Notes From My Captivity

by Kathy Parks

  All of a sudden, the chance of that falls in my lap in the most random of ways.

  On this day, I’ve helped clear the dishes, and Gospozha is sitting on a bench attempting to thread a needle under the flood of morning light. I watch as she tries again and again. Finally, Clara takes over. Both women squint and hold the needle and thread right up to their eyes, so close I think they’ll puncture themselves. They murmur, as though trying to urge the tip of the thread through the eye. Even Clara gives up in frustration. I’m not sure whether it’s through bad diet or bad genes, but the entire family seems to struggle a bit with their vision. Marat holds his whittle stick close to his face to examine his progress; when Vanya reads, his nose practically touches the page.

  And I realize that the Osinovs seem to measure the precious salt grains by feeling them between their thumb and finger, not by sight. But how can Clara make those amazingly detailed drawings?

  It’s yet another mystery. Not surprisingly, I have no answers.

  I approach Clara. “Mogu li ya pomoch?”

  Can I help?

  She relents. In two seconds, I thread the needle and hand it back to Clara. She draws the thread taut to show her mother that victory has been achieved, and the two of them chatter excitedly. Apparently, I’ve actually done something right. Who would have known that threading a needle would bring you such praise in this corner of the world? If I read the bottom of an eye chart, they would make me a god.

  Gospozha gives an order and Clara bolts from the hut and returns with a small sack in one hand. She empties a quantity of grain out on the flat table. It makes a small hill, which she flattens out with the palm of her hand into the shape and level of a sand painting. The women look at me expectantly. I look back at them, not sure what I’m supposed to do.

  Clara coos me an explanation. I stare at her blankly. Finally she gets up and returns with one of the flashlights, shining it on the grains. I stare into them, trying to see whatever they’re talking about. I narrow my eyes. Some of the grains are black. I begin sorting out the black grains from the light brown ones, putting them into their own neat pile.

  Apparently I’m doing something right because a delighted murmur rises from the women. When I am finished, Clara scrapes the black grains off the table with the side of her hand, gathering them in her palm and rushing out the door. After she leaves, Gospozha keeps sending me glances of approval. I suppose, in the Russian outback world, separating bad seed from good is like playing a board game by the rules. Family harmony ensues.

  When Clara comes back in, the men troop after her. They lean over, inspecting the grain. There is a general family discussion in which they seem to forget I’m even there, but the tone seems happy, excited. As though they are discussing a warm Christmas. Marat goes over to the hearth and bends down beside it, retrieving a small box made of birch bark. It’s grimy and streaked with black from the soot. He carries it to the table and takes out a chunk of flint. Marat looks at me, and it feels strange, watching his rigid face register a glimmer of enthusiastic intensity before it passes and his expression goes blank again. He holds the flint up to the window, turning it so that the stone catches the light in shimmers, studying my face to see if I understand.

  I don’t.

  It’s a rock, turned to the light. Glinting. I shake my head and turn my palms upward, feeling helpless and frustrated. Moments ago I was a hero. Now I’m an idiot who can’t understand a simple rock language.

  Clara has a brainstorm. She takes the flint from Marat, grabs my good hand, and leads me out of the hut, into the clearing by the side of the outside fireplace. She puts the piece of flint down near some stones and then backs up, sweeping her hand over the area and then looking at me expectantly. From a distance, the flint doesn’t look much different from the surrounding rock, but when I move my head I catch the glitters of it. I look at Clara. She looks at me. As though she’s willed it, I finally understand: the Osinovs want me to find flint for them. Evidently it’s a precious resource, the way they keep it in a box and treat it like gold.

  I nod, and she whoops and runs back to the hut with the news.

  I thought I had trouble understanding my new family in Boulder when Dan and Jason moved in. That family was a walk in the park compared to my new hosts. Still I feel I have achieved some kind of major Viktory.

  A few minutes later, Vanya has fetched what looks like a very old pickax, the handle worn and the blade rusty, and the two of us are on a quest. In addition to his other roles, Vanya must be the finder of flint.

  I’m overjoyed at my good fortune. In those blogs about how to find a boyfriend, they never say, Have incredibly sharp eyesight. But they should have. Now, amazingly, the family is letting me go off alone with Vanya.

  I’m determined to make some progress with him. I need to speed things up on this whole romance. Cold weather is coming. And my empty stomach hurts. I want him to believe I’m hungry for love, but the truth is, I’m just hungry.

  The air is warm. The mountain is alive with flowers. Birds call, flying low over our heads. I duck when one swoops down especially close, and Vanya laughs. I like hearing his laugh. It’s shy and high-pitched, like his younger sister’s. I’m happy to get away from the hut and have some time alone out here, where I can pretend I’m out hiking in Boulder and a hot cup of cocoa waits for me an hour away. Vanya, it turns out, can make a sport out of anything. The woods have no internet, no Grand Theft Auto or Minecraft, so he makes do with whatever he finds. He shows me he can juggle rocks. He paces off and hurls them at saplings, where they hit their mark every time. He swings from branches. He makes a conch shell out of his folded hands and scares a bird off out of a low-growing bush. He is clearly flirting with me.

  Maybe.

  I point up at the retreating bird.

  “Bird,” I say.

  He seems delighted by the English word. “Burr,” he repeats. “Birddddd.” His eyebrows furrow as he forms the hard “D.”

  “Khorosho,” I say. “Good.”

  “Goodddd.” He points at another bird. “Ptitsa.”

  I sound it back at him until it’s right, and that’s how we spend the next hour, hiking through the mountains and sharpening the languages between us, simple words that one day might join together into sentences, rough and scratchy but usable, like his hemp clothing.

  Tree, blue, red, cold, wind, rain. We repeat the words back and forth, Russian and English.

  He teaches me some words I already know, but I play along: mother, father, sister, brother, baby. When he repeats the last word, slowly for me, he rocks a pretend baby in his arms, and I imagine him performing that very task for his own little sisters, and it is with a sharp stab that I realize that one of those sisters, one that he knew every day of his life, is now gone. He looks up, notices my sad stare, and drops the pretend baby to hold up his hands.

  “Chto takoye?” he asks.

  What’s wrong?

  “Nothing,” I say in English. “You just dropped the baby.”

  We’re facing each other now. We point to each other as we continue learning: hair, arm, splint, broken, eyes, knuckles, and—I stop now; I know what I’m doing; just elect me Permafrost Tease of the Year—and slowly I reach out and touch my fingers to his lips.

  “Lips,” I say, touching one and then the other. They are remarkably soft after a life spent in such brutal conditions.

  He’s looking at me. He doesn’t say the word back to me in Russian. It’s as though he’s hypnotized. I must admit the feeling of his lips is rather nice. And we’re all alone out here, no Gospozha, no Clara, no Marat and his tragic flute. Gently I stroke his beard.

  “Bearddd,” I say. “Beard.”

  Suddenly he grabs my hand and pulls it away from his face. He starts walking again without speaking. I guess I’ve gone too far. Maybe touching a beard is second base in this country. I’m a Siberian tramp, a wilderness whore. I follow him until finally he slows his steps and I catch up to him. I want to tell him I�
��m sorry or explain myself or something, but I’m not sure if I should. I am hopeless at seduction. I will die this winter and be buried here and my tombstone with spell out, in Russian words: Cock-blocked herself, starved, froze.

  Finally he points to a sunflower.

  “Podsolnukh,” he says, which either means “sunflower” or “a skank like you would blow a Yeti for a boiled potato.”

  I nod. “Sunflower,” I say. I’m going to have to move slowly with Vanya, I can tell. Tits and ass maybe shouldn’t be on the lesson plan for a while.

  I go back to pointing at things and saying their English words. A little more friendship building here before I attempt romance again. We reach a stretch of rocky ground where the vegetation is sparse.

  He stops, shows me his piece of flint, then sweeps his hand over the area. I scan the rocks, searching for a telltale glimmer as Vanya waits expectantly. I squint. I thought it would be easier, that I would triumphantly bring him to the miracle rock of fire and warmth and I’d be a hero. I look at Vanya.

  “Kremen’?” he asks.

  I don’t know what he’s saying, but I imagine it means, “So you are not useful after all?”

  I shrug.

  We walk another thirty yards and stop. I look again. This process repeats itself over the next hour, and I begin to understand why flint is so precious to this family—it is extremely rare and perhaps even extinct. A dodo bird of a rock. But suddenly I see something: a glimmer up ahead and off to the right. I start toward it, Vanya following me, his steps quickening as he gets close enough to recognize it.

  He kneels reverently beside the rock. I sink down next to him.

  “Khorosho!” he cries. “Khorosho!”

  I raise a hand to high-five him.

  He stares at me.

  “High-five,” I say weakly, then, “Never mind.” I lower my hand. “Khorosho. Good.”

  He smiles. “Good.”

  He rises and gets to work, bringing his pickax down again and again, the heavy crack of metal against rock ringing through the forest, until he’s freed a small chunk of the flint. We look for another hour, but I can’t find any more. He says something in Russian that has a forgiving tone and holds up his sack and the heavy bulge the flint makes in it.

  “Good,” he says. Then he adds in rough but understandable English, “Let’s go home.”

  I stop. I stare at him. I have never taught him those words.

  “Hey, what the hell?” I sputter in English. “Where did you learn that?” By what sorcery has a Russian boy learned English in the middle of the Siberian woods?

  * * *

  People ask me what I would say if I met the Osinovs.

  I’d simply shake hands with each of them and say: Thank you for existing.

  Dr. Daniel Westin

  New York Times article

  * * *

  Eighteen

  Another week passes. My homemade cast itches my arm terribly. It’s a long way from fiberglass. I find sticks in the woods to scratch under the cast.

  I am officially missing now, along with Dan and the crew. We have not arrived back at the mouth of the river; we have not gone back to the hotel; no texts or emails or phone calls have been made. The secrets of our whereabouts lie buried in twisted metal. The signals are like flat lines on a heart monitor.

  Yes, my mother—and perhaps Lyubov’s mother, Viktor’s mother, Sergei’s mother, too—has no doubt sounded the alarm. The university has been notified, the US Embassy in Moscow. We’re probably on the news. A search party is being organized. But things are not so simple. I am a tiny speck in an almost endless wilderness. The river is nearly unnavigable. And no one knows exactly where Dan was going because he was so paranoid about someone else getting there first, he kept his planned route to himself. The chances of me being found are about as good as those of this family being found—and since 99 percent of the world thinks they’re a fairy tale, I have a pretty great chance of staying lost.

  And so, the only strategy that makes sense is my own—to continue to make Vanya my friend, then my boyfriend, then my savior. He’s obsessed with learning my language, pestering me with questions—How you say this?—and I can’t help noticing, again, that his English is advancing far faster than my Russian. How is that possible? How does he suddenly come up with words I haven’t taught him, then retreat as if he’s been caught with his hand in a cookie jar? Has he ever even seen a cookie jar?

  Late summer makes the woods beautiful even as it carries the warning, in the early morning frost, of the coming fall and winter. I can’t get over how clean everything is, the smell of the plants, the variety of birdsong. The trees tower above me. Even the sky looks different, foreign, like the kind of sky that hangs over some undiscovered planet. I’ve never seen a plane in this sky, and I think the winters must be terrible indeed to keep humanity from wandering up this far, to see such beauty. I’m afraid of such a winter and if such a winter comes, which it will, and I am still here, I will be toast. A popsicle of a teenage reporter, frozen stiff on the ground.

  I’ve gone a little feral. My hair is tangled. My clothes are filthy. I feel microscopic creatures crawling on my skin at night, and in the morning I scratch new welts. I imagine the critters passing the word down the line, using tiny iPhones: American flesh, come and get it! Clara and her mother go to the riverbank to bathe, in a place where the water pools and is warmed by the sun. One day I go with them, and leave my clothes on the riverbank as we wade in together. I feel shy, naked. Mostly because I am naked. The water is freezing. The women wash themselves with some kind of weeds whose roots make a lather. They offer them to me. The lather will never be bottled and sold at Nordstrom. But I feel so clean afterward that it is hard for me to put on my clothes. It turns out, though, that Clara and Gospozha have a surprise for me. After they dress, Clara reaches into a burlap bag and pulls out a set of jeans and a T-shirt, handing them to me. I stare at them, dumbfounded. These were the clothes that were in my knapsack when we overturned in the river. Somehow they have been recovered. I put them on, stretching the sleeve carefully over my cast. The T-shirt has the name of a coffee shop in Boulder.

  Tears fill my eyes. I miss that coffee shop. I miss my mother. I miss Dan. I even miss my idiot stepbrother.

  Clara and Gospozha seem confused by my reaction. They exchange anxious glances.

  “Spasibo, spasibo,” I assure them.

  Thank you, thank you.

  I have to leave. I can’t live here with them. Can’t die here with them. Don’t they notice how thin I am? How thin they are?

  I smile at them.

  Every day, the family seems a bit more accepting of me, a bit more unguarded.

  Except for Marat.

  If anything, he seems more agitated around me. Angry. As though I had airlifted myself out here and plunked myself down in his life just to annoy him. One night I wake up from a dead sleep and look straight into his eyes. He’s on his side, lying next to me, facing me, his eyes dark and unblinking in the moonlight. There’s nothing flirtatious in them, nothing warm or friendly. This is a threat. My throat goes dry, heart starts up. He can’t strangle me here, can he, with his family sleeping all around us? I shut my eyes tight, lie there shivering until I finally hear his breathing withdraw, and when I open my eyes again, I’m staring only at a wall.

  I’m shaken by the weird encounter, but decide not to tell Clara or Vanya about it. What good would it do me? Instead I resolve not to get in Marat’s way and hope he decides I’m not worth harassing.

  Two days later, I’ve been sent to gather tubers in the woods. They grow under some bushes with red berries on them that, through Gospozha’s pantomime, I’ve been advised are poisonous. But the tubers themselves are harmless, and when added to soup, taste a bit like onions.

  I kneel on the ground, still cold in the early morning, and use a small rusted trowel to find the tubers, my good hand moving speedily and efficiently. I’ve done this a few times now, getting better at gatherin
g them every single time. Dan would have been proud of my trowel-manship.

  I try not to think about Dan and where he is now, submerged in freezing water in his red jacket. There’s nothing I can do about it.

  Not yet.

  When the bucket is half-full, I decide that’s enough. I can always come back for more later. I rise and brush the dirt off my knees.

  I hear footsteps, and look up expecting Vanya or Clara, but it’s Marat who emerges from the trees and lumbers toward me. The hand holding my bucket trembles, but I force myself to face him as he approaches me.

  My father once told me during a camping trip to put my arms in the air and make myself look big if a mountain lion ever stalked me. I don’t think this is going to work for Marat. Neither will climbing a tree or curling into a ball.

  His eyes are staring into mine, and now he’s so close that I can sniff the musky odor of his body.

  “Privyet, Marat,” I say in greeting. My voice sounds weak and scared.

  He comes closer.

  I take a step backward. The bucket of tubers slides out of my hand and falls to the ground. I keep backing up. Marat keeps moving forward. Finally my back comes to rest against a tree. I can go no farther. I decide to try to reason with him.

  “Ty khochesh, chtoby ya ushla?”

  You want me to leave?

  He doesn’t blink. His eyes seem to blacken.

  “Ty ne mozhesh uyti,” he growls.

  You can’t leave.

  I recognize something in his eyes. It’s not anger. It’s fear. I realize that he’s afraid if I leave, I’ll spread the word about the Osinovs, and his family will be discovered. Then what will become of them?