Notes from My Captivity(61)

We have finally reached our destination. Vanya guides me through a copse of dense vegetation and trees, and we are suddenly out on the other end, looking down at a chasm cut out of the middle of the forest. I look around, amazed. It’s the ruins of some ancient civilization. Crumbling stone columns, carved statues, steps made of granite. Half-fallen structures that must have served as homes. I can see, even through centuries of neglect and overgrowth, the circular grid in which the village was laid out.

I shake my head. “Where did the people go?”

“I don’t know,” he says. He tells me, half with words, half with gestures, the story of chasing an elk all day through the woods with his spear. The elk eluded him but brought him to this ancient place. We wander around the square, whose edges of rock we can still find among the plants and trees.

A statue of some large animal still remains in the center of the square, although it has no head and the front legs have crumpled, giving the feeling of a creature bowing to the passage of time. I reach out and touch the crumbly shoulder. The stone feels like it might turn to dust. I wonder if the ancient people still live here as spirits, if they come to Clara in the middle of the night and beg to have their faces drawn. I wonder if they still have town councils, and if in the middle of this council, my father has appeared, some strange spirit from the other side of the world with a graceful way of speaking, and if he has the same attorney job he had in life, giving opening statements here, his voice echoing in the ruins as it once did in court.

Standing in this place makes me feel that everything is believable and happening at the same time. Our miracles are another dimension’s passing days. Our love is borrowed and returned to those who come before and after us. Everything we believe is something unreal, and everything magical is something we can taste and feel, if we only try. And what we think of as news is only what we think we recognize as true. The real news, the real happenings, occur beyond our discovery. Whole nations have lived and died right under our noses, and we don’t know anything.

I turn to him, stare into his eyes.

“Vanya,” I say. I’ve been cautious about asking for this. Afraid he would say no. But now, I take the chance. “I want to see my father. Tell me how to see him again.”

He blinks, then looks back steadily. His shoulders square. “Do not tell Mama I help you. Do not tell Clara. Do not tell Marat.”

“Oh, sure, Marat and I hang out all the time.”

He raises his eyebrows. Vanya has not yet mastered sarcasm and may never.

“Sorry,” I say. “I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

He takes a deep breath and looks into my eyes. “I see Zoya. I see Papa.”

It’s astonishing to realize that, standing here with the sun on his face and stone monuments of some lost civilization crumbling around us, here in these shadows and light, it would seem stranger if he didn’t see them.

“When?”

He falls silent.

“When?” I ask again.

“Clara knows when they are coming. Clara is special. Zoya was special.”

“Special, how?”

“They see things others don’t see. Like my father. He see things. His people in Moscow don’t like. They call him a devil.”

It dawns on me. The old man did have special powers. He really was afraid to stay in Moscow. Dan was right, again.

“My father leaves,” Vanya continues. “He comes to the river. He tells me one day, ‘I am dying.’ Zoya was alive then. He says, ‘Zoya and I will die.’ I say, ‘Why? You are strong. Zoya is strong.’ But then winter comes. They die.

“But—four times now—I see them. Clara knows when it is time. She sees signs from the sky. We gather on the stones and we see them. We touch them. Zoya and my father become alive again, because we believe.”

“When will this happen again?” I demand.

Vanya is thinking. He counts on his fingers. Finally he says, “Seven days.”

“Seven days?”

He’s nodding. “Moon will be full.”

“I want to be there.”

He shakes his head. “You cannot. You are not family.”

“I’ll be there.”

“No.” He says it firmly now. I have seven days to work on changing his mind.

When we leave, we are different. We know each other. There are so many things that we will never understand from the world each of us comes from, but those things aren’t important. We have more important things in common: wishes and feelings and prayers and love for things you can see and things you can’t.

I wonder if my father is watching us now. Wonder if he can reach out and touch my face.

Seven days.

We walk back slowly. There’s a crackle in the air. A distant lightning without thunder or rain. This seems to make Vanya anxious.

“What’s the matter?” I ask.

He shakes his head, indicating it’s either nothing or nothing he wants to speak about. But I notice he hurries his steps, and so do I.

It’s late in the afternoon by the time we pass the encampment where the dead crew lie and my stepfather’s grave. As we get within a few hundred yards of the point where the family’s stream feeds into the river, Vanya suddenly stops and stares at the tops of the trees over the mountains, then breaks into a run, forgoing the bank and rushing up the side of the mountain as I scramble to keep up with him, and we rush together toward the hovering plume of smoke.