“Why would she do that?”
“Maybe the rabbits took them.”
“The rabbits,” said Marina, “took the pebbles?”
“I don’t know. Can we just keep walking? I’d like to find a rabbit now. I’m hungry. And so thirsty.” Saika tipped her flask, but there was nothing in it. A few drops dripped into her mouth.
It was impossible to tell how long or far they had walked. Saika kept glancing at the compass, which Marina might have found amusing under different circumstances. The tall pines and spruce obstructed the sky, and the underbrush was severe, slowing them down. There were fallen trees and rocks and uneven ground, but there was no break, and there was no lake, and there was no Tatiana.
“I don’t understand,” Saika muttered. “The compass is pointing northwest, which is the direction we should be heading, and I’m sure we walked as far as we did when we came this way, yet there is no lake. I just don’t understand.”
Marina laughed softly. “Are you relying on Tania’s compass to get us out of here? What about the pebbles on the ground?”
“Oh, will you quit with the fucking pebbles!” yelled Saika.
Marina continued to laugh. In a minute she thought she would roll into hysteria. “There are two idiots in these woods,” she said. “Give me that.” Roughly she ripped the compass from Saika’s hands. Turning it over, she grabbed the small steel square that was adhered to the bottom and yanked it off. The girls stared at the compass needle that turned sharply east, then sharply west, then spun around, stopping in a quiver between northeast and north. It did not move again.
“What is that?” Saika said.
“That,” said Marina, “is what Tatiana thinks of your little directional.” She flung the compass to the ground. “The compass is useless. Don’t you remember Pasha telling you Tania spent last summer trying to make gunpowder?”
“What does that have to do with the compass? And what do you mean useless?”
“I don’t know how I can be more clear.” Marina laughed. “And now . . .” she said, more subdued but trembling, “I give you the rest of your evening, Saika and Marina. It’s nearly eight o’clock. You have no compass, no rocks, no way out, no food, no light, no matches. And no Tania.”
Short of breath, Saika said in a seething voice, “She did this on purpose.”
“Did what?”
“Handed me the compass without saying a word, knowing it wasn’t working.”
“You didn’t ask! You said, give me the compass. She did as you asked. How did she know you were going to ditch her? Perhaps had she known that, she would have kept her stupid broken compass. She would’ve been able to find her way out with it backwards and forwards, no matter which way the needle was pointing.”
“Well, then perhaps she already did—even without it. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t call for us: she ran straight to the boat. Perhaps she rowed home,” Saika said. “Left you here in the night woods by yourself.”
Marina shook her head. “She got the leeches off you. She touched you when no one else would come near you. Tatiana would never row home and leave me in the woods.”
“As a prank? She’d do anything.”
“No, she wouldn’t. That’s not Tatiana.” Marina stopped talking. “That’s not her,” she whispered after a moment.
“I’m glad you’re so sure,” Saika snapped. “All I know is, she was supposed to come looking for us, and she didn’t. And you and I have a broken compass that she gave us. I think she’s playing games with the mouse, Marina.”
“Whose idea was it to hide? Hers? Oh, let’s hide, Marina, let’s hide, it’ll be so funny!”
“Well, if you didn’t think it was going to be funny, why did you do it?”
“I did it because I thought we would hide for a few minutes!” Marina exclaimed. “Because I thought we ran along the pebbles! Because I thought we were close to Tania, because I thought she’d find us, that’s why.” Breathing hard, she said, “I hid because I thought it was a joke. Because I trusted you.”
“Why did you do that? Tania’s been telling and telling you, I’m not to be trusted.”
“God, I should’ve listened to her.”
“Yes,” said Saika, “you should’ve. But I am unrepentant. I don’t care about her or you if you stand in my way. All I want is to get to the boat before it gets completely dark. Now are you coming, or are you going to stay here and rot?”
For a few moments Marina stood in front of Saika, motionless, haggard, hungry, thirsty in the coming of night.
Then Marina said, “I’m going to stay here and rot.”
“Great,” Saika said, and she turned around and began to walk away.
Marina pressed her trembling body against an oak, hoping to get some courage from the sturdy trunk.
A few minutes later Saika came back. “Don’t be an idiot,” she said. “Come on. Two in the woods is better than one.”
“There are two in the woods,” said Marina. “Me and Tania.”
“So clever. Stop it and come with me.”
“No.”
“Come, I said.”
“What are you going to do, drag me with you? I’m not coming with you. You don’t know where you’re going. Wherever you’re headed I don’t want to follow. Go ahead. Go, find the lake, row just yourself across, and then explain to my mother and father how you left Tania and me in the woods. You go on and be reconciled with your universe, Saika.”
Saika stormed off. Huddling against a tree, Marina tried to focus on the feel of the bark, on the sifting leaves in her hands. The forest had gone dark. There were no human sounds in the woods.
Behind her she heard a voice again. “Come on, don’t be stupid. Don’t just stand there. Let’s walk together, let’s move forward.”
“Saika, we’ve been walking for hours and have not found the lake. It might as well have vanished off the globe.” Marina started to cry. “We have no matches. Do you even know how to start a fire so we can stay warm?”
“Without matches?”
Tatiana would know, Marina thought. She wished she were lost with Tania. There was a constant crackling, occasionally an owl hooted— and worse, there was a flutter of wings through the air.
Bats.
Marina shuddered. “What about a cave somewhere?” she said uncertainly. If there was a cave, there would be cover, and she wouldn’t have to lie down in the dead leaves and spend a night on the damp ground in the open forest. Were caves safe for human beings? Marina didn’t know. She wished she had read more. Tatiana would know.
“You want to go into a cave, Marina? What if there are bats there?” Saika smiled. “Flying rodents?”
Even with flying rats, thought Marina, as long as it was away from you. She groaned. If it weren’t so dark, she would have covered her eyes. As it was, she remained stationary, the darkness of her clothes no longer discernible against the whiteness of her palms. She heard the flutter of wings again and a screech, and the fear of night became so intense she lurched forward.
“All right,” she said in a lifeless voice. “I give up. Where to? Lead the way.”
They found a small opening in the bedrock in the low part of the forest. Marina had been so brave talking about it, but when Saika motioned her to go in, Marina lost her nerve. Was it safe? She just didn’t know. Who lived in caves? Robinson Crusoe. Who else? “You know what? I’d just as soon stay here.”
“You wanted to find this damn cave!”
What was there to say? What if bears slept in caves? Or bats swung upside down? Bats and Saika in one small dark space? “No,” is what she said.
“Fine, stay here by yourself.” Saika crunched through the underbrush to the cave. Marina listened for noise. But Saika wasn’t screaming, there were no flying objects, there was no flapping screeching. Saika’s voice carried out muffled. “It’s warm here,” she said. “And it’s quiet. It’s fine. Come. There’s nothing here.”
Marina sank down against a tree. Night fell
. The forest became black so suddenly once the last light left the sky. She could not see Saika, she could not see anything. Maybe morning would come soon in June. Maybe in a few hours Marina would be able to see again, and then they would get up and find the lake.
“Saika?”
“What?”
“Where are you?”
“I’m trying to get some sleep, that’s where I am.”
“Why don’t you come out?”
“Why should I? It’s warm here. It’s nice.”
Marina swallowed her fear, from the tongue to the throat where it remained lodged and prevented her from breathing and prevented her from sleeping.
She didn’t know how much time passed. She was half asleep when she heard someone sink heavily down next to her.
When she opened her eyes, the silhouettes of the forest were marked in blue shadows. Morning had come.
Saika was slumped next to her. Daylight brought little relief for Marina. They could not find a clearing to see the overcast sky. They could not find a stream, or a meadow, just kilometers of tractless forest covered with underbrush and leaves, and lichen, and—
“This is ridiculous,” she said as they wandered, miserable to the bones. “Wait until I tell Mama and Papa what you did. Just wait till I tell them, and they’ll tell your mama and papa, and if you think you were punished before, just wait till this time.”
Saika laughed. “You think this is worse than what I’ve been through? You think my father is going to care about this?”
Marina knew that Saika was right.
They spent a day in despair. Marina could have sworn she had seen the same felled tree several times in a row. She could have sworn she had seen the same clearing with the same pattern of white birches, black pines, taupe poplars. There were rocks and pebbles and debris from the forest, life organic to the forest, indigenous to the forest, essential to the forest. Marina and Saika were not essential, and as they meandered or sat to rest, it became very clear to Marina that the forest didn’t particularly want them there, nor had any use for them. Certainly it was not going to give them clues as to how to get out.
She was cold. She was dirty, drained. She was hungry. She was thirsty. The blueberries she kept eating to quench the thirst irritated her stomach; she had to stop eating them.
Saika irritated Marina’s whole soul. She had to stop listening to her. But Saika, seemingly having forgotten much of the past twenty-four hours, seemingly having forgotten showing Marina her true colors, nattered incessantly to an unlistening and sullen Marina. She was friendly, cheerful, indifferent to being lost, indifferent to not finding the lake. It didn’t seem to Marina that she was even looking particularly hard. Saika just kept on and on, a barrage coming out of her mouth while Marina’s chest wanted to claw out, Help me! Help me! Please . . .
“My parents must be going out of their minds,” she said as the sky was darkening, another day coming to a close. “Tania’s too.”
Shrugging, Saika leaned over to grab a handful of blueberries. “How often do you stay overnight in the woods?”
Marina stared at Saika coldly. “Never.”
“Oh. Well, if they’re not too busy trying to kill each other, they might’ve noticed then.” But she said it skeptically.
“What about you? Won’t your parents be looking for you?”
That stopped Saika from eating blueberries for a moment. “How do they know I’m missing?” That’s all she said.
Unbelievably, they spent another night in the woods. The mushrooms, so lovingly collected, had been thrown out long ago. The woods were noisier the second night and darker, and less inviting, if that were possible.
The Tundra and Taiga
The morning was cold and gunmetal. As it turned out, finding the second largest lake in Europe after Lake Ladoga proved difficult.
There was no sun. The sun meant Tatiana could tell time, could tell direction, could make a fire and cook mushrooms, and stay warm, and send smoke signals into the air. The sun was everything. Everything. Without the sun and without a compass and without a wind through the trees, with just a cloud cover and a chill to the air, Tatiana had nothing.
She waited what she thought was hours for the sun to come out but finally decided she couldn’t stay in one place. She had long stopped shouting; she had lost her voice after yesterday’s prolonged yelling. As Tatiana walked she looked for water and couldn’t find any. She ate blue-berries instead, which quenched her thirst a bit, making her wish for black bread and sunflower oil, and hot tea.
As she walked she kept getting the feeling that wherever she was, she wasn’t in the right place. When she got that feeling, she would make a quarter turn and walk in a new direction. After getting nowhere, she would make a quarter turn again.
And again.
Tatiana tried to keep the turns in her head, but after hours and hours, the morning gone, the gray afternoon going, she thought she was closer only to nothing.
Nothing changed either in the trees or on the ground, or in the smell. The conifers, the birches, the elms, the larch, did nothing to help her, to quell the alarm inside, the disquiet of being not just lost, not randomly lost, not accidentally lost, but lost on purpose.
As Tatiana made her way through the woods, she broke branches and threw them down in patterns—to leave a deliberate trail of herself behind, in case someone came looking for her. Aunt Rita and Uncle Boris—they might come across the twigs and realize the wood patterns were not random brambles.
She tried to think of poetry to comfort her. She couldn’t think of a single verse. She tried to think of books she had read where the hero was lost. The hero or heroine was never lost alone. The heroine was always lost with someone, a friend, an enemy who became a reluctant friend, a family member with no mettle or too much mettle. Together people braved the South American jungle only to end up in an African slave village. Together with her friend, Dorothy braved dark wet tunnels only to find herself not in Kansas but under the Land of Oz. Maybe Tatiana could brave the Lake Ilmen jungle to end up—to end up where? Where did Tatiana Metanova, lost in the woods, want to end up when she came out on the other side?
Slowing down, she stopped walking, unable to take a step further, afraid it was in the wrong direction. What did Blanca Davidovna teach her? She said, no matter how far you’ve walked, if you’ve walked down the wrong path, it’s always better to turn around, head back, and start all over—but this time in the right direction.
But what good were those words to her here? Every trail seemed to be the wrong trail. Every direction seemed to be taking her farther from the lake. Tatiana ate some more blueberries, the damn blueberries! She called out hoarsely for Marina, and she tried to remember how deep the Lake Ilmen woods were. She didn’t know. She’d never seen a map of the area. She had no idea what was behind the woods to the south, to the east, to the north. Byelorussia, maybe? Without the sun, where was she?
Once she had read that taiga, the subarctic coniferous forest east of the Ural Mountains, was hundreds of kilometers long and when it ended, the tundra of the Central Siberian Plateau began. Maybe the Lake Ilmen taiga ended there, too, in the Siberian tundra.
But who said she was heading east? She could be heading south to Moscow, or north to the Baltic Sea. Who knew? She was heading nowhere because she had stopped walking. After a while sitting on a fallen tree made her cold, and Tatiana got up and, with a sigh, began to walk again. It was so painfully slow getting through the woods.
Forgetting once again about shelter, she continued to struggle through the forest until night fell and it was too late.
Who am I near to, in the night? Tatiana thought, lying covered by twigs, by leaves. Do I feel alone? Am I alone? Where are the stars? The moon? Where is the sky, even the sky reflected in the lake, where is the mirror that contains plants, and algae and minerals and life? Where is life besides mine? My family? Marina? She is probably home right now in bed, looking up at the ceiling, giggling, thinking of me. What d
oes she think happened to me, the second night alone in the woods? How far can I walk tomorrow under the cover of nimbus, of cirrus? If I walk far enough, will I be in Estonia? Will I be in Poland, in Prussia? Back in Leningrad, maybe? In the Land of Oz? Can this forest empty out into the Gulf of Finland and if I walk far enough, will I empty out into the Gulf of Finland, too?
How far will this forest take me?
How could the woods be so empty during the day, yet so not empty at night? They felt infested with living creatures, all waiting for the dark to wake up and begin their living while Tatiana tried in vain to sleep to shut them out. The hooting, the howling, the whining, the crying, the whingeing—the scooping. She heard bats, she was sure she did. Time, distance, it all seemed to lose its meaning here. She could have walked twenty kilometers, but what did it mean if she were just spinning in one place, keeling over on her tilted axis?
Walking in circles, around the same stone, the same willow, the same cloud-capped clearing?
Yes, Tatiana thought, curling up—senseless, but not without purpose. There was always a purpose: to get ahead, to beat the night, to get to the lake, to a cabin, to another human being, to yell for help. The purpose was always to life. Because without life, all other values ceased to be. Blanca Davidovna said that, too. She said the earthly vessel was the temple in which resided the immortal soul. Life was the first principle. And so you walked. Perhaps even in circles, painfully retracing your steps, but moving inexorably toward something.
If only she could find a small stream. Eventually it would lead her to a larger body of water, maybe a river, maybe even to the lake itself. If she got to the lake, she was saved, but she couldn’t find even the smallest stream! Two days of blueberries, two days of no sun.
Tatiana tried to look on the bright side. At least it wasn’t raining.
Honor Among Thieves Slightly Thinning
The next morning it was raining.
At first the rain was a blessing. Marina raised her face and opened her mouth and stuck out her tongue and let the droplets collect before she swallowed. Not very efficient. She got a large green leaf, held it slightly folded into the rain, letting it fall inside the groove and then when enough water collected, she drank it. Better. She did that until her thirst was slaked, and then she looked at Saika who stood under a tree, covering herself from the rain.
The Summer Garden Page 79