Behind the first room was another, to the left, and I made my way there without thinking, as if someone had grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me forward. I stepped inside and froze in place. Against the wall, between two lamps with hideous curlicues, stood a divan I remembered so well. I hoped that the vision would disappear, but there it was still, an object whose pattern of wear was forever imprinted in my brain, whose scratches and bumps I knew with every fiber of my body—our divan, Nadia’s and mine.
I stood in front of it, emptied of feeling, numb. Before me was Nadia’s past, for sale, her family’s past turned to merchandise in a secondhand shop. It only confirmed the worst scenarios hurtling through my mind, the dark scenes I’d been trying to banish so I wouldn’t go mad. It only validated the toxic fear that there were no more Goldbergs. It only pressed into my brain the monstrous, vomit-tasting probability that there was no more Nadia.
30
“So after that,” Sasha asks, pointing to Kolya’s scorched notebook, “what do we do?”
“After that, soup with cat,” her mother says, a saying she invokes when the future presents itself as nebulous and murky, as opposed to the unclouded version offered by the Pravda, or when she doesn’t even want to think about the future. She has just lumbered in with a load of wet laundry that she begins to pin on two clotheslines that crisscross the room.
“I have to tell you something,” Sasha says. “I’ve read all this already. I found this journal in Ivanovo, when I was eleven, stuffed into the storage loft, behind Grandma’s prerevolutionary hat.”
Her mother unbends from the aluminum tub with the heap of laundry and for a minute stands there silently, looking at her, waiting for an explanation.
“Our house was full of secrets.” “Full of lies,” Sasha wants to say but doesn’t. “And this journal was just one of them. A secret, I knew, you didn’t want me to know.” She walks over to the wall and tightens the sagging clothesline around the nail. “I hated you and Grandpa when I found it. You hid the truth Kolya saw at the front, and that was another lie added to a mountain of lies about our glorious past. It made me feel complicit, this adult secret I had to carry all those years. It almost felt like an initiation, a required rite of passage into our life of lying and pretending. The guilt that we pass down from one generation to the next.”
Her mother is bent over the laundry, taking a long time to unwind the nightshirts from the towels.
“Why did you keep it there, with all that old, discarded junk?” Sasha asks, watching her mother’s deliberately slow movements, watching her straighten a towel to fit over the rope.
“You still don’t understand,” her mother says and sighs. “It was the only safe place in the house. It was the only place they didn’t turn upside down in 1937, when they arrested Uncle Volya.”
Sasha had to know this: the storage loft was not a place of disgrace but safety. The only place to hide prerevolutionary and unpatriotic things. She is chagrined by her unnecessary question, yet there is still more she needs to know. “But how did this journal get to you in Ivanovo? All the way from the Leningrad Front?”
For a few moments, her mother pats the hanging towel, ironing the wrinkles. “A man came to our door in 1943. He may have been in the same platoon with Kolya; I don’t know. The man was demobilized; he had been wounded in the head. He could barely remember his own name, but he had our address written with indelible pencil on the inside of his shirt. Kolya Kuzmin asked me to give this to you, he said and handed me the notebook. Of course, we immediately brought him into the house, Grandma boiled tea, pulled out every scrap of food we had. He didn’t touch a thing. He didn’t even sit down. He paced the room from corner to corner, shaking, his teeth clattering, as if he had a high fever. Then he would suddenly stop and look around. We asked him where he had been; we asked about Kolya. He didn’t answer any questions. He only mumbled about some peasants from a tiny village he’d been ordered to shoot in the woods.”
“What was his name?” Sasha asks.
“Anton, he said, after we repeated the question five times at least.” It wasn’t Kolya’s pal Seryoga. No easy coincidences here, no missing pieces conveniently fitting into an unfinished puzzle. “His shoes were all torn, and his feet were bloody. I tried to clean and bandage them, but he pushed me away. He gave us his address, somewhere on the other end of the town, but when I went there a month later, there wasn’t a trace of him. A family, evacuated from Kalinin, had just moved in, a woman with two children and a sharp-elbowed mother-in-law. They hadn’t heard of a wounded man who returned from the war. They had their own two men still fighting, the woman’s husband and brother, and they didn’t want to hear anything about someone who had just been demobilized and sent home.” Her mother pauses. “After that, we sent Kolya several letters addressed to the Leningrad Front. I don’t know if they ever reached him. We wrote that his brother Sima had died. We wrote that you were born. But we never received anything from him again.”