But then the year Tanya turned thirteen, the bells in a few of the churches were allowed to ring. People were saying the unthinkable and hoping for things they'd never allowed themselves to hope for. At the city university history professors cancelled exams. 'Not to worry,' Tanya saw one of these professors say on TV. 'We believe in the future. It's the past we're not so sure about.' About that same time Lukeria stopped hiding her metal icons behind those shabby pictures of fruit. All this inspired in Tanya a boldness she'd never felt before, and one morning she followed her grandmother into the kitchen, solemnly watched the morning protocol and even ventured a religious question.
'Why do you kiss the icons?'
Lukeria did not look at Tanya, but merely climbed down from the wooden chair as steadily as she had climbed onto it, as if she'd known all along that Tanya had been observing her. 'The kiss is a reminder to hold heaven on the lips,' Lukeria said evenly.
Tanya helped Lukeria scoot the chair back to its proper place. 'Do they kiss back?' Tanya asked.
Lukeria straightened, looked as if she'd been slapped across the face. From that day on, if heaven were at her grandmother's lips, then pure hell was on her tongue. If ever Tanya ventured a question, Lukeria turned surly and short. About her work on the Sverdlovsk line, Lukeria would say very little. Inside that steamer trunk was a wooden box her grandmother had shown her once—only once—and inside the wooden box—an Honourable Railway Worker Medal. It took her forty years to earn this medal and was not an easy feat for her, a small woman, and one of the only women on the tracks working among men.
'Did you sell tickets?' Tanya asked.
'No.'
'Inspect travel documents?' This question produced a dark look like none she'd ever seen before on her grandmother's face.
'I pulled the traction string that was connected to the switch at the box. Some trains were sent south, some east beyond the Urals. And then some were diverted to the spur that ran to Kutchina.'
Kutchina was a word in Perm like no other. If the Devil had a nickname it was Kutchina. If there was a hell outside of hell, it was Kutchina. But being the child that Tanya was, in the presence of something horrible and secret, she had to ask—wanted to know—what was in those wagons that barrelled over the tracks toward Kutchina?
'Freight.'
'Cows?'
'Not cows.'
'Pigs?'
'Not pigs. People.'
'What kind of people?'
'People like you wouldn't believe. Dissidents. People who talk. Otherwise-minded people. Poets.'
Could this be the answer to the riddle, the answer to the real question Tanya had wanted to ask: Where was her mother? Where had Marina gone? Had she, too, taken a fatal train ride? Tanya wasn't completely a child anymore, she had started to bleed down below and felt it was time her grandmother told her the things girls like her needed to know.
Lukeria merely nodded to the windows, to the clouds. 'She went to a better place,' she said in a voice as flat and formidable as the steppe in February, as the back of her iron skillet from Magnitogorsk.
Even then, Tanya knew that a better place was anywhere but here. Australia. Canada. Finland. Or maybe the Black Sea—Sochi—where they sold lemon ices. As an Honourable Railway Worker, Tanya's grandmother, Tanya figured, would know all these things. Of course Tanya asked.
'Don't ask the cuckoo in the tree foolish questions,' Lukeria replied, and it was then that Tanya understood her mother's departure had been swift and it had been Tanya's fault. Tanya had been unwanted and there was nothing she could ever do to change that fact. She felt a sadness that no words in the world could name. Yoked with that sadness was the hard and sudden understanding that if she could not be lovable, then she must try to be likeable. And if not likeable, she must at all costs find ways to be useful, malleable, agreeable. If her grandmother loved an invisible God, then Tanya would too. If her grandmother prayed on her knees in the morning, Tanya would pray too. She would learn the protocols and the rituals and recite the prayers, quietly, of course. The stories about the saints and their miraculous visions in the forests, all these things she would treasure in her heart, because these were the grand stories of faith, and her grandmother valued them. And faith, her grandmother said, was cloud, water and air, acted upon by the unseen hand of God. Faith was not about knowing where the path led, but believing the path led somewhere. And when her grandmother talked like that, in a whisper—always a whisper—her words were to Tanya the greatest gift. Her words were beautiful and wise because Tanya knew that they had first come from an old woman, maybe even the great-grandmother Tanya had never met, but who had, nevertheless, whispered them to Lukeria—but only after it had once been whispered to that old woman, and so on and so on. This was how the faithful find God—in repetition of sound and gesture over time. That was tradition and tradition was not some silly ritual or toneless chant, but one woman after another, a mother singing into the ear of her daughter the words and the melody of an ancient unbroken song, which, Tanya was learning, almost always sounded like suffering.
On this morning, Tanya stood at the threshold dividing kitchen from living room. Lukeria had already kissed the icons, something Tanya was still not permitted to do, and now she was reading aloud from one of the many letters she kept locked in the steamer trunk.
Though it is cold and the work is hard winter will not last forever.
This was just one of the many letters Lukeria found on the tracks, tossed from the wagons. Some of the letters even had photos inside, prayer cards, locks of hair. Perhaps they were written by prisoners in transit, men and women desperate to discard anything that might be used against them or their families.
Slava has taken ill with a vapour. I have given him my blanket.
Or likely as not, they were simply letters in excess, the letters prisoners had written beyond their twice-a-year allowance. Confiscated by the guards, these missives were stowed in the wagons to be pulped and recycled, and somehow they'd found their way into her grandmother's trunk.
But do not worry. Some things never change. The stars shine whether we see them or not.
Pure poetry, some of these letters. This one anyway. The Yellow Letter, Tanya dubbed it. Folded and refolded so many times it was the suggestion of paper; bends and seams rather than actual wood fibres held it together.
I will always love you.
The kettle screamed. The spell broken, Lukeria stopped reading, carefully refolded the letter in half and tucked it between her blue bathrobe and the side of the chair.
They had lived together for so long they were like an old married couple, only noticing the other when, like a stitch dropped, a line forgotten, something in the pattern of their routine went askew. This is the only way Tanya could explain why her grandmother would make herself so painfully transparent, reading aloud a love letter that was not written to her, but that she read and reread, claiming it as her own.
Tanya carried the tea to where Lukeria sat in contemplation before the weak light resolving itself to day. A leaden hulking cloud massif, the kind that carries snow, obscured the horizon. Tanya sank into the chair opposite Lukeria and opened her cloud notebook. If she superimposed that horizontal scoring of her grandmother's forehead and the deep crow's feet at the corners of her eyes over her own doughy half-finished face she could translate cloud to image, translate water to woman, and bring her mother back, as long as they two, grandmother and granddaughter, sat at the window.
Today the grey is a hueless hue hovering between light and dark. I want to know you by your eyes, your lashes, your hands, your teeth. Instead you are light dampened by windows, colour with the noise turned low.
'When I was your age,' Lukeria paused to light a cheap Bulgarian cigarette, 'I was prettier than you are now.'