From the festival crowd, the craftsmen invited a boy onto the stage to participate. They draped a hide over his knees and showed him, and the crowd, a stone set into a wooden bow. When the boy scraped the bow across the leather once, the stone fell out of its wooden socket to the boards. In the audience, those paying attention laughed.
An artisan replaced the boy in his seat and guided the tool in long strokes. Marina’s heart was more or less steady. She did not see the reporter, but he was somewhere out there. Who else would she bump into here? She saw the black humps of cameras all around her—more journalists? Strangers who might recognize her from a months-old city broadcast? This was precisely why she ought to avoid busy places. When she got back to Petropavlovsk, she had to tell her editor: no more public events. No matter where she went now, people, consciously or not, were drawn toward her tragedy. They responded to some call she was still emanating; they felt compelled to approach.
The sun was lost behind clouds. The air around them was heavy. Eva squeezed Marina’s shoulder and pointed out a log bench on the right side of the stage. The three of them shuffled over to take those seats.
Alla Innokentevna called for a volunteer from the crowd for a game. She handed a lasso to a Russian woman who came forward to play, while a dancer onstage leaned on a pole with a deer skull tethered to it. At a sign, the dancer rocked that pole to make the smooth bone spin. The skull swung around him like a moon around a planet. The goal of the game was to snare the skull in motion. The white woman took aim, clumsy with the rope, and Marina stared away at the forest.
The music thumped through her brain. Marina could tell from the hoots in the crowd that the woman was missing her mark over and over again. “Are you three enjoying yourselves?” someone said.
Marina looked up. Alla Innokentevna, in her holiday tunic, looked down. The other organizers had taken charge of the stage and were calling for a second volunteer. Up close, Alla Innokentevna’s outfit showed the tracks of traditional craft. A stone rubbed over leather. “Yes,” Marina said.
“So many people came out this year, despite the weather,” said Eva.
“The weather doesn’t matter. We’re not here to sunbathe, but to celebrate our history.”
Marina straightened her back. “You’re all doing an excellent job. It seems like everyone’s having fun.”
“Are you?” said Alla Innokentevna.
“I’m a little tired,” said Marina. The crowd mocked someone’s latest failure to lasso the skull.
“We haven’t had lunch yet,” said Eva. Petya stood.
“Going for food?” Alla Innokentevna asked him. “Walk around the back of the stage. Fewer people there.” The organizer sat in the spot Petya vacated.
The bench was low to the ground, forcing their knees up. Marina wrapped her arms around her shins. The three women watched in silence as the dancer slowed the momentum of the swinging skull then reversed its direction, prompting cheers.
Marina sat back a little to get a good look at Alla Innokentevna in her old-fashioned clothes. A serious face, framed by shaggy gray hair. Earrings shone silver underneath. This campground was built to emulate an Even settlement, and Alla Innokentevna, who managed it, must be Even, too, Marina decided. Though Marina couldn’t tell northern people apart. Even or Chukchi or Koryak or Aleut. Her grandparents used to speak fondly about how the peninsula’s natives had been pushed together, Sovietized, with their lands turned public, the adults redistributed into working collectives and the children taught Marxist-Leninist ideology in state boarding schools.
Alla Innokentevna turned from the stage to face Marina. Marina looked away.
“I heard about your girls,” Alla Innokentevna said. “Eva told me. My oldest daughter told me, too, months ago. She lives in the city. She followed your news at first.”
The organizer’s voice was low. Marina concentrated on her own inhalations.
“How did the police treat you?” Alla Innokentevna asked. Marina shrugged. “They were fine? They kept looking for a while?”
Eva must not have mentioned the case was cold. “They’re always looking,” Marina said.
Alla Innokentevna grimaced. “How nice.”
They sat under the roars of the crowd.
“Eva told you my girl is missing, too.”
“Right,” Marina said. “Your teenager.”
The organizer looked over Marina’s head. Her face was drawn. “Not a teenager anymore. Lilia was eighteen when she disappeared, but that was four years ago.”
“Eva said she ran away.”
“That’s what the village police told us.” Alla Innokentevna met Marina’s eyes again. “The police say many things, don’t they? To stop citizens from pestering them.”
Marina did not want to talk about this. As if she and Alla Innokentevna had had the same conversations with the police.
“I have a question for you,” Alla Innokentevna said. “About the authorities in Petropavlovsk. I heard they were very aggressive. They searched for months. And they came up with many theories, organized searches, interviewed people. Is that the case?”
“Many theories. They did. Yes.”
“Are you satisfied?”
“Oh,” Marina said. Cheers and hoots sounded around them. “I’m outrageously happy.”
After a moment, the organizer smiled. The corners of her eyes did not crease. “Aren’t we all,” she said. “Then I have a second question. A request.”
Wherever Marina went, people tried in this way to consume her.
Alla Innokentevna took a breath and dipped her face down, setting her earrings swinging. “Tell me, how did you influence them to stay so active? You paid them.”
“No,” Marina said.
“You must have paid them, I think,” Alla Innokentevna said. “Otherwise what reason would they have to continue? I understand, believe me. Who did you contact there? How much did you give?”
Everyone’s lurid questions. Their suppositions. Every conversation Marina had had over the past year was long, unbearable, one after the next in a rhythm as steady as dirt shoveled into a hole.
“I called the ministry in Petropavlovsk,” Alla Innokentevna said. “After it happened, I went to the city police station in person. They didn’t listen to me. But they listen to you. Don’t you have their ear?”
Marina pressed on her chest. If there were a price for the discovery of a missing person, she would have paid it to the authorities in August, ten times over. “You’re wrong,” she said. “The police do what they will without me.”
“I am asking you as a mother.”
“Asking what? Alla Innokentevna, I can’t help.”
“Simply tell me how.” Alla Innokentevna was close. She smelled of shampoo, lotion, ash from the morning’s fire. Suffocating. “And I could do something for you, if you like. We have, for example, poachers up here to write about. There are stories I could show you exclusively.”
Marina shook her head. “I don’t do those kinds of stories anymore.”
“No? You can ask me anything.”
Eva, hands around her mouth, shouted encouragement toward the stage. The skull on the pole circled endlessly. Anything, the organizer said. What answers could Alla Innokentevna have for her? Marina might ask what it was like to see your child turn thirteen, or fifteen, or graduate from high school. How it felt to know, and not just suspect, that if you had been a better parent, more attentive, more responsible, then your baby would not be gone today. How to go on.
Anything? Marina would take a piece of nonsense for her editor to slot into the arts section. She focused on the warm spot of her fist over her breastbone. “Tell me,” she said, “what inspired you to establish the cultural center?”
Alla Innokentevna drew away. Behind her glasses, her eyelids lowered. “Love for my community,” she said. “Quote m
e on that in your article. They don’t have that in the city, do they? No.” The organizer turned back toward the lasso game on the stage, and Marina, too, faced forward.
Petya returned with three shallow bowls of salmon soup on a tray. Alla Innokentevna did not budge, so he ate standing, and Marina and Eva spooned up their own portions without any more attempts at conversation. A native boy came onstage to try his luck. He raised the lasso and rocked on his heels, waiting. The deer skull spun. As Marina ate, and even after she set her bowl and spoon on the ground, she felt the presence of the organizer weighing on her, like someone’s foot stepping on her chest. Alla Innokentevna wanted to use Marina’s loss of Alyona and Sophia; she had failed the first time, but she would try again.
Marina put her head down. Her hiking boots were spattered with mud. The crowd erupted in applause and she knew the boy had finally lassoed it.
When Alla Innokentevna left to introduce the next event—an hour-long dance marathon for children—Petya took his seat back. Eva asked Marina, “How are you doing? Are you going to dance in the adult one?”
“For an hour?” Marina said. “No.” On the stage, schoolkids moved in thick-limbed imitation of the earlier dance ensemble. One little girl was even decked out in a tiny leather tunic with a matching strap around her forehead. The girl swayed, arms in the air.
“For three hours,” Eva said. “The adult one’s longer. Petya and I are going to do it—aren’t we, my love?” Petya agreed. “We danced through the whole thing last year. It’s fun. Think about it.”
“I am,” Marina said, though in truth she was thinking about her grandmother’s soup recipes, her father’s lessons in her childhood about chopping wood. Anything to keep out of her mind the thought of what she had not been able to do for her daughters. Marina scanned the scene for another distraction. She saw children—girls waving to their parents, smiling on the stage, arranging their arms like ballerinas.
Marina stood from the bench. “I’ll be back,” she told her friends and made her way toward the trees.
The forest muffled the music’s high notes so only the bass came through. Marina found the tent. The afternoon was drawing on. She checked her phone—no service—and slipped it into her jacket pocket anyway. Then she crawled onto her sleeping bag.
Rain came light on the tent top. The sound was soft crackles. The distant music did not interfere. She, Alyona, and Sophia used to lie in her bed together, when the girls did not want to sleep alone. Her daughters would talk across the pillows until late. Their high, precise voices on either side; Sophia’s head heavy against Marina’s bare arm; the twinkling spearmint smell of Alyona’s brushed teeth.
Surface tension, Marina reminded herself. The reflection and refraction of light through water. If this weather continued, she would run out of rain trivia. The raindrops made noises like a thousand parting lips.
Eventually she checked the time to make sure the kids’ marathon was well over. Adjusting her hood, Marina crawled out and zipped the tent flap shut behind her.
The path took her back to the clearing. Adult couples were onstage now, with drums throbbing behind them; Marina spotted Eva tossing her head and Petya stomping to the beat. Choral singing and prerecorded gull cries played through the sound system. As Marina edged around the back of the stage, Alla Innokentevna’s voice came over the speakers. “Aren’t they wonderful? Let’s hear you cheer.” A yell went up on the other side of the banner. “How long can they last?” Alla Innokentevna asked the crowd. No one responded to that.
Marina emerged beside the food booth. One of the cooks looked at her, waiting for a dinner order. “What do you have?” Marina asked.
“Soup.”
“Just soup? Fish soup?”
“Fish soup and reindeer blood soup,” the cook said. Marina was already taking bills out of her pocket. “The blood soup,” she said, passing the cook a hundred-ruble note.
Marina held the hot plastic bowl in both hands as she shouldered her way to a spot, twenty meters from the stage, that was relatively free of other people. The evening stank of smoke. Strong alcohol and charred meat. The broth in her bowl was clear brown, and at its bottom were countless suspended droplets, darker, solid, a heap of stones on the floor of a lake. She watched the dancers while she ate. Eva, spotting her from the stage, waved with both arms high, and Marina raised her spoon to signal back.
Getting to the dregs, she put the bowl to her mouth and drank. Slivers of green onion slid down her throat. She lowered the bowl. The comment-seeking reporter stepped in front of her. “Marina Alexandrovna.”
Immediately her body began to shut itself down. “Yes.”
“Your friend told us about your situation.” Behind him, the photographer, who looked barely out of his teens, hung on to his camera. The reporter said, “We’re very sorry for your loss.”
“What friend?” Marina knew, she knew, that Alla Innokentevna had arranged this ambush. Not only had the organizer herself been after Marina all day but she had enlisted the other villagers to lay claims to Marina’s tragedy.
But the reporter corrected her. “Your friend, the woman—” He pointed toward the stage.
“I see,” Marina said. Eva.
“She explained what happened. I’m the editor of Novaya Zhizn, Esso’s newspaper. We have four hundred and fifty readers, and we can run a piece in our next edition, put the call out around the village. Do you have a picture with you of your girls?”
Marina heard the pulse in her ears. Felt the blood in her stomach. Constant, constant, these small tortures. Everyone behaving as though their offer of assistance would change her world. “On my phone,” she said. “But it’s back at the tent.” She put the bowl on the ground, the spoon in it. Placed her hands in her pockets. “Oh. No,” she said when her fingers bumped against a screen. “I have it. It’s here.” If she moved slowly, she could last on the oxygen left in her lungs.
The reporter said, “You just tell us in your own words, and I’ll record you. Their picture?” She slid her phone out of her pocket. “Perfect. Great.” He gestured to the photographer, who raised the camera to cover his face.
The reporter’s recorder drifted toward her mouth. Music thumped around them. “When you’re ready,” the reporter said.
She lifted the phone to her collar. Glass and metal touched her there, hard over her clavicle, and she lowered the phone again. She looked into the black, strange eye of the camera. Opening her mouth, expecting to choke, she spoke.
“Please help me find my daughters, Alyona Golosovskaya and Sophia Golosovskaya, who went missing from the center of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky last August. August fourth. Alyona is twelve years old now. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt with stripes across the chest and blue jeans. Sophia is eight and was dressed in a purple shirt and khaki pants. They were taken by a heavyset man in a big, new-looking car that was black or dark blue. If you have any information, call Major General Yevgeny Pavlovich Kulik at 227-48-06, or contact your local police department.” Marina had memorized these descriptions and numbers early on. Her face in the circle of the camera lens was a person trapped in a well.
“Would you please show us?”
She unlocked her phone, scrolled to the photo roll, and held up her older girl’s school portrait. “Alyona.” The shutter clicked. She flicked the screen. “Sophia.” They were well lit and smiling. “We are offering a reward. If you know anything, call the police.”
The camera still pointed at her. Again the shutter click. The reporter asked, “Is there any message you’d like to send your girls?” He enunciated to make his later transcription easier. This was a favor he had done her, this little feature. This transaction. One column of type in exchange for her life. “What would you like to tell them?”
“That I love them,” she said. And there it was—the constriction. The weight coming down. “That I’m desperate for them. I lo
ve them more than anything in the world.”
“That’s good. That’s enough,” he said. “An awful incident. We’re certainly glad to help.”
She edged her body away from him and shut her mouth to draw air in through her nostrils. The air did not reach deep enough to give her relief.
The photographer said, “A big guy in a black car?” She nodded. It was all she could do to inhale through her nose. The photographer said, “A Toyota?”
“Just a big black car,” the reporter said. “Black or dark blue. Isn’t that right, Marina Alexandrovna?”
The photographer stared at Marina. This was the difference after people found out—the raw curiosity. “You should talk to Alla Innokentevna.”
Marina said, “She already talked to me.”
“What did she say?”
“That—” Marina stopped, unable to continue.
“She mentioned Lilia? Her daughter?”
The reporter broke in to stop the younger man. “They already spoke, she said.”
All this year had gone this way: coworkers approached Marina at her desk, or old classmates sent her emails, or her parents’ friends took her aside if they saw her grocery shopping to tell her they had figured out how to find her daughters. Meanwhile the detectives told Marina they knew nothing and expected less. Your theories don’t help me, she no longer had the oxygen to say.
“We’ll print it next Saturday,” the reporter told Marina. “You never know, maybe they were taken north. This might make all the difference.” She tilted her head back. “Are you all right?” he asked. “Marina Alexandrovna?”
Disappearing Earth Page 25