26

AND SO, NOT QUITE eight hours later, just in time for dinner, he found himself standing in front of the burgundy front door to his parents’ modest, siding-sided Craftsman house. During the last decade’s D.C. real estate boom, these had become “starter homes” for young families eager to give their children the best public education money could buy. They would stay for a few years, and then trade up to a more suburban suburb, one where they could be grander and more isolated, could see even less of their neighbors and spend more time in their cars, but feel just that much better about themselves every time they wrote their fashionable 20852 zip code on their return address.

Yet when Rosie and Sam bought the house almost thirty-five years ago, they had no thought of leaving: they had finally arrived. When they had their children, each could have his own room (and if, as happened, only one came along, they could have a library and a guest room, too); they had a patch of yard out front and a garden out back; they had their own garage and their own driveway and their own walkway leading to their own front door. Rose no longer had to live with three brothers and two sisters in three rooms above a bar and grill, perpetually slick and meaty with hamburger grease and ripe with beer vapors that floated up through the bathroom, so you stepped out of the shower smelling like the bottom of a pint glass. Sam didn’t have to traverse a maze of fabric, cloth, half-made dresses, and piles of cleaning just to wait outside the bathroom in the middle of the night while his mother took her time, only to be rewarded with half a double bed and a fragrant view of his brother’s feet.

For the rest of her life, whenever she told Jim and his cousins the story of their first night in the new house she would say, “At last, we’d live like Americans,” and then proceed to recall that every creak and whisper terrified her, the house’s empty space pressing in on her like an unwelcome harbinger of purgatory, and they ended up squeezed back in the Hamden apartment with the rest of the Dooleys for the next six days, until Sam finally and for the last time put his size 6 foot down. “He wanted someplace of his own,” she’d say with a shrug. “Of our own,” he’d correct. It was a polished routine; it was a happy marriage; and almost all of it had taken place within these walls and those of the restaurant not two miles away.

Jim put his bags (one satchel, and one cheap Chinese suitcase—bought at the chintziest of outdoor markets on the way, no doubt from Jim’s apartment to the airport—that Mina had filled with as much as she could from his apartment) down to the side of the walkway—he didn’t want to make his mother step over luggage when she gave him a frantic hug. As he leaned forward to knock on the door, he noticed a thin cardboard envelope propped against the house in the shadow of the eaves. It didn’t look like it had been there for long—no water stains, no fraying of the brown paper wrapping—and his parents used the garage door: they wouldn’t have even seen it. Jim picked it up, and saw that it was addressed to him. The blocky, unsteady lettering of the non-native writer of roman letters couldn’t quite disguise the elegance of the writing. It was addressed only to “VILATZER SEAMUS, VILATZER HOME NOT RESTAURANT, WASHINGTON DC.” Jim smiled: a few courier services had their regional sorting services behind the tracks at Twinbrook, and the restaurant always had done well with those employees.

It bulged slightly, and bore no return address, stamps, postage, or evidence of customs inspection; a sticker on the top bore the name “Zachistki International Courier Company, Bayonne, New Jersey.”

Jim sat down on the stoop to open it. From beneath the door an evening at home wafted: the smells of frying onions, roasting meat, and cigar smoke; the faint sounds of his mother singing in the den as she folded laundry, and his father opening and closing cabinets in the kitchen. Home. He used his key to tear through the tape, then reached into the envelope. He felt nothing. He turned it upside down and shook it. A postcard fluttered down. The picture showed the tracks of a busy train station early in the morning, the sun rising over two long trains, whose blocky, military-green cars, black and red engine, odd aerial attachments hooking on to the wires over the tracks, and general look of sturdy implacability would have marked them as Russian even without the Cyrillic lettering on the front, without the identifying name—SLYUDYANKA STATION—printed on the border beneath the picture.

He turned the postcard over. In the bottom right corner was an outline map of Russia with a dot showing the position of Slyudyanka: on the southern tip of Lake Baikal, by the Mongolian border. In the opposite corner: his name, in ballpoint pen, swooping handwriting, and Cyrillic letters:

 
Dzheem:

My grandfather the scientist believes that you are in superposition as I write these words: like Schrodinger’s cat, you are neither alive nor dead, because I am not there to take your measure. But I know this is not true. I know you are alive. I know it. I do not know how, but I know it. Perhaps I think that by saying it over and over again, I can make it true.

It is a grave sin to depart from someone dear without saying good-bye, and I write hoping, believing, that you can forgive me for it. You see, my grandfather has lived like a prisoner for so many years. He is not jailed, of course, but neither is he free: always watched, always asked, always hounded. He retired and thought he would be free to do as he wished, go where he wished, but his old life has followed him like a shadow, and living always in someone else’s eye—someone other than your beloved, of course—is no kind of life. In the confusion at Zavodsk, I saw my only chance to make him free. He has given everything to his country, his family, his work, and he has never asked for anything in return. He deserves to live what remains of his life on his own terms.

To tell you the truth, I never thought we would make it as far as we have. I thought we would be caught as we snuck through the woods behind Vorov’s house, but the soldiers had more important prisoners to worry about. I expected we would be taken at the train station, then on the train itself, but Grandfather’s Hero of War card melted doors before us. Not until we boarded a commuter train here at Slyudyanka and disappeared into the immeasurable space where the tracks give up that I finally realized we might have escaped.

I had an inkling something like this might happen—not an escape east, of course, but something world-changing—when Grandfather disappeared, so I have been traveling with all the money I have. It isn’t much (to an American!), but it was enough to get us here.

But we will not be here for long. To many people—to you, perhaps, and also to us Siberia stands for cruelty, prison, exile, but in truth it has always offered another bargain: freedom in exchange for isolation. Siberia has always been Siberia, never quite Russia, and as I write this looking out the window at the black pines, white sky, and brown soil, I cannot quite decide if it is not of this world or if it is the world distilled. It will, anyway, allow us to live, and pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh at gilded butterflies. I always did like Lear, but I think my days onstage have passed.

I am running out of space, but do not think of this as an ending. As surely as I feel you are alive, I feel sure I will see you once again. Until then, I hope you will think of me, too, in superposition, even as you know and feel that I am, in fact, not.

He ran a finger delicately over the letters, feeling the slight impression, as close as he would ever come in this life to touching her again, and put the card in his pocket. She would be there for a day, maybe a week, and then disappear, like so many others, into Siberia’s wild anonymity.

Siberia. In his mind an image flashed as though transmitted: thickets of birch and pine, dense, balsa-scented forests abutting a deep blue lake, tiny villages of wooden houses, smoke curling from their chimneys. Siberia has always offered freedom as much as exile, safety as much as punishment. Jim’s grandparents went west for their new world; Katya headed east.

And Jim? As he thought about what he would say to her, to his parents, to Vivek—as he thought about translating experience from feeling and memory into language—he felt the images start to stiffen, go word-brittle and necrotic.

He looked around at the place he had so desperately wanted to flee, and he felt Moscow recede into his past, become swallowed up by everything that he had been and would be here. He refused to allow that. Life’s sharp immediacy, the acceptance of risk as a necessary condition of existence rather than—per the American suburbs—as something to downplay or run from: these things he would keep with him here. He wasn’t sure how, but he knew that returning home meant more than just sliding back into old patterns, old selves, old expectations. He was himself now, more than he had ever been before.

Jim stood up, brushed himself off, and tried the door. The handle moved smoothly: the Vilatzers were the last couple in suburbia to leave their doors unlocked. Before pushing the door open, Jim took a deep breath, partly to ready himself for the stories and the explanation, but mostly just inhaling the warmth, savor, and welcome of home.