The kitchen was filled with the fragrance of piroshki. We began making regular visits again to the town with our baskets. Ludmilla started radish and lettuce seeds and planted them in pots on a sunny windowsill. One morning a seedling appeared, the first green thing we had seen in months. Georgi ran to show it to Papa, who held the pot with its green seedling in his hands for a long time.
There was a pocket-sized porch, and when it was warm enough, Papa, wrapped in a blanket, loved to sit outside in the sun. But as the days grew warmer and lighter, Papa grew weaker. Mama seldom left his side. Each morning as soon as my eyes opened, I looked to see if Papa was all right. Often I would wake in the middle of the night to find Mama and Papa deep in conversation. Almost always they were whispering about long-ago times and memories of Leningrad, which they always thought of as St. Petersburg.
“What wouldn’t I give to see our beloved city once more, Katya,” Papa said. That gave me the idea. I whispered to Georgi and Ludmilla. That evening after dinner I hurried into Ludmilla’s tiny room and closed the door. All evening I painted, and the next evening as well.
On the afternoon of the third day, when Mama and Papa went to sit outside, Georgi, Ludmilla, and I got busy. We pushed and pulled the tables and chairs until we had a clear path through the room. Up went the sign I had painted that said NEVSKY PROSPEKT. Two chairs were placed on a table, and Ludmilla draped them with a blue cloth while I pinned on paper squares for windows and Georgi rolled paper into white pillars to decorate our Winter Palace. Farther along the path a blue rug became a canal. Beside the canal we fashioned a cathedral from the firebox. The bread bowl was painted in bright colors and turned upside down to make the dome. Off to one side I pinned all the drawings I had made of the Summer Garden, with its flowers and fountains and wide green lawns. By the stove Ludmilla set up a little table and two chairs. A white cloth was on the table, and a sign overhead read TEAROOM.
Georgi opened the door and called, “Welcome to St. Petersburg.”
I led Mama and Papa inside while Ludmilla brushed one of the rabbits off the tearoom table. At first, when I saw them break into tears, I thought we had done something to make them sad, but I was wrong, for they were laughing as well as crying. They walked down the Nevsky Prospekt admiring the palace and the cathedral. With a sweep of his arm, Papa seated Mama in the tearoom and settled down next to her. Georgi, with an apron around his waist, brought glasses of tea, and Ludmilla proudly produced a plate of fancy cookies she had baked while Mama was taking her piroshki into the village. When they had finished their tea, Papa said, “And now for a stroll in the garden.” Arm in arm they walked by my paintings, Mama commenting, “My, the geraniums are superb this year,” while Papa agreed, “They have never looked so lovely.”
After that afternoon Papa seemed better for a few days, but soon the coughing grew worse and Papa could not eat. It was a soft night in May when I heard him whisper to Mama, “I could not leave you alone in the cold and darkness of winter.” When the first wildflowers were blooming on the tundra, Papa died.
Mama gathered Georgi and me in her arms. We cried for a very long time while Ludmilla patted us gently to console us. At last Ludmilla went into town to find a priest she knew, who was in hiding from the Communists and working as a shoemaker.
“He does not dare give us a real funeral,” Ludmilla said, “but he will surely say some prayers.” That night we followed the custom and stayed up all night to pray. The next morning I went out on the tundra to gather wildflowers—buttercups, primroses, and cowslips for Papa. Beneath the thin soles of my boots I felt the coldness of the ice under the tundra’s surface. I knew that was how it would always be for me. Beneath whatever happiness came to me would be this icy coldness of Papa’s death.
That day the shoemaker came, and there were more prayers. Then Papa was taken away.
After Papa died, we hardly left one another’s sight. Georgi and I walked into town with Mama on her way to the bakery. She would go with us to the river. We would meet the fishing boats and barter for salmon or cod. When the whaling ships arrived, everyone rushed down to the pier to see the bits and pieces of the great beasts that were left on the boats. The harbor was crowded now with barges and freighters. Steamboats came and went. There were rumors of a prison camp near Dudinka, and one day we saw prisoners in chains being led off a steamboat. Mama sank down on a bench. Her hands were trembling, and tears streamed from her eyes. “Poor Russia,” she said over and over. “Russia is devouring her children.”
There were happier days. Squirrels chased one another over the tundra. The new rabbits frisked about in their pens, giddy with being in the open air. New heads of cabbage like green roses thrived in the long days of sunlight. The birds returned one by one, and then one hundred by one hundred.
In the long, light evenings we would take the chairs onto the tiny porch and Mama would tell stories of her days in the palace.
“Can such things be?” Ludmilla would exclaim.
Sometimes Mama would look off into the distance. We knew then that she was thinking of Papa.
We were all changed by Papa’s death. Ludmilla spent more time fussing over her rabbits. She would take them in her arms and croon, “Poor things, poor things.” Mama was quieter. When she spoke, it was often about the old days, when she and Papa were young. Georgi had decided he was the man of the family and was bossy around the house, but all I thought about was how we might escape Siberia.
At night I would retrace the long trip we had made. One day Mama’s exile would be over. Then Mama and Georgi and I would travel along the river, over the tundra and then into the forest, and finally back to the city of Krasnoyarsk and onto the train that would take us to St. Petersburg. All the Comrade Tikonovs and all the Comrade Stalins would not keep us out of our city. Night after night I made the trip, until each mile was familiar and a thousand miles were no more than a step.
GLOSSARY
babushka: grandma, old woman
blini: little pancakes
borscht: beet soup
isbas: the small wooden homes of Siberia
kopeck: a small coin; one hundred kopecks to a ruble
kutya: a porridge made of barley, honey, and nuts
makivnek: a raisin cake
malshyka: a brat
molodyets: well done!
NKVD: People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs; the Soviet secret police.
piroshki: small pies filled with cheese or meat
ruble: monetary sum
About the Author
GLORIA WHELAN is the bestselling author of many novels for young readers, including HOMELESS BIRD, winner of the National Book Award; FRUITLANDS: Louisa May Alcott Made Perfect; ANGEL ON THE SQUARE; ONCE ON THIS ISLAND, winner of the Great Lakes Book Award; FAREWELL TO THE ISLAND; and RETURN TO THE ISLAND. She lives with her husband, Joseph, in the woods of northern Michigan.
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ALSO BY GLORIA WHELAN
ANGEL ON THE SQUARE
FRUITLANDS
HOMELESS BIRD
THE INDIAN SCHOOL
MIRANDA’S LAST STAND
The Island Trilogy:
ONCE ON THIS ISLAND
FAREWELL TO THE ISLAND
RETURN TO THE ISLAND
Credits
Cover art © 2003 by Peter Malone
Cover © 2004 by HarperCollins Publishers Inc.
Copyright
THE IMPOSSIBLE JOURNEY. Copyright © 2003 by Gloria Whelan. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter inve
nted, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub © Edition NOVEMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780061975837
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Gloria Whelan, The Impossible Journey
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