‘I Felt Something Grabbing Me, Something Big’

NORFOLK, Va. —  The first time, the shark merely brushed against her--a rough surface scraping her back and legs.

The second time, the shark got hold of Natalia Slobodskaya by her foot. She felt it release her and then bite her again. And again.

“I felt something grabbing me, something big grabbing me two or three times,” Slobodskaya, 23, said last week from her bed at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital, recovering from the Sept. 3 attack. “I remember thinking it was actually biting me.”

The shark was unpredictable.

“We just knew that she was somewhere around us, because several times I felt her approaching,” said Slobodskaya, who had been swimming at dusk about 100 feet offshore with her fiance at Avon, N.C. “She was all around us. . . . It was very hard to say where she would come from the next moment.”

Slobodskaya lost track of the number of times the shark’s teeth tore into her during what she estimated was a two-to-three-minute ordeal that came with no warning--not a splash or a fin breaking the surface of the murky green water.

In the last few weeks, she has gone over each detail again and again. She has wanted to reconstruct the events that led to the death of her fiance, Sergei Zaloukaev, 28, a computer consultant, who became the first shark-attack fatality in North Carolina in 50 years.

A 10-year-old Richmond, Va., boy, who was attacked by a shark a day earlier in Virginia Beach, Va., about 135 miles up the coast, also died over Labor Day weekend.

Slobodskaya is being treated for a severed left foot and the loss of a fingertip on her left hand and has received skin grafts to replace a 15-inch-long chunk of flesh torn out of her upper left thigh and buttock.

It was to have been a seaside idyll in a rented beach house, a chance to be with friends before going back to school and work. That day, she and her fiance were the last swimmers in the water. Wind swept the surface of the ocean, and the water was deep green in the early evening light, “an unusual green, the color of a bottle,” Slobodskaya said. She estimates she was in about 10 feet of water, swimming parallel to the shore. Zaloukaev was swimming in front of her.

“At that moment, Sergei turned and said, ‘It’s a shark. Swim faster,’ ” said Slobodskaya, a Moscow native who is a graduate student at George Washington University. “Then we both started swimming to the shore as fast as we could, and we’re both good, strong swimmers.”

They aimed for the surf line, where the waves break and where she thought it was too shallow for a shark. But again, she felt the shark in the water. She turned and pushed the animal away with her left hand.

“I pushed it away and I felt it; I touched it,” Slobodskaya said. “The most horrifying thing I remember is when the shark touched me and her skin was rough. When you feel something like that next to you, you instinctively push it away.”

At the time, she had no idea the shark had attacked Zaloukaev too. There was no chance for conversation. He swam near her but slightly ahead of her, trying to make his way to shore.

“Several times I heard Sergei screaming,” she said. “We were both terrified.”

Slobodskaya kept swimming, moving by the force of adrenaline and feeling no pain initially.

“At some point, I felt there was something wrong with my leg, my hand,” she said. “I think in cases of such massive shock, you don’t feel much pain.”

When she and Zaloukaev reached the surf, they waved and screamed for help, trying to alert their friends on the beach. The swimmers felt weak, and the surf was heavy and hard to cross.

“Sergei helped me from the waves several times, and I didn’t realize how badly he was injured,” she said. “He spent some of that last energy on me.”

Slobodskaya remembers looking at the water. “It was this weird green, totally mixed with blood. It was all around us.”

Friends dragged the couple onto the sand, keeping Slobodskaya a short distance from her fiance, who was in bad shape with a severed artery in his leg.

“I heard what was going on over there, and I understood it wasn’t good,” Slobodskaya said.

Lying there, surrounded by friends, Slobodskaya finally felt the pain of her wounds.

She has undergone a half-dozen surgeries and faces more. But her doctors have said she is healing more quickly than they had expected and should make an excellent recovery.

Facing up to two more weeks in the hospital, she has no health insurance, and bills are mounting. Her friends have set up a Web site, www.helpnatasha.com, hoping for donations.

Meanwhile she practices walking on her new artificial foot, the first of two temporary prostheses she will have before she is fitted with a more flexible permanent foot.

She has put her graduate courses on hold and hasn’t decided whether she will go back to live in the Oakton, Va., townhouse she shared with Zaloukaev.

“I had a practical mind on that day. I realized I was losing a lot of blood and that I should stay conscious,” she said. “Now I have emotions. How does it feel to lose the closest person to you? I don’t know what my life will be like now.”