“You’re not intruding. I’m inviting you.”
After a moment, Marina stepped off the path. Alla Innokentevna nodded and turned back to her cooks.
Marina let her fingers trail along the plank tabletops as she approached their little group. Flakes of ash, caught by the wet air, floated toward her. One of the cooks held out a plastic mug. “Take it,” the cook said, and Marina hurried to do so. A tea bag was already inside. The cook said, “Here,” and poured water from the blackened kettle. “How’d you sleep?”
Both this cook and Alla Innokentevna had that bouncing, northern way of speaking. “Fine,” Marina said. The cook turned her attention back to the meal—rice floating in milk—but Alla Innokentevna faced Marina. Soon, the organizer would start to ask questions.
“It’s lovely here,” Marina said, to stop her.
“You don’t come up this way too often?”
“No. I can’t. I have work.”
“We all have work,” Alla Innokentevna said. She waved one hand, and ash fluttered in her wake. “In any case, you’re here now.”
Marina slid her palms around her mug, which was hot enough to light up the tender skin. The rest of Marina’s body was cool, wary. Rice swam through the milk as one cook stirred the pot.
“My son and one of my daughters will be here today,” Alla Innokentevna said. A mention of children. Finally the organizer was coming to her point.
“Good morning,” Eva called from the path behind them. Marina turned to see her friend wave. Eva’s face was fresh from being washed.
“Did you sleep well?” Alla Innokentevna called back.
Eva came over. Drops of river water were suspended on her jaw. “My husband’s just getting up. He’s not a morning person,” she told the group. “Unlike some of us.” She nudged Marina. The cooks ignored the conversation now. Eva drove talk toward the day’s events, then the recent construction on the campground—Alla Innokentevna had installed a sauna with a wood-burning stove—and then incidents from around the peninsula. Global complaints: the country’s downgraded bond credit rating, the interventions in Ukraine. There was always some new catastrophe to discuss.
Marina sipped her tea. The taste was bitter. The bag had steeped too long.
Once Petya joined them, Marina left the couple to eat together, with their spoons resting in half-full bowls of porridge and their knees touching under the table. She took her time around the camp. A pen and notepad were in her jacket pockets in case the need for any award-winning journalism arose. In the woods, away from the first clearing, surprises were hidden: the sauna, a shack stocked full of canned food, a small yurt. Traces of conversation came from the eating area. Music played in the distance. Farther into the trees, Marina found a little house on stilts—a granary. Notched logs made a ladder from the ground to its door. She climbed up.
On her back on the planks, she watched dust drift from the bunches of dried grass that insulated the granary’s roof. She was close enough to the river to hear water rushing. What kind of place was this? Meant to store food, obviously, but during what time, and for whom? If a grounds tour was offered later, Marina should take it. She knew too little about Kamchatka’s north. Native culture was not taught in school when she grew up. There was a little more of that local history in today’s lessons…Alyona would probably know.
The girls had now missed an entire school year. If they came back, they would have to join new classes.
Why did she do this? Couldn’t she recall the past without imagining what had happened to her daughters since?
They could come back. They could not.
The last Marina knew, Alyona and Sophia were in the city center. A woman taking her dog out had seen them walking there. After that, the police lost them; investigators said at first a man snatched them, but the search teams turned up no men to hold accountable. Marina had walked the city shouting her daughters’ names. She pounded on her neighbors’ doors. She enlisted librarians to help scour the archives for any mention of children gone missing. For four fruitless months, she called the headquarters of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Moscow, gasped on the phone to junior staff members, scribbled names and phone numbers that led her nowhere.
Then the Petropavlovsk police interrogated Marina and her ex-husband, as though Alyona and Sophia would turn out to have been hiding in one of their apartments the whole time. Then the police said the girls drowned. In the spring, they dragged the bay for bodies. The major general had used that excuse to scale back the investigation last month, so there would be no more organized search parties or announcements to local media. When she heard about that decision, Marina went to the station with the girls’ bathing suits.
“These were still in our apartment,” she said, pressing the printed nylon to his desk. “Are you thinking Alyona and Sophia went swimming in their clothes? During a cold summer? That they drowned in the center, in still water, at the height of tourist season, without anyone noticing?”
He asked her to sit. She took the bathing suits back to hold in her lap. “Do you want to know what I’m thinking?” he said. “We have not found any evidence of a kidnapper. We have not found your daughters on land. We know they were next to the water when they disappeared. It’s a reasonable conclusion.”
“And the witness?” Marina asked.
The major general shook his head. “At this point, we don’t believe she was a witness to anything at all.”
Marina started to hyperventilate there in the station. An assistant came over to help her out of her chair. The police did not believe the witness—but Marina did. She had interviewed enough liars over the years to see when someone was telling the truth. The dog-walking woman did not have much information to offer, but she was frank, when Marina met with her that first day, about what she saw: a man in a dark car with two girls.
No. Alyona and Sophia did not drown that day. They were taken.
This was the knowledge that depressed Marina’s lungs. She understood how such cases took shape. Though her work now, for the party paper, was generally cheery (electricity grids humming, roads repaved, citizens turning out to the polls in record numbers), she was familiar, from her early work and her latest research, with the other side of the news. Kidnappings around the world. Police corruption. Sexual assaults. Abuse. Children murdered. Alyona’s and Sophia’s school pictures appeared on her own front page—their faces alike as two drops of water, their finely combed hair—and when she saw them, Marina pictured terrible things: where were those childish heads now? Where were their bodies? Which girl was victim first? Had they screamed?
“Are they dead?” she asked her ex-husband, when the drowning theory came out. He had moved to Moscow for a job when the girls were little, and the time difference meant Marina was always interrupting in some way. Still, she kept calling. Her ex was a comfort to speak to because they could share the blame: she should have never left them alone that day; he should have never left them in Kamchatka to begin with; she should have taught their daughters to stay away from dangerous men; he should have shown them what a trustworthy one looks like. He was the only person, besides the girls’ kidnapper, who might deserve more guilt than Marina.
He was quiet. “I don’t know,” he said.
“Exactly. Because I think we would know. I think we would feel it—something different. A more permanent absence.”
“Maybe.”
“You don’t think so?” She had wanted him to agree, or to disagree, or something. To tell her how to proceed.
“I don’t know,” he said again. “I would…like to believe that was true.” He spoke carefully. This was how he talked in moments of great stress; during arguments, he became deliberate. He tried to manage her. He was hurting, she knew, but not as much as she was. She suffered more. She was the guilty one, after all. The blame did belong to her.