Chapter Text
Father,
It feels strange calling you that, you know? I never called you that when I was little — I guess maybe you don’t remember. It was always Papa, just like most of the other kids. But I tried starting a letter that way and it felt wrong, so I hope you’ll forgive the formality.
I know you don’t want to come home. I’m eighteen now; I’m well over that particular delusion. You are happy in the West, clearly. I was sad to hear you’d retired from chess so soon after you won, but nobody can play forever. Alexander Ivanovich says you’re teaching mathematics now, is that true? I can’t imagine that pays well. Maybe it’s different in England.
The reason I write is only to inform you of my upcoming graduation from secondary school. It is in only a few months — May 22nd, to be exact. You must be aware of how travel restrictions have been changing, with glasnost and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Everyone I have talked to thinks that you would be able to safely come and visit for a few weeks. My friend has relatives from West Germany who visited last month. I know your situation is different, but I feel confident you could do the same. I do hope so, anyway.
Your presence at my graduation would mean a lot. Some people here do miss you, still.
Yours sincerely,
Sofia Anatolievna Sergievskaya
“You can’t possibly be seriously thinking about it,” Freddie says after reading over the letter in full, pushing his (newly acquired, much lamented) reading glasses back onto his head.
“So what if I am?” Anatoly retorts, suddenly on the defensive.
“So what? There’s no way you think they’ll actually let you back into the country. I know shit’s all chaotic now after Berlin, but they’re still gonna notice a famous defector trying to get back in, come on.”
“Sofia says—”
“Sofia’s a kid. The hell does she know?”
“She’s eighteen, and she lives in Moscow. I'd imagine she knows a thing or two about the political situation there.”
“She knows what they tell her! I bet she's been fed a very nice story about how free everything is now, but that doesn’t mean you have to risk your luck believing it.”
“Get over yourself,” Anatoly says, snatching the letter back. “Since when are you this concerned about my safety, anyway?”
Freddie doesn’t respond to that, only crosses his arms and stalks off to the kitchen. Anatoly can hear him slamming cabinets.
“Very mature,” he calls after him, although Freddie probably can’t hear him over the noise he’s now making. Anatoly sighs, folding the letter back up and putting it back in the drawer by his bedside table, where it’s been residing for the past week since he received it.
It’s a better response than it could have been, actually. In the going-on six years they’ve been living together, Freddie and Anatoly have had much nastier arguments over much smaller infractions. Anatoly had hoped that Freddie might have more tact when it came to his children, but if he was going to get pissy about it, a short spat isn’t the worst way it could have gone.
They have been arguing more recently. There had been a few years in the middle where things had been — not good, but okay. Once they had moved past their initial grievances with each other and gotten used to the idea of living together, they’d settled into something that could almost pass as domestic. It was nothing like with Florence or even Svetlana, but it was comfortable, like a familiar thorn in his side. Anatoly would take it over coming home to nothing any day. He still would, now. He never did like living alone.
Anatoly can’t exactly put his finger on what’s changed. He’d say that Freddie’s been picking more fights, but then, how many of them were started because Anatoly had goaded him into it? Not that he wants them to fight, but — maybe Freddie’s been more irritating recently. Maybe Anatoly’s maturing, and finally realizing how terrible of an idea it was to get involved with him.
Maybe he’s just bored.
Not that it matters. Anatoly wasn’t showing Freddie the letter to ask for his opinion on it. If he does go back to Russia, he’ll be going regardless of how much Freddie bitches and moans about his decision. Freddie would probably appreciate the time apart, anyway. Anatoly has a feeling that his expressed worries about Anatoly leaving were coming less from a place of genuine concern and more out of a desire to get pissed off for the sake of it.
Frankly, the safety issue is the least of Anatoly’s concerns about going home. The KGB must have bigger problems than a washed-up chess player making a brief visit to the USSR, especially right now. No, what worries him is what comes after he gets through customs — the snowy rooftops of Moscow, the crowded apartment building, Svetlana’s piercing gray eyes. All the pieces of a life that he left behind a decade ago that he doesn’t know if he’s ready to return to.
He never disliked Moscow. When he’d first moved there for school, it had seemed downright magical, a stark comparison to the little town he’d been raised in and grown tired of by age thirteen. He’d spend hours sitting and playing chess at the metro station closest to his university, watching the trains pass by and the hoards of people rushing on and off. It had made him feel like anything was possible. Like he had the whole world surrounding him, and at any moment he could take a train somewhere else and never look back again.
And then he’d met Svetlana, and then there was Sofia, and the offer from the Moscow chess team, and Yulia, and dozens of other little strings tying him down to one apartment and the chess center the next block over. He took the same metro route every day and traveled maybe twice a year, for holidays, and played chess in his living room covered in children’s toys or in an empty room at the chess center with one little window facing outside. And that had been good, for a while. It was what he wanted. There were moments when he held baby Sofia or played chess while Svetlana made dinner and felt just as much like he had the world at his fingertips as he did in university, because he was finally working towards everything he’d wanted as a boy. He was in control of his own career, his life. It was a good feeling.
Eventually it stopped feeling that way. He can’t pinpoint a moment when it happened, only knows that it must have, otherwise he can’t explain how the tall buildings had suddenly felt less like a promise of possibility and more like they were hemming him in. How his daily routine had turned more and more into a chore. How the chessboard had shrunk from a game with millions of outcomes to the small, perfectly arranged sixty-four squares.
And then suddenly he was on a mountaintop in Merano and feeling the same boyish sense of hope he hadn’t experienced properly in years.
All that to say: It’s not that he hates the idea of visiting Moscow again. It was a beautiful city, even towards the end. It’s just…
It’s where he spent over half his life. It’s complicated.
“I don’t think she even wants you to come back,” Freddie announces over dinner, dashing Anatoly’s hopes that they might be over this particular argument.
“Are you an idiot? That is the opposite of what she spent the whole letter saying.” Anatoly pokes at a spear of asparagus. “I know your Russian reading skills are bad, but—”
“My Russian is fine.”
“It’s better than your speaking skills, but that bar for that is really quite low.”
“You just don’t like my accent.”
“Maybe if your accent didn’t make you mispronounce every other word, we would have less problems.”
“You pronounced coupon as cyoopon for the first three years I knew you.”
“And I can hardly tell if you’re saying здороваться or до свидания. This is not the same thing.”
Freddie rolls his eyes. “Anyway, I know what the letter said. I just don’t think she meant it.”
“Oh, you’re privy to my daughter’s thoughts now?”
“All I’m saying is that I sure as hell wasn’t writing my deadbeat father begging him to come to my graduation.”
“Do I look like your father to you?”
“I don’t know.” Freddie makes a show of sizing him up, making a little picture frame with his hands. “You do have his eyebrows.”
“You’re not funny.” Anatoly swats his hands away. “And I’m not a deadbeat.”
“You left your wife and kids behind. That is the definition of deadbeat.”
“I don’t think—”
“Look, call it what you want, but the point is that you’re not in their life anymore. I’m sure at this point they don’t want you back in it.”
“Did you forget how less than a minute ago we established that Sofia actually does want me to come back home?”
“God, don’t you get it? She’s setting you up. She probably got all buddy-buddy with some KGB agent — she mentions Molokov by his first name in the letter, for Christsakes — and they’re using her as a way of convincing you to defect back home. Come on, it’s so easy to see through.”
“Is it so hard for you to believe that my children just might want to see me again after ten years?”
“Yes!”
“That’s absurd. They don’t want me back badly enough to be playing a long game of ten years.”
“You never know.” Freddie shrugs. “You are one of the best players they’ve ever had.”
This — you’re one of the best chess players in the Soviet Union, in this generation, in the world — is the single compliment Freddie has ever been willing to give Anatoly. As far as Anatoly can remember, it’s also the only consistent reasoning he’s given for sticking around as long as he has. Anatoly doesn’t think it’ll ever not be weird to hear something resembling genuine flattery coming out of Freddie’s mouth.
“Your reasoning doesn’t even make sense. First my daughter is completely unaware of the political situation in her own country, and now she’s part of some KGB master plan? Which is it?”
“I’m just saying some of it doesn’t add up.”
“You’re projecting.”
“No, I know more about this than you. I’m giving you a different perspective.”
“What? You don’t know my children.”
“Oh, and you do?”
“They were not babies when I left. I remember what they were like.”
“Yeah, when they were under the age of ten! They’re both teenagers. You don’t know jack shit about what they want now.”
“Some things don’t change.”
Freddie snorts. “Uh-huh, sure. I bet you didn’t even realize your daughter was turning eighteen.”
“I did,” Anatoly protests, somewhat weakly. Because he must have. He remembered both of his kids’ birthdays this year — he remembers them every year. Surely it registered in some part of his mind that Sofia would be eighteen. He must have spared at least a passing thought to do the math, wondered at least briefly if she might be considering a job or university next. The letter couldn’t possibly have been the first time he realized how old she was now. It didn’t seem right.
Freddie looks at him like he knows he’s lying.
“Look, none of this matters,” Anatoly says, trying to steer the conversation away before Freddie can interrogate him further. “I have a letter from my daughter asking me to come home for her graduation. I know that. Wouldn’t it be worse if I deny her that request?”
“You’ve denied her everything else she’s probably wanted from you in the past decade. Why stop now?”
“This isn’t a joke.”
“Really? Because I think it’s pretty funny.”
“Stop acting like a child.” Anatoly rises, clearing his plates from the table. “If you’re not going to say anything helpful, I'm not going to talk to you about it.”
“I'm being helpful. It’s not my fault you refuse to accept the fact that you’re a shit father.”
“We're done talking,” Anatoly reiterates. “I'll do the dishes.”
It occurs to him as Freddie disappears into the living room that he should have chosen a better way of getting him off his case. Anatoly hates scrubbing wet food off of plates.
He would never concede far enough to admit that Freddie had a point, but Anatoly is of course aware that his daughters might not idolize him the way they did when they were little. Even now, they may not be able to fully grasp how much it was necessary that he leave when he did. Or how much it had felt necessary, maybe. Now it’s hard to imagine it being quite so urgent of a situation.
He never intended to leave his children behind. It was never them he was trying to escape, really, more the stifling domesticity of it all — coming home to toys strewn about the floor, to someone sleeping next to him in bed. But he loved his daughters. It was only once he was standing in the embassy, paperwork in hand, that he’d realized with an awful lurch that he might never see them again.
He’d hadn’t explained all this to them, of course. He never had the chance. For all they know, he left because of them. They could resent him for that. Anatoly wouldn’t blame them.
Sofia wanted to see him, though. Anatoly didn’t believe a word of Freddie’s insistence otherwise. For her to go through the trouble of finding his address — Molokov had it, probably, which does make him shudder — it couldn’t have been some half-hearted attempt at reaching out. She thought about him, still. Enough to want him home.
It’s still strange to him. Whenever he pictures his children, he thinks of them as they were when he left, tiny little things of barely six and eight. It’s odd to think of them as changing in his absence. In truth, it’s hard for him to even remember that they still exist somewhere, and that they aren’t just distant figures living on in his memory. It’s not a new problem — the first time he had visited his parents after spending several years in Moscow, he had been shocked to see that his father’s beard had gone completely white while he was away. It feels wrong to think that other people could change so much when his whole life it feels like he’s been doing nothing but running in place.
Of course, he has changed. It’s another situation where he thinks he must have, because when he looks back at himself at age fifteen or twenty-six or thirty-two there are dozens of little differences he can find. Even between when he’d first moved to the UK and now he’s changed. The forty-two year old, brand new to London and madly in love with Florence Anatoly would never have agreed to return to Russia, even if it were safe, even if Sofia asked. Fifty-something year old Anatoly is somehow seriously considering it.
He can’t identify what in him has shifted to prompt such a change in opinion, just like he can’t explain why he and Freddie have been arguing so much lately, or why Moscow now feels like a prison instead of the endless city it once was. He can only recognize that something, somehow, must have changed. Many parts of his life have been like that, it seems.
His children will have changed, Freddie is right enough about that. But surely some things will stay the same. Sofia will still have her mother’s eyes. Yulia will still have a birthmark on her forearm. They’ll both be as fiercely independent as they used to be, he hopes. Maybe Yulia will still like to swim.
Maybe Sofia will still love him.
Freddie stays in the bed with him that night, so he can’t be that mad at Anatoly — or, at least, he’s not angry enough to risk a sore back from the couch. It’s something.
He should buy Freddie his own bed, Anatoly thinks distantly as he drifts off to sleep. He’s been promising Freddie he will for years, ever since it became evident that their living together would become a more permanent arrangement. Freddie had suffered it out on the couch for a while, but after more than a few incidents that ended with Freddie in his bed for reasons entirely unrelated to sleeping, it had seemed simpler to let him stay in his bedroom, at least temporarily. There is a spare room in the apartment, one that Anatoly has mostly been using for storage, but it would only take a weekend or two to turn it into a functioning bedroom. He really has been meaning to, he swears. He’s sure Freddie would prefer his own space.
But sharing the bed works for now. Anatoly’s used to sleeping next to someone, anyway. And Freddie doesn’t get nearly as offended as Svetlana or Florence when Anatoly needs to spend a night on the couch because he can’t stand to hear someone else’s breathing in the middle of the night.
He rereads the letter again the next morning. Notices how neat Sofia’s handwriting is, compared to the cursive she was still mastering when he left. (She didn’t get that from him, that’s certain. His handwriting has been terrible since the day he learned to write.) Wonders if the rest of her schoolwork is this composed and thought-through. Realizes that in a few months she won’t be a child at all anymore, but a newly minted adult, preparing to go off to university or get a job or get married — good Lord, she could get married. He and Svetlana were only a few years older than her when he’d proposed.
He doesn’t know what he wants to do about it. But he has a feeling he knows what he has to.
“I’m going to book a flight today,” Anatoly informs Freddie as he’s getting ready for work. The timing of the announcement might be slightly intentional, in hopes that Freddie will only have a limited amount of time to get annoyed about it before he has to leave for the day.
“Like hell you are.”
“I am, and you actually don’t get a say in the matter.”
“As your roommate, I think I should get some say in whether you leave our apartment for God knows how long.”
“I’ll tell you my plans once I’ve made them.” Anatoly shrugs. “I could buy you a ticket too, if you want.”
“Fuck no.”
“Your Russian is shit, but if you stuck with me, you could probably manage. If you’re that afraid of temporarily living on your own.”
“So we can hand the KGB two players they want for the price of one? I’ll pass, thank you.”
“The KGB barely wanted you fifteen years ago and they certainly do not want you now. You cannot possibly be this full of yourself.”
“Jesus Christ, I’m being reasonable! This is a major decision, and you’ve barely thought it through at all, I think I’m right by suggesting you pump the breaks a bit.”
“I’ve thought it through.”
“Do you know where you’re going to stay? How you’re going to explain what the hell you’ve been up to in England? Where any of this money is coming from?”
“It’s a one week trip, max. I can figure it out.”
Freddie laughs bitterly. “Yeah, I bet you told your wife that before you left for Merano, too.”
Anatoly stops short. “Oh. That’s it.”
“That’s what?” Freddie demands.
“Why you’re so mad about me leaving. You don’t seriously think I’m going to get kidnapped out of my bed, or anything — you’re just afraid that if I leave, I’m not going to come back.”
Freddie reddens and goes very quiet.
“That is what it is, isn’t it? And here I thought you’d be happy to get rid of me for a few weeks.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Freddie snaps. “I’m not that reliant on you, Jesus. I just want someone to cover your half of the rent.”
Freddie’s salary could easily pay the entire month’s rent with room to spare, but Anatoly chooses not to bring this up. The damage has already been done.
“I’ll pay the rent before I leave,” Anatoly says, a little softer.
“Fine. Fine! Go to your shitty commie city and get thrown in a gulag, see if I care.” Freddie throws on a suit jacket and stomps, rather childishly, towards the door. “But never try to psychoanalyze me like that again, God. Don’t act like you know what I’m thinking.”
To his credit, Freddie does not slam the door. He closes it very pointedly, but it does not slam. The quiet click of the latch sliding back into place is somehow worse.
Anatoly buys a single plane ticket, from London to Moscow, before he, too, heads off to work.