A Train to Moscow(75)

He doesn’t answer, but she sees his eyes darken, despite a sudden ray of sun that slants through the window from the courtyard.

“What are you doing in my room?” he roars.

“You know what I’m doing in your room,” she says in a voice she has never dared use in this house before. “You know what I’m doing, and you know what I’m holding in my hand.” She realizes this is the first time in her life that she has ever confronted him, a thought that surprisingly doesn’t make her knees wobble because she is no longer afraid of him. “Answer me!” she demands, knowing she is the only one left to whom he must now answer.

His face has stiffened, a ripple of hard wrinkles, like bark on an old oak. He turns his head away from her, clamps his hand into a fist. His fingers are old and gnarled, joints swollen with arthritis, and there is dirt under his fingernails. “My son was a traitor,” he says, spitting the last word out as if he were spitting out poison.

His words are hardly a revelation. This is what Sasha expected to hear, but she knows this is only the beginning of their battle.

“You had no right,” he sputters. “Who gave you the right?”

Sasha leans toward him, the pages with Kolya’s handwriting in her hand like a weapon. “Did you have the courage to tell Grandma about this letter?” she demands, although she already knows the answer.

He is silent, and she is livid, sparks of rage spewing in her throat. “Did you tell her that her son was alive?” she shouts.

“This”—he stabs his index finger at the letter—“would have killed her.”

“This?” She lifts the letter. “This would have killed her?” she yells. “This?” She shakes the letter, a piece of damning evidence that sprang to light twelve years too late. “This would have given her a reason to live! She waited for this letter her whole life. For this piece of paper. For proof that Kolya was alive.”

Her grandfather grips the bedpost behind him, leans on it, and sits down, his hand clutching at his chest. A terrible thought rises in her mind: if he died here, right in front of her, it wouldn’t even make her cry. It wouldn’t make her feel anything.

“I did write back,” he says, his voice muffled, as if it came from an empty barrel. “I wrote back that we were ashamed of him. I wrote that he was a coward. That we no longer have a son.”

“You wrote we?” she says. “You wrote we, without ever showing the letter to Grandma?” In her mind, Sasha can see her grandfather carefully inscribing the foreign address in Latin letters, sealing the envelope by spitting on the glue and holding it with two fingers, as though it were a worm.

“You know nothing about the war,” he growls. “You know nothing and have no right to judge me. He should have died like a soldier. Instead, my son was a traitor.”

“You’re right. I only know about the war from what Kolya wrote in his journal. And from what Mama told me. But that was enough for me to know he was not a traitor. Enough to know that he was a hero in a country that betrayed him.”

“We fought, we lost millions, but we won,” he says, the old fire sparkling in his eyes once again. “We saved the world. Soviet Russia, the first socialist state, under the leadership of Stalin, saved the entire world.”

There is nothing Sasha can say to this. It’s useless to tell him that Stalin killed as many millions of their own people as Hitler did, that their motherland is nothing but a colossal mountain of lies. Her Bolshevik grandfather, ardent in his self-righteousness, will remain here until the end of his days, tending to his radishes and apple trees, dusting the branches of black currants with DDT, cranking the handle of the well, leafing through the four pages of Pravda. Fossilized like an ant in a piece of Baltic amber. Sasha finds perverse satisfaction with the image she has conjured up in her mind—her grandpa as a relic—but she can see he isn’t yet ready to fossilize and give up his power. His nostrils flare, and he draws in breath as he used to do before he flogged her.

“You’re nothing but an arrogant fool,” he thunders. “You think you know things, but you don’t. You think you’re like one of those pundits who live in the capital and see the truth.” He straightens his spine, pulls his shoulders back. “The truth is that you know nothing. You’re blind, just like your mother. You don’t see that all these years, you’ve been pining for a murderer. A man who killed his own father.”

His words strike her with the stinging force of nettles whipped across her face, and now it is Sasha’s turn to grab the bedpost. The day of the fire flashes in her memory, the figure of Andrei crouched in front of the smoldering heap of wood that used to be his house, a smell of wet ash hanging in the air.

“Everyone knows that his father was nothing but a drunken convict. A man who threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of his house to trap his wife inside. That was his way to get back at her for all those times she dragged him back home, his shirt stained with vomit and his pants soaked with piss. All those bystanders, the crowd that watched, think they know the truth, but what they saw was what became the official story. I was in the garden, and I saw what really happened. I saw it all.”

Sasha lowers herself onto the other end of the bed. They are both sitting now, facing each other.

“I knew Andrei wanted to kill his father, even before the roof cratered and the house collapsed. I saw him with my own eyes. I saw him pick up a rock big enough to crush through his drunken father’s skull. But the thug saw what his son was up to. He smashed a bottle in his hand against the fence; then he turned toward the crowd. One of the neighbors yelled at him to drop the bottle. Instead he shouted back a squall of curses and took a few wobbly steps. That was when he lost his balance and fell.” Her grandfather pauses, takes a breath, stares into space in front of him. “It would’ve been so easy if he’d died right then. The son rushed forward and squatted over him, to see what he was hoping to see. The drunk’s face was bloodied from the fall, but he opened one eye and looked up as if waiting for the verdict. His hand was still holding the bottle, a bloody circle on his shirt, but it was only a minor wound. Not deep enough to kill him. I could see that from where I stood, and his son could, too.”