Notes from My Captivity(49)

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.