Yulia Garanina in the flesh—Aunt Yulia, as I called her when I was a child. She had not aged a day, and in fact looked quite radiant and plump compared to the woman I had remembered from the war, though she had never quite looked hungry even then, not like the rest of us. She was still working in the metallurgy division, and there she was, with a new husband and a small boy about Tolik’s age who had dark hair and a serious expression, none of the blond lightheartedness of poor Yaroslava, the older sister he would never meet. Luckily I had my Misha, because if I had been alone, I might not have restrained myself. Seeing that bejeweled, heartless woman who had once called me and my sister thieves for taking two measly pieces of chocolate from her treasure trove made my blood boil.
“Larissachka,” she said, holding my hands in hers as if we were dear old friends. “How nice to see you. You’re looking well. I’m so sorry about Bogdan, he was such a big, warmhearted boy. We had some good times together, really. Can you believe how long ago it was that we were all in the mountains?”
I released my hands from her icy grip. I could not believe the way she was talking—as if she were reminiscing about a summer vacation! I backed away from her, but she kept going.
“When I think of those years, do you know what I remember most? The sunsets. I have been all over the world since then, all over, but I can tell you that no city holds a candle to Lower Turinsk’s sunsets. They took my breath away every time. I have never seen a sky so pink and purple in all my life before the sun went down below the scraggly trees—they were simply stunning, darling, don’t you remember?”
“What I remember,” I said, raising my voice at this ghastly woman, and then faltering. I remembered the stink of flesh and death and urine and the sensation that we were already walking corpses, that we were living in the land of the dead. In the nearly three miserable years we had spent there, the only sunset I could recall was on the evening after my sister got lost by fainting in a snowbank, clutching her white dog. When I dragged her in, our parents collapsed over her, crying madly. The sun was going down right then. It was something unbelievable—the sky painted orange, so luminous and benevolent. Me and my sister and Mama and Papa and our grandmother and the Orlovs—we stood by the balcony and watched the sun fall below the pines until the darkness filled the room. But I would not share this memory with this self-serving woman, who spoke of sunsets like her time in the deadly mountains was a wild romp.
“What I remember,” I said again, catching the alarm creeping into her face. “Is something else entirely.”
Misha stepped in front of me. “Thank you for honoring my brother’s life,” he said. He bowed and pulled me away before I could do any damage. He was grinding his jaw. It was rare that he allowed someone to get under his skin—it was a relief to see it, actually, and it made him seem more human. I saw him as a young man on the evening when Aunt Yulia chastised my sister after we had tried to steal her chocolate, when he had stood by without defending me, and now he was refusing to contradict her again. She walked away with her skirts bouncing behind her. I was tempted to yank her back by her hair, to give her a swift kick in the stomach. That ridiculous woman and her sunsets! It was a blessing I never saw her again.
The next morning, I decided to stop avoiding my grandmother’s old apartment on the way to work; the mountain world was dead to me, belonging to ancient times. I walked through Postal Square and was surprised that no fireworks or lightning bolts greeted me when I found the building, which was smaller than I remembered. The two columns still stood at the entrance and the windows were high and majestic, but it was no larger than my home. Through its arched front window, I could almost see my sister and grandmother and Aunt Shura, laughing recklessly as they did the can-can, tangled up in that blasted boa like they were never going to die. After a few minutes, the front door opened and a man emerged holding the hand of a little girl. I watched them cross the street, and then I went on my way. That was the only time I ever stood there.
I do not realize I am crying until the drops hit my keyboard. Natasha has tears in her eyes. Though I must say that in spite of her current pouting, she has appeared to be in better spirits lately, looking less done in. Perhaps my story has rejuvenated the girl after all. But what, I wonder, will bring me back to life?
“That’s it,” I say as I wipe my face.
“I’m sorry, Baba,” Natasha says. “I can’t imagine.”
“Do not be sorry, my darling. You had nothing to do with it.”
I take a long sip of my tea but it has gotten cold, so I put the kettle on once more. It’s nearly midnight. A light in the building across the street flickers off, followed by another, the world winding down. Again she tells me she is sorry, and I do not even know which part she is sorry about. The destruction of my city? My estrangement from my sister—or her eventual death? Bogdan’s sad demise?
“In fact,” I tell Natasha, “it was after Bogdan died that your grandfather bought the cottage on the sea. We always vacationed on the sea, but he thought it would be nice for us to have our own place. Or rather, a place for me and your father to go in the summers while he was at work, a place to call our own.”
“I didn’t know that,” Natasha says. Then she clears her throat and adds, “I guess there’s a lot I don’t know.”
“That’s right, my child.”
She runs a hand through her hair, looking uneasy, and then adds: “Did you always have affairs, or was it after…”
I sigh before I decide to go on. Of course she was aware of my dalliances, though they dwindled by her teenage years. “Until your uncle Bogdan died, I didn’t entertain the notion of being disloyal to your grandfather—the biggest betrayal at that point in our marriage was his refusal to read with me. But after I saw Bogdan again—well—I felt that old passion again and needed to do something with it. The seaside cottage appeared like a safe harbor in a storm. I know you can’t possibly understand it, but that’s the way it was.”
“I’m not judging you, Baba. I never have.”
“That is kind of you, darling. When I first made eyes at a bachelor by the sea, I thought this was it, that I was living the life my coquettish sister would have lived if the war hadn’t ravaged her, making her shift her priorities from flirting to hating the government and caring for dirty dogs. During my first rendezvous, I pretended I was Polina—not shorn-haired, wan Polina who left Kiev for a second time, but the bright-bodied girl with the long red hair who still turned heads when our family arrived at the station to leave for the mountains. I felt alive again, the world heavy with possibility, the future no longer a guillotine slowly bearing down over my head. That’s just how it happened. I didn’t stop and think about it, really.”
“And Grandpa Misha? Did he know?”
“Who could say, dear child? He was brilliant—how could he have missed it? He never said a word about it, all those long years. He only hinted at it at the end of his days, when he became sweeter, more forthcoming. ‘I hope you have found the excitement you were after,’ he said to me just a few months before he passed. ‘Of course I did, my darling,’ I told him, because what was I supposed to do, ask for clarification?”
I picture my husband at the very end. His heart was weak, we were in the hospital, we both knew this was it. And as I watched him resting there, I thought that he had not only grown to resemble his serious father but that he had outgrown him. He had outlived him by several decades, and it was as if he had become an even more extreme version of the state-fearing bureaucrat in the process, one who would have raged over seeing his porcelain vases and lacquered dining table carted off forever. One who would have been livid that I was leaving our immaculate home to live out my remaining days by the sea.