FINDING KATARINA M. Read online

  He lowered his voice. “You’re being very stupid now, Tarasov. You do realize that Novaya Gazeta is closely monitored, don’t you? Anyone who writes for us goes on a list; even the submissions aren’t safe. Which is why I destroyed your manuscript and the photos that came with it. And why I wrote you that note: I thought you should be warned. What’s your accent, by the way?”

  “American. My father was a diplomat.”

  “Well, that’s another thing you should keep under your hat. But it does explain your naïve attitude.” He paused. “You want a story idea, how about the herders? What were they called again?”

  “They were…Evenki,” I said, the old man on the shaggy horse popping into my mind.

  “Right, right. Interesting people. You can take photos of them, and nothing will come of it. Especially if you stress the healthy and productive lifestyle they’re enjoying. If you want to send me that story, I promise to give it a good look.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Gusev. You’ve been a big help.”

  A baby’s monotonous wail drifted through the open window. I paced the living room, piecing together what I’d learned: Reindeer herders had discovered an abandoned prison camp and given it a name. Misha took photos and made “allegations” that his photos didn’t support. That means he’d been to the place. But where was it, and what were the allegations? More importantly, did his foray into journalism have anything to do with his disappearance? If that were the case, Gusav had been right to warn him. But what could be dangerous enough to warrant the arrest of a nineteen-year-old Sakha man whose exposé wasn’t going to be published anyway?

  My plan was to visit Misha’s friends, Bohdan Duboff and Tanya Karp, that evening after dinner, when they were likely to be home. In the meantime, a long, hot afternoon stretched ahead of me. Out of curiosity, I googled Evenki herders and abandoned gulag camps. Nothing came up, but I started reading articles about the Evenki—their history and geographic distribution, their ancient customs and modern-day herding operations—and before I knew it, an hour had passed. I discovered that Mirny was home to the Evenki Historical and Cultural Museum. The museum didn’t have a website, but the Mirny visitor page gave its address and hours of operation: Wednesday and Saturday afternoons between two and four p.m. I checked the map; it was on the outskirts of town, about a half mile away. I had time to shower and find a decent lunch somewhere. Then I would enjoy a culturally enriching afternoon.

  The Evenki Historical and Cultural Museum was sandwiched between a liquor store and hair salon. Its name was carefully hand-painted in fanciful lettering on a pretty wooden plaque decorated with reindeer, horses, and a crescent moon. The plaque was affixed to the center of a rusted metal door that might have been salvaged from a derelict prison or military site. I tried the handle. It didn’t budge. I pressed a buzzer and waited.

  A second-floor window opened, and an old man peered over the ledge, tufts of white hair sticking out from his head. His face was burnished to a ruddy brown, the skin pulled taut over high cheekbones.

  “Are you here to visit the museum?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait a few minutes, please. We’re almost ready.”

  A short while later, I heard a light step on the stairs, and the creaking door was opened by a young woman resplendent in a reindeer-hide tunic embroidered with tiny multi-colored beads. Her face was flat and pale, heart-shaped, astonishingly pretty—framed by silver ornaments dangling from a silver headdress. The black hair falling loose across her shoulders and down to her waist was like a silky second garment. Close to her chest she held what appeared to be a warrior’s shield—an animal skin stretched on a round frame decorated with beaded horsehair tufts. She bowed slightly, too bashful to meet my eyes.

  “Welcome to the Evenki Museum. I am pleased to be your guide today. May I ask what country you are from?”

  When I told her, she announced that she would conduct the tour in English. I explained that she didn’t have to do that, as I spoke Russian quite well, but she demurely insisted.

  I followed her up a narrow stairway to a long, cramped room with a scuffed wooden floor and a single window, the same one from which the old man had looked down. He stood smiling in the doorway to a side room, wearing a wrinkled suit jacket, a tailored white shirt, and a western-style string tie. He was small and genial, apparently content to observe the proceedings with kind, indulgent attention.

  The museum consisted of a counter with a glass case running along the left wall. Inside, dozens of small artifacts were arranged on green felt cloths. The right wall was crowded with photographs of varying sizes in cheap plastic frames—mostly black-and-white, some sepia-toned, many hanging tilted, all of them dusty.

  The young woman introduced herself as Emmie. Her grandfather was named Tolya. With a graceful Vanna White gesture, she directed my attention to the glass case and began to speak in slow, rather tortured English sentences. It didn’t go well. She stumbled over every other word, blushing with each mistake, but showed no signs of letting up, until with a lightly rueful shrug she suddenly reverted to her native language. Tolya grinned, perhaps in support of her brave linguistic attempt, and she couldn’t suppress a proud teenage giggle. She then proceeded to describe the origin and uses of each artifact displayed on the green felt, working her way across the first shelf before moving down to the second.

  I quickly got bored—I was not, it turned out, particularly captivated by artifacts such as clay pots and beaded headdresses, however authentic they might be. I would much rather have scanned the shelves on my own for a bit, and then talked informally with Emmie and Tolya, who seemed quite nice. But when I tried to politely interrupt Emmie’s memorized spiel, the girl appeared crestfallen, so I held back and let her finish. When every item in the glass case had been fully explained, I again tried to initiate a two-way conversation, but Emmie gracefully swirled to the wall of photos and began explaining those. I resigned myself to enduring the performance, even managing a smile and several interested nods of the head. By the time she’d finished naming the six people in the last photo and explaining the important event that the photo commemorated, I was ready to cheer with relief. But the treasures of the museum hadn’t been exhausted yet. Jangling the silver ornaments on her headdress, Emmie floated to an ancient saddle mounted on a log base, and proceeded to instruct me in the process of its construction from reindeer hides and sinews, her delicate fingers tracing the intricate workmanship.

  At long last she favored me with a lovely smile and said in letter-perfect English: “Admission is free, but donations are welcome.”

  I opened my wallet and pulled out a generous wad of rubles, which I slipped into a glass jar on the counter labeled for that purpose. “I have a question I’m hoping you can answer,” I said.

  “We’ll be glad to help if we can,” Tolya replied. One of his eyes was dark brown, almost black; a cataract in the other eye had turned it milky beige.

  “I heard that an abandoned gulag camp was discovered recently, perhaps by herders from around here. Do you know anything about that?”

  He furrowed his brow. “Do you mean Death Valley?”

  “Possibly. I don’t know its name.”

  “Why are you interested?”

  “I’m looking for someone who might have gone there.”

  Creases appeared in his forehead as he thought about that. He asked if I’d like to sit down, and led me through a doorway into a studio apartment with one twin bed, one mattress on the floor, a sink, small refrigerator, and a stove on which a dented kettle sat. Clothes were crammed into a broom closet and folded in piles on the floor, and there were piles of books and papers everywhere. A dining table pushed against a wall was covered with a vinyl cloth; a vase in its center held sprigs of poplar. Emmie trailed after us, grabbed some clothes that were lying on the bed, and quietly left.

  The old man began, as Russians inevitably did, by making tea. We engaged in pleasant small talk about my trip, the weather, and so on. It went on
long enough that I started getting impatient again, until, finally, he began talking about an abandoned camp that an Evenki brigade travelling along the Dentin River had discovered this past spring. They’d come across a huge field in a shallow valley and stopped to let the herd graze. The reindeer started showing signs of illness within a few days. First the fur on their legs came out in clumps, then they became very tired and refused to walk. Alarmed, the herders drove them down the valley as best they could, and were surprised to come across the remains of a mining camp. A uranium mine, by the looks of it, so they figured there was radioactivity in the grass, and that was what was making the animals sick. They called the place Death Valley.

  I frowned as I processed the information. It was no secret that the Soviets had mined uranium in Siberia to make the bomb; any number of such places would have been in operation during Stalin’s brutal regime. I doubted that the discovery of such a site would be considered controversial; it might not even be particularly newsworthy.

  “Herders must come across a lot of abandoned prison camps in their travels,” I said.

  “Yes, but they’re usually marked on maps, and if there’s radioactivity, signs are posted. Warnings not to drink the water or eat the berries, and so on. This camp was unknown until the herders stumbled across it, and there weren’t any warnings.”

  “What do you make of that?”

  Tolya shrugged. “Don’t know. There were so many prison camps in the Kolyma Region during the gulag era, it’s possible one was forgotten.”

  “Did the herders report it?”

  “You mean to the government?” He grimaced bitterly. “We have as little to do with the Kremlin as possible. If the Russians overlooked one of their death camps, what is that to us?”

  “I see. How might someone local—not an Evenki—have found out about it?”

  “There was a notice in the Mirny paper, in a section called Evenki News, that described the camp and warned other herding groups to stay away.” He sipped his tea, and when he put the cup down on the table, he said, “Now tell me who this person is who went to Death Valley.”

  I told him as much of my story as was needed—a death in the family, a desire to meet my relatives, arriving in Mirny to find that my cousin had vanished without a trace. I explained that he’d been trying to sell a story about an abandoned gulag camp recently discovered by herders to a newspaper, that the camp was probably one of the last places he visited before he disappeared.

  Tolya looked askance. “You think he might be there now?”

  “From what you say, I hope not. I just know that something important must have drawn him there, and if I knew what it was…”

  Tolya pondered, shook his head. “I can’t imagine what it would be.”

  “You didn’t happen to hear about a young man going out there, to Death Valley, did you? It would have been in June, most likely. Mikhail Tarasov is his name.”

  “No, I heard nothing like that.”

  “Would you let me know if you do?” I produced my card and put it on the table. “Thank you, Tolya. You’ve been very kind. And I certainly enjoyed the museum.”

  His smile revealed worn-down stubs of stained teeth. “I don’t think so. But it was nice of you to let Emmie conduct her tour. She practices very hard, and her English is getting better all the time.”

  On my way back to the flat, I stopped for groceries at a little mom-and-pop store painted bright yellow with an off-kilter screen door and a couple of old cars parked in a dusty lot. The cashier glanced up briefly, seemed to take me in for a moment as a bit of an oddity. I smiled, which probably only served to confirm my strangeness in that generally unsmiling country, and the cashier looked away quickly, as if recoiling from the excessive friendliness.

  I scoured the aisles, picking up anything that looked good, with a mind to stock Ilmira’s empty refrigerator and cupboards. There were various cheeses and yogurts; beets, tomatoes, and cucumbers; and, of all things, frozen Purdue chicken breasts. No sodas or processed junk foods from international food companies, who probably hadn’t found a way yet to turn a profit in this faraway corner of the world.

  When Ilmira returned from work and opened the refrigerator door, she gave a squeal of delight. We sat down to Bulgarian wine, pickles, olives, cheese and crackers, followed by a simple dinner of chicken and rice. I think she was relieved to see that I wasn’t going to be a slacker, that I intended to pull my weight in cooking and chores.

  As daylight faded and shadows lengthened in the room, we talked together easily, exchanging stories of our lives. She was a person of puzzling contradictions: one on hand, pragmatic and literal-minded. On the other, moody, fatalistic, and full of old superstitions. In another circumstance we might have become friends, but I was sharply conscious of my duplicity. My goal was just to do my job and get out of Mirny as quickly as possible.

  I eventually steered the conversation to Misha, explaining what I’d learned about his interest in the gulag, reindeer herders, and journalism. She said he hadn’t mentioned any of that to her. But she did recall him taking a weekend trip in late May, shortly after he moved in. I checked off the days in my head: he would have had plenty of time to write and submit the article between then and July twelfth, when he disappeared.

  Had Gusev’s warning come too late?

  Around eight-thirty p.m., after Ilmira and I cleaned the kitchen, I went down to the second floor and knocked on the door of the Duboff/Karp apartment. It had three deadbolts, so a fair amount of metallic clicking and sliding attended its opening. A thin sylph of a woman peered out at me. Her hair was jet black with a bluish sheen, cut in short spikes moussed straight up. Heavy make-up bruised her eyes, and a small purple tattoo of a Russian Orthodox cross nestled in the indentation at the base of her neck. Her skin was the near-translucent white of many sunless winters.

  “Tanya Karp?”

  “Who are you?” She was in her late-twenties maybe, toughened and wary, but curious.

  I introduced myself and explained my reason for being there. “We’re all very worried. We haven’t heard from Misha in quite some time. His roommate said you were friends, and I was wondering if you have any idea where he might be.”

  A gruff male voice interrupted. “Tanya, who’s at the door?” A man appeared and edged her aside with his bulk and self-importance, dark eyes glowering from under thick black brows. He was dressed in a white, blue, and green athletic suit about twenty years out of date, its top zipped over a slightly protruding abdomen, tufts of curling chest hair blooming almost to his neck. His hair was slicked back from his low forehead with some kind of oily gel. He looked to be my age, maybe a few years younger—a once-strong man going soft with time, but still, in his puffed-out chest and bandy-legged stance, exuding the hostile arrogance of a fiery youth.

  Tanya spoke to him in a low, confidential tone. “Misha’s cousin. Looking for him.”

  “We don’t know where he is,” the man said bluntly. He turned away, and Tanya moved to close the door.

  “You must be Bohdan Duboff,” I interjected. “Please, could you spare a minute or two? Misha’s mother is very worried. We all are.”

  He turned to observe me keenly. “Where are you from?”

  “The United States.”

  “I thought so,” he said, proving the minor fact of his accent prowess. He looked me up and down until it was blatantly rude, and, either incorrectly guessing that I was harmless, or curious about how an American had arrived on his doorstep, stepped aside. I was ushered into a small dimly-lit room overfilled with furniture—brown polyester couch threadbare in spots, rattan chairs scattered about, an old exercise bike crammed in a corner, and a wall of pine bookcases stuffed with books, papers, and photographs that were either cheaply framed or taped to the shelves. An ashtray on the coffee table brimmed with cigarette buts, half-smoked joints, and a roach clip, while spindly plants in clay pots kept close company on a windowsill. A gorgeously colored Turkish rug that most Westerners would have
coveted warmed the dusty wood floor.

  A frenzy of shrill squawking erupted as a large green parrot lunged off its perch and attached itself to the bars of its ornate metal cage, leaving the vacated swing to sweep back and forth, squeaking on an unoiled hinge.

  “Hush,” Tanya told it, using her index finger to flick the bird’s talons off the bars one by one. The bird croaked some outraged Russian-sounding words before repairing to its swinging perch, where it bobbed its yellow-crested head in what looked like keen excitement.

  I took a seat on the couch, keeping up my anxious patter—Misha’s been gone for so long, it’s unlike him not to call, he’s never done anything like this before, etcetera.

  Duboff scoffed paternalistically. “Come now. Don’t be so dramatic. Why do you think the worst? He’s a young man feeling his oats. Probably just gone off somewhere—maybe on a trip or with a woman. Tell his mother not to worry. He’ll show up soon.”

  “It’s been over six weeks,” I insisted. “Did he say anything to you before he left? Was he seeing anyone? Did he mention any new friends?”

  “Nothing that I recall,” Tanya said, frowning. “Six weeks? I didn’t realize it’s been that long since we’ve seen him.”

  If they knew anything about Misha’s covert activities, they were hiding it well. Bohdan’s masculine condescension and Tanya’s bewildered concern seemed genuine and unrehearsed. I picked up no shared glances or fleeting expressions of suspicion or fear. But I was a neophyte in the spying business, and my instincts might very well be wrong. They could still be Misha’s snitchers, or even his abductors.

  “His clothes are still in his room,” I continued with breathless worry. “His roommate says he always told her where he was going—then suddenly, with no word to anyone, he disappears!”

  “Oh, you can’t listen to Ilmira Nikolina. That woman is always complaining and finding trouble,” Bohdan said. “Last month, she told a neighbor there were ghosts in the hallway. Ghosts! Can you believe it? No, she’s not to be taken seriously. She’s a…” Here he used a Russian word that had no real English equivalent—something like old biddy with a twist of virago.