Sasha almost gasps, too, but stifles a groan in the depth of her throat. Grandpa’s words metamorphose into images in her mind, rushing before her eyes like frames of a film she would rather not see. Scenes of what Andrei had told her over the years and what he hadn’t told her, what he couldn’t tell her. She thinks of how his face cringed into a mask of hatred when he spoke about his father after the fire, when he spat out his father’s camp stories, almost as if he had to purge them out of his system. She thinks of their walk to the Neva when Andrei admitted he had done something that his father-in-law could send him to prison for. Something that was too late to confess to her, too late to mend. She thinks of the wife Andrei did not choose. Now it all begins to make sense. Like colors in a kaleidoscope, with one turn of Grandpa’s hand, Andrei’s cryptic stories and his refusal to explain anything have snapped together, arranged into a pattern.

Sasha gets up and stuffs the pages of the letter into the envelope with foreign stamps. “I’m going back to Leningrad tomorrow,” she says, walking to the door, heading for the exit from her Ivanovo life. She turns back one last time and sees a commander again—snow-haired, rooted to this house, not nearly extinct—her grandfather, who has fought his last battle and won.

Past Kolya’s paintings on the walls, past Grandma’s holiday teacups in the sideboard, she flees to the room she used to share with her mother, where she kneels by her suitcase and carefully fits the letter into the zipper compartment on the bottom. It will stay there in dark safety until she arrives home, to her Leningrad apartment, where she will expose it to the milky light streaming through the windows, the light Kolya painted so well, where she will decide what to do about the two secrets revealed today: her uncle’s letter from America and the truth just forced upon her.

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