didn’t even have to ask. He just pointed to the second black car. I kissed both my children goodbye and got inside.
My children didn’t look as I was driven away. Ira stood in the doorway, surveying the damage the men had done. Mitya sat on the top step, his head resting upon his knees. I closed my eyes and didn’t open them again until we’d arrived at the big yellow building.
“What’s the tallest building in Moscow?” the driver asked me when we stopped.
“She’s heard that one before,” the man in the trench coat said as he opened my door. “Haven’t you?”
Without answering, I got out of the car, straightened my skirt, and let them take me.
Dear Anatoli,
I woke to the sound of my daughter wheezing. My dear Ira. They say she helped me conceal foreign money, and now she sleeps in the bunk across from mine. She is ill. A fever. They’ve allowed me to stay with her until she shows improvement. But I don’t want you to worry, Anatoli. She’s fine. I’m fine. I just thank God they left my Mitya alone. At least there’s that.
Although I last wrote to you so many years ago, I’ve never stopped writing. Letters composed in my head while I bathed. Letters composed when I could not sleep. Letters penned somewhere deep inside myself. But now I can no longer keep the words from coming out.
I traded knit socks for this pen and paper. I want to purge what is inside me. Now, where was I?
I wonder where you are. Why were you not the one to meet me at Lubyanka and continue our late-night chats? Have you been replaced? Have I been? Do you ever think of me? Does my name ever cross your lips? Perhaps you stayed away this time because I am older now than I was before. Perhaps my company was more pleasing then.
The first time, I was pregnant. I lost my baby. Now I am older and becoming infertile, the man who fathered my unborn child buried. Time is a terrible thing.
I have been here before. And yet, in a way, I never left.
The ink on my sentence has dried. I will spend the next eight years at this place—the first three alongside my daughter, an innocent. I suppose I always knew they would find the money, or at least say they had.
It is March 1961, month three of our sentences, and our surroundings are still a blanket of white, the horizon gray. It is night, and I write under a gas lamp turned so low I can only see the paper in front of me and the shadow of my daughter’s slender back as she sleeps on her side under two woolen blankets—one of which is mine.
Earlier, Ira and I worked at the pit digging a new latrine. Her hands are blistered and cracked and she can barely lift the pick, so I dig harder and faster. I don’t say it aloud to anyone, but part of me has missed this work—putting the shovel to the earth, stepping on it with both feet to penetrate deeper, exposing the soil underneath, dark against the white snow.
I am exhausted, and yet I do not want to sleep until this story is told. I’m pressing the pen harder now. It is fading. I think the woman who is wearing my socks lied to me for the trade; the pen’s ink is almost gone. There is so much more to write. Maybe the rest of this letter will be written in the indentation the pen’s tip makes in the paper. Maybe you will have to read it like braille.
As it is, my story no longer belongs to me. In the collective imagination, I have become someone else—a heroine, a character. I have become Lara. And yet when I look, I don’t find her here. Is that how they will know me when I’m gone? Is that the love story they’ll remember?
I think of Borya’s own ending for his heroine:
One day Larisa Feodorovna went out and did not come back. She must have been arrested in the street at that time. She vanished without a trace and probably died somewhere, forgotten as a nameless number on a list that afterwards got mislaid, in one of the innumerable mixed or women’s concentration camps in the north.
But Anatoli, I am no nameless number. I will not disappear.
EPILOGUE
THE TYPISTS
In the winter of ’65, Doctor Zhivago premiered on the big screen. We went