Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland by Susan Richards Page B

he was scared witless. Kept saying ‘they’ were coming for him. ‘We came to help you with your ecological disaster,’ they said, ‘and you met us with gunfire. We’ll be back. Meanwhile, we’re borrowing your legs. You’ll be paralyzed for ninety-three days.’ And they did come for him again. It was in the ward—in full view of lots of people. He was carried to the door by invisible hands. He clung on to the doorpost—people rushed up and dragged him back to bed.”
    “So what happened?” Ira asked.
    “After three months he recovered the use of his legs.”
    When Sasha left I asked Ira what that was all about.
    “Something that happened recently on night watch at the mine.”
    “He was pulling your leg—”
    “Things like that are happening all the time, he said.” When I asked Ludmila to explain she groaned. “I’ve not seen a thing myself. Ask Vasily Vasilevich. He’s Oscar’s best friend. I’ll be taking you over there when he’s finished work.”
    Vasily Vasilevich was the engineer in charge of supplying the water that kept the fifty thousand people in this desert town alive. The light was failing when Ludmila drove us over, and the windows of his bungalow were dark. “He’ll be here any minute.” I got out of the car. A dry wind was blowing off the desert. The sound of rustling leaves was magnified by the emptiness. The headlights fell on chunks of stone stacked along one side of the house. I was looking at them when a voice from the darkness said: “Let me give you some light.” The bare bulb revealed a thin, tanned man in his fifties in faded brown shorts and a half-buttoned shirt. With his bright blue eyes and enchanting smile, he looked like some desert Ariel.
    “People think the desert’s dead, but that’s because they don’t know how to read it—the Syr Dar’ya used to run near here on its way to the Aral Sea. Now every drop of water we use comes from two hundred kilometers away. Look at this—it’s jaspar. That’s white opal. Here’s a fossilized tree. It wasn’t always desert here, you know.”
    We sat on the verandah drinking fermented camel’s milk. The wind rustled the leaves of his orange grove. I looked into the darkness and thought of the FSB, out there looking for us. Vasya was talking about the region’s early history, showing us photographs of rock drawings, images of animals, men, and strange discs, said to be about four thousand years old. The pool of light on the verandah seemed to hold us in a spell of safety.
    When I confessed how heedlessly I had flown in on a borrowed passport Vasya laughed. As a boy growing up in Siberia, he had stowed away on a plane for Moscow. “There was just room around the oxygen containers. It was summer, but there was ice forming on every surface. We’d have frozen to death if the plane hadn’t stopped at Tomsk. We arrived in Moscow none the worse for wear and had a marvelous few days exploring the city.”
    Ira mentioned Sasha’s story of the shining man. “What’s that all about?” Vasya walked over to his collection of stones and handed us fragments of gray-green stone, light, like pumice. “I’ve had it tested by a lab. It’s sand that’s been heated to an extraordinarily high temperature. Do you see the slight curve?” he said. “They’re part of a saucer-shaped crater, about twenty meters across.”
    “Do you mean a UFO crater?” Ira asked.
    “Yes. We see things like that all the time.” Despite the smile, he was serious. “The earth here gives off an energy they need. Vortex energy, they call it. They come to recharge themselves. But they also come to help.”
    It began a few years ago, he explained. People started bringing stories to Ludmila’s husband, who was first secretary of the Communist Party. They were seeing UFOs, shining beings, all sorts of odd things. They wanted Oscar to “do something.” He handed the problem over to Vasya.
    “And what did you do?”
    “Oh, this and that! But