Мария Кузнецова - Something Unbelievable

“Shura,” she mutters under her breath when she reaches the grave, calling to her long-dead daughter. “Dear Shura. Why aren’t you here to save me?”

This old, tired woman in a boa, babbling in her nightgown—I almost pity her, but I do not lose my resolve.

“Maybe Papa could have saved you,” I say.

“How’s that, my dear?” she says. She wipes her forehead with her coal-black boa. It takes a moment for her eyes to settle on me, for me to be certain she knows I am not Shura.

“Papa could have saved you, maybe,” I say. “But you killed him.”

“How’s that?” she says again, genuine confusion furrowing her ancient face.

“You killed him slowly when you trucked him off to that orphanage, when you made him a caretaker of Uncle Pasha and all those lost, lonely boys. Then you killed him again, last month, when he saw another crowd of helpless boys and could not help but save them over himself. You exiled him from his own family and made him think his life was worth nothing—even at his funeral, you couldn’t be bothered to say a single kind word about him! You’re the most selfish woman I’ve ever met, but Papa was utterly selfless because of you, don’t you see? Just like Polya is utterly spoiled because of you! You are hideous and vile and have never done anybody a lick of good!” I say.

She tilts her head back and lets out a long, maniacal laugh. I can see a sliver of her white throat, bare without its necklace.

“Selfish?” she says. “You think I am selfish?”

And then she gives me a hard, cold slap. She had not hit me since she mocked me for wanting to touch her necklace when I was a child. I enjoyed the familiar bitterness of the sting.

“Who are you?” she says then. “Who are you to understand the decisions I have made? To know what I have suffered? You don’t know anything about the world. I am not selfish in the least—if I were selfish, I would have fled to Odessa with my children and set foot in the free world, but I did not know what life would be like there. So what did I do for them, instead? I married a monster!”

“A monster?”

“A man whose monstrosity I did not understand until my boys had been living under the same roof with him for a few months. It was too late to take my choice back, but not too late to send them away! What else could I do—leave him and my daughter and go back out on the streets? I couldn’t do that on my own.”

“So you’re the one. You’re the one who sent them away.”

“It was best for everybody.”

“You’re crazy,” I say, stepping back. “You’re a crazy old lady. You’re the monster!”

I could not believe what she was telling me. I searched her face for hints that she was crazy, that she was the same person who was babbling to her dead sister just moments ago. No, her story was reasonable. It made sense of her comment that entering the orphanage was the best thing that ever happened to my father. I recalled how Papa always stood an arm’s length away from Dimitrev senior any time we visited his lavish apartment, his body stiff like he was bracing against an icy wind, his knuckles white against his sides. How could I have misread his hatred of him—I assumed it was because the man had him sent away, not because he had degraded him. My poor Papa! All those evenings spent enduring this bawdy man with his vodka as he flirted recklessly with Polina and Baba Tonya. Twisting his silver mustache around his dirty finger. The more he twisted it, the longer—

Could it be true? Of course, it was beyond me to show my grandmother that I believed one shred of her story. It was too late. I had already made up my mind about her.

“Go back to bed, Baba,” I say. “Come on, let’s go back to sleep.”

She looks up at me like she has an endless river of things to tell me, her eyes wet but lucid, and I do not want to hear it. Instead, in a small voice, she says, “I am exhausted.” And then she follows me back to the apartment.

Which is where I lie, wide awake, waiting for signs that my grandmother is asleep—but she continues to toss and turn until I hear Uncle Ivan and Snowball stepping out for a walk, and then I hear Mama and Aunt Tamara stirring, so I lose my chance to creep back under the linden tree to dig up the necklace, which is very unfortunate, because when everyone gets up, Mama insists that Baba accompany me and my sister and the brothers to the market, where she dies before I have a chance to return her finery.

I leave it resting under the linden tree until we prepare to leave the mountains. Then, while my sister and Bogdan sleep above me, I sneak out to dig it up, pausing to run my hand over the Papa and Mama portrait packed in the dirt. Though the town is silent as I claw through the earth, when I look up at the apartment, I think I see it: a tiny rustling of the curtain on the balcony. Did Polina hear me leaving the room and go out there to see what I was doing, suspecting that the only thing worth digging up in the middle of the night was the damn necklace? Or was I just seeing things? The next day, she treats me with her usual indifference and does not seem particularly suspicious, though she is so weak that it’s hard to see how she feels about anything.

I keep the necklace hidden in Kiev for the next decade, until Bogdan dies and we buy the cottage by the sea, and then I hide it under the floorboards there, not knowing what to do with it for all these long years until I began telling Natasha my story and understand where it must go. I resurrect it during my return to my seaside home, finding it waiting for me there, as shiny and formidable as it had been in my youth. At first, I am almost afraid to touch it, as if it is haunted. As if my grandmother will materialize out of the ether to slap me for taking it away, and tell me, one more time, “Why Larissa. I did not think you cared for nice things.”

My edges fade by morning. All night long, it is not the conversation with my grandmother that flits before my eyes, but my last conversation with my sister. I see Polina, shorn-haired, standing beside me at the Kiev station as she prepares to board the train that will take her away from her Motherland for good. After I told her to keep up her looks a little more and she scoffed at me and said, “Is that right, Larissa? Our grandmother cared about appearances, didn’t she? And look where it got her.” I wondered—had she seen me digging up that necklace, just before we left the mountains, understanding what I had done? Or was she just commenting on our grandmother’s frivolous nature—one she had decided to forgo, and one which she believed, with good evidence, that I carried on?

I have tried to return to that night again and again over the years, to stare up at Building 32 after I unburied the necklace to see if someone was watching me from the balcony. Sometimes I saw my sister in her nightgown, but more often I saw nobody. Once the ghost of Papa appeared, staring out into the dark woods, eyes tinged with disappointment at me for not taking care of my sister. Yet another time, a ray of light shined on the balcony and revealed Licky merrily rolling around on his back, his belly basking in the glow. My grandmother and horse-faced Aunt Shura made an appearance once, doing the can-can with their arms around each other, their skirts flying up.

And truly, what did it matter? It is as pointless as trying to recall whether I ate fish or beef on my wedding night. There is no getting Polina back. Though I have my doubts, if there is something on the other side of this life, then perhaps I will find her again. Perhaps I will walk toward her, and tug on her arm as she had once done to me as we were leaving the city. “I’m scared,” I would tell her, while she would give me a triumphant smile and say, “Well, don’t be!” It would serve me right.