“A good son!” a relative nodded. “Nastya was proud of him, she always said: ‘My Valerka is a good boy’.”
Viktoria stood by the coffin in a black dress, accepting condolences, nodding at words of comfort, and felt everything inside her clench with disgust at this virtual performance, these tears that hid the ski slopes of Bukovel and the embrace of a bleached blonde.
She organized everything herself. The contract with the crematorium—forty thousand (the last of her credit). The memorial lunch at a cafe near her home—another fifteen thousand (borrowed again from a friend who was starting to sigh at her calls). Then the nine-day, the forty-day memorials… All this time she moved like an automaton, unable to shed a single tear in public, because all her tears had been cried over the three months at the dying woman’s bedside.
“Leave the ashes in the columbarium in the city, it will be easier to visit,” Valery wrote after the funeral.
Viktoria didn’t reply, just gave a bitter smile reading the message. She knew: Anastasia wanted to return to the homestead, to the land where she had lived her whole life, to the place where her last secret was buried under a potato box.
The bus rattled along the broken winter road to Podgorodnoye, bouncing on every pothole, then she hitched a ride in a farmer’s van to the village of Volosskoye. The old Titov house stood at the very edge, by an overgrown ravine. A crooked fence, a yard overgrown with dry weeds, shutters on the windows nailed shut in a cross. Viktoria struggled to open the rusted lock on the gate, which wouldn’t budge until she thought to drip some oil on it from a bottle she found in the shed.
Inside, the house greeted her with the smell of an uninhabited space, mouse droppings on the floor, and cobwebs in the corners, even covering the portrait of the young Titovs on the wall. She placed the urn with the ashes on the dresser next to the photograph, lit a church candle in front of an old icon of the Mother of God in the corner, and spent the night on the sagging sofa, fully clothed, covered with all the blankets she could find in the closet, which smelled of mothballs and old age. She didn’t sleep—just stared into the darkness and listened to the house creak in the gusts of wind, something rustling in the attic, the candle crackling by the icon, casting flickering shadows on the walls.
At dawn, as the sky turned grey over the snow-covered steppe, she took a shovel from the shed and went to the summer kitchen—a separate building in the backyard where Anastasia used to make jam and pickle vegetables for the winter. The door barely gave way, warped and swollen from the dampness; Viktoria had to lean her shoulder into it to open it. Inside—a potbelly stove with a broken door, blackened pots on a shelf, jars of dried-out jam covered in dust.
In the corner was the entrance to the cellar, a heavy wooden lid on rusty hinges that she had to lift with both hands. She descended the rickety ladder, shining her flashlight on the damp walls. Shelves with empty jars, boxes of sprouted potatoes, dampness, and a cold that chilled to the bone. The largest box stood in the corner, half-buried in earth and covered with old straw. Viktoria pushed it aside, picked up the shovel, and began to dig, biting into the compacted clay. Half a meter down, metal clinked against metal. She threw the shovel aside and began to clear the damp earth with her hands, not caring about her manicure, oblivious to the pain and cold, until she pulled out a tin box with a faded inscription, wrapped in several layers of plastic and carefully tied with twine.
On the steps of the summer kitchen, in the frosty air, under the grey January sky, Viktoria tore the plastic with fingers stiff from the cold and struggled to open the rusty lid. Inside lay a savings account statement and a yellow envelope sealed with wax. She unfolded the statement and nearly dropped it in the snow. The account balance was 2,980,000 hryvnias, and the last transaction—a deposit from a state program—was dated five years ago.
In the envelope were two documents: a court decision from 1986 on the adoption of a minor and a birth certificate where the Titovs were listed as the parents of the foundling. And a letter—two pages from a school notebook, written in Anastasia’s uneven but legible handwriting:
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