“My grandfather told me what happened on the day of the fire,” she hears herself say. “What really happened.” She watches Andrei’s face tighten up as he leans back. “He was in the garden and saw it all. Your father was the one who set the fire. He didn’t die from the fall.” She pauses, as she paused before opening the box where Kolya’s letter had been hidden. “You killed him.”
Andrei balls his fists under his chin and stares down at the stained tablecloth. Does he see what she sees in her mind, the charred carcass of his house, his mother’s grave? Does Sasha want him to admit his guilt? Does she want him to repent, to say anything at all? For what feels like several endless minutes, he stares at the tablecloth, and she stares at his face. When he finally looks up, his gaze has lightened. He remains silent a few minutes longer, but she can see that his face has softened, eyes lit with relief.
“I did what I’d wanted to do ever since my father returned from the camps. Ever since I remember.” He speaks hastily, words rolling down his tongue, as if all these years he has been waiting for this moment to tell her his story. “As he stood there swaying and bragging about how she finally got what she deserved, all I could think of were those times when I tried to protect her from him. So just as the burning house crashed behind us, as I saw blood soaking his shirt, I knew exactly what I was going to do. For the first time, I knew I could be free of him.” Andrei rubs his forehead, shielding his eyes with his palm. “I felt no guilt at that moment, no shame. But I must have felt shame because I drank for weeks. Every night when we returned from work, Vadim—my future father-in-law—set a bottle of vodka on the kitchen table. We drank from tea glasses, just the two of us.”
Sasha remembers this from their talk in Ivanovo, when Andrei told her his father’s camp stories. The two of them, he and his boss, hozyaeva, the masters of everything.
“I don’t remember how long I stayed with Vadim and his family. I don’t know how many times we left for work and came back together, how many bottles he set down on the table, how many times Natasha and her mother ladled soup into my bowl.
“What I do remember is that on one of those nights, I confessed to him what really happened. I told him I’d killed my father.” Andrei props his forehead with his hand and looks down. “And he told me that I was a hero. That I did what I had to do, what he would have done, what any man would have done. That was when he gave me a promotion. He said the Party needed strong, determined men like me.”
Andrei stops, presses his palms over his eyes, as if he wants to black out what he saw.
“With the promotion, they gave me an apartment, but I still went to dinner at Vadim’s at least once a week, an invitation extended by his wife, without fail. And every time, without fail, I felt Natasha’s liquid gaze on me, the heat emanating from her body when she stood close in the hallway to say goodbye. Why am I telling you all this? It doesn’t change anything. It can’t. Then one day she came to her father in tears and begged him to do anything to get me to marry her.” He pauses. “That was when Vadim gave me a choice”—the word echoes in Sasha’s head, in sync with her pulse—“a choice between a life of hard labor for murder and a life of privilege with his daughter.”
For a minute, they are both silent. “But he knew that what you did was to avenge your mother’s death,” Sasha says quietly.
Andrei smirks. “At that point, who would have cared about this tiny detail? Not Vadim. Not the courts. Not anyone.” He exhales loudly, as if he wants to rid his body of every detail of the story he has just told her. “This was the beginning of the end—not my first downfall and not my last.”
In her mind, Sasha replays the day when she saw him crouched by the smoldering pile of wreckage that used to be his house. She didn’t know then that everything had been already set in motion, that their lives had been already placed on tracks running in opposite directions.
Andrei stares down at the stains from the food and wine, his hand wiping away the invisible detritus from the tablecloth, as if he hoped to make it white and crisp again.
“When my father got back from the camps, he told me stories of what it was like, stories I refused to believe back then. Back in Ivanovo, I told you some of those stories. He said that among his fellow inmates were former Party members who had interrogated prisoners and carried out horrific verdicts. Now, in a kind of cosmic mockery, they found themselves incarcerated for the same crimes for which they had tortured and executed others. Later I thought of it as universal retribution. But what struck me most about his stories was that the victims’ denouncers were not some foreign agents. The denouncers were their own neighbors and friends. Sometimes even their cousins, their own brothers and sisters.”