“Grandma never gave up hope that she would see you,” she says. “To the end of her life, with every creak of the gate, she waited for you to return. Mama brought your war journal to Leningrad when she moved in with me. Your paintings still cover the walls of our Ivanovo house. You have been with us every minute of our lives. We’ve never forgotten you,” she says, and the more she tries to resist crying, the stronger the pressure pulses behind her eyes, the more her mouth trembles uncontrollably. She sees Mama perched on a stool in Leningrad, telling the story of the demented soldier who brought Kolya’s war journal. She sees Grandma on the porch, her body leaning toward the gate she has just heard creaking open, her blue cotton dress as soft as her skin. She sees Nadia on the Palace Bridge, her face fallen, as if she has already glimpsed the future, looking down into the river at the yellow hat blown off by the wind. The three women who loved him, all gone. Sasha sees all this and weeps, and she can hear, through the static, that Kolya, all the way on the other side of the world, is weeping, too.
43
Sasha hangs up and stares at the gleaming phone that has just miraculously given her Kolya. Would Grandma and Mama still be here had Grandpa not hidden Kolya’s letter away from them? Would they have died in peace knowing that Kolya was still alive?
She tries to imagine Kolya on that morning in Berlin, forced to make a split-second decision that defined his life. By crossing the border between East and West, he had entered a life from which there was no return. There is no connection between the two worlds, the old and the new, between the two lives, before and after the decision. There is no bridge, no road, not even a footpath. For Kolya, that decision meant death. Kolya died at that moment, and his life in the West is an afterlife.
“I need to go outside.” She gets up. “To clear my head.”
“I’ll go with you,” Andrei says. “I’ll just walk by your side. We don’t have to say anything.”
What is going on behind the facade of his face? she wonders. Does his job require him to consider Kolya a traitor for making the decision not to return home, for questioning the sacred mercy of their motherland, for doubting the heroism and sacrifice of the war no one is allowed to doubt?
The little park in front of the Party building is filled with diffused light, and, as always in June, it is difficult to tell afternoon from night. Sasha doesn’t know how long they spent in Andrei’s office, how long she sat there staring at the phone after the call. It could be six in the evening, or it could be ten at night. They walk along the street toward the Neva, their silence matched by the unusual stillness of the city, interrupted only by gusts of wind from the river. It must be late, Sasha thinks, with most people home, windows lit by the pale light of white nights.
An occasional bus clangs by on the embankment as they cross the nearly empty street and lean on the brown granite banister. The light above the river is so white and thick that you feel you could hold it in your hand. With the baroque center of the city behind them, the view from here is rugged and industrial, necks of construction cranes hanging over the water, drawing long shadows onto its leaden surface with the sun sinking toward the Okhtinsky Bridge. This is the unbound time, the disconnected time, time that has lost its meaning, time where no time exists. Down below is the river—its surface rippling and sparkling in the sun, the image that Sasha knows is still burned into Kolya’s brain—its enormity and depth an extension of life itself.
“So what do I do now?” she asks. This is a complicated question, but if it has an answer, her chances of finding it are better here, by the river, in this milky light, at this unknown time.
Andrei turns to her, and his eyes are dark green again, the eyes of their Ivanovo childhood. They are so close that she can no longer make out his whole face: his features have disintegrated and shifted, like she imagines in the Picasso portrait that she has never seen, the one Kolya described in his journal. They stay like this for what feels like several minutes—his chest rising when Sasha takes a breath, the two of them melded into one—their faces only centimeters away from each other, deconstructed and warped. What is she hoping for? That he will announce he is going to divorce his wife and quit his job so that he can be with an actress?
This thought breaks the magic of the moment, and they separate, his features assembling back to normal, his eyes turning brown again.
“I can do something for you that no one else can do,” says Andrei, and from the deep place his voice emerges, she knows this is serious. “After all I’ve done to you, I hope you will accept this as a gift with no conditions.” For a minute, he stares at the ripples of water below. “I know I hurt you, and we both know I can’t undo what I did.” His voice is hoarse, and she can see only one side of his face, a blue vein pulsing under his temple fringed with white hair. “But I can get you on a plane to see your uncle in America.”