The Drau River Flows to Siberia: The Victims of Victory by Marina Osipova

Author:Marina Osipova [Osipova, Marina]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-10-25T00:00:00+00:00

ZAKHARY

October 1955, SIBERIA

She stops at the loud sound of a bell. Through a light fog from the river, he sees a barge loaded with timber and pushed by a towboat. On the shore, a woman, a girl, maybe ten or eleven years old, and a boy, still a toddler, are flapping white handkerchiefs. From the towboat, a man waves his arms back.

Zakhary turns to the woman beside him. She does not take her eyes off the people on the shore. She probably feels his gaze. “That man on the barge. Misha,” she says. “He was a tank man. Returned from the war with a medal. There was no living place on his body. Burned terribly. She nursed him out of death. Fell in love with him. See? Now they have a daughter and a son.”

A son. He feels as if the ground is slipping from under his feet. To escape from another round of painful memories, he turns to her. “I remember you said that after your incarceration in Lubyanka prison and later days and days on the train, you arrived.” He doesn’t need to pronounce the name of the destination they both knew.

“Yes,” she says, “But before we reached our journey’s end, we had to walk tens of kilometers more.”

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