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Page 4.
Jump Ahead: Police Station in Anadyr
 ‘Why do you make this trip alone, a woman who barely understands Russian?’
So asks the pretty young police woman—a Sergeant Lena Varov—in Anadyr police station, after Marianne arrives and presents her papers—she also needs a trustworthy local guide.
‘Are you not afraid?’
‘Not any longer,’ Marianne replies, standing before the duty desk while the young sergeant’s brother and cousin, both constables, look on while smoking harsh cigarettes. They have silently violent eyes.
Jump Back: Aircraft over Siberia
On board the plane, Marianne felt her own foreignness, high over the soil of her birthplace, as she tiptoed down the rubber-matted aisle, past smiling and nodding Aeroflot stewardesses, toward the little lighted W.C. sign. She was French, but her natural father had been a U.S. Navy officer and spy during World War II, and her mother had been one of the three important women in his life at the time. Marianne spoke perfect English. Some called her the American.
Long ago, on the soil below where she had come into the world amid Arctic darkness and Stalin’s personal vendetta, her mother had called her by a Russian endearment—Umnitsa—good or clever girl. It had taken her half a century, but now she had proven it to be a true name for herself. She had only one thing left to prove it absolutely and totally forever. That meant taking the ashes to a grave that lay on the edge of the Siberian Sea.
Jump Ahead: Police Station in Anadyr
‘I’m no longer afraid,’ Marianne says of personal matters beyond the girl’s understanding.
‘I am not either,’ Lenka says, meaning something very different from her own small world here in the vastness at the world’s edge. ‘My name is Elena—you can call me Lenka. Everyone does in this little town, where everyone knows everyone else. At least until foreigners and bizenis men showed up, now that Communism is finished. Now this is the murder capital of Chukotka Peninsula.’
Marianne clings to the jar of ashes and offers a reassuring smile. “I have nothing to worry about, since I am with the police.’
Lenka’s look darkens, but she says nothing. Her cousin and brother exchange startled looks, as if they are culprits who have been found out. Marianne has no doubt they smoke an occasional marijuana cigarette on duty—she smelled it on her way into the station. Suspicious smoke wafted around the building’s corner from in back.
‘Are you the police chief as well?’ Marianne asks flippantly. She admires this businesslike young woman who clearly runs the show here.
Lenka looks directly and frankly into Marianne’s eyes. She gives her a surprised or surprising look. It is like sunshine flashing in baby-blue glass. ‘The police commissioner was murdered in a drug deal last year—two streets away in broad daylight. Big shootout with bizenis men from Vladivostok. Nobody wants to be police chief here anymore.’
Marianne wonders if it had been a drug bust or a drug deal. She doesn’t dare to ask.
Jump Back: Aircraft over Siberia
In the W.C., Marianne examined her straight hair, chopped to a page boy style. She had not been caring for it much. Her coiffure was losing its rinsed color amid her new Diogenes penitence and search for light. Her hair, though turning gray, was still thick, and parted in the center—all she needed was a tall, colorful Sami cap to look like an aging hippie queen of an earlier generation. Her face had lost its unflinching addiction to flashbulb lights, and now looked plain and pretty and almost serene. Her warm but concerned gray-blue eyes only betrayed that she had miles to go before she slept. Hidden in her carry-on, in the luggage rack above her seat, was the ceramic jar of ashes she was bringing home.
Jump Ahead: Police Station in Anadyr
‘You bring ashes to put on beach, is that right?’
‘Not on the beach, exactly. My mother’s grave is on a small, old cemetery near the sand bar.’
‘And you are American?’
‘No—yes—French, but my father was American.’
‘Then you are American,’ Lenka says authoritatively while checking over Marianne’s paperwork at the desk in the small police station. Things are simple in Lenka’s small world.
Marianne says: ‘I am Chukot, because I was born here.’
The pretty young blonde looks up with bright blue eyes under a ledge of rebellious blonde hair pinned with combs. Lenka’s uniform cap lies on the desk near the police radio and a duty roster. She has a little pink plastic flower on one of her combs, high up on the line of her part—no coloring or rinse there, Marianne notes—it’s the girl’s natural hair color. She is still so young. Her skin is pale and soft as snow, except for a natural rose-blush on her cheeks. Her cheeks are not broad, nor are her eyes almond-shaped—she could pass for a college student from Amsterdam or London or Kansas City, but she has never been beyond the Chukotka Peninsula—the only part of the Russian Federation in the Western Hemisphere, a few hours’ flight across the Aleutians to Alaska (though Marianne’s tortuous path has taken her the long way, from the west, via Paris and Moscow). ‘I am Slav,’ Lenka says defiantly, ‘from Latvia—okay, it’s two generations ago.’ She does not want to be thought of as Asian, though she is.
Marianne takes her turn to ask a question. ‘Why were your grandparents sent here?’
Lenka quickly retraces the limits of her schooling—there too, she has never been much beyond the Anadyr Estuary: ‘Something happened in World War II. Stalin and the Five Year Plans—the reforms and all—you know.’
‘Yes, I know all too well.’ Marianne looks at this small, thin girl, in her uniform, with gun and cuffs and spray, who is young enough to be her daughter, and half a foot
Lenka looks up from Marianne’s paperwork, and slides it across the desk to its owner. ‘So, you will take ashes to cemetery.’ It is a question.
‘Yes, and I need someone to guide me there. I will pay.’
‘I can guide you,’ Lenka says. ‘You pay one hundred U.S. dollars.’
‘Yes,’ Marianne says quickly, surprised that the policewoman asks so little.
‘No, Lenka,’ object the two young constables who are her relatives.
‘We don’t have time this morning,’ says her brother Anatoly.
‘You forget our bizenis,’ says her cousin Mikhail.
‘We have time for both,’ Lenka tells them sharply, and that ends the discussion. No wonder she is the sergeant and they are constables. Marianne wonders what their business deal might be. She gets a dark feeling. Her dark feelings have never been wrong.
Jump Back: Aircraft over Siberia
The arc of Marianne's journey to Siberia was near its end. Events of today had been set in motion lifetimes ago. An arrow shot into the air in Stalin’s age was about to hit the ground in Yeltsin’s age. Marianne touched her cheeks with probing fingertips. She herself was that arrow. The ground was the soil of her birth—Mother Russia. She was returning to her mother, and bringing her father back to the woman who had never stopped loving him—nor had he ever stopped loving her—though he was married to two women in fact if not on paper.
Love, like Mother Russia, was larger than any human life—vast, and unfathomable. Love and war were the mother and father of gods and goddesses. Human mythologies since the Ice Ages had endlessly repeated this epic marriage song, the most primitive and powerful of all cosmic ideations that propelled the warriors of Sumer and Troy, of Rome and the World Wars. It was true then, and it was true now. Marianne, world traveler and seeker, had heard their siren songs over the horizons of the earth and the seas. The truth spoke to her soul, and told her she was nearly finished with her journey. Soon, the arrow would rest. She would be free. The whales and sirens of the sea would sing on, long after she too lay with her mother and father, until the very end of time. To have lived was glorious, if it meant to have heard the song of the universe and its deities.
Just as there were reasons for how and why she had been born, and lived her life, and circled the globe in search of her long-lost father, now there was a reason why she had returned to the womb of Siberia, and in fact to this small, cold refuge high above the clouds, so near the stars. It began with a violent shaking of her shoulder blades, as if someone were beating her. It was totally out of control. She clung to the sink with both white-knuckled hands as deep, racking sobs rose from her guts like whales breaching the frizzy, icy Bering Sea surface. It was a crying that had waited, like a white wolf among pine trees, to race forth and devour her with its ripping teeth. Sheltered by a Soviet-era door with torn placards, she cried loudly and uncontrollably. She heard the sound of herself, which was like a wounded forest animal dying in agony. All those glittering media eyes, flashbulb smiles, topless Monagasque sun tans, paparazzo Vespa rides, white whirling gowns at Paris or London balls, and a tiny girl in a torn dress, holding her beautiful but dying young mother’s hand as they gazed together across the frigid, wind-ripped sea toward America under the Milky Way…now it all crashed down in a cacophany of truth. The chorale in the air conditioning ducts howled around her, while a concerned attendant banged on the door and yelled Is something wrong in there?
Jump Ahead: Police Station in Anadyr
‘You have no fear?’ Lenka asks as she signals to her brother Anatoly, and tosses the keys to the squad car to her cousin Mikhail.
Marianne shakes her head. ‘Do you?’ she asks in an ironic tone.
Lenka shrugs. ‘We live life as everyone must—whatever is handed to a person.’ She picks up her cap and a padded uniform coat with stuffing leaking from frayed edges. The four tromp across the wooden floor, out onto a plank porch, and down worn concrete stairs onto a gravel street.
Lenka, even under her gray-blue fatigue cap, is the smallest of the four, while Marianne next taller. Anatoly and Mikhail stand just under six feet. The two men carry the wide saucer caps common to Russian uniforms, ready to throw them unworn into the back of the police car. Mikhail has blond hair like his sister, and blue eyes, but a scarred and beard-stubbled face with uneven teeth, one of which is broken and brown. Anatoly has longish brown hair that curls over his dirty gray-blue uniform collar.
Both young men wear black clip-on neckties, but Mikhail displays a fine golden cross in the Orthodox manner, with one straight and one skewed lateral bar, which lies on the knot of his tie from a fine chain. ‘Given by my mother,’ he explains fervently in response to Marianne’s praise for its beauty. Everything about these Siberians, Marianne thinks, is fervent and secretive. They seem intense and pent up. They are the police, and she has no reason not to trust them, but she has an uneasy feeling.
The air is cold, with a chill wind that keens in the barren hills.
Anadyr seems typical of small, barren settlements along both polar circles around the globe. Along its harbor lies a collection of rusting, capsized steel deep sea fishing trawlers. A few modern ships come or go with silent purpose on the flat, silvery waters of the Anadyr Estuary. Multi-colored Soviet era housing blocks stand shoulder to shoulder in the downtown area. Everything quickly recedes on all sides into frozen waste and drab hills before there is a chance for flowers or urbanity to crop up.
Jump Back: Aircraft over Siberia
After the longest, hardest cry of her life, the still very youthful widow Marianne washed her face slowly, looking into the W.C. mirror on the jet passenger plane. She felt numb, yet hopeful, even painfully reborn. It was a relief to have quaked with sobbing and tears, to have closed the curtains on her past life, to be ready for a new start, to feel drained and newly born.
Hearing din-din-din warning signals that the plane was about to start descending for its landing at Anadyr, Marianne took one last look in the bathroom mirror. She was beyond the question why.
Opening the door, she made her way forward to her seat. She heard a routine speech rattled off by the male co-pilot as the plane angled sharply forward to its landing. Opening the door, she sidled back to her seat amid a carpet of yawning faces, fingers wiping eyes, mothers comforting squalling babies, men finishing a last cigarette in the smoke-thick air. In less than an hour, she expected to be on the ground with her luggage. She would drop it at the plain, modern hotel near the airport, and then head into town to see a certain Sergeant Lena Varov who had been looked up for her by someone at the Russian embassy in Paris. What could go wrong with a woman cop? Marianne would need a safe, armed local guard to help her find her mother’s grave on the 40 kilometer sand bar between the Anadyr Estuary and the Bering Sea. Who better than the police?
As the plane thundered down to a landing at Anadyr-Ugolny Airport, Marianne studied her maps and notes again. It was very difficult to obtain an accurate map of granular, precise detail for her destination. She would have to rely on this Sergeant Varov for local guidance. Marianne read that the flight distance between Anadyr and Nome, Alaska in the U.S. is 506 miles (815 km). By contrast, between Moscow and Anadyr lies 3,861 miles (6,214 km). The Bering Sea is a marginal body of water of the Northern Pacific Ocean. The Russian-U.S. border is a little over 300 miles east of Anadyr in the Bering Sea.
Stalin had chosen cleverly—Anadyr, administrative capital of Chukotka Autonomous Okrug (Region), the baited trap for Tim Nordhall, with Anna and Anechka Timofeyeva as the cheese. But not too cleverly, because the trap had never been sprung.
Jump Ahead: Police Station in Anadyr
Marianne waits in the police station of Anadyr, wearing slim-legged jeans and bulky parka. She has graying, page-boy cropped hair, a long handsome face, and gray-blue eyes. If there is anything at all Slavic about her face, it is the slightly almond-shaped eyes and broad cheekbones she inherited from her mother. It is a subtle Asian effect, seen in many Western Europeans, a result of millennia of invasions from the East.
By her choice, Marianne has finally put the paparazzi behind her and can blend anonymously among the people of the world in her travels. She holds the ceramic jar of ashes on one arm like a baby.
The three Anadyr police wait as Lenka must organize things before the ride to the sand bar and cemetery at the mouth of Anadyr Estuary.
Slight and blonde, girlish yet authoritative, Lenka is a young woman who has taken charge when the world around her is falling apart. Lenka tosses the patrol car keys to her brother Anatoly and cousin Mikhail. Lenka makes a phone call while the two constables trudge outside to get the patrol car.
Lenka speaks by radio with the regional police dispatcher. Marianne sits on a hard wooden bench by a worn wooden window. Lenka has a sweet voice, like honey, but hard around the edges like dried sugar. The window is streaky, and has greenish paint spatters along its edges to match the socialist era wall décor. An electric samovar bubbles nearby. The room is filled with smells of tea and cigarette smoke, as well rotting wood imported decades ago to build this precinct station.
As Marianne watches through the window, she sees Anatoly and Mikhail outside—loading boxes into the back of a second police cruiser, this one a small Land Rover-type, parked behind a smaller Lada. Both vehicles are blue and white, with colored emergency light bars on top.
‘We go now,’ Lenka declares as she rebuckles her pistol belt. Putting her cap on over her blonde hair, she comes around the desk and wags her fingers in a hold-hands motion. Her tone is nurturing. She holds out a hand, as if Marianne were a child. ‘Come, Anna Maria Didier. We visit your mother.’
‘Thank you,’ Marianne says, rising, and grateful for Lenka’s warmth and humanity. She squeezes the girl’s hand briefly, but does not hold it. She is afraid.
Jump Back: Aircraft over Siberia
As the plane landed, Marianne thought about all that she had read about her birth place. Though she had not been back here in forty years, since early childhood, it seemed familiar. There was the great Anadyr Bay in the Bering Sea, and east of it the large Anadyr Estuary. On the southern shore, a peninsula jutted north, almost cutting off the outer bay from the Anadyr River that flowed from west to east into an inner bay. At the tip of the peninsula, which separated the inner and outer bays, was the administrative capital of Russia’s largest autonomous okrug or administrative region—Anadyr, population about 13,000—a relative metropolis in this vast Arctic emptiness dotted mostly by remote little aboriginal villages. She had arrived at the place where her journey had begun. She'd been a tiny little girl, holding her dear mother's hand, the young loving mother who looked down at her four year old and called her umnitsa, a clever and precious girl. Mother had died soon after of some horrid, unusual cancer, but Marianne treasured moments like that forever.
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