“Everyone knows that his father was nothing but a drunken convict. A man who threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of his house to trap his wife inside. That was his way to get back at her for all those times she dragged him back home, his shirt stained with vomit and his pants soaked with piss. All those bystanders, the crowd that watched, think they know the truth, but what they saw was what became the official story. I was in the garden, and I saw what really happened. I saw it all.”
Sasha lowers herself onto the other end of the bed. They are both sitting now, facing each other.
“I knew Andrei wanted to kill his father, even before the roof cratered and the house collapsed. I saw him with my own eyes. I saw him pick up a rock big enough to crush through his drunken father’s skull. But the thug saw what his son was up to. He smashed a bottle in his hand against the fence; then he turned toward the crowd. One of the neighbors yelled at him to drop the bottle. Instead he shouted back a squall of curses and took a few wobbly steps. That was when he lost his balance and fell.” Her grandfather pauses, takes a breath, stares into space in front of him. “It would’ve been so easy if he’d died right then. The son rushed forward and squatted over him, to see what he was hoping to see. The drunk’s face was bloodied from the fall, but he opened one eye and looked up as if waiting for the verdict. His hand was still holding the bottle, a bloody circle on his shirt, but it was only a minor wound. Not deep enough to kill him. I could see that from where I stood, and his son could, too.”
Sasha draws a deep breath and runs her palm over her cheeks as if to sweep away the words her grandfather is pressing upon her, rubbing into her face.
“There was still a rock in Andrei’s hand, and I saw him linger. Maybe he imagined what should’ve been that miscreant’s death. Maybe he imagined yanking his father to his feet so that he would tumble straight into the flames. It would be like flinging him directly into hell. But that didn’t happen. What happened was that with his back to the crowd, Andrei closed his fingers around his father’s hand with the broken bottle and drove the jagged glass deep under his ribs. The father gasped, but the two of us were the only ones to hear it.”
Sasha almost gasps, too, but stifles a groan in the depth of her throat. Grandpa’s words metamorphose into images in her mind, rushing before her eyes like frames of a film she would rather not see. Scenes of what Andrei had told her over the years and what he hadn’t told her, what he couldn’t tell her. She thinks of how his face cringed into a mask of hatred when he spoke about his father after the fire, when he spat out his father’s camp stories, almost as if he had to purge them out of his system. She thinks of their walk to the Neva when Andrei admitted he had done something that his father-in-law could send him to prison for. Something that was too late to confess to her, too late to mend. She thinks of the wife Andrei did not choose. Now it all begins to make sense. Like colors in a kaleidoscope, with one turn of Grandpa’s hand, Andrei’s cryptic stories and his refusal to explain anything have snapped together, arranged into a pattern.
Sasha gets up and stuffs the pages of the letter into the envelope with foreign stamps. “I’m going back to Leningrad tomorrow,” she says, walking to the door, heading for the exit from her Ivanovo life. She turns back one last time and sees a commander again—snow-haired, rooted to this house, not nearly extinct—her grandfather, who has fought his last battle and won.
Past Kolya’s paintings on the walls, past Grandma’s holiday teacups in the sideboard, she flees to the room she used to share with her mother, where she kneels by her suitcase and carefully fits the letter into the zipper compartment on the bottom. It will stay there in dark safety until she arrives home, to her Leningrad apartment, where she will expose it to the milky light streaming through the windows, the light Kolya painted so well, where she will decide what to do about the two secrets revealed today: her uncle’s letter from America and the truth just forced upon her.
42
She stares at the card Andrei gave her, at his name printed in bold official letters, Andrei Stepanovich Gordeev. Would anything be different now if he had told her what really happened on the day of the fire, what transpired later between him and his father-in-law? Would her knowing the truth have brought them closer together or torn them even further apart? Andrei and Kolya, the two names ingrained in her heart, the two Ivanovo revelations that now seem inherently connected. She rereads the handwritten pages of the letter several times until she, too, begins to question Kolya’s decision not to go home, until she begins to hate herself because this doubt diminishes her, makes her just like Grandpa, cruel and small-minded. What is it in Kolya’s letter that brings this doubt to the surface, makes it unfold like the petals of a poisonous flower? Why wasn’t his love for Nadia strong enough to make him return to look for her, not to give up after just one trip to the Liteyny prison? Why did it take the word of only one bureaucrat to end his search?