When Sasha switches on the lights in her new apartment, she watches her mother’s face as she looks around the hallway and into the open doors to the bedroom and the kitchen. Wrinkles gather around her eyes, and her mouth softens: she is clearly impressed.
“Good for you, Sashenka,” she says, stroking the rounded door of the refrigerator in the corner of the hallway. “Your theater must like you.”
Although Sasha can’t deny a rush of pleasure at hearing the words she has hoped for since drama school, she is not quite sure what they mean. Has her mother finally accepted Sasha’s choice? This is the first time she has attached words of praise to theater, but what exactly is she praising? Sasha’s acting career or the apartment that came with it?
Sasha lifts her suitcases onto the divan and helps her mother unpack. She has brought her good dress, white with a red apple print; her photo album with pictures of Sasha in a white apron on the first day of school, of Grandma and Grandpa staring into the photographer’s camera on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, and of her pressing stethoscopes to the bare chests of eight-year-olds at her first job in the summer camp called the Dawn of Socialism.
She has also brought Kolya’s original journal.
March 14, 1942
I don’t know why I am writing all this, and for whom. I suppose I am still clutching at the hope that this war will end before I get killed, that these pages will somehow find their way to my mother and sister even though no censor will let them pass through. But if I don’t write and if I don’t draw, I will become like my sergeant. I would invalidate every painting on the walls of the Hermitage. I would betray the milky air of Leningrad’s streets, and the softness of Nadia’s arms, and her foolish trust in my promise to save her.
A hunk of sealing wax with a round stamp across their front lock, a stamp that branded Nadia’s apartment the property of the state.
I stood in front of that sealed door, in a state of shock so complete that I could see myself from the outside: my frozen limbs, my jaw hanging open in a stupor, my eyes squinting to make out the letters stamped on the wax. I stood there, helpless and defeated. Then I began banging on the door with my fists and then with my feet, as if those who took away Nadia and her mother might still be inside, waiting for an accomplice to whatever crime they have concocted.
Just then, the door to a neighboring apartment opened a crack, held by a chain from the inside, and a young woman in an apron glared out. I had seen her before: we collided at the front door to the building a few times in the past when she clicked her way down the stairs on high heels in red lipstick and teased hair. “What’s all this racket?” she demanded. Her hair was peroxide blonde, and there was something waspish in her demeanor that warned me not to ask any questions. “No one lives there anymore; can’t you see that?” she said and gave me a long, scathing look to make sure that the message had sunk in. It had. “And if I were you, I wouldn’t hang around this place too long,” she added and banged the door shut.
I stared at the wax seal on Nadia’s apartment again. The landing smelled of old cigarette butts and yesterday’s soup. That was the moment when I realized, with horror, that I didn’t know any of Nadia’s family or friends. Her mother had a sister, Nadia’s aunt, living somewhere in Sverdlovsk; Naum Semenovich had no siblings. If Nadia had any grandparents left alive, she never talked about them. She and I were so wrapped up in our own world, we were reluctant to open its doors to anyone from the outside. We didn’t need anyone else, she used to say; all we needed was each other.
At the university, the secretary at the philology department where Nadia was studying leafed through the students’ files, and I watched as her fingers with short, bitten-off nails reluctantly walked through sheets of paper in the drawer. She finally stopped at one folder, stared at it for a while, then lifted her eyes to look at me. I held her gaze, suspicion mixed with disdain.
“She left school,” said the secretary curtly and looked down at the file to avoid my gaze.
I knew what this meant but wanted to press this bureaucrat further, to make her uncomfortable, as if she were complicit in Nadia’s disappearance. “When did she leave the school?” I asked. “And why?”
It was as useful as Evgeniya Iosifovna asking the men arresting her husband about the reason for his arrest.
“Recently,” said the woman, letting me know with her frown that the second half of my question was out-of-bounds. She pushed the filing drawer shut and straightened her spine, signaling that our conversation had come to an end.