Legends

When Martin reached the wooden fence surrounding the Oligarkh’s dacha, he thought he could make out a woman singing to herself. Unlatching the gate and circling around toward the back of the dacha, he stepped carefully through a neatly tended garden, with alternating furrows of vegetables and sunflowers, until he spotted the source of the singing. An old and frail crone, wearing a threadbare shift and walking barefoot, was filling a plastic can with rainwater from a barrel set under a gutter of the dacha. Long scraggly white hair plunged across her pale skin, which was stretched tightly over her facial bones, and she had to stab it away from her eyes when she caught sight of Martin to get a better look at him. “Tzvetan, as always, was correct,” she said. “You will have been better able to survive the winter once the hole was covered with snow, though I was dead set against their burying you before you had eaten your lunch.”

“You know who I am?” Martin asked.

“You didn’t used to ask me silly questions, Jozef. I know you as well as I know my own son, Samat; as well as I knew his father, who hibernated to Siberia during the time of Stalin and never returned. Curious, isn’t it, how our lives were utterly and eternally defined by Stalin’s whimsical brutality. I knew you would come back, dear Jozef. But what on earth took you so long? I expected you would surely return to Prigorodnaia after the first thaw of the first winter.” The old woman set down her watering can and, taking Martin’s hand in hers, led him across the garden to the back door of the dacha. “You always liked your tea and jam at this hour. You will need a steaming cup to see you through the morning.”

Kristyna pushed through a screen door hanging half off of its hinges and, slipping her soiled feet into a pair of felt slippers, shuffled through a series of deserted rooms to the kitchen, all the while glancing over her shoulder to be sure Martin was still behind her. Using both thin arms, she worked the hand pump until water gushed from the spigot. She filled a blackened kettle and put it to boil on one of the rusting electric plaques set on the gas stove that no longer functioned. “I will fetch your favorite jam from the preserves in the larder of the cellar,” she announced. “Dearest Jozef, don’t disappear again. Promise me?” Almost as if she couldn’t bear to hear him refuse, she pulled up a trap door and, securing it with a dog’s leash, disappeared down a flight of steps.

Martin wandered through the ground floor of the dacha, his footfalls echoing from the bare walls of the empty rooms. Through the sulfur-stained panes of the windows he could make out the priest and his flock of faithful gathered at the fence, talking earnestly among themselves. The double living room with an enormous stone chimney on either end gave onto a study filled with wall-to-wall shelves devoid of books, and beyond that a small room with a low metal field-hospital cot set next to a small chimney filled with scraps of paper and dried twigs waiting to be burned. Half a dozen empty perfume bottles were set out on the mantle. A small pile of women’s clothing was folded neatly on an upside down wooden crate with the words “Ugor-Zhilov” and “Prigorodnaia” stenciled on several of its sides. A dozen or so picture postcards were tacked to the door that led to a toilet. Martin drew closer to the door and examined them. They’d been sent from all over the world. One showed the duty-free shop at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, another the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, a third a bridge spanning the Vltava River in Prague, still another Buckingham Palace in London. The topmost postcard on the door was a photograph of a family walking down a paved country road past two identical clapboard farm houses built very close to each other. Across the road, a weathered barn stood on a small rise, an American eagle crafted out of metal sitting atop the ornate weather vane jutting from the mansard roof. The people pictured on the postcard were dressed in clothing farmers might have worn going to church two hundred years before—the men and boys were attired in black trousers and black suit jackets and straw hats, the women and girls were wearing ankle length gingham dresses and laced-up high shoes and bonnets tied under the chin.

Martin pried out the tack with his fingernails and turned over the postcard. There was no date on it; the printed caption identifying the picture on the postcard had been scuffed off with a knife blade, the post office cancellation across the stamp read “fast New York.” “Mama dearest,” someone had written in Russian, “I am alive and well in America the Beautiful do not worry your head for me only keep singing when you weed the vegetable garden which is how I see you in my mind’s eye.” It was signed, “Your devoted S.”

The old woman could be heard calling from the kitchen. “Jozef, my child, where have you gone off to? Come take tea.”