The rest of the gang came panting in, calling my name. When I apprised them of what had happened, Farley looked at the door hinges and the frame and said, “We can have this thing open in no time.”
Eggers said, “I bet Trudy can pick the lock.”
“Hey, hey,” Gerry said. “You can’t just drag her out of there. The woman’s alone in there, afraid. She’s got to come out on her own terms.”
Vadim sat on his stool, eating pizza.
Trudy said, “Let me try to talk to Yulia,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, “that’s a good idea. That’s worth a try.”
I pictured poor Yulia down there in the dark. I remembered the way she described herself in that speech: as a girl, suffering first from terrible allergies, then caused further pain by the doctor who was supposed to help. I had to get Yulia out of that cellar. I had to show her that I was here to help, that I would never hurt her.
I went to Vadim. He was wiping his mouth with a napkin. Some kind of eerie, casual disconnection had taken hold of the boy.
I asked, “Where can we find one of these vulgaris plants?”
“This was a kind of joke,” he said. “The D. vulgaris is one of the rarest flowers in the world. They bloom only at night, along the South China Sea.”
“There’s got to be some other plant we could bring her?” I asked.
“We saved all the plants.”
“Well, then, we’ll dig one up,” I said.
“Out there?”
“Yeah,” I said, “out there.”
I grabbed a bucket, and we walked to the hothouse door, where we closed our coats. Vadim grabbed a gardening spade off the wall. It had a long, lean blade, and I could tell this was what he carried to ward off dogs. He waited for me to choose a tool. I grabbed a pickax and leaned it over my shoulder. “Where to?” he asked.
Outside, I tried to head away from the ugly portraits of town. A couple knolls overlooked the Missouri at the edge of campus, and I figured there had to be some shrubs or something up there.
Vadim was petrified of dogs. His cool, collected posture quickly disappeared. Watching him constantly scan for marauding dogs made me realize this wasn’t a single morning’s work. My entrance into the lives of these two people wouldn’t be as simple as the rescue scene I’d imagined. There wasn’t going to be a dinner where I regaled Yulia with stories of hardship, kept filling her champagne glass, and later claimed my passionate reward. I didn’t even know Yulia that well, and it would prove true that she’d gone a little mad from the events depicted, as testified by some of her behavior later in life. But I held her in my heart, and would stay with her all my days, even if a great many of them were trying ones. If love dictated only in Russian, I would learn that thorny tongue.
Since the boy owned no snowshoes, he stumbled often, and each time he fell, his first thought was to defend against advancing dogs. Before, he’d been a smart, brooding boy, prone to silence and introspection. Now, after what he’d experienced, I wondered if I’d ever get through to him.
We were making for the highest spot on the hill. There were some little chinaberry bushes poking out of the snow.
“I know you’re going through a hard time,” I told the kid.
He didn’t answer.
“I’ve brought you something,” I said. I produced Keno’s point. “Dogs are afraid of this,” I said. “I’ve scared many dogs away with it. Keep it in your pocket. They’ll smell it on you. They’ll keep their distance.”
I placed the point in his hand. The thing would save his life come spring, after we’d all set out for Okinawa. Now Vadim seemed impressed mostly with its beauty, with the pink light coming from its edge, but he looked indifferent to my claims of its potency. I’d expected a few of his science-minded questions, like How can dogs smell It? or How does It work? But such questions were dangerous. From them, it was only a short hop to other questions, like Where is my father? and What will happen to me now?
I knew where he was at — it seemed impossible that mere inquiry could protect you from the unknowns swirling about like cast-nets. It seemed unthinkable that simple questions could prevent you from being forever drawn into the seine purse of doubt. But one day, that would change. One day, he would separate himself from what he felt, so “this hurt” would become “that hurt,” and once that happened, once he learned to step outside the cloud of his loneliness and examine loss with scientific eyes, then words and names would begin to work for him. Then he’d be able to tell his story as if it had happened to someone else, which is the only way you can speak the story of your life and still survive when it ends.
The ridge, when we reached its rounded peak, was stunning. A gray wedge of cold front cut against the horizon, and in the sun off the water, the light was intense. I tried to find the smallest chinaberry out there, one that would fit in our bucket. That chinaberry smell always made me think of Parkton. I pulled out my GPS unit and marked the spot. Its batteries were failing.
With the pick, I scraped snow away from the little plant until I found frozen soil. I began chipping at the earth, breaking a little dirt loose with each stroke.
“You gonna help or what?” I asked Vadim.
“This isn’t going to work,” he said. He stood there, watching me dig. “She will not be impressed by this weed.”
It was pretty hard not to hurt the roots in the frozen dirt, but I did my best. The plant smelled good on my hands, and I’ve always liked the shape of those little blue berries.
Vadim wouldn’t let up. “What makes you think she will like that plant? There are a million plants just like it. What makes you think that one is special?”
I just kept digging. When my face started to shine, Vadim joined me, and soon we had a passable hole. Soon we had a plant in a bucket. I looked at that hole. It was a good spot we were at. I didn’t quite understand Vadim’s resistance, but we’d turned our first corner here. I pulled out my GPS unit. I wrapped it in the buckskin I’d used for Keno’s point, and together Vadim and I buried the thing. If this story has reached you, fellow humans of the future, then you have no doubt found this and all the other artifacts I have left for you. Perhaps some sort of historical marker now stands where Vadim and I stood that morning. Perhaps such monuments to our deeds litter the landscape from here to Asia.
Certainly, of course, there will be those in the future who have found a way to hold me responsible for the very calamity that we here survived. I trust the thinking persons among you know foolishness when you hear it. Always there are lesser scientists who, for lack of a good dissertation topic, will spend several years researching such cockamamie ideas. Their goal is not truth but celebrity, and their means are incendiary sensationalism. I’ve said enough on the topic already; suffice it to say that, over the last million years, the fates of the cultures of the world have always been the same: dust. Anthropologists don’t erase cultures; we remember them.
Other decisions, I’m sure, will fall under some scrutiny. In teaching Gerry’s kids, a duty that fell solely to me during their long march toward doctoral degrees, I instructed them in Latin at the expense of Greek. I perhaps overstressed the Enlightenment, and I confess that I pretended the entire twentieth century didn’t occur. As to my rendition of feminism, I tried my best. Vadim was to outclass all students before him, earning his Ph.D. in record time, and when his thirst turned from humanism to popular culture, I readily admit the inaccuracies I may have passed on in my depiction of the movies, songs, and literature of the day.