31_days | [Dec. 21st] [Original Short Story] Return Once

Title: Return Once
Day/Theme: 21st December/"This place that was no place"
Series: Original
Character/Pairing: Sofiya (Sophie) Volkova <--whatever her married name is, I don't know yet. She is the only character present but she mentions her mother, Erinah Benyaminovna Satz, her father Nikolai (Kolya) Aleksandrovich Volkov, her mother's parents Emma and Benyamin Satz, her father's parents Evgenia Dimitrievna and Aleksander Mikhailovich Volkov... and that's about it.
Rating: PG

Author's Note: Set in the year 2000.

He didn't have a grave. At least, there was none Sophie knew of. She had no idea what had become of his body and, given the likely possibilities, was almost glad not to know. Her mother had never known, but it hardly mattered to her. She'd seen him die, after all, watched as his lifeblood seeped from his body and the fire in his blue eyes faded. He was gone and nothing could be done about that; knowing where his body rested would have been no consolation at all. Her comrades had been too busy trying to rescue the survivors, err, that would be Sophie's mother, Erinah; they had no time to search for a corpse that was clearly beyond help. So, Sophie, now fifty-nine years old, on her first trip back to Mlodovska since she was six years old and she'd left less than a year after the end of WWII, searched for her father, knowing she would probably never find him.

She found plenty of other graves. In the cemetary in the capital city, the old one, the cheap one, she found a marker that indicated the final resting place of her father's mother, Evgenia Dmitrievna Volkova. She'd died young, in her twenties, when her son was only four. Possibly, she'd died trying to bring another baby into the world. Yes, women still died in childbirth back then, didn't they? They probably still died in childbirth in this part of the world, Sophie reflected. All of those archaic diseases that her ancestors had died of were probably still a threat here.

Her father had idolized his mother. He'd only known her for a short time and barely remembered her. Erinah, determined that Sophie should know her grandparents if only through their echoes, repeated time and again what Kolya had told her of his mother. "She was gentle and quiet and kind," she'd said. "She was pretty and..." Erinah had one photograph, a photograph that Kolya had kept, of Evgenia and her son in happier times, the woman smiling self-consciously, her lips closed, and her son, too young to know better, grinning. Yes, Kolya had idolized his mother, probably in that same way Sophie idolized her father. But, if Kolya had little memory of his mother, Sophie had no memory of her father. He'd died before she was even born.

Beside Evgenia lay her husband, Kolya's father, Aleksander Mikhailovich. He'd died in 1961, a broken man. He'd never been too strong, Erinah had told her, once again repeating Kolya's words. He'd been a man content to take life as it came, never dreaming big dreams or planning an unlikely future, but even his simple hopes were unfullfilled. Deeply devoted to his wife, he was crushed when she died. He'd retreated into himself then, ignoring the young son who so needed him. As the years went by, Kolya's intelligence proved too hard to relate to for his father, who worked in a factory. Aleksander Mikhailovich had never understood Kolya the university student, Kolya the communist party organizer, Kolya the Resistant ... Kolya who was killed in only 1939, six months before his lover would give birth to his only child. Possibly, Kolya's father realized only then how much his son meant to him. Perhaps he never realized it at all. He was sixty-eight when he died, having survived his entire family. Well, there'd been Sophie, but he'd never known about her. Kolya was barely on speaking terms with his father when he died; the man probably had never heard of Erinah Satz. If she'd felt any compulsion to get to know Kolya's father for the sake of the child, her fear and natural shyness had kept her from doing so. Besides, she wasn't even married to Kolya and perhaps she'd thought he'd disapprove?

In another part of the cemetary she found the grave of Emma Satz, her mother's mother. In fact, Emma should not be buried there, by anyone's reckoning. Emma had grown up Orthodox, had married a Jew; whichever faith she identified with, neither would allow buried in their cemetary someone who'd taken her own life. This was, however, one of the secrets that Erinah had almost taken to the grave. One day, when Erinah was only sixteen, she'd come home to find that her mother had hung herself in her bedroom. It was Erinah who'd cut her down, who'd cleaned and prepared the body, trying to hide all signs of suicide. She'd arranged the burial and nobody had asked questions. Ever since then, she'd claimed that her mother had died from, 'one of those diseases you get when you work too hard.' Shrugging, she'd hid behind her lack of medical knowledge to keep from having to say more. She was only sixteen then, people said; of course she wouldn't know. Sophie stared at this grave, torn between pity at the plight of this woman who'd found life so hopeless and anger that she'd left her daughter all alone. Erinah had died a few years ago, almost eighty, ... how different her life had been! She didn't need you! Sophie thought. She did fine without you. You were right to think you didn't matter!

In a small town far from the capital, she'd found the last grave she was looking for; that of her mother's father, Benyamin Petrovich, who had died when Erinah was only ten, in 1928. He was buried in a family plot, surrounded by a surprisingly large number of ancestors. She'd spent nearly two hours there, reading the tombstones of men named Benyamin who called their sons Pyotr who in turn called their sons Benyamin, their wives and children. Her Benyamin was the last one; after his death the family had left this place. He'd had brothers, though; what had become of them? She knew it was entirely possible, as this side of her family was Jewish and they'd lived in a Nazi-occupied country during the war, that some or all of them had died in the camps. She hoped it wasn't true. This was one more question, however, that she would not ask, for fear of the answer.

Most of her time, though, she spent on the streets of the capital, searching for familiar buildings and monuments. So many new buildings had been built in the 60's, those characterless building that the Soviet Union was so famous for, that those few places she remembered were almost unrecognizable. In the end, she never did find the building she'd lived in, nor the building where her father had been killed. Knowing she would never find his grave, Sophie had settled for hoping to find the place he'd died; a hope that, like so many others, could never come true.

No, she determined, as she sat in her seat on the airplane back to France, back to her husband, children, and grandchildren, back to the land that was her present and future, she determined that her father's grave was no place. Her father's grave was the whole of the lost Mlodovska, the land that had disappeared into the current of time and change. Her stepfather, who'd cautioned her against taking this journey, had been right. Besides for some other graves, the graves of people who'd lived and died in a more commonplace manner, there was nothing left at all.