by Dan Pollock
Marcus remembered passing this stop on his train up from Nakhodka. He was becoming excited. “This is what they call serendipity,” he told Eva.
“What is this?”
“Travel surprises. Stuff that can’t happen to you if you never leave home, or don’t take a chance. Okay, for instance, I saw this movie Dersu only because I went with a guy I met in aikido class, which I took mainly because the teacher, Master Kobayashi, was the brother-in-law of this big Buddha head I knew in the Islands, the one who also got me the ride on the ketch. And here we are. That’s serendipity. You go with the flow.”
When Marcus expressed interest in seeing where Kurosawa had filmed, Serdyuk went back to his office and came out with the address of a local trapper, who, he thought, had been a technical adviser on the film. In fact, this man claimed to be a descendant of Arsenyev. Whether or not this was so, he was certainly knowledgeable about the filming, and about the taiga, the great Siberian forest.
*
A half hour later, propelled by Marcus’ enthusiasm—and quite against Eva’s sober judgment—they found themselves several kilometers outside Khabarovsk along the Ussuri, inside an old peasant cottage, or izba. The trapper, whose name was Kostya, turned out to be a big, wild-eyed man with doughy skin and stringy, shoulder-length brown hair. He was apparently unused to company, and rushed about ineffectually, till Eva took charge. In a few minutes, under her supervision, the samovar was heating up, and they were seated on chairs and benches before a large, tiled stove, listening to the trapper describe, in the most agitated and grandiose tones, his obviously insignificant role in the filming.
Rather, Marcus and Eva listened, prompting with further polite questions. But Taras Arensky leaned his wooden chair against the log wall and focused far off through the windows, watching the early winter twilight deepen into darkness.
Actually, he was again mired in his frustrations. If only the damn American cowboy would go away, get on the morning train to Irkutsk! As incredible as Marcus’ stories had been—and Taras admitted he’d been carried away for a while—he couldn’t stand another day of them, watching Eva staring up in doe-eyed admiration. And two more days of the bragging, swaggering foreign bastard would definitely call for murder.
Besides, all those adventures couldn’t possibly be true, not even half of them. It was impossible. Giant waves! Mountain climbing! Hang-gliding! Lumberjacking! Sailing ships! Japanese sword-fighting and samurai-cowboy movies! And he’d done it all in, what, less than three years? And the crazy kid was only a year older than Taras. Shit on all of it! Either this Marcus Jolly was a superman, or a pathological liar. Or maybe a criminal, a dangerous American hooligan on the run from the police. But Evushka, the silly, gorgeous goose, believed every word.
She might even be in love with the perpetually grinning stranger. Taras thought about that—and of how he might distract her from Marcus and tell her about all the fencing medals he, Taras, had won at his sports club—as he fingered the pocket which imprisoned the sacred lock of her hair, that hair which he beheld across the cabin, gleaming buttery gold in the light from a single overhead bulb. How raptly she was listening to Marcus, telling another of his Sinbad stories. Beside her the wild-eyed trapper was also listening, waiting for her translation as Taras had done all day.
Fuck you all, he thought. His gaze wandered to the over-mantle trophy. A double set of antlers, locked together. Two red deer, Kostya had explained, wapiti bucks, had fought so violently over a doe they’d become entangled and unable to wrench apart, and were thus linked forever in death. A perfect symbol, Taras thought. It could be Marcus and himself, fighting for Eva. Like the American, Taras had come nearly half around the world to be here tonight, in this smoky little room. And he hadn’t come all that way to back off and lose Eva to any rival.
The excitable Kostya hurried off to an adjoining pantry, returning with four chipped mugs and a liter of local vodka. Then there were toasts, and, at Eva’s insistence, Taras joined in. To America. To Russia. To health, freedom, peace and international fraternity! To Abragam Lyeenkuln and Zhon F. Kennedy, to Arsenyev and Dersu! Down the hatch and bottoms up!
Food was brought out, unwrapped, passed around. Salted herring, black bread, sausages. The trapper began telling how a caged tiger had been carried into the taiga for the movie, although there were many Siberian tigers still lurking in the area. He found this enormously funny for some reason. The food and talk made them all thirsty, and the grinning trapper triumphantly produced another bottle.
Soon they were singing Russian songs. Marcus, who of course didn’t know the words, fished a small harmonica from under his sheepskin jacket and began to accompany them—with a skill that impressed both Eva and Kostya and aggravated Taras.
“But this is a toy, anyone can play it,” he said.
Marcus tossed him the instrument. Taras blew into it with all his force, producing an ear-splitting squeal, till Eva snatched it away.
Taras protested: “But that was Shostakovich!”
When they all laughed, Taras was swept into the party despite himself. Another bottle materialized. It became somehow obvious that there was to be no trekking back to Khabarovsk this night. Snowflakes were sifting silently against the windowpanes, and Taras saw, pushing back filthy lace curtains, a powdery mantle covering the little Moskvich coupe.
Eva’s protests were strongly worded, but only half-hearted. Intourist at the Tsentralnaya would be worried over Marcus’ absence. Not to return would be an itinerary violation, and she would be held accountable. If only there were a telephone... But Kostya sloshed more vodka into her mug, which made her lose her train of thought, which in turn made her quite furious, and then helplessly giggly.
So, Taras thought, cocking his head, his darling Evushka was also tipsy. Tipsy, and so girlishly desirable that it made him ache to look at her yet not be able to touch her, the way he had done last summer.
Outside, wind-whipped snow was now swirling in every direction. Inside, time had begun subtly to alter, speeding up, then slowing down, like a clockworks with slipping gears. Events lost continuity, ran together in a bright blur, then stood forth in a series of sharply etched, bizarre vignettes. Marcus juggling three, then four potatoes, finally dropping them all and collapsing himself in a cackling spasm. Eva, childishly demonstrating some silly upside-down yoga posture, with her head on the floor and woolen legs kicking the air, toppling sideways to resounding male laughter. And Kostya, grinning and pouring, looking more and more like Rasputin with his deranged smile and ragged, greasy hair.
One moment stood out. Marcus had stumbled outside in the snow, leaking vodka. Then Kostya also vanished, either into the pantry for more food, or also outside, to fetch more stovewood. In his sodden state of mind Taras did not immediately grasp the enormity of the moment. Then all at once he realized, and slid off his bench and onto the wooden floor beside his beloved. After the wretched eternity of the day, here he was—suddenly and miraculously—alone with Eva. Yet the others might come back at any second.
He couldn’t restrain himself an instant longer. He reached for her, pulled her close, drowned his face in the intoxicating golden mane of her hair, snuggled against her.
“Evushka, Evushka,” he had whimpered, all his pain coming out. “How I adore you, Evushka! I think of nothing but you, always. I must have you!”
If she answered, he could not hear it. He began kissing her passionately, demandingly, throwing his arms around her. She cried out as they tumbled over. He remembered kneeling astride her, looking down at her, blind with desire and then confusion, as she had screamed over and over. He had shaken her, simply to make her stop. She had wrenched away from his grip, then scrambled off to the darkest corner of the shadowy room, where she huddled, weeping.
The other two men were suddenly standing in the doorway. Taras had felt stunned. He began to stammer. Eva looked at him as though he had transformed into a monster before her eyes. He got up and stumbled about, apologizing over and ove
r, to Kostya and Marcus, and endlessly to Eva, till she finally yelled at him to stop. Then he had wept.
Incredibly, the party had gone on after that. There was more singing, and at one point Eva even forgave him. But she stayed nearer to Marcus, Taras saw, and had more to say even to the simpleton Kostya than she did to Taras. When she began to drink again, so did Taras, seeking swift oblivion.
The room became a swirling carousel, careening so fast he could no longer attach names to faces or words to voices. Only at the very last, as he slipped into insensibility, did a single, fleeting thought take frightened flight across the fading sky of his mind: By being the first to pass out, he was leaving his beloved alone with two strange men.
*
Taras awoke in a freezing room with a sledgehammering headache—pain so blindingly intense it felt like a saber being thrust again and again through his brain. When he tried to open his eyes, white light seared into his sockets. He screamed and rolled over. He was aware now that he was uncovered, freezing to death. Yet he could not bring himself to move again.
But there was something else, something even more terrible than the pain. A nightmarish after-image, something glimpsed in that hideous, flashing knifeblade of daylight, something etched retinally inside his mind. He willed himself to roll over and squint through his eyelashes.
Across the frost-rimed pine floor, protruding from behind a low wooden chest into a slush-stained rectangle of windowed sun, was a bare foot. A small, plump foot with a lovely arch. He had held that foot in his lap and caressed it as they lay tumbled and sandy together on an Odessa beach. Her skin had shone peaches and cream in that southern sun; now in the cold winter luminescence it was ghastly bluish-ivory. Taras felt something precious dying inside his soul as he forced his eyes wide.
Eva’s body—naked, as he had only dreamed of it—lay sprawled on the floorboards. Taras sprang up, ignoring his exploding headache, bellowing her beloved name into winter silence. He took three lurching steps toward her and fell to the floor, just close enough to reach and touch her cold breast.
Nine
Taras Arensky smelled the coffee before he opened his eyes. The crewcut flight steward was standing in the aisle with a well-stocked plastic tray.
“Breakfast, sir?”
“Thank you.” Taras lowered his tray table, trying to banish the nightmare images that had surrounded him in half sleep.
Focused instead on scrambled eggs, sausage, croissant, fruit cup, orange juice. Coffee steaming in a blue plastic cup. He wasn’t particularly hungry, but knew he should eat something. His watch read six-twenty, D.C. time. Sunlight streamed out the window.
Where had the night gone? He noticed that flatware, napkins, placemat and cup bore the Air Force One monogram with presidential signature. Great souvenirs; unfortunately Taras had no one to give them to.
Across the aisle Clyde Brunton was already attacking his food; and in the row ahead of him the big Secret Service man, Usher, was apparently having two breakfasts, on adjoining tray tables.
“Where are we?” Taras asked the steward.
“The southern tip of Greenland is just over the horizon. I can get you an exact position, if you like. We’ll be serving lunch before we land at Tempelhof, a snack before Moscow. Cheeseburger okay for lunch?”
“Fine, thanks.” Taras sampled a forkful of eggs, a swallow of coffee. Outside and below, through the scarred Plexiglas, morning sun shot through whipped cloudtops to confect a painfully dazzling, gilded fairyland. A brand-new day, Mr. VIP, Taras told himself. Just relax and enjoy yourself, in your plush, presidential cocoon twelve thousand meters over the Atlantic.
Eva’s gone. Don’t go wandering back there again, looking for ghosts in the graveyard of memory.
But the undertow was too strong, the old wound aching anew in his heart. He couldn’t abandon her again.
He put down the fork. The past was still there, the nightmare still lurking around a corner of his subconscious. He closed his eyes and was sucked back to that long ago frozen morning.
*
His darling had been strangled by fiendish hands that had left a livid necklace in her flesh. She had been violated as well—Taras knew it, though he wrenched his head aside from her blind stare, unable to look more closely, especially there, between her thighs. Instead, he ripped a woolen blanket off the trapper’s bed and, weeping and apologizing for its filth, draped it reverently over her. Once more he dropped to the floor, sobbing. He touched the blanket, then a sheaf of tawny hair that had escaped the shroud into a shaft of sunlight. Unable to help himself, Taras drew the long, silken strands through his fingers, then brought them to his lips. The ripe fragrance seduced him, undiminished by death, whispering earthy promises never to be fulfilled.
Taras staggered to his feet, but the name he bellowed now was Kostya’s. The wild-eyed cretin had surely committed this atrocity, then vanished with all their clothes. Even their winter underwear had been taken; only Marcus’ black cowboy hat was left behind.
Across the cabin floor Marcus himself lay alternately snoring and shivering in sleep, like Taras stripped to his shorts. Taras touched his body; Marcus was alive, but cold.
Taras shook him violently, shouting his name.
It took several minutes to rouse Marcus from frozen stupor. And when the American was finally able to unglaze his eyes and understand where he was, and what lay lifeless under the blanket, he erupted in fury, grappling Taras to the floor. “You bastard!” he screamed, spittle flying. “Why did you do it?”
An elbow to the jaw stunned Marcus, and a vehement explanation finally convinced him of Taras’ innocence. Marcus staggered up again, still freezing, unable to hide his own tears when he lifted a corner of the blanket. The next instant he was ready to charge naked into the snow and wreak vengeance on the trapper. Instead, Taras pushed him toward the wall pegs on which hung some of the murderer’s filthy garments. With near- frozen fingers, the two fumbled into dirt-glazed corduroy pants, stained quilted coats and valenki, felt boots, all several sizes too large.
Not only had the trapper made off with their clothes. Also missing, they now discovered, were all their identity papers and Marcus’ moneybelt with nearly five hundred U.S. dollars—a potential fortune on the Soviet black market.
Once bundled up, they had rushed outside. Eva’s Moskvich was there, but buried under a mound of snow. It must have snowed steadily since the trapper had made his escape, for no tracks marred the crystalline white carpet surrounding the izba.
They had rushed about like madmen, seeking clues, their valenki postholing through the soft powder. They had slogged down to the banks of the frozen Ussuri, then up to the main road without finding a trace of Kostya’s flight. Exhausted, their breath plumes mingling in the air, they had stood, staring both ways down the empty road. It began to snow again, wet flakes spinning down out of a mother-of-pearl sky.
Then a bus came grinding through the vaporous clouds. Taras flagged it down and talked the driver into dropping them off at militia headquarters. There, still shivering despite the overheated vestibule, Taras blurted out the grim tale to an already mournful-looking duty sergeant, who could not seem to comprehend the need for immediate action.
It wasn’t until almost an hour later, when several detectives returned noisily from a nearby cafeteria, that urgency was manifested. Taras and Marcus were driven back to the scene of the crime in a cream-colored van with a red militia stripe. The detective captain apologized for the strong disinfectant smell; a drunken hooligan had been violently ill in the back earlier that morning. Riding along in the van beside them was a tearful Intourist guide, Mariana, Eva’s friend, now pressed into service to translate for Marcus.
The detectives combed the area all around the izba, flapping about in the snow in their heavy gray greatcoats and communicating by walkie-talkie. But, like Marcus and Taras, they could discover nothing beyond Eva’s pitiful corpse, which was photographed extensively, then taken away in a second van by the militia
pathologist. The detective captain was phlegmatic as they drove back through thick snow flurries to headquarters. The trapper might have taken to the taiga, in which case he was either holed up in a cave or frozen in a snowdrift. If he didn’t come in to confess when he sobered up, they’d probably find his body in the spring. Still, he might have escaped on the train, using Arensky’s military papers and clothing. At the terminal it was learned that several soldiers had indeed purchased tickets that morning. A description was flashed along the line—westward to Birobidzhan, Belogorsk and Skovorodino, and east to Vladivostok and Nakhodka, and to dozens of little stations in between. Unfortunately, the captain pointed out, Kostya might easily have dropped off undetected between stops.
Several more times, that day and the next, Taras and Marcus retold their story, filling out and signing endless carbon forms, contributing a sense of overwhelming futility to their already full measure of grief. Through it all, they sat together, these former rivals, now united in tragedy.
On a leaden afternoon—on what should have been the fourth and final day of Arensky’s idyllic visit to his fiancée—he stood beside Marcus at Eva’s burial. The gravediggers had set a fire to thaw the frozen ground, and now an icy wind whipped both snow and ashes among the few mourners. Besides Taras and Marcus, there were only two militiamen and three of Eva’s Intourist coworkers. As the pine coffin was lowered into the grave, both young men, despite their resolve, had wept openly. Then, unable to bear the sight and sound of earth being shoveled in, they had turned and walked off, hunched over against the wet wind.