The dream came in hard and fast and she found herself in a long alleyway, seeing people in NKVD uniform but oddly with death’s heads on their peaked caps. They were after her.
Ulya woke up with a jolt and, staring into the darkness of her tiny, separated room in the military barracks, thought back to the time when a bold idea took hold of her. At that precise moment, she knew that all those war-time years, subconsciously, she was searching for who she was, asking herself if she’d taken a wrong path from the very beginning. But was it the choice for her to make? Not until now.
Sifting through the memories, her mind brought to the surface so many things and there were even more she’d like to forget. She remembered various crosscurrents of feelings she’d preferred not to examine then. Was fate really at fault for her wrong turns?
They cast her as a hunter—and she readily agreed thinking she was saving her father—but it turned out she was some game, a little kernel of grain caught between Stalin’s millstones.
Was she ready to spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder, wondering when the wolves would close in on her?
It was with a slow inevitability that she inferred she hated Stalin. If it were not for her patriotism—Hitler after all invaded her country and killed so many of her people—time would come when she would just as well fight Stalin. He or, at least under his rule, her father was killed. And millions of her compatriots. His compatriots. A dreadful realization overcame her: she could not go back to that regime, could not listen one more time to their commanding and deceitful voices, to be a part of their lies and machinations. By now, she knew with deep conviction that only by breaking these chains would she be free.
No longer deluding herself, she acknowledged that both ways—Nazi and Soviet—were alien to her. The realization was liberating in a way she hadn’t expected, an astounding, bracing, and unanticipated release.
The moment she made the decision, a peaceful steadiness spread inside her chest. This was who she was, or at least who she wanted to be. She accepted in a very strange way that she did not need to apologize to anybody for her decision: her Volga country and her folks were taken from her. Her father was executed for what she didn’t even know. She met her love, and the damned war took him from her by the hands of her own countrymen. With indifferent cruelty, her own countrymen took away another life from her—her future child.
And yet she couldn’t take that last, crucial step as long as she carried the stone in her heart—the responsibility for the fate of the little girl whose mother she’d killed. Shall I ever deserve a pardon for that? Can I ever forget? It tortured her. It shackled her to the place. As she lay awake in bed night after night, she couldn’t rid her mind of the image of the young woman’s little body crumpled sideways on the thinly snowed ground, and she knew the disturbing images would forever be part of her memories.
Would she ever achieve atonement? She faced the answer, and it landed heavy on her heart.
The remorse slacked a bit when she saw Lyuba, the girl’s mother’s friend, carrying the little one in her arms from the sad, dilapidated hut to the road leading away from this godforsaken place, away from the people like Dobrova, like Zaitsev, like those who persecuted her in the same torture chambers the Germans tormented her Soviet compatriots. And finally making peace with herself, she had an intoxicating sense of radiance, of sheer weightlessness akin liberation, an entirely new feeling for her, something she had never before experienced, as if a missing piece of her had somehow been returned and stillness entered her heart.
She would never know if her father was justly sentenced. She would never find out who shot at her. If Hammerer survived. What would happen to the little girl? All loose ends. And from now on, she resolved to simply acknowledge the fact that she’d live with it till her time came.
MEMORANDUM
November 1945
Agent Hunter was spotted in the American Occupation Sector in Berlin.
In handwriting: To capture dead or alive.
Epilogue
May 14, 1971
Moscow
Before exiting her tiny partitioned room in the flat of a formerly elite mansion that after the October Revolution was re-designed as kommunalka—communal apartments, Natashen’ka steals another glance at the picture of four young people she repaired with tape and framed. She can’t help but smile at it before closing the door behind her.
A minute later, she walks along Petrovka Street, soon passing the Bolshoi Theatre on the right and the Maly Theatre on her street side then, through an underpass, she is at the Metropol Hotel. The uncertain light of the early morning sun illuminates its sophisticated facade in shades of white-and-gray. Seconds later, it’s behind, and through a narrow passage between the restored sixteenth century houses, she heads for 25th October Street. At the entrance to the Moscow State Institute for History and Archives, she climbs four-steps then more steps inside and, after turning to the right, she is in the assembly hall of her Alma mater, an applicant for a Doctorate Candidate degree.
Internally, she is calm. As soon as the members of the Dissertation Council are in their places, as is her research advisor, and the official opponents, the academic secretary introduces her and her work, “The Archive Documents as a Source of Uncovering the Names and Heroic Deeds of the Forgotten Partisans in Byelorussia During the Great Patriotic War.”
Natashen’ka enumerates the archives she worked at, stressing she had access only to declassified documents and that
