Notes From My Captivity

by Kathy Parks

  I drop my armload of wood. I recognize that tent. It was Lyubov’s. The brothers look up and notice me. Clara appears confused.

  Lyubov was proud of that tent. It was brand-new. Something to stand up to the weather and the chill of the Siberian mountains. She died before she could spend her third night in that tent.

  It’s true, I can’t prove the Osinovs—or at least Marat—are killers, but the evidence is pretty damning: the missing salt packages from my backpack and all the booty from the campsite are now here, the clothing of the dead cut up and sewn onto the tattered dresses and trousers of the family, technology shattered, tools appropriated, and I am here helping them, and this tent seems obscene to me, and what they did to get it.

  “That’s not your tent,” I say, pointing. “That belonged to Lyubov. She had a name. They all had names.”

  Marat and Vanya exchange glances.

  “Lyubov,” I say. “Her tent. Not yours.”

  I walk away, wading through sunflowers, and keep walking to the place where the birch trees grow in a circle. I stand a respectful distance from the graves and say their names.

  Zoya. Grigoriy.

  Whatever killed them is the worst story of this family, and this family, in turn, is my worst story. I will try to keep my wits about me, try not to make waves, but I will never forget who they are.

  Sixteen

  Today marks a week with the Osinovs. I have learned to walk past the tent full of firewood. I have watched Vanya and Marat try on the dead men’s boots. I’ve seen Clara carefully shatter the lenses of Sergei’s tinted sunglasses with a rock and then arrange the jagged shapes into the irregular petals of a flower. They have also taken apart the knapsacks, except for the one which they use to gather nuts.

  I learn to avert my eyes. Think of other things. Breathe. Smile. Now is no time to avenge their deaths. Now is the time to join. To make myself useful. I’ve taught myself to put wood in that tent as though it were any other shelter in the world. Wood-gathering is something that I can do to help. So is sweeping the area in the front of the house. So is clearing dishes. So is grinding pine nuts under a stone.

  And so is working in the garden.

  The garden amazes me. It’s about the size of a large dance floor and crawls up the side of the mountain in neat rows. Potatoes, hemp, carrots. Onions and parsley and peas. Every day, the women go into the garden, tilling and turning the soil, fussing over the sickly plants, expressing happiness over the healthy ones, and pulling weeds. Every morning, there are more weeds. Weeds are universal pests.

  I have one good hand to pull weeds and I have gotten pretty fast at it, but not even close to how fast and efficient the others are. I really miss my recorder. Now all the notes are in my head and that is not a very reliable machine. I do the best I can to observe and remember. If by chance I survive this ordeal, this is going to make one hell of a story.

  Gospozha uses a hoe that consists of a carved wooden stake tipped by a bit of iron. She turns the earth, singing. Clara joins in. I can’t understand the words, but the reverence in them leaves me no doubt it’s a hymn to their god. I hear the same song so much that I learn the sounds. Finally, on the seventh day, I decide to sing along, joining in lustily.

  The women stop singing and stare at me. I never was much of a singer. My off notes may have killed something vital in the garden, or maybe they are just astonished at my attempts at harmonizing. My voice trails off. Now there’s just quiet. Birds calling in the distance.

  “Sorry,” I say. “That’s what Auto-Tune is for.”

  They exchange glances. We all go back to work. They have stopped singing, maybe afraid they’ll encourage me.

  Early that afternoon, Vanya ambles into the garden. He kneels next to me and silently starts pulling weeds. This seems to be a source of great merriment to his sister, who immediately begins laughing at him and speaking to him in a teasing voice. My guess is that the men never usually work in the garden. At first he ignores her, shaking the dirt off the roots of the weeds before throwing them to the side. Finally the torment becomes too much and he snaps something at her angrily, gets up, and stalks away as Clara laughs merrily.

  “Perestan,” Gospozha admonishes Clara as Vanya disappears into the sunflowers. Stop it. She shakes her head. I see a hint of a smile. Sometimes I think the old lady actually likes me. The way she gently checks my homemade cast and presses upon me some kind of milky substance in a birch bark cup, all the while tapping my broken arm lightly and repeating, “Sil’ny, sil’ny.” Strong, strong. And yet, other times she gives me a look of sadness and fear. I wish I knew what she is thinking.

  When the garden work is done, I go farther into the meadow, following the scraping sound to find Vanya hard at work hollowing out a canoe from a section of thick log. He’s taken his shirt off and I’m amazed at the shape he’s in. The chiseled muscles of the chest and arms. I imagined Russian men as hairy all over and am surprised to find he just has a small dark patch on his chest. He looks up at me and drops his tool. He scrambles to put on his shirt.

  “Sorry,” I mumble in English, and turn to go.

  “Nyet, ostan’sya,” he says. No, stay. He looks at me a moment, picks up his tool, and begins to scrape the wood, hollowing out the log.

  I watch as long shavings curl and fall away. He’s perspiring, sweat running down his face. His hair is wet. His motions are careful and methodical. I can’t help thinking, This is the boat that will someday bring me home. And here is the man who will take me.

  “Rybachit’?” I say in his language. I make a motion like I’m hauling a fish in.

  He lets go a stream of Russian then, at what must be my confused expression. He puts away his tool, takes up a stick, and kneels on the ground. I watch as he draws a line in the dirt, then the figure of a boat on top of it. He points in the direction of the hut and makes a small x below the river. He traces his stick down the line drawing of the river, then draws, very carefully, a familiar-looking animal. He’s not as good as his sister but better than me.

  I plot my next move. We’re going to need some kind of way of communicating beyond gestures and smiles.

  “Deer,” I say.

  Hey, you’ve got to start somewhere with flirtatious banter.

  He looks at me, tests out the word. “Dee-uh.”

  “Deer,” I correct him. I hold his stare a little longer.

  “Deer,” he says.

  I smile at him. After a moment, he gives me a slight smile back.

  I make the motion of a spear, throw it into the air, then move my fingertip from the drawing of the boat forward a couple of feet. “The deer are farther upriver,” I say in English.

  He nods, at the motion if not the words.

  Our eyes lock again. We’ve communicated. Part English, part line drawing, part Russian, part goodwill, part pure effort. Now that we’re having a conversation, sort of, I decide to keep going. After all, conversations lead to feelings, and feelings lead to Boulder, Colorado. Or so I hope.

  I search for the phrase I’m looking for.

  “Skol’ko tebe let?”

  How old are you?

  He smiles. “Dvadtsat.”

  Twenty years old.

  He points at me. “Skol’ko tebe let?”

  “Semnadtsat.”

  Seventeen.

  I feel a surge of triumph, as though communication is a fire we’ve started out of breath and moss in the middle of a snowstorm. We’re leaning close over our marks in the dirt. I do feel a certain electricity coming from Vanya. He’s interested in me. My plan is working. All I have to do is act interested and be the only captive female in eighteen hundred square miles.

  Vanya stands and motions me to come with him. I hobble after him into the woods. After a few feet he stops. An enormous pine log, stripped of bark, lies horizontally across a series of stumps on the forest floor. It is sanded and looks coated with some kind of polish. There are marks on the log that begin at the bottom and extend upward as far as I
can see.

  Vanya moves his finger up the marks until he finds a name.

  Clara.

  He looks at me, folds his arms and moves them as though rocking a little baby. I realize that the pine tree is a calendar, counting back the days. And on this day, in a moment of time that is now recollected in wood, was this when Clara was born? I can’t be sure.

  His finger continues to trace the marks, tiny slivers in the surface, dozens upon dozens of cuts the width of a sewing needle, all of them in neat little groups.

  He comes to another name. His own.

  Vanya.

  He looks at me. He continues down the log until he finds another mark. Next to that mark is written Zoya. He looks at me sadly, puts his hands together, resting his head on them, closing his eyes as though he’s asleep.

  I think I understand. On this day in history, his little sister died.

  He moves his finger until he finds his father’s name again. Looks at me. Shakes his head. So the sister died and then the father. Children should never die before their parents. Parents should never die before their children.

  “Kak?” I ask.

  How?

  He says something rapidly.

  “Ya ne ponimayu,” I tell him.

  I do not understand.

  He tries some more words.

  “On bolel,” he says.

  I nod. Sick.

  He covers his mouth and begins to cough, demonstrating. In the back of my mind I chalk up one more similarity between his world and mine: in the deep woods of Siberia, in the coffee shops of Boulder, it’s polite and medically sound to cover your mouth when you cough.

  He keeps coughing. The sound goes deeper. It’s a dangerous baritone now. I’ve heard that sound in sad movies before the nurse comes in and shakes her head. Finally his hand falls away. His eyes water.

  We look at each other a long moment. Now my eyes are watering. I forget my plan for a moment. Maybe it’s the pure, crisp air, but his grief buzzes out of him, fills me. Another thing we share. I wonder if he wandered the woods, calling for his lost people, trying to bring them back with magic.

  Everywhere in the world, magic works and doesn’t work and no one’s ever figured out how to make it more consistent, not with technology or potions or prayers.

  Suddenly a harsh burst of Russian fills the air. Vanya stiffens. Marat comes out of the trees. He’s furious, gesturing at me and then the log. I don’t have to know Russian to know that this is a sacred place, like the graves, and Vanya has let me intrude.

  Unlike Clara, Vanya doesn’t back down. He shouts back at his brother. The two of them draw closer together, their voices heated. Marat’s fingers curl into fists. The cords stand out in his neck and I don’t know what to do: apologize or run or simply stand there.

  Finally I hobble back to the meadow. I can still hear them arguing from the edge of the garden.

  I open my eyes. The hut is dark. The little girl is back. Moonlight streams through the windows and lights up her hair as she crouches near me, smiling.

  “Privyet, Zoya,” I whisper. Hello. She’s familiar to me now, a tiny replica of Clara, but even lighter, more angelic. As though Clara and a rainbow were combined.

  “Byd’ ostoroznha,” she whispers. She reaches out to touch my face and disappears, leaving just darkness and the breathing of her family.

  He is coming.

  Long after she has faded into the darkness of the hut, I stay awake, eyes wide in the darkness. Nothing in my life so far has equipped me for a Zen riddle from a ghost while I’m lying captive in a dark hut in Siberia. I missed that lecture. That was never supposed to be on the final. I’m still astonished at her presence, so real and so magical and strange. But now I’m more intrigued by her message. What could it possibly mean?

  Who is coming?

  I want to sleep, but I’m afraid she’ll come back to me, crouch down, and whisper it in my ear again. He is coming, he is coming, he is coming.

  Seventeen

  Who is coming?

  I don’t understand. And I don’t understand if it’s a warning or the promise of a gift. Alongside all the terror and the discomfort is this wonder, this mystery. This little girl must be the dead sister, Zoya. And, like Clara, she seems to love me. But why?

  I have to tell Vanya about this. I have to let him know that his sister is alive. At least alive in the sense that she can speak and appear in a room. I’m not sure how it will be received, or if it will make me something terrible and frightening. Maybe it will even make Vanya not like me. Which means the end.

  Because I can see the end coming.

  The truth is, even with the food from our expedition, there is not enough food for the family. Marat grumbles when he sees me get my share. And my share is very little. They parcel out the potatoes and the root vegetables carefully, and the only animals Vanya has managed to find were the rabbits he killed on the first night. Vanya and his brother go fishing in the river with homemade poles but return with nothing. And this is the summertime. What will winter be like? Yuri Androv told a grim tale of the family half-starved and eating their shoes. And this is a family who grew up in the woods, trained in survival. What will it mean for a girl from Boulder, Colorado, who once came unglued at the age of thirteen when her iPhone was taken away?

  What if I start coughing and can’t stop? What if my cough deepens and what if one day I’m appearing in a dream to my poor mother?

  The next morning, breakfast is a potato gruel that barely covers the bottom of the bowl. Marat growls at me and it startles me. I try to scurry to my seat, get tripped up by my tether, and fall down. The contents of the bowl soak my shirt and I gasp. I sit up, chest on fire, pulling at my shirt as Clara rushes to me.

  Vanya’s on his feet. He’s angry now. I’ve made him angry. He doesn’t want a stupid, clumsy girlfriend who can’t carry gruel across the floor. He points at me, shouting something. I pick up “girl” and “stupid” and I cringe.

  But then his finger swings. He’s pointing at Marat. He’s yelling at his brother. Marat yells back at him. They stand up and scream at each other face-to-face as Clara waves her arms, shouting encouragement at Vanya:

  “Vanya prav! Vanya prav!”

  Vanya is right! Vanya is right!

  Gospozha sets down her spoon. “Khvatit!”

  Be quiet!

  But Vanya’s all riled up. He grabs a knife from the table and approaches me, his eyes wild. I don’t know this Vanya, and I try to move out of the way. He leans down to me.

  Before I can react, he grabs my tether and cuts it through. My knees fall to either side. I’m free.

  Marat’s face is bright red. He releases a stream of Russian words, so hot and angry I’d need a hot, angry dictionary to translate them. He storms past me and out of the hut.

  Silence now. Clara picks up my bowl. Vanya unties each tether from my legs, one and then the other. I rub my legs, look up at him.

  “Ya ostayus,” I tell him.

  I stay.

  I lack the vocabulary and the stupidity to elaborate: I stay because I know damn well you’ll hunt me down, and what chances do I have in the wilderness anyway? I stay because I have a better plan, one that involves being your friend and becoming your pretend girlfriend so that I can get the hell out of here before winter.

  Vanya looks at me. “Khorosho.”

  Good.

  Gospozha says something quietly, wearily, and her children go back to the table and finish their breakfast. There’s nothing for me. That is all the food there was.

  It is on the eleventh day that I finally prove my worth.

  It’s early in the morning, just after a breakfast of gruel. My clothes are loose on me. I dream of turkey sausage and pancakes. And yet I act grateful, humble, like a good guest should. That’s what I want to become to them—a guest. Unlike prisoners, guests can leave.

  Meanwhile, I’m learning as much Russian as I can from Vanya and Clara. I’m picking up a lot of words. And every once i
n a while, I manage a passable sentence. When I’m not learning Russian or building my sham relationship with Vanya, I try to mentally take note of everything around me. I’ll need details for my article. And the book that follows. I want to remember everything about this little world, even as I plan to leave it behind.

  This is the most resourceful family I’ve ever met. I watch them reuse thread, patch their ragged clothes, make spearheads out of rocks. I watch the canoe take shape as Vanya and Marat work on it every day using old axes, their motions as careful as if they were making a giant watch. Chores seem very parceled out here: the women in charge of gathering firewood, cooking, and sewing, and the men in charge of hunting, fishing, repairing the house, boatbuilding, and chopping wood. I’ve tried my best to help out with the chores, and to stay out of Marat’s way. Lately he’s begun playing horrible tunes on some kind of handmade wooden flute. I think they’re supposed to be hymns or maybe Nine Inch Nails. Whatever they are, they sound like what hell must sound like to a new, disoriented soul. Late one afternoon, when he was playing his flute outside, I came out a polite distance away and sat myself down to listen, swaying to the music as though it actually had a melody. Marat glowered at me for a few moments, then suddenly threw his flute at my head. I ducked just in time, got up, and beat it out of there.

  So much for that.

  And Vanya. What interests him? Seemingly everything. He reads the old books in the cabin voraciously. He makes tools and slingshots. He plays with frogs. He hunts. He fishes. He can even weave baskets out of grass—which is evidently women’s work, the way Marat, from his tone, makes fun of him. I suspect Vanya’s mind is a teeming place, filled with crazy dreams and wild plans and ghosts and monsters and gods. I want to get to know this mind. I need to get to know it if I ever expect to know him. But that’s no easy task. I know only a handful of Russian words, and I need to spend more time with him.