Andrei must hear something on the other end because the phone is now pressed to his ear. “Yes, go ahead,” he says, walks over to where she sits, and hands her the receiver. “It’s him,” he says. “It’s Kolya.”
His words make no sense. Her uncle’s name, the name of someone who has been dead her whole life, used with present-tense immediacy, stuns her senses and renders her mute. This is a Party office in Leningrad in 1968, and it can’t be Kolya on the other end of the line, Kolya who has been missing in action since the war, who has been in limbo all this time, not listed among the dead or the living. The possibility of this unimaginable connection has warped the reality around them and emptied her of words. Andrei puts the phone into her hand, cradles his fingers around hers. “Talk to him,” he says.
Sasha slowly lifts the receiver to her ear. “Hello,” she mumbles, as if falling from a roof.
The voice on the other end is vulnerable, frightened. “Who is this?” he asks in the fragile tone Grandma used whenever there was a knock on the door of their Ivanovo house.
“It’s eight in the morning there,” Andrei whispers. “We woke him up.”
“Uncle Kolya,” she says, the words scraping out of her throat that suddenly feels parched. “It’s me, Sasha. The one you never met.” She doesn’t recognize her own voice, a voice he has never heard.
There is silence peppered with static, and she presses the phone tighter to her ear, afraid to miss what he says next.
“Sasha, Galya’s daughter?” he says finally, when her ear is numb from the pressure, when she looks at Andrei, desperately, pleading with her eyes for what she should do.
“Yes.” She breathes in, not to be overtaken by rising tears, to be able to utter what she wants to say. “I found your letter in our Ivanovo house. Twelve years after you wrote it.”
“Sashenka, wait . . .” She hears static again, the noises of fumbling, but now she is grateful for the pause, trying to sniffle away the tears, failing, rubbing them around her face with the palm of her hand. “This is so sudden . . . Please just give me a moment.” She tries to imagine Kolya on the other side of the line, the other side of the world, in pajamas and slippers, fumbling for his glasses. “Where are you, Sashenka? Are you in New York? Where are you calling from? How were you able to leave?”
“No, Uncle Kolya, I’m in Leningrad. In a Party office, using an official phone. It’s hard to explain.” She is glad they are still talking about Party offices and phones and not about Grandma and Grandpa.
“I still don’t understand. I never thought I would hear your voice. You weren’t even born.”
“Grandpa said he wrote back to you.”
“I got his letter. I know he was the one who wrote it, not mamochka. He was so angry that I didn’t return home or die.” There is a pause, and she hears a sharp intake of breath. “What he didn’t understand is that I did die.” She can hear his voice break, and in her mind, she can see him crying into the crux of his arm, the way Grandma did when she needed to hide her tears.
She waits for Kolya to catch his breath. “Is he still alive? Is Mamochka?”
By the pause she takes to respond, Sasha can sense that he knows the answer. “Mama died in 1966. Grandma died two weeks ago, just before her name day. That’s when I found your letter.” She swipes at her eyes as Andrei’s hand with a handkerchief comes into her line of vision. She is not sure if she hears the static echoes of her own sobs or Kolya’s, on the other side of the world. “They are all gone,” she manages to utter.
A minute passes, maybe several minutes, as she takes deep breaths to stop new tears from rising in her throat.
“Tell me about yourself, Sashenka,” he says finally.
What should she tell him? What can she tell Mama’s brother, whose story she knows as well as her own, her uncle who she always wished had been her father, a man who has been dead for as long as she has been alive and whose voice is now as close as if he were across the street, speaking to her from what can only be another life? “I’m an actress,” she says, wiping her nose with Andrei’s handkerchief. “I’m all grown-up.”
There is more crackling, but she is able to make out his words through the static. “I feel like I abandoned all of you,” says Kolya, a phrase that Sasha has often repeated in her mind, a thought that has woken her up at night. I feel like I abandoned all of you is what she often mumbles into the darkness at three or four in the morning. Mama and Grandma, Marik and Andrei and every soul in Ivanovo and Moscow who wished her well. This is the moment, with Kolya’s guilt only a centimeter away from her own heart, when she knows what she should tell him. She swallows to steady her voice.