The Siberian Dilemma

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “I love it,” Tatiana said. “Sharpening pencils is now my greatest survival skill.”

  Arkady wiped a portion of the helipad clear of snow and laid the small branches in a grill pattern on the concrete. Around the grill, he placed larger pieces of wood, log cabin–style, in hopes that they would protect a small fire and dry out enough to burn.

  “Ingenious.” Tatiana crouched down beside him and presented him with a bag full of shavings, paper, pencils, cones, and twigs. Using the grill as a base, they piled first a layer of twigs, then paper and shavings. Arkady reached into his pocket for his lighter and aimed into his well of kindling. As it ignited and burned, he placed bigger branches on the fire.

  From a corner of the helipad, Arkady pulled two large rubber chocks within feet of the fire. He and Tatiana collapsed against them and basked in its warmth.

  28

  Bolot emerged soundlessly from the half-light. By the time Arkady heard the crunch of footsteps, he was already close enough to kick aside Arkady’s rifle.

  “I’d have missed you anyway,” Arkady said.

  Bolot had brought back not just the sled but also extra clothing, piled on top of the skins. Arkady recognized the topmost item as the jacket that Benz had been wearing.

  “Took me ages to strip them,” Bolot said. “They’re blue and stiff as boards.”

  “What did you do with the bodies?” Tatiana asked.

  “Left them where they were.” Bolot handed them the clothes. “I had to come back the long way round, just to check that whoever murdered them is gone.”

  “And?” Arkady asked

  “And I think they have.”

  “You think they have?” asked Tatiana.

  It was the first time in their acquaintance that Bolot sounded worried. “I can’t be sure, obviously, but I’m still here, and you’re still here, right? The helicopter’s gone, and the cabin’s nothing but hot cinders. I couldn’t even get close to it, let alone retrieve anything, so my guess is that the killers have retreated to civilization.”

  “Or to Chita,” Arkady said. “Any clue as to who they are?”

  “None at all. The only thing I found is this, but it may be nothing.”

  He held up a key ring. Half a dozen keys of varying shapes and sizes hung from the snout of a silver fish. “I found it under the snow next to Benz’s body.”

  Arkady was holding Benz’s jacket, which was encrusted with frozen blood. He checked the pockets. They were all zipped up. The key ring, therefore, couldn’t have fallen out.

  He examined Georgy’s jacket too. Same result.

  Bolot nodded. “The key ring must have come from the killer.”

  Arkady held his hand out. Bolot gave him the keys.

  “Evidence,” Arkady said.

  He unzipped the pocket in his parka, put the key ring in, and zipped it shut.

  “Why didn’t they come after us?” Tatiana said.

  Bolot shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t know we were here.”

  “Or maybe killing us wasn’t part of the plan.” Arkady shivered. He was getting cold already. “I suggest we cook the bear meat on the fire because we need to keep the fire burning and we need to eat. Bolot, you and I will take turns watching out for bears. Two hours on, two hours off. And tomorrow morning, assuming no one’s come to get us, we leave.”

  “Where do we go?” Tatiana asked.

  “We flew over a railway line on the way here,” Bolot said. “That’s the BAM. It runs east to west, so if we head due south, we’ll come to it sooner or later.”

  “What’s the BAM?” Tatiana asked.

  “It’s the old Baikal–Amur main line, an old construction project. Stalin ordered it to run several hundred kilometers north of the Siberian Express, which he thought was too close to the Chinese border.”

  “Any idea how far away it is?” asked Arkady.

  “I don’t know,” Bolot said. “Five kilometers? Twenty?” On a flat tarmac road in the summer, they could have knocked off twenty kilometers in a few hours. In the winter, crossing the snowbound taiga could take days.

  “Wouldn’t it be better to stay here?”

  “Maybe. If we knew for sure that rescue was coming, then yes. But we don’t. Better to do something than nothing.”

  “The Siberian dilemma,” Arkady said.

  The ice crystals round Bolot’s mouth cracked when he smiled. “Indeed. Yes indeed. Exactly that.” He clapped Arkady on the shoulder.

  “Siberian dilemma?” Tatiana asked.

  Bolot gestured in Arkady’s direction.

  “A fisherman is on a frozen lake. He moves around, listening all the time for the ice cracking beneath his feet, ready to jump back to thicker ice if necessary, but sometimes he’s not quick enough. The ice breaks. He falls in.”

  “So, what’s the dilemma?”

  “I heard it from my wife, Irina. If he pulls himself out of the water onto the ice, he’ll freeze to death in seconds, a minute at most. If he stays in the water, he’ll die of hypothermia in five.”

  “Then he must stay in the water,” Tatiana said.

  “Why?”

  “He lives longer. Only a few minutes, but longer is longer.”

  “No. You’re thinking like a Muscovite,” Arkady said.

  “I am from Moscow,” she said.

  “Think like a Siberian.”

  Her brow furrowed as she tried to remember what Bolot had said. Better to do something than nothing. She smiled, knowing she had the answer.

  “I was wrong,” she said. “He gets out of the water.”

  “Why?” Arkady asked.

  “Because that way he’s doing something. He gets out; that’s the crucial thing. He doesn’t just wait to die. He moves; he might run; his circulation starts up again. He might warm up the whole lake. You never know.”

  “The lesson is it’s better to take action than be passive,” said Arkady. “Better to fight than to surrender, even if you know you’re going to die.”

  Tatiana’s words, her rationale in working out the dilemma, were almost word for word what Irina had said when she first told Arkady about the Siberian dilemma, and Arkady didn’t know whether this made him happy or sad.

  “Tell me about Irina,” Tatiana said. “I know how she died from a medical error. Tell me what she was like when she was alive.”

  “She was a remarkable woman, a lot like you.”

  “In what way?”

  “She was brave to a fault. She didn’t mind putting herself in danger, and that frightened me. And she was beautiful.”

  29

  Bolot was insistent that they cook the bear meat for several hours, way longer than Arkady and Tatiana thought necessary.

  “Bears often carry parasites,” Bolot explained. “You don’t want to catch trichinosis, trust me. Happened to two friends of mine. One of them got severely ill, the other, severely dead.”

  Beyond the leaping flames of the campfire and the sizzle of the fat was darkness and silence. The three of them sat at points of a triangle so that between them they could see anything or anyone coming out of the forest.

  It was a matter of percentages. Without the fire they’d be dead by morning, so they needed the fire. Without the meat they wouldn’t have the energy to make it to the railway line, so they needed the food. If a bear smelled the cooking and came searching, they could shoot it. The only situation in which this all worked against them was if the man or men who’d killed Benz and Georgy were still around. In that case, Bolot, Arkady, and Tatiana silhouetted against the fire would be sure targets for anyone with decent aim.

  “Is it ready yet?” Arkady asked.

  “You’ll thank me in the long run,” Bolot replied.

  Eventually he decided that even the hardiest parasite would be, by now, little more than carbon and ash. He cut the meat into long strips and served it off his knife. It was tastier than Arkady had expected, like beef, but with a distinctly gamey flavor.

  “Bears are omnivores, so they
taste like their last meal,” Bolot said. “Berries are good. But if they’ve been eating salmon, they smell like low tide on a hot day.” He made a face.

  “Can you taste a hint of berry?” Arkady pictured Bolot as a sommelier in a Moscow restaurant, giving newly minted oligarchs a crash course in vino culture. “What do you think?” he asked Tatiana.

  “It could do with some vegetables.”

  “The chef regrets that vegetables are not in season,” Bolot said with gravity.

  They could still laugh at small jokes.

  “Eat until you’re full, and then some more,” Bolot said. “We’ll need all the energy we can get for tomorrow.”

  Only when Arkady felt himself eating with joyless repetition did he stop.

  “I can do my turn too,” Tatiana said.

  “Absolutely not,” Arkady said.

  She lay on her side and pulled her knees up to her chest to stay warm.

  Bolot nodded in Tatiana’s direction. “You better go first.”

  “What about you?”

  “It’s nine p.m. I’ll wake you at midnight.”

  Arkady lay down next to Tatiana. She took his hands and pressed them to her chest. Arkady molded his shape to fit hers. He was sure he couldn’t fall asleep, but he went out like a light.

  Bolot woke him at twelve o’clock and took his place next to the fire. Tatiana didn’t stir. Arkady stood up, rifle in hand. He put more wood on the fire and watched the flames rise and settle. His world extended to the edge of the fire. The taiga extended for thousands of kilometers in pretty much every direction, but now it seemed as remote and otherworldly as the moon.

  30

  Once there was light enough to see by, they were on their way. With no more than a nod, Bolot took the lead, and Arkady brought up the rear.

  “Bears are still the threat,” Bolot said. “If a bear doesn’t see you, don’t disturb it. If the bear does see you and stands up, he may just be curious. Back away slowly if you can. If the bear follows you, stop and stand your ground.”

  Bolot’s pace was metronomic. Tatiana, more at ease with the snowshoes than the day before, followed in his footsteps. Arkady followed in hers, as if the three of them were marking a safe path through a minefield.

  The world was white. When there were no trees to break the horizon line, it was impossible to see where land ended and sky began. The effect was unnerving. Arkady found it easier to look down at the snowshoe prints in the snow. They seemed proof that they were making headway. Otherwise, everything stayed the same: his speed, his breathing, the ache in his legs, the glare of the snow. No one spoke. Speaking was a visible waste of breath. Sooner or later they were bound to reach the railway. They stopped for five minutes every hour to drink some snowmelt and catch their breath.

  “We can’t stop for any longer,” Bolot said. “If we do, our muscles will seize up and we will never get going again.”

  It was past two. They’d been going for eight hours. Despite the freezing weather, Arkady felt himself sweat. He was wearing one layer too many. He should have taken off one of his sweaters earlier. He thought about asking Tatiana and Bolot to stop, but didn’t want to break their rhythm. He would catch up with them soon enough.

  He stopped, placed his rifle on the snow by his feet, shrugged the backpack off his shoulders, unzipped the parka, and took off his sweater. Tatiana and Bolot were a hundred feet ahead, disappearing over the crest of a low hill. He fixed his sight line on that.

  As he reached down for his backpack, he sensed the bear. He turned to see a slab of brown standing upright no more than twenty feet away. It was an old bear, a veteran with beady brown eyes, not a specimen you would find at the Moscow Zoo. His head swayed from side to side and when he roared, it came from his gut. The bear charged, and in the moment before it reached him, Arkady saw old scars and wounds that crisscrossed his scalp and the ebb and flow of muscles as he reared up. The Russians had a word for that kind of sight, grozny, which meant in equal parts awesome and terrible. Grozny, as in Ivan the Terrible, and grozny, as in the bear that was about to kill him.

  Arkady grabbed his rifle and fired. Blood sprayed the snow. Not even Arkady could miss a target that big from that distance, but it wasn’t enough to stop the bear, let alone bring it down, and now it was on top of him, swiping left and right, all claws and gaping mouth. Arkady heard a roar, but he couldn’t be sure if it was him or the bear.

  He fired again. The trigger clicked on an empty chamber. He jabbed at the bear with the rifle, trying to slam the barrel into its mouth. Another swipe sent the gun spinning into the air, taking Arkady with it. For a brief, peaceful moment there was nothing but white, and then Arkady landed and the air rushed from his lungs. He felt as if he’d been hit by a car.

  Arkady remembered General Renko barking out instructions in the voice he had always used when talking to Arkady, the same voice he had used on his lowliest, most inept, most slovenly conscripted soldiers.

  “Play dead or be dead. Lie flat on your stomach to protect your vital organs. Lace your hands over the back of your neck to cover the arteries there.”

  It was a long time since Arkady had felt any reason to be thankful to his father. He rolled onto his stomach and covered his neck as instructed. The bear turned Arkady over. It mauled him and shook him like a rag doll. Play dead or be dead. Pain dug deep within him as if he was being torn from the inside out. Yellow teeth took his parka and flesh down to the bone of his arm, and he felt his right hand go numb and limp. The bear redoubled his attack, picking Arkady up, swinging him left and right, and dropping him. He tore the skin off part of Arkady’s forehead. Arkady heard the huffing and snuffling and smelled the rot of his breath. The bear wouldn’t quit. Arkady played dead. There was nothing else he could do. Eventually the beast would give up and leave him alone.

  A shot was fired, then another. The bear staggered, paused as if he heard a distant call, then pitched face forward. He was dead before he hit the ground. Blood spewed from his mouth and ears. Arkady heard Tatiana’s and Bolot’s voices. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but it didn’t matter: he heard the terror and knew it wasn’t good.

  31

  Bolot and Tatiana patched Arkady up as best they could. They removed his shredded parka and Bolot took out his knife to cut what was left of it into strips, which he used as tourniquets. Over these went Arkady’s sweater, which they found lying in the snow. Tatiana put her fur hat on Arkady’s head to help preserve the heat there and to keep torn strips of cloth in place. Finally, they helped Arkady stand.

  “Put your arms over our shoulders,” Bolot said. “It will hurt like the devil, but it’s the only way to support you. Besides, we need to keep your arms high. That right arm in particular.”

  He raised his arms. Bolot had said it would hurt, and he was right. The muscles in Arkady’s back and shoulders felt as though they were being torn apart all over again. He gritted his teeth.

  “Your legs are fine, so you can walk,” Bolot said. Arkady noted how measured his voice was. This was Bolot taking care of him, his factotum who found solutions where others saw only problems; a man whose calm under pressure had helped keep both Tatiana and Arkady from panicking. Arkady was suddenly grateful to whoever had placed them next to each other on the plane to Irkutsk. Maybe Bolot was right after all: maybe it was fate.

  “Slow and steady,” Bolot said. “We don’t want to get your heart rate up too much…” “And bleed you out quicker” went the second half of that sentence.

  They set off, Arkady draped between them and trying not to sag too much. It was a condition every Russian knew, a man with too much vodka inside him being half carried, half dragged by his friends. Bolot soon had them in a rhythm: short steps so Arkady and Tatiana could keep pace. A human troika without a sleigh.

  Arkady dripped blood as they walked. He wondered if bears could sense blood in the snow the way sharks could sense it in the water. One foot in front of the other, each foot nearer the railway line. H
e didn’t ask Bolot how far they had to go. His world was pain. It would be so easy just to stop, but he knew they wouldn’t let him. He could tell them to go on and leave him there, but they’d refuse.

  Arkady didn’t know how long they walked, only that it was still light when they struggled up a short hill and found themselves on a berm that ran along a railroad track.

  “This is it,” Bolot said. “Can you stand on your own for a moment?”

  Arkady struggled to stand straight with Tatiana’s arms supporting his upper body.

  “Good.”

  Bolot gently removed Arkady’s arm from across his own shoulders and motioned for Tatiana to do the same. He shrugged off his rucksack, took Tatiana’s off her as well, and jabbed both packs into the snow a few feet apart.

  “Okay. Tatiana and I are going to lower you down to the ground. Keep your arms on top of the packs.”

  They gently lowered him. Arkady adjusted his position slightly.

  “Comfortable?” Bolot asked.

  Arkady allowed himself a groan.

  “What now?” Tatiana asked.

  “Now we wait. Stay with him. Talk to him. We can’t let him sleep.”

  Arkady wasn’t sure how long he could wait. He was equally aware that he had no choice. A train would come in time or it would not. Life versus fate.

  “Arkady?” Tatiana sat and held his head in her lap. “Tell me where you’d like to go when we get out of here. Anywhere in the world.”

  Arkady tried to focus. A foreign city, perhaps, like Prague, with cobblestone streets where he could wander all day and sleep with Tatiana all night. He was, after all, an urban animal.

  She rested her head against his, trying not to touch anyplace where the bear had mauled him.

  Bolot wore his bright orange sweatshirt to be more visible. He marched along the track as if motion alone could make the train come sooner.

  “Half an hour until it’s dark,” he said. “Don’t worry, he won’t die.”

  “How do you know that?” Tatiana asked.