Notes From My Captivity

by Kathy Parks

  I am growing even thinner. My clothes hang on me. Gospozha gives me a length of rope to hold my pants up. One day, I open the door and find the women sewing something at the table. Clara spies me and shrieks, and they quickly put the item away. I’m guessing they are making me a dress, and though it doesn’t seem like it would be very warm, I’m touched by the gesture.

  I can’t talk to the women about the usual things: What kind of purse goes with a belt, the annoyance of the shampoo always running out before the conditioner, the folly of trying to find a hunter-green shirt when it’s not in fashion this season. The fact that the aluminum in deodorant might kill you but it just works so well. Music, movies, politics, global warming. How could they know that in the thirty years since their vanishing, the population has doubled again?

  They don’t know that Princess Diana has died or about 9/ll, the rise of the internet, the stock market crash, the housing market bubble. The world as I know it is outside their understanding and experience.

  But basic things join us: the need for food and warmth and stories, appreciation of flowers, the craving for salt when salt is scarce. The need for love. The habit of making work go faster by singing. The desire for solitude and for company. The appreciation of summer beauty. Reverence for the dead. And occasionally, laughter. Once in a while, I do something that makes them inexplicably laugh, or they do something that makes me laugh, or someone laughs and it spreads fast. At those times, we need no language. Everyone understands it. People laugh when they are safe. And that’s how I suppose I’m beginning to feel here. It’s the real world that seems dangerous.

  Clara and I have wandered far from the hut, looking for a certain wildflower that her mother likes to boil into a poultice that seems to ease the stiffness in her knees. I’ve seen the wildflower from time to time, but now the season seems to be fading, and we walk farther and farther downriver in search of them. We reach a meadow covered in white flowers, with apparently nothing to offer except the beauty of blooms, because Clara doesn’t pause to collect them. Clara takes my hand as we wade through them. She’s not very talkative today. She seems content just to be out in the woods with me.

  I’m thinking about Vanya. The way he looks at me. Studying me up close. The thought of him is still confusing, half-formed. Like other things. Maybe I’m not getting the right vitamins, because my mind is playing tricks on me. Shadows move, take vague human shape and disappear. Last night when I was drawing water from the river, I thought I felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked around and no one was there. I’m not sure what is real and not real, and that includes my attraction to Vanya. I’ve been away from everything so long, zero communication, no email, no text. No nothing. Have I gone crazy out here?

  Halfway through the meadow, Clara freezes and drops my hand. Her eyes grow wide, and my heart begins to pound. There’s an electricity in the air, like the kind you feel before a great clap of thunder.

  Is he here? Has Clara led me to him at last?

  “Daddy?” I murmur.

  Clara looks at the sky and I watch, too. We wait.

  Then I see it.

  It’s not the spirit of my father descending from a cloud to give me comfort and astonished joy.

  It’s a helicopter.

  Instead of relief, I’m filled with panic. I have to get away. They can’t find me, not yet. Not before the full moon and the ritual. Clara and I rush toward a large bush near the edge of the meadow, diving into it, branches breaking and quivering around us. We lie on the ground, spooning, making ourselves small, very small, each of us holding our breaths as we hear the sound of the blades grow louder, lingering over our head.

  Finally the sound of the helicopter fades, and we are left in silence. Clara and I crawl out from under the bush. She looks at me, wide-eyed, releasing a stream of quizzical coos. I’m guessing she has never seen a helicopter, or an airplane, for that matter. I try my best to explain in limited Russian. I clear a place on the ground and draw a stick figure of the helicopter and the people in it.

  I try to tell her it’s okay. The helicopter is gone, and we are safe.

  But are we? Maybe the smoke from the fire has alerted someone to our position. Maybe they are coming back. But they can’t. Not yet.

  The full moon is two days away.

  She takes my hand, and we keep walking. We find the medicinal flowers half an hour later, at the next meadow over. Clara seems subdued, troubled. She barely speaks as we walk home together. I think she will give the family the news of the strange sighting as soon as we are through the door, but instead she puts the flowers in her mother’s lap and accepts her smile of approval.

  It is only later that I realize that Clara isn’t stupid. She knows that the helicopter full of people might be searching for me and to tell her family this would not be good news to them.

  I wait until nightfall, crawl over to Clara, and whisper, “Thank you,” into her ear. Her eyes open. She pats my cheek. Her eyes close again, and I crawl back to my corner of the room.

  Was the helicopter even real? Or just another apparition?

  Day 6.

  Tomorrow the full moon rises. Tomorrow is the ritual. The one I’ve been left out of. I beg and plead with Vanya in the woods, hidden safely in the middle of a group of red-berried bushes. Finally he bursts out, “I can’t help you! I do not decide! My mother decides!”

  “What?” I gasp. “Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

  He looks guilty. “I like the kisses,” he admits.

  I snort in disgust and stand up. “You are a typical man, Vanya. And that’s not a compliment.”

  He looks at me quizzically. “What is ‘typ-i-cal’?”

  “Look it up.”

  I storm away. The truth is, I haven’t regretted the time I’ve spent kissing Vanya. Far from it. In fact, other than the desire to see my father, I’ve found my other preoccupation is Vanya himself. His insatiable curiosity. The way he puts English words together. His accent as he says them. The way he makes toys out of sticks for his sister and cocks his head to listen to his mother. The way he and his brother fall into rhythm as they chop wood together.

  The kindness in his eyes.

  His laugh, so clean and pure, it would work in the streets of Boulder, or on a lifeboat, or in outer space. It would work anywhere.

  His smile.

  The touch of his lips.

  Perhaps I’m losing my mind.

  Or falling in love.

  Or both.

  In all my time here, I have not had a single private conversation with Gospozha. There’s still something unreachable about her, intimidating. And I know she knows about Vanya and me. She’s his mother. She knows everything.

  Tonight, when she quietly leaves the cabin, I follow her. Find her in the middle of the meadow, her back to me, gazing out into the trees. Somewhere in the dark, in that direction, lie the graves of her husband and daughter. I wonder if she’s thinking of them.

  I head out to her, wading through sunflowers, the moon almost full over my head. The air moves through my shirt, makes me shiver. She doesn’t acknowledge me when I reach her. Says nothing as I stand beside her, my arms crossed, my breath making mist. I almost lose my nerve and head back to the cabin. But I force myself to speak.

  “Moy otets zdes’.”

  My father is here.

  I look sideways at her. For a long moment, she doesn’t react. Then, slowly, she nods.

  “Ya khochu uvidet’ yego.”

  I want to see him.

  No reaction now. Complete stillness. I hope she is not silently calling her owl to come kick my ass. I try to keep talking, in Russian, but I stumble. So many words I don’t know. And so I talk in English, hoping that the magic that seems to hover all around us will enter my words, my voice, make it all understandable. “I know some things about your family. That you left Moscow years ago because you had special powers and no one understood you and people were afraid of you. And now people are still afraid of you. I’m not afr
aid of you. I understand you. I know that you have lost people and found a way to find them again.”

  I say the names of her loved ones. Say them with reverence.

  “Grigoriy. Zoya.”

  With each name, she closes her eyes and then opens them.

  “I know they’re coming back tomorrow night. Vanya told me. My father died seven years ago. I think he is here now. I want to see him, too.”

  And then I say his name.

  “William.”

  It shivers in the air. It was his name and saying it means hearing his voice and watching him tie his jogging shoes. Saying it hurts and helps.

  “Please let me see him. Just one more time. I believe.”

  I say the last two words in Russian. “Ya veryu.”

  She says nothing. I’m not even sure she’s understood. I don’t know what else to say. I want to add, “Pozhaluysta”—Please—but it seems wrong. Like begging. Finally I walk away.

  I’m heading back to the cabin, head down, when she calls my name. “A-drum.”

  I realize I’ve never heard her say it before. She pronounces it like Clara does.

  I turn around.

  She looks at me for a long moment.

  “Khorosho.”

  Yes.

  Clara wakes up all excited and talks to her family, too fast for me to follow.

  All day long, I go about my chores with a gathering sense of bewildered excitement as I watch the family. They’re different. Lighter. More prone to laughter. Marat seems just on the edge of his first good mood. He blows cheerfully on his flute. I wince. He never gets better.

  Near nightfall, as the air chills and the owls come out and the full moon rises, Clara returns from the forest with a small sack that the family keeps glancing at all through dinner. Clara keeps jumping up and looking at the sky and streaming some kind of live dove news that seems to further animate the family. I have no idea what’s going on, and no one will tell me.

  Later that night, Marat lights the fire outside while Clara dumps the contents of her sack into a boiling pot of water on the stove. Gospozha stirs the pot; I lean in for a glance. The water smells earthy. I wrinkle my nose. Gospozha waves me away. After several minutes of a hard boil, she removes the pot from the fire and sets it aside to cool. Clara runs to the window again. She can barely contain herself. She throws her arms around her mother’s neck.

  The tea is poured off into bowls. We carry them to the men, who are sitting on the stones, then join them with our own bowls. There is barely any wind tonight. The fire burns evenly, warming our faces. This is a tame fire, not like the wild fire that almost ate our lives. It’s like fighting a ferocious wolf in the woods and then going home to pet the dog.

  Everyone looks at Clara as though waiting for a sign. I glance sideways at Vanya. His face is intense. Finally Clara nods and lifts her bowl to her lips. The rest of us follow her, drinking the liquid, which tastes terrible, like dirt. We look at one another. We wait.

  The firelight curls, straightens. My head feels light in the center, as though that part of my brain has turned to froth. My eyelids flutter. The fire is now blue at the edges. It’s half a fire and half a body, moving and dancing.

  I notice everyone is looking up at the night sky. I look up, too, and gasp. A brilliant yellow light undulates like a snake; from this light springs a red light. Like waterfalls of colored mists, they play together. The murmurs of the family around me prove that I am not imagining this, that everyone sees the same thing. Clara reaches her hands to the sky. We all do, as the lights spread out as though they have wings now, then fold back into one another. Purple emerges. Orange. Green.

  Under this light, I feel joined not just with the family, but with the woods and the sky and the world. It’s all the same fabric now, something where nothing is lost and no one is strange. It’s an eternity of the familiar expressed in colors. I speak to the people around me in the circle, in a language of silence. I understand them perfectly, their fears and their longings and all the things they’ve dreamed about with me in the darkness of the hut. I know them, and I am not alone. I’m one of them, one of everyone and everything. The lights above us descend. The fire reaches out for them and then we are all enveloped in colored light.

  Clara turns and cries out. I follow Clara’s gaze and then I see her.

  It’s the little girl with the rosy-lipped smile.

  Their sister, my sister.

  Just behind her is an old man. He is thin. His beard is full, but his hair is cut short. His back is straight; his steps are light and easy.

  There is nothing about their appearance that would indicate they’re anything but flesh and blood. They look like they’ve been out for a stroll and now they are coming back home.

  “Zoya!” Clara cries. “Papa!”

  The family shouts out ecstatic greetings and rushes to them, surrounding them. They are jubilant, embracing. I stand there, dazed, watching them. It’s not that I believe. I don’t have to. I’m here. I’m a witness. This is fact, as surely as it’s fact that I am alive, that I move and breathe. The miraculous is as real and basic and crucial as a pile of salt or a threaded needle.

  I don’t have to believe or not believe. I am right here, experiencing it. I’m a part of it, a part of everything.

  Zoya notices me. She breaks free of the family and comes to me and holds her arms out. We embrace. Her body is solid, and has the scent a little girl would have after running in the woods, sweaty and warm and alive. I can feel the beating of her heart as I hold her against me, the rest of the family making a circle around us. Clara cries with joy and the mother is reaching out to stroke Zoya’s hair, whispering, “Moya malyshka, moya malyshka.”

  My baby, my baby.

  I am not afraid. This feels natural. An ordinary visit on an ordinary night.

  The little girl whispers into my ear, He is here, in a language made of all the languages, and she turns me around.

  My father is standing there in front of me.

  He is alive.

  He is that same exact man taken from me when I was ten. He’s wearing the same jogging shirt and shorts. His hair is as it was that night, growing out, the top a little curly.

  For a moment I stand frozen in place. For so long I’ve waited for him, hoped for him, and now it seems too good and real and natural to be true.

  “Dad?” I whisper.

  He smiles. “What did I miss?”

  Tears run down my face. “Everything.” I rush to him and throw my arms around him, feeling his stubble against my cheek and the warmth and substantiality of his body as he holds me.

  “Adrienne,” he whispers. “The messes you get into.” That lighthearted voice has not lost its tone in seven years. It’s traveled thousands of miles to tease me.

  “Is it really you, Daddy?” I ask him, ear against his heartbeat, nose against his shirt that smells of his jogging sweat. I’m afraid to let go. Afraid that I’m only holding cold night air in my arms and I’ll realize that at any second. And I can’t bear it. I can’t bear to wake up in this moment alone and cold in Siberia without him.

  “It’s me,” he reassures me, and he’s still real and still warm.

  I release him and look up at his face. “I have so many questions. So much to tell you.”

  “I already know.”

  “But where have you been?”

  “With you.”

  “Here?”

  “Everywhere.”

  He strokes my hair and kisses my forehead. He whispers in my ear. “You’ve found me again. Now go home, Adrienne. Go home to your family, or you’ll die here this winter. There’s not enough food for you. There’s not enough food for them with you here, either. Go home, because you have a story.”

  “The story of the Osinovs?”

  He shakes his head. “The story of you.”

  “Me?” I’m puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

  He smiles. “Your story is forgiveness.”

  I’m dumbfounde
d. “Forgiveness? Of what?”

  Somewhere the other family members are still embracing, rejoicing. But now my father and I are locked in our private conversation.

  “Say her name,” he says. “Say the name of the girl who killed me. Because I forgive her. And everything is good.”

  This is the last message I expected.

  “But Daddy—”

  His voice is kind, but he’s not asking. This is an order. “Forgiveness is your story.”

  Twenty-Four

  The next morning, I wake up in the hut, staring at the ceiling. I’m not sure at first if I imagined it all. I blink. My eyes adjust to the old beams of the ceiling. The family stirring, the light coming in.

  No, it was real. It happened.

  Our loved ones are gone, but only gone in a way that water is gone when it turns to vapor. The people in the small hut share a sleepy contentment. I’m filled with a peace I haven’t had in years. I saw my dad last night. He spoke to me. He was alive and no one can tell me different.

  Clara goes with me to fetch the water, holding my hand. I want to tell her about the night before, how it made me whole again, and thank her so much for the gift of my father, but I sense that this is something not meant to be spoken of by light of day, so I say nothing. Instead we sing the Rolling Stones song I taught her, “Ruby Tuesday.”

  Clara understands the melody if not all the words. “Goo . . . dy ooby dooday, oo koo put a nae don oo . . .”

  The air is crisp and cold. I am the happiest that I can ever remember being since my father left me.

  But he didn’t leave.

  This is the truth I’ve found out here, with this family and with this girl.

  “Ya schastliva, Clara,” I tell her as we dip the water.