43 pages • 1-hour read
Disappearing Earth
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Chapters 10-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary: “April”
Chapter 10 tells the story of Zoya, the restless wife of Nikolai Danilovich (Koyla), a police detective in Petropavlovsk. Zoya is a new mother on maternity leave who passes the time chain-smoking and watching migrant construction workers from Central Asia from her balcony. She used to imagine her husband finding the Golosovskaya sisters and basking in his new-found fame, but her fantasies did not come to pass. She recalls her life before she had the baby, when she worked in ecological education at a national park.
Zoya asks a neighbor to watch her baby under the pretense of going grocery shopping. Instead, she goes to the construction site across the street, but the workers are on break. She heads to the city church and sits in the courtyard, scrolling through social media. She comes across Masha’s profile, who she met at a holiday rental house on New Year’s. She recalls Koyla feeling sorry for the girl, calling her an old maid. Masha’s lifestyle and beauty make Zoya jealous.
Zoya envisions a different life. She imagines going back to work and chatting with her co-workers before realizing she doesn’t have anything interesting to say: “And what did Zoya have to show, beyond her infant’s blank expression? Almost half a year spent indoors. What could she say to them?” (176). She contemplates going to the city center to buy a sausage and enjoy the shore, but she fears her husband will see her. She imagines moving to St. Petersburg, like Masha, but banishes the thought almost instantly.
The workers return from lunch. Zoya greets them on her way home. Her neighbor warns her the migrants are dangerous: “Nobody keeps an eye on them […] I heard on the news this morning that the police found a body in the bay” (178). Zoya asks if the body is one of the Golosovskaya girls, but the neighbor tells her it is an adult. The neighbor speculates that one of the workers took the sisters, earning an objection from Zoya: “‘They’re just construction workers […] Not child molesters’” (178). She fantasizes about having sex with the workers. The neighbor talks about real Russians needing police protection from foreigners and speaks nostalgically about the great Russian past.
Zoya makes dinner after the neighbor leaves. Her husband comes home with two officers and Anfisa, an assistant in the police department. One of the officers reveals Koyla was in trouble at work for making a joke about the corpse they dragged out of the water that morning. Koyla insists that the Golosovskaya sisters did not drown but were instead abducted. Zoya agrees, citing the witness. Zoya inquires about a vandalism case involving migrant workers. Koyla loses his temper: “Why should you tell me how to do my job? Do I tell you how to do yours? ‘Sit at home, get fat, and tend to the baby’?” (186). He later apologizes. Zoya once again fantasizes about the migrants. She devises a plan to absent herself for three hours to act on her desires. The next morning, she sees that the worksite has been vandalized. She silently implores the workers to do something about it. Then she realizes they are powerless, just as she is powerless to change her life.
Chapter 11 Summary: “May”
Chapter 11 focuses on Oksana, a researcher at the volcanological institute and the sole witness to the abduction of the Golosovskaya sisters. Oksana returns home to find Malysh, her dog, missing. She frantically calls for him, berating herself for entrusting Malysh to her colleague, Max. While searching for Malysh, she thinks bitterly about the relationship between Max and Katya (her friend of 10 years), comparing their exciting new romance to her failed marriage to Anton. Oksana calls Katya and accuses Max of being irresponsible. The pair offer to help with the search, but Oksana tells them not to bother. The missing dog reminds Oksana of the missing Golosovskaya sisters. Witnessing their abduction was bad luck, leaving her with a feeling that was “dense and swift and devasting” because “she was the one who could have stopped it” (196).
Katya and Max arrive. Oksana bristles at the affection they have for one another. They drive around looking for the dog without success. Oksana recalls how aggressive Detective Ryakhovsky was when he interviewed her after the kidnapping. She remembers the way he belittled her when she was unable to describe the kidnapper: “‘Do you try to be this useless?’ he asked. ‘You work at it in your spare time?’” (197). Oksana is keenly aware that Ryakhovsky doubts her account because is a woman. Her advanced degree, her financial stability, and her well-kempt appearance cannot outweigh the fact that she is a woman and thus inherently untrustworthy.
Oksana recalls an incident the previous summer when Anton threw a stick over a cliff. Malysh gave chase but stopped just short of jumping. The incident both terrified and infuriated Oksana. She thinks back to her last conversation with Ryakhovsky, who informed her that the investigation was winding down. She now understands that the police have lost all hope of finding the Golosovskaya sisters.
Oksana ends her friendship with Max and Katya. She recalls a conversation she had with Marina and feels a kinship with the woman. Both bear responsibility for losing the most important things in their lives. One left the door unlocked, the other left her children unattended.
Chapter 12 Summary: “June”
In Chapter 12, Marina, a journalist and the mother of the missing sisters, travels to a campground near Esso with her friends, Petya and Eva, to cover a festival celebrating Kamchatka’s cultural minorities and the native New Year. She has a panic attack in the backseat and distracts herself with facts about forests and trees. She recalls taking her daughters on a hike when they were young. Her panic returns. She loathes being without cell service, but during her last conversation with the police, she learned that her daughters’ case was “no longer active” (207).
At the campground, Marina and her friends encounter Lilia’s mother, Alla. Eva deliberately brings the women together because both have missing children. Marina does not see the connection between the cases, as Alla’s daughter is older than her girls and a runaway. She has another panic attack in her tent while drums sound from a nearby yurt. She envisions her daughters’ homecoming. Then she imagines finding their bodies. Eva and Petya enter the tent. Marina pretends she is asleep.
Marina joins Alla for breakfast the next morning. Alla circles the topic of their daughters, but Eva interrupts. Marina goes for a walk and thinks about the day her Alyona and Sophia went missing. She recalls knocking on doors searching for them, the initial police interrogation, and the subsequent decision to scale back the investigation. In the spring after their disappearance, police tried to convince Marina that her girls had drowned. Marina disputed this, pointing out that it was too cold to swim when they disappeared, that the girls did not have their bathing suits, and that a witness saw them in a man’s car. Unlike the police, Marina believes Oskana’s account of the abduction.
The New Year’s celebration begins. A journalist tries to get a comment from Marina about the event, sparking yet another panic attack. The presence of news crews reminds her of the media frenzy in the immediate aftermath of the kidnapping. Marina recalls sobbing on the evening news, begging her daughters to be returned to her. Alla finds Marina during the festivities and brings up her missing girls. She shares that her daughter, Lilia, is also missing. Marina repeats the theory that Lilia ran away. Alla bristles: “That’s what the village police told us […] The police say many things, don’t they? To stop citizens from pestering them” (223). Alla wonders how Marina convinced the police to keep searching for her girls. She asks if Marina bribed them. When Marina denies this, Alla grows more desperate: “I’m asking you as a mother […] Simply tell me how” (224). She offers Marina exclusive stories in return for information about how to keep the police on task.
A reporter from Esso questions Marina about her missing daughters. Marina pulls out pictures of her girls and makes an on-camera plea for help finding them. Marina’s description of the kidnapper and his vehicle strikes the photographer, Chegga. He suggests she speak to Alla, but the reporter cuts him off. Marina returns to her tent, distraught. Chegga comes back and asks about the abductor’s car. He tells Marina that a man who lives near Esso might be the kidnapper: “‘This man is strange […] His name is Yegor Gusakov. He lives alone’” (232). Chegga reveals that Yegor was obsessed with Lilia and that the teenager looked young for her age. Marina begins to take Chegga seriously. He reveals that the missing person posters never mentioned a kidnapper. Marina realizes how shoddy the police investigation was. Chegga proposes going to Yegor’s house in the northern village of Anavgai. Marina agrees.
Marina introduces Chegga to Petya and Eva, who repeats what he knows of Yegor. They seek out Alla. Chegga tells her about Yegor’s black car, but Alla doubts his account. She is reluctant to point a finger at Yegor because his strangeness reminds her of Denis, her unusual son. She calls Yegor a harmless, sad, friendless boy. She remains adamant that her daughter is dead: “‘Someone killed her […] Like someone killed your daughters. You fool yourself by believing otherwise. You want a different answer so badly, but it will not come’” (238). Alla refuses to go to Yegor’s house, but her daughter, Natasha, goes along.
In the car, Chegga recounts that Yegor used to leave gifts for Lilia outside her door. He describes Yegor as a large, white man. Natasha tells Marina that she followed her daughters’ case, but that she never linked it to her missing sister: “Esso seemed a world away from what happened with your daughters. I never thought…” (240).
They arrive at the dark house. A black SUV is parked in the unpaved driveway. Chegga snaps pictures before exiting the vehicle and knocking on Yegor’s door. He starts back toward the car when no-one answers. Marina approaches the SUV and sees the bird charm Alyona kept on her phone hanging from the rearview mirror.
The group drives to Esso, where they have cell phone reception. Marina informs Lieutenant Ryakhovsky of their discovery. He tells her he will be in touch in two hours and promises to send a team north by helicopter. The group collects their things from the campsite. Natasha finally understands that something terrible happened to her sister. The chapter closes with Marina jumping over fire during a New Year’s ritual.
Chapter 13 Summary: “July”
Chapter 13 is set inside Yegor’s house. Alyona and Sophia are locked in a room. Sophia is crying. Alyona tries to console her by telling her stories. She repeats the tale of the village that a tsunami washed away. She tells her sister that the villagers swam in the ocean amidst their belongings and happy sea creatures. In this imagined aquatic community, “everyone is kind to each other” and “nobody gets hurt” (254). Alyona alludes to the abuse she and her sister have been subjected to: “No Sophia, not that. Because that can’t happen there” (254).
Lilia is locked in the adjacent room. The Golosovskaya sisters hear her banging and yelling. They hide under the bed. Other noises come from downstairs. Unbeknownst to the girls, it is the police searching the house. Alyona assures Sophia that it is Lilia who will receive punishment for misbehaving, not them. She continues her story, telling Sophia that the villagers, though frightened, started swimming when no-one came to rescue them. The sound of screaming interrupts Alyona’s tale. She comforts Sophia, telling her it will soon stop. She urges her sister to be brave, no matter who opens the door. She reminds Sophia that no-one helped the villagers after the tsunami swept them away–they helped each other.
Chapters 10-13 Analysis
A common theme runs through the novel’s four final chapters: loss. In Chapter 10, Zoya struggles with the loss of her freedom and her old self in the wake of becoming a mother. The boredom she experiences alone at home with her infant leads her to fantasize about the migrants working at the construction site outside her balcony. She envisions an exciting, dangerous life filled with anonymous sex with foreign men:
The locked joints of her knees. Her neck tense, her jaw hard. A thousand things to say behind her teeth. She pressed her back to the wall and listened to her heart pound them out: I want you, it said in the dark (178).
Similarly, in Chapter 11, Oksana experiences the wrenching loss of her dog, Malysh, with whom she has an unusually strong bond. Oksana’s life experiences explain the attachment:
With Malysh, she–who grew up an only child, lying on the pullout couch and hearing her mother through the wall, who maintained friends she could intimidate and lovers who broke her faith, who had never been chosen for marriage and was told she was too old for babies, who was always apart from herself–was not alone anymore (195).
The loss of Malysh reminds Oksana of the missing Golosovskaya sisters, whose abduction she witnessed. She feels a connection to Marina, the mother of the two girls. Alyona and Sophia are gone, just as Oksana’s dog is gone. The two women are alone in the world. Both lost the beloved, one because she left her doors unlocked, the other because she left her daughters unattended.
The penultimate chapter, the longest of the book, reinforces the theme of loss while also providing a more cohesive view of the events surrounding the disappearance of the three girls–Lilia, Alyona, and Sophia. The chapter brings many of the novel’s characters together, all of whom have experienced loss. It opens with Marina musing about forests, which take 70 years to recover from fire. This observation resonates with her personal circumstances. If a forest takes decades to recover from the trauma of losing trees, how long does it take for a person to recover from the trauma of losing a child? Marina is still grappling with the relatively new loss of her daughters. The police tell her to move forward with her life, but she is unable to do so. She distracts herself with random facts and presses her hand to her chest every time she has a panic attack. She believes Oksana’s account of the abduction and hopes that her daughters are still alive.
Alla’s loss is nearly four years old, but no less acute. Although she is able to maintain employment and relationships with her other children, she is still desperately searching for answers about Lilia’s disappearance. Despite what the authorities say, she believes her daughter was killed. Even after all these years, she grills Marina about how to make the police take the case more seriously. Alla’s daughter, Natasha, deals with the loss of her sister in a different way. Blind to the facts of the case, notably the eyewitness account of the abduction and the lack of news from Lilia, she moves forward by telling herself her sister ran away.
Loss in the final chapter takes an extreme form. The Golosovskaya sisters have been locked in a room in Yegor’s house for almost a year. They have lost their freedom, their family, and everything that defined their former lives. Reintroducing Alyona and Sophia in Chapter 13 lends the story symmetry. The novel ends the same way it begins–with an older sister caring for her younger sibling.
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