FINDING KATARINA M.

by Elisabeth Elo

  “We?”

  “Misha and I. He said you were planning to come here after you left the herders’ camp. When you didn’t show up, we assumed you’d gone back to the States.”

  “I didn’t go back,” I said, remembering the moment in the airport when I’d made that choice.

  “Where were you?”

  “I was arrested.”

  “Arrested?” She turned to me with a frown. “For what?”

  “The murders of Bohdan Duboff and Tanya Karp, and acts of espionage against the Russian Federation.”

  Her eyes widened in shock, then just as quickly contracted in fear. “Did you say anything?”

  She was asking if I’d given them up—her and Misha and Meredith and Oleg. “Not a word.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “And you’ve been…?”

  “In prison.”

  She shut off the tap without saying anything. She seemed to be thinking.

  “I escaped,” I added.

  Silently, she lit a burner on the stove and put on the kettle. I saw her struggling with the news, perhaps not sure what or how much to believe. She motioned to the table. “Sit down. Tell me everything.”

  I wondered if I should trust her—everyone I met seemed capable of duplicity to me now—but distrust was too arduous for me at that moment. I had no energy left, and no place else to go. So I recounted everything that had happened since my arrest in the Yakutsk airport, including the murdered Samaritan and the hot car presently parked outside her house. She questioned me with great specificity, circling back to clarify points, and, with subtle skill, worming out of me information about the Russian authorities I didn’t even know I had. It was an unofficial debriefing carried out by a pro. It lasted a couple of hours, through several cups of strong black tea. In the end, she was clearly satisfied, and went off to make some phone calls in another room, leaving me with a bowl of warmed-up borscht, which seemed pathetically anti-climactic, a culinary pat on the head, not that I didn’t devour it.

  “Don’t worry about the car, we’ll get rid of it,” she said brightly, sweeping back into the kitchen.

  “And the guy—the dead guy?”

  She gave me a quizzical look. “What do you mean?”

  “The guy. He’s dead.”

  Leaning down, she put her hands firmly on my shoulders and stared deeply into my eyes. “It’s over, Natalie. Let it go.”

  I drew a deep breath. Could it really be that easy? Should it? I was no fan of guilt, but I felt it nonetheless. An innocent man was dead, and I had played a part. I was guilty, wasn’t I? Or was it only Zara who had murdered? Or was the past so far behind me now, so beyond anyone’s reach, that it practically didn’t exist?

  “Can I call my mother?” I asked like a child.

  “Not as long as you’re in Russia. We have to assume her calls are being monitored.”

  “How about Meredith Viles? Can I talk to her?”

  “I already let her know you’re here. Don’t worry. We’ll find a way to get you back to the States.”

  “I have no passport, no money. Not even my own clothes.”

  “Let us take care of that.” She smiled at me warmly, a look of respect in her eyes. “You’re a survivor, Natalie, like your grandmother. You’ve got her courage and her luck. You’ll do fine.”

  “Is she here?” I asked, startled. I’d almost forgotten about Katarina Melnikova, who’d been the whole purpose of my trip.

  “I’ll introduce you later. For now, wash, rest, eat. You made it. You’re safe.”

  The words produced a dizziness in my brain. I was suddenly a child again, whirling in the teacup ride at the amusement park, where you spun crazily in two directions at once. Now the ride was ending; the teacup was knocking lazily back and forth in its metal track before coming to rest. There was the sound of the buzzer that unlatched the safety gate. But I was still jumbled internally, too disoriented to exit the ride.

  “Where’s Misha? Is he okay?”

  “He’s here in Cherkeh. He’ll be very glad to see you.”

  I somehow dredged up the hardest words. “I’m so sorry about Saldana.”

  Her eyes softened. “I know you are. But let’s not talk about that now. Let’s just be thankful you’re here. We’ll have a few days to spend together before you have to go, I hope. I want to know everything about you and your mother, and your life in Washington, D.C.”

  “That seems so far away.”

  “You’ll be back there soon. You will.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “One thing at a time. First, let me get you something to wear.”

  It turned out that Cherkeh was home to a modern replica of a traditional Sakha settlement that had been built years ago to attract tourists, though few had come. Lena said that a group of patriotic Poles had ridden all the way to Cherkeh once in a rented van to visit the tiny restored cabin of the Polish exile Petr Alekseev, who’d started a school for the native children and was much beloved. But that was all so far; no other tourists of any nationality, not even Russians, had been willing to traipse so far across the Siberian steppe for the pleasure of sleeping for a small fee in a babarnya, the traditional octagonal dwelling of the formerly nomadic Sakha people. They hadn’t been enticed by the chance to sit inside the sturdy log meeting house, tucked ingeniously inside a shallow hill, so as to be insulated from the cold by the earth itself; neither had the cleverly engineered horse-powered water wheel seduced them. Or the one-room houses with scuffed plank floors, complete with authentic tools and fishing gear, wooden buckets with woven horsehair handles, and fur-draped sledges for winter travel.

  This lonely ghost town, a half-mile trek from her house, across a meadow and along a forested path, was where Lena led me as daylight waned. She carried fresh sheets and towels; I carried a shopping bag of groceries: crackers, a bottle of fresh milk, a block of cheese, and a tin of sardines. Apparently, the babarnya had become the village’s unofficial guest house.

  It was a good-sized structure with thick log walls and a clean plank floor. A large, elevated fire pit occupied its center, directly under a wide, circular opening in the domed mud-and-thatch roof. The air inside was dry and woody-smelling, and felt quite warm after the stinging below-zero temperatures outside.

  A man was there, busily splitting a pile of logs into firewood. He’d already gotten a small blaze crackling in the pit, the smoke rising straight up to meet a swath of twilight sky. He was in his late thirties or early forties, dressed in jeans and a dark sweatshirt, so intent on the thudding rhythm of his swinging ax that he didn’t hear us come in.

  “Dmitri,” Lena said. “This is Natalie.”

  He laid down the ax and turned to us. “Welcome,” he said, extending his hand.

  I put the bag of groceries down and shook it. He was an inch or two taller than me, broad-chested, dark-skinned, with a firm grip. I glanced at Lena, questioning her with my eyes. How much did this man know?

  “Dmitri is a friend. Anything you say to me, you can say to him.”

  I met his eyes—narrow, dark eyes with sparks burning in their depths.

  “Dmitri will get it warm in here in no time,” Lena said. “I’ll send someone out to let you know when dinner’s ready. In the meantime, just relax.” As she let herself out through the screen door, she called back to me, “You’ll want to shut the heavy door behind me so the heat doesn’t escape.”

  As I did so, Dmitri went back to his log-splitting. I walked around the babarnya curiously. Wooden sleeping pallets covered in animal skins were built into six of the eight walls; various primitive artifacts hung on hooks. Into this authentic indigenous habitat, a full-sized modern picnic table had been dragged. Also two big coolers and a collapsible card table displaying various items of convenience—two kerosene lamps, a couple of flashlights, fat candles in silver holders, boxes of batteries and matches.

  I found myself quietly alarmed. Was I really suppo
sed to stay here, in some kind of failed tourist experiment deep in the woods, with no lock on the door? I remembered the billboard warning against alcohol abuse. No doubt the village was full of carousing drunks. And god only knew what was in the forest. Bears, probably. Odd, of course, to have survived a filthy prison cell and crowded, disease-ridden barracks only to quibble over these vastly improved, if rustic, accommodations.

  Dmitri was loading split wood onto the fire, and it was answering him with bright licks of flame.

  When I asked if he lived in the village, he explained that he was an engineer who’d been working on an oil rig in the arctic until recently. Which didn’t answer the question.

  “Did you grow up here?” I pressed.

  “I come from Ulan-Ude. That’s a city south of Lake Baikal, on the Trans-Siberian Railroad.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  He gave a close-mouthed smile. “Vacationing.”

  “Not one for a typical tourist spot, I see.”

  He threw another log onto the fire, and switched the topic. “Lena says you’re a doctor. Better be careful: if word gets out, there’ll be a line of patients outside your door.”

  “I’d be happy to see them, though I don’t know what I could do without basic supplies. I’m actually not planning on staying long.” I wanted this to be true.

  He picked up the ax and resumed chopping.

  Raising my voice over the dull thudding, I said, “If you won’t tell me what you’re doing here, maybe you could tell me how you know Lena.”

  He stopped his work and regarded me thoughtfully. Finally, he said, “Lena and I work together.” He paused, seemed about to speak again, but didn’t. “It’s better if I don’t say any more. All you need to know about me is that I trust your government more than I trust Putin’s, which isn’t saying much.”

  Feeling reassured, I let out a long sigh. “Do you really think you can get me out of Russia?”

  “It will take a little doing, but we’ll figure it out.”

  I wanted to believe it, but I couldn’t. “You know, for a long time in prison, I was convinced that the US State Department would suddenly show up to demand my release.”

  “You were disappointed,” he said in a neutral tone.

  “I suppose the fantasy kept me going for a while, until I realized I didn’t want to wait any longer to see if it was really going to happen.”

  “So you got yourself out.”

  “With one fuckload of luck.”

  “There was probably more to it than that.”

  I shook my head ruefully. “I’m not so sure. Things could so easily have gone another way.” I could still feel the ice floes dipping under my weight, sense the speed of the moving river, see the rotating blue lights of the police cruisers on the highway outside Irkutsk.

  “True, but that doesn’t change what you did.”

  He set a log on its end on the chopping block, swung the ax, and split it cleanly down the middle. He took one of the pieces and set it on the flames. The fire was burning steadily now, throwing out plenty of heat.

  “There’s enough split wood here to get you through the night. If you need more, let me know.” He leaned the ax on the wall by the door and lifted his parka off a hook.

  “How will I reach you?”

  “Lena knows where I am.” I must have looked doubtful, because he added, “Don’t worry. You’re perfectly safe.”

  “Really? There must be bears in the forest,” I said lightly, as if it were a joke.

  “There are. But they stay away from people.”

  “In the States, you always hear stories about bears wrecking campgrounds, searching for human food.”

  He shook his head a little, gently amused. “These bears have plenty to eat in the wild.”

  I gave a tight, embarrassed smile. “Okay. Just nerves, I guess.”

  He paused, re-hung the parka on the hook, and came back to perch on the earthen lip of the fire pit, his arms loosely crossed. “I don’t have to go just yet.”

  “Oh. Well, really, it’s okay if you do,” I said, hating that I’d come across as needy. But why try to hide it? I wasn’t ready to be alone out there with night falling and nothing to occupy my mind. In prison, I’d never been alone, not even in the toilet.

  “Have you ever been to the States?” I asked.

  “Never been outside Russia. I’m a single guy with no kids, so it’s almost impossible for me to get a visa. Putin’s government is afraid I won’t come back.”

  “Are they right?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, the US is a great place to visit if you ever get the chance,” I said, aware of how lame I sounded. “I grew up in Rockville, Maryland, which is near Washington, D.C.…” His eyes were patient and tolerant, and I found myself going on. And on. Blathering my life story, as if it were important news. Maybe he was just that type—the quintessential poputchik to whom people poured out their hearts on a train or plane. Or maybe I just needed to talk, to try as best I could to resurrect the old Natalie March, the person I’d been before I got split into a hundred different parts.

  “I’m probably boring you to death,” I said after a while.

  “Not at all. I enjoy hearing about your life.”

  “I usually don’t talk so much. I’m more of a listener, actually.”

  “Whom do you listen to?”

  “My patients, mostly. I have to figure out what’s wrong with them, which isn’t always that easy. They tend to bury the important facts—not intentionally, of course. Maybe it’s just human nature to hide your vulnerabilities. So sometimes I have to draw them out, until they find what they want to say.”

  “Like a detective.”

  “I guess so. Only in medicine, the bad guy always wins in the end.”

  “By bad guy, you mean death?”

  “Yeah, death. The big D. We throw everything we’ve got at it—medicines, technologies—and we can do a pretty good job sometimes of postponing it for months or years. But it always wins in the end.” I realized I was echoing Zara’s words: Every life ends the same way.

  “You fight it anyway,” Dmitri said quietly, firelight glowing on the side of his face. “If you stop fighting, what’s left?”

  I felt uncomfortable suddenly and went to the door. I opened it to the frigid air, gazed across a low, snowy meadow. It was dusk, and the sky and snow had blended together into a fog of muted lavender. In the distance, a group of shaggy ponies emerged as gray shadows, mixing smoky plumes of breath.

  “When do the horses go back to the barn?”

  “When they want to,” he said.

  “How is it they don’t freeze to death?”

  “They’ve made a lot of adaptations over the centuries, like reindeer.”

  “Clever of them.”

  “Very.” There was a smile in his voice, as if I’d gotten an answer right.

  I turned, wanting to see his expression, but he was stooping to pick a log off the woodpile. When I looked out the door again, a little boy was running up the path, making fast time despite his puffy pants and heavy boots. He skidded breathlessly through the door I held open for him, and fairly shouted at me, “It’s time for you to go to dinner at Lena Tarasova’s house!” He stared in excited wonder at the American visitor for a few moments before bolting away.

  Lena’s kitchen was filled with warm cooking smells, but what riveted my attention was the old woman seated at the table.

  “Mother, there’s someone here to see you,” Lena said.

  The woman raised faded blue, milky eyes. Her face was narrow and very pale—so unlike the Sakha faces. In comparison to theirs, her nose seemed abnormally long and thin. Wisps of steel-gray hair strayed from a headscarf, her shoulders hunched forward, a hand-knit afghan covered her lap. She seemed to have collapsed into herself, the way the ground might sink over time into an unused mineshaft. But a strong jaw hinted at former beauty, and there was an appealing inquisitive tilt to her head as she tr
ied to fathom the unfamiliar person in her line of sight.

  “Do you remember the baby daughter you told us about—Vera—who stayed with your brother in Kiev? Well, this is her daughter. Her name is Natalie, and she’s come all the way from America to see you.”

  The rheumy eyes flicked over my face. There was no understanding in them.

  I crouched to be at her level. “Katarina?”

  She seemed befuddled.

  Lena shook her head. “No, don’t call her by her first name. You should call her Grandmother out of respect.”

  “Grandmother,” I said gently.

  She reached out a gnarled hand and patted my arm.

  I glanced to Lena for help.

  “It isn’t clear how much she understands,” Lena said.

  “Does she recognize you?”

  “Sometimes, I think. It’s hard to tell.”

  The old woman continued patting my arm gently.

  “Grandmother,” I whispered, looking for signs of Vera in the aged face, signs of myself.

  She smiled, showing grayish, worn-down teeth.

  “She fades away day by day,” Lena said sadly. “There’s less of her all the time.” The table was set for three. There was a pot of boiling water on the stove, and sliced tomatoes and cucumbers arranged on a serving plate. Lena placed a steaming mug of tea on the table. “Here, this will warm you up.”

  I sat next to Katarina. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Ten years, I’d say.”

  “Has she seen a doctor?”

  “I offered to take her into Yakutsk for treatment when her symptoms first started, but she refused to go. She’d actually never been to a doctor before, at least not in Siberia. During Stalin’s time, it was too risky. Her European features, no ID—anyone would have figured it out. Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, there were still plenty of former Communists around who would have seen her as a criminal. She said she’d come this far in her life without medical treatment, and didn’t need it now.”

  “It’s probably Alzheimer’s.”

  “That’s what I figured. And since there’s no treatment for it anyway, there seemed no point in forcing her to go.”