Sasha follows her mother to the kitchen, her hefty figure leading the way through the hallway, past the refrigerator and the coatrack. She has always led the way, but Sasha hasn’t always followed. She has escaped from Ivanovo, and for all these years, she has wanted to think that its provincialism had not left a permanent mark on her soul, that the air of Moscow and Leningrad allowed her to draw a clear line between truth and pretense, between the heroic textbook story of the war and what Kolya lived through at the front.
In the kitchen, her mother boils water for tea and spoons out of a jar the strawberry jam from Grandpa’s Ivanovo garden. Frankly, Sasha doesn’t know how to react to her mother’s story. She thinks she would feel better if she hadn’t told her, if she didn’t know that her mother was an informer. She wonders if having this knowledge makes her a coconspirator, if she is now complicit in the deed. This knowledge has raised more questions than she knows how to answer. If she were in her mother’s place, would she have done the same thing? Would she have come to an NKVD apartment every month and concocted reports about her teacher, no matter how benign? And although she wants to think that she would never succumb to spying, how can she know this for certain? And if she refused—if her mother had refused—what would have happened then, to her and to Sasha?
Her mother drops two cubes of sugar into her cup and slowly circles her spoon around until they dissolve. Kolya’s journal is between them at the center of the table, a stark reminder of their past, marking the gap between their ways of thinking.
“We wrote to Leningrad to find out about Kolya,” her mother says. “Right after the war and then again, at least three more times. It was always the same answer: not listed among the dead or the living.” She takes a sip of the tea from her spoon, then pours it into the saucer because it is too hot to drink from the cup. “I even went to the island of Valaam soon after Stalin died. There was a holding pen for war invalids in the old monastery there, men without arms or legs, some without both arms and legs—they called them samovars. I don’t know how those people got there. There was a rumor they were rounded up at night in the streets and railroad stations of the cities where many of them begged for a living. They put them in cattle cars, the rumor went, and brought them to this faraway island on Lake Ladoga so people wouldn’t have to see their deformities and be reminded of the war. Anyway, that’s what we heard.” She lifts the saucer to her lips and takes several sips of the tea. “And then there were some who chose to go there because they didn’t want to be a burden on their families after the war.” She pauses. “This is what Kolya would’ve done, I thought, if he’d been badly wounded. So I took a train to Leningrad and boarded a boat—they had excursion boats going to Valaam once a day. It’s a serene island, with a striking northern nature, stark and beautiful. I knew they didn’t let tourists visit the invalid home, and even giving someone directions could cost you your job. So I’d packed my white doctor’s coat and hat. The monastery wasn’t difficult to find—it was the tallest structure on the island. The white coat worked: the nurses and doctors all wore white gowns, as I knew they would.”
Sasha sits over her cup of tea and listens: today seems to be a day for revelations. She can’t imagine Uncle Kolya maimed, with missing arms or legs or with his face burned away—disfigurements that would make him unrecognizable to her. She doesn’t want to think of him ending up in such an inglorious place as this invalid repository on some remote island.
“It was a day in August, unusually warm, and everyone who could get outdoors was outside, on the grounds of the monastery. The men without legs rode on boards with little wheels, and those without arms, who could walk on their own, sat on benches. The samovars with no legs and no arms were hanging in baskets suspended on tree branches, brought there by the nurses.” Her mother stares into her cup, as if trying to see once again what she saw on Valaam island back then. “They were hanging off the tree branches, talking to each other, arguing, laughing. With their war decorations displayed on their chests. I walked around and peered into their faces. They were young, most of them, but they all looked older than me. One man Kolya’s age, with four medals and the familiar softness of the chin, called to me as I was walking by. “Sestrichka,” he said, “can you help me?” He called me little sister and asked me to carry him inside and put him on top of a bucket so he could relieve himself. I did, even though he wasn’t Kolya. Even though not one of the invalids was Kolya.”