40
My dearest mamochka, papochka, Galochka, and Sashenka （whom I’ve never met but who should now be thirteen）。
For a second, she raises her eyes and looks at Grandma’s dress hanging in the armoire, its little white stars beginning to twirl in a wild dance before her eyes, together with the whole room. I am now twenty-five, she wants to scream to him. I have lived my entire life with your paintings and your journal; with your disdain for the lies of our motherland; with your story of Nadia and the war, which to a large extent has defined my life. I have lived with your memory but without you, because you were dead. You were the first to leave us, before Mama, before Grandma, maybe even before Sima, who died in this house in 1942. You were our conscience, our truth. Just like Theater is for me. So why did you not return after the war? Why weren’t you here to give me guidance, to protect me from floggings and old neighbors’ gossip, to stand in for my father? Why did you abandon me?
As tears blur her vision, she sniffles them away and continues reading.
It took me so long to write because I was afraid to send you a letter from the United States. For all these years, I’ve been torn apart by not being able to contact you, to tell you that I am alive and well because of what we hear about Stalin and his terror. I’ve heard that a letter from the West could land someone in prison, and I didn’t want this to happen to any of you, so I decided to keep silent, as difficult and heart-wrenching as it was. But after Stalin’s death, and particularly after Khrushchev’s speech, things seem to be different, so I’m hoping this letter will reach you and cause you no harm.
I sent you my journal from the Leningrad Front, with a soldier who was demobilized and going back home to Ivanovo. Did you get it? I only received one letter from you, addressed to the Leningrad Front, where you wrote about Sashenka’s birth and Sima’s death in 1942, only a few weeks apart. I cried, tears of joy and tears of sorrow. I was lucky to survive when so many others didn’t. All these years since the war ended, eleven endless years, every day I fought with myself not to tell you I was alive, not to write to you, to send you a telegram, to call. It was a struggle, and I had to remind myself that I couldn’t selfishly announce what I wanted you to know because it would hurt you, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted so much to be with you, but I couldn’t be there. I miss all of you terribly; I miss the dusty road that led to our house, the brown oilskin of the river, the smell of pirozhki Mamochka always baked for my birthday. And I couldn’t write to you; I couldn’t even tell you how much I missed you all.
If you’re reading these lines, please know that all I think about is you, my dearest mamochka and papochka, you Galochka, and Sashenka, whom I’ve never met but who so often comes to me in my dreams. She is always little, four or five, in a navy-blue dress and canvas shoes rubbed with chalk to make them whiter, the way I remember Galochka was dressed for our family photograph when she was that age.
Sasha looks up from the letter and takes a breath. What was true only a few minutes earlier—Grandma’s fresh grave dug by the same two drunks with veiny faces who have dug every grave she can remember, the cotton dress that still holds her smell, Grandpa watering and weeding as if this routine would erase this last week from his memory and grant him peace—is no longer real. Reality seems to have shifted, the past and the present bleeding into each other, the straight timeline crumpling into an accordion of chaos, making everything muddled and disorderly, something Mama would have hated. But she is no longer here to tell Sasha how unruly all of this is or how much she abhors this bedlam.
Sasha looks down at the boards of the floor, scuffed almost white by their feet, by the intertwined lives now all happening at once. She sees her five-year-old mother in a navy dress, a picture she remembers from Grandma’s photo album. Did Sasha also have a dress like this, with a white sailor’s collar stretched over her shoulders, complete with the canvas shoes rubbed with chalk? She begins to feel the weight of its thick, heavy cotton on her arms. Was it her mother’s dress or Sasha’s? She lifts her eyes and through the window she sees Kolya standing by the apple tree, in round glasses that make his features even softer, trying to reach an apple dangling on the highest branch, laughing at his own clumsiness when the branch he is holding slips out of his hand and whips him in the face. As images flood her consciousness, the present and the past jostle for space, crowding the room like pieces of furniture from her childhood, bending and breaking the paths of their lives she has always assumed to be linear. She stares down at the letter in her hands, at her and her mother’s names written twelve years ago with such fierce urgency somewhere on the other side of the world.