Notes from My Captivity(32)

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.