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Epilogue
 here were six square windows with falling rain. There was a silver sky above a broad plain. Anya Drugo put the letter she had just read into the drawer of her desk. She sipped black coffee from a white cup. She blocked her cigarette into an ashtray. She yawned, and rubbed her reddened-from-lack-of-sleep blue eyes with her big rough hands. It was Ufa. It was 1927.
She had come to Ufa in 1925 after Sasha Dumatskoy died, to attempt to connect with the spirit of her late husband. She didn't know if Drugo had ever actually come to Ufa in 1922, as he had informed her in the note he left for her the night before he departed on his "mission," the last time Drugo had ever been in their apartment. Ufa: that was all she had to go on. Ufa: that Drugo might have been there. So that was where she decided to go and live, and work.
Little Sasha lived three years after sustaining brain damage. He hit his head, much harder than Anya realized at the time, when he and Anya fell to the floor of the apartment in 120 Novokirovskaya from whatever force it was that lashed out at them in February 1922. After Zina and Uchitelnitsky were arrested, they were sentenced to twenty years of imprisonment in Siberia. Ninety-three books from the up-to-that-time legendary 16th century library of Tsar Ivan IV had been found at Aleksandrov by Cheka in 1922. The world press praised the Soviet government for its priceless discovery. The Soviet government embarked on a sustained national effort to recover more of the library. Anya took care of Sasha, and she was with him until the end. About 1924, Anya quit her job at the Red Rooster, and began working with the People's Sanitarium for Children, Moscow Sector, at first as a volunteer; then, soon after, as a full-time caregiver. The Sanitarium was a facility where children with mental deficiencies or brain impediments could be kept entertained, warm and fed at the state's expense. Those children were viewed as uneducable. That was the most that could be done for them, it was thought at the time. The parents were, therefore, free to devote their time and energy to work. They could see the children on their days off.
The letter Anya read was from Zina. She was in Siberia, across the Ural Mountains from Anya in Tomsk, 2420 miles from Moscow, and 520 miles north of the China border. Zina had been in Tomsk since her sentencing. Uchitelnitsky had been sent somewhere else in Siberia, Zina did not know where. Zina had not seen him since the sentencing in 1922. Zina was permitted to write one letter per month. She could receive up to three letters per month. She wrote almost every month to Anya for the first three years. Then, there was a drastic reduction of letters from Zina: about five letters in 1926, and in 1927, the letter that Anya had just received from Zina was the first of that year.
Two little girls came into the room where Anya was sitting. The older one, about ten, had brought the younger one in from the play area outside. The younger girl had fallen while running and cut her leg rather badly. The little one was crying. Both girls were soaked from the rain, and their shoes were muddy from the wet play yard. While she cleaned and bandaged the cut, Anya spoke to the older girl, "Why were you playing in the rain, in the mud? Didn't anyone tell you to go in out of the rain?"
The older girl didn't seem to understand the question. The younger one kept crying and threw her thin little arms around Anya's neck. She held on for dear life.
"Marishunka, Marishunka, you'll be fine, my little darling, you'll be fine!"
After she let go of Anya, the child stopped crying. Anya spoke again to the older girl,
"Allusha, my dear. Thank you for bringing Marishunka in to me. She will be fine, eh, Marishunka?"
The little one smiled and walked slowly around the room, looking at things, touching the chairs and the couch.
Anya would have to reprimand the aides responsible for allowing the children to play in the rain and mud. Anya went to the door, opened it, and walked onto the wooden porch. About ten children were still in the yard in the rain. Some were huddled under a small pavilion to keep dry. No aides were in sight. They were probably in the barracks, smoking and drinking vodka! Anya cursed the aides! She went into the yard and brought all the children up onto the covered porch. Some went inside the building.
"Mommy, mommy, give us chocolates! Mother, dear mother, give us toys!" The children yelled. They always called her "mother." They loved Anya dearly. And she returned their love, each and every one, each and every day.
Anya was fortunate that there was a sanitarium located in Ufa that served the Ufa, Perm, and Orenburg provinces. It was a sprawling complex that also cared for adults with similar problems. After two years at the sanitarium at Ufa, Anya had become director of the children's division of the facility.
There were times within those last five years while Zina was in Siberia, that Anya contemplated embarking on a journey to visit her old friend. But the trip would be arduous. Ufa to the Krasny Dom station on the Trans-Siberian Railroad was a distance of a thousand miles. It was another 250 miles north to Tomsk, by whatever means a person could negotiate. And more profoundly, Anya no longer considered Zina her "friend." Anya could never forgive Zina for abandoning Sasha. The fact that Zina ran away with Uchitelnitsky and broke Soviet law was horrible enough in and of itself, but secondary to the unspeakable crime of a mother forsaking her baby!
From the beginning, Zina's letters from Tomsk were long, circumspective, rambling, at times incoherent monologues. When Sasha died in 1925, Zina's emotional state became critical. For a time, she was nearly paralyzed from grief and guilt. She was hospitalized. As she began to recover, her letters to Anya demonstrated an increasing preoccupation with the time when Zina would be released from Siberia. The year 1942 became her goal, her god. She would find Uchitelnitsky, leave Russia forever, and live in Greece on the island of Ithaca. She almost never made paintings: canvas, paints, brushes were not available to her. She only made pencil sketches on whatever paper she could find.
In that last letter that Anya had read, Zina wrote about her father. She seemed to be trying to bring closure to her relationship with him. What she wrote about him seemed almost like a short story to Anya. Zina speculated on what his final days must have been like. He drank more in the last six years of his life than he had ever drunk before, or so it seemed to Zina. At any rate, that was how she depicted the situation. The hopelessness he must have encountered after Zina's sentencing was only surpassed in the depths of its utter despair by little Sasha's death. Zina pitied Ostavlyavich, thought him weak and his life virtually a waste; but from the tone of what she wrote, Anya felt something akin to love, if not love itself in Zina's words about that unfortunate man. A massive heart attack ended Ostavlyavich's life in 1926.
Zina also wrote about Dmitri in that same letter. His body was never found. His disappearance from the Cheka cell during the horrible fire there in 1922 was a complete mystery. Officially, he was charged with theft, and escape from incarceration. He was considered a fugitive. Zina had left her husband for another man. At that time, she thought Dmitri either dead or missing; or she didn't think about him at all. She had given it all up for Uchitelnitsky and "Ithaca" -- her baby son, her husband, Russia. She must have made a complete mental and emotional break with everything, or nearly complete. In the letter, Zina speculated about Dmitri and his "place," that space in his mind where he found peace. Anya knew something about Dmitri's place. She remembered seeing sketches of it that Zina made in preparation for her painting. Zina's thoughts on that subject sounded supernatural to Anya. But then again, Zina had always pushed the limits of what others considered "rational" -- her early Moscow lifestyle, the Tarot cards, Greek mythology, her creative nature.
Zina wrote, "Dmitri must have found some way to get there, among all that which he truly loved, to constantly wander through that landscape where nothing ever changes, the beautiful painting that he could step into. I remember him in despair about not being able to get there for some reason, all the horrors in our lives -- Shpion, Ostavlyavich, Tatiana, and most of all Podly -- and that his place was destroyed. But I didn't pay attention, involved in my own desires as I was. I couldn't be there for him anymore. I did not love him, nor any of it. I saw his place being destroyed before my very eyes in my painting, remember, Anya? I told you. Somehow he is there, he must be, he got there. He is always there."
How very strange, thought Anya. And Podly, another one who disappeared off the face of the earth. One of the most powerful men in Moscow, gone without a trace. There one day, manipulating people's lives, gone the next into ... Murdered, no doubt, most people thought, by someone, one of a countless number, that he had wronged. Zina could have done it!" Anya shuddered at the thought of all of it. Those Moscow years!
After supper, Anya walked out to the wooden fence at the edge of the sanitarium's border. Cattle were once prevented from straying by those fences when the land was owned by wealthy ranchers during Tsarist times. The fences were in need of repair. The sun was setting in the distance, the huge, red April ball being slowly swallowed by the jagged peaks of the beginnings of the Ural mountain chain. Beyond the mountains and sun were Zina and Uchitelnitsky. And further, much further were Drugo, Sasha, Dmitri, Tatiana, Ostavlyavich, and Podly. All that was Anya's past. She particularly hoped that Podly was far, far into her past. Anya turned away from the past. She leaned against the wooden fence. It creaked from her weight. She looked forward to her future, her children, the little ones -- frightened, confused, and forgotten. They needed their mother.
Anya decided to take the roundabout way back to her living quarters. There was a copse of oak trees at another end of the facility's border that she loved to wander through whenever the opportunity presented itself. Picnics were held there on special occasions. Everyone loved the copse. It was on higher ground and looked out over the rest of the facility.
That early spring evening, nightingales were creating their special music in the oak copse. Anya got the impression that the birds sounded unusually harmonious, as though a composer had written a symphony for them, and their voices were blending with one other, and following the score unceasingly. In order to get the full effect of that experience, Anya felt she ought to position herself in the center of the copse. She sat on the ground, still cold from the long winter. Above her, through the huge, gnarled old branches of oak, the sky turned from royal blue to black in an extraordinarily short time, or so it seemed to Anya, spellbound as she was by the nightingales' music. A star burst through the black, as if it was compelled by the music to come to life. Anya made a silent wish on that star, deep within herself, beyond the clutches of the memories and pain of the Moscow years, centered deep within herself, there at Ufa -- and aimed directly at Ufa, and all of her children there. When the music stopped, Anya wiped tears of joy from her beautiful blue eyes with her big rough hands. Then she walked back down to her living quarters, went immediately to bed, and fell asleep, a sleep of the innocent, a sleep of peace.
The End
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