My grip on the wheel tightened when the sign appeared. The exit came, and I stayed in my lane and didn’t slow down.
If I stopped, I was admitting I might not return to this country. My parents had been dead for twenty-four years. They would understand that the daughter who’d survived them had to keep moving, even when that meant driving past their graves without stopping.
I told myself that on the straightaway after the exit, and I told myself again at the next curve, and by the time the road climbed toward the estate, it almost felt true.
“Babushka,”I said when I returned to the estate and found my grandmother in her usual chair. I sat beside her, and she took my good hand in hers. Her fingers were cold, and her grip was strong.
“Where did you go this morning?”
“To the headquarters. There’s nothing left,” I said.
“The building was never what mattered, Katarina. It was a place where people worked. What they do and what you’re doing resides inside you, not in a structure or a particular country.”
“How are you feeling this morning?” I asked.
“This is not the first country I am leaving.”
“I know.”
“I was younger than you the first time. I had a suitcase that belonged to my mother, and the ring your grandfather had given me the week before they killed him. That was all.”
“You don’t speak about it.”
“There is a time to speak of it and a time to stay quiet. I will say one other thing to you. Leaving is the part you already know how to do. Arriving is the part you do not.” Her accent thickened on the word arriving.
“Did my parents ever take me to Onteora?”
It took her a while to answer. “Once. I think it was the summer before they died.”
“I don’t remember it.”
“You were four years old. Your father taught you to swim off the dock at the main camp. You screamed each time he put you in the water, and each time he lifted you out, you demanded that he do it again.”
She was quiet for a moment, then tightened her grip on my fingers.
“There is a place on the property I want to show you when we are there. Your grandfather and I used to walk to it. I’ve not been there in so long. I bet it’s hardly recognizable anymore.”
“What’s there?”
“Nothing that shows on the ground. Only what we intended to put on it. I will tell you when we are standing in the place, not before.”
“Henry says the plane leaves at four. I’ve packed what we need,” said Anna, joining us.
“Anna, you didn’t have to?—”
“Katarina, this is not the first time I’ve packed a life and moved.”
“You shouldn’t have to.”
“There are many things I shouldn’t have to do. I’ve done most of them,” she said, walking over to a sideboard and opening a drawer. She took out a small leather case I’d never seen before and handed it to me.
“This was your father’s.”
I opened it. Inside was a brass compass. The face was scratched from use, and the hinge was worn smooth. My father’s initials, PS for Pavel Stepanov, were scratched into the reverse side. The letters were uneven, as if he’d done it with a knife. I ran my thumb across them and tried to imagine his hands making those marks.
“I remember so little of him,” I murmured.
“You told me once that you remembered him reading you stories.”
