The Impossible Journey (13 page)

“When that happened, I went to Dr. Glebov. ‘Help me escape,' I begged. He told me I was not well enough, that I would never survive such a journey. ‘Then I will escape without your help,' I said. He knew that would be certain death, but he saw how desperate I was. Finally he agreed to help me.”

We could hardly bear to hear Papa's terrible story, but we suffered it, for the telling made Papa better, as if some poisonous snake that had been coiled inside him had crawled off forever. He didn't get stronger,
but he took a greater interest in things, chatting with Ludmilla about her rabbits and making plans with Mama for Christmas.

We were all shut into the cottage together against the Siberian winter. The windows were coated with frost, and a seal of ice had to be broken to open the door. On some days it was so cold that when we went out of doors, our eyelids froze together.

With no trees for shelter, the Siberian winds were like a great beast shaking and rattling our cottage. We huddled around the stove, where a pan of snow was always melting. The sun rose late and set in the afternoon, so our lives were lived by the light of candles and lanterns and by the stove's firelight.

Still, I was happy, for everywhere I looked, Papa and Mama were there. The Siberian winter was terrible to us but nothing to Ludmilla, who always had some tale of colder winters and stronger winds. “This is nothing,” she would say when the snows came and the winds howled. And then would come the story of
a stronger storm or a colder night.

Christmas arrived in a fall of snow. When I peeked outside, the world was a white blur. Mama told us of her Christmas in the tsar's palace, of the huge tree in the palace hall decorated with candies and gilded nuts and lit with hundreds of small candles. “On Christmas Eve sleighs carried us across the snow to church. I can still hear the sleigh bells. The tsar and the empress stood at the entrance of the church while the people came to bow to the tsar and kiss the empress's hand. And afterward, what a feast we had!”

On Christmas morning we all knelt before the icon of St. Vladimir and said our prayers. Mama had bought me a paint set and paper. For Georgi there was a package wrapped in store paper. It was a glass globe. Inside the globe was a small cottage on which the snow fell gently.

Georgi had written the story of the bear that the shaman had told and made it into a book for Papa, who had said how much he missed his books. I had
embroidered a scarf for Mama in the pattern Tadibe had taught me. For Ludmilla Mama had knitted a warm shawl, and I had made the fringes. We all said it was a perfect Christmas.

At noon we had our own feast of borscht made with cabbage, carrots, and onions; a fine roast of reindeer; and
kutya
, made with poppy seeds and honey. For dessert there were
blini
, thin pancakes spread with jam made from wild berries. Ludmilla placed a bit of straw on the table to remind us of the manger in which the Christ child was born. In the evening we all sang carols by the light of the stove.

As the winter went on, Georgi and I grew less afraid of the ice and snow. We put on the Samoyeds' gifts and wandered out into the half-light of the day. How strange it was to discover in the snow the tracks of small creatures running about. Sometimes we saw a hawk or an owl and we felt less alone, less as though we were marooned on an ice floe. Once we saw an arctic fox, his white coat no more than a movement of
white against the white snow.

March came, and then April. The days grew longer; the icicles that decorated the cottage dripped to nothing. The frost on the windows was no longer thick enough to draw pictures in. At any moment you could look up and see returning birds—hawks and gulls, lapwings and falcons and, once, perched on the roof of the cottage like a feathered ghost, a snowy owl. As it grew warmer, mysterious little pools and ponds seeped onto the surface of the tundra. Georgi tried fishing in them, but there were no fish, and in a day or two they would disappear. Papa said it was the ice melting beneath the land.

The kitchen was filled with the fragrance of
piroshki
. We began making regular visits again to the town with our baskets. Ludmilla started radish and lettuce seeds and planted them in pots on a sunny windowsill. One morning a seedling appeared, the first green thing we had seen in months. Georgi ran to show it to Papa, who held the pot with its green
seedling in his hands for a long time.

There was a pocket-sized porch, and when it was warm enough, Papa, wrapped in a blanket, loved to sit outside in the sun. But as the days grew warmer and lighter, Papa grew weaker. Mama seldom left his side. Each morning as soon as my eyes opened, I looked to see if Papa was all right. Often I would wake in the middle of the night to find Mama and Papa deep in conversation. Almost always they were whispering about long-ago times and memories of Leningrad, which they always thought of as St. Petersburg.

“What wouldn't I give to see our beloved city once more, Katya,” Papa said. That gave me the idea. I whispered to Georgi and Ludmilla. That evening after dinner I hurried into Ludmilla's tiny room and closed the door. All evening I painted, and the next evening as well.

On the afternoon of the third day, when Mama and Papa went to sit outside, Georgi, Ludmilla, and I got busy. We pushed and pulled the tables and chairs
until we had a clear path through the room. Up went the sign I had painted that said
NEVSKY PROSPEKT
. Two chairs were placed on a table, and Ludmilla draped them with a blue cloth while I pinned on paper squares for windows and Georgi rolled paper into white pillars to decorate our Winter Palace. Farther along the path a blue rug became a canal. Beside the canal we fashioned a cathedral from the firebox. The bread bowl was painted in bright colors and turned upside down to make the dome. Off to one side I pinned all the drawings I had made of the Summer Garden, with its flowers and fountains and wide green lawns. By the stove Ludmilla set up a little table and two chairs. A white cloth was on the table, and a sign overhead read
TEAROOM
.

Georgi opened the door and called, “Welcome to St. Petersburg.”

I led Mama and Papa inside while Ludmilla brushed one of the rabbits off the tearoom table. At first, when I saw them break into tears, I thought we
had done something to make them sad, but I was wrong, for they were laughing as well as crying. They walked down the Nevsky Prospekt admiring the palace and the cathedral. With a sweep of his arm, Papa seated Mama in the tearoom and settled down next to her. Georgi, with an apron around his waist, brought glasses of tea, and Ludmilla proudly produced a plate of fancy cookies she had baked while Mama was taking her
piroshki
into the village. When they had finished their tea, Papa said, “And now for a stroll in the garden.” Arm in arm they walked by my paintings, Mama commenting, “My, the geraniums are superb this year,” while Papa agreed, “They have never looked so lovely.”

After that afternoon Papa seemed better for a few days, but soon the coughing grew worse and Papa could not eat. It was a soft night in May when I heard him whisper to Mama, “I could not leave you alone in the cold and darkness of winter.” When the first wildflowers were blooming on the tundra, Papa died.

Mama gathered Georgi and me in her arms. We cried for a very long time while Ludmilla patted us gently to console us. At last Ludmilla went into town to find a priest she knew, who was in hiding from the Communists and working as a shoemaker.

“He does not dare give us a real funeral,” Ludmilla said, “but he will surely say some prayers.” That night we followed the custom and stayed up all night to pray. The next morning I went out on the tundra to gather wildflowers—buttercups, primroses, and cowslips for Papa. Beneath the thin soles of my boots I felt the coldness of the ice under the tundra's surface. I knew that was how it would always be for me. Beneath whatever happiness came to me would be this icy coldness of Papa's death.

That day the shoemaker came, and there were more prayers. Then Papa was taken away.

 

After Papa died, we hardly left one another's sight. Georgi and I walked into town with Mama on her way to the bakery. She would go with us to the river.
We would meet the fishing boats and barter for salmon or cod. When the whaling ships arrived, everyone rushed down to the pier to see the bits and pieces of the great beasts that were left on the boats. The harbor was crowded now with barges and freighters. Steamboats came and went. There were rumors of a prison camp near Dudinka, and one day we saw prisoners in chains being led off a steamboat. Mama sank down on a bench. Her hands were trembling, and tears streamed from her eyes. “Poor Russia,” she said over and over. “Russia is devouring her children.”

There were happier days. Squirrels chased one another over the tundra. The new rabbits frisked about in their pens, giddy with being in the open air. New heads of cabbage like green roses thrived in the long days of sunlight. The birds returned one by one, and then one hundred by one hundred.

In the long, light evenings we would take the chairs onto the tiny porch and Mama would tell stories of her days in the palace.

“Can such things be?” Ludmilla would exclaim.

Sometimes Mama would look off into the distance. We knew then that she was thinking of Papa.

We were all changed by Papa's death. Ludmilla spent more time fussing over her rabbits. She would take them in her arms and croon, “Poor things, poor things.” Mama was quieter. When she spoke, it was often about the old days, when she and Papa were young. Georgi had decided he was the man of the family and was bossy around the house, but all I thought about was how we might escape Siberia.

At night I would retrace the long trip we had made. One day Mama's exile would be over. Then Mama and Georgi and I would travel along the river, over the tundra and then into the forest, and finally back to the city of Krasnoyarsk and onto the train that would take us to St. Petersburg. All the Comrade Tikonovs and all the Comrade Stalins would not keep us out of our city. Night after night I made the trip, until each mile was familiar and a thousand miles were no more than a step.

babushka:
grandma, old woman

blini:
little pancakes

borscht:
beet soup

isbas:
the small wooden homes of Siberia

kopeck:
a small coin; one hundred kopecks to a ruble

kutya:
a porridge made of barley, honey, and nuts

makivnek:
a raisin cake

malshyka:
a brat

molodyets:
well done!

NKVD:
People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs; the Soviet secret police.

piroshki:
small pies filled with cheese or meat

ruble:
monetary sum

Cover art © 2003 by Peter Malone

Cover © 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.