Lost Believers: A Novel

PART I

ЧАСТЬ I

CHAPTER 1

Г∧ава 1

Agafia was walking along the rows of susurrating wheat and potato stalks when the valley exhaled a peal of thunder. Booming in the near distance, it brought to mind the rumbling rains that had put out the most recent grass fire. She pushed a finger into the soil to feel for moisture and squinted at the incongruously clear skies.

It had been a hard winter and the spring had brought wildfires and unpredictable weather. Summer had rolled in slowly. A sheet of thin wispy cloud had blocked out the long gray season before itself dissolving into blue skies. Work came easy when the sun shone the family’s way, without the heavy blanket of snow to burden their movements. They had spent those early warm days rushing around the homestead, every atom in their bodies sped up by the thawing air. What they accomplished early—the planting, the cleaning, the preparations—would determine the whole year ahead, and the weeks had filled with organized chaos.

Dima had chopped wood, Hugo and Natalia had hacked at the still-cold ground to prepare it for planting, and Agafia had walked the dug rows inserting seeds into the dirt one by one. She was the one they trusted to make things grow, to eke out something from the unwilling ground. Sometimes Agafia had become distracted, her concentration blurred by the emerging greenness just beyond the field. It’s that when the seasons changed, her feet and fingers extended beyond her gloves and shoes, unfurling like ostrich fern fiddleheads. Her siblings also changed, turned their broad faces to the sun to warm like smooth river stones and tucked wisps of hair behind their ears to open them to the sound of rushing water. Natalia wasn’t prone to let Agafia dream long—she had shoved her in the side, urging her progress. Agafia had resumed her rounds, murmuring to each seedling under her breath as she covered it with soil. She hadn’t been sure the seeds were still good.

But sprouts had pushed up in green lines and Agafia had crossed herself, her pointer and middle fingers extending out to touch her forehead, just above her belly, then one shoulder and the other. Amen. Here they were with a garden in full bloom, their fortunes tenuously reversed.

The thunder worried her.

The helicopter was a hulking metal box painted olive green and stripped inside except for two seats and instrumentation. Its lumpy chairs gave off a mild animal smell, unwashed camel hair or squirrel fur. The mission was classified as highly important, and Galina, its leader, had no trouble convincing the military to hand over the helicopter for the entire summer. She told the general that the work would ultimately benefit him anyway. The general hadn’t argued, just signed over the machine, like he didn’t think it capable of flying far anyway.

Find your own pilot, he told her.

Blue eyes pinched into slits of concentration, her pilot maneuvered out of the valley. Snow still sat in the shadowy crevices of the north-facing slopes. White strips of it on the dark rock transformed the mountain face into a zebra haunch. She almost expected the noise from the helicopter to scare the animal, for the giant mountain equid to take off running below her. Instead, a freakish stillness. The helicopter’s sharp blades cut through the valley’s silence, each rotation slicing the air into ribbons.

The pilot steered to an opening where the land stepped up from the water more gently, and scanned for breaks in the birch and cypress. On the horizon, the river meandered toward flatter land, the stream splitting around pebbled banks and reuniting in wide stretches etched with rapids. Galina clicked a small Zenit camera pressed against the helicopter’s window glass. She squinted at the ground, looking for outcrops visible from the air and signs of faults. She creased her brows, progressed the film, and refocused the lens on the ground below.

Should we look for a landing pad? the pilot asked. He looked like he belonged in the navy. He wore Breton stripes and a silk scarf tied jauntily around his neck. He jabbed a thick finger at the radio buttons and Galina adjusted her headphones.

She pointed to flatter land, to note it, but said, Not yet.

The pilot drew on the stick, sending them forward. Galina lofted the camera to the glass and scanned the horizon with the lens out of focus. In the viewfinder, the river and forest dissolved into painterly splotches. She picked up the intercom but didn’t say anything.

The pilot started to draw a grid with the helicopter, running long lines north-south, each lap ticking its way east. The magnetometer trailed behind the helicopter, pinging. The machine penetrated till and forest to measure the magnetic field below them, uncovering the blob of metal ore hiding in plain sight.

Moscow probably vibrated with unbearable heat by now, but here the valley’s tendershoot vermilion signaled the early start of summer. That morning she’d loaded black-and-white film into the Zenit, to capture the contrasts in terrain, simplify the aerial maps to their basic hues. But in her mind, she recorded the oversaturated colors. Remember it, she told herself. Remember it.

In her hands, the lens bumped the window, glass clinking glass.

Used to be, when Agafia worked or strolled or slipped into bed at nighttime her mind raced, tripping over itself. Now, unless she made herself sit and think about something, her mind settled into a cool still lake, unmoving. As she toiled in the garden, this lake stretched in front of her for miles, a well of serenity and boredom. She was thinking about how she didn’t think about much anymore when the thunder interrupted her thoughts. It came from the mountains.

The men were gone somewhere, but her sister worked by her side. Natalia tugged at weeds in the potato bed, pulling them out one by one. In the summer the family worked so much that there wasn’t as much time for prayer, and Natalia used each uprooted weed as a notch on her lestovka, counting off recitations as she cleared the beds.

Don’t you hear that?

Natalia had a way of shutting out the world.

Agafia sat down on the ground and gazed toward the noise.

It’s like the rain is running toward us.

Natalia rarely said much, but she stopped weeding and looked in the same direction as Agafia. They watched a dark speck emerge in the valley. A small object approached from a distance, carrying a large noise.

It’s for our sins, Agafia told her sister. They trained their eyes on the horizon, following the object as it receded then returned, like a fly, back and forth, its hum expanding and contracting in the air.

We were so lazy this winter! Agafia said, panicked. I barely moved from my cot.

Natalia hushed her. Let’s go inside, she said.

The sisters crept through the greenery, keeping to shadows until they reached their house. The one-room hut stood in a small clearing, watching like a sentry over the river, the garden, the mountains and forest. Inside, an audience of four beds stood around a masonry stove. A nest of blankets lay on the stove, the prized sleeping place in winter. In every corner clutter climbed toward the eaves except the east-facing side, where icons and a large metal cross, all eight points dulled by age and groping fingers, occupied a clean three-legged table. A shelf wedged into the log walls protruded at waist level. Agafia retrieved a prayer book from the shelf and the sisters squeezed in front of their makeshift sanctorium. Natalia started. O Angel of God, my holy guardian, preserve my life in the fear of Christ our God. Her voice spilled from her mouth, a vomit of noise, a barely controlled scream. Agafia joined in. Glory: now and ever.

Inside the hut, the women’s prayers shape-shifted like swallows’ murmurations. Prayer a physical presence, growing and shrinking and changing form as its keepers ululated and hummed. There was the blocky Russian stove, the small mantel of books, the birch boxes, and there was their prayer. It took up more room than the furnishings.

Galina was the boss of the whole operation. She signed off on the budget, on the summer camp preparations, on the employee roster, on the canisters of helicopter fuel and boxes of canned meat stacked in neat rows at camp. On the 5 a.m. wakeup call. She stalked the rows of tents in the morning fog with a flyswatter, hitting each tent wall twice to rouse the team. From inside, the men—and all five were men—would plead with her.

Galockha, two more minutes, sweetheart.

It was her first time truly in charge, leading a team surveying the land for a new iron mine. She’d run two field seasons, the first to examine a large area and make rough maps of the deposit, the second to gather rock samples and figure out where, exactly, a mine should be located. She had not asked for these responsibilities and assumed them reluctantly. She wanted to be woken, to be told what to do, for someone else to give the journalists quotes and count the canned meat portions. To be a piece of a solution, not its architect.

The helicopter turned around to run another line on the grid, still no flat, stable land in sight for the machine to land. She considered clicking on the headset and issuing an order for the pilot to return to camp, but instead she sat back. If she didn’t say anything, maybe he’d run the grid back and forth and back and forth until they ran out of fuel.

Galina imagined the helicopter a Trojan horse soaring over the mountains, and she Odysseus, preparing to unleash destruction on the kingdom below. Tasked with evaluating the iron deposits, she’d be the one to order the charging of the rock. Drill rigs and front loaders groaning, the mountains would submit like the Trojans. She pressed the button on the transmitter.

You ever feel bad telling them where to dig? she asked the pilot.

It’s not God’s work, is it? his voice crackled back.

They veered off the grid, toward a mirage of flatness.

Galina had decided to study geology after her mother took her to the Orlov Paleontological Museum. She was young, and for nearly a decade her father held to the hope she’d change her mind and enter the university’s economics department, like he had, so she could eventually work on some government planning committee, like him. He revered geologists for making progress possible, but he despised their bohemian bent. They had a reputation for beards, liberal politics, and drinking, and he didn’t want his daughter in their milieu. But when Moscow State University sent her an acceptance letter in the mail, she rode the metro to campus the same day and filled out the paperwork in the run-down geology building. Her first act of rebellion.

Classes started soon after. She left the house at sunrise and didn’t return until dinnertime.

She made friends whose parents didn’t work for the state and got a whole new education. Everybody she met understood more about the world than she did. When she ate with her parents in the evening she stayed quiet, as she’d been taught, while they discussed politics. But inside she was a desert bloom, a vastness suddenly quenched and turned radiant.

An old lecturer with hair growing out of his nose and a jewel thief’s air led the introductory class. He dimmed the lights and clicked through colorful slides of kaleidoscopic minerals. Garnet, calcite, pyrite, hematite. Oolitic limestone. Tennantite. He laid out small white boxes, nests full of rocks, for the class to identify. She’d scratch their surfaces with her teeth to test for grittiness, and drip acid to see if they’d reveal their properties. At night, lying in bed, she replayed the day’s slideshows in her head. Geology all wizardry and divination.

Her favorite class was stratigraphy, taught by a short woman with a squeaky voice. On field trips, the professor brought along the pointer she used in class and poked it at the striped road cuts. She teased out the rock’s history from the tan lines she found on its surface, painting old landscapes for the students on the sides of roadways. She found time tucked into thin black stone layers and led them through years of drought to desiccated river bottoms millennia old. A magic trick. The rock faces spoke along with the professor, and when she moved on they closed back up, a book slammed shut.

Galina took applied geology classes too, with patriotic guest speakers and field trips to big open-pit mines and terrifying underground ones. Galina liked to suit up, clipping the headlamp battery on a wide leather belt and wrapping a kerchief around her nose and mouth to keep out the dust. She’d heard that dissidents were forced to labor in the nation’s mines, and though her father denied the rumors—Not since Stalin’s death! he’d say, as if offended by the notion—she looked for them during mine visits. At a distance she spied men scratching ore into piles. She searched for their faces with her headlamp, catching skittish eyes and framing sweat-slicked brows in yellow light. Always a foreman made them turn away.

Galina obsessed over the mines. Civilizations, she knew, rose from rock. The newspapers printed mineral production figures that ran for pages, incomprehensible rows of numbers that in their sheer overwhelming quantity implied a steel-hardened future. The dust-covered men underground translated into rows of data, and that translated into tractors and bridges and munitions, and that was progress. Galina ran her finger along the rows of numbers, smearing ink, until the pages became greasy and unreadable.

The economic geology professor noticed her enthusiasm for the mines and began to groom her. On trips, she directed questions directly at Galina, pulling her to the front through the scrum of students as they examined gleaming veins of ore. On exams, she received an abundance of notes for her efforts. And when she finished the class, the teacher, a reserved woman so tall that she entered the mines folded low like a leggy heron, gave her an orange hard hat.

Make use of it, she had said, and slapped her on the back.

Before she’d even graduated she received a letter in the mail inviting her to work as a mine geologist for the state’s Moscow office. You’ll train under senior geologists on some of the biggest, most exciting projects in the Union, the letter read. We hope you’ll use your knowledge to divine the rocks, decipher what the raw landscape can offer to our people. The bureaucrat tasked with typing it grew, at times, poetic in his acknowledgment of the exciting opportunities that awaited the recipient of the form letter.

At dinner that evening, Galina had gushed to her parents about her news, taking the letter out of her purse and reading passages aloud. Her mother had placed a hand on her father’s arm.

Your father called an old friend in the geological division, she’d said. The man owed him a favor.

Her father had barely put down his fork, a speared cutlet midway to his mouth. He’d looked up at Galina and nodded, to accept her thanks, though she had stayed quiet.

It had been a good education. Years of work helped open mines across the vast Union, and aerial photographs of blasted horizons decorated her new office, each a medal for her labor. But since her promotion, since she’d come to Siberia, all she desired to do was walk, play hide-and-seek with outcrops of gunmetal-gray mountains, and sketch along riverbanks. Camera tightening noose-like around her neck, she snapped several photos in a row, to stitch into a fresh panorama.

Agafia’s ma, Nadia, had given birth four times. The first three came into the world in their old home, in a village where the smell of hay drifted on neighbors’ voices. When she first bent over with pain in the church, women carried her to the town’s wooden bath and brought stacks of towels and metal bowls to the banya. They boiled water on the banya’s heater and wiped her with warm cloths, heaping heavy mantles of prayer on her small, laboring body. The first birth broke her body in half, followed by her heart; the child died in her arms before she could memorize his face.

Before baptism. They buried him in the cemetery’s pagan section, alongside the old souls struck down by unholy deaths, those who had lived unholy lives, and Nadia’s brother, killed by a lightning strike. Whenever Nadia pondered the child, all she had to conjure him was the small, nameless wooden cross her husband erected over the creature’s body as she lay recovering.

The second came quick and painless. The boy emerged with lungfuls of air, wet and perfect and curious. She named him Dima and swaddled him in yards of white cloth, singing to him every waking hour of every day. Curls cupped a heart-shaped face and his alabaster skin glowed like the icons’ in the town church.

When Dima was five, she made Natalia. She slid out of Nadia without anyone’s assistance, independent from her mother the moment a neighbor pinched off the black-eyed girl’s umbilical cord. Nadia admired and feared her first daughter. The girl’s quiet stilled her surroundings and slowed time. If Nadia weren’t so sure of her offspring’s holiness, she might have thought her a devil instead. Natalia straddled that fine line.

Things were getting bad by then. Beardless men with rifles slung against their backs showed up regularly in the village demanding that the children go to schools outside the community and the adults to factories to work. Nadia and Hugo thumbed through their handwritten books, two-hundred-year-old tomes Nadia’s mother had given the couple on their wedding day, for guidance. These changes all around them, they concluded, were signs of the Antichrist’s nearing. To preserve their old ways, they’d have to go to the mountains, far from temptation and worldly sins.

Only then could they be saved.

The family didn’t wait long—their books described in great detail what happened to people who didn’t heed the call to flee. Hugo and Nadia packed what they could.

For generations, the Kols’ people had traded tales about a utopia, somewhere east, where people like them lived safe from the Antichrist. It was a place called Belovod’e, where the trees grew as tall and straight as their faith, the winter frosts were thick, and real priests, serving barefoot, still swept the ground with their robes. One hundred forty churches rose from Belovod’e’s fertile soil. Upon arrival, refugees underwent three baptisms in the river to wash away the impurities they had carried. Travelers from all over had searched for this refuge, but it had been hard to find. As the Kols prepared to flee, Nadia’s mother gave them a pamphlet she’d long kept in one of her books. It had directions, landmarks, distances, promising deliverance to Belovod’e. Maps with detailed topographical markers, town names, and friendly shelters along the way folded out of the leaflet.

Nadia’s family had always spoken about Belovod’e—White Waters—as if of heaven, a place as fantastical and as true. But the directions were a revelation. Why hadn’t they gone? Nadia’s mother couldn’t say. Nadia and Hugo traced the map’s faded lines east, calculating the journey’s toll. The names and landmarks rang vaguely familiar, though neither had ever gone far from their village. They set off on a gray morning in the summer of 1934, on foot, dragging along a cart packed with their belongings and their two living children.

Hugo lost count of their steps when he counted to eternity. They stopped when they reached a clearing by the river, a thick carpet of grass ringed with dense forest. In some ways it was as the brochure promised: they’d traveled a long, long time and found tall trees, clear water, the land free and rolling, no sign of the Antichrist. They prayed without hindrance. But no priests greeted them, no one welcomed them from their long journey. There was not a single person within screaming range. Hugo jabbed his pointer finger at the map, which had run out months ago.

A little farther, he said.

But Nadia shook her head, so they unpacked, without reaching Belovod’e. She slipped the leaflet back into a book. With no priest present, they didn’t dare call it baptism, but they entered the water reverently and dipped each other in the current, tired hands cupping their heads, floating, letting go of past lives and future ones. The frost here, Nadia thought, will indeed be thick.

Agafia was born there. Only five-year-old Natalia and Nadia’s own husband, Hugo, attended her in this last birthing. They hadn’t built a bathhouse, so she crouched on the tundra-grass mattress by the hut’s stove. Nadia thought she would die pushing life out in such empty vastness, staining the white winter with her labor pain. But Natalia placed a cool small hand on her mother’s forehead. The pain in Nadia’s belly melted away and Agafia’s tiny squawks joined the taiga chorus.

The newborn’s wail announced her to the wolves. Wildness must have seeped into Nadia, who pumped it through her umbilical cord and her thin blood to this second daughter. The girl internalized the feral world outside, half human, half mossy wood. Chest full of woodpecker thumps, pine knots in her calves. The others tolerated the taiga’s harshness and learned to ask it for forgiveness. To survive. But Agafia, having known nothing else, thrived in the secluded brutality of her home. In this way, Agafia stood apart from the rest of the family, building a home in a nook of Siberia far from any settlements.

Years had sped by since Nadia had passed away, but whenever Agafia prayed she still appeared by her side. Nadia had passed down her books to her daughter, the travel guide to Belovod’e still tucked like a bookmark between pages covered in Church Slavonic script. When Agafia was alone she studied it, imagining herself moving along the map’s twisted routes. If anyone else was around, she kept it hidden in the thick leather tomes, which contained their community’s history and their prayers, one bolstering the other.

You’ll memorize the prayers soon enough, Nadia had told her young daughter. And she had.

Agafia held on to these devotions as if to buoys, bobbing with them in the open waters of her isolation. They were company, compass, structure. They were a home, however cramped. In times of uncertainty, she felt the bigness of the books’ promises crash against the smallness of the world they contained, like great blocks of melting ice on a river eager to flow free.

The pilot turned on his headset and let it sputter before addressing Galina.

Look, he said, pointing below them. A jute rug, woven neat and tight and straight, lay below them.

What is it? she asked.

He hovered over the carved hole in the forest, waiting for it to reveal itself.

Are there any settlements in the area? he asked.

Galina had pored over the government maps at camp before they set out that morning. They detailed where oil and gas deposits might be, but the thorough geologists who drew them had marked just about everything else on the maps too. Mineral deposits, roads, railroads, rivers, villages. Down to the individual warming shacks hunters built atop the tundra to shelter them as they gathered ermine and fox furs. On the map for the section they were flying, nothingness reigned. It was as if they’d drawn the map in winter, and the drafter had transferred the unblemished whiteness of the plain onto his page.

Nothing, she said.

The pilot hovered, then looped around and approached from the other side.

Looks like a garden, he said.

That’s impossible.

Galina unscrewed the lens from the camera and switched to a longer one. The new lens swooped out of the helicopter into the immensity below. She clicked off several frames, wound, zoomed, clicked again.

Let’s go, she said.

Thundering, the machine bored through the landscape back to camp.

A bear couldn’t claw his way out of this valley, the pilot mused as they reentered