Escape from Memory (11 page)

“Why didn’t they just leave?” I asked.

“Oh, Kira, you are such an American,” Mom said scornfully.

I felt scolded, put down.

“It’s not my fault,” I protested. “You’re the one who made me an American. Right?”

Mom shook her head, but she looked amused.

“I deserve that,” she said. “But you are so much what you are that I’m not sure you can understand Crythians. Americans believe that if you’re not happy where you are, you pack up, you move, you go somewhere better. Or you go through a twelve-step program, you improve yourself. You leave the past behind. You think you’ve got a right to happiness, and you’re going to make yourself happy even if it kills you.”

“You’re an American too,” I pointed out.

Mom shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “I think I’m still more of a Crythian. Crythians believe in the past. They believe in memories. They do everything for memory, not for happiness.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” I said, not interested in all this philosophizing. What about my parents? What about my kidnapping? But I was still curious about one other detail. “Aunt Mem—I mean, Rona—told me Crythians remember everything that ever happens to them. But that’s not possible, is it?”

“Probably not,” Mom admitted. “From the beginning, I think there were always details that Crythians forgot. The things that nobody cared about—the angle at which each blade of grass grew, the exact placement of each button in a button box—what did it matter if we remembered or forgot? But Crythians did have good memories. One Crythian left early in the twentieth century, and he created quite a stir, out in the Soviet Union. He worked as a journalist, and he could remember every interview without taking a single note. He did vaudeville-type shows, memorizing long strings of numbers or words and reciting them back perfectly. What he did was nothing a five-year-old Crythian couldn’t do, but the rest of the world was amazed. He was written up in psychology texts. They called him ‘S.’” The problem was, once he’d memorized all
those meaningless numbers and words, he couldn’t get them out of his mind. And so the psychologists taught him to forget.”

Mom looked sad all of a sudden, and I couldn’t think why.

“And then?” I prompted her. I was getting stiff sitting on the cold floor. I shifted around, trying to sit sideways, but there was no way to get comfortable on the bare concrete.

“S was probably the reason Crythe came to the attention of the Soviet government. Or maybe not. It was years later, during the height of the Cold War … When they came to Crythe, they didn’t explain. But since I left, I’ve done research. I read everything I could find about S. And I can just picture some Soviet leader coming across reports of his amazing feats, saying, ‘Eureka! This has military applications!’ Back then, that’s all the Soviets and the Americans ever thought about, the military and having better weapons than the other side.”

She was confusing me. “Since when is memory a weapon?” I asked.

Mom frowned, making me feel more ignorant than ever.

“Think about it,” she said. “If you were a military leader, wouldn’t you love to have pilots who needed to be told only once how to operate their planes? Or soldiers who could carry around complicated battle plans in their heads? Or electronics operators who never had to write down secret codes? Or—”

“Okay” I said. “I get it.”

Mom shook her head, as if shaking off my impatience. She pulled her hair back from her face, held it tight at the back of her head, released it.

“I was four years old when they came to Crythe,” she finally said. She had a faraway look in her eye, as if there were a movie playing out on the opposite wall. All I saw was blank cinder
blocks. “The Soviet officials came in jeeps—I’d never seen a jeep before,” she said dreamily. “They began testing us, testing us all. And we were all too stupid or too naive or too proud to play dumb. We kids begged our Aunt Memories to train us harder than ever. We were like small-town starlets, dreaming of Hollywood.”

I couldn’t help dreading whatever she was going to say next.

“They picked twenty-five people, mostly kids. My sister Toria was the youngest. Just six.”

“Toria? You mean Victoriana? My my—” I couldn’t say it, couldn’t even get my lips to press together for the “m” in “mother”

Mom tore her gaze away from the invisible scene on the back wall and focused her eyes on me.

“Yes,” she said. “Your mother was chosen. So was your father. Alexei was eight.”

She gave me time to let that sink in. Or maybe she was giving herself time. I glanced down briefly, and when I looked back at her she was staring at the back wall again.

“I was so jealous,” she said. “Mama said I was too young, but I was the typical little sister—convinced that anything Toria could do, I could do too.

“Then we found out they were taking the twenty-five away….”

I shivered. This was scarier than the ghost stories my friends and I told at sleepovers. Mom certainly looked haunted. She sat silent for a long time. I didn’t prompt her to continue. Finally, she gave a little sigh and went on.

“When they came back, there were only six of them. Toria and Alexei would never tell us what they’d witnessed. They were strong, strong people. They’d lost a decade of their lives—most
of their childhoods—to that horrible experiment. I think they were the only ones who returned sane. The other four were older. Men. They’d been in the Soviet Union’s war in Afghanistan, and they still believed they were fighting it. You know the Vietnam veterans with post-traumatic stress syndrome? I think that was what they had, only worse, because they did not know how to forget anything. They could not stop reliving the past even for a moment. And Toria and Alexei were the only ones who could help them at all.”

I tried to imagine my real mother, sixteen years old, a teenager, like me, helping war veterans instead of gulping down Diet Cokes and crying over stupid movies. She did not seem like a real person, this Toria.

“And then 1986 came, and it was not just the Soviet officials who came to warn us about the Chernobyl radiation,” Mom continued. “Alexei figured that out, he knew what to say … he wanted to get us away.”

“Aun—Rona said the Rusians and the Americans cooperated, that they worked together,” I protested.

Mom laughed.

“Now, that’s an interesting lie,” she said. “No—we were smuggled out, everyone in our entire village. Alexei said we knew military secrets we were ready to sell, we were each of us secret weapons…. I’m not even sure who he talked to, U.N. officials with American sympathies, maybe. But he was convincing. It’s funny—a few years later the Americans would not have cared, the Cold War was over. But at that time the Americans still thought of the Soviet Union as the evil empire. They lived in fear that the Soviets would develop some all-powerful, secret weapon. So we were treated as
highly valuable defectors. They helped us get land to build a new Crythe, an almost exact replica. I am not sure how Alexei strung them along. I can’t imagine him betraying anyone. I think, perhaps, in the end, the Americans were not satisfied. Eventually, they stopped coming, the men in black cars. And then I think they forgot us. We had visas, we got citizenship, but we were just footnotes in the reports that nobody bothered to read anymore because the whole world had changed.”

“I’ve never heard of anything like this in history class,” I protested.

Mom gave me a scornful look.

“Oh, Kira, would you? Think for a minute about the thousands of lives that have never been written about. Think about the wars that have been fought that are never mentioned in your schools because they don’t involve a single American or a single American interest—”

“There was a war in Crythe,” I said. “The new Crythe.”

Mom nodded.

“Yes. The officials didn’t know about that, either.” She was staring off into the distance again, talking as if in a trance. “We could have had peace. We could have just been those weirdos up in the mountains that nobody knew much about. But in America we broke down into factions. In our old land it was easy to live simply, forgetting nothing. But here—Leonid wanted a TV Marta wanted the kind of kitchen she saw advertised in a magazine…. Then there were the extremists on the other side, those who wanted our village kept ‘pure.’ And both sides resented your parents.”

“Why?” I asked. For the first time I felt possessive of them—Alexei
and Toria—not quite Mom and Dad, but almost Mother and Father. My parents.

Mom sighed and finally looked back at me.

“Alexei and Toria were the only two who left the village on a regular basis, because they were going out to earn money for us. They were good with computers—their minds practically were computers. And back then a new idea with computers could make millions overnight, it seemed. You didn’t need a college degree, you just needed to be smart and determined, and they were both. They were supporting the entire village, and people hated them for it.”

I thought about how I’d felt toward Lynne over the years, the digs disguised as jokes: “Oh, you think you’re so smart!” But Lynne was my friend. I didn’t
hate
her.

“They were married by now,” Mom continued. “They had you, but they hadn’t forgotten the veterans of the Afghan war. And they weren’t ignorant of the problems the extremists were causing in the village, expecting everyone to remember everything, punishing children for forgetting anything….” Mom slowed down now, pacing her words as carefully as she’d steer a car alongside a dangerous cliff.

“They developed something with computers, to help some people remember, to help others forget. They were far ahead of their time. And what they did helped us all. But Crythians weren’t satisfied. They wanted Alexei and Toria to—to sell their ideas. Some of the Crythians were greedy. And they found a buyer. Rona Cummins.”

I jerked back. Everything so far had seemed like ancient history, from the Romans to my practically mythological parents. But that name—Rona Cummins—brought me back to the
present. This wasn’t just long-ago turmoil Mom was describing.

“Aunt Mem—I mean, this Rona—she said my parents disapproved of using computers in Crythe. She said that was why they were—” I couldn’t finish.

“Rona Cummins would say anything to get what she wanted,” Mom said disgustedly. “She was just manipulating you.”

I felt more mixed up than ever.

“Did she want my parents to die?” I asked weakly. It was less frightening than asking a more current question: Did she want me to die?

Mom shook her head. “She just wanted your parents’ ideas. She didn’t care how she got them. But she paid some of the more rabid Crythians to try to scare your parents into submitting…. It scared them into sending you away.”

“With you,” I said. “And that’s what I remembered last Friday night, my real mother carrying me to you.” I was sure of this suddenly. It was such a relief not to have any more doubts. “You didn’t kidnap me.”

“No,” Mom said. “But you don’t remember seeing me that night because you fell asleep in your mother’s arms. She … she couldn’t bear to say good-bye, so your father gave you to me. And then I carried you down the mountainside, and we found the car he’d hidden there….” She seemed lost in memory. I realized suddenly that that was nothing new—every time over the past thirteen years that she’d seemed far away, distant, aloof, she’d really just been remembering.

“Why didn’t my parents run away too?” I asked. “If they knew they were going to be killed—”

“They didn’t know for sure,” Mom said. “I think they must
have had hope until the very end. I want to believe that.” She grimaced, and I remembered that Toria had been Mom’s sister. And Mom was like those Crythian war veterans, unable to leave the past behind. Mom was still grieving.

“They thought it was not honorable to abandon their people,” Mom said. “They thought they could convince them. … Oh, Kira, there was already fighting when you and I escaped. I—I’ve read about wars, and they always seem so cut-and-dried in retrospect, so many troops lost, so much land taken, so many causes won. So neat and clean. But this war … this was people who’d known one another all their lives, shooting each other, point-blank. This was a man strangling his brother, bare-handed. This was a woman stabbing her neighbor in the back while she hung out her laundry.” Mom spoke as if she were watching it all over again, as if everything were replaying before her eyes.

“Why?” I asked in horrified fascination.

“Like everything else in Crythe,” Mom said, “because of memory.”

For a second I almost felt Crythian. I knew I would never be able to forget the sight of Mom’s face just then: the pale cheeks, the flowing tears, the anguish. She was weeping now. I’d never seen her weep before. I didn’t want that image burned into my mind. I stood up stiffly and began pacing the floor, as if it might be possible to run away from everything Mom had told me. But the room was so small that I could take only five steps before I had to turn around. It was the same between the other walls—the room was practically a perfect square. I tapped on some of the cinder blocks, dug my fingernails into the mortar that held them together. But there were no weak spots.

“It’s no use,” Mom said, looking up at me through the tears. “The walls are solid. So is the floor. And the ceiling. I already tried. We can’t escape.”

I felt like the walls were closing in on me.

“What do they want from us?” I asked.

“Your parents’ secrets,” Mom said.

“But we don’t have them” I protested. “Do we?”

Mom just kept looking at me. Strangely.

“Do you?” I asked.

Mom gave her head such a slight shake, it was barely perceptible. She kept watching me. She reminded me of those few teachers I’d had over the years who didn’t keep talking when kids didn’t understand, but just waited and waited.

I thought of drug smugglers who hid bags of cocaine in baby’s diapers, I thought of Holocaust victims who swallowed valuable jewels to keep them from the Nazis. But Mom had spirited me out of Crythe thirteen years ago. Any diapers I’d worn then were long gone; anything I’d swallowed had passed through my system within days.