The Impossible Journey (8 page)

“What will they do to us if they catch us?”

“They will send you to one of the prison camps and Georgi to an orphanage.”

At the sound of his name Georgi awoke, just in time to hear the word
orphanage
.

“Don't worry,” Fenya told him. “Your sister will watch over you.”

Her words reminded me of my mother's charge to
care for Georgi, and I could not keep tears from my eyes. Throwing on my clothes, I asked Fenya, “Won't Old Savoff be very angry with you?”

She shrugged. “I can handle the old man. He needs me more than I need him. But where will you go when you leave here? You can't wander about Siberia.”

At that I told her our story, but I did not trust her enough to tell her we were going to walk a thousand miles. Instead, I named a village two hundred miles north, for I was beginning to believe our journey might take years, not months.

She shook her head. “Two hundred miles! That's a long way.”

“We have the whole summer.” What would she say if she knew the truth?

When we were ready to go, Fenya stuffed our knapsacks with bread, cheese, hard-boiled eggs, and dried apples. “Here,” she said, handing us a bag of bones. “This is not for you but for the dogs of the village.”

It was early morning when Fenya led us outside. She smoothed over a piece of earth and drew a picture with a sharp stick. “Just here the road leaves the river, for the riverbank is nothing but swamp. Then here the road leads to the village where Old Savoff and Vadim have gone. You must stay clear of that village.”

She took up the fishing pole that was propped against the hut. “You can't carry a pole through the woods, but take the line. A branch will make a pole, and I'll give you some hooks. You can find bait under any log.” She patted Georgi's head. “You will see, you will become a fisherman and the river will feed you.”

We both hugged her and clung to her until she pried us loose and sent us on our way. When we looked back, she was wiping away her tears with her apron.

It was midday when we came to the swamp where the road left the river.

“Look, Marya!” Georgi turned an excited face to mine.

The puddles and pools of the swamp were crowded with birds. There among the reeds and rushes were ducks with brilliant green feathers and ducks with red crests and ducks as black and white as a printed piece of paper. There were geese and long-legged cranes, and here and there stately swans with arched necks. It was as if all the cages in the world had been opened. As soon as one flight of birds landed,
another took off. The geese were busy cropping the new grasses while the ducks turned tail up to search the ponds for fish. I would have given anything for the paints I'd had to leave behind.

Georgi and I stood still, holding hands as if we were afraid that in all that soaring, one or the other of us might find ourselves in the sky with the birds. At last we left the swamp to follow the road to the village. The road led though a dark forest filled with cedar trees and another kind of tree whose name I didn't know but whose needles were soft as feathers. At each turn I was afraid we would bump into Old Savoff and Vadim, but we had the road to ourselves. When we heard the dogs bark, we knew we were near the village.

In the distance we could see a row of is bas, the little wooden houses of Siberia. “Hurry,” I urged Georgi, pulling him along. “We have to get by the village quickly before Old Savoff sees us.”

We had passed the road that led into the village,
and I thought we were safe, when a pack of snarling dogs came after us. In the distance a man looked curiously in our direction.

We were surrounded by the dogs. They were ragged, half-starved beasts that looked like anything would do for a meal, including us. Georgi clung to me. I was sure the villagers would hear the commotion and investigate. Hastily I emptied the bag of bones, scattering them on the ground. While the dogs lunged at them, we made our escape.

The road began to climb. Georgi begged, “Marya, I'm tired. Let's stop and rest.”

“We can't, Georgi. We have to get as far from the village as we can. Besides, if we don't walk fifteen miles each day, we won't reach Mama until after the winter starts and we'll freeze to death.”

The idea of freezing to death did not quiet him for long. “I don't care if I freeze to death. You can just melt me when the summer comes.”

“Don't joke about something so serious, Georgi.”
I tried again to tell him how cold it would be when summer ended. When I saw he wouldn't listen, I said, “Georgi, you know all the famous explorers Papa taught us about? Genghis Khan and Marco Polo and Christopher Columbus and all the rest?”

Georgi nodded his head, more interested in the explorers than in talk of his freezing to death.

“Remember, Georgi, what hardships they had? Did they complain?”

Georgi shook his head.

“Well, we are explorers. We will have all kinds of stories of our adventures to tell Mama when we see her.”

Georgi looked at me from the corner of his eye. He half believed that we were to be explorers and he half believed I was telling him a tale. At last the wish to be an explorer won, and he trudged after me, complaining about his knapsack and the little black flies, so small you did not know they were there until they bit you. The only comfort we had was the company of the
river, which by now was an old friend, tagging along with us wherever we went. The ribbon of water was the color of strong tea and sometimes so wide you could hardly see across it.

When fishermen or barges passed, we were careful to hide behind the trees. When we could walk no longer, we settled down on a sandy bank. I snapped off a branch and fashioned a fishing pole. Georgi eagerly turned over logs and stones and at last held up two fat worms. I was about to fasten them to the hook, but Georgi took the pole from me.

“No. I do the fishing.” Much to my horror, he bit one of the worms in half and threaded one half onto the hook.

“Georgi! That's disgusting!”

Seeing how upset I was, he looked very pleased with himself. “Old Savoff taught me how to do that.”

This time Georgi was successful, though the two trout he caught were small. He could hardly bear to part with his fish. While he danced around holding a
wriggling fish in each hand, I gathered an armful of twigs for a fire. I knew that the trout must be cleaned, but how that was done I had no idea. In the city the few fish we could buy were ready for the pan.

“You have to get to their insides and take them out,” Georgi said. “Only I think you should kill them first.”

We whopped the fish against a stone, and I made a long cut in each one's belly. Gritting my teeth, I reached into the fish and pulled out whatever would come out. I whittled points on two green branches and stuck the fish on the points, and Georgi and I held the branches over the fire.

The fish were very tasty and the fire cheerful. I began to think that the journey would be possible after all. I fell asleep at once, only to be awakened by Georgi shaking me.

“There's something there,” he whispered.

I thought of the great Siberian mammoth Papa had showed us in the Leningrad museum. Might there
be such animals still on the earth? Then I remembered that mammoths ate buttercups, and I felt better.

There were scampering, rustling sounds and then nothing. It must have been after midnight, though it was light as day out. I sat up and looked around, but there was nothing to see. I didn't have the courage to climb out of my blanket. It was a long time before we fell asleep again, and then we woke at every noise. In the morning we found tracks circling the place where I had left the fish's insides. The prints were small, so the animal was not worth worrying about.

After a quick breakfast of bread and cheese, and a reminder to Georgi that we were explorers who did not complain, we started out. I had no idea how much ground we were covering, but I thought if we walked for two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon, and two hours in the early evening, we would have walked fifteen miles a day. Since Old Savoff's boat had already carried us a hundred miles, by the summer's end we should have traveled the thousand
miles to Dudinka and our mother.

The first three days went very well. The path followed along the river, so we had the river's company, water to drink, water to bathe our feet, and ducks, boats, and barges to watch. We saw no more barges carrying prisoners.

On the other side of the path was a forest, a little too dark and too crowded with huge trees to be a friend. Sometimes we sensed movement in the woods, so we knew we had invisible animals for company, but they kept to themselves. Once, when the trees gave way to a meadow, we found a field of wild strawberries. We spent a whole precious hour on our hands and knees gently twisting the strawberries, like tiny red rubies, from their delicate stems. All the while we picked, beetles and ants climbed over our sticky fingers. At last we fell back onto the ground, our mouths stained red and our bellies full.

By eating mostly fish, we saved what little food we had. Georgi was becoming a good fisherman, even
throwing back into the river fish he pronounced too small. After we lost a chunk of bread to a thieving wolverine, we learned to hang our knapsacks from tree branches. Since it never got dark, it was hard to tell when night came and went, but when we were too full of fish and too tired to walk any farther, we rolled up in our blankets and went to sleep until the early-morning birdsong awoke us. Georgi was eagerly playing the part of explorer. He would dash into the woods after “lions” and “tigers,” returning minutes later to announce he had frightened away the wild beasts.

At the end of our first week Georgi caught a large fish. While I was cleaning it, Georgi wandered into the woods. I thought nothing of it when he ran out of the woods shouting, “It's a bear and it's got two Russes with it!”

I was sure it was part of his game. “Georgi,” I said, “stop running into the woods. No wonder you get so tired. Stay on the path.”

“Marya, there's a bear coming!” Georgi grabbed me around the waist and hung on. I could feel his heart pounding against me. I looked up to see a brown bear with two cubs. In that huge body the bear's eyes looked very tiny and very angry. Her lip was drawn, showing her sharp teeth. The bear lumbered toward us. When the cubs followed their mother, she slapped them so that they tumbled onto their backs. I knew what that huge paw, as large as a dinner plate, could do to us. A tree, I thought; but no, bears climbed trees. Run? Bears were fast runners. Then it came to me: the dogs and the bones! I scooped up the fish, tossing it in front of the bear. At my quick movement, the bear rose up on her hind feet. She looked huge. A moment later she was nosing the fish, and then, seated on her rump, she began tearing it apart.

I grabbed Georgi, and we ran along the river path as fast as we could, never looking back. We must have run a half mile when we finally stopped on a hill overlooking the river.

“Let's keep going,” Georgi pleaded.

“We can't. We have to go back for our knapsacks.” I was panting so hard, I had trouble getting the words out.

“They'll eat us if we go back.”

“We must wait until they're gone.”

We sat very close together on the hill and looked out at the river. There were no boats or barges to be seen, just the brown river and two ducks looking unprotected as they swam alone on the wide stretch of water. The two ducks suddenly shot up into the air. Downstream the mother bear and the cubs were frolicking in the water, splashing one another. After a few minutes of play the mother and the cubs swam across the river and, climbing out on the other side, loped away.

I am not sure why, but I began to cry. Georgi patted my shoulder. “They've gone away now, Marya. You don't have to be scared.”

I knew now how many dangers the woods held. I did not see how we would ever reach Mama. That
was not all. Though I couldn't tell Georgi, seeing the mother watching over and playing with her two cubs made me miss Mama more than ever. I was tired of being brave and tired of being in charge. I didn't believe we could make such a long journey. I wanted to lie down in the woods and never get up again.

Georgi was watching me.

“Come on, Marya,” he said. “I'll show you the way back to the knapsacks.”

I made myself get up and follow him.

We found our knapsacks broken open and our belongings scattered everywhere. Our last bit of food had been eaten. I began to think even an orphanage would have been better than starving in the woods.

The next day there were no bears, but there was rain—not a gentle rain, but a downpour. It felt like someone had turned on a faucet and we were standing under the stream of water. The path turned to mud. Our clothes clung to us as if we had been wrapped in wet sheets.

Georgi said, “Marya, it's raining so hard, I can't keep my eyes open.”

We tried to find shelter under the branches of the trees, but the wind blew the rain across us as well as over us. Georgi and I broke off branches from the pine trees, weaving them back and forth among the boughs of a tree until we had a shelter. The drops still found their way to us, but we weren't being drowned anymore.

We sat all day under the tree while I worried that no miles would be covered. When Georgi became restless, I told him Pushkin's story of poor Yevgeny. The great Russian poet Pushkin described how terrible rains came to St. Petersburg until the Neva River burst her banks and flooded the whole city. “Smashing and slaying, destroying and pillaging,” Pushkin wrote. When poor Yevgeny found that his sweetheart was drowned, he became a madman, wandering the city day after day and night after night. One night in his misery Yevgeny cursed the great
bronze statue of Peter the Great on his horse. The bronze statue came to life and began to ride after Yevgeny, chasing him through the city until the terrified man fell exhausted and died. Georgi loved the story, for Mama had often taken us to see the statue of the bronze horseman.

“It won't rain so hard that the Yenesey will flood like the Neva did?” Georgi asked.

I promised it wouldn't, but it was still raining when evening came. We had no fish and no fire. Curling up on the wet ground on wet blankets, we tried to sleep. Early in the morning the rain turned into a thunderstorm. With the first bolt of lightning I pulled Georgi away from our shelter under the tree and out into the open.

“What are you doing, Marya? You are getting us all wet again.”

“We can't sit under the tree, because we might get struck by lightning.”

We were standing in a clearing. The pale sky that
never darkened was dark now with storm clouds. The river seethed and roiled.

“If we keep standing here, Marya,” Georgi whined, “the lightning will find us.” Georgi started back toward the shelter of the tree.

There was a terrible crack, as if the whole world were splitting in two. Only a few feet from us a huge tree branch crashed to the ground. After that we did not dare go into the woods.

As suddenly as it began, the storm ended. In an hour's time a pale morning sun shone, warming the ground so curls of steam rose all around us. We wrung out our clothes and hung them on branches. While we waited for them to dry, we saw a marten poke its head out of a hole in the branch that had split from the tree. It had a baby marten in its mouth. The animal made its way to the ground and then up a nearby tree. It disappeared into a hole and then, without the baby, scampered back to the first hole to collect a second and then a third and a fourth baby to carry back to its
new nest. To make its way from its old nest to the new one, the marten had to cross just in front of us. We kept very still. Each time, the marten paused, looked our way, seemed to decide we were not dangerous, and hurried by us.

The marten cheered us. The sun was hot now, and our clothes dried quickly. The river settled down. Georgi caught a large fish with pink flesh that was very tasty. We set out in a good mood, walking most of the day to make up for the day we had lost. After that we made good time each day, and though we never went hungry, we grew very tired of fish twice a day.