The Secrets We Kept(26)

It was rumored that Stalin was sick and his reins were loosening. After my night in the cottage, I was allowed to receive mail from my family and Borya. He wrote of his heart attack, a condition he attributed to my arrest, and how he spent months in a hospital bed fearing he’d never see me again.

He wrote of his renewed obsession with finishing his novel now that he was well again and could be in contact with me. He said he’d finish it at all costs, and nothing—not the authorities who were likely reading his letters, nor his bad heart—would keep him from doing so.



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Dear Anatoli, do you remember the night before Stalin died? I dreamed of birds that night. Not the white doves I’d been longing for—which the women of the camp believed signaled one’s imminent release—but of black crows, thousands sitting in rows like chess pawns in an empty concrete lot. The crows barely appeared to be breathing, and when I walked toward them and clapped my hands, they remained still. I clapped and clapped until my hands were raw. And when I turned to walk away, some inaudible signal propelled them to take flight. They swarmed into a beating cloud that covered the moon. I watched as the cloud shifted to the right, then left. Then, all at once, the cloud dissipated in all directions, each bird going her own way.

The next morning, the music started before dawn, blaring from the camp’s loudspeakers. We all seemed to sit up at once, squinting until our eyes adjusted to the darkness. Funeral music—they were playing funeral music. No one in Barrack No. 11 said a word. No one asked who had died. We already knew.

As the music continued, we splashed cold water on our faces from the bathing trough and dressed in our smocks, not knowing if we’d be summoned. When no roll call came, we sat on our bunks and waited in silence. Buinaya went to the door, cracking it open and sticking her head out. “Nothing,” she said, shaking her head.

The music stopped and the loudspeakers crackled. We heard the needle hit a record, then our national anthem began. We looked around, not knowing whether to sit or stand and sing. A few women stood, then the rest of us followed. The anthem finished and we remained standing. There was a moment of silence before the speakers cracked again and the familiar, deep voice of Radio Moscow’s Yuri Borisovich Levitan announced, “The heart of the collaborator and follower of the genius of Lenin’s work, the wise leader and teacher of the Communist Party and of the Soviet people, has stopped beating.”

The recording ended and we knew we were supposed to cry. And we did. We cried until our eyes were swollen and throats raw. But not one tear dropped for him.



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Soon after the Red Tsar fell, my five years were cut to three. I’d be home by 25 April. Stalin’s death prompted our new leaders to release 1.5 million of us. When I received the letter stating the date of my release, I went back to Barrack No. 11 and looked into the jagged piece of mirror hanging above the bathing trough. I had the bronzed look of someone who’d spent years in the camps. My eyes were still cornflower blue, but framed by wrinkles and dark bags. My nose was spotted from sunburns. My figure was not the picture of health but of survival: my clavicle sticking out, each rib visible, my thighs thin as sticks, my blond hair dull and lifeless, my front tooth chipped from a pebble in my soup.

What would Borya think? I thought back to the time he told me he feared seeing his sisters again after years of being apart, after they’d emigrated to Oxford. He said he almost preferred to not see them again, to keep the pretty young visions he had of them intact. Would he feel the same way about me? Would he look at me as he had his wife—someone he no longer shared a bed with? Would he compare me with my own daughter, someone he’d seen grow into a beautiful young woman while I aged beyond my years? “Ira’s become the very picture of her mother,” he’d written me in a postcard.

Buinaya, who had yet to receive amnesty, walked behind me as if going to wash her face, then turned and pushed me into the makeshift mirror. Shards of glass dropped to the floor and I stumbled back, a thin line of blood dripping from my forehead. She smiled at me and I smiled back, blood trickling into my mouth. She scowled and walked away. And that was the last I saw of her. But when I heard that those who had not received amnesty eventually rose up—and that during that uprising, the fields and the Godfather’s cottage and the whole camp had burned to the ground—I imagined Buinaya was the one who’d lit the match.



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I boarded the train to Moscow a rehabilitated woman, Anatoli. The city had grown in bounds during the three years I’d been gone. Cranes hoisted steel beams. Factories had taken the place of fields. Between the old two-story buildings made from logs, blocks of apartments had sprung up with thousands of windows and thousands of laundry lines stretching across their thousands of balconies. Stalin’s baroque and gothic vysotki reached for the sky with their star-topped towers, changing the cityscape and announcing to the world that we, too, could build buildings that touched the clouds.

It was April and the city was on the brink of spring. I’d come home just in time for the purple lilacs and tulips and beds of red and white pansies to emerge from their winter slumber. I imagined walking along Moscow’s wide boulevards with Borya again. I closed my eyes to savor the picture, and when I opened them again, the train had arrived. I looked anxiously down the tracks. He said he’d be waiting for me.