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Page 3.

Chapter 1. 1992: Umnitsa (A Dear and Clever Girl)

On the last leg of the thundering Aeroflot flight from Moscow to Siberia, Marianne prepared herself for her life’s moment of greatest and final honesty with herself.

The urn of ashes sat overhead in a compartment, along with luggage, coats, and satchels of food and duty-free treasures. Her only possessions on this trip, leaving behind chateaux and family in France, were a coat, a small suitcase, and the ashes of a lost lifetime.

She was no longer a brassy tabloid princess with nine lives, no longer tracked by shouting paparazzi and beaming in the attention of tracking flash bulbs. She hugged herself, in her beige, high-necked pullover and jeans, and tried to be as small and modest as possible in her seat.

She kept herself all alone among vibrant passengers—a few blond, blue-eyed Slavs; most of them Yupik, Inuit, and other Siberian Asiatics. They wore a mix of Western dress and colorful native costume, as they crowded around in family groups with laughter, talk, and cigarette smoke. Like Marianne, they were coming home from distant places. Unlike Marianne, they were not living interrupted lives in search of lost truths and loves.

She had found the yin of her beginning and end; now she would close the circle by bringing the yin to the yang, and complete her life so she could start to live, for the first time, as her own person. She remembered very little of her mother, except her love and affection, and the endearment she would call Marianne while hugging her. It was a very Russian word of subtle meanings: Umnitsa…my good little girl, my clever little girl…

Marianne smiled amid welling tears, feeling her shoulders start to quake with a barely controlled mix of feelings from grief to elation.

The plane would soon land on remote Chukotka Peninsula, and she would set foot in the tiny Arctic capital of Anadyr—for the first time since her departure as an orphan, aged four, so many years earlier.

After a lifetime of parties, news feeds, hangovers, blackouts, and the whole blur—she was now an anonymous traveler, a middle aged woman, still stunningly beautiful, but mature and graying, with reading glasses and deceptively calm eyes.

She was approaching the edge of the world, and a return to her beginnings. This was the right thing to do—the right place to go.

Overwhelmed, and fearing a thorough, wracking cry, she hurried along the Ilyushin Il-62 passenger jet’s crowded aisle to wash her face at the W.C. sink. After so many hours of travel, it would be refreshing—even if it overwhelmed, at last, any further resistance to a long built-up sense of profound helplessness and loss. She consoled herself by thinking: I have three such good sons. What did I do to deserve them? She’d been pretty much a lousy mother. Under the all-seeing eye of their grandmother, and fabulous family wealth, the boys had raised themselves and were now successful men. No suicides, no depression. They were strong men, who sometimes seemed almost like father figures to their wayward, yet beloved mother. But was I a good daughter? Marianne thought as the first sobs began to pound like sledge hammers inside her diaphragm, breaking out into air and light. If she could be done being a daughter, maybe she could fully function as a mother, what was left of her time and that mission. What had her sons’ grand-mère, her adoptive mother, said with a knowing grin while chain smoking in the garden in Provençe? “Look at me. If nothing else, you can become a good grandmother one day.” The old woman, born with the new century, and now in her 90s, had lived a profligate youth herself, and her outcome had been no children and a suicidal husband. But not before they had traveled to Siberia and adopted a little four year old Caucasian girl who would mother three sons and keep the family line going stronger than ever. Am I a player, or just a passer-through? Marianne asked herself on the way to the loo. It was a question she’d asked a thousand times since the fatal accident at the Red Bull air races in Barcelona, years ago, that had claimed her young playboy husband, Count Didier. She had been snatched from the Arctic grave of her mother, and she had redeemed herself by being a mothering bed of three male heirs, but she was still a half-formed soul in need of the finished shaping. Now she was close to the end of her journey. Just a few more days, and she could at last become a complete person. Fire in the forge, sparks and dross flying away while hammers banged the glowing steel—so the steel mill, so Marianne’s heart.

The engines’ thunder and whining almost made a symphony. A chorale seemed to sing amid the rushing wind, but it was an illusion of memory and expectation. There was no Bolshoi hidden in the air conditioning ducts or in the cargo caverns—only heartless Siberian air, full of Arctic ghosts, spattered by brutal Russian engines at 10,000 feet that courageously met power with power.

At age 46, Anechka looked like what she was—a well-heeled Westerner—in her yellowish hiking boots, slender-figured tight jeans, purple sweater over travel-sweaty camisole. She might look like one of the new Russians as well. The new Russia—the Soviet Union had just been dissolved—was filled with adventurers. Most were shady, some downright deadly. Marianne was not one of these. She was acutely aware of looking different—yet in her heart, she knew she belonged here more than anywhere else on earth. It was her birth place. She was coming home to her mother, the soil, and in the soil. And yet she could stay. Mama would understand. A tear rolled down one cheek.

Her light but bulky military-style parka with faux-fur collar was jammed into the luggage compartment over her seat, along with the white, ceramic jar of ashes that was half her reason for making this journey.

The other half of her reason lay enurned in her heart, which she touched with her fist as she sidled down the aisle—a woman on a mission.