Anna’s Treasures
by Peter Lundell
Anna Petrovna died in springtime. She had always wanted to die in winter, because that’s when everything slept. Death was natural, and properly done, in winter. But the cancer metastasized like a trespasser over the borders of her wishes and took her three seasons early. This upset her.
Sergei clutched her diary as he gazed out the rain-streaked window. The funeral was over. Furniture, appliances, paintings, and clothes had all been sold, given to friends or shipped off to charity. He stood in the empty apartment, its bare white walls indifferent to all that once hung on them. The last box of Anna Petrovna’s keepsakes lay at his feet, the apartment key in his pocket, and her life’s catalog in his hands. It wasn’t so much a diary as a record of major life events that skipped through decades. Whether she once had a previous book, Sergei did not know. A lot he did not know. This one started in 1917, and he leafed through it one more time, sometimes struggling with the Old Russian words.
The first entry was dated April 17, 1917: “We moved from Khavarovsk to Vladivostok, where Anatoli makes a great deal of money importing and exporting. We live in a grand home just up the hill from the harbor, bright yellow with broad gables and a balcony. We have a maid, a carriage, fireplaces in four rooms, and more foreign gadgets and ornaments than anyone else in the neighborhood. My favorite is the phonograph from America, on which we listen to rather scratchy renditions of Tchaikovsky and Beethoven.”
She made no mention of the Great War. It was thousands of miles away. But under October 1918 she noted, “Red October and the rise of the Bolsheviks” after a reference to a picnic with import-export business owners and their families.
Then May 1919: “The teeth of the Bolsheviks are now sinking into the Far East, and Anatoli and I are classed as bourgeois, which is like being a fire-breathing dragon at Christmas. My sister Karina was hauled out of her home in Khavarovsk, with no word of her after that. To think she’s only a day’s train ride up the Amur. I so desperately want to look for her, but Anatoli insists it would only make things worse. From hearsay that trickles through the harbor offices, he thinks they’ll come for us within weeks or even days. My sister, oh, my sister!”
The next entry, June 1919: “Ocean all around. These are the saddest days of my life. We stole out of our home and boarded a ship bound for Seattle, U.S.A. Anatoli’s friends and money secured a place for us, but pulling out of the harbor, I could see our house on the hill, looking like a frightened orphan in the midst of bullies. We hadn’t even sold it. Anatoli says we would have been arrested if we had tried, and that the Bolsheviks would have confiscated it anyway. Four miserable trunks are all we have. I am sick from the sea. And sick from the ache of what I have left behind. My house with all its furnishings waits alone on the hill. Into my bag I slipped one phonograph recording to remind me of home. Yet I have faith that when we return, all my things will greet me just as I left them.”
September 1919 came several paragraphs below. “I want to go home. The almost constant clouds and rain drive me to despair, and I feel out of place in my mink coat and hat, while others wear thin canvas coats. I can hardly say a word to anyone outside of our small Russian community. I hate the term ‘immigrant.’ The harbor has no work for Anatoli; he acquired a job as a janitor for a nearby school. How humiliating. We are reduced to living in a dingy, two-room, red-brick apartment above a noisy street.”
Sergei turned a few pages. January 1921: “Anatoli insists that we cannot go home. Lenin is in firm control of the whole country. We may as well try to be American. Oh, my home, my furniture, my phonograph recordings. How are they now?” The April entry read, “Good news! Anatoli has improved his English enough to secure a job at the harbor. Life will improve again.”
Then Sergei found March 1922: “We have adopted an orphaned boy. He is the son of newly arrived refugees from St. Petersburg, who were Protestant Christians. They fell ill and died of typhoid, but the boy was quarantined and saved. His name is Sergei and he is eight. He is a mild, fearful boy, but surviving the loss of his parents and the un-Russian beliefs they held, that is understandable. I am pleased to own a child without the disgusting ordeal of childbirth. We are now a proper family.”
Sergei reread it—“own a child.” He imagined himself as a marble statue. But he could only see it standing alone, covered in ice.
He wept, his tears imitating the dreary rain on the window. Death had wrenched from his hands the mother he loved. Almost as bad, he couldn’t remember what she looked like. And someone between her and the adoption agency had disposed of her photo. At least the mother who owned him didn’t consider him a problem.
He leafed through a few years to November 1927: “The happiest day of my life came last week! We moved into a white house with a picture window and a broad porch around the front door. My life has returned. I can be respected again. Anatoli has done well and proved himself a good husband. French provincial furniture is what I want more than anything.”
Sergei skipped ahead to September 1928: “Sergei begins high school today. What a fine young man he has become. He is bilingual, a mediocre sportsman, but a fine academic. He is intelligent and always seems to be thinking something. I don’t know what to make of it.”
He turned two pages to November 1929: “The news is bad these days. I had always thought depression was something I felt when things were bad. It seems the whole of America will be dragged into poverty. I hope it doesn’t interfere with the Ladies’ Club. I’m concerned for Anatoli. How can he do well in such circumstances?”
Sergei skimmed the entries of how difficult house payments became, to where the house was foreclosed, and the family moved back into an apartment. He remembered well. But he had never understood why Mother spent so many hours crying in her bedroom. Father usually stared out the window.
Sergei had met someone about that time, a man distributing pamphlets on a street corner. He went along to meetings with this man and started seeing life differently. He learned that God was not a Russian, and life was more than owning a house. He wondered if the things he came to believe, the new life he experienced, were like those of his birth mother and father. His father Anatoli had nodded his approval, but Anna Petrovna only said, “Think of the house we lost!”
Yet they had never stood in food lines.
Sergei paged past the years where she noted his entry into the University of Washington with money Anatoli had hidden away. On another page Sergei had taken a position as a high school teacher. Later on he married “a lovely, respectable young lady.” On another page came the first grandchild, “a nuisance if there ever was one, but nevertheless a happy child and a guarantee to the family line.”
Father’s cardiac arrest must have been too painful for her to record. She only noted the date of the funeral, then the “darkness and emptiness” that closed around her. The journal held only two brief entries after that—both of them describing her misery
He bit his lip over a trembling breath, then shouted into the hollow room, “You had so many chances to wake up!”
Loving her had been like loving a mannequin.
He knew it was futile, but he couldn’t shake loose the remorse that he could have tried harder. And each piece of his fragmented heart weighed as much as the whole should have.
He closed the book and dropped it into the cardboard box. It displaced a stack of photos to reveal the one phonograph record that Anna Petrovna had brought from Russia and played a thousand times to shut out the world into which she had been sentenced. She played it more than any of those she had bought in America. His teeth clenched. He picked it up. It was scratched and pockmarked, and its faded label read “P. I. Tchaikovsky, The Nutcracker.” He had heard it over and over. Yet as much as he liked it, even her music was about a dream.
With both hands, he broke it in half.
He cracked it into quarters; several fragments splintered and fell at his feet. The rest he hurled across the room. The black vinyl pieces clattered against a wall and littered the floor.
The air hung still, like death itself, a silent requiem to these last pieces of her deterrents to life.
The door creaked open. His wife and little boy stepped in. She held their son’s hand and embraced Sergei. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing anymore.”
The cloud-muted light diffused through the window to the paint-chipped windowsills, the uneven floorboards, the adjoining bedroom and kitchen. Here he had spent his last two years of high school and all his college years. Here his father had died. And from here his mother had never moved back to a real house. The room did not demand despair from anyone, except of course from Anna Petrovna.
“Don’t forget this junk.” His wife walked to the wall, and their son helped her pick up the broken record.
Junk.
She looked around the room.
“I took the waste bin out,” Sergei said. “Toss them in the box.”
She dropped the pieces on top of the diary, and touched his hand. “Are you ready to go?”
“I loved her anyway. But there’s nothing left.”
She looked at him quizzically.
The rain streaks on the window were the last rinse of anything in the room that might have lingered.
He crouched and took the photos out of the box. “I’m ready.” He turned toward the door.
“Aren’t you going to take the box?”
He stopped and glanced at it. Take the box. What would I do with it? He stared at it. Then nodded. “You’re right. It deserves a proper burial.”
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