by Kathy Parks
We plunge into a thicket of larch. The forest is dense and overgrown here. We stop, and I gather some berries nearby while Vanya draws nuts and slices of dried potatoes from a sack tied around his waist, and we eat in silence.
Here the trees are three feet in diameter at the base. The forest looks like it’s been standing undisturbed for centuries.
It’s time to bring up my father, but Vanya brings him up first, surprising me.
“Your father,” Vanya says.
“Yes?”
“How did he die?” It is something, over the years, that I learned not to talk about, once I realized that the counselors were not doctors and talking healed nothing in me, just made it real all over again, and that well-meaning friends could hear the story but not feel it, and that I had to disguise everything to tell it, the black despair and the terrible, unrelenting rage so pure and so immediate that the sight of a sorority bumper sticker would make me lose my breath.
So I shut up.
There was a peculiar satisfaction I got from keeping the story to myself because whatever reaction I got was not the right one. Maybe there was no right one.
And now, telling Vanya meant I had to explain so many things first. What my father meant to me. What a district attorney was. What a car was. What a sorority girl was. What an ICU breathing machine looked like. What a court of law was, and what it meant to have a justice system fail you.
There’s no way I can make him picture these things. So I keep the story as simple as I can. Using words and gestures and a stick that was worn down to the nub before I was done drawing and redrawing things in the dirt, I tell him about my father. I say his name. William Cahill.
“Moy otets.”
My father.
“Moy drug.”
My friend.
As I get further into the story, my voice begins to rise, thinking of how he died because of someone else’s stupidity and carelessness.
I draw a car.
“Devushka. Glupaya devchyonka.”
Girl. Stupid girl.
I imitate drinking.
“P’yanaya.”
Drunk.
He nods, but does he really get it, not having ever been drunk, not having ever driven a car or even seen one before in his life, does he get how stupid, how utterly selfish it is to do both at once? I lapse into English now.
“My father was jogging down the road, minding his own business, and she mowed him down like he was just some animal, some thing, do you understand, Vanya? How she took his life? How she took my life? My life was over then. I had to make a new life and the new life is nothing like the old one. It will never be like the old one, does anyone understand?”
I get more and more angry, throwing the stick into the trees, pounding on the dirt meant for drawing, because I am mad, furiously mad, ragingly angry, still just as angry as the moment it happened. And everyone has wanted me to experience that rage, tell them of it in the context of moving on from it, like talking about how much I love my home while I’m packing to leave. I still can’t say the girl’s name because I don’t want to see her as a person, know her a person. I don’t want to believe she has an identity beyond a faceless drunk driver.
I scream and he screams too. He hates her too, hates her purely and with intensity. Finally someone hates her, too, because of what she took from me, because her story beat mine in the courtroom and in the press. Because she still has a father and I do not. I kick trees. He kicks them too. Birch bark crackles and falls, collecting like paint chips at our feet. I scream at the clouds and he screams with me. He hates this girl too, this girl I cannot and will not ever name.
Finally I can tell the story that no one wanted to hear stripped of its politeness and religion and context and civility.
Finally it’s mine.
I lose energy and sink to the ground. He lies next to me, puts his arms around me. He feels the story, the gravity of my loss. He has lost people too, and maybe he can’t name what took them, either.
We turn to face the sky, watching the clouds drift by together. He doesn’t have to tell me he’s sorry. He doesn’t have to talk about the people he has lost. We’ve both lost people. We both wonder why. I’ve never thought of him this way, really, someone who knows me more than my own friends who still have their dads, their brothers, their sisters. Who haven’t known loss. Right now, it just feels right to watch the clouds together, and remember.
We have finally reached our destination. Vanya guides me through a copse of dense vegetation and trees, and we are suddenly out on the other end, looking down at a chasm cut out of the middle of the forest. I look around, amazed. It’s the ruins of some ancient civilization. Crumbling stone columns, carved statues, steps made of granite. Half-fallen structures that must have served as homes. I can see, even through centuries of neglect and overgrowth, the circular grid in which the village was laid out.
I shake my head. “Where did the people go?”
“I don’t know,” he says. He tells me, half with words, half with gestures, the story of chasing an elk all day through the woods with his spear. The elk eluded him but brought him to this ancient place. We wander around the square, whose edges of rock we can still find among the plants and trees.
A statue of some large animal still remains in the center of the square, although it has no head and the front legs have crumpled, giving the feeling of a creature bowing to the passage of time. I reach out and touch the crumbly shoulder. The stone feels like it might turn to dust. I wonder if the ancient people still live here as spirits, if they come to Clara in the middle of the night and beg to have their faces drawn. I wonder if they still have town councils, and if in the middle of this council, my father has appeared, some strange spirit from the other side of the world with a graceful way of speaking, and if he has the same attorney job he had in life, giving opening statements here, his voice echoing in the ruins as it once did in court.
Standing in this place makes me feel that everything is believable and happening at the same time. Our miracles are another dimension’s passing days. Our love is borrowed and returned to those who come before and after us. Everything we believe is something unreal, and everything magical is something we can taste and feel, if we only try. And what we think of as news is only what we think we recognize as true. The real news, the real happenings, occur beyond our discovery. Whole nations have lived and died right under our noses, and we don’t know anything.
I turn to him, stare into his eyes.
“Vanya,” I say. I’ve been cautious about asking for this. Afraid he would say no. But now, I take the chance. “I want to see my father. Tell me how to see him again.”
He blinks, then looks back steadily. His shoulders square. “Do not tell Mama I help you. Do not tell Clara. Do not tell Marat.”
“Oh, sure, Marat and I hang out all the time.”
He raises his eyebrows. Vanya has not yet mastered sarcasm and may never.
“Sorry,” I say. “I promise I won’t tell anyone.”
He takes a deep breath and looks into my eyes. “I see Zoya. I see Papa.”
It’s astonishing to realize that, standing here with the sun on his face and stone monuments of some lost civilization crumbling around us, here in these shadows and light, it would seem stranger if he didn’t see them.
“When?”
He falls silent.
“When?” I ask again.
“Clara knows when they are coming. Clara is special. Zoya was special.”
“Special, how?”
“They see things others don’t see. Like my father. He see things. His people in Moscow don’t like. They call him a devil.”
It dawns on me. The old man did have special powers. He really was afraid to stay in Moscow. Dan was right, again.
“My father leaves,” Vanya continues. “He comes to the river. He tells me one day, ‘I am dying.’ Zoya was alive then. He says, ‘Zoya and I will die.’ I say, ‘Why? You are strong. Zoya is strong.�
� But then winter comes. They die.
“But—four times now—I see them. Clara knows when it is time. She sees signs from the sky. We gather on the stones and we see them. We touch them. Zoya and my father become alive again, because we believe.”
“When will this happen again?” I demand.
Vanya is thinking. He counts on his fingers. Finally he says, “Seven days.”
“Seven days?”
He’s nodding. “Moon will be full.”
“I want to be there.”
He shakes his head. “You cannot. You are not family.”
“I’ll be there.”
“No.” He says it firmly now. I have seven days to work on changing his mind.
When we leave, we are different. We know each other. There are so many things that we will never understand from the world each of us comes from, but those things aren’t important. We have more important things in common: wishes and feelings and prayers and love for things you can see and things you can’t.
I wonder if my father is watching us now. Wonder if he can reach out and touch my face.
Seven days.
We walk back slowly. There’s a crackle in the air. A distant lightning without thunder or rain. This seems to make Vanya anxious.
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
He shakes his head, indicating it’s either nothing or nothing he wants to speak about. But I notice he hurries his steps, and so do I.
It’s late in the afternoon by the time we pass the encampment where the dead crew lie and my stepfather’s grave. As we get within a few hundred yards of the point where the family’s stream feeds into the river, Vanya suddenly stops and stares at the tops of the trees over the mountains, then breaks into a run, forgoing the bank and rushing up the side of the mountain as I scramble to keep up with him, and we rush together toward the hovering plume of smoke.
Twenty-Three
We have no time to talk. By the time we reach the hut, we must grab what we can—brooms and birch bark buckets—and rush to help the family defend their homestead from the fire that crawls down the mountains, through the dry woods, straight for their garden and everything they own. I have never fought a fire before. I have no idea how it can appear in one place and then another. How it can grow and fade and bite your feet and be beaten down and spring back again. Frantically we carry water from the creek in any container we have. We beat at the fire with branches and shovels. We scatter dirt on the flames. Soot fills the air, and the sun sinks in the sky.
Slowly, we inch up the mountain and the fire retreats, only to swell again when a breeze comes up and fans it. The woods, dry all summer, are crackly with dead leaves and bark. It is a forest full of tinder.
Smoke burns my eyes and chokes my throat. My hands and arms turn black. It’s like being inside a chimney. I grab a bucket from Gospozha and hurl it at the blaze. Marat shouts orders and the family moves into a line, Clara at the edge of the stream and Marat and Vanya at the front of the fire, and we pass the homemade buckets as quickly as we can. I’m exhausted, but we can’t stop. We battle for hours as the sky grows dark and our only light is the fire trying to eat us. Gradually, though, it begins to fade, sparking up again and then relentlessly beaten back, and now it’s finally just a line of embers and a forest full of smoke. Together we move through the trees, stomping on whatever glows red and threatens us when the wind brings reinforcement.
It’s over. The fire is dead. My throat is scorched. Tears of pain run from my eyes. My skin is blistered. My back is in knots from lifting buckets of water. We start to go back to the campsite, but we are too exhausted to go more than a few feet, and collapse in the remains of the faded sunflowers, five ash-blackened creatures lying as though dead among those wilted blooms. We sleep that way, in the positions that we fell.
We awaken at dawn and look at one another. Clara smiles. Soot is caked in her nostrils. Her teeth are stained black. She points, laughing at the way her family looks. One by one, we join in the laughter, even Marat. We all look ridiculous and we are all alive.
We finally get the strength to stagger back to the hut. Gospozha lights the stove and Clara grinds the grain with a mortar and pestle and I go to fetch the river water that, when heated and added to the mixture, will turn it into gruel. Vanya lights a fire in the pit outside among the stones, a friendly fire that knows its place and does no harm. As the gruel cooks, we wash our arms and faces and hair in the stream. When Marat washes his beard, black water drains onto his shirt in a spreading stain. We all walk back to the hut. Gospozha stirs the gruel until it is soft. A measure of salt from the dwindling supply is added to the gruel in an amount that I know means celebration.
“We kicked ass,” I announce in English. No one understands, but it had to be said.
The meal is divided into five bowls. The family takes their positions on the stones, and I take my usual position on the stone behind them. They bow their heads and Marat gives a prayer of gratitude and relief. Just as I begin to take the first spoonful of gruel, Vanya sets down his bowl and stands up. He leaves the circle of stones and walks over to me. He extends his hand. I don’t know what he’s doing, but I take it, and he pulls me to my feet. His family has been chattering nonstop among themselves about the miracle of their deliverance, but now they fall silent as Vanya leads me back into their circle and sits me down next to him, on the stone where Grigoriy used to sit, or Zoya. The Osinovs stare at me. Clara’s eyes are wide. Marat opens his mouth to say something. His mother shoots him a glare and he closes it again.
We all eat together.
The days until the miracle pass slowly.
I can’t stop thinking about what Vanya said about his father, about mine. I’m not feeling so good lately. My skin is peeling. I have sores on my feet. My teeth hurt. I know I’m missing some essential vitamins and minerals that could be found at any GNC, if any were local to the middle of nowhere.
Marat’s nose is blistered, as are Vanya’s hands. Gospozha thrusts a clean needle through the blisters and presses on them until they drain.
And we go back to work. We have to. When we look up, we see the first snowfall on top of the mountains. We have firewood and pine nuts and buckets and buckets of potatoes to gather. Vanya manages to kill another rabbit. It doesn’t last long.
My arm feels weak but serviceable. Summer is passing, in a way that summer does everywhere—getting warmer and warmer until the day it will collapse and fade. More and more, I’m beginning to understand the gist, if not the details, of the family’s conversation. I know they worry about Marat’s last unsuccessful hunting trip and the effect the dry summer is having on the crops.
A bear has been hanging around the main river. They wonder if it’s a sign of something, an omen. They see things in the sky: objects, lights. I know they are not pleased with this year’s potato crop, and they dread the coming winter. Marat accidentally damaged the family Bible while trying to turn a page. The fragile state of the family book disturbs them. It is all they have of the word of God.
Gospozha is a mystery. She is very thin and yet incredibly strong. I’ve seen her run through the meadow with a full pail of water and not spill a drop. She’s an avid fisherwoman but catches very little. She hums through her nose. She is a teller of stories, and as I listen, night after night, I start to understand that many of the stories are the same story told a different way.
There is Vanya’s birth, which was difficult and almost killed her. There was the time Clara wandered away as a little girl and was not found for two days and yet was smiling, curled up somewhere, living on berries. And the terrifying tale of the time a white wolf jumped at the old man and would have landed on him had Marat not killed him with a spear through the heart. She is obviously revered and adored by her family. Marat is the leader, but she can cancel that leadership anytime she wants and put him in his place, take his car keys, so to speak, and show him who’s boss.
Marat is still scowly and unfriendly to me. Also, he’s super
opinionated. When Clara reads aloud from the Bible, Marat will correct her from across the room. Evidently there are right ways to harvest and pray and hunt and whittle, and Marat is certain he knows them all. And yet, he is tender with his sister. He never goes to sleep without kissing his mother good night. And I have seen him fish meat from his own bowl with a spoon and dump it into one of the women’s bowls. He even puts up with Clara’s playfulness. While the rest of the family, heads bowed, listens to one of his interminably long family dinner prayers, Clara will open one eye and spider her fingers down the table and up his arm. Eyes still closed, he will patiently catch her hand to stop it and hold it steady, his prayer never missing a beat.
It is clear he still doesn’t like me and considers me a danger. Sometimes he’ll point at me and then point out the window into the sky while spewing in Russian. They’re going to come for her and discover us. His meaning is clear even if every word is not.
And Vanya. I woke up last night and sat up against the wall. Saw that he was awake and looking at me across the dark room from the floor where he lay next to his brother.
And we just looked at each other over the the sleeping bodies of the family. And a warmth went through me, down my arms, into my hands. All this time, I’ve been pretending I like him. Using him to get back to Colorado, back to my father. But what if I do really feel something for him?
Three days now, until the moon is full.
The nights are getting cold. In the daytime, the sun fills less of the canyon by the river, and fishing is a shadowy business. I’ve learned to cast nets, a chore that both the men and women share. Nine times out of ten, they are empty when I bring them up. Vanya communicates to me—in that hybrid language we call Vandrienne, Russian and English and gestures and expressions, a language choking on the dust of trampled grammar but in which meaning is miraculously preserved—that in the old days, the fish were plentiful but somehow they went away. They are like ghosts now, and their silvery fins are greeted with joy and respect. Every bit of them is eaten. The head and the flesh and even certain organs. The skeleton and fins are boiled into a soup stock.
