we unload our supplies and pitch the tents. Overall, it’s been a pretty easy day: calm water and manageable rapids. Sergei says it will get progressively more dangerous as we go farther up the river.
“How did this family possibly make it out there?” I ask. “I mean, if even guides don’t want to go that far?”
“Maybe they didn’t make it,” Sergei says. “Maybe their boat overturned and they drowned in the river. There are hunters, drillers, guides, fishermen that never come back, every year. Sometimes their bodies are found. Sometimes, not.”
“Circle of life, I guess.” My voice quavers a little as I look out in the dark.
“You look scared,” he teases. “Are you sure you want to sleep alone in your tent?”
“Yes. Right after I leave a trail of marshmallows leading up to your tent, just to be neighborly.”
I decide it’s time to figure out whether Viktor and Lyubov believe in the Osinovs or if they’re just here for the money or the adventure. He’s busy cleaning his camera equipment when I mosey up to him with my Dictaphone.
“Can I interview you, Viktor?” I ask.
He looks up at me and smiles. “You want to talk to me? I think you only like Sergei.” I’m not sure if he’s flirting with me or not. It’s hard to tell with Viktor.
“What do you think of the Osinovs?”
He laughs. “Think? I don’t know, nice family?”
“No, I mean, do you believe in them?”
“Believe? No, I mean yes. Maybe. I don’t know. You see? How do you say it? It is not my job to believe. Dan doesn’t say, ‘Viktor you believe. Here is more money.’ Or ‘Viktor you don’t believe. You’re fired.’ My job lives in here. . . .” He taps his camera. “It does not live in here.” He taps his head. “That is not my job’s address. You see?”
“Right,” I say. Trying to talk to Viktor is giving me a migraine, so I move on.
Lyubov has her tent up before I can get mine unpacked. She’s pounding in a stake with a rock when I approach her.
“Is there nothing you can’t do?” I ask her.
She pauses, ponders this. “I can’t dance worth a shit,” she says.
“I don’t think it’s that important out here. Unless the Osinovs communicate only through the art of dance.”
She laughs. “You’re funny.”
“Thanks. I’ve been trying out my humor all day on Sergei.”
She scowls. “You be careful with him.”
“Why?” I ask.
“You know why. He’s thinks a lot of himself. And he’s a stranger to you. You’re still very young.”
“I can take care of myself,” I assure her.
“This is Siberia. Be more careful of everything than you
think you should be.” She finishes pounding the stake and grabs another one, moving toward the next corner of the tent. I crouch down next to her with my Dictaphone.
“Do you believe in the Osinovs?” I ask.
She scowls a bit. “You mean, that there is a family called the Osinovs and they live up the river? Yes, of course I do. Why would I be on this trip if I didn’t believe?”
I admit I’m a bit disappointed. I thought Lyubov was on my side and that we could make fun of Dan together, once I knew her a little better. She reads my look, reaches over, and takes my Dictaphone. She switches it off, then grabs the collar of my shirt and pulls me close to her.
“It’s bullshit,” she whispers in my ear. “I’ve always thought it was. But your stepfather is very nice to us, and he pays very well. If he was looking for Jesus, I’d go with him to find Jesus. That doesn’t mean I think Jesus will be waiting for us.”
She releases my collar.
“I guess I can’t put that in my story?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “That is off the record.”
Well, at least I have my answer. Lyubov is in it for the money. No disrespect for that.
Time to build the fire next.
“I’ll do it,” I say. “I’ve built a fire before, many times.”
“Let Sergei do it,” Dan says.
“I know how to build a fire,” I insist. “I used to go camping with my dad in Colorado all the time.”
“I can build a fire with a flint and a rock and a cotton ball,” Sergei said.
“Well, I can build one with a strike-anywhere match.”
“Will someone please just build the damn fire?” Dan asks wearily. “I’ve got to go over the schedule.”
Of course. Always the schedule.
“Okay,” I tell Sergei. “Build the fire. Just know I can do it too.”
I kind of like this little flirtation we have going. Margot would love to know every detail. Now I find myself grabbing for my phone before realizing it’s not a phone anymore. It’s nothing. It’s a shell with the internet inside, sleeping like a vampire.
Dinner that night: canned beef with rice for us, and macaroni and cheese for Dan, who doesn’t eat meat. The Russians are all washing their food down with something from a bottle they’re passing around, but I’m done with that. I’m here to work.
