Reunited After 25 Years 5

"Please don't be sad, dear little Andrea." Anton smiled as he gently caressed Andrea's cheek. "We're here together, now. I know it took me a long time, but I did come back to you just like I said I would. We have all the time we need now, not like before."

"I know." Andrea smiled. "If it's not too personal a question, why didn't you and Nadya have any more children after Darya?"

"Oh, Andrea, there is no need to worry." Anton chuckled. "You can ask me anything at all. I will not be mad. Nadya and I both wanted more children. We tried and tried for many years, but had no success. First the doctors said she have endometriosis. Then she got cancer."

"Anton...if you ever married again, would you like to have more children?"

"Me? I am old man now." He laughed. "What about you, Andrea? You want more children?"

"I always wondered what it would be like to have a daughter," Andrea said softly. "While you and Denny were in electronics at the mall Darya and I went clothes shopping. I couldn't believe how much fun it was. That's the first time I've done that with someone in so long that I can't even remember the last time. Denny hates to go clothes shopping."

"I hate it too." Anton laughed, then looked thoughtful. "Dasha has no mother now...and you have no daughter."

"Why do people stand on street corners holding signs here? Do they have no job, no home? Why does the government not take care of them?"

It was Sunday evening, and Andrea had driven Anton to the supermarket for groceries. Anton had noticed a group of vagrants standing on the corner waiting for handouts and was curious.

"Some of them just slip between the cracks, I guess. Others can't, or won't, help themselves. The government can't do everything for everyone."

"Still, America is so rich, so powerful...it just doesn't seem right that such situations should exist in America..."

"I couldn't agree with you more, Anton," said Andrea.

"Andrea!" One of the vagrants, a man in a wheelchair, called to her. He was filthy, and both his legs were missing.

"Hi, Marty. How are you? Are you taking your meds like you should?"

"Fuck the meds. They don't do no good." Marty was right beside the car now. He reeked of alcohol.

"This is my friend Anton," Andrea told him.

"Anton? What the hell kind of a name is that?" Marty scowled menacingly at Anton, who recoiled from him. "Listen here, boy! It was Commies that killed my best friend! Yellow-skinned, slant-eyed Commies! Ya got that?"

Andrea quickly rolled the window up and pulled away from the curb so quickly that she almost hit another car and then pulled into the parking lot of the motel.

"I'm so sorry," she whispered.

"It is all right. If I lost both my legs, I would be pretty upset as well. What happened to him?"

"He stepped on a land mine. He was Dennis' best friend. He saw Dennis die. He saw...Dennis...die."

"Oh." Anton felt more awkward than he had ever felt before in his life. "I can very well understand how he would be angry. But it happened many years ago, did it not?"

"To Marty, it's still nineteen seventy-three. It will always be nineteen seventy-three to him." Andrea sighed deeply. "He has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He has flashbacks where he thinks that he's still over there, that the war is still going on. It's very sad."

"Petya was my nephew." Anton wasn't looking at her, and his voice was so soft that at first she wondered if he was merely talking to himself. "I loved him just as much as if he were my son. He was killed in Afghanistan in nineteen eighty-four. I remember it like it was yesterday, the day his body came home on the train. I was at the station with his wife Tanya and their little boy Sasha. Sasha was only about three years old at the time."

"I know exactly how she felt," Andrea told him. "It was just the same for me when they brought Dennis' body home. How well I remember standing in the airport looking at the casket with the American flag draped over it." An image came to her mind, one of Petya's casket with that other flag draped over it, the red flag with the intersecting hammer and sickle, and she shuddered involuntarily. Years of indoctrination still had that effect on her, even now.

"Tanya reminded me a lot of you, Andrea. You would have liked her."

"Perhaps." Andrea was still struggling to get the disconcerting image out of her mind.

"First I lost Petya, then only a year or so later, I lost Nadya." Anton looked so despondent that Andrea's heart ached for him.

"You'll see them again one day, Anton."

"That's what you Americans believe. I was always told not to believe. Lenin did not believe, Stalin did not believe, so I should not believe either."

"But you should believe, Anton. Not because of what anyone else tells you, but because it helps. Believe, me, Anton, it does."

"You are such a special lady, Andrea. You are the first American I told about Petya. I knew that I could because you would listen and will not pass judgement."

Andrea struggled to stifle a yawn.

"I am so sorry, Andrea. I kept you up far too late, talking."

"Oh, that's all right! But I do need to get home now."

"You are perfectly welcome to stay here for the night," Anton told her. "You shouldn't drive if you are too sleepy. It is not safe."

"Oh, I'll be all right." Andrea yawned again.

Anton chuckled. "You stay. Sleep in my bed. I will take the sofa."

"Oh, no, I wouldn't do that..."

"I will not sleep in the bed. So if you don't, nobody will." Anton grinned.

"Well, if you insist..."

Anton laughed.

Andrea found that she was unable to fall asleep in Anton's bed because she kept thinking of him lying on the sofa. After a while she tiptoed into the living room and lay down beside him.

"If we are going to sleep together, we might as well take the bed," Anton mumbled.

They fell asleep together with Anton curled around Andrea and holding her tightly to himself.