Notes from My Captivity(33)

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.