The shelves on the left are filled with packs of aspirin and tetracycline, with rolls of bandages and cotton, with knitting needles and a rainbow of crocheting thread, the same things Mama kept in their Leningrad armoire. The top shelf seems to be empty, and for no reason whatsoever, she stands on tiptoe and shoves her hand up to swipe around its bottom. Her hand slides over what feels like a small box, but she is too short to close her fingers around it, so with the help of a stool from the dining room, the box is now in her hands, and she is back on the floor.
From the window, Sasha sees Grandpa in the courtyard, pulling the yellow bursts of dandelions out of a bed of radishes, as she holds the box like a stone weighing on her palms, something she already knows she shouldn’t have taken down from its deliberate hiding place. Something that ought to have stayed out of sight where it belonged, where someone placed it not to be found. But it is too late. It is in her hands now, claiming its space with sudden urgency, deliberate and jarring.
She lowers herself onto the stool and peers out the window again, as if looking away would make the box in her hands vanish back into its shelter on the top shelf of the armoire. Grandpa has pulled out the last dandelion and is now cranking the rusty handle of the courtyard well, waiting for the bucket to creak its way up from the echoey darkness into daylight. A watering can is waiting at his feet, ready to be carried to the bed of carrots and beets. Sasha pulls up the lid of the box. Inside is a book-size square wrapped in the kind of cloth Grandma used to make cottage cheese. Inside the cloth, after she untangles it, is a piece of cardboard bent in two, held by a rubber band. Someone has made an effort to disguise what is inside, trying to hide it not only from an outsider accidentally stumbling onto it but also from himself.
She weighs the folder on her palm, as if its heft could determine its importance, as if the act of staring at its brown cover could reveal what is contained inside. Behind the window, Grandpa is lugging a watering can in one hand and a bucket in the other, his shoulders stooping under their weight, his knees nearly buckling. She didn’t know he was so old. Or did he suddenly get old because Grandma is no longer here to fill him with reasons to go on, reasons beyond the garden with its watering and weeding?
The rubber band around the folder crumbles under her fingers, but the creased cardboard doesn’t spring open, kept folded for years. How many years—five, fifteen, twenty? How long has this box been sitting on the top shelf of the armoire, away from anyone’s reach?
Sasha doesn’t want to wedge herself between the past and present again; she doesn’t want to become complicit in another secret. But with the empty box in her hand, she knows she already has.
She straightens the crease and tries to massage away the years of storage with her fingers. The inside feels about a centimeter thick. She thinks of the storage space above the kitchen where years ago she found Kolya’s journal, of its cramped interior that smelled of dust and old shoes and that held so many secrets. She closes her eyes and sees the magazines with poetry by the writers no longer recognized by the state, recipes for dishes whose ingredients have long vanished from their store shelves, hats—the objects of frivolity and luxury—that women gave up wearing decades ago. She thinks of the small things that made up their life here: Mama helping Grandma shred heads of cabbage, then pouring salt over the crunchy layers that were stuffed into a barrel until the slivers of thick leaves reached the brim; of Grandma singing as she knitted another sweater or another pair of mittens; of Mama sorting strawberries and currants before she poured them into copper bowls to make jam; of the life Sasha so deliberately left to be an actress. And now the question stares her in the face: Was it worth it? Have her performances and her acting changed anything or anyone? Have they brought back the forbidden writers, or the forgotten foods, or even women’s hats that all those years before the Great Terror had kept her grandmother elegant and young?
Inside the folder is an envelope, long and narrow, with foreign stamps and red-and-blue airmail stripes around the edges. It is not at all like one of the Russian envelopes, plain and square. It is addressed to her grandparents, in a handwriting that is definitely Russian in the way it effortlessly loops the letters together, the way they taught them cursive writing in first grade, through hard work, repetition, and shame. On the other side is the return address that makes the blood drain from her veins: Nikolai Kuzmin, 41 Grand Street, New York, USA. A letter from Kolya.
The stamp on the envelope is a washed-out blot of black ink, the post date dissolved, impossible to make out. The top of the envelope is neatly cut open with a knife, the way Grandpa opens all mail, and Sasha yanks out the folded pages, the date glaring from the top right corner: 15 of April, 1956. Twelve years ago.