A Train to Moscow(72)
She lowers herself onto the stool and peers out the window again, as if looking away would make the box in her hands vanish back into its shelter on the top shelf of the armoire. Grandpa has pulled out the last dandelion and is now cranking the rusty handle of the courtyard well, waiting for the bucket to creak its way up from the echoey darkness into daylight. A watering can is waiting at his feet, ready to be carried to the bed of carrots and beets. Sasha pulls up the lid of the box. Inside is a book-size square wrapped in the kind of cloth Grandma used to make cottage cheese. Inside the cloth, after she untangles it, is a piece of cardboard bent in two, held by a rubber band. Someone has made an effort to disguise what is inside, trying to hide it not only from an outsider accidentally stumbling onto it but also from himself.
She weighs the folder on her palm, as if its heft could determine its importance, as if the act of staring at its brown cover could reveal what is contained inside. Behind the window, Grandpa is lugging a watering can in one hand and a bucket in the other, his shoulders stooping under their weight, his knees nearly buckling. She didn’t know he was so old. Or did he suddenly get old because Grandma is no longer here to fill him with reasons to go on, reasons beyond the garden with its watering and weeding?
The rubber band around the folder crumbles under her fingers, but the creased cardboard doesn’t spring open, kept folded for years. How many years—five, fifteen, twenty? How long has this box been sitting on the top shelf of the armoire, away from anyone’s reach?
Sasha doesn’t want to wedge herself between the past and present again; she doesn’t want to become complicit in another secret. But with the empty box in her hand, she knows she already has.
She straightens the crease and tries to massage away the years of storage with her fingers. The inside feels about a centimeter thick. She thinks of the storage space above the kitchen where years ago she found Kolya’s journal, of its cramped interior that smelled of dust and old shoes and that held so many secrets. She closes her eyes and sees the magazines with poetry by the writers no longer recognized by the state, recipes for dishes whose ingredients have long vanished from their store shelves, hats—the objects of frivolity and luxury—that women gave up wearing decades ago. She thinks of the small things that made up their life here: Mama helping Grandma shred heads of cabbage, then pouring salt over the crunchy layers that were stuffed into a barrel until the slivers of thick leaves reached the brim; of Grandma singing as she knitted another sweater or another pair of mittens; of Mama sorting strawberries and currants before she poured them into copper bowls to make jam; of the life Sasha so deliberately left to be an actress. And now the question stares her in the face: Was it worth it? Have her performances and her acting changed anything or anyone? Have they brought back the forbidden writers, or the forgotten foods, or even women’s hats that all those years before the Great Terror had kept her grandmother elegant and young?
Inside the folder is an envelope, long and narrow, with foreign stamps and red-and-blue airmail stripes around the edges. It is not at all like one of the Russian envelopes, plain and square. It is addressed to her grandparents, in a handwriting that is definitely Russian in the way it effortlessly loops the letters together, the way they taught them cursive writing in first grade, through hard work, repetition, and shame. On the other side is the return address that makes the blood drain from her veins: Nikolai Kuzmin, 41 Grand Street, New York, USA. A letter from Kolya.
The stamp on the envelope is a washed-out blot of black ink, the post date dissolved, impossible to make out. The top of the envelope is neatly cut open with a knife, the way Grandpa opens all mail, and Sasha yanks out the folded pages, the date glaring from the top right corner: 15 of April, 1956. Twelve years ago.
40
My dearest mamochka, papochka, Galochka, and Sashenka (whom I’ve never met but who should now be thirteen).
For a second, she raises her eyes and looks at Grandma’s dress hanging in the armoire, its little white stars beginning to twirl in a wild dance before her eyes, together with the whole room. I am now twenty-five, she wants to scream to him. I have lived my entire life with your paintings and your journal; with your disdain for the lies of our motherland; with your story of Nadia and the war, which to a large extent has defined my life. I have lived with your memory but without you, because you were dead. You were the first to leave us, before Mama, before Grandma, maybe even before Sima, who died in this house in 1942. You were our conscience, our truth. Just like Theater is for me. So why did you not return after the war? Why weren’t you here to give me guidance, to protect me from floggings and old neighbors’ gossip, to stand in for my father? Why did you abandon me?
As tears blur her vision, she sniffles them away and continues reading.
It took me so long to write because I was afraid to send you a letter from the United States. For all these years, I’ve been torn apart by not being able to contact you, to tell you that I am alive and well because of what we hear about Stalin and his terror. I’ve heard that a letter from the West could land someone in prison, and I didn’t want this to happen to any of you, so I decided to keep silent, as difficult and heart-wrenching as it was. But after Stalin’s death, and particularly after Khrushchev’s speech, things seem to be different, so I’m hoping this letter will reach you and cause you no harm.
I sent you my journal from the Leningrad Front, with a soldier who was demobilized and going back home to Ivanovo. Did you get it? I only received one letter from you, addressed to the Leningrad Front, where you wrote about Sashenka’s birth and Sima’s death in 1942, only a few weeks apart. I cried, tears of joy and tears of sorrow. I was lucky to survive when so many others didn’t. All these years since the war ended, eleven endless years, every day I fought with myself not to tell you I was alive, not to write to you, to send you a telegram, to call. It was a struggle, and I had to remind myself that I couldn’t selfishly announce what I wanted you to know because it would hurt you, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted so much to be with you, but I couldn’t be there. I miss all of you terribly; I miss the dusty road that led to our house, the brown oilskin of the river, the smell of pirozhki Mamochka always baked for my birthday. And I couldn’t write to you; I couldn’t even tell you how much I missed you all.