When I was little, I thought I knew things. I listened and I even eavesdropped, but everyone probably always knew I was there. If it wasn't for my father, I wouldn't have realised how dumb I was. He was a quiet man. Children don’t understand quiet until it’s explained to them or they’re shown what it means. It doesn’t mean nothing. It can mean anything.
“It’s good that you are friends. It’s good to look after each other and care for each other.” Dad was sat in the kitchen at the table with Maxime. It was early afternoon on a Saturday. Mum was out, maybe with Jelena. I was being clever and practising sneaking around the house. I was listening to their conversation from my hiding place in the eaves.
“I’m still the fastest across town to his house. 18 minutes. He’s annoyed! His bike’s still broken so I’ll be fastest for a bit longer,” boasted Max.
“What happened to his bike?”
“He held on to a van to go faster on the road but he couldn’t stay on properly and his front wheel hit into it when it stopped and it bent the wheel!”
“What? No, no. Is he OK?”
“I think so. He told them that he fell off and hit a kerb.”
“Don’t ever do that! Please. Stop him doing it. Life is a long ride and being very fast is dangerous. If you are hurt or injured then your ride will be over. Now he has to walk. Imagine if he couldn’t walk. Then what would the two of you do?”
Quiet.
“Maxime, there is something I need to your help with. Very important. Will you think about helping me, please?”
“Yes, what is it?”
Dad began to tell Max about Artyom’s mum, Jelena. She was a pretty woman and lively, but she was also sad and people couldn’t tell. When she was young, her parents were too busy to look after her and sad things happened but she didn’t tell people. Oleg knew and sometimes Oleg would talk to dad.
“What happened to her?”
“People aren’t always nice to each other. Sometimes people who love each other get angry or sad or other things, and it makes them unkind or bad. Sometimes they just… ignore each other and don’t care for them. Things like that.”
Jelena and Oleg seemed happy and I couldn’t picture what things would make someone sad like dad said. My hiding place was small and I rolled over to stay comfortable. Then I wasn’t so sneaky any more.
“Luka! Luka, come down! I know you’re up there! Come to the kitchen, please. Maxime is eating all your biskvit!”
Unauthorised consumption of my cake was a wrong that needed to be righted and only I could right it. That demanded my presence.
“You must both help me, now. Biskvit or no biskvit.” The cake had my attention, but while my mouth was full, my ears were empty.
Jelena’s sadness had never gone away even though they had a happy life when they lived next door. Oleg’s new job had meant they had moved to a nice place out of town, but Jelena wasn’t very busy and hadn’t made friends as solid as mum. Oleg dearly loved her but dad said that sometimes sadness was more than one or two people. Jelena drank too much wine, not just at parties, to help her feel happy.
“Jelena seemed happy when they lived here, and she’s always happy when we go out or there’s a party,” said Max.
Dancing and singing and smiling and laughing are signs of happiness, dad explained, but sometimes Jelena pretended and she hid her sadness. When you hide sadness, he said, it can get worse. Max said that sometimes she would snap at the table and be angry about nothing, then Oleg would get annoyed. I’d seen that too and it had made me feel strange; sort of scared. It was like Jelena didn’t care that Max and I were there when she got like that.
“I need your help to make sure that Artyom and Dinara don’t grow up with that sadness. We can all help them to be happy because, I think, we all love them as much as they love us. Do you love them all?” We both nodded. Of course I did. They were the children I spent all my time with when they lived next door and even though they lived elsewhere now, I still saw Artyom every week for some kind of adventure. Dinara was growing more mysterious in her absence but that made trips to Artyom’s house more attractive to me. Something was more attractive.
Dad explained that Jelena had made a mistake with another man, thinking that it would make her happy. Worse, Oleg knew and so it had made him angry and hurt. But Oleg’s love for his wife meant that he pretended he didn’t know and he was trying to quietly forgive her. Dad loved Oleg and that was why they had been on a few trips and gone hunting and camping without us last summer.
“So, you see, Jelena’s sadness made her do something bad. That hurt Oleg and made him sad. Oleg’s trying to follow God’s word by loving and forgiving Jelena. God’s tests are hard. We must help them pass this test. Do you understand? Will you help me?”
Dad rigged our answers by taking control of the biskvit.
“Yes, dad,” said Max. I nodded along, then said yes too. Dad cut us each another slice.
“Now you know what’s happening, so you can start helping. But Artyom’s parents think he broke his bike on a kerb. If they don’t know what really happened, how can they fix it? If Oleg and Jelena only found out that Art was chasing cars when it was too late because he got run over, how do you think they would feel then?” He looked at Max, who looked glum as he pondered our father’s question.
“Sad? They might cry like Mrs. Kovtun.” Mrs. Kovtun’s youngest son had drowned in the lake three years before because they said it had been too cold, even in the summertime and he couldn’t get out because of the reeds and the mud and being scared. We were not to swim in the lake unless mum and dad were there looking after us.
“Yes. That is sadness that lasts forever.” Dad was tearful. I hadn’t really seen him like this. I felt scared for him. “Jelena’s sadness will probably last forever.” He stopped talking and stood up, then came around our side of the bench seat and forced his way between us. There wasn’t enough room. He fixed that problem by cuddling us tight in the too small space and letting us wriggle about and over him to get close. He kissed my head and held our hands and just looked at them and us. He did not hide his tears or his sniffs but also he smiled and stroked our hair and held us and told us he loved us all.
“We’re happy and we’re OK, Papa,” said Max, as a childish comfort.
“Why are you sad and why are you crying?” I asked our conundrum wrapped in a spikey woollen cardigan.
“Because to know love and happiness, you must also know sadness and grief. Then you know what you want the most.”
Dad had begun to prepare us for a change that we never saw or understood. When mum came back that afternoon, we just spent the evening together on the sofa, cuddling and looking at photographs of past times when all of us were together, before Oleg and Jelena and Artyom and Dinara had moved, and after. In the comfort of their warmth I let slip that we had become good at finding chocolate, but just that childish hint was too much and, in addition to them finding the cause of my puppy fat, they knew that we were clearly up to no good. Instead of anger, my parents faux-scolded us and told us that we had not become “good” at anything that might result in running away from shops. All we were doing was spending our share of good luck on chocolate. They said that God gave everyone a certain amount of luck and you never knew how much you had. If you used it up too quickly, then you wouldn’t have any left for when you really needed it. The best thing to do was never, ever spend it on finding chocolate. And anyway, biskvit was better than chocolate.
That Easter, Artyom and the increasingly mysterious Dinara came to stay at our house and we took trips to the lake and for picnics and adventures in the woods. A couple of times in Easter, Oleg and Jelena joined us and there was a barbecue. Jelena seemed happy and she fawned over Oleg a few times more than I had noticed before. In the summer, we went camping without Oleg and Jelena and we all conquered the mysteries of kayaks and little sail boats. Dad picked the crews - Art and I teamed up in the kayak and it was Dina and me in the sail boat.
She was the mystery that I had no idea how to fathom. She was the real unknown. Almond hazel eyes, fair skin and near black hair, with a small rounded nose, Dinara was a kind of light that couldn’t be found on bikes or in chocolate shops, but occasionally could be glimpsed on the surface of the lake, at sunrise and sunset. Sometimes I would want to run away from her, although I didn’t know why and hadn’t “borrowed” any chocolate. Sometimes, I wanted her to be with us and sometimes I wanted her to myself. She laughed with a high giggle, wore dungarees in the woods and skirts at the barbecue. When she didn’t ride her bike she ran with us or skipped unlike us. She taught me how to cartwheel but couldn’t explain why I should. I did it to show her I could and to keep her pretty face the right way up in my view so that her smile never turned to a frown, even for just one cartwheel.
It was the sound of someone else’s sobbing in our kitchen that put me off eavesdropping. Low, stulted, long and drawn, punctuated irregularly with gulps and almost coughs. Sometimes a higher whine like an animal caught in a snare.
It could have been an animal. In my mind I tried to make it so to dampen the fear I felt, but the picture did not remain. Oleg’s face always returned. I knew the sounds of his weight, the sense of his motion, his laughter and his voice, his smile and his other looks, even if I didn’t know all of their true meanings.
I still didn’t really know the words that went with the sobs. Words they all spoke. They weren’t in my childish lexicon. That was still mostly full of emotion and so I understood the feelings, the tones, the cadence and the rhythms of sadness and pain and grief and loss. That was when I began to crystallise the meaning of guilt. Not the kind of guilt one comes to understand when caught with someone else’s chocolate, but the visceral kind. The feeling that what you are doing is wrong or unkind or that you are unworthy. I knew it was wrong to spy on the sounds of pain when I could have been helping make it better. I left my hiding space in the eaves and ran to the kitchen to somehow childishly confess.
They were at the kitchen table - Oleg in the middle of the long bench and mum and dad either side, holding him. My confession was wordless. I jumped up to stand on the opposite bench so that I could reach out across the table to him. At full stretch I gently toppled across the table, forcing him to reach for me and let me join their embrace. I tell myself now that perhaps together we might have sundered his pain.
Jelena’s second affair, though equally short-lived, was an undoing of things. Her looks had begun to give way to the puffiness of early middle-aged drink but her vision had begun to fail as well. She became blind to the truth that it was Oleg who saw her beauty no matter how she looked, and he had kept her blind to how forgiving and accepting he had been of her first transgression. In retrospect, that may have been the fault of them all in colluding to tolerate and stay quiet and acquiesce to this aspect of Jelena’s flawed nature. Perhaps if both Jelena’s and Oleg’s grief had come out earlier, things would have been different. But time and events and people and emotions don’t work like that. They grow, for ill or good, with time and can become the unstoppable power that drives war and death or love and creation.
“This is the time that all of them need us the most,” mum had said. “All of them are sad and all of them are at a crossroads. When people are in pain, some of them find more people to help them with that pain and some shun people and deal with it alone. Neither one is right or wrong but when you deal with pain alone, it can be much, much more difficult to recover. There is a saying, ‘no man is an island’. It means that someone cannot deal with everything in life on their own, alone. This is why we pray to God and go to church and ask God for help and guidance. Because, through that conversation with God, we are not so alone. But it is also why we are together, with each other, why we are families and friends and lovers and wives and husbands. Because together, we are more. Alone we are just us.”
“What do you mean about ‘crossroads’?” I didn’t get that bit.
“I mean that they’re going to choose how they deal with their sadness. They will pick a path to walk. The path might be good or right and they might become happy on it. But maybe they’ll pick one that gets them lost in sadness and makes them worse, and maybe they’ll never turn around. If you were lost, would you want someone to come and look for you?”
“Yes, of course. You found me in the woods… and the forest and… Max came for me when I took the wrong tram.”
“Exactly. And so, because we love them, we should be there at this crossroads to help them to find the right path and if they start to get lost, we should help them to come home here with us.”
On the cusp of my teenage years, I saw less of Max in the afternoons. He would spend more time with Artyom at their house, doing homework and being friends. But when he came home he would more often be accompanied by Artyom and, occasionally, the morphing mystery of Dinara. She was a year older than me and at a different school, so I saw her far less frequently than I did Artyom. Perhaps that made me appreciate her more. She had an affinity for dancing and physical expression, a love of music and dreams of ballet. Despite a later start than many, she was talented as a young dancer and generous in her spirit. It was her generous mystery that began to expand my horizons in the dining room with the table moved aside and just enough room to learn steps while becoming lost in her hair.
“She is very beautiful, isn’t she?”
“Err… what do you mean?”
“Just that. She’s beautiful. They way she looks and moves. Don’t you like her smile?”
“It’s just errr… no, not really.”
“Not really? Then why do you always smile when she smiles? Why do you two laugh together when you dance?”
Quiet.
“There’s no need to be shy, is there? Not with me. You know I love you more than anything in this world and I want to know what makes you happy so that you can find that happiness. It looks to me like you make each other happy. Or have I got that wrong?”
I blushed. I have no idea how other people’s mothers were with them when they talked together, but my mother had a degree of soft, disarming and tender candour that cut through me like an ardent knife made of honey-sugared butter. It started with a gentle discomfort but it filled me with warmth and sweetness.
“Maybe…”
“Maybe what, my darling?”
“Maybe her smile is nice.”
“You were smiling all the time you watched her dance last night.” She was right, I had. She’d danced in her school’s performance of The Nutcracker. Dinara had caught up enough to have joined the corps de ballet and she glided and spun about the stage as though she was someone from another universe; a universe of grace and light and soaring sound. I’d never seen or heard anything like it. Its amateurish lacquer was polished bright by virtue of it being my first experience of such delights, and she was a gleaming reflection of beauty personified. Her absence during the solo and duet scenes made me long for the crowded stage that afforded me a glimpse of her new layer of impenetrable mystery. It wasn’t about “language” as I then understood it to mean. It was about more basal, raw emotions written in movements that left room to imagine, in the moment, the possibilities that a word like “maybe” could hold.
“Yes…” I stuffed the gaps in my lexicon with the language of biskvit while I remembered Dina’s magical performance.
“It’s really sad, dad.” Max was in the kitchen. He’d grown to like the balanced bitterness of coffee. He said it was the contrast against which the opposite of his palate could be measured. I’ve always preferred tea. It could be appreciated singularly, with nothing else or other additions. Blended in the moment with so many other things, or accompanied by myriad more. As my love of tea grew, my liking for sweetness in other things faded and was replaced by an appreciation of breadth and depth and balance.
He drank coffee with his biskvit but then I was young enough to know juice or milk was still superior. Either to boost the sweetness or to enhance the richness. Then, bitter was a nonsensical contrast. Quite the opposite of the point of biskvit.
“Things are always quiet there,” Max continued. “Oleg is in the study or the garden, Jelena watches the TV. Sometimes you hear her snapping and shouting at Oleg, saying things are his fault or that he should do something else or more of… something. The other night he said, ‘When have I never paid you attention?’ Well, he shouted it downstairs. Artyom says she goes out with friends a bit more and then slops about when she gets in, then sleeps in all day. Her drinking’s getting worse. And Oleg is slower. He’s a bit cuddlier. At least he likes his garden and all his things there. Maybe we should spend more time there and get him to show us more things? He has some bees now, right down at the end.”
“You’re right, we should. It’s because you see this and you say that and you feel these things that you are right.” Dad took his hand. “You are the crossroads again. You can offer them a path, and they can choose. We can offer them a path. Let me call them.”
They say that tea is what built the British Empire, but perhaps tea is simply a reflection of what human empire always was?
The Empire was, as are all empires, the expression of every facet of mankind’s nature. What empire is not, though, is something strong enough to outlast or transcend Nature itself. All empires flourish through toil, care, love, labour, pain, domination, exploitation. All empires linger and draw out and stretch through grasps and clutches and the desperation to survive at all levels. Ultimately, they give way to failing health, corruption of principle, of purpose, of mind and soul. When certainty of what empire is, is lost to the faded memory of what it once might have been, it must return to the earth to be reborn and reimagined, just like the men and women who strive beyond themselves for more of something, more of anything, more of someone, more of everyone. Their sweat and tears and blood are offered up by Nature and solidify in the form and edge of things; the things that build and hold, bind and control. Things that begin and last, fall and crumble, like tea from seed through plant to a final sip and fleeting memory of flavour.
In all its forms and stages tea has nuance and mutable delicacy like the character of a person and a whole nation. It can be made sweet and lingering or bitter and striking by choice or accident, misfortune or neglect. Nuanced, delicate, refreshing, reviving. A source of pleasure, sustenance, unity and bonding. The complexities, joys and sorrows of humanity brought to life in water and with deliberate attention, to be captured in a vessel, served hot, enjoyed warm, discarded when cold and bitter.
We would talk about this to my father’s amusement and satisfaction. In both of us, he said, he saw the world and humanity. We embodied what the world had eventually taught him at a much greater age. Even as we matured and withdrew into concepts of privacy in thought and touch, my father’s quiet care and deep tenderness kept those barriers from forming between us as we became men. He, through his demonstrations of love for others, along with my mother’s, kept a place for us to be something more in each other’s company.
I was fifteen, Max and Artyom were eighteen.
With their complimentary differences, Max and Artyom were brothers, but the past year had brought other kinds of difference that stressed both of our families and lead to their separation.
Jelena and Oleg’s relationship had seriously faltered due to her increasing alcoholism and the growing struggle with her own pain and past darkness. She became more and more verbally spiteful and sometimes openly baleful towards Oleg and would try to emotionally blackmail him with whatever issues she could cling to. Her behaviour and thoughts grew irrational and impulsive and her spite became more public at times. To her, Oleg couldn’t really understand what she had been through and how it made her feel. She was a victim of the past and this drove Oleg to heartbreak and despair. He went from happy and caring to morose, dejected and withdrawn; prone to bouts of momentary rage. Their household began to separate and withdraw from each other.
Dinara, now sixteen, avoided the house by throwing herself deeper and deeper into her dancing but Oleg, my father and mother had carefully encouraged her to maintain separate interests as a backup plan should a career as a dancer prove to be capricious. She had a capability in maths, which possibly explained her natural affinity for dance and music and so she would revert to that field depending upon her progress over the next year. Her heart was in dance so it was a key time for her. Oleg feared for his daughter and the possible negative effects of his wife’s state on Dinara’s future, and he naturally felt compelled to shield her. He doted on her and shuttled her between recitals, performances and whatever demanded her time. In doing so, Jelena’s isolation from Dinara grew, and this was another source of conflict with Oleg.
Artyom began to resent his mother’s behaviour and her treatment of his father, as he could see the damage being done and was aware of the basic underpinnings. Oleg’s excessive focus on Dinara caused him to lose sight of Artyom’s needs and sympathy and an unintended distance began to form between them. Artyom once said that he felt like his father had poked a little hole in his heart and in doing so, he ever so slowly began to bleed out.
As my father’s vessel, Max had been a foil and source of perspective for Artyom. It was my parent’s way of deliberately compensating for the breakdown of Jelena and Oleg’s relationship and the possible missed chance to intervene earlier with stronger truths.
Jelena had chosen isolation and self-pity at the expense of true love. Oleg felt abandoned and betrayed; Jelena had made a fool out of him and taken advantage of his kindness and care. They became locked, for a time, in a stalemate of negativity that headed towards increasing mutual contempt.
My parents began to treat Jelena more forthrightly, possibly as compensation for being so tolerant early on. They hoped, I think, to bring her back with sterner and more honest engagement, but it was too late. Jelena rejected them and they too were kept at the length of an arm and a bottle. When Jelena was at her best, she was unpredictable in company and would sneak off to find vodka even when there was little to none. At worst, she would be drunk around the house and next to useless for the family, acting almost childishly at times. Whether she kept another man at these times we did not know and stopped trying to find out, mainly for Oleg’s sake and sanity.
Oleg began to contemplate divorce on the grounds of Jelena’s drunkenness but his resolve was weakened by his past love for her and the fear of what would become of her if she was truly alone, so their misery dragged on.
I think it was these developing circumstances that drove Artyom into the infantry. He was too impatient and impulsive, and things at home were so disrupted that he began to yearn for some escape to come quicker than university or a job. In the late stages of school he underperformed and Oleg’s attention was taken up by Dinara. We did what we could to keep Artyom close and support him, but he was old enough to make his own stronger choices about how he spent his time and we couldn’t fully compensate for his penchant for football, rock music and occasional but short-lived successes chasing local girls. He’d joined army cadets at 16 for some structure and to sate his curiosity. Cadets connected him to a new social group whose influence we couldn’t override.
My father was careful not to overpower Max and Artyom’s relationship and instead he acted through Max. He guided and counselled Max and encouraged him to include Artyom in his plans for the future. As the Russian economy began to emerge from the Yeltsin era, the signs of opportunity began to emerge and with it glimpses of the freedoms of liberalism, capitalism and the property markets. Max saw the opportunity for independent life and had a goal of beginning to modestly flip a flat with some seed money from our parents. He pictured Artyom and him working together on the project and in doing so, they would remain fast friends and grow into business partners. Artyom was physically and spatially intelligent, whereas Max was more intellectual and considering. In this way, the two complimented each other and so their agreement began to take shape.
Artyom’s other social circles put him into contact with a couple of junior soldiers and their skewed tails of what sounded like adventure began to interest him. Notions of capable, physical exploit played to his desire to break free of his quietly frustrating home life. His impulsive streak lead him to begin investigating the Army before he sought counsel closer to home.
By the time my father became aware of Artyom’s serious interest in the Army, we were playing catch up with its sophisticated recruitment machine. It was then that we began to learn more about aspects of my father’s past that we’d not really been aware of.
Having been born in 1964, my father was 19 when he joined the Russian Engineering Troops at a time of Engineer shortages during the Afghanistan war. Just out of training, he was posted to that theatre at the beginning of 1984 when the guerrilla conflict was in full swing, just before the bloodiest year of fighting. This was the back end of the period in which the Soviets had begun to truly dirty their hands with intimidation, subversion and search-and-destroy tactics that saw them launch multiple offensives to weed out the Mujahideen guerrillas who, despite suffering heavy losses, were able to sustain an effective resistance.
My father described it as the “engineering of chaos and destruction”. When he spoke to us about it his demeanour and posture sank to some low place I did not know existed. His voice lost its softness and care, became noticeably lower and carried an edge of buried torment. As a Sapper, he had been immediately assigned to the Panjshir Valley after the spring offensive that hammered the Mujahideen. The Mujahideen effectively employed hit-and-run and ambush tactics, and had mined the brutal terrain. Dad was kept busy building the forts and infrastructure in the valley while at the same time trying to de-mine areas, deactivate the guerrilla’s booby traps and fight alongside the units he was trying to keep alive. He fought in the battle at Hazara Valley in April, 1984 when the 1st Battalion of the 682nd Motor Rifle Regiment suffered massive casualties. He told us that despite his Orthodox upbringing, he’d been unable to fathom hell in a way that remotely compared to what he saw in Afghanistan. As little short of a boy, he had been plunged into constant mortal fear that he believed, for a long time, cost him a part of his soul. He said that he had come - like so many in brutal war - to believe he was already dead in order to be able to somehow deal with fear that would have been otherwise debilitating. There’d been others who couldn’t cope and never came home because they’d been totally overwhelmed in battle. Others returned as ghosts of themselves and many were physically and mentally incomplete. My father said that for a time, he ceased to think of people as friends because if he had, he could not have coped with the losses of so many.
“It is a deliberately contradictory notion that somehow, the Army builds a man and his character up by using him to destroy other men and the world of man and Nature,” he had said to us.
As he revealed his past and hinted at the darkness he had encountered, the light in his eyes faded and he was somewhere else. He told us that despite being surrounded by comrades suffering and fighting just the same as he, there were moments in which he felt totally alone and it was only in moving closer to God that he found the strength of hope in a future beyond the Panjshir Valley. We listened intently during those few times that he shared these stories of his past. It was natural for us to spend close time together and we trusted in whatever our parent’s motives were in those moments. Again, they were preparing us for inevitable change that we could not ourselves foresee. My parents had been sure to include Artyom in some of these moments, but he was of a different character and patience; he saw my father’s survival as heroic whereas dad was trying to describe tragedy without resorting to truly horrific stories that would have disturbed all of us. In hindsight, perhaps dad made the same mistake as he did with Jelena in being too gentle and kind. Dad wasn’t blunt enough for Art. Although he was careful to never glorify anything - he described the Afghan war as a total failure and waste of lives on both sides - he couldn’t get through to Artyom, whose other influences and drives were more powerful and in dad’s stories he found a warped, immature justification to join up. Once it became clear that Artyom was growing increasingly certain, Oleg and my parents both tried to directly counsel him about either postponing or picking a non-combat role in order to build broader skills. In the end, his impulsiveness and impatience got the better of him and he was destined, ultimately to see Chechnya at its worst.
We spent that year’s Victory day at Oleg’s. We were in our kitchen, getting ready to go. Mum and dad had a lesson ready.
“When people lose connections; when they experience pain; when they must or choose to cope with that pain alone, they become other things. Sometimes it is necessary, sometimes it is tragedy.” Mum’s voice was always deeper when she delivered her sermons. “If you love Art, he must know that. We must all let him know that we love him. He must also know that there is a future here for him to give him a reason to live, survive and return from the Army. Without that, he will have no other crossroad and he’ll remain on a path that’s set by others who do not feel love, to places where hope diminishes and souls darken. His parents have become distant because of their own pain and sadness, and that has spread to both Dinara and Art, which is why he’s trying to escape. Dinara captivates Oleg more because that’s just what daughters do to their fathers. It’s a natural flaw of humanity, and sadly Jelena is lost to her children when they need a mother and a father most. You and Max are vessels and crossroads and a future for your brother. You and God are love that he will not find wherever it is that he goes soon.” We were both scared by the burden of her words, but I was too young to know their true gravity.
“This advice I give to you is from an old man to a new ones,” dad said. “The thing I ask you to become is not men, but strong men who are brave enough to protect what and whom they love. That is a teaching of God that I came to know and understand in places no man needs to walk. I have tried to spin you into a strong yarns. If you can stay bound to Artyom, he may return in hope and love and his own strength so that together you twist into a stronger rope. Without a rope, a ship cannot weigh anchor. Without an anchor, the greatest ship will drift. One day, Artyom may need you to pull him up from the depths and out of the dark. I promise you that we will be here to help you to haul Artyom back home. But now it is you who are the vessels and you are full of our love.”
“What about Dina?” I asked.
This is deeply sad and touchingly beautiful. Reading it left me with stirred emotions in my Slavic soul. Thank you.