By the way, some of the italicized parts aren't coming out... ugh!
The priest’s words reverberated off the walls in a tongue I was not familiar with. It was English, I was almost certain, but the words themselves were too complicated for me to comprehend. His voice was solemn and he seemed to be the only person in the vicinity who lacked any emotional anguish.
I looked behind me and saw my cousins, Nicky and Mikhail, weeping silently into a shared handkerchief. My mother, too, was lamenting; and my Auntie Anya’s face was hidden in my Uncle Gavin’s shoulder; and even Grandpa had a single tear rolling down his wrinkled cheek. The world rushed in a blur of colors about me, the lights seemed to intensify, and I felt my eyes burn.
“Does it look good, Mommy?” I danced down the stairs in my new lilac dress and white shoes.
“Yes.”
I twirled around, laughing. “I feel much like a princess. Would Daddy like it?”
Some clockwork of emotion was sprung within my mother, and she lashed out and grabbed me, pulling me in. “He knows that you are beautiful, my doshka.”
My Uncle Peter was singing. It was beautiful, bouncing across the walls of the church with an incredible, strange joy, much in contrast to the lackluster voice of the priest. It was Russian, and the harsh sound of the words was tamed by the splendor of Peter’s voice. Normally I could trace some meaning in the language, but at this point I do not believe I could have even understood English. The world was turning at a thousand miles an hour, and I could not make sense of it all.
My mother picked me up from school. It struck me as peculiar, as I tended to ride the bus home. She even went so far as to come into the room and talk to my teacher. She whispered something in the teacher’s ear, and the teacher’s face melted into a sympathetic, compassionate expression as she hugged my mother.
The ride home was awkward, to say the least, and silent. I got the feeling that my mother was angered at me. Had I forgotten to feed the dogs that morning?
“How was your day?” she asked, neglecting to look at my face, and instead staring at the road.
“Good. I got into a fight with Cassidy Heron at recess. And during silent reading. She makes me so mad… I almost wanted to throw my desk at her!”
“Oh really?” Again, there was no eye contact. And the conversation ended there.
Mikhail was speaking now. I could not understand the gist of his speech either, probably because he was already eleven, and I was only eight. His vocabulary was, of course, much more extensive than mine.
He had to take off his glasses in order to clear his eyes of the tears; they had blurred his vision to the extent that he could no longer read the little note cards his speech was written on.
"I just wish I could change things, go back, and get to know people. But now I guess it's too late..."
That weekend, my mother and I drove up to the mountains. The snow was beginning to melt, so the little mountain streams were alive with rushing water. The birds were back home from their yearly flight south and they interjected a lovely chorus into the serene silence of the mountains.
“Oh my doshka, your father does love it up here.” My mother was sitting adjacent to me on a log, and she reached across and stroked my hair. “But I cannot blame him. It is ever so beautiful. The world up here has not been touched; it has not been contaminated by us people yet. It is still pure.”
I smiled and looked up at her. “We haven’t killed all the animals yet.”
She closed her eyes quickly and looked away, wiping her eyes on the back of her sleeve. “No, we have not. And it does seem as though we have the tendency to do so, my darling.”
I picked a rock up off the ground and threw it into the stream. Some of the water splashed up, sprinkling my miniature fur-lined boots.
“I would like to live here someday. I would like to live out of the city,” she said, looking across the expanse of terrain. “But now… Now I do not think we will ever have the money for that. There is no work out here, you know.”
I could not understand what she was talking about. I hugged her. She leaned in and sobbed into my hair.
“Go up, Kira.” My mother whispered at me. “It is your turn. Go up to the front.”
I looked down at my hands and saw that my own sheet of paper sat on the knees of my lilac dress.
“Doshka! Please, for me.” Tears silently fell out of her eyes.
As my knees shook, my hands sweated, and eyes burned, I walked to the front of the church, where a hundred tear-stained faces were staring soberly up at me. At first, when I tried to articulate the first words of my speech, my lips merely flapped about and no sound came out. I breathed in quickly, and spoke. My lips opened and closed mechanically and my brain was no longer controlling them. The words that I spoke meant nothing to me.
My entire family was gathered at Grandpa's house, in the basement. There was a piano there, and I immediately sat down on the bench and played “The Entertainer.”
“That was beautiful, Kira,” said Auntie Anya, as the rest of the family clapped.
My mother took a sip out of a wine glass. I did not know that she drank, ever. It was strange, all this was.
“What was that song that your father likes, Kira? The New Year’s eve one?”
I did not know.
“Auld Lang Syne,” said my mother, taking another sip of the red wine. “His favorite.” She leaned forward on the sofa, her head almost between her legs and hidden from sight.
I played it; it was a simple tune. Almost the whole family was singing, with the exception of my mother.
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and ne’er brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot, and day of Auld Lang Syne?”
Nicky took over the piano, and I was on the floor, dancing with Uncle Gavin, and then Uncle Peter, and then Grandpa, my lilac dress swaying about my knees. What a wonderful family holiday it was.
After we left the church, we went to my grandpa’s house, had dinner, and then I got into my Uncle Gavin’s van with my cousins, and we drove a few miles out of the city, to a gated field filled with a thousand grave markers.
“Is this a graveyard? What’re we doing here?”
Nicky and Mikhail cast me angered looks. I innocently stared back at them.
“It’s called a memorial park,” said Mikhail, rolling his eyes.
I felt frustrated, my eyes burning once again. Aunie Anya stroked my hair. “You’re mommy’ll be there,” she said. “It’ll be fine. Don’t worry. It’s all okay.”
I was confused, yet again. What was all this?
Following the ride home and the trip to the mountains, my mother spent much time alone. My father was yet to return from his business trip, and she missed him, as did I. Every night I kissed I said "goodnight" to the small photograph of him that sat above my bed.
She, on the other hand, would finger her wedding ring, and even kiss it. I could hear her whispering to it, saying: “I love you, Victor.”
It seemed silly to kiss her wedding ring when my father was on a mere business trip. But it had been a longer one than usual, but he had gone all the way to New York, after all.
When we got out of the van, I felt my legs give way beneath me, and I fell into the dirt. Aunt Anya grabbed me below my armpits, lifting me up. “Kira, stand… You’ll ruin your new dress.”
“I don’t want to be here… I don’t like it here…”
“Please, Kira. Your mother is waiting for you. She needs you.”
I followed them to my mother, where she stood with the rest of my family.
A week after the trip to the mountains, Auntie Anya had come to visit us, as she always did, periodically.
“Oh, Clara…” she said to my mother when she arrived, dropping her suitcase and wrapping her arms about my mother.
“You don’t need to say anything. Your face makes everything better,” said my mother, kissing her sister on the cheek.
“How is Kira?”
“Good as ever. She is my little north star.”
Anya bent down and kissed my cheek. “Beautiful Kira, oh, you are a work of art.”
My mother, Auntie Anya, Uncle Peter, Uncle Gavin, Grandpa, and the others were standing around a deep hole in the ground. A coffin sat next to it.
I grabbed my mother’s skirt and pulled myself into its folds. “Mommy! Mommy! What is happening? Oh Mommy, I don’t want to be here…” I cried into her skirt, and she knelt down and picked me up, whispering a Russian lullaby into my ear.
“It is okay, it is all right, my Doshka.”
A man lowered the coffin into the pit. I closed my eyes, yet I could still hear the dull thuds of the dirt being shoveled over the coffin, into the pit. When I got the courage to open my eyes a little, peering out of thin slits, I saw that they were putting sod over the once deep whole, and it looked the same as the other thousand graves that were there.
“Where’s Gramma Orya, Mommy? Why isn’t she here?”
My mother held me tighter. “She couldn’t make it…” Gramma Orya was her mother.
Confusion controlled me. The sky turned dark, then light, the grass seemed to be sinking, or else my legs were getting longer. What was happening to me?
“Here, Kira, put these flowers over there, like Nicky is,” said Aunt Anya, shoving a bouquet of carnations into my palm.
I trudged towards the headstone at the pace of a demented snail. I closed my eyes and walked blind, with some innate sense I knew that the epitaph inscribed on the stone would not bode well. I threw the flowers down, saying a silent prayer my Gramma Orya. Although I tried not to let them, my prying eyes caught a glimpse of the headstone, and my brain instantly understood the significance of the words. My legs buckled and I collapsed, memories filling my mind.
I had forgotten to feed the dogs, that day when my mother drove me home from school, after all. My mother went inside, and I stayed outside, feeding our five Malamutes. When I was done, I ran to the house, threw open the door, kicked off my boots, and realized that my mother was standing next to the door, watching me silently.
“Mommy? Is everything all right?”
She was silent.
“Mommy? Please tell me, I know something’s wrong, oh mommy!” I almost started crying, I clutched her leg.
“Let go, doshka. There is something I need to tell you.”
My heart missed a beat as I calculated all of the negative circumstances that could, possibly, be taking place.
“Your father will not be returning from his business trip.”
I opened my eyes so wide, I was almost sure they could have gone falling out of my skull. “Why? You- You’re- You guy’s aren’t getting a- a divorce, are you?”
Tears fell from my mother’s eyes. “No, no my darling. He would never voluntarily leave you. He was killed- murdered- by a man, in New York City. Victor- your father witnessed the man mugging another man, and he tried to intervene. Sub sequentially he was shot.”
“But… But… He’ll be alright, right? Not everyone who gets shot dies!”
My mother’s tears were uncontrollable now. “No, Kira… He is dead. He died before the ambulance could even get there. But I know he loved you. And that is all that matters, he lived with a full heart for his beautiful family.”
I stepped away. “No! No! You’re a liar! I don’t believe you!” I ran away from her, leaving her to collapse in a heap next to the door, crying.
And, later, when Aunt Anya came and visited, I could remember them talking of me… My mother was worried for me, worried that I’d shown no emotion at all concerning my father’s death.
“Don’t worry, Clara,” said Anya, stroking my mother’s hair when she had asked of this matter. “She is just a child, and I have heard of times when people are in shock they will develop a sort of amnesia. She is in denial over Victor’s death.”
My mother was bawling. “I hope you are right. It does seem out of character for her to not care for her father, at all.”
“No, I’m sure she does. She loves him. And has simply convinced herself that he is fine.”
I pulled my face out of the soft grass and forced myself to read the epitaph. My vision cleared of tears, and I pushed all my false realities to the back of my mind.
Victor Nikolai Petrov
October 4th, 1972
March 26th, 2008
Beloved Uncle,
Brother,
Son,
& Father
он является, и всегда будет, любим
The night before he left for his big, annual business trip to New York, my father held threw me up in the air. “You have gotten so big, my doshka.”
“Not too big to throw!”
He laughed. “Yes, but soon you will be. Have you grown out of your formal dress already?” he gestured to my nicest dress, made of dark green velvet. It reached above my knees.
“I guess I have!” I laughed. “Can I get another one, Daddy?”
“Of course, my darling, my angel.”
“What color should I get?”
He hugged me tight. “I’d say… Light purple! How do they say it in English?”
“Lilac!” called my mother from the kitchen.
He drew me in even closer, and whispered in my ear: “It does not matter what color your dress is, my doshka, because you will always be the most beautiful girl in the world.”
I'm not just saying that because I'm trying to make you feel better, just so you know. Your work really is enjoyable to read, as I'm sure you know yourself.
