010

H er name is Vera, and she is a poor girl. A nobody.

No one in America can really understand this girl or the place in which she lives. Her beloved Leningrad—Peter’s famous Window to the West—is like a dying flower, still beautiful to behold but rotting from within.

Not that Vera knows this yet. She is just a girl, full of big dreams.

Often in the summer, she wakes in the middle of the night, called by some sound she can never recall. At her window, she leans out, seeing all the way to the bridge. In June, when the air smells of limes and new flowers, and the night is as brief as the brush of a butterfly’s wing, she can hardly sleep for excitement.

It is belye nochi. The time of white summer nights when darkness never falls and the streets are never quiet....

I cannot help smiling as I close this book—my book. After all these years, I have finished my journal. Not a fairy tale, not a pretense; my story, as true as I can tell it. My father would be proud of me. I am a writer at last.

It is my gift to my daughters, although they have given so much more to me, and without them, of course, these words would still be trapped inside, poisoning me from within.

Meredith is at home with Jeff; they are preparing for Jillian’s wedding and the plans are all-consuming. Maddy is still at work, managing the four gift shops her mother runs. I have never seen Meredith so happy. These days her schedule is full of things she loves to do, and she and Jeff are often traveling. They say it is to research his novels, which are so successful, but I think they simply love to be together.

Nina is upstairs with her Daniel, whom she has never married but loves more than she realizes. They have followed each other around the world on one amazing adventure after another. Supposedly they are packing now to leave again, but I suspect that they are making love. Good for them.

And Anya—I don’t care that she Americanized her name; she will always be Anya to me—is at church with her family. They come down often throughout the year and fill this house with laughter. My eldest daughter and I spend hours together in the kitchen, talking to each other in Russian, remembering the ghosts in the room. In words and looks and smiles, we honor them at last.

I open the journal one last time and write, for my children, in as bold a hand as I can manage at my age. Then I close it and put it aside.

I cannot help closing my eyes. Falling asleep comes easily to me these days, and the room is so warm on this late December day....

I think I hear the sound of a child laughing.

Or maybe that is a left over sound, the remainder of our Christmas dinner. We are together again this year, all of us, this new version of my family.

I am a lucky woman. I did not always know that, but I do now. With all the mistakes I have made, all the bad and terrible choices, still I am loved in my old age, and, more important perhaps, I love.

I open my eyes, startled by something. Some noise. For a moment I am confused, uncertain of my surroundings. Then I see the familiar fireplace, the Christmas tree still up in the corner, and the picture of me that hangs above the mantel.

It hangs where once I had a painting of a troika. At first I didn’t like Nina’s photograph. I look so terribly, terribly sad.

But it has grown on me. It was the beginning of this new life, the time when I finally learned that with love comes forgiveness. It is a famous photograph now; people all over the world have seen it and call me a hero. Ridiculous. It is simply the image of a woman who threw too much of her life away and was lucky enough to get some of it back.

In the corner of the room, my Holy Corner still stands. The candles burn from morning tonight; both of my wedding pictures stand upright, reminding me every day that I have been fortunate. Beside the photograph of Anya and Leo, a dirty gray stuffed rabbit sits slumped on his side. Comrade Floppy. His fake fur is matted and he is missing one eye, and sometimes I carry him around with me for comfort.

I stand up. My knees hurt and my feet are swollen, but I do not care. I have never cared about such things. I am a Leningrader. I walk through the quiet kitchen and into the dining room. From here I can see my winter garden, where everything is covered with snow. The sky is the color of burnished copper. Ice and frost dangle like diamond earrings from the eaves above the porch. And I think of my sweet Evan, who saved me when I needed saving and gave me so much. He is the one who so often told me that forgiveness could be mine if I would reach out. I would give anything to have listened to him earlier, but I know he hears me now.

I am barefooted and wearing only a flannel nightgown. If I go outside, Meredith and Nina will worry that I am going crazy again, that I am slipping. Only Anya will understand.

Still, I open the door. The knob turns easily in my hand and cold air hits me so hard that for a beautiful, tragic second, I am back in my beloved city on the Neva.

I walk across the new-fallen snow, feeling it burn and freeze the bottoms of my feet.

I am almost to the garden when he appears. A man, dressed all in black, with golden hair set aglow by the sunlight.

It cannot be him. I know this.

I go to the bench, hold on to its cold black frame.

He moves toward me, gliding almost, moving with an elegance that is new, or that I don’t remember. When he draws near, I look up, and stare into the green eyes of the man I’ve loved for more than seventy years.

Green.

The color takes my breath away and makes me feel young again.

He is real. And here. I can feel his warm presence, and when he touches me, I shiver and sit down.

There are so many things to say, but I can say nothing except his name. “Sasha...”

“We’ve waited,” he says, and at the sound of his voice, a shadow peels away from the blackness of his coat and takes its own shape. A smaller version of the man.

“Leo,” I say, unable to say more. My arms ache to reach out for my baby boy, to hold him. He looks so healthy and robust, his cheeks pink with life. Then I see that same cheek slack and gray-blue, sheened in frost. I hear him say, I’m hungry, Mama... don’t leave me....

At that, pain uncoils in my chest, making me gasp out loud, but Sasha is there, taking my hand, saying, “Come, my love. To the Summer Garden...”

The pain is gone.

I look up into my Sasha’s green, green eyes and remember the grass in which we knelt so long ago. It was there that I fell in love. Leo clings to me as he always did, and I scoop him up, laughing, forgetting how I’d once been unable to hold him in my arms.

“Come,” Sasha says again, kissing me, and I follow.

I know that if I look back, I will see my body, old and withered, slumped on that bench in the snow, that if I wait, I will hear my daughters discover what has happened and begin to cry.

So I do not look back. I hold on to my Sasha and kiss my lion’s throat.

I have waited so, so long for this, to see them again. To feel like this, and I know my girls will be okay now. They are sisters; a family. This is the gift from their father. This is what my story gave them, and in the past ten years, we have loved enough for a lifetime.

I think, Good-bye, my girls. I love you. I have always loved you.

And I go.