Notes from My Captivity(46)

“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 in 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.