Notes from My Captivity(52)

I look up at him.

“Ty,” I say.

You.

He shakes his head. “Nyet.”

The answer takes me by surprise. “No?”

“Not me.”

“Marat?” I ask, barely believing.

He laughs in answer.

“Right,” I say. “Who, then?”

Vanya shrugs. “Tebe prisnilos.”

“Tebe prisnilos?” I don’t know the words.

His eyebrows knit together as he searches his mind for the English equivalent. “Dree-yum,” he says at last.

“No, it wasn’t a dream. I was really drowning. I didn’t imagine this.”

“Imagine?” Vanya says.

“Imagine is not real,” I say, then give up. Sometimes it’s exhausting trying to talk to Vanya. I stand and scuff out the line drawing with the sole of my shoe. The identity of the person who saved me from drowning is just one of the many mysteries piling on top of one another, like why was I born and why did my father die and why am I here in the middle of the forest, and what will become of me? But there’s no time to ponder these questions.

The afternoon is passing.

Dan’s body lies dripping on the bank. The freezing water has left him remarkably preserved. He looks like he is asleep. His boots and clothes are miraculously intact. His springy hair is drying. He looks peaceful, ordinary. Nothing to indicate terror or fear. For this I’m very grateful. At first, after Vanya had navigated by fallen tree limb and boulder to the place where Dan’s body lay submerged and dragged it back to the bank, I’d avoided looking at my stepfather’s face. But now I find myself stealing glances at it, curiously reassured, as I kneel on the bank and help Vanya dig his grave.

Vanya’s wet with sweat as he swings his pickax into the ground and then tosses it aside, kneeling to help me dig out the loose soil. I have to work one-handed, but I haven’t rested since we began, and we have made good progress. The afternoon is waning, the sunlight moving back up toward the low-lying clouds. A sense of sadness emanates from Vanya, although he has spoken very little since we started digging. Maybe Dan reminds him of the death of his sister, or his father, or some unnamed sorrow in his past, something involving a hard winter or a lean spring. Or maybe he simply realizes that if he loses his family, he is alone. I have told him Dan’s name and age and that he was a “good man” and, when I didn’t know the word for brave, settled for “strong.” I lack the vocabulary to tell Vanya all Dan’s peculiarities, the kale shakes and the weaving back and forth while in thought, the way he rose on the tips of his toes for emphasis and his habit of saying “you guys” and—my heart hurts—how he’d invite me to work with him in his garden, Come on, kid, an offer I never accepted.

The grave is finally deep enough. Vanya and I get to our feet. My legs are cramped from kneeling for hours, but I’m satisfied with our work. Vanya goes to get Dan and I try to follow him, but he waves me away. I turn, grateful not to have to hold my dead stepfather’s feet. I have realized I’m stronger than I think, but I’m not that strong. I watch the river continue down its course as though it never killed a man, looking across into a bunch of mushrooms that grows around the base of a tree, imagining faces in those clumps as I try not to hear the sound of Dan’s heels scraping the soft earth.

Vanya’s heavy breath and then a body-shaped thump.

A few minutes pass as Vanya fills the grave. I hear Vanya stand up and knock the dirt from the knees of his pants. I turn around and there’s no Dan anymore, just a patted-down mound approximately as long as Dan was tall.

I kneel and burst into tears. Vanya stands by silently. I take my good time, crying. This is Dan’s funeral, and he deserved to have his family there, his friends and the colleagues who stood by him after Sydney Declay’s article came out. And the Osinovs, the family that made him famous and then a laughingstock, should be lined up in the first pew. Dan deserves that. Instead, he’ll get a few tears now, some grateful thoughts, and a cold riverbank for a grave.

Eventually Vanya wanders off. When he comes back, he carries two sticks with him. I watch in wonder as he takes out Sergei’s pocketknife and whittles down a point on one of the sticks. He trims a length of hemp off the bottom of his shirt, places one stick across the other and winds the strip of cloth around the place they intersect, forming a cross. He puts the pointed stick in the ground, finds a rock, and pounds the cross into the head of the grave.

I find a cluster of purple flowers, pull them up by the roots and lay them at the foot of the cross. I’ve finally stopped crying. Vanya and I stand looking down at it.

“Spasibo,” I tell him.

Thank you.

He nods. He folds his pocketknife and grabs his pickax. Suddenly he stiffens. His eyes go wide. He looks up and so do I.

I see it, small as a bird in the sky, beyond the tree line, downriver but coming closer.

It’s a helicopter.

The twenty-first century has finally arrived, looking for its lost comrades. Dan, Lyubov, Sergei, Viktor . . . and me. Vanya freezes for a moment. I do not. I bolt away, running down the bank, stumbling on rocks, my hands in the air, screaming at this tiny metal rescuer.

“Help me!” I scream. “Help me, help me!”

Vanya has recovered from his stupor and is chasing me. I hear the thud of his leather moccasins against the bank, and I stumble faster, arms wide, as the helicopter grows slightly larger in the sky.