A Train to Moscow(76)
Sasha draws a deep breath and runs her palm over her cheeks as if to sweep away the words her grandfather is pressing upon her, rubbing into her face.
“There was still a rock in Andrei’s hand, and I saw him linger. Maybe he imagined what should’ve been that miscreant’s death. Maybe he imagined yanking his father to his feet so that he would tumble straight into the flames. It would be like flinging him directly into hell. But that didn’t happen. What happened was that with his back to the crowd, Andrei closed his fingers around his father’s hand with the broken bottle and drove the jagged glass deep under his ribs. The father gasped, but the two of us were the only ones to hear it.”
Sasha almost gasps, too, but stifles a groan in the depth of her throat. Grandpa’s words metamorphose into images in her mind, rushing before her eyes like frames of a film she would rather not see. Scenes of what Andrei had told her over the years and what he hadn’t told her, what he couldn’t tell her. She thinks of how his face cringed into a mask of hatred when he spoke about his father after the fire, when he spat out his father’s camp stories, almost as if he had to purge them out of his system. She thinks of their walk to the Neva when Andrei admitted he had done something that his father-in-law could send him to prison for. Something that was too late to confess to her, too late to mend. She thinks of the wife Andrei did not choose. Now it all begins to make sense. Like colors in a kaleidoscope, with one turn of Grandpa’s hand, Andrei’s cryptic stories and his refusal to explain anything have snapped together, arranged into a pattern.
Sasha gets up and stuffs the pages of the letter into the envelope with foreign stamps. “I’m going back to Leningrad tomorrow,” she says, walking to the door, heading for the exit from her Ivanovo life. She turns back one last time and sees a commander again—snow-haired, rooted to this house, not nearly extinct—her grandfather, who has fought his last battle and won.
Past Kolya’s paintings on the walls, past Grandma’s holiday teacups in the sideboard, she flees to the room she used to share with her mother, where she kneels by her suitcase and carefully fits the letter into the zipper compartment on the bottom. It will stay there in dark safety until she arrives home, to her Leningrad apartment, where she will expose it to the milky light streaming through the windows, the light Kolya painted so well, where she will decide what to do about the two secrets revealed today: her uncle’s letter from America and the truth just forced upon her.
42
She stares at the card Andrei gave her, at his name printed in bold official letters, Andrei Stepanovich Gordeev. Would anything be different now if he had told her what really happened on the day of the fire, what transpired later between him and his father-in-law? Would her knowing the truth have brought them closer together or torn them even further apart? Andrei and Kolya, the two names ingrained in her heart, the two Ivanovo revelations that now seem inherently connected. She rereads the handwritten pages of the letter several times until she, too, begins to question Kolya’s decision not to go home, until she begins to hate herself because this doubt diminishes her, makes her just like Grandpa, cruel and small-minded. What is it in Kolya’s letter that brings this doubt to the surface, makes it unfold like the petals of a poisonous flower? Why wasn’t his love for Nadia strong enough to make him return to look for her, not to give up after just one trip to the Liteyny prison? Why did it take the word of only one bureaucrat to end his search?
Andrei’s name stares back at her from the card, constricting her heart, making her wonder if what she feels for him is a disease, a stubborn virus she has been unable to clear from her system. Is that what has been feeding her toxic doubts about Kolya? Is that why she keeps returning to the question of how he could be in America, instead of searching for Nadia in the wastelands of their country? On a scale with love on one side and the Gulag on the other, shouldn’t love always outweigh fear? Shouldn’t love outweigh everything?
She lifts the receiver and dials Andrei’s number.
The car he sends for her flies along Nevsky Prospekt and then turns off toward the Smolny. It is a black Volga, the preferred apparatchik vehicle, a car that smells of gasoline and old leather. Borya, the chauffeur, who is close to his pension age, occasionally glances at Sasha in the rearview mirror, his broad face collapsing into a cascade of wrinkles when he smiles.
“Where do I know you from?” he finally asks.
The recent Gorky television production of The Philistines, probably, rather than the latest addition to the theater repertoire, The Shadow by Evgeny Schwartz, another play recently decreed as destined for closure by the Ministry of Culture.
“Yes, yes, the Gorky play.” Borya nods enthusiastically. “You were the merchant’s wife, the one who had an affair.” She nods. She is always the one who has an affair, or who is unkind to her stepchildren, or who is morally bankrupt in so many other ways. She is a character actress: a villain, or a bully, or a miser, or a simpleton. From Borya’s eyes in the rearview mirror, she can see he is completely satisfied with her character’s moral failings.
Why, in all these years, did Andrei tell her nothing about what he had done? Was he paralyzed by the fear of her judgment, embarrassed by the prospect of her condemnation? Did he think she would be harsh and unforgiving? She stares out at the tree-lined canal where a motorboat is plowing through gray water, overtaking Borya’s car, its engine revving up unsettling questions in her head. Does she really know Andrei? Did she ever know him? Why does she doubt him so much? Why does she doubt Kolya?