Before sunrise, Galina packed a few belongings, collected Alya at Benjie’s house, and caught the morning train for Ryazan. She left Alya with the Baturins, who were delighted to reunite with their former charge. Knowing Viktor’s haunts and habits, Galina had no trouble finding him. She ascended the steps of a bleak building to the top floor. The nameplate was devoid of a card. She listened for a moment. On hearing movement inside the apartment, she knocked. At first, Viktor opened the door only a crack, but on seeing Galina, threw the door open and spread his arms wide. Several minutes later, he was found on the floor in this cruciform posture, with a bullet hole in his forehead. Galina had made no attempt to escape. The neighbors on hearing the report of the gun had called the constabulary. She was casually reading a magazine when the police arrived.
Alya remained with the Baturins during her mother’s trial, at which Galina was found guilty of having been driven to murder because of jealousy—her lawyer argued that Viktor, her former lover, had abandoned her—and sentenced to ten years in a work camp. With the outbreak in 1939 of the Russian-Finnish war, she volunteered for nursing duty at the front. In February 1940, after a massive Russian push breached the Mannerheim Line (the Finns’ southern defensive barrier stretching across the Karelian isthmus), the Red Amy moved north to the Finnish city of Viipuri (Vyborg), where Galina died of typhus.
Petr Selivanov, although a deserter, and denounced as an enemy of the people, made his way undetected from Kiev to Ryazan, where he rejoined his daughter and took her back to Bogdanovka, in Ukraine, where he was living with his second wife, Tatiana, and his young son, Benedikt. In October 1941, Bogdanovka became the site of an extermination camp, run by Rumanian occupation authorities. At one point, fifty-four thousand Jews were held there. Petr and his wife hid a local Jewish couple and their two daughters. When discovered in the attic of the Selivanov’s house, the Jews, as well as Petr’s family, were marched to a nearby forest, ordered to remove their clothes, and kneel. They were shot in the back of their necks. A plaque, honoring all the murdered, now marks the spot of the extermination camp.
Bogdan Dolin was sentenced to ten years in Kolyma. At the end of his sentence, he chose to live in Magadan, working for a printer.
Goran Youzhny escaped punishment but was forbidden to work as a photographer. He apprenticed to a tinsmith, eventually gravitating to a metal shop in Leningrad. The shop, however, published its own newspaper, and Goran quietly oversaw the photography department.
Vera Chernikova was appointed temporary and then permanent director of the Michael School and immediately invalidated all of Sasha Parsky’s reforms, returning the school to its former curriculum and pedagogy.
Major Boris Filatov had hoped to find a new director for the school, but before he could do so, he was transferred from Tula to Moscow, to work in the disinformation section of the NKVD.
Avram Brodsky escaped imprisonment, but was placed under house arrest, forbidden visitors, and subject to the whims of a police “minder,” a state of affairs that he regarded as tantamount to capital punishment. During Stalin’s purge of “cosmopolitans” (read: Jews), the government rescinded his food-ration card. Rather than depend on the handouts of neighbors, he slowly starved himself to death, perhaps in part because of what had happened to Benjie’s mother.
Natalia Korsakova was transported to the Vorkuta Gulag, located in the Pechora River Basin, twelve hundred miles from Moscow and one hundred miles above the Arctic Circle. She died of starvation in the service of the state, digging coal.
Devora Berberova continued as the head secretary of the Michael School and quickly became a favorite of the interim director, who now knew that Devora reported directly to the NKVD.
Father Zossima, because of Comrade Berberova’s benign reports of him, was left to his hovel and humble life, dispensing aid when he could.
Ekaterina Rzhevska, Alya’s tutor, adopted Benjie, following the Soviet custom of adopting waifs and the orphaned children of exiles.
Larissa, Basil, and Polkovnikov remained with the NKVD. They felt that they had played an important role in unmasking the Three Musketeers and exposing the “wreckers,” and that the medals they received, like the many they’d earned in the past, were not sufficient recompense for their unstinting work. But they said nothing and merely increased their vigilance for the good of the country.
And the innumerable denouncers, what of them? Did they too have medals pinned on their chest? As far as anyone knows, they received the government promise that they would live in a prosperous and glorious land, a paradise, in the life to come. Sadly, the government neglected to say, “only not yours.”
FINIS