Notes from My Captivity(55)

“What did Marat do?” I ask. “Smother them? Strangle them?” He squints at me, like my question is the eye of a needle that’s too small to see. “Did you just watch him kill my friends?”

Finally he shakes his head. “No.”

“YES!” We glare at each other. His face is red. There is no friendship in his eyes. We are enemies.

His breathing slows. A bit of the flush leaves his face. Never taking his eyes from mine, he offers up his closed fist for my inspection.

I look down at it. “Chto eto?”

What is this?

He opens his hand. At first I can’t identify the dried-up and blackened objects. Then I see the tiny caps, the pieces of stem.

Mushrooms.

“Bad,” he says softly. He thinks hard, struggles with the word. “Pizone,” he says.

“Poison,” I correct him in a whisper. I shut my eyes tight and see so clearly the four of us in a bar in Moscow, taste of dark beer on my tongue, Dan’s unamused stare, and Lyubov and Viktor laughing merrily. Someone told me there are magic mushrooms in that forest. Imagine the colors to see!

I sink to my knees. My eyes flood with tears. A rush of pure guilt washes over me. I’ve misjudged him and Marat and the rest of the family. None of them are murderers. And they are only holding me out of self-preservation. They can’t trust me to keep their secret. The people I have found, and who have found me, are not monsters. They are just a family who wants to be alone.

“What is the matter?” Vanya says.

I just shake my head.

On the way back to the hut, I ask Vanya about the story Yuri Androv told my father, how they kidnapped him, how he feared for his life, how he heard Marat telling Vanya he was going to cut his throat.

Vanya smiles. “Pravda,” he says.

True.

“Pravda?” I repeat.

Vanya stops, touches my arm, smiles again.

“Marat khochet vsekh ubit.”

I still don’t understand. So he tells me in English.

“Marat wants to kill everyone.”

I’m starting to think that even Marat is all bark and no bite. I ask Vanya more about Yuri’s story. Yes, they did capture him. He was drunk. No, he didn’t escape. They got tired of him, decided no one would believe his story, took him by canoe halfway down the river, then let him go on a bank.

I want to tell Vanya that I’ll get drunk too, if his family will just let me go. But I like my other plan better. The one where I up my game by walking close to him and repeatedly touching his arm.

We’re halfway back to the hut. Darkness fell as we walked, and now Vanya has apparently decided that we’re going to camp here for tonight, on this riverbank. I wonder how many hermit-family rules we are violating right now, how many pages of the household Bible are curling with indignity.

Thou shalt not go off to clear yourself of murder and not return by nightfall.

Now that I’ve realized that the Osinovs are not going to harm me, I’m much less afraid of them, although I still have a healthy respect for their wrath, especially Marat’s. Vanya sits me down on a large stone, rolls up another one for him, and goes off to scout for firewood as I wait and watch the evening sky. I’ve finally gotten used to my homemade cast, its bulk and unbending boards, although it itches a little. I find a stick to scratch under the boards and then contribute my homemade tool to the pile of kindling as I think of Vanya, immediate as the river, Vanya digging my stepfather’s grave, Vanya innocent of any terrible act that would make him terrifying. Vanya who now returns with wood from the forest, places it down, and begins to arrange it.

I watch him work, the graceful way he moves, as though born to the woods and the harsh tasks within it. And yet, there is nothing primitive about him beyond his beard and clothes and his scraggly hair. I imagine him now holding the strange device to his ear and hearing my voice. That astonished expression at the tiny box with the girl’s voice. Had he heard my voice first there, or had he been nearby in the woods, watching me, listening?

Something tells me that he has grown up in these dark woods and can easily lead me back to the hut without a flashlight or torch, by the light of the stars and half-moon, or simply by instinct. Maybe he has seized upon this occasion to be alone with me. I’m thinking tomorrow morning we’ll be in trouble, though exactly what trouble means in this instance is unknown and probably unprecedented.

I try to tell him in Russian that I want to learn how to make a fire, give up and say it in English.

Vanya pauses, then nods, looking pleased. “Okay,” he says. The night is cool but tolerable. An owl cries out. The leaves flutter in the wind and the river runs past us, calmer in this stretch.

“Vanya,” I say.

“Yes?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry because why?”

“Because . . .” I wave my hand toward the miles of woods now between us and the bodies. “I was wrong about you. Wrong about your family. They are not monsters. They’re a family, just like my family back in America. I should have thought maybe the crew ate something poisonous. I guess I was too busy looking for someone to blame rather than think maybe it was their own fault, that they died because they weren’t careful. Maybe it comes from being an American, thinking when something bad happens, there’s got to be a bad guy somewhere responsible for it.”