Epilogue - Das Vadanya

Epilogue In the summertime, he brings sunflowers to her grave. She loved them so much, kept a small garden even in the middle of the city when she could. He thinks that they reminded her of her siblings. And now they remind Mikhail of her. And so he goes, every summer, to the small cemetery in the midst of the turmoil of the city, and brings her one. He talks to her sometimes, or at least tries to. It’s so hard to get any of his words to sound right. He used to be better at it, but time and business have made him rusty. She never liked the business, never liked the violence it necessitated. But when you’re dropped into a world where you shouldn’t exist and there’s no record of you anywhere, you do what you can to survive. And, admittedly, when the small, idealistic part of him saw the true horror that could be caused by pure, unbridled capitalism, well, that just wasn’t a system he could supports, was it? Though she never really understood, she had always been there through it all. After Jack had vanished, after Katya had grown up and washed her hands of the whole business, she had stayed. After she had died he found himself alone. Well, not entirely, of course. For years Mikhail visited her grave alone, no bodyguards, no company of any kind. But as soon as Nikolai was old enough, he started taking him along to see his mother’s grave. The boy had never really known her, and Mikhail vowed never to burden this innocent child with the knowledge of a cosmos that even he himself couldn’t comprehend, so he never really seemed to understand why they went, why they brought the sunflowers. But for years they went together, just the two of them. Nikolai had Mikhail’s eyes, and his hair more resembled his aunt and uncle than either of his parents. Maybe it was something about the shape of his face, the way he tilted his head when he was considering something; it reminded Mikhail of her. Yet as Nikolai grew older, he stopped coming to the grave, and Mikhail found it harder and harder to understand him. He was so often busy that he found it difficult to make time for his son, and before he knew it, Nikolai had grown into a young man. And Mikhail discovered with regret that he’d mostly missed it. He wishes that she had been here. She would have put a stop to it; his absence, his distance. She would have never stood for it. But she isn’t here. And even if she had been, he isn’t sure that she would like the man Mikhail had become. That young man who couldn’t even fire a gun to avenge a fallen friend now had immeasurable amounts of blood on his hands. Sometimes when he look in the mirror, he thinks just for a split second that it is Ivan staring back at him. But it’s not too late. It’s not too late to find that boy again. “I’m going to meet with Nikolai tomorrow,” he tells her, even though deep down, he knows he’s just talking to himself. “I’m just… so afraid that… that I won’t be able to tell him what I want to. You would know exactly what to say. But you are not here anymore, so it’s now my responsibility.” Even if it scares him, he knows it’s what she would have wanted. How many times had she put aside her own emotions, and done what she knew she had to. Compared to everything she had been through in her short life, this should be easy. So why does it seem so hard without her? “I miss you every day, Marie.” He places the sunflower gently next to her grave, and walks away.