When the opening credits rolled and the sound came up, Yvonne leaned over and whispered, “Why didn’t she show me? She acts like I don’t exist.” She was jealous of Zara in a touching way, like a little sister forced to share an adored older sibling with an unworthy interloper.
Soon, slow-moving tortoises were lumbering over jutting island rocks, and an even slower Russian voiceover was offering scientific commentary. The smooth sand beach and sapphire ocean were the best things I’d seen in months. I imagined salt air filling my nostrils and a warm breeze stroking my face.
Partway through the film, Yvonne nudged me. Two huge black iguanas were butting their tufted, leathery heads on the screen, while a heavy, short-necked, buzz-cut blond was strolling down the center aisle. It was Svetlana, and behind her was another woman, so fat that she rocked side-to-side as she walked. Yvonne pointed in the other direction, where two more women were coming down the side aisle, not bothering to hide the fact that they were carefully scanning the spectators’ faces, obviously looking for someone. Heads were turning to follow the gang’s progress; a low buzz was building in the hall.
“It’s happening,” Yvonne said tersely.
I glanced behind me. The laptop showing the movie was unattended. The rear half of the hall was vacant, no guards in sight. It was a straight shot to the doors.
I leaned over and whispered to Zara, “You’ve got some friends coming.”
“Shh. This is the best part.” The iguanas were starting to fight.
“Zara. You’ve got to get out of here now.”
She frowned, then spied Svetlana and the others. To my surprise, she exploded from her seat like a rocket, and screamed over the soundtrack, “You bitch. You afraid to fight me alone? You need your friends with you? Well, fuck you, you stinking piece of lesbian cunt. You want me, here I am!” She scrambled over my knees and Yvonne’s, emerging in the center aisle about eight feet from her rival.
Svetlana stopped, feet planted wide apart, and puffed up her chest; the fat woman hovered at her elbow. The two other gang members appeared behind Zara—how they got there so fast was anyone’s guess—and one of them shoved her hard between the shoulder blades, so hard that she lurched toward Svetlana, who tripped her and stepped aside adroitly to let her fall. Svetlana’s minions were upon her in an instant, kicking her viciously in the stomach, back, and head. The air filled with their grunts of exertion and the thud of heavy shoes impacting tissue and bone.
The iguanas were quickly forgotten. The prisoners streamed out of their seats and crowded around the assault, many of them silent and aghast, many more cheering and yelling encouragement. Standing close to the action, hands on hips, Svetlana watched fixedly.
I was frozen in place. Zara was supposed to have tough companions who would come to her aid, but she didn’t. Only Yvonne and I were on her side, and then only tentatively, by proxy, and, in any case, we were obviously not battle-ready. In fact, Yvonne was tugging my sleeve, urging me to run. She seemed to think that the casual association we had with Zara put us next in line for attack. I shook her off, and just kept standing there in impotent horror, my ears filled with the ugly sounds of the beating, while my eyes were glued to Svetlana’s smug face. Then, without warning, a fiery rage surged from the deepest ground of my being like an eruption of molten rock.
Roughly pushing my way to the center, I reached Svetlana in a few swift steps, using momentum to shove her off balance, just as skinny Zara had been shoved. Svetlana staggered, managed to catch herself, quickly found her equilibrium. Fists raised, she squared off to me, a satisfied smile playing across her lips.
The ring of onlookers expanded to accommodate us. The thugs working Zara drew back, their attention lured by the surprise attack. Svetlana waved them off. She wanted the American doctor for herself. The next thing I knew, one of Svetlana’s fists had powered into the pit of my stomach, and the other was smashing the side of my face. My torso spun in a bent-over position, falling across my own stationary feet. I landed on my side on the floor next to Zara, and immediately sensed shadows converging on me, the minions closing in. There was no time to get up. I covered my face with my hands and stiffened my abdomen against what was going to happen next.
Which took place very quickly. Zara sprang up, attached herself like a monkey to the fat woman’s back, and started raking her eyes and cheeks with stiff fingers bent like claws. The woman swung from side to side like a powerful blinded animal, trying to throw the monkey off. A glinting knife emerged from someone’s pocket, and was plunged into Zara’s side. She slid off the fat woman’s back onto her knees, where she wobbled at dwarf height, unprotected. I spied the bloody knife in a lowered hand, and staggered to my feet, ready to knock it away, but it vanished before I could get to it. All this happened silently. Then a sudden roar reached my ears: the hollering of prison guards and the stomping of heavy boots. The crowd dissolved, Svetlana blending in with the others. The empty seats were quickly re-populated. By the time the guards reached the scene, the prisoners were paying rapt attention to phalanxes of mottled red crabs swarming by the thousands across a white sand beach.
I knelt at Zara’s side. My fingers slid under the heavy tunic to gauge the severity of the wound. The knife had slashed the top layer of skin but hadn’t penetrated beyond that. Nevertheless, there was a lot of blood; a sticky pool was spreading across the pine floorboards.
Zara struggled to sit up; she appeared confused, dimly enraged. I pushed her firmly onto her back, leaned down, and brought my mouth close to her ear. “You’re in no danger. It’s a superficial wound. If you want to get out of this place, shut up and do exactly as I say.” Then I rocked back onto my heels, yelling, “She’s bleeding out! Hurry! Get a bandage! Quick!”
There were only two guards standing near me—they had sounded like a herd—young men from the village with no appetite for blood and guts.
I screamed at them, “Get a stretcher! What are you waiting for?”
They both ran off a few paces, until one, realizing he wasn’t needed, doubled back.
“A bandage, for Christ’s sake! Hurry!” I shrieked.
Yvonne, to her credit, hadn’t run away. Her eyes wild with terror, she pulled off her tunic top and tried to rip the stiff fabric.
“Just give me the whole thing,” I said.
Together, we lifted Zara’s torso and cinched the sleeves around her waist. When Zara tried to say something, I quickly pinched her lips closed. “Don’t talk, not a word until I say so. You’re in shock. You’re going to need CPR, IV fluids, and life support. Now try to fucking act that way.”
I removed my fingers, and Zara obediently kept her mouth shut, while Yvonne’s eyes widened in confusion.
The guards returned with a stretcher, with Nurse Latypova—would-be sex goddess, sneaker of cigarettes, and connoisseur of fashion—bringing up the rear.
“Isn’t anyone else on duty tonight?” I asked in a voice of desperation.
“Just me. What difference does it make?” she said sullenly.
“Fucking Christ,” I muttered, hoping to exacerbate her lack of confidence.
Zara was heaved onto the stretcher, her head wobbling as if no muscle was controlling it. She was either passed out or doing a good imitation. The guards carried the stretcher toward the exit, Latypova following in a sulk. The movie-goers took precious little interest, acting for all the world as if the Galapagos had them enthralled. Yvonne fell in behind me, walking practically on my heels. I whirled around and said sharply, “You stay here.”
“Please. I want to come.”
“No, Yvonne. You have to stay.”
“No, no, Natalya. I can’t bear to be here for two more years. It’ll kill me, I swear. I don’t care what the risks are. I want to go with you.”
I drew close beside her and lowered my voice. “Listen to me. Two years is nothing. You’ll have your whole life to forget about this place. Now go sit down. Get away from me.”
“Please, Natal—”
She stood still and mute as I followed the stretcher out the door.
I hovered over the bed on which Zara lay, applying a large gauze bandage to her superficial wound, while furiously barking orders to a stony-faced Latypova. Loitering near the door, the brash young guards seemed eager to bolt out of the pee-smelling sick house; only the opportunity to ogle the lovely Latypova was holding them back. In the shadowy beds along the ward, patients slept or quietly observed the crisis. The stale aroma of Latypova’s cigarettes hung in the antiseptic air.
“She’s lost a lot of blood,” I bellowed to Latypova. “Blood pressure’s low and falling. Abdominal swelling suggests heavy internal bleeding. We need to get some fluids into her fast, but it probably won’t be enough. If she doesn’t get to a hospital soon, she’ll die.”
Latypova stared blankly for a few moments, until her brain shifted into low gear. “I’ll call an ambulance.”
“Not enough time. She’ll be dead before she gets to Krasnoyarsk.”
The nurse looked horrified. I got the sense she’d never seen a patient die before.
“What’s wrong with you? Call for a prison van!”
“I should ask Dr. Chereshkevich first,” she said hesitatingly.
“Well, for god’s sake, do it now!”
The doctor was home with her family, about a thirty-minute drive from the prison. It was 9 p.m. on a Sunday night, and the temperature outside was ten degrees. After a brief conversation in which Latypova offered tentative, mumbled answers, Chereshkevich asked to speak to me. I summarized the patient’s critical condition in rapid-fire medical talk. We agreed that emergency surgery might be required, and that a trained medical worker should accompany the patient during transport to administer CPR if needed. I didn’t have to add that we couldn’t wait for an ambulance to arrive; Chereshkevich said it herself. She got Latypova on the phone again, and the nurse listened, not saying anything, just nodding her head. After hanging up, Latypova repeated her boss’s instructions like a robot. “You are to take the patient to the hospital under guard. I am to stay here and supervise the ward.”
“Well, let’s go! Hurry up!”
She made another call, this one to the guard house, while I grew frustrated trying to find a healthy-enough vein in Zara’s arm for the IV. Five minutes later, we were loading the patient’s stretcher into the back of a prison van. I piled in after, and set up the IV drip. Zara lay motionless, her face blank and chalky. It was hard to tell how much of her unresponsiveness was an act and how much was real. I worried that there had been internal damage after all.
When one of the guards pulled out handcuffs, I responded in high umbrage. “How the hell can I take care of a patient while wearing handcuffs? Do you want to be the one to administer CPR when she goes in to cardiac arrest?” He contented himself with slamming the heavy metal doors, plunging the back of the van into darkness.
“You still with me?” I whispered.
“You are very bad with the needle, my friend. Someday, I’ll teach you how to do it right,” she whispered back.
The guards were in high spirits, having lucked into an off-campus jaunt. Pop music blared out of the crappy speakers and echoed in the cavernous back of the van, mixing with the loud engine noise. Every once in a while, the vehicle’s rear end fishtailed on a patch of ice, and Zara’s IV bag swayed precariously on its jury-rigged holder. There was no heat in the back, as well as no light. Zara was covered with two thick blankets from the ward, but I had only my parka over the prison uniform, and the metal floor was like ice. I wouldn’t let Zara give me a blanket in case one of the guards slid open the panel on the wall separating us and took a look back.
After about forty-five minutes, the van shuddered to a stop and the doors swung open. The first thing I saw was a beautiful yellow crescent moon suspended in a velvety black sky, just above a concrete building about the height and width of a battleship—Krasnoyarsk Hospital. The waiting room was crowded and overheated, filled with adult moans and the whining of children, thick with the smells of sour bodies and damp wool. It was hard to tell the sick from the well as everyone appeared to be suffering.
Zara was carried in on the stretcher. When the triage nurse came, I spoke to her out of earshot of the guards, who seemed discomforted at having found themselves crammed among the injured and infirm. I described the patient’s condition as stable, and the nurse instructed the guards to place Zara on a hospital bed at the end of a corridor. The dozen or so beds parked along the way were occupied by other patients awaiting treatment. With any luck, it would be a long time before a doctor got to us.
Once Zara was transferred to the bed, the two guards and I were pressed together awkwardly in the narrow corridor. What to do now? Should we just leave the patient there and return to the prison? Should someone stay with her? For how long? No one had thought this far ahead.
An orderly pushing a wheelchair tried to get past us, but the guards were blocking the way with their large bodies and the unwieldy stretcher, now empty. Once the wheelchair had squeezed by, I suggested that they go and sit in the waiting room, while I stayed with the patient until the doctor came. They happily complied.
Minutes went by—ten, maybe fifteen. White-coated medical staff popped in and out of examining rooms; the triage nurse seemed to have forgotten about the stable patient with the superficial knife wound at the end of the hall. I was keenly aware that the minute Zara passed into the control of hospital personnel, my presence would be superfluous. I’d be forced to return to the van, and shunted back to Female Prison 22. I couldn’t allow that to happen, but there seemed no way to break free. I was wearing a blood-smeared prison uniform, and there were too many people around.
A few minutes later, Zara solved the problem by insisting she had to pee.
“Of course you do,” I said. “Here, let me help you up.”
She sat straight up, rising like Lazarus from the dead. Wincing at the pain in her side, she threw off the blanket, and viciously yanked the IV needle out of her arm.
Laying a firm hand on her shoulder, I hissed, “Take it easy. Act like you’re injured. Walk.”
I helped her carefully off the bed, pulling one of her arms across my shoulders, and we staggered toward a sign marked tualet at the end of the hall. Next to it, there was a metal door with a push bar topped by a red exit sign. I glanced back to see if we’d drawn any attention: the corridor was empty but for the line of hospital beds. We passed the bathroom at a snail’s pace, then slipped through the heavy door, finding ourselves in a gloomy, unheated stairwell. Up or down? In wordless unison, we descended, moving fast now. The stairway ended abruptly after one flight. We faced another metal door, which we pushed open, emerging onto a concrete platform, into bitterly cold air. It was a delivery bay; a couple of trucks were parked for the night under an overhang. There was a narrow access road, well-ploughed; banked snow along one side reflected the crescent moon’s pale light.
We raced quietly along the access road, then along the far edge of the parking lot, to an exit that dumped us onto a wide thoroughfare with a median strip. A couple of cars sped past, heading toward the lights of Krasnoyarsk, but overall there was little traffic. It must have been midnight, maybe later.
Zara darted across the lane, clambered over the snow mound on the median strip. I followed. Turning south, she sprinted along the shoulder; I was right behind. The snow bank to our right was waist-high; behind it, a row of evenly spaced evergreens; beyond that, utter dark. We ran full-out on the pavement for a long time—too long to be so exposed. A couple of cars overtook us, tires spewing grainy mud. Once the news of our escape was out, would the drivers remember seeing two women running on the side of the road? Could they make out our prison uniforms, or was it too dark?
Finally, we came to a turn—an unlit road disappearing into woods. As we jogged along it, the highway drone faded and was replaced by the rhythmic thudding of our fe
et. A park, I thought.
“Wait,” I called to Zara. I stopped, doubled over, and tried to catch my breath. My lungs were on fire.
Zara’s face was a haggard pale oval not far ahead. “Don’t stop yet. Hurry, hurry.”
I broke into a sluggish jog, willing my legs to pump faster than they wanted to go, intent on keeping Zara’s shadowy form in sight.
The road wound at its leisure through a pine-scented forest, and the night grew darker, quieter, colder. An icy wind sighed in my ears, carrying the tang of fresh moisture.
Zara slipped on a patch of ice, let out a cry. I reached her and helped her up. If her wound opened, what would I do?
“Come on, we’re almost there,” she said, walking now, canted sideways, pressing her palm into her side.
The road ended in a cul-de-sac around a tall stone obelisk and some snow-topped shrubs. Beyond that, an enormous empty field glowed with dull phosphorescence in the moonlight. Only it wasn’t a field; it was a river snaking gently northward, losing itself in the sparkle of not-too-distant city lights. The sky above it was satiny black, the crescent moon hanging crisply in one corner, like a yellow paper cutout. The scene might have come from a book of Russian fairytales.
I was shivering. The instant I’d stopped moving, the sweat on my body had begun to freeze. The shivering quickly became violent, until I felt like a jangling skeleton. Neither of us had coats.
“What now?” I asked.
Zara gazed at the river with strangely rapt attention, her black hair streaming out in the frigid wind sweeping across the ice.
“There must be someone you can call,” I prompted, my teeth clattering like castanets. Krasnoyarsk was Zara’s city.
“With what phone?” she said sarcastically.
FINDING KATARINA M. Page 26