When Zoya was six years old my husband and I made up our minds to go to Siberia. "To see a bit of the, world!" as Anatoly Petrovich put it.
It was great fun for the children to ride to the station in a cart. And then, for the first time in their lives, they saw a locomotive…And, oh, how they pressed to the window to see the hamlets and villages flash past, the tiny herds on the meadows, the woods and the rivers, and, at last, the rolling, circling steppes…And, beneath the carriage floor, the ceaseless rumble of the wheels, a giddy song of travel and adventure.
Our journey took a whole week, and all this time Anatoly Petrovich and I had not a minute's respite from questions fired at us by the children: "What's that? What's that for? Why? What for?" One usually sleeps well on the road, but the children were so full of what they had seen and were seeing that it was impossible to make them lie down in the daytime. Towards the evening Shura grew fired and fell asleep, but Zoya could not be dragged away from the window. Only when the window was painted a deep blue by the night did our girl turn round to us.
"Nothing to see…just lights…" she said with a regretful sigh, and at last agreed to lie down. On the seventh day we arrived at the town of Kansk in the Yenisei Region. The one-storied houses of the little town were built of wood, and the pavements were also wooden. We took the children to the hotel and ourselves set off for the Department of Public Education to choose a village where we, Anatoly Petrovich and I, could teach at one school. They gave us an appointment to the village of Sitkino, and we decided to waste no time in setting out. With this decision we returned to our room in the hotel and found Shura playing alone with his bricks on the floor.
"Where is Zoya?"
"Zoya told me to sit here and said she'd go to the market to buy wax. They all chew wax here, she said." I gasped and flew out into the street. It was only a small town, a stone's throw from the forest—what if the girl had wandered off there?
At our wits' end, Anatoly Petrovich and I walked through street after street, looking into all the yards, questioning everyone we met. We searched the market place…Still no Zoya.
At last Anatoly Petrovich turned to me and said, "You'd better go to the hotel and wait for me there. And keep an eye on Shura. I will go to the militia."
I returned to the hotel, took my son in my arms and again went out into the street—it was more than I could do to wait in the room.
We stood there for half an hour, looking this way and that. Suddenly Shura shouted, "There's Daddy and Zoya!"
I rushed to meet them. Zoya's face was very red, and she looked awkward and a little scared. She was holding a dark chunk in her hand.
"There," she said in the kind of voice she might have used had we parted only five minutes ago. "This is wax. Only it doesn't taste nice."
It turned out that she actually had been to the market and had bought some wax, but had forgotten the road back to the hotel and did not know how to ask. She guessed wrong and wandered nearly as far as the forest. There a passer-by ("a big woman, in a shawl") took notice of her, grasped her by the hand and led her to the militia. It was there that Anatoly Petrovich had found her. Zoya was sitting at the table drinking tea like a guest and gravely answering questions: What was her name? where had she come from and with whom? what was her father's name? and her mother's? and her brother's? She had at once explained that she must return to her brother quickly because he was still a tiny tot.
"How could you leave Shura alone?" I asked reproachfully. "After all you are a big girl, you are older, we relied on you."
Zoya stood beside her father and looked with uplifted chin from one of us to the other: "I thought I'd be back at once. I thought I would find everything here right away, like in Aspen Woods. There's no need to be angry, I shan't do it again."
"Agreed," said Anatoly Petrovich, suppressing a smile. "I forgive you the first time, but don't ever go out without asking. You see how frightened your mother was."
Next: In Siberia