1955

Annushka

I told a series of half-truths to get here.

When the woman stamping travel papers asked, I said I was looking for my late father-in-law’s sister, to give her a few of his things. I would have had to bribe her if I were trying to go to Moscow or Leningrad, or any of the cities where you need a residency permit. But no one was trying to illegally set up in a backwater like Tambov Province. I packed up a few worn-down things in case they decided to search my bag. No one did, though. I’ve been told I have an innocent face. 

The railroad took me as far as the city of Tambov, but from there the only way was to hire a ride from a peasant with a cart. I brought cigarettes for that sort of thing. I can’t stand the smell of tobacco, but they’re as good as currency, sometimes better. A hunched old man demanded two packs to take me back to his village, and I could hardly argue, since winter had closed the markets and I might not have gotten another chance for days. 

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We rode in silence for maybe the first hour, bouncing over the ruts and bumps locked in place when the autumn mud froze. The brown grass, roughly the same color as the mud, was unchanging as far as I could see, so I played a game of guessing what happened on these roads. For a while, I followed tracks left by a truck, which suddenly cut off—it must have bogged down and been abandoned. 

“When did they tow it out?” I asked.

“What?”

“The truck that left those tracks.” He looked at me suspiciously. “In my village, the mud could almost swallow a wagon whole. Though our mud was darker.”

It probably hasn’t changed color, but I can’t help thinking of my home in the past tense. If there are people there, talking about my mud as theirs, I can’t imagine them. I don’t want to. 

But it’s a safe topic. Russians are always happy to talk about their mud, like they do their parents and children, with a strange mix of complaints and love. From there, we went on to agriculture, then to who did and didn’t do their share at the kolkhoz, the communal farm. I don’t like to think about kolkhozes, but I let him say his piece before asking if he knew my father-in-law’s family. 

“Chekhov,” he murmured, stroking his silver-stubbled chin. “No, can’t say I’ve heard of them.” 

“His sister’s name is Olga Aleksandrovna,” I said as casually as I could. “Oh, Olga Aleksandrovna? She’s been dead for years.”

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“Did she have any children? My father-in-law passed not too long ago. I wanted to tell them myself, not just send them a letter.”

“Good girl,” he said. “Most young folks don’t bother about the people they left at home.”

I let him go on about the ingratitude of the young for a bit before gently steering him back to Olga Aleksandrovna. She had three children who survived to adulthood—two good ones and one wastrel who was drunk more than he was sober. The old man, who told me to call him Volodya, promised to introduce me to the daughter, and I couldn’t let him see just how grateful I was.

I didn’t want to answer questions about why it was quite so important to me. The village Vitya grew up in was much like any other: little heaps of wood and thatch that only look worse when the steppes turned green around them because their faded gray-brown stands out. It’s the sort of place where men beat women, and women beat children, and everyone is exhausted before they’re old. I don’t think my village was like that, but maybe I’m fooling myself.

Olga Aleksandrovna’s daughter was just another worn-out, middle-aged peasant who looked older than her years, but she was pretty once. I could see the remains. No peasant woman is pretty after her early twenties. The sun bakes and wrinkles their skin, and their bodies don’t go back to their previous shape after pregnancy, like some city women’s do. It doesn’t matter if a woman is pretty when her purpose is to raise children and sling hay bales.

I’m not beautiful, but I could see that she thought I was and hated me just a little bit for it.

“You think you’re one of us,” her eyes said, “but you have no idea what we’ve suffered.”

She didn’t know what I’d suffered either, but the worst parts of my life happened when I was a child, so they don’t show on my face. I gave her my green headscarf when I noticed she was eyeing it. I guess she saw it as a trade, because she finally spoke. 

“You didn’t have to come here,” she said. “My uncle dying has nothing to do with me.” 

“I didn’t exactly come for your benefit,” I said, and her eyebrows rose. She didn’t expect me to confirm her suspicions. “I have a son. His father’s dead, and now his grandfather. And there are some things I need to know, for his sake. Anything you can tell me about the family’s history would help.” 

She settled heavily into a chair near the stove. I could tell from the way she moved that she was wearing a band across her lower belly to hold her organs in, as so many women like her have to.

“There’s nothing to tell. Nothing different from everyone else.” 

I hesitated. “Did your mother ever say anything about her brother? That he was—different?” 

“You want to know if the crazy runs in the family.”

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I lowered my eyes, but I nodded.

“Mama told me her brother lost his mind in the war—not this last war, the tsar’s war. Burned down a house after he got back. That’s all I know.” 

I believed her. No one around town knew much more. There were fragments of old gossip about a farmer named Chekhov marrying a woman from a traveling tribe, fragments generally told with a wad of spit directed at the ground. 

The man who ran the village clubhouse in what used to be the church tried to help me, but there was nothing beyond records of births, baptisms, and deaths. I thanked him anyway and went to wander between the rows of graves before returning to spend the night at the one guest house run by the kolkhoz. 

I found Vitya’s mother, Elizaveta Chekhova, marked with a neat headstone. Something that looked like it might have been a hastily erected cross leaned against the stone, though it had mostly been reclaimed by the earth. I didn’t look around before I crossed myself. If the clubhouse man saw me, he’d just shake his head at a superstitious country woman. And he might have been right. Because I wasn’t praying to God at that moment. I was begging these people who are part of the past to give me some shred of information that absolved me, that said it wasn’t my fault three lives were wrecked. But all I heard was the wind blowing snow. 

I gave Volodya another pack of cigarettes to take me back to the train station. Once I arrived, I found a public phone and went through the ordeal of dialing Moscow, knowing that I’d have to immediately hang up if the wrong person answered. 

“Alo?” the voice on the other end said with Diana’s French lilt. I sighed with relief. 

“Nothing,” I said. “There’s nothing here beyond what he already told you.” 

“I expected as much,” she responded. “Can you describe it, though? To set the scene.” 

I told her everything I observed, down to the color of the mud, and I heard her pen scratching in the background. 

“Thank you,” she said when I’d finished. “I’ll send you something for your time.” 

“There’s no need,” I answered. 

“Oh, don’t be foolish. I know how little they pay you. And I’ve put you to so much trouble, going out there.”

We both knew the real trouble hadn’t yet begun, but we couldn’t say that on a line that anyone could be listening to. “I’m going to send some textbooks for your son. He should start learning French soon.” 

I said I understood and hung up. I didn’t doubt she would send me textbooks, but I could never let my son read what she wrote in the margins. This was dangerous. If I were caught, which I would be if I ever shared any of it, I’d spend the rest of my son’s youth in a prison camp. But I agreed to accept it anyway, because I owed it to her. Hers is one of the three lives I have to atone for. 

1905-1922

Diana

I was five when my father first told me he had plotted to assassinate the tsar.

I had walked into the sitting room in our apartment. His head was bowed in sorrow over the newspaper. I stood on my tiptoes to peer at the paper on his desk, which was larger than our sofa. I could already read, though I have no idea who taught me. Men and women of letters were always coming and going from our apartment on a fashionably shabby street on the left bank of the Seine. It would be a few years before I discovered that not every home in Paris functioned as a stage for a rotating cast of intellectuals dressed in workers’ clothes, laboring over their speeches and newspaper articles. 

Some of them would hide sweets in their jacket pockets and faux-scold me when I filched some, then pat my little blonde head and tell me how pretty I was. My parents never did that. They were old Bolsheviks par excellence, and they took the responsibility of raising the next generation of revolutionaries too seriously to allow for that sort of thing. You young people probably don’t know what that means, since the old Bolsheviks who didn’t have the good sense to die early have all been killed. You join the Party for the perks and promotions. They did it knowing there was every possibility they’d end up on the gallows. 

I knew I was to stay quiet and out of sight when they were writing, until I was old enough to contribute something of value. My father wasn’t writing then, though, so I bumped him in a way that might have passed for accidental. He startled and looked at me as if I’d materialized out of thin air. 

“What happened, father?” 

“The tsar and the emperor of Japan have concluded a peace treaty.” I didn’t really know what this meant. He sighed heavily. “They stopped the war.” 

I had known Russia and Japan had been fighting for as long as I could remember, and that everyone was excited about it. I didn’t yet understand imperialism, that both countries were trying to grab bits of Manchuria and Korea. “Maybe they’ll start another war soon,” I said. 

“No, Diana, they won’t. Even the tsar wouldn’t be that stupid. The people were starting to rise, and it frightened him enough to give just a little. Just enough to quiet them.” 

“Did they win?” I’d heard all my life that we were waiting for the people to rise. 

“No. All they got was a little more pay and a few more holidays, but they don’t know to demand anything else.” I didn’t say anything. He sighed again, probably at my underdeveloped sense of class consciousness. “Happy, comfortable people will never be desperate enough to overthrow their oppressors. Revolution comes from pain. Do you think I was happy when I worked with The People’s Will to try to kill the tsar’s father?” 

“Non, papa.” That seemed to be the correct answer, though the question was perhaps asking a bit much of a child that age. 

“Of course I wasn’t. Foolish people will spend their whole lives trying to scrape together the little happiness their rulers leave them. Our job is to see that they know they are miserable and what to do about it. Bolsheviks don’t try to make people happy. We try to make them into what they can become. Do you understand?”

I didn’t, but I said I did. 

Meg Wingerter lives in the Denver area with her husband Justin and daughter Claire. She covers health for The Denver Post. “The Silence that Remains” is her first novel.