I couldn’t go east, not yet. For a few weeks, John and I stayed with the American division that liberated our camp, pulling bodies out of shallow graves, then moving north from Bavaria toward Berlin. The west, despite the magnitude of its colossal ruin, lay powerful and calm, like a large, sleeping lion. By the time we reached Berlin, Germany had surrendered. “Come with me to the States,” said John, who by then—from our conversations in two broken languages and from my drawings—knew about all of you, my art studies, and Nadia. “If you go back, they’ll kill you. You’re talented, and maybe someday you’ll be famous and rich,” he said and smiled, a naive smile showing the gap between his front teeth.
So clearheaded, so simple, so American. I was already in the west—beyond our borders that were soon to close shut and be guarded day and night again—having paid with four years of hell for a one-way ticket out of my motherland’s murderous embrace. But in my mind I saw all of you, even Sashenka; I saw our Ivanovo house, and my Leningrad art classroom, and Nadia on the Palace Bridge, her yellow hat bobbing in the waves.
In 1941, after Nadia’s arrest, I went to the prison on Liteyny Prospekt and stood in line with hundreds of others looking for their loved ones—a useless act brought on by overpowering guilt. When my turn came, a woman behind a glass window ran her hand down the long list of names until her finger slowed down and froze. “Without the right of correspondence,” she muttered and looked up, calling the next person in line. I only learned later what this meant: Nadia didn’t have the right of correspondence because she had already been executed.
We remained in Berlin for a few days, or was it weeks? It was a strange time, almost surreal, pulsing with energy that radiated from the law-abiding Americans, the mild-mannered British, and from my compatriots, who drove too fast on the broken streets and shouted about their victories in the loud, arrogant voices of winners. I walked around the city with my pad and pencil, soaking in this air of impossible unity, albeit short-lived, of buds of the future unfolding before my eyes. And then one morning, John charged into the room where I slept, dropped his backpack by his feet, and yelled that I should get up and catch the plane with refugees leaving for America. I had only a few seconds to make the decision that has haunted me ever since.
Now you know everything there is to know. I live in New York. I never got married. I’ve been without you all for sixteen years, and I can wait no longer. Please forgive me for leaving you after the war, for not coming back. I was young and selfish, obsessed with my art, blinded by freedom and terrified of what the state would do to me for allowing myself to be captured and held as a prisoner of war. I want you to know that John was right, and I’ve become a little famous. But no amount of fame or money can take away the fact that I am an ocean and a half away from you.
With kisses for everyone, until we are all together again,
Yours forever,
Kolya
41
Sasha lowers the pages onto her lap and sits there. How long? She doesn’t know. Images roll before her eyes, things that happened after this letter had already been written and delivered. As she was memorizing her lines for her high school’s acting club, as the fire they’d made in the forest was licking at the snow and Andrei was handing the shell to Marik, as she was standing on the platform by the train bound for Moscow, this letter was already in this house, received and stashed away by her grandfather. Was it ever answered? Sasha can’t conceive of Grandma, who had been waiting for Kolya until the day she died, running to the gate every time it creaked, not answering this letter. She can’t imagine her not getting on a train to Moscow, with the letter in her purse; not taking a taxi straight to the Lubyanka KGB Headquarters and demanding—in a leaden voice Sasha heard only once—an immediate visa to see her son in the United States.
The bang of the front door plucks her out of her trance, and she knows it is Grandpa coming back, having finished his watering and weeding. She hears him stomp his feet on the doormat; she hears him wheeze and lumber toward where she is sitting, in front of the open door of the armoire, with his son’s letter, plucked out of darkness, in her lap.
For a few seconds he takes it all in, and she watches his jaw tighten and his nostrils flare as if he were taking a deep breath.
She rises from the stool and thrusts the letter into his face.
“Did you at least have the decency to write back?”
He doesn’t answer, but she sees his eyes darken, despite a sudden ray of sun that slants through the window from the courtyard.