Notes From My Captivity

by Kathy Parks

  A selfie, I think. A selfie in this world is something drawn with a stick on the forest floor.

  She gently places the pendant of my necklace just over my breastbone, and releases a string of syllables in dove language that is so soothing my lids start to feel heavy. If I drifted off to sleep, would I ever wake up again? She touches a fingertip to my face, then leans forward bit by bit until she rests her nose on my neck. She takes a deep sniff and giggles. In the process, she touches my hurt arm and pain shoots off in ferocious sparks.

  I shriek.

  She jerks back, eyes wide. Slowly she peels back my coverings to reveal my injured arm. The sight of it seems to concern her. She strokes the air above my arm and coos to it. Finally she rises to her feet and leaves me alone. I hear her calling outside in what sounds like normal Russian, and I begin to feel afraid again. My body begins to tremble. I wonder if, even in my state of pain and exhaustion and fear, I should get up and try to run. Then the voices, growing louder, come toward the door.

  One of the voices is deep and harsh.

  My heart rises into my throat as the family rushes in, surrounding me. I shiver under the blankets as fear rushes through my body. And yet the reporter in me can’t help but take in every detail as I stare up at the faces.

  An old lady. The mother? Her eyebrows are bushy, nose sharp, mouth slightly twisted. Her gray hair is pulled back and covered by a simple kerchief. Her eyes contain not a drop of warmth. This must be the mother—although mother is way too soft a word to describe any part of her.

  I drag my eyes away from her to a man who looks angry enough to own the angry voice. His glowering stare and crazy locks remind me of a possessed Maine coon. His beard is so thick that it’s almost impossible to tell his age. But his expression tells me his mood and he’s not in a good one.

  Beside him stands a younger guy, the one who chased me until I fell into something—a pit? I can’t be sure. He has more of a curious expression—something approaching awe, as though I am a great mystery, a meteorite, or a wounded unicorn. I can see more of his face. His skin is paler than the others. His eyes, a lighter color. The young guy doesn’t look quite as wild as his older brother. Stripped down to a pair of board shorts, he could be a vagabond in Venice, California, who dropped out of college to surf. It’s hard to say what he looks like under his beard, but I suspect he would be considered what one calls handsome in a land that puts a value on such things.

  He’s dressed head to toe in burlap like the rest of his family. They all smell vaguely of pine.

  I decide right then not to move a muscle or say a word. Perhaps my stepfather and I were spared because we were quiet and sleeping, and not loud and insulting the gods with rock ’n’ roll. I feel the urge to break into tears, I’m so frightened, but I’m afraid tears will anger them somehow.

  Clara points to me and coos, “A-drum.” And I have a sudden memory of my father, who grew up on a farm, once telling me he named the chickens in the hope they wouldn’t be slaughtered.

  “A-drum,” the younger man repeats as his brother glares at him and barks out an admonition in Russian, gravelly and rough. The whole family begins arguing, except the mother, who stares coldly down at me, and I can’t take this anymore.

  I shut my eyes tight and wait for them to decide what to do with me. The words bounce into my ears, growing louder. I don’t understand any of the words; they’re running together so fast. I just know that I should make myself as small and still as possible, to let them know I am not a threat. I’m just a girl who means no harm, a girl who’s stumbled into the wrong place, in the wrong century, a girl who just wants to go home.

  The older brother’s voice dominates now, making some kind of case against me, by the tone of it. I don’t know what manner of death he is suggesting, but I hope it is merciful and leaves no marks, like whatever they did to the others. A heart-stopping poison or quick strangulation or merely some muttered curse.

  Two tears escape and run down each side of my face. I’m not going to just lie here in terror and have my fate decided. I have to speak for myself.

  I open my eyes and utter a single word. “Osinov.”

  The family stops arguing. They look down at me, astonished, and I feel a very tiny spark of satisfaction through the fear, wishing that Dan was here to see them in person, even though I have no idea what’s in store for me.

  I keep talking. I speak their language, everything I remember from the guidebooks, leaning on the wrong syllables, consonants crashing into vowels, verbs instead of nouns, the grammar of a rabid parrot. I make no sense at all. I don’t care.

  “Do you think it will rain? How old are you? I’m from America. Can you please speak more slowly? I am looking for a restaurant. How old is your dog? Here is my passport. Which way is the hotel?”

  They listen. They have no choice. I won’t stop talking. People are strange when you’re a stranger, and my goal is to be less strange. More like them. Because maybe they could sneak up and kill a bunch of obnoxious Russians encroaching on their territory, but they will not be able to harm this quiet, hurt girl who looks up at them and asks them to please bring the check. It’s a one-way conversation that means nothing and everything; I want to survive. I want to live to tell the tale, and by the time I finally run out of Russian, I’m really crying. Tears pour down the sides of my face as I ask them if they take credit cards.

  Clara reaches out to me, gathers a tear on a fingertip, and holds it up to the light from the tiny window. I imagine she doesn’t have many distractions here or sources of entertainment. A stranger’s tear will have to do. The angry brother mumbles darkly but seems confused. The others simply stare.

  The woman finally speaks, which draws the respectful attention of the rest of the family. I have no idea what she’s saying, but the tone sounds reasonable. She could be telling them to have mercy on me because I am so young and so harmless, or she could be giving them instructions on how to tenderize my meat. Whatever it is, the family seems to be in agreement, nodding along, except for the older brother, who gestures at me and snarls out something that sounds distinctly hateful.

  Someone must have taken his iPhone away.

  The mother gives him a stern order. She’s a head shorter than her son, but that tone is clearly law, in civilized Boulder and wild Siberia, and the son seems suddenly cowed. He asks her something in a pleading voice. The woman shakes her head; he gives up and huffs out of the hut. Clara claps her hands together. She seems delighted, and the pounding of my heart settles a bit. I don’t know what’s happened, only that I’ve bought myself some time. Something Sergei didn’t have, or Viktor, or Lyubov, or Dan.

  For now, I can do nothing but try to stay alive until I can form some kind of wild, hopeless plan to leave this place and find my way back down the river. The fact that I have a broken arm and no food and no boat are problems I will have to think about later. In the meantime, I need hope. I have to believe that I will survive this ordeal and have a story to tell. And so I resolve to soak up as much detail as I can. Yuri Androv—Dan’s main source—was an unreliable narrator. But Adrienne Cahill is not. Adrienne Cahill will leave this forest carrying proof that the Osinovs exist.

  I will avenge the crew. I will avenge my stepfather. I vow these things as I lie quietly, my broken arm throbbing.

  In a few minutes, the younger brother comes back into the hut and hands his mother a length of leather cord and an armful of tiny, uneven boards, about the size you’d use to build a sturdy birdhouse. The old woman and Clara kneel around me. With surprising gentleness, the mother takes my broken arm, holding it on either side of the fracture. Clara coos out some kind of encouragement, and the mother suddenly tightens her grip and leans on my arm with all her force.

  I scream as the lump disappears from under the skin.

  Darkness.

  When I come to, I’m propped in a wooden chair. A blanket covers my knees. I look at my arm. Those tiny boards are arranged around it from wrist to elbow, and the
leather cord has been wrapped tight, securing the boards into a kind of crude splint. My arm still hurts, but I can move it without the searing pain I had before. More than that, I feel a surge of hope. After all, if they were going to have me for dinner, would they really have tried to fix me up like this beforehand?

  A fire has been lit in the stove, and the mother and Clara are cutting potatoes with folding knives that look brand-new. They seem so excited about the knives that they don’t pay me any mind, and I realize, with a sinking feeling, that I saw Lyubov and Viktor whittling with knives that had those same red handles.

  I drag my eyes away from them and study the hut. Everything is as Yuri Androv described it, down to the giant book on the mantel, the framed oil painting of a saintly-faced woman wearing scarlet robes, the spinning wheel, the enormous open Bible, and the stove made entirely of stone.

  Yuri was telling the truth. And Dan’s article was telling the truth. And my hero, Sydney Declay, was entirely wrong. New tears form as I think of how thrilled Dan would be to know this. Except he would not be thrilled to know I am their prisoner, just as Yuri once was.

  The article I write, once I’m safely out of this predicament, won’t be called “Wild-Goose Chase.” Not anymore, now that the geese have caught me.

  Two people, though, are missing. Yuri said that Clara had a sister with whom she shared the secret language, and yet she is nowhere to be seen. Neither is the father, a man Yuri described as having “a thin, gentle face, tangled eyebrows, and a square beard that is dark on the sides and gray around the mouth.” No one here matches that description.

  The older brother comes in with an armload of wood, and his mother gives him an order, calmly and casually, her hands never leaving the chore of cutting the potatoes. I imagine mothers everywhere in the world, of all different races and religions, ordering their sons around while cutting up potatoes, and this has just given me the slightest bit of comfort, when he turns back around and I see it.

  He’s removed his woven smock, and in its place he wears a black, short-sleeved Mighty Mouse T-shirt, stretched tight over his large frame.

  Sergei’s shirt.

  I cry out, trying to struggle to my feet. The brother’s eyes widen in surprise and then turn angry, and he says something in harsh Russian. Clara comes running, kneeling before me, petting my face, trying to calm me in the language of doves.

  * * *

  “Yes, they gave me a balm for infected bites on my arms,” Androv told me. “But they were planning to kill me. I heard the older brother tell the younger one that before night fell: he was going to cut my throat.”

  Dr. Daniel Westin

  New York Times article

  * * *

  Twelve

  My eyes open. The details of the cabin come into focus. My rapid heartbeat and dry throat return. I must have dozed off despite my pain and fear. I’m still propped up in a wooden chair. Rough blanket still across my knees. The homemade cast feels heavy on my arm. My feet are bare. I see my shoes and socks drying by the fire.

  The brothers are nowhere to be seen, but I hear them working outside digging something, from the sounds that drift in through the window. Clara and her mother sit at the table, a pile of clothing between them—more of their booty from our campsite. They have two pairs of ancient scissors. I watch as they sharpen them on the whetstone; the sound goes through me, feeling ominous, like the harshest tones of their language. They start cutting the clothes up into squares the size of playing cards. When they have collected enough scraps, they pull some tattered dresses from a woven basket and begin to sew the patches over the tears in the fabric. I recognize a patch of Lyubov’s plaid shirt and another from Viktor’s canvas pants. I picture their bodies lying together on the bank, and I bite my lip to keep from crying again.

  Something tells me crying is both a nonessential and potentially annoying activity this far out in the wild. I imagine that a family who has lived through thirty Siberian winters on the brink of starvation, surrounded by wild animals, has long ago dried their tears.

  I guess my role is to sit here and be glad to be alive, and that is a role I’m fine with, for now. My arm has stopped throbbing, but the homemade cast feels tight and uncomfortable.

  The sunlight grows less intense. The shadows move across the wood shavings on the floor and an open sack of seeds. My bladder has begun to ache and I have ignored it up until now.

  I speak haltingly, apologetically. “Tualyet.” It’s one of the first words I learned in Russian, and I used it to great effect at the airport.

  The women look over at me.

  “Tualyeeeet,” I say, drawing the word out slowly until Clara jumps up and releases a song of comprehension. She calls to her mother in something that sounds much more like Russian, and I realize this girl has two languages. One she uses with the family, and one she apparently shared with her sister. She uses that “special” language to talk to me alone. I am the replacement for a dead girl? And is that a good or a bad thing? The mother answers her in words I can’t understand. She sounds reluctant. Are they afraid I’ll run? My bladder’s about to explode, and while the odor of urine in this shack would not be as unfamiliar as in, say, Martha Stewart’s kitchen, it would still be noticed.

  Some kind of agreement has been reached, because Clara leaps up and holds out her hand to me. Ah, so even out here in remote Siberia, girls go to the bathroom in pairs. I take her hand with my good hand, and she draws me out from the chair, across the spongy floor of the hut, and out into the light.

  I blink. I’m in the middle of a meadow. I see the brothers about twenty yards away, digging in the dirt with axes. The older, mean one has on Viktor’s cap that spells out something in Russian. And he’s giving his brother orders.

  The way he’s already decorated himself with the booty of our camp and the way he orders everyone around point to him as at least the ringleader of the murders. Maybe the others weren’t even there. Maybe he did it all by himself, lurking quietly in the dark and then striking while the others slept innocently at home. That’s my hope at least.

  They look over at me and I quickly glance away, looking back at the hut and its surroundings as Clara stands patiently holding my hand. The hut is blackened at the front, possibly an effect from the fire pit, which has been dug perhaps fifteen feet away. Around the fire, six large stones have been placed. From the looks of them, they have been there a long time, and I guess they must have at one point held the complete family. Now, two of those members are missing.

  I look around, determined to remember every detail. I’m still a reporter. I still have eyes and ears. I’m still alive.

  Around the hut, birch bark containers are piled, as well as bones, pieces of wood, carved troughs, and broken spears. The trash a family makes even out of the wilderness. A hundred yards up the slope from the hut is a garden, filled with crops and surrounded by a sea of tall sunflowers. I am so happy to see anything familiar. The basics. The things that make up an hour or a day, all around the world, even here. Trash, gardens, sunflowers. A girl and her brother. Weave those together with electric lights and indoor plumbing and the internet and a little Rihanna music, and I’m home.

  Clara leads me past the fire pit, where strange things lie in the ashes. Misshapen lumps and wires and blackened glass. I look closer.

  Technology.

  Satellite radios, iPhones, laptops. All crushed and burned. This is what’s left of the society I can no longer reach for. It looks like someone has literally beat them to pieces, although the laptops are still vaguely recognizable. It disturbs me, like these are evil spirits cast away by a church, and I want to speak for my century. Explain that there are both good and bad within those wires and circuits, and that they communicated the voices of the people I loved. These things used to talk to me, like Clara’s missing sister.

  My eyes fill with tears. Clara is upset to notice this. She pulls on my hand, tries to urge me away.

  “Pochemu?” I ask her, pointing down.


  Why?

  She begins to explain in her own language, waving her hands and knitting her brows, occasionally gesturing to the sky, and I can only interpret that their god is displeased by such gadgets.

  As she speaks, I look down the mountain, searching for a pathway. There’s nothing that appears the least bit navigable. Just a seemingly impenetrable mass of trees and briars. I could never force my way through these woods. But how does the family get to the river? I’m still thinking about it when Clara tugs on my good arm to get me moving again.

  I notice butterflies rising blue-winged into the sky as Clara leads me into the meadow and we wade through sunflowers together, hand in hand. Something seems so weird about my predicament—wading through sunflowers on the way to a Siberian outhouse—I can’t help but laugh.

  The sound delights Clara, who releases a few peals of her own to the wind. I wonder if she’s mystified by the moods of the captured stranger, tears and laughter in quick succession.

  We stop to look at the garden. Plants grow in neat rows, and I point at them. Clara immediately understands my question, and she kneels and burrows in the dirt until she takes out the prize: a small potato. I nod. Of course. I’m very hungry, and I don’t mind potatoes at all. Of course I usually like them cut into fries and covered with chili, but something tells me the mother is not much of a short-order cook. Crops of other kinds grow along the edges of the garden, and in the center is an unmistakable patch of hemp. Now I understand how they make their clothing.

  Farther up the hill is another crop, covering a square space about the size of the average kitchen. I can’t tell what it is, although it looks like some kind of flowering grain. Clara looks at me as though to see if the garden gets my approval. I look at her and smile, giving her a thumbs-up. She carefully puts her thumb up, mimicking me. I wonder if she knows what that means. I’ll save teaching her emojis for later.

  “Good!” I say in English, and she whoops with joy. She takes my hand again, and we head to a stream that serves as the border between the meadow and the woods. It’s clear and shallow, tumbling down the mountain out of sight. Clara leads me across a rickety wooden bridge.