The earth smelled of grief and damp. Every clod thrown onto the coffin lid thudded dully somewhere beneath my ribs.
Fifty years. An entire life lived with Dmitry. A life filled with quiet respect, with habit that had grown into tenderness.
I didn’t cry. My tears had dried up last night, when I sat by his bed holding his cooling hand, listening as his breaths came farther apart until they stopped altogether.
Through the black veil I saw the sympathetic faces of relatives and acquaintances. Empty words, formal embraces. My children, Kirill and Polina, held me by the arms, but I could hardly feel their touch.
And then he stepped toward me. Gray-haired, deep lines at the corners of his eyes, but with the same straight back I remembered. He bent to my ear, and his whisper—so familiar it made me tremble—pierced the shroud of mourning.
“Liza. Now we are free.”
For a moment I stopped breathing. The scent of his cologne—sandalwood and something resinous, forest-like—pounded in my temples.
In that smell everything mixed together: brazenness and pain, the past and the inappropriate present. I raised my eyes. Andrei. My Andrei.
The world swayed. The heavy smell of incense turned into the scent of hay and a thunderstorm. I was twenty again.
We were running, hand in hand. His palm—hot, strong. The wind tugged at my hair, and his laughter drowned in the chirr of grasshoppers. We ran away from my house, from a future plotted out years ahead.
“That Sokolov boy is no match for you!” boomed my father’s voice, Konstantin Matveyevich. “He doesn’t have a penny to his name, no standing in society!”
My mother, Sofia Andreevna, wrung her hands and looked at me reproachfully.
“Come to your senses, Liza! He’ll ruin you.”
I remember my answer, quiet but hard as steel.
“My disgrace would be to live without love. And your honor is a cage.”
We found it by chance. An abandoned forester’s hut sunk into the earth up to the windows. It became our world.
Half a year. One hundred and eighty-three days of absolute, desperate happiness. We chopped wood, carried water from the well, read by the light of a kerosene lamp from a single book for two. It was hard, hungry, cold.
But we breathed the same air.
One winter, Andrei fell gravely ill.
He lay delirious, hot as a stove. I spooned bitter herbs into him, changed the icy cloths on his forehead, and prayed to every god I knew.
It was then, peering into his gaunt face, that I understood this was my life—the one I had chosen myself.
They found us in the spring. When snowdrops had already pushed through the thawing snow.
There were no shouts. No struggle. Just three sullen men in identical overcoats and my father.
“The game is over, Elizaveta,” he said as if it were a lost chess match.
Two men held Andrei. He didn’t lunge or cry out. He just looked at me. And in his gaze there was so much pain I almost suffocated. A look that promised: “I will find you.”
They took me away. The vivid, living world of the forest gave way to the dull, dusty rooms of my parents’ house, smelling of mothballs and frustrated hopes.
Silence became the main punishment. No one raised their voice at me. They simply stopped noticing me, as if I were a thing, a piece of furniture that would soon be carted off.
A month later my father came into my room. He didn’t look at me; his gaze was fixed somewhere out the window.
“On Saturday, Dmitry Arsenyevich and his son will be visiting. Make yourself presentable.”
I said nothing. What was the point?
Dmitry Arsenyevich turned out to be the complete opposite of Andrei. Calm, laconic, with kind and tired eyes.
He spoke of books, of his work at the design bureau, of plans for the future. There was no place in those plans for madness or flight.
We were married in autumn. I stood in a white dress like a shroud and mechanically answered “yes.” Father was satisfied. He had what he wanted—the proper son-in-law, the proper match.
The first years with Dmitry were like a thick fog.
I lived, I breathed, I did things, but it was as if I never fully woke. I was an obedient wife. I cooked, cleaned, met him from work.
He never demanded anything. He was patient.
Sometimes at night, when he thought I slept, I felt his gaze. There was no passion in it, but an endless, deep pity.
And that pity hurt worse than my father’s anger.
Once he brought me a lilac branch. He simply walked into the room and held it out to me.
“It’s spring outside,” he said softly.
I took the flowers, and their bitter scent filled the room. That evening I cried for the first time in many months.
Dmitry sat beside me without embracing or consoling. He simply sat there. And his silent presence proved stronger than a thousand words.
Life went on. Our son Kirill was born, then our daughter Polina. The children gave the house meaning. I looked at their tiny fingers, at the way they laughed, and the ice in my soul began to thaw.
I learned to value Dmitry. His reliability, his steady strength, his kindness. He became my friend, my support. I loved him. Not with that first, searing love, but with another—a quiet, mature, hard-won love.
But Andrei did not leave. He came in dreams. We ran through the field again, lived in our little hut again.
I woke with cheeks wet from tears, and Dmitry, without a word, simply gripped my hand more tightly. He knew everything. And forgave everything.
I wrote to Andrei. Dozens of letters I never sent. I burned them in the fireplace and watched as the fire devoured the words meant for someone else.
Did I ask about him? Try to find out? No. I was afraid. Afraid to shatter the fragile world I had built. Afraid to learn that he had forgotten, stopped loving me, married.
Fear proved stronger than hope.
And now he was here. At my husband’s funeral. Time had erased the boyish lines from his face but hadn’t changed the essential thing—his eyes. They looked at me just as piercingly.
The memorial meal passed in a haze. I mechanically accepted condolences, nodded, answered at random. My whole being was drawn taut like a string; I felt his presence behind me.
When everyone had left, he stayed. He stood by the window looking out at the darkening garden.
“I looked for you, Liza.”
His voice had dropped, roughened.
“I wrote to you. Every month. For five years. Your father sent all the letters back unopened.”
He turned to me.
“And then I learned you had married.”
The air in the room grew dense, heavy. Each of Andrei’s words settled like dust on Dmitry’s portrait on the mantel. Five years. Sixty letters that could have changed everything.
“My father…” I began, but my voice broke. What could I say? That in acting for the best he had broken not one life but two?
“He came to me. A week after we were… separated. Set a condition. I leave the city for good and never try to contact you.
“In return he doesn’t file a charge against me for…” Andrei’s smile twisted, “for abducting his daughter. Nonsense, of course, but at twenty I was frightened. Not for myself. For you.”
I listened, and before my eyes rose a picture: my father, Konstantin Matveyevich, with his heavy jaw and domineering gaze, and twenty-year-old Andrei, bewildered, humiliated, but trying to keep his dignity.
“I went north. Took a job in geological exploration. There was hardly any communication; letters took months. I thought I’d run away from everything. You can’t run from yourself.” He ran a hand through his gray hair. “I wrote to your aunt’s address.
“I thought it would be safer. Apparently your father foresaw that, too. I couldn’t come—expeditions lasted two or three years. And when I returned after five, it was already too late.”
The room where I had lived fifty years with Dmitry suddenly felt foreign. The walls, steeped in our shared life, watched me in silence. Here was the armchair where Dima liked to read in the evenings.
Here the little table where we played chess. All of it was real, warm, mine. And now a ghost from the past had burst into this present and made it stagger.
“And you?” I asked quietly, afraid of the answer.
“Me? I lived, Liza. Worked, roamed the taiga. Tried to forget. I couldn’t. And then… then I met a woman. A good one. Simple. She was our expedition doctor. We married. We had two sons, Pyotr and Alexei.”
He said it simply, without drama. And that simplicity cut the deepest. The dream in which he had always been alone, waiting for me, shattered into a thousand shards.
He had lived. He had a family. A life in which there was no place for me.
I felt a prick of strange, untimely jealousy. Jealousy of a past I had never had.
“Her name was Katya. She died seven years ago. Illness.” He wasn’t looking at me but through the wall. “Our sons grew up, moved away. I came back to this city a year ago.”
“A whole year?” burst from me. “Why didn’t you…”
“What should I have done, Liza?” He looked straight at me. “Come to your house?
“I saw you a few times. In the park, by the theater. You were walking arm in arm with your husband, talking quietly. You looked… calm. At peace. I had no right to destroy that.”
“Why did you come today, Andrei?” I cut in. I needed to know this. Why wreck my world when it had only just begun to heal?
“I saw an obituary in the newspaper. Your husband’s surname… I remembered it. And I understood I had to come. Not to demand anything. But to… to close that door. Or open it. I didn’t know myself.”
He took a step toward me.
“Liza, I’m not asking you to forget your life. I can see from this house, from the photographs, that you were happy.
“And your husband… He has the face of a good man. I only want to know whether there’s still a spark left in you from the bonfire that burned in the forester’s hut.”
I looked at him. At this gray, weary man in whom I could barely make out the reckless boy. And I looked at Dmitry’s portrait, his calm, familiar face.
One gave me half a year of fire, for which I paid all my life.
The other gave me fifty years of warmth, which I learned to value too late.
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “I don’t know, Andrei. All I know is that today I buried my husband. And I loved him.”
He nodded, and understanding flickered in his eyes. Not hurt—understanding.
“I know. Forgive me. I’ll come in forty days. If you allow it.”
He left. The sound of the front door closing brought no relief. On the contrary, the house, emptied after the memorial, filled with booming questions.
Forty days. In Orthodoxy that is the time allotted for the soul to bid farewell to the earthly world. For me, those forty days were given to sort out the worlds within myself.
The first week I went through Dmitry’s things. It was torture and medicine at once.
Here was his favorite sweater, still holding the faint smell of his tobacco. Here his glasses on the desk beside an unfinished book. Every item cried out about him, about our quiet, measured life.
About how he taught our son to tie his laces, how he read bedtime stories to our daughter, changing his voice for each character.
In his desk drawer I found an old box. Inside were not documents or awards.
It held my dried flowers, the ones I used to weave into my hair, a movie ticket from our first date, and a small, faded photograph. I am twenty-one in it.
I look into the lens seriously, almost hostilely. Not a shadow of a smile. He kept that picture for fifty years. He kept me—the me he got, not the one he dreamed of. And in that silent adoration there was more love than in the most ardent vows.
The days passed. The children called, came by, brought groceries. They surrounded me with care, but their presence only sharpened my guilt.
One day my daughter, Polina, hugged me and said:
“Mom, we know it’s hard for you. Dad loved you so much. He always said you were the best thing that ever happened to him.”
Her words were sincere. And that made it even more bitter. I betrayed his memory with every thought of Andrei.
I stopped sleeping. At night I sat in the armchair and stared into the dark garden. Two images stood before me.
The wild, searing passion of youth—and the deep, quiet river of my maturity. Can they be compared? Can one be chosen? It is like choosing between the sun and air. Both are life.
I realized Andrei had been wrong about the essential thing. He asked about a spark from the bonfire. Yes, a spark remained.
But over fifty years Dmitry had built a warm, reliable house around that spark. And that house had become part of me. To destroy it would be to destroy myself.
On the fortieth day I woke with a clear sense of rightness. I baked memorial blini. Set the table, as my mother had taught me. Placed Dmitry’s photograph there.
I didn’t know if Andrei would come. I didn’t know what I would say to him.
After lunch I went out to the garden. The roses Dmitry loved needed pruning. The cold autumn air cleared my head.
I heard the creak of the gate. He stood on the path. He didn’t dare come closer. He simply stood and looked at me. In his hands was a small bouquet of wild daisies. The same kind he used to give me back at the forester’s hut.
He took a step. Then another. I didn’t move; I only gripped the pruning shears tighter.
“Hello, Liza.”
“Hello, Andrei.”
He held out the flowers. I didn’t take them.
“Thank you, they’re very beautiful. But you shouldn’t.”
Pain flashed in his eyes. The same as fifty years ago.
“I loved my husband,” I said softly but firmly. Each word had been paid for with sleepless nights.
“He was my life. And I will not betray his memory. The path you spoke of… it’s overgrown. Long ago. There is another garden there now. And I will tend it.”
I turned and walked toward the house without looking back. I heard him standing behind me. I waited for him to call out, to say something.
But he was silent.
Already at the door, I did look back.
He was still standing there. Then he slowly laid the daisies on the garden bench, turned, and walked to the gate.
I closed the door. Went up to Dmitry’s portrait and gazed a long time into his kind, all-understanding eyes. For the first time in forty days, I smiled. The path was not open. The path was complete. And I was home.
Five years later.
The bench in the garden—the one where Andrei laid the daisies—has long since been claimed by my grandchildren. They leave their toys, half-read books, and secrets on it. I no longer sit there alone.
Time is a remarkable healer. It doesn’t erase scars, but it smooths them, turning them into fine silver threads in the fabric of life.
The grief of losing Dmitry has settled, replaced by a bright, quiet sorrow and immense gratitude.
The house has ceased to be a place of mourning. It is full of life again—of great-grandchildren’s laughter, of the smell of apple strudel on weekends.
I never heard from Andrei again. Sometimes, when I was alone, I thought of him. Not with longing or regret, but with a kind of adult, detached curiosity.
How did his life unfold after our last conversation? Did he find his peace?
I sincerely wished it for him. He was a page from the book of my youth. Vivid, searing, important. But the book had long since been read, and I knew it by heart. There was no point reading it again.
My life now consisted of small rituals. Morning coffee on the veranda, tending Dmitry’s roses, which had grown into a lush, fragrant wall.
Evening calls with the children, bedtime stories over video for the great-grandchildren.
One day my eldest granddaughter, Katyusha, came to see me alone. We sat in the garden, and she, looking at me with her serious eyes, asked:
“Gran, were you happy with Grandpa? Truly?”
She was at that age when love seems like a storm, a blaze, something extraordinary. I looked at her young, searching face and understood I couldn’t answer with a simple sentence.
I got up and invited her inside. I took from Dmitry’s box that very same faded photograph.
Me at twenty-one. And I set beside it another, recent one, from my eightieth birthday. In it I sit surrounded by a huge family, and my face, lined with wrinkles, shines with a smile.
“Look,” I said. “In this photo is a girl who thought happiness meant running away. And in this one is a woman who understood that happiness means building. Not on ashes, but on solid ground.”
I took her hand.
“Your grandpa didn’t give me a conflagration, Katyusha. He taught me to kindle and tend a hearth.
“He didn’t give me half a year of madness, but half a century of life. Real life. With all its joys and hardships. And that turned out to be the greatest happiness.”
My granddaughter was silent, studying the photographs intently. I think she understood.
In the evening, when the house grew quiet, I went out into the garden again. The stars were bright and cold.
I thought about the roads we choose. The ones that lure us with their unknown, and the ones we lay ourselves, step by step.
Andrei said the road was open. But he didn’t grasp the main thing. Freedom is not when every road lies open before you. Freedom is when you have chosen one road and walk it to the end, without regret.
And on this road, in my garden, with the memory of my husband and the love of my family, I was truly free.