The Invisible City of Kahyav

By Jeff Baker

I am not expecting this document to be believed by the time it is found, but as I shall be gone by then it does not matter. I have been engaged for the past several years in research documenting my ancestors and other Russian immigrants who found their way to Kansas and in particular to a small group who settled several miles west of what is now Kansas City and for all intents and purposes disappeared off the face of the Earth.

The papers Marco found gave us the location, but not the how, why and when of the moving of a population from one continent to another. Their being invisible doubtless had something to do with it. As remarkable a thing as it is to believe, these people were immigrants from the fabled invisible city of Kitezh! We were able to discover what we should have guessed: that the evacuation of Kitezh was connected to the turmoil in Old Russia in the decades leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

It was at this point of wondering that Marco disappeared. A week later I received a message slipped under my apartment door at midnight:

Join Me!

Bring Pears!

Signed, Marco.

Underneath this was a set of directions. I first assumed it was a joke, but I as live in a high-security building and found that nobody had entered or left. Video showed nobody near my door. And I remembered an oblique reference in the papers to a lack of fresh fruit.

So I will be standing at the appointed place at the appointed time with clothing, a few books and an offering of pears from the local supermarket. I will doubtless feel strange standing in the middle of nowhere with a suitcase but I shall be waiting for a door to open to grant me entry into a life in an invisible world.

—end—

AUTHOR’S NOTE: The fabled(and invisible) Russian City of Kitezh makes an appearance in an opera by Rimsky-Korsakov. The classical station used to play the overture.