Louise woke early Monday morning in the sparsely furnished hotel room where she’d collapsed after the long train ride with Natalya, Fanya, and the children. There was a toilet and sink down the hall. To wash her hands, she had to break a thin layer of ice in a large pitcher that the owner had put out the night before. She took the pitcher back to her room to sponge bathe where it was marginally warmer.
As agreed, she met Natalya, the children, and Fanya for a typical Finnish breakfast of split whole herring, coarse brown bread, cheese, butter, and karjalanpiirakka, a pastry made of talkkuna flour, eggs, and short grain rice. The children, unsure what was going on, were subdued. They knew that they had come to meet their father, but their mother was tense and distant, speaking to them tersely for behavior that normally wouldn’t even evoke attention.
Louise took Alina in her lap and helped her drink her cocoa while talking to Natalya in French. Fanya ate silently. Grisha was constantly toddling off to investigate other tables. He was mostly tolerated and sometimes even smiled at, until he tried to see what was on one of the tables, rocking it a bit. Fanya was on it instantly, rushing over to the table, scolding him in Russian. Hearing the Russian, the temperature at the table Grisha was visiting dropped a good ten degrees Celsius.
When Fanya returned with Grisha, Louise leaned over to Natalya and whispered, “Good thing we’re speaking French.”
Natalya, who had been constantly looking out the window, didn’t seem to register what Louise was talking about.
“Maybe we should go to where they’ll finish. Mikhail might get in early. We won’t want to miss him.”
Natalya shrugged the Russian whatever-happens-happens shrug, but her eyes showed her anxiety.
Up to this point, Louise had been confident that Arnie would be carefully and deliberately just behind Mikhail, whatever time they crossed the northern Kuopio city limits. Natalya’s fatalistic shrug evoked a quiver of anxiety. She wouldn’t be sure until she saw Mikhail crossing the finish first.
A small crowd had already formed in the lightly falling snow when they reached the city limits. Clearly, the publicity effort had worked, Louise thought somewhat ruefully. Someone had stretched a ribbon across the road, one end tied to the city limit sign and the other to a leafless bush across the road.
After about an hour, during which time both Natalya and Louise had been interviewed by a reporter from the local newspaper, the children had come to the end of their patience. Grisha had a runny nose and the snot had frozen to his face and chin. Alina had built a tiny village of little snow houses with twigs for flags but had started complaining, showing her mother her hands. When Natalya snapped something at her in Russian, she turned around and stomped all the snow houses back into the snow. Natalya sent them back to the hotel with Fanya.
Both women paced, keeping warm that way, constantly scanning to the north. Where were their husbands?
Around midmorning, an enterprising teenaged boy arrived with a large container of hot Chaga pulled behind him on a sled. He was quickly doing a brisk business. He would carefully wash the used ceramic cups in the snow and dry them with the towel that he kept wrapped around his neck. Louise remembered a State Department lecture that said that before the war, Finland had supplied a huge percentage of Europe’s and Russia’s lumber and paper. The war had ended that. How long, she mused, would it take to recover fully? No one in America thought twice about throwing away paper cups.
The morning was an anxiety-filled stupor of stamping their feet and slapping their arms for warmth. Spectators came, stayed until they got cold, then disappeared to someplace warm. Natalya and Louise wouldn’t leave. At lunchtime, Louise volunteered to go back to the hotel to check on the children and get some lunch, leaving Natalya looking anxiously northward. Louise returned with some bread and cheese wrapped in newspaper that she’d stuck inside her coat, hoping to keep it from freezing.
The day dragged on, the crowd thinning. The sun, hidden behind the overcast sky, was slipping closer to the southeastern horizon when the crowd started building again, hoping to see a finish before dark. People were starting to speculate on why the racers hadn’t yet shown.
Darkness in the east began replacing fading gray in the west. It had momentarily stopped snowing.
Louise wanted to hug Natalya to give her comfort but knew the gesture would be futile, given all their clothing, and besides, she wanted Natalya to hug her, for the same reason. Where were their husbands? Were they even alive? She no longer thought about who would win the race.
A young man came skiing toward them at a furious pace in the gloom. He was shouting something in Finnish. Louise’s heart rose. Then it plummeted. All she could understand from the young man’s excited shouting was the word “Amerikkalainen.”
She looked at Natalya. Natalya stared into the distance, her face immobile.
“Oh my God,” Louise whispered aloud. She didn’t know what to do. A second skier was now visible, clearly Arnie, his style unmistakable. She looked at Natalya again. Natalya was standing very still, her mittens held close to her chest. If Louise didn’t know better, she would have called it praying.
The crowd was now roaring; people were moving parallel to the road. Shouts were repeated up and down the road. “It’s the American! It’s the Finn!” Louise felt someone clap her shoulder. Then she noticed a smaller group of clearly disappointed Finns standing together, saying nothing. Some jubilant Finns made comments. A fistfight broke out, broken apart by one of several local police who were on hand.
Arnie was skiing easily, almost unhurriedly, toward the finish line, his breath condensing in the air, trailing behind him. The initial joy of seeing him safe was now being replaced by all the guilt that she’d pushed down while trying to fix the blunder of the press releases. How could she rush to hug Arnie, who was obviously unaware of what was happening, with Natalya standing silently beside her, stricken with grief? Should she hug Natalya? She could see that Natalya’s world was crashing around her.
The crowd was cheering her husband—victory.
Louise saw Arnie looking around for her, then spotting her and pushing his way through the crowd to reach her. She made one last hopeful scan of the distant and now-darkening snow to the north. No Mikhail. She covered her face with her mittens. She felt like the inside of her body was whirling, draining into some vacuum beneath her legs. She had been so hopeful, hopeful to the point of almost certainty that Arnie would throw the race. She looked over at Natalya, not knowing what to say or how to comfort her.
Natalya didn’t move.
Louise ran to meet Arnie.
After a hard but brief hug amid the backslapping and laughing of surrounding Finns, they both almost simultaneously blurted out, “Where’s Mikhail? Have you seen him?”
The simultaneous questions gave them the answer they were dreading. He was still out there somewhere.
“Oh my God, I missed him,” Arnie said. He looked back into the north. Someone offered him a glass of some liquor. He declined it. The man looked at him, puzzled.
“How could I have beat him?” he asked no one in particular, still looking to the north. “I spent the whole afternoon going in circles.” He waved off two more laughing well-wishers. “He must be in trouble. We have to look for him.”
Natalya had joined them, searching Arnie’s face, not understanding the English.
Louise couldn’t hold back any longer. “Pietari said he found you. You were going to let Mikhail win.”
“He did. Told me about the raffle. The story making all the big papers. Gave me some BS about you wanting me to know the honor of the army was at stake.”
“That’s not at all what I—”
“I know. If I’d known right then you were worried about Mikhail, I might have found him. I didn’t figure out Pietari wasn’t straight with me until long after he left. With that delay and the snow. It’s probably why Pietari’s friends missed him, too.” He looked north again. “I have to find him.”
“That son of a bitch.”
Arnie had never heard Louise use that word. He suddenly grew serious. “Has there been any, you know, reaction, statements coming from the Russians?”
“There has,” she said quietly, looking at the ground.
Natalya was tugging on her coat sleeve. “Where is Mikhail? What is Arnie saying?”
Louise swallowed. “We’ll find him,” she said.
Natalya looked at her, her face paling, trying to take in what Louise was saying. Then she turned her face to the sky and howled like a wounded animal, “Au, bog na nebesach. Boze moi.” Oh, God in heaven. Oh, God.
She knew.
Louise took her into her arms and Natalya broke down weeping. “We’ll find him,” Louise whispered in her ear. “We’ll find him.” Never show anything but optimism.
Arnie held up both arms, looking at the crowd, waiting for it to quiet. “You must hear me,” he said. “Please. I have to say something.”
When there was total silence he said, “Mikhail Bobrov is the true winner.”
Natalya took her head from Louise’s shoulder at the sound of her husband’s name. Louise pulled her in tighter.
There was a stir, a murmur of question, but then everyone was again quiet. “On Friday, Colonel Bobrov was well ahead of me,” Arnie said. “Then I fell through the ice and was totally soaked.” He let that sink in. The Finns all knew that “totally soaked” meant death in these temperatures. The crowd grew more solemn. “He circled back. Somehow, he found me.” Arnie choked up, then regained control. “He saved my life.” There was silence. Arnie repeated, “He won the big race. I only won this last leg and I’m afraid it’s because he’s in trouble. We need to form a search party. Now. Who will help me find him? I’ll wait for half an hour for you to get your gear.”
Natalya had stopped weeping, trying to translate what Arnie was saying to the crowd, knowing it was about Mikhail. Louise’s Finnish was totally inadequate to help.
When he’d finished, Arnie walked over to Natalya and Louise and told Louise the story. Louise translated it to French. Natalya nodded. “Yes. That would be Mikhail.” Then she turned and headed in the direction of the hotel.
The light was nearly gone, and it was snowing again. Arnie waited by the finish line with several of the local men who’d already gone home and gotten their skis. They now stood in a circle around Arnie, discussing what possible routes Mikhail might have taken once he and Arnie departed from the lake. The group agreed on a search pattern. When the half hour was up, they strapped on their skis and headed north into the night.
By midnight, most of the searchers had given up and returned home, knowing that if Mikhail had managed to find shelter, they’d find him in daylight. If he hadn’t, he was already dead. Arnie searched until two in the morning before he, too, gave up and wearily made his way to the hotel.