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Page 7.

“No you don’t,” she said. She stirred her coffee thoughtfully. “I came here with the ashes of my father. I am going to bury him next to my mother, who has lain out there on a god forsaken sand spit for nearly half a century. Actually, half his ashes stayed in San Francisco with the two women who were his wives.” She paused a second to gauge his reaction. When there wasn’t one, she knew he knew a lot about her, her father, and her background. She got chills up and down her spine. But what did any of it matter any more, with Stalin dead nearly fifty years and the hunt for her father concluded in the most final way possible. “I have the other half of the ashes. His women gave them to me, in an urn. I chose my way of burying them…to bring them to the woman he never stopped loving.”

“Very dramatic,” Nayden said softly and guardedly. “Very beautiful. I commend you on the poetry with which you live your life.” For a moment, she could hear a Russian accent in his voice. The truth never leaves you, no matter if you wash a thousand times, drive all night, or burn your clothes. As the old joke went: No matter where I go, there I am.

“Will you go back to the U. S. any time soon?”

“In due time,” he said. “Everything in due time.”

Pleasantries petered out, and Nayden got that dark, furtive look again as he stabbed and slashed his bread to butter and spread it.

“In due time,” she echoed. “You know something you aren’t telling me.”

He stopped in mid-slash and looked at her directly, face to face. “I had to see you.”

She regarded him speculatively. “Refresh my memory. Did I know you back then?”

He resumed preparing his fish sandwich. “I am two years younger than you, Anechka. I barely remember you, except from stories told to me by Auntie Dora. You were four when the French couple came to take you away. You might not remember the little boy who hung around Auntie Dora’s tavern…”

Marianne’s heart skipped a beat as a thousand dark images flooded her memory. “Auntie Dora! Oh my god.” Did she remember a little boy? No—just drunken fishermen and sailors, bar fights, cigarette smoke, the smells of fresh beer and stale beer puke, not to mention the river of urine foaming in the alley out back on its way into the Anadyr estuary if it didn’t freeze along the way, crossing the gravelly harbor road by a little tin-lined sluice that cars and trucks drove over. How vivid some things were—but how dim most of it was.

“Yes, Auntie Dora,” Nayden said as he reached for his mug of steaming black coffee. “Auntie Dora was my mother for real. Your mother married her good-for-nothing brother, because he had local Communist Party connections. Not membership, mind you, but criminal connections.”

“He used to beat my poor mother and yell at her,” Marianne said with a dull, dark sense of pain that would never go away. “Luckily he was at sea much of the time, fishing. And then he drowned in the Siberian Sea.”

Nayden shrugged. “Nobody missed him, I’m sure. You don’t remember me? I suppose I was just a toddler then.”

Marianne shook her head. She tried to remember, but nothing came.

For a moment, Nayden sounded bitter. “I remember you not as a person, but as a girl who got away. I envied you when I played behind the same bar where you used to play.” Marianne barely heard him talking, so overcome was she with memories.

She remembered standing on the seashore by moonlight with her mother, who pointed across the sea and said: San Francisco. There is your father, my love forever. It was the seashore on the Ugolny or north side, near the sand spit where her grave would be under the Milky Way forever.

Marianne—Anechka—looked up in memory, at her mother, and asked in a little girl voice: Is he coming to get us, Mama?

One day he will, sweetie. One day, Umnitsa, he will come for us.

Umnitsa in Russian was a term of affection, meaning ‘good girl’ or ‘clever girl’. It was one of the few Russian words she would remember in the decades to come. Russia was like a distant dream, shimmering in smoke, very dark and stormy like the Arctic Ocean—it might as well never have happened. Now that the flood gates were open, it most assuredly happened, every tormented and lost minute.

Does he love us, Mama?