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Page 12.

Marianne, now alone, trudged on. She came to the rise and stopped.

Behind her, she heard the distant slam of car doors. She saw the police cruiser do a fast U-turn and wheel away in a cloud of dust on a high, dry portion of the gravel road. They were headed back in the direction of Ugolny.

Consumed with her mission, Marianne put it out of her thoughts. Stumbling on the uneven ground, she fell twice. Her palms were rough and painful from gravel burns. The skin in her palms looked red from both the scrapes and the cold.

The stone was not hard to find. It was larger, cleaner, and more recent than most of the others. Some were old and cracked, with cyrillic lettering dating to the early explorers of the 1800s. She found the gravestone of her mother lying on its side near the top of the rise, not far from the shrine and the Orthodox cross.

If the embassy man had heard the stone was fresh and new, he did not realize that half a century of hard weather lay between the age of Stalin and that of Yeltsin. The stone was unbroken—the only one intact, that she saw—but it was a sour shade of smoky gray, streaked with salt and pitted with efflorescence. It was covered with a patina of mosses and lichens in green, white, and rust-reddish. But her dear, sweet name was clearly visible, etched in moss, in the Latin alphabet.

Some fresh flowers, wrapped in cellophane from the airport gift shop, lay beside the stone. Someone had come here, very recently—maybe this morning or yesterday—and brought the flowers. They’d left the flowers in a crack between the stone and the gravel under it, pinning the flowers down with a few small stones to prevent wind from savaging them prematurely. Everything here would quickly weather and blow away, that much was clear. The flowers were expensive carnations, flown in from some warmer place on earth along the Siberian air routes, maybe even from Alaska—or, she speculated, from Seattle. Right now, it didn’t matter.

It was herself, her lost childhood, that she had come to redeem.

Marianne threw herself on the cold stone, sobbing, and lost herself in time. She cried hard, more so than even the massive cry she’d had in the airplane’s toilet. If her shoulder blades ached after that, they would be in pain after this. It was like a violent, out of control beating.

She was blind with grief and longing for the lost, long ago past. She should have had a mother and a father, and yet both were torn from her. Now her decades of numbness, the crazy drinking and partying, were torn from her soul in turn, leaving the fresh wounds of the late 1940s. Just past toddlerdom, she’d had no choice or understanding, no guilt or control, in matters so long ago. She could not say far away, because it was right here. She had come back to the focus and the epicenter of her life’s childhood crash and burn.

Still sobbing, she rose after a long time.

Why had she not thought to bring a little shovel or a pick? She cried anew at the stubborn Siberian resistance to any slightest comfort or reason. How could she force his ashes into the frozen ground? She clawed at it until her nails broke and the skin around her fingertips hung in shreds. The scrapes in her palms hurt worse than ever. Now they actually bled. She took a sharp rock the size of a melon and beat the ground, trying to break it. She sobbed, she groaned, she cursed, she implored. She spoke soothingly, beseeching her mother. Oh please, dear mama. Just this little favor for me. I came so far to see you and bring him here for you, for both of you to be together. Okay, to make me happy too. Is that so much to ask.

“Go to hell!” she screamed hoarsely at the harsh sky overhead.

Only a few screeching gulls mocked her as they circled looking for a fish kill, or maybe a poor crab scuttling among the lichen-blotted rocks and pocked ice sheets like window shards. The tide was low, and a smell of cold rotting kelp made the very air unattractive.

She stood and contemplated the satchel. Taking the urn from it, she threw the satchel away. It landed out of sight somewhere on the far side of the cemetery rise.

She had come to redeem her soul and her lost childhood. Sniffling, but dry of tears, she unscrewed the lid of the urn. It was surprisingly light. The ashes inside were thick and flaky, the color of the sky above.

For a moment, she thought of dumping them. The wind would blow them away, but then did it not blow everything away? But not the spirit of the dead woman who lay here, a young life snuffed out so cruelly. Regarding the logic of the flowers, she just dribbled a few ashes into cracks in the ground. She screwed the lid back on, and laid the urn carefully alongside the grave stone. On second thought, she laid it down on the other side, away from the flowers. This was her moment, not his. He had no doubt already cried over her, if he had tears for such things. She used her wounded hands to painfully scrape enough gravel close to almost cover the urn. The local people, if any came here, were spirit worshipers, animists, who would not disturb a place like this out of fear for their own souls. The urn might lie here a year, a century, a thousand years—however long it took for the sun, and the air, and the water, and the earth to grind everything down to dust and return it to the drifting galactic fog of eternity among the stars.