The old woman directed him to the front of a long counter and disappeared into an adjoining room. Behind the counter, women in faded smocks, their heads wrapped in scarves, moved about the stacks of files and papers. The Gulag had been an assiduous compiler, and Danforth imagined that with the current thaw, thousands upon thousands of people were now seeking their lost kindred. In that paper graveyard and in others like it throughout Russia, the millions of dead lay in the mass coffins of filing cabinets.
“Okay, come,” the woman said as she emerged from the room. She motioned Danforth down a corridor, past several rooms where children sat at small desks, making him realize that the building also served as a school.
When they reached the end of the corridor, the old woman led Danforth inside a room where perhaps thirty children sat facing an ancient blackboard. The lesson had to do with Russian history, but now there were no pictures of Lenin or Stalin.
“You wait,” the old woman said, then marched up the center aisle and spoke briefly to the teacher. Danforth couldn’t make out what was being said, but after a short conversation, the teacher, a small, squat man in a threadbare suit, walked halfway up the aisle, then bent forward and whispered into the ear of one of the students. For a moment, the little girl sat quite still, then, as if in response to the teacher’s urging, she rose, turned, and walked toward Danforth. She wore a white shirt and gray skirt, as did all the other little girls, but her hair was shorter, and very curly.
“Hello, sir,” she said in perfect English when she reached him. She stretched out her hand. “A pleasure to meet you.”
It seemed to Danforth that he had never held so slender a hand. “Where did you learn such perfect English?” he asked.
“From my grandmother,” she said.
Danforth saw her startlingly blue eyes and knew that they were his; he saw her tightly curled hair and knew that it was hers, and in seeing this, he recalled that long-lost night, and under the weight of that remembrance, he sank to his knees and gathered his granddaughter into his arms. A great seizure of weeping shook him and he cried in a way that returned him to all the many ages he had known: the young man who had loved her, the middle-aged man who had sought her, and now the old man who had found her in the only way she could still be found.
~ * ~
Lexington Avenue, New York City, 2001
There was a knock at the door.
Danforth glanced at the clock, and a tiny smile crossed his lips. “Right on time,” he said, then called out, “Just a minute.” He looked at me. “Could you get the door, Paul?”
I rose, walked to the door, and opened it to find a woman in her early twenties. She was small and dark, with strikingly blue eyes and short, very curly hair.
“Hello,” she said, giving no hint of surprise at seeing a stranger open Danforth’s door.
“Hi,” I answered from the curious daze that overtook me. “I’m . . . Paul.”
“Yes, I know,” she said. She offered her hand, and I took it. It was extraordinarily small and delicate.
“I’m Alma.”
“Alma,” I repeated. “That means ‘soul’ in Spanish.”
“In Spanish, yes,” Alma said in a tone of complete authority. “And in Arabic it means ‘apple.’”
“So you’re a student of languages,” I said.
“Yes,” she said. “I work as a translator.”
“Come, sit down,” Danforth called from behind us.
She stepped in front of me, made her way over to Danforth, and kissed him softly on the forehead. “How are you doing?” she asked.
“As well as can be expected,” Danforth said in a way that attested to some grave circumstance he had not revealed to me but that I now saw in the waning strength and slight pallor that had overtaken him during the past hours.
“Sit there,” he told Alma, then nodded to the seat I’d earlier occupied. “And you sit there, Paul.”
Danforth waited until we’d taken our seats, then he said, “So, to Anna’s story.” He looked at Alma. “This part is yours,” he told her.
She looked at me, her gaze as intense as that of Scheherazade. “My grandmother,” she began, “was born in…’
~ * ~
Erzinghan, Turkey, 1915
She would all her life recall how distinguished her father had been, the way he’d dominated the men who gathered around him. Even as a girl of five, she’d noticed his knowledge of many languages, and how the leaders of the community often came to him for counsel. He had traveled all over the world and yet had returned to the little town in which he’d been born and in which he’d married and where she expected to live out her life as his adoring daughter.
But dark news had begun to trickle in from other parts of the country: a massacre in Van, and a roundup of what her father called “notables” in Constantinople. Fear grew and deepened, and in the midst of that gathering terror, her father had met with other men like himself to plan what must be done.
The first soldiers arrived in the village on a sweltering day when the dust was made bright yellow in the sun and swirled in gusts and pools, and it was into this dust that her father walked to meet their leader.
From the darkness inside her house, Ana watched the men on horses peer down from what seemed a great height to where her father faced them, unarmed and without defense, as it had seemed to her, his hands pointing
