Notes From My Captivity

by Kathy Parks

  “Ya nikomu ne zkazhu,” I offer, trying to stay calm.

  I won’t tell.

  I hold a shaking finger to my lips to show him.

  His eyes darken.

  “Vy ne mozhete uyti!” he insists.

  This isn’t working. I have to try something else. “Ya ostanus zdes,” I lie.

  I will stay here.

  This seems to piss him off even more.

  “Nyet!” he hisses, and shakes his head. “Nyet! Nyet!”

  He grabs my shoulder roughly.

  I scream. Watch his expression change to something like surprise. I take a deep lungful of air and scream again. It echoes through the trees. He releases my shoulder and I scream again.

  This time, I hear answering voices coming from the cabin. Vanya’s. Clara’s. They sound frightened and uncertain. Marat looks toward the cabin, glowers back at me, turns, and disappears into the trees. I sink to the ground and burst into tears.

  Someone’s running up to me. I feel another hand on my shoulder. Lighter, kinder. I look up. It’s Vanya. His sister hovers nearby, looking worried.

  “Chto sluchilos?” Vanya asks.

  What happened?

  I struggle to stop crying, to catch my breath.

  “Tvoy brat . . .”

  Your brother . . .

  I wipe my eyes.

  “Nenavidit menya.”

  Hates me.

  I expect Vanya to jump in, tell me no, of course not. But he exchanges glances with Clara. The two of them help me up, and help me pick up the tubers. Later, Vanya tells me never to collect tubers alone again.

  I don’t know what they think they would do to protect me. Vanya is strong, and even little Clara has a kind of catlike grace, but the muscle of the whole family together would be nothing against Marat. After all, look what he did to the crew.

  I notice Vanya glancing at me more and more. I really do think he’s starting to actually like me, and Vanya has the keys to the canoe. We have a broken language all our own, missing key ingredients that make a sentence a healthy, happy thing.

  A prepositional phrase is replaced by a motion of the hand. Meaning is often lost. Sometimes we laugh at how ridiculous it is. I try to show him where I am from, a land called Colorado.

  “Co-lo-ray-do,” he says.

  “America,” I say, and he nods.

  “Way over there,” I add.

  “Cold?”

  I can’t think of the Russian, so I say in English, “In the winter, yes.”

  He cocks his head. He may understand, may not. It would be amusing if the circumstances weren’t so dire. Not so long ago, I had the power to say anything that was on my mind to anyone in the world. I had emojis and a screen and a lot of opinions. And now I am back to the basics again. Pointing and drawing things in the dirt. And yet Vanya seems to listen more intently than the boys back home. And sometimes, I have to admit, when Vanya looks at me a certain way, I get a slight shiver. Like a tiny bit of Boulder snow has just been sprinkled on my head. But this is just the electricity of hope. The chemistry of being rescued, of getting away from this place and never coming back.

  He wants to know everything about the world outside this wilderness. I tell him, with pictures drawn in the dirt, gestures, and with whatever words I have, about the twenty-first century. All the things he has never seen or experienced. Refrigerators, cars, spaceships, space heaters, televisions, dishwashers, microwaves. Just the appliances exhaust me. But there’s more. So much more. Streets and cities and football stadiums and restaurants and coffee shops and the ocean and doctors and music and video games and voice mail and Christmas trees and alarm clocks and ice cream trucks and fireworks and candles and Band-Aids and M&M’s.

  In fifty years, I’ll get to Spanx.

  As I attempt to describe these things, they haunt me. A Kleenex is a tiny miracle ruined by snot. A lightbulb should be worshipped as a god. M&M’S are nature’s perfect food. The thought of butter makes me want to cry.

  I miss everything.

  Vanya’s eyes don’t blink. He barely breathes. The modern world is a religion—dangerous, beautiful, fantastic—and he struggles to believe.

  He’s never seen a dog in his life. He’s never had to decide between paper or plastic. He’s never been to get his hair cut, or used a crosswalk. He’s done the things that boys all over the world do: skip rocks across the water, climb trees, whittle on sticks, learn to swim—but he’s never gone on to Algebra or baseball or sexting. He’s stuck with what he has, and I don’t know if it’s helpful or cruel to let him know what he’s missing.

  Could it be that Vanya wants to escape here just as much as I do? I can’t imagine the woods and those few books can keep up with his seemingly endless curiosity.

  He gets wildly excited when I tell him about planes. He points at the sky. “Ya vizhu, ya vizhu!”

  I see, I see.

  “You’ve seen planes?” I ask in bad Russian.

  He nods excitedly, holds up three fingers. I’m hoping that, very soon, he’ll also see a helicopter. The one that might come rescue me.

  The one that might not.

  One afternoon Vanya leads me to a place in the woods I have never been before. I can’t really read the look on his face. We stop at a tree, it’s half-dead, leaning a little.

  “It’s a tree,” I say. “Apparently not a very healthy tree.”

  Then I notice that the tree has a hole in it the size of a basketball. Vanya reaches his hand inside the hole, rummaging around.

  He pulls out a clothbound notebook and hands it to me carefully. It has Russian letters on the cover. I remember the words of Yuri from Dan’s article:

  The younger boy in the family stole my notebook. . . .

  I open the notebook to the first page and see tiny, strict handwriting on it, margin to margin, careful use made of every bit of the page, in the same way his family consumes a rabbit or bird of prey. I look at the writing wonderingly, then back to Vanya.

  “This is your writing?” I ask.

  He nods.

  I turn the pages. “I guess you stole his pen, too,” I said.

  “Stole?”

  “Never mind.”

  I can’t believe it. Vanya has been keeping a journal. On these pages must be life as he knows it. There must be secrets here. Lore. Amazing stories of survival and hardship. Vanya studies my eyes. I keep turning pages. Weeks, months, years. Then I see my name.

  Adrienne. I had once spelled it out for him, with a stick in the dirt, and I can see he has a good memory. It’s weird to see my name appear in ink on paper. As though affirming I still exist.

  I see my name farther down the page. Then again.

  Vanya is writing about me.

  I see another word. Krasivaya.

  Beautiful.

  Is that what he thinks of me, or have I misinterpreted?

  Quickly he takes the notebook away. He’s seen what I saw. He puts the notebook back in the tree and starts walking back to the hut, his body tense, as though he’s told me too much.

  I follow silently. I wonder what is written about me in that diary. All I know is he’s been thinking about me.

  But there’s something else on my mind today.

  “Vanya,” I say. “Mne nuzhno chto-to.”

  I need something.

  We stand at the bank of the river. We’ve been looking for flint most of the day, and we’ve had little luck. So we’ve given up, and I’ve led him here. Downstream, the remains of the boat are still caught on the rocks, the bent frame of the engine visible just above the waterline.

  I’m standing near the place on the bank where my body lay after I nearly drowned in the river.

  I want to know if Vanya saved me.

  I tell him the story of the tragedy in English, hoping he follows some of it.

  “We were trying to get away,” I say, pointing at the boat. “The boat hit a stone. . . .”

  I slap my fist hard against the flat of my hand and Vanya nods, his
face serious. I throw my hands in the air, spreading my fingers to indicate our flying bodies.

  I don’t know how to say stepfather, and I don’t feel like trying to explain the intricacies to a man for whom a blended family is one who adopts a bear.

  “Dan,” I say.

  I wave my hand to where Dan’s body still lingers in the freezing river.

  Vanya nods. “Dan,” he says. “Dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “Father?”

  “No,” I say. I think a moment. “Friend.”

  It’s true. Dan was always my friend, even when I didn’t want to be around him. Even when I made fun of him.

  I kneel. With the point of a stick I draw the waterline and a figure of a girl beneath it.

  The girl is me.

  “Drown,” I say, then pant as though I’m gasping for breath.

  He looks at the drawing, then at me. “Down.”

  “No, not down. Drown.” As I say it again, water fills my throat, because I remember it. The frantic clawing, the aching of the lungs. And then a hand clasping mine, pulling me out. Then nothing. Just blackness and waking up in the space where now I kneel, drawing another stick figure standing above the waterline, reaching down. With the point of my stick I approximate the two hands clasping, the savior and the saved.

  I look up at him.

  “Ty,” I say.

  You.

  He shakes his head. “Nyet.”

  The answer takes me by surprise. “No?”

  “Not me.”

  “Marat?” I ask, barely believing.

  He laughs in answer.

  “Right,” I say. “Who, then?”

  Vanya shrugs. “Tebe prisnilos.”

  “Tebe prisnilos?” I don’t know the words.

  His eyebrows knit together as he searches his mind for the English equivalent. “Dree-yum,” he says at last.

  “No, it wasn’t a dream. I was really drowning. I didn’t imagine this.”

  “Imagine?” Vanya says.

  “Imagine is not real,” I say, then give up. Sometimes it’s exhausting trying to talk to Vanya. I stand and scuff out the line drawing with the sole of my shoe. The identity of the person who saved me from drowning is just one of the many mysteries piling on top of one another, like why was I born and why did my father die and why am I here in the middle of the forest, and what will become of me? But there’s no time to ponder these questions.

  The afternoon is passing.

  Dan’s body lies dripping on the bank. The freezing water has left him remarkably preserved. He looks like he is asleep. His boots and clothes are miraculously intact. His springy hair is drying. He looks peaceful, ordinary. Nothing to indicate terror or fear. For this I’m very grateful. At first, after Vanya had navigated by fallen tree limb and boulder to the place where Dan’s body lay submerged and dragged it back to the bank, I’d avoided looking at my stepfather’s face. But now I find myself stealing glances at it, curiously reassured, as I kneel on the bank and help Vanya dig his grave.

  Vanya’s wet with sweat as he swings his pickax into the ground and then tosses it aside, kneeling to help me dig out the loose soil. I have to work one-handed, but I haven’t rested since we began, and we have made good progress. The afternoon is waning, the sunlight moving back up toward the low-lying clouds. A sense of sadness emanates from Vanya, although he has spoken very little since we started digging. Maybe Dan reminds him of the death of his sister, or his father, or some unnamed sorrow in his past, something involving a hard winter or a lean spring. Or maybe he simply realizes that if he loses his family, he is alone. I have told him Dan’s name and age and that he was a “good man” and, when I didn’t know the word for brave, settled for “strong.” I lack the vocabulary to tell Vanya all Dan’s peculiarities, the kale shakes and the weaving back and forth while in thought, the way he rose on the tips of his toes for emphasis and his habit of saying “you guys” and—my heart hurts—how he’d invite me to work with him in his garden, Come on, kid, an offer I never accepted.

  The grave is finally deep enough. Vanya and I get to our feet. My legs are cramped from kneeling for hours, but I’m satisfied with our work. Vanya goes to get Dan and I try to follow him, but he waves me away. I turn, grateful not to have to hold my dead stepfather’s feet. I have realized I’m stronger than I think, but I’m not that strong. I watch the river continue down its course as though it never killed a man, looking across into a bunch of mushrooms that grows around the base of a tree, imagining faces in those clumps as I try not to hear the sound of Dan’s heels scraping the soft earth.

  Vanya’s heavy breath and then a body-shaped thump.

  A few minutes pass as Vanya fills the grave. I hear Vanya stand up and knock the dirt from the knees of his pants. I turn around and there’s no Dan anymore, just a patted-down mound approximately as long as Dan was tall.

  I kneel and burst into tears. Vanya stands by silently. I take my good time, crying. This is Dan’s funeral, and he deserved to have his family there, his friends and the colleagues who stood by him after Sydney Declay’s article came out. And the Osinovs, the family that made him famous and then a laughingstock, should be lined up in the first pew. Dan deserves that. Instead, he’ll get a few tears now, some grateful thoughts, and a cold riverbank for a grave.

  Eventually Vanya wanders off. When he comes back, he carries two sticks with him. I watch in wonder as he takes out Sergei’s pocketknife and whittles down a point on one of the sticks. He trims a length of hemp off the bottom of his shirt, places one stick across the other and winds the strip of cloth around the place they intersect, forming a cross. He puts the pointed stick in the ground, finds a rock, and pounds the cross into the head of the grave.

  I find a cluster of purple flowers, pull them up by the roots and lay them at the foot of the cross. I’ve finally stopped crying. Vanya and I stand looking down at it.

  “Spasibo,” I tell him.

  Thank you.

  He nods. He folds his pocketknife and grabs his pickax. Suddenly he stiffens. His eyes go wide. He looks up and so do I.

  I see it, small as a bird in the sky, beyond the tree line, downriver but coming closer.

  It’s a helicopter.

  The twenty-first century has finally arrived, looking for its lost comrades. Dan, Lyubov, Sergei, Viktor . . . and me. Vanya freezes for a moment. I do not. I bolt away, running down the bank, stumbling on rocks, my hands in the air, screaming at this tiny metal rescuer.

  “Help me!” I scream. “Help me, help me!”

  Vanya has recovered from his stupor and is chasing me. I hear the thud of his leather moccasins against the bank, and I stumble faster, arms wide, as the helicopter grows slightly larger in the sky.

  “Help me! Help—”

  Vanya tackles me. The weight of him cuts off the air in my lungs as we go down together on the bank, my cheek hitting smooth pebbles, my body flopping like a fish, Vanya’s heaviness on top of me. His heart beating against my back, his breathing hard.

  I can’t move. My face hurts from the fall. My homemade cast is trapped beneath me, digging into my ribs. I try to struggle, but Vanya’s holding me down. Everything is silent but for the wind and birds and river and Vanya’s breath steadying. I have screwed up. Showed my hand. All this time I’ve pretended that I am totally cool with living off the land as a guarded pet of his wild family and never seeing my own family again. Totally cool with strange rashes and bug bites and bears in the woods and weird ghosts who appear in the darkness of the hut. Cool with the near starvation and the hard work. Cool with the fact that my friends are dead, that Dan is dead. Now he’s seen me for what I am. A frightened person who just wants to get away.

  His weight is painful. My cast hurts my ribs so much I’m afraid I’ll cry out. But I don’t. I surrender.

  Finally he gets off me and stands. My breath whooshes back into the starving parts of my lungs. I rub my sore rib cage. He doesn’t hold down his hand to help me as I stagger to my
feet. I don’t dare look into the sky, because his eyes will follow me, but I know that modern society is gone. It flew off somewhere to send a text or download a podcast or eat a Cronut, leaving us here several centuries behind, bitter, tired, alone.

  Vanya’s clearly pissed. If he had the English mastery I’m sure he’d snarl, This is the thanks I get for digging your stepfather’s grave. He motions me with his hand and starts trudging up the bank in the direction of the hut.

  I wonder if I’ve just completely botched my escape plan, if he no longer likes or trusts me and will no longer wish to save me. On the way back, I try to speak to him in English, then in Russian. He won’t answer me. He stays several steps in front of me. He juggles no rocks. He makes no whistling sound at the calling birds. He kicks at no Siberian pinecones. I’ve taken away his playfulness with my traitorous pursuit of freedom. And I think to myself, how oddly nice it must have been for him to live so long without being suckered by a girl.

  “You know what, Vanya?” I say to his back. “Sorry I tried to save myself. But I come from a place where winter means a Rag and Bone sweater, not death. Do you care that there’s not enough food? Do you care I’m going to freeze? Or maybe that if somehow I do survive, your crazy brother will finish me off? Yeah, believe it or not, girls in America aren’t that easy. You just can’t bury their stepfather in a riverbank for them and expect to get in their pants.” My voice is angry, my tone defiant. He glances back at me and keeps on walking. “Oh, don’t pretend not to understand me. You understand a hell of a lot more English words than you’re supposed to. Which makes no sense at all to me.”

  He walks a few more feet, stops, and turns around. We lock eyes. We are not friends. We are adversaries. Tarzan and Jane will never make Boy.

  Vanya enters the hut, where Clara and Gospozha are immersed in their sewing. Clara puts down her fabric, comes and hugs Vanya, then me. It’s nice to feel her warmth and joy at the sight of me. Something Vanya evidently doesn’t share. Without a word, he empties the sack of flint we’ve collected. We haven’t had a productive day, and disappointment shows on Gospozha’s face.