A Train to Moscow(78)

“Three weeks ago, Grandma died.”

She sees him scrunch his face and shut his eyes for a moment, as if her words have struck him on the head. His eyes are even darker when he opens them, as black as Grandpa’s well.

“I didn’t know,” he says, “otherwise I would’ve helped with the funeral.” This seems to be his main function in her life, arranging funerals for her family. “Are you all right?” he asks, although he knows that if she were all right, she wouldn’t be sitting in an armchair across from him in the middle of the afternoon with a glass of cognac in her hand.

“Do you remember Kolya’s journal?”

He nods. Of course, she knows he remembers.

“I found a letter from Kolya. From America. Dated 1956.”

Andrei puts down his glass and straightens in his chair.

“He wasn’t killed in the war, like we all thought. He made it to Berlin and then, instead of coming back home, he went in the other direction. He lives in New York now. Or at least he lived in New York twelve years ago.”

Her sentences come out short and hesitant, almost reluctant, as if her mouth refuses to wrap around the strange words and validate them with sound.

For a few moments, Andrei is silent, processing the news, his face expressionless, a functionary’s face. She doesn’t know what is brewing behind this Party mask and its practiced lack of emotion. Is he going to tell her that having a relative abroad has now placed her into the category of traitors? That she is now an enemy of the people, just like all those arrested and sent to the camps?

“This is good news,” he says after a minute of silence. “An even greater reason to celebrate.”

Is this what he really thinks? Sasha gives him a squinted-eye look, hoping to see the cracks in the stone of his face, the openings into the human features under the mask. Should she believe that he is sincere? And is it possible that he is right?

Why has she doubted Kolya’s intentions? Why did she blame him for not coming back to look after her, like a father would, or to search for Nadia? Why does she blame him that he was determined not to die, that he made a choice to avoid the fate of Uncle Seryozha, Uncle Volya, Nadia’s family, and millions of others? Why didn’t she see Kolya’s letter the way Grandma would’ve seen it—a triumph of life over death, a cause for celebration?

“I have no one else to tell this to,” she says. “You are the only one left who knows about Kolya.”

“Kolya and Marik, our two big secrets buried in Ivanovo. And here we are, in Leningrad, still stalked by them a half-life later.” He pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and offers her one. “I often think about how we itch to run away from home and then keep searching for it for the rest of our lives.”

He is right. Ivanovo, she knows, is tattooed onto her heart. But she also knows that if she hadn’t left it to go to Moscow, they wouldn’t be sitting here today, sharing their memories, talking about the transience of home. Sasha knows that Andrei knows this, too. Just as he knows that she knows. They are both poster children for vranyo, pretending that they live in a normal country, pretending that there is no fiery connection between them. Pretending he is simply helping out an old friend at a trying moment of her life, pouring her a few shots of cognac, offering a cigarette to calm her nerves. Nothing improper, nothing that the Party would frown upon.

“So what do I do with Kolya being alive?”

“What do you want to do?”

She knows what she wants. She wants him to still be alive, twelve years after the letter. She wants to talk to him, to hear his voice. She wants to ask him about growing up in Ivanovo, about his paintings, about the war and what it did to him. About the betrayal of their motherland. Not his betrayal of their motherland but their motherland’s betrayal of him. She wants to see Mama through his eyes. She wants to ask him if he ever thinks of her, Sasha, the one he never met.

But she can’t, of course, because he lives—if he is still alive—on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, on the forbidden western side, behind a curtain that never lifts.

She looks at Andrei, who seems to be able to guess what she is thinking.

“To talk to him, is this what you want?”

Sasha nods and lifts her glass to acknowledge his insight.

“Life and fate, this is what it’s all about,” he says, quickly giving a snort of laughter at what he has just uttered. “There’s a Russian novel, Life and Fate. It’s as good as War and Peace, but it’s one of those books that will never be published in this country. The author traveled with the Soviet Army all the way to Berlin, just like your uncle. So if Kolya were a writer and not a painter, this is what he would have written. Life and fate.” Andrei gets up and walks over to the phone on his desk.

Sasha watches him from her chair, not knowing what he is about to do.

“Do you have Kolya’s address in New York?”

She has Kolya’s address, written in his own hand on an envelope stuffed into the inner pocket of her handbag. She unearths the envelope and hands it to Andrei, not sure what he plans to do with it, fearful that he could use it against him. Or, possibly, against her?

Andrei picks up the receiver and dials some numbers on his phone. “I need to be connected to Nicholas Kuzmin, 41 Grand Street, New York City, the United States. K-u-z-m-i-n,” he spells to the operator. He is told to wait, she guesses, because he holds the receiver away from his ear, as if it were a weight. Sasha doesn’t know if this is real or if it’s a sick Party joke Andrei has learned in his job at the Smolny. They can barely place a call to Moscow, let alone the West, so she is keeping her eyes on him, taking puffs on a cigarette, ensconced in her armchair, tired and tipsy and resigned to finish the cognac in her glass. She doesn’t believe that it is possible to pick up a receiver and be connected to someone in New York. They all know there is an indestructible barrier that stops any attempts to make such calls. A thick curtain between them and the rest of the world that prohibits all communication. But as the minutes pass and these thoughts grind through her head with crushing slowness, it dawns on her that they are in the Smolny, the control center for the dreaded barrier. It dawns on her—something she should have realized much earlier—that the barrier may be standing right in front of her, a telephone clutched in his hand.