I sent you my journal from the Leningrad Front, with a soldier who was demobilized and going back home to Ivanovo. Did you get it? I only received one letter from you, addressed to the Leningrad Front, where you wrote about Sashenka’s birth and Sima’s death in 1942, only a few weeks apart. I cried, tears of joy and tears of sorrow. I was lucky to survive when so many others didn’t. All these years since the war ended, eleven endless years, every day I fought with myself not to tell you I was alive, not to write to you, to send you a telegram, to call. It was a struggle, and I had to remind myself that I couldn’t selfishly announce what I wanted you to know because it would hurt you, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted so much to be with you, but I couldn’t be there. I miss all of you terribly; I miss the dusty road that led to our house, the brown oilskin of the river, the smell of pirozhki Mamochka always baked for my birthday. And I couldn’t write to you; I couldn’t even tell you how much I missed you all.

If you’re reading these lines, please know that all I think about is you, my dearest mamochka and papochka, you Galochka, and Sashenka, whom I’ve never met but who so often comes to me in my dreams. She is always little, four or five, in a navy-blue dress and canvas shoes rubbed with chalk to make them whiter, the way I remember Galochka was dressed for our family photograph when she was that age.

Sasha looks up from the letter and takes a breath. What was true only a few minutes earlier—Grandma’s fresh grave dug by the same two drunks with veiny faces who have dug every grave she can remember, the cotton dress that still holds her smell, Grandpa watering and weeding as if this routine would erase this last week from his memory and grant him peace—is no longer real. Reality seems to have shifted, the past and the present bleeding into each other, the straight timeline crumpling into an accordion of chaos, making everything muddled and disorderly, something Mama would have hated. But she is no longer here to tell Sasha how unruly all of this is or how much she abhors this bedlam.