Julia Phillips - Disappearing Earth

From the festival crowd, the craftsmen invited a boy onto the stage to participate. They draped a hide over his knees and showed him, and the crowd, a stone set into a wooden bow. When the boy scraped the bow across the leather once, the stone fell out of its wooden socket to the boards. In the audience, those paying attention laughed.

An artisan replaced the boy in his seat and guided the tool in long strokes. Marina’s heart was more or less steady. She did not see the reporter, but he was somewhere out there. Who else would she bump into here? She saw the black humps of cameras all around her—more journalists? Strangers who might recognize her from a months-old city broadcast? This was precisely why she ought to avoid busy places. When she got back to Petropavlovsk, she had to tell her editor: no more public events. No matter where she went now, people, consciously or not, were drawn toward her tragedy. They responded to some call she was still emanating; they felt compelled to approach.

The sun was lost behind clouds. The air around them was heavy. Eva squeezed Marina’s shoulder and pointed out a log bench on the right side of the stage. The three of them shuffled over to take those seats.

Alla Innokentevna called for a volunteer from the crowd for a game. She handed a lasso to a Russian woman who came forward to play, while a dancer onstage leaned on a pole with a deer skull tethered to it. At a sign, the dancer rocked that pole to make the smooth bone spin. The skull swung around him like a moon around a planet. The goal of the game was to snare the skull in motion. The white woman took aim, clumsy with the rope, and Marina stared away at the forest.

The music thumped through her brain. Marina could tell from the hoots in the crowd that the woman was missing her mark over and over again. “Are you three enjoying yourselves?” someone said.

Marina looked up. Alla Innokentevna, in her holiday tunic, looked down. The other organizers had taken charge of the stage and were calling for a second volunteer. Up close, Alla Innokentevna’s outfit showed the tracks of traditional craft. A stone rubbed over leather. “Yes,” Marina said.

“So many people came out this year, despite the weather,” said Eva.

“The weather doesn’t matter. We’re not here to sunbathe, but to celebrate our history.”

Marina straightened her back. “You’re all doing an excellent job. It seems like everyone’s having fun.”

“Are you?” said Alla Innokentevna.

“I’m a little tired,” said Marina. The crowd mocked someone’s latest failure to lasso the skull.

“We haven’t had lunch yet,” said Eva. Petya stood.

“Going for food?” Alla Innokentevna asked him. “Walk around the back of the stage. Fewer people there.” The organizer sat in the spot Petya vacated.

The bench was low to the ground, forcing their knees up. Marina wrapped her arms around her shins. The three women watched in silence as the dancer slowed the momentum of the swinging skull then reversed its direction, prompting cheers.

Marina sat back a little to get a good look at Alla Innokentevna in her old-fashioned clothes. A serious face, framed by shaggy gray hair. Earrings shone silver underneath. This campground was built to emulate an Even settlement, and Alla Innokentevna, who managed it, must be Even, too, Marina decided. Though Marina couldn’t tell northern people apart. Even or Chukchi or Koryak or Aleut. Her grandparents used to speak fondly about how the peninsula’s natives had been pushed together, Sovietized, with their lands turned public, the adults redistributed into working collectives and the children taught Marxist-Leninist ideology in state boarding schools.

Alla Innokentevna turned from the stage to face Marina. Marina looked away.

“I heard about your girls,” Alla Innokentevna said. “Eva told me. My oldest daughter told me, too, months ago. She lives in the city. She followed your news at first.”

The organizer’s voice was low. Marina concentrated on her own inhalations.

“How did the police treat you?” Alla Innokentevna asked. Marina shrugged. “They were fine? They kept looking for a while?”

Eva must not have mentioned the case was cold. “They’re always looking,” Marina said.

Alla Innokentevna grimaced. “How nice.”

They sat under the roars of the crowd.

“Eva told you my girl is missing, too.”

“Right,” Marina said. “Your teenager.”

The organizer looked over Marina’s head. Her face was drawn. “Not a teenager anymore. Lilia was eighteen when she disappeared, but that was four years ago.”

“Eva said she ran away.”

“That’s what the village police told us.” Alla Innokentevna met Marina’s eyes again. “The police say many things, don’t they? To stop citizens from pestering them.”

Marina did not want to talk about this. As if she and Alla Innokentevna had had the same conversations with the police.

“I have a question for you,” Alla Innokentevna said. “About the authorities in Petropavlovsk. I heard they were very aggressive. They searched for months. And they came up with many theories, organized searches, interviewed people. Is that the case?”

“Many theories. They did. Yes.”

“Are you satisfied?”

“Oh,” Marina said. Cheers and hoots sounded around them. “I’m outrageously happy.”

After a moment, the organizer smiled. The corners of her eyes did not crease. “Aren’t we all,” she said. “Then I have a second question. A request.”

Wherever Marina went, people tried in this way to consume her.

Alla Innokentevna took a breath and dipped her face down, setting her earrings swinging. “Tell me, how did you influence them to stay so active? You paid them.”

“No,” Marina said.

“You must have paid them, I think,” Alla Innokentevna said. “Otherwise what reason would they have to continue? I understand, believe me. Who did you contact there? How much did you give?”

Everyone’s lurid questions. Their suppositions. Every conversation Marina had had over the past year was long, unbearable, one after the next in a rhythm as steady as dirt shoveled into a hole.

“I called the ministry in Petropavlovsk,” Alla Innokentevna said. “After it happened, I went to the city police station in person. They didn’t listen to me. But they listen to you. Don’t you have their ear?”

Marina pressed on her chest. If there were a price for the discovery of a missing person, she would have paid it to the authorities in August, ten times over. “You’re wrong,” she said. “The police do what they will without me.”

“I am asking you as a mother.”

“Asking what? Alla Innokentevna, I can’t help.”

“Simply tell me how.” Alla Innokentevna was close. She smelled of shampoo, lotion, ash from the morning’s fire. Suffocating. “And I could do something for you, if you like. We have, for example, poachers up here to write about. There are stories I could show you exclusively.”

Marina shook her head. “I don’t do those kinds of stories anymore.”

“No? You can ask me anything.”

Eva, hands around her mouth, shouted encouragement toward the stage. The skull on the pole circled endlessly. Anything, the organizer said. What answers could Alla Innokentevna have for her? Marina might ask what it was like to see your child turn thirteen, or fifteen, or graduate from high school. How it felt to know, and not just suspect, that if you had been a better parent, more attentive, more responsible, then your baby would not be gone today. How to go on.

Anything? Marina would take a piece of nonsense for her editor to slot into the arts section. She focused on the warm spot of her fist over her breastbone. “Tell me,” she said, “what inspired you to establish the cultural center?”