I DON’T THINK I can sleep through the long, interminable wait for Anna’s plane to arrive in Washington. I don’t think I can sleep, knowing what Valya’s suffered through, and not knowing what poison is pumping into him with each beat of his heart. But sometime in the deepest hours before morning, sleep comes to collect its due.
I dream, again, of Mama. We’d found the bird on our afternoon walk, one wing stretched out, rubbery, and dragging on the ground as it hopped in circles. Zhenya laughed and snatched a stick from the ground to poke at it, but I pried it out of his fingers. “It’s hurt,” I scolded him, in as stern and motherly a voice as a ten-year-old could manage. “We have to help it.”
It was September, and still warm enough that I could make it home without my hat and scarf, so I scooped the bird into the knitted cap and wrapped the scarf around it like padding, thinking, foolishly perhaps, that it might feel comforting, like a nest. The bird glared at me with black, glossy eyes, the feathers around them damp and crusted. Each jostle along our path home brought a fresh squawk of indignation, a small protest in the larger indignity of its abduction.
Mama clucked her tongue as we came in the door; she pulled on rubber gloves and eased the wing out straight, not flinching when the bird shrieked and pecked at her. “It’s broken badly,” she said. “Looks like he was attacked by a bird of prey. He has wounds on his stomach, too.”
Somehow the word attacked pushed tears to my eyes, as if it had ripped away a scab. Mama peeled off her gloves and pulled me into her arms with a sigh, pressing my face against the warmth of her jagged collarbone as she awkwardly patted my head. “It’s the way of things. It’s not your fault. It’s just how the world works.”
Even so, she helped me mix together a paste of cherries and water, and we fed it to the bird with an eyedropper, his beak opening and closing in a silent question when he wanted more. Mama helped me tape a tongue depressor to his wing with medical tape, and we used hydrogen peroxide to try to clean the wounds on his stomach.
He should have healed up. Zhenya kept his promise to leave him alone; we made the bird comfortable in a cardboard box on the windowsill so he could bask in sunlight and see the sky that we wanted him to return to soon. But within a few days, his will to live must have dried out, for I woke to find him stiff and cold, already smelling musty.
“Why did he have to die?” I screamed at Mama, as she dug a hole in the backyard of our dacha. “It’s all so senseless. There’s no point in it.”
The shovel fell from Mama’s hands, clattering against the freezing earth. She seized me by the shoulders with startling swiftness. Her nails dug into my arms through her wool gloves; her eyes tightened to two blazing points as she knelt before me, urgency rippling through her. I felt bolted into place by that intense gaze. I didn’t dare so much as breathe, lest I disrupt the moment with a tuft of frozen breath.
“There is always a purpose.” Cold spit flecked across my face as she hissed out the words. “The more senseless a death seems, the greater a purpose it can serve. The less sense it makes, the more we must honor it. Remember it. Vow to never let it happen again. Do you understand me?” She shook my shoulders; my brain rattled in my skull. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I muttered, though of course I did not.
How could I? I had no real perspective on death. The most senseless, most tragic deaths, like those of millions of Russians in the Great Patriotic War or in Stalin’s purges, are like a great weight on a cosmic scale, and the only way to balance them is to heap justice on the other side of the scale—through honoring, through remembrance.
And maybe, just maybe, through revenge.