Her mother, in Sasha’s imagination, would shake her head, as if to rid her mind of the nonsense her daughter had just uttered. “This is what you don’t understand,” she would say, forcing each word into the air through tightened lips. “This is exactly why this journal is so dangerous for the family. The truth that Kolya saw.”
In the kitchen, Sasha’s mother, now real, dumps the potatoes into a copper pot she uses to make jams, ladles water from the bucket to rinse them, and snatches an apron off a nail on the wall.
“What’s the NKVD?” Sasha asks, the ominous letters from the journal clanging on her tongue like sounds of a latching padlock.
“Where did you hear about the NKVD?” her mother asks suspiciously.
“From someone at school,” Sasha lies.
“The People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs,” her mother says, tossing the potato peels into a waste bucket. For a minute, she is silent. “Grandma’s brother Volya used to live with us before the war,” she says, having decided to bring the NKVD to life with her uncle’s story. “In 1937, they arrested him for telling a joke. He lived in this house, with Aunt Lilya and their fifteen-year-old daughter.” Her voice now is stern, as if she were delivering a lecture. “There was a knock on the door in the middle of the night. I can still hear it, the kind of knock that only comes at two or three in the morning. Two men in black coats announced that Uncle Volya was under arrest. They didn’t bother to say why they were taking him away. Weeks later, Aunt Lilya learned that as part of his job in a propaganda agency, Uncle Volya had taken a stranger from Moscow to a restaurant. There, not knowing he was sitting next to a good citizen dispatched by the NKVD to listen to conversations with strangers, Uncle Volya told a joke. It wasn’t even a political joke,” she says and shakes her head. “But he should’ve been more careful around strangers. He shouldn’t have babbled. Babbling is dangerous; it’s only one step from treason.” Sasha knows what her mother is referring to: they’ve all seen the poster of a woman in a red head kerchief with a finger across her lips and the caption NE BOLTAI in big red letters.
“But how could they arrest him for a joke?” Sasha asks, glad that she didn’t tell her mother about the journal she found. “Even if he babbled.” She thinks about the early morning when they took away Marik’s father, almost four years ago. Did he also tell a joke? Did he babble? “I babble; my friends babble at school. We babble all the time. Babbling is just speaking. Does this mean that we can’t speak? Should we all be deaf and mute, as Grandpa demands when we sit at the table to eat?”
Her mother opens the door of the kitchen stove and shoves the remaining kindling inside. She lights a match and holds it to the thinnest pieces until they catch fire. The flickering flames are dancing on her face, and Sasha sees the anger rising in her eyes.
“You’re still a child, and you think like a child.” She is stern, punctuating her phrase with a slam of the stove door after she flings a couple of logs into the flames. “This was an arrest Comrade Stalin didn’t know about.” She straightens and walks away from the stove. “Comrade Stalin would never have given the order to arrest an innocent man,” she says, a coda to her Uncle Volya story.
Maybe Comrade Stalin didn’t know about Marik’s father, either. Is it possible, Sasha wonders, that Ivanovo is too far from Moscow for Comrade Stalin to sort out who gets sent to labor camps from here? Too remote to see who does or doesn’t come back home?
Her mother lifts the pot with potatoes and lowers it onto the surface of the stove. Then she turns back to Sasha, pointing her finger at her daughter’s chest. “You should be careful what you say to others.”
She folds her hands on her stomach, pressing the notebook into her skin, and waits for her mother to make her usual trip to the shed for more wood when Sasha can quickly climb up to the storage loft and return the journal to its hiding place. She knows she did the right thing not to have told her mother about the discovery. She feels content. She now has her own secret.
Her mother stares into the pot, where the water is beginning to boil, the tendons in her neck tense, as if she were fighting an invisible fight.
“Uncle Volya never returned from the camps,” she says. “He was shot attempting to escape. At least that’s what they told Aunt Lilya.”
It is difficult to imagine that Uncle Volya, soft-jowled and asthmatic, tried to crawl under three rows of barbed wire. His daughter, Nina, nineteen when the war started, volunteered for the front to avenge her father and was killed during her first week of service. When the mailwoman brought a gray letter announcing her death to their door, Aunt Lilya collapsed and never recovered. She died from the heart, Sasha’s mother says. All Russian women, according to her mother, die from the heart.