by Jeremy Bates
I arrived at Denise’s place at twenty minutes past seven that evening. She answered the door in a short black dress and heels, which was a bit over the top for where we were going but looked great regardless. She had put her hair up with lacquered chopsticks, and her cinnamon eyes seemed to sparkle even brighter than usual.
We kissed and I said, “I told you not to dress up.’
“This old thing?”
“Seriously, it’s just an Indian joint. I think they use metal cafeteria trays instead of plates.”
“I’m going to finish getting ready. Why don’t you grab a beer from the fridge. I’ll meet you out back in a minute.”
She disappeared through the beads into her bedroom. Passing through the living room, I eyed the glass coffee table where I’d found her drug paraphernalia what seemed like a lifetime ago now.
In the kitchen I grabbed a Budweiser from the fridge and went to the backyard, where we often hung out to smoke.
I’d only taken a single step onto the paved patio stones when I froze. Huddled in the yard beyond the reach of the motion-sensor spotlight, just visible in the gloomy half-light, were about twenty of our friends. In unison they cried, “Surprise!” and broke into enthusiastic applause.
A hand touched my shoulder and then Denise was beside me, smiling. She whispered in my ear, “I know how much you love parties.”
“I’m going to get you back for this.”
“Happy birthday.”
Over the next few hours people chowed down on catered sushi and Subway six-inch subs, drinks flowed freely, I opened presents and cards, the cops stopped by to tell us to keep the noise down, chocolate cake was served, a few toasts were made, two girls puked in the bathroom, and my college roommate passed out facedown in the yard and pissed himself.
By midnight everyone had left save for Disco and his date, a thirty-three-year-old Greek makeup artist. Sitting around a weathered picnic table, we sipped our drinks, told stories, and laughed a lot.
Denise said, “So Corey and I have decided to go to Russia to research his new book.”
“Coo-wee!” Disco said, tilting an India pale ale to his lips, the green bottle looking small in his large hand. “Can I come too?”
“Nobody’s coming,” I said. “I’m going alone.”
Denise added, “We’re going to climb the mountain too.”
“I’m going to climb it,” I said.
“Get over it, Corey,” Denise said. “I’m not letting you go to Russia alone. I’ve seen what the women look like over there. They’re all anorexic models.”
“Is that what this is about?” I said.
“What what is about? I’ve been working just as hard as you trying to figure out what happened to those hikers. Russia is likely the only place we’re going to get a definitive answer, and I’m not going to be shut out of that.”
Disco flicked his wrist while mimicking the sound of a whip cracking.
Ignoring him, I studied Denise across the table, and I knew she wasn’t trying to stir me up. She was dead set about coming with me—and to be honest with myself, despite my objections, I was excited by the prospect of having her company. “Tell you what,” I said. “If you can name all nine hikers right now, without a single mispronunciation, then you can come.”
“Deal!” she said. Speaking slowly and with concentration, she began with Igor Dyatlov and ended with Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolles—enuciating each name and syllable with near perfection.
Disco and his date broke out in applause, though I held up my hands.
“Whoa, whoa, wait up,” I said, nitpicking. “It’s ‘Zolotaryov. Oh-vee. You said—”
Denise cut me off with a look. “Whatever, Corey, whatever. I’m coming.”
⁂
Whatever, Corey, whatever.
But it was Olivia’s voice I was now hearing.
I recalled the surprised and hurt on her face that short while ago, and I felt pretty darn shitty for being so blunt with her.
But what had the alternative been?
Sleeping with her had been a mistake, and there was no nice way to tell a woman that. Better to be honestly blunt than coy or dishonest.
Disco, I noticed, was crossing the Lozva River toward me. He slipped, regained his footing, and kept coming, flopping into the drift to my left.
“If I never see snow again,” he said, “I’ll die happy.”
“You feeling okay this morning?”
“One hundred percent.”
“No chills or—”
“One hundred percent, Whitey.”
I nodded, relieved. “You hear the wolves last night?”
“Yeah, when I went out to take a slash.”
“So that was you? I thought I heard someone moving around outside the tents. What about the tree-knocking?”
Disco frowned. “The tree what?”
“Sort of sounded like someone whacking a tree with a stick.”
“Like a lumberjack?”
“Not an ax. A stick.”
“Why’s someone whacking a tree with a stick in the middle of the night out here?”
“That’s the mystery.”
“A woodpecker?”
“It was way too loud to be a woodpecker. It must have been a couple hundred yards away, and we heard it pretty good. Plus it wasn’t random knocking. More like this.” I clapped out a metrical beat to demonstrate. “I’m thinking Mansi hunters. Maybe that’s how they communicate if they spot game.”
“In the middle of the night?”
“Nobody else is out here.”
“So—was this before or after you and Olive bumped uglies?”
“You heard us?” I said, surprised.
“Heard you this morning arguing.”
I shrugged. “It just sort of happened.”
“Was she good? I know she was. The crazy ones always good.”
“You think she’s crazy?”
“Sexy crazy, you know what I mean? Fatal Attraction crazy.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I still have to sleep next to her for the next couple days.”
“Why you complaining? She’s sexy sexy.”
“You said sexy crazy.”
“Both.”
“You want to switch tents?”
“She likes you, neg. What’s so bad about that?”
After a long moment, I said, “I was supposed to be here with Denise. This was supposed to be our trip. She couldn’t make it, so I came here to finish it for us. That’s why I’m here. For closure.”
“And you getting that.”
“Really? By sleeping with Olivia? That’s not the kind of closure I had planned. I’m a complete…slime ball.”
Disco raised his eyebrows. “Slime ball? What you been watching? Degrassi Junior High? You being too hard on yourself, Whitey.”
“Am I?”
“Yeah, you are.”
“I’m tired,” I said, shaking my head. “The book, this trip…I want it all done.”
“Hold tough, neg. Few more days and you’ll be back in your little cottage sipping Mai Tais under the sun.”
“With still no idea who or what killed the hikers.”
“You’ll figure something out. You always do.”
“Yeah…I’ll figure something out,” I said halfheartedly, pushing myself to my feet. “C’mon, let’s get back to the fire. I’m freezing.”
⁂
At the fire Vasily was sipping a coffee, Olivia preparing macaroni and cheese.
“Morning, Vasily,” I said.
“Good morning, Mr. Smith. Did you sleep well?”
I glanced at Olivia. She seemed intensely focused on the butter sizzling in her skillet.
“Yeah, slept well,” I said.
Olivia poured hot water into her mug. “Anybody else?” she asked.
Disco accepted, and we sat down next to each other, close enough to the fire to bathe almost painfully in its heat.
Olivia passed Disco a steaming mug.
; He sniffed it. “Is this that love potion you gave Whitey?”
I elbowed him in the side.
Olivia glared at me. “Corey has a wild imagination,” she said. “In fact, I’m surprised he remembers drinking any tea at all, considering he doesn’t seem to remember much of anything else that happened last night.”
“Do the Mansi hunt at night?” I asked Vasily.
He shrugged. “I imagine they would if they were hunting wolves or some other nocturnal animal.”
“I did hear wolves—”
“Oh come on, Corey,” Olivia snapped.
To Vasily I said, “After you guys went to bed we—”
“Yes, yes, Olivia has already filled me in.”
“Any guess as to what it could have been?”
He shook his head. “I’m at a loss unfortunately.”
“Maybe it was Fyodor?” Disco said.
I considered that. “Out trying to scare us?”
“It wasn’t Fyodor,” Olivia stated flatly, still acting pissed off at me.
“Why don’t we ask him?” I looked around. “Where is he?”
Vasily said, “I’ve yet to see him this morning.”
“There,” Disco said.
As if on cue, Fyodor mounted the riverbank to the west, his rifle clutched in one mittened hand. He slogged through the snow and stopped before the fire.
“Where were you?” I asked him.
“Scouting.”
“Scouting what?”
He looked at Vasily, then back to me. “Last night there was noise.”
“You heard it too?” I said, surprised.
“Bang, bang, bang.”
“What was it?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I scout.”
“You’ve never heard it before?”
“Nyet.”
“Could it have been Mansi hunters?”
“Nyet.”
“Did you find tracks or anything? A campsite?”
“Nyet, nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “Only snow.”
⁂
Breaking camp after a quiet breakfast, we headed north along the east bank of the Lozva River, not wanting to risk crashing through any more unreliable spots in the ice. Disco now rode on the dogsled, tucked into the toboggan bed next to Vasily, while Fyodor mushed from the driving bow. Olivia sat behind me again on the snowmobile, which proved much more difficult to control with no trail to follow. Not only did I have to navigate trees and rocks but also dips and hummocks and even craters, all of which riddled the bumpy terrain. Twice I nearly flipped the sled on its side, and on several occasions I buried the skis beneath deep powder and became stuck, requiring the others to help dig me out.
As the morning progressed, and we continued inexorably north, the snow fell faster and harder, escalating to blizzard conditions. The wind sang mournfully in my ears and ice spicules bombarded the snowmobile’s Plexiglas windshield, overwhelming the monotonously thumping wipers and obscuring my visibility.
By noon we were progressing through a full-fledged whiteout that prevented me from keeping tabs on Fyodor’s dogsled, and if it wasn’t for the ubiquitous river to my left, I would have become hopelessly lost.
I’d already throttled the engine back to five miles an hour, and I was wondering how to communicate to Fyodor that we needed to stop and find shelter—I couldn’t speed up for fear of driving headlong into a tree—when I spotted him waiting for us on one of the Lozva’s eastward tributaries.
I stopped next to his sled and shouted, “We need to—” The rest of the words were lost in the storm.
But Fyodor seemed to understand. He pointed down the tributary and said something, though I only caught a single word.
Gulag.
⁂
Ten minutes later we arrived at a derelict Soviet-era prison camp. Ten-foot-deep snowdrifts buttressed the towering log fence, which was topped with loops upon loops of razor wire. Watchtowers stood at fifty feet intervals, lonesome sentinels presiding over the Siberian wilderness.
Without slowing, Fyodor mushed his dogs through the open chain-linked gate, which would have been large enough to allow a tank entry. I followed close behind.
Upon crossing onto the prison grounds, a palatable sense of wrongness slipped beneath my skin, a subconscious reminder of the human rights atrocities that would have been committed in this camp, as had been at all of the forced-labor camps operated under the Gulag: skulls crushed with iron rings, acid baths, electrocutions, rats placed in heated buckets beneath a victim’s bare buttock, red-hot ramrods thrust up anal canals, drownings in feces-filled barrels, women forced to sit naked on ant hills, genitals squashed beneath the heel of a jackboot. The sadism went on and on, rivaling that of Nazi Germany.
We proceeded down a road lined with silver birch trees, passing a two-story building and several other smaller outbuildings, before stopping in front of a block of four structures uniform in nature and size. Fyodor tied the end of his gangline to a denuded tree and led the way to the closest building. Inside, I pushed my goggles up to my forehead and scrunched my nose at the moldy smell of damp and wood rot. Once my eyes adjusted to the darkness—the grime- and cobweb-obscured windows didn’t allow for the passage of much natural light—I saw that we stood in a long rectangular room empty save for frayed propaganda posters hanging alongside pictures of Stalin and Lenin. A thick skin of dust carpeted the timber floor.
“Where’s the pool at?” Disco remarked.
“This was once a prisoner barracks,” Vasily said. “A relatively luxurious one, as there are basins in the change room to wash one’s feet.”
“You’ve been here before?” I asked him.
He nodded. “Fyodor brought me a number of years ago.”
“I don’t like it,” Disco said. “Feels like somewhere you might bunker down to wait out a zombie apocalypse.”
We ventured deeper into the room, the floorboards creaking loudly beneath our footsteps. Through a doorway on our left I glimpsed a bookcase filled with books and aged newspapers.
“They had a library?” I said, surprised.
“That was a so-called Leninist corner,” Vasily explained. “Prisoners would study material from Communist Party congresses there, and listen to political information sessions.”
“In other words,” I said, “it was a brainwashing corner.”
“Not necessarily, Mr. Smith. Many prisoners in the Gulag were intellectuals, some with several higher education degrees. They shared their knowledge among themselves and kept up to date with current events. In fact, many were superior thinkers to the lecturers who taught them.”
“So who were the prisoners exactly?” Disco asked.
“They ranged from petty criminals to political dissidents and other enemies of the state, real or imagined,” Vasily said. “Given the age of this camp, it would have operated before Stalin’s death, which meant it would have mostly housed the bytoviki and ukazniki.”
“The who?”
“The bytoviki were those unfortunate enough to be convicted for minor crimes. Making moonshine, for instance, or riding public transport without a ticket. The ukazniki were those arrested for stealing food from a collective farm. As this was deemed theft of socialist property, the sentences were severe. I knew one such ukazniki. The woman was incarcerated for over twenty years because she stole a bottle of milk to feed her infant daughter. This was somewhat ironic as the cow from which she got the milk used to belong to her before she was forced to hand it over to the state.”
“And people, they just went along with this?”
“There was no free press in the Soviet Union, Mr. Brady. Everyone was told they lived in the best country in the world. Everyone was told Communism was the best system. If you disagreed with Stalin or his policies, you were labeled a counter-revolutionary and sent to the Gulag like the bytoviki and ukzazniki—that is, if you weren’t shot outright by a firing squad. Serious organized resistance was next to impossible.”
I sa
id, “Not to mention a lot of ordinary Russians liked Stalin.”
Vasily nodded. “There is a saying that Stalin inherited a country in bast shoes and left it with nuclear bombs. Many people became much better off under his rule.”
When we reached the end of the room, we passed through a doorway into the prisoner sleeping quarters. Two-tiered plank beds lined the two longest walls, perhaps sixty in total, each stripped of the bedding. In the center aisle stood a brick hearth with a horizontal throat to supply heat to the length of the chamber.
“Now,” Vasily said, “who would like to volunteer to find us firewood?”
⁂
Fyodor volunteered and, deeming he needed a second pair of hands, recruited me.
Finding firewood in a murderous snowstorm proved neither fun nor easy, as I could barely see a few feet ahead of me, let alone any deadwood buried beneath the snow. During our Easter egg hunt, we took periodic refuge in a decrepit bathhouse that had once doubled as a laundry room, a barbershop that would have had no shortage of heads to shave during the camp’s zenith, and a small clinic whose main purpose would have been to get prisoners suffering from abuse, malnutrition, and botched suicide attempts back to work as quickly as possible.
When we passed through a briar patch of razor wire, Fyodor told me we had moved from the residential to work section of the camp. Soon we came upon a sawmill littered with rusted circular saws and rotting logs. We promptly filled our arms with all the useable firewood we could carry and were heading back to rejoin the others when I spotted an incongruous concrete structure with barred windows and an oversized steel door.
I turned to ask Fyodor what it might have been used for, but discovered I had lost him in the white squall.
After a moment of hesitation, I set aside my firewood and trudged up to the steel door. It stood slightly ajar and was either frozen or rusted in place because it took some effort on my part to push it farther open.
I slipped sideways through the narrow wedge I’d created between door and frame and stepped inside. I raised my goggles and stamped the snow from my boots. As had been the case in the prisoner barracks, I could smell damp and wood rot, but something else too, a musty locker room odour akin to dirty socks.