FINDING KATARINA M. Read online

  “Saldana said that your mother, Katarina Melnikova, is still alive. My mother—her name’s Vera, by the way—was so surprised and happy to hear that. It meant a lot to her. To me, too.”

  When Lena didn’t answer right away, I figured the conversation, and any chances of a relationship, were about to end.

  But I was wrong. When she finally answered, there was a smile in her voice. “You really ought to meet her. And Mikhail, too. We call him Misha.”

  “Misha,” I repeated. “That’s a nice name.”

  “He’s a nice boy. Though he’s nineteen now, so I should probably stop calling him a boy.”

  Given the way my previous probing questions had gone, I decided not to mention that Saldana had been worried about him.

  Lena said, “I was meaning to ask you this after Saldana had settled in a bit. But I suppose I might as well ask you now. Would you and your mother consider visiting? I know it’s a long trip.”

  “That’s very kind. Actually, we talked about it already. My mother would like nothing better, but she can’t make it, I’m afraid. She has multiple sclerosis and is confined to a wheelchair.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “But I could come,” I heard myself saying.

  “That would be very nice. It would be good to meet you. Especially now. Saldana’s death…” My aunt’s voice grew thick with emotion. “I want something good to come from it. If that’s possible. It’s the only way I can—” The words caught raggedly in her throat. “Saldana would want it, too…for something good to come of…this.”

  “I think she would,” I said softly.

  “Let’s talk again soon,” Lena said, her voice husky with grief. We exchanged information, and she promised to call in a couple of days.

  Her word was good. She phoned that weekend and proposed a two-week trip. The plan was for me to spend some time in Yakutsk with her. Misha, she said, would join us there. Then she and I would travel out to the country so I could meet Katarina Melnikova.

  I firmly stifled all the usual concerns about my patients that had prevented me from taking vacations of more than a few days in the past. Life was short and precious, and opportunities like this usually came but once. Saldana’s death had put that much in perspective for me at least. If I’d needed any more motivation, there was always Vera. She talked about nothing else. When I finally confessed what had happened to Saldana, the shocking news only strengthened her commitment to reach out to her Russian family through me.

  It took a couple of weeks to settle the details. Lena and I talked on the phone a few more times and exchanged emails. There was a passport to renew, a tourist visa to be granted, and coverage at the hospital to be arranged. As luck would have it, Joel agreed to take most of my patients, an act of generosity that I found bittersweet.

  I flew from Washington D.C. to Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport—a loud, dirty, and confusing place. Taxi drivers accosted me as I made my way through the terminal; pamphlets were shoved in my face. Clumps of people moved about in surges that seemed to have no direction or destination, like schools of fish. As I had a six-hour layover before my flight to Yakutsk, I thought I might have lunch, then find a quiet place to dip into the novel I brought. But the few cafes were crowded, and I didn’t see an open seat in any of the gates I passed. Finally, I found one in an odd balcony area overlooking a roiling sea of heads. I tried to read, but my concentration was broken every two minutes by a woman’s heavy voice loudly announcing departing flights and gate numbers. The voice seemed quintessentially Russian, a blend of brash indifference and jaded carelessness—a far cry from the sing-song, saccharine tone of corporate reassurance that I was used to hearing in American airports.

  I felt a bit anxious as I sat there, unavoidably eavesdropping on the conversations happening all around me. I had always felt a deep connection to Russia, if only because of my parents and my ability to speak the language. But what did I really know about the land of my forebearers? Just the usual stuff Westerners learned: Russia as Cold War adversary, as present-day bad actor, as a sham democracy barreling toward outright dictatorship. Mixed in with that, a hodge-podge of random images gleaned from novels, history books, and the media: the Romanovs, Rasputin, the pogroms, Doctor Zhivago, the bombs in Chechnya, the oligarch Khodarkovsky, oil pipelines, Matryoshka dolls, endless silvery green forests, and Putin’s pale-faced scowl. It was alarming, really, the paucity of my knowledge. My brain had been little more than a lint catcher.

  By the time I was finally seated on the Siberian Airlines jet to Yakutsk, I was clumsy and dull-witted from fatigue and a quiet unease. It seemed the day had ended hours before, leaving behind a strange pointless trailing in which I was caught. The plane was flying against the planet’s rotation, and it felt like going back in time. When the drinks cart came, I ordered two shots of vodka, and finally, at thirty-thousand feet somewhere over the Urals, I fell into a twilight sleep. The rumbling of the jet engine became the shuddering of the earth as in my dream masses of people, massive plodding armies, churned and grated west to east across the steppes like a human tectonic plate, accompanied by the rhythmic clack-clack-clack of train after train speeding along the newly laid iron tracks of the Trans-Siberian railroad, people crammed inside the filthy cars so densely that they didn’t lean in the turns—all betrayed, disowned, rendered useless to themselves and others, barreling toward the frozen catch-basin of Siberia, toward unimaginable suffering and near-certain death. The horror startled me awake, and I felt something in my psyche shift. I understood more deeply what I’d known only superficially before: that my grandparents had been among those nameless masses, two real people caught and swept away like specks of dust in a thundering maelstrom. I couldn’t imagine what they’d felt, and didn’t want to try. But it seemed important to me suddenly—crucial, even—to find out from Katarina Melnikova when I met her exactly how she had managed to escape.

  NIGHT WAS DISSOLVING, stars winking out in a violet wash of dawn. With a couple of dozen other passengers, I stumbled sleepily across the tarmac toward a one-story building made of cheap concrete. The air was cool and mild; it smelled of mud and something sweet. Inside the terminal, a group of people with dark, Asiatic faces stood patiently behind a flimsy rope, peering eagerly around and behind me, breaking into wide, occasionally gap-toothed smiles when they caught sight of whomever they were waiting for.

  I scanned the terminal, looking for Lena. It was the kind of place you could take in at a glance: one gate, one baggage carousel, one ticket counter, and a couple of soda and snack machines. Two police officers in black uniforms stood near the main entrance, billy clubs fastened at their belts. Disheveled travelers waited for bathrooms along the side wall, where there was an administrative office and, further along, a corridor leading somewhere.

  I’d seen a poor-quality snapshot of Lena on Saldana’s Facebook page. With her square-ish face, short haircut, and rectangular black glasses, she’d struck me as stolid and plain, the kind of person you wouldn’t pick out in a crowd. And I certainly wasn’t picking her out now. Luggage from the flight started appearing on the moving belt. My leather duffel was conspicuously expensive and intact among the battered valises tied with twine and the cardboard boxes wrapped in swaths of plastic. I grabbed it and made my way to the front of the terminal. I’d sent Lena my itinerary a couple of days ago, and she’d replied with an enthusiastic promise to meet me at the airport at the appointed time. Maybe she meant at the main entrance or outside on the curb.

  There was nowhere to sit on the concrete apron in front of the terminal building, so I plopped down on my bulging duffel and finished off some bottled water I’d bought eight hours earlier at Domodedovo. I’d been travelling for over twenty hours and was bleary with exhaustion. It was just after five a.m. Once the travelers who’d disembarked with me had dispersed to waiting cars and sped away, I was left alone to contemplate the airport’s huge empty parking lot, a dreary moonscape of potholes and broken asphalt. I figure
d I’d give Lena fifteen minutes before I called.

  When the time came, I tried her cell, got bumped to voicemail, and left a message. She’d probably gotten the time wrong and might still be asleep. Just after six, I dialed her landline and got no answer. I called her cell again and said that I was heading to a hotel and would try her again later that day.

  A taxi had pulled up while I was waiting and was idling by the curb. The driver seemed to have sensed my situation because the minute I pocketed my phone he emerged from his cab and went around back to open its trunk. A fat-cheeked man wearing a grease-stained nylon jacket, he approached and pushed a business card under my nose.

  “I work for hotels sometimes, but mostly for myself. Call this number when you have to go someplace.” He jabbed a dirty finger at the card. “I work days, nights, weekends—any hour. If you want to take a long trip outside the city, I will take you myself or arrange it for you. If you want to bring your friends, I will rent a van. I am very safe, very trustworthy. With me, you are assured of a fair price. All you have to do is call that number, and I will come for you right away.”

  “Aysen the Taxi Driver,” I said, reading the name on the card.

  He nodded, his black eyes thin as slits above his mounded cheeks.

  He drove canted forward, hugging the wheel of a battered Land Rover Discovery. The windshield was streaked with dirt, and the radio played tinny Western pop remixed with a syrupy beat. High-rise concrete apartment buildings backed up to both sides of the highway, broken by on/off ramps and billboards advertising such things as washing detergents and fruit-flavored drinks. In one, a pasty-faced campaigning politician with a bad haircut and ill-fitting suit grinned down at passing motorists, menacing in his enormity. Everything was hovering behind a scrim of dust.

  Traffic into the city was light. But Aysen stayed glued to the car in front, speeding up and slowing down as it did, as if driving were a matter of not letting the distance between bumpers expand. Finally, he swerved onto a ramp, and soon turned onto a wide city avenue.

  “You see all the construction?” he said, waving his hand. Steel cranes rose here and there like long-necked birds, and scaffolding rigs covered several facades. “Yakutsk is growing all the time. It’s the gold, the oil, the diamonds—all of it making the politicians and businessmen rich. And foreigners—they get rich, too. The rest of us? Not so much.” He turned to me. “What are you here for?”

  “Visiting family.”

  “Oh.” He laughed with disappointment.

  Eventually, the SUV jerked to a stop in front of a yellowish building with a high windowless facade—the North Star Hotel. A flashing neon column ran up its face, exploding at the top in a red, five-pointed star that managed to salute the Kremlin and Las Vegas equally.

  I paid Aysen in rubles I’d acquired at the currency exchange at Dulles, the transaction prompting him to assure me once again that the fastest taxi service in Yakutsk was at my immediate service with a direct call to his private line.

  I checked in foggily at the front desk, too tired to notice much of the hotel decor—worn red carpeting, fake flowers, a lot of gleaming white tile—and bumped my luggage up three flights of stairs, step by tedious step, because the elevator was broken. The room was stuffy and overheated; the triple-paned window wouldn’t budge. A sign over the sink warned me not to drink the water, so I screwed the plastic top off the bottled water that had been provided and chugged half of it.

  Fatigue was overtaking me with delayed vengeance, as if my jet-lagged body was catching on to the fact that it wasn’t supposed to be awake. I propped two thin pillows against the headboard and half-reclined on a pink-fringed double bed. I couldn’t sleep just yet—I had to call Vera and let her know I’d arrived safely.

  The guide book I’d read on the plane had cheerfully reported that cell phone reception in Yakutsk was excellent. I had my doubts about that, but when the night nurse at the rehab, Caitlin O’Donnell, answered the phone, the guide book was proved right. Caitlin’s voice was loud and crystal clear, even clearer, it seemed, than when I called from Washington.

  “Hi, Caitlin. It’s Dr. March.”

  “Dr. March! Your mother said you were in Russia.”

  “I am. It’s seven a.m. here. What time is it there?”

  “Nine p,m. How’s your trip so far?”

  “Fine so far. I just got to the hotel. Is Vera up?”

  “Ah, no. She’s sleeping right now. Actually…she had a fall. No broken bones, but she was a little shaken up.”

  “A fall? When?”

  “A couple of hours ago. She got out of bed somehow and was trying to use the bathroom by herself. She wasn’t there long.”

  “There?”

  “On the floor. She was able to reach the emergency buzzer.”

  I groaned, picturing the scene: Vera crumpled on the bathroom tiles, not calling out right away because she wanted to get up by herself. Only after many minutes of fruitless, silent struggle would she have alerted the staff. Thank god she was all right. It could have been much worse if she’d hit her head or the emergency buzzer had been out of reach.

  “You said she was upset?”

  “A little shaken up, yes. Dr. Branson prescribed Xanax as needed. I hope that’s okay with you?”

  “Fine, Caitlin. But one dose ought to be enough.” I trusted Dr. Branson, but I also kept a keen eye on how he managed my mother’s care. I wasn’t about to sanction regular use of an addictive psych med.

  “Of course. Do you want to leave a message?”

  “Yeah. Tell her to use her call button the next time she wants to get out of bed. That’s an order.” Vera knew she was supposed to notify staff when she wanted to get out of bed. But now and then she liked to test herself, just in case any of her functions had been miraculously restored.

  “Will do, Doctor.”

  “And tell her I arrived safely and will phone again in the morning—your morning.”

  I ended the call with a worried sigh. I hated being so far away. If there was a crisis while I was gone… But the care at the rehab was first rate. I’d made sure of that before Vera was admitted. Still, I’d feel better when I was home.

  I woke a little after noon. There were no messages from Lena on my phone. After a quick shower and change of clothes, I went down to the lobby, where a skinny concierge wore an expression that seemed expressly designed to warn away irritating travelers. I bravely asked if anyone had tried to contact me. She raised aggressively tweezed eyebrows at me, as if it was a rare and stupid question, which in the age of cell phones, it probably was. Nevertheless, she obliged me with a cursory glance at some papers on her desk before delivering a neatly clipped nyet. She probably hated Americans, or everyone. I still wasn’t too worried about Lena. I figured the problem was nothing more than a simple miscommunication, which would be straightened out soon enough with a bit of embarrassment and a friendly laugh. After lunch at the hotel restaurant, and two more unanswered calls to Lena’s landline and mobile, I decided to walk to her flat.

  It was hot out. Not as bad as D.C., but hotter than I’d expected. The sun was a whitish disc, indistinct and low-hanging, oddly searing. A breeze raised reddish-brown dirt and swirled it through the air, so that every parked car, every sidewalk and curbstone, was copper-tinged. I stood under the hotel awning next to an animated group of Asian businessmen carrying identical briefcases, and brought up the street map on my phone. Lena’s address appeared as a blinking blue dot over a mile away, diagonally across the city, on the edge of a river that bore her name. When the driver of a taxi idling nearby gave me a pointed look, I shook my head to signal that I didn’t want his services. After so much time cooped up in planes, I needed exercise, and I was curious to see the city.

  As I reached into my bag for my sunglasses, I felt a touch on my shoulder and turned to see a woman about my age in a beige linen pantsuit with a large leather tote slung over one shoulder. “Excuse me, but I’m in a bit of a hurry. If you’re going downtown
, would you be willing to share your cab?” She had a strong, brassy voice. Huge sunglasses covered half her face.

  “You can have it,” I said, stepping aside. “I’m going to walk.”

  Swiping off the glasses, she blinked at me with a trace of something—familiarity or amusement—and said in English, “Don’t tell me you’re American.”

  “Is it that obvious?” I answered in English.

  “Afraid so. But your accent isn’t too bad. I’m a Yank, too, actually. Meredith Viles.” She reached out her hand, and my eyes caught the gleam of a large diamond on her finger, larger than any I’d seen.

  “Natalie March,” I said. Her hand was dry and thin, with a firm grip.

  “Business or pleasure?” she asked in the abrupt manner of busy people who are eager to get to the point. She brushed over-processed blond hair away from heavily made-up eyes, giving the diamond another chance to dazzle.

  “Pleasure. Family,” I replied, matching her succinctness.

  “Ah, nice,” she said meaninglessly as she opened the door to the cab. She tossed her tote onto the backseat and, as she slid in after it, called over her shoulder, “Enjoy Yakutsk.” The door slammed, and she immediately craned forward to speak to the driver. I got the impression that she went about her business in a chronic state of urgency like I did back in Washington. It ocurred to me that for the next few weeks I had no appointments, no scheduled surgeries. It felt odd to be so footloose, but I was determined to adjust.

  The buildings in the downtown area were either drab concrete boxes preaching the Soviet utilitarian gospel, or modern glass-and-steel towers bragging about their newfound capitalist wealth. Mixed in to the architectural argument were some elegant old wooden structures, relics of nineteenth-century Czarist Russia. Painted in soft pinks and blues, with folksy pointed shutters, they added a bygone romantic aura to the city streets, even when their flat roofs were crammed with silver satellite dishes and spurts of shooting antennae.