Part 4 — The Mother Decided to Reject Her Unborn Child, but One Old Letter Silenced Everyone Present

At the sight of my own address, I could not make a sound for several seconds.

Dmitri, however, seemed to have been expecting that message.

“Now do you understand why I asked you to stop?” he told me.

“No,” I answered. “Now I understand why you are afraid.”

The ambulance workers entered the room. Xenia’s blood pressure was low, but she was conscious. Elena held her hand, while Irina wrapped the white shawl around her mother’s shoulders.

The purple cross stopped at her neck.

“Mother, I will go with you,” Irina told her.

“No,” Xenia said. “You go with Giorgi.”

“Why?”

Xenia looked at Dmitri.

“Because he still knows where the second folder is.”

Dmitri moved toward the door, but Nino stood in his way.

“You are not going anywhere.”

“You do not know whom you are fighting.”

“You no longer know whom you are hiding from either,” I told him.

That same night we returned to the archive. The corridors were empty. The lights flickered, and traces of mud brought in by the rain could be seen on the floor.

Nino opened the door to the second basement.

“This room has been locked for twenty years,” she said.

“Then why did you open it for us?”

“Because today I saw Xenia’s signature for the first time on the sheet that was kept here.”

Behind the door, shelves rose to the ceiling. On the fifth shelf, among old medical journals, we found a small cloth bag. Inside it were a magnetic recording wrapped in papers and one photograph.

In the photograph, young Xenia stood in the yard of a maternity hospital. She held a newborn in her arms. Dmitri stood beside her, but his face was turned to the side. On the back of the photograph it said: “If something happens to me, name the child Irina. That is her real name.”

Irina held the photograph with both hands.

“I have never seen this face.”

“Because Mother hid it,” I told her.

Nino put the recording into an old device. After several seconds of hissing, a man’s voice sounded.

“The child must disappear. If Xenia resists, tell her that her child will not even have a name.”

Then Xenia’s voice sounded, young but firm:

“You will not take my child’s name away. If I cannot raise her, I will still do everything so that one day she learns who she was.”

Irina closed her eyes.

Dmitri sat down on a chair. His face became gray.

“This recording must not exist,” he said.

“But it exists,” I answered.

“You cannot publish it. Many people will suffer.”

“People have already suffered. For a century.”

The next morning Dmitri’s lawyer called me.

“My client denies everything and demands the immediate transfer of the materials.”

“He can demand it. But I cannot hide the evidence.”

“Think about whom you are opposing.”

“You think about whom you are defending.”

The lawyer was silent for several seconds.

“I am withdrawing from this case,” he said. “Last night I received a document that Dmitri had hidden from me too.”

Just then I heard Dmitri’s own voice on the tape. He himself described how he forced Xenia into silence, how he forged the transfer order, and how he deceived Irina into believing that her mother had wanted to leave her.

But the heaviest thing was one sentence:

“If the truth is ever revealed, Irina will think that her mother rejected her from the very beginning. That will be enough to separate them until the end of their lives.”

Dmitri heard these words and, for the first time, did not object.

He buried his head in his hands.

“I only wanted to survive,” he whispered.

“No,” Irina said. “You wanted others to be afraid like you.”

That same day we handed the recording, the letter, and the documents to the investigator. A case was opened against Dmitri for forging documents and making threats. The police took him from the hospital, but Xenia did not have the face of victory over his arrest.

“I did not want his downfall,” she told me in the evening. “I only wanted my child to stop thinking that I had ever rejected her.”

Several days later I recorded an interview with Xenia. The camera stood by the window. Outside, the first snow was falling.

“What would you say to the girl you gave birth to then?” I asked.

Xenia looked at Irina.

“I would tell her that a mother’s fear is not a lack of love. Sometimes love is such a difficult choice that it makes a person carry its mark for a whole life.”

Irina kissed her mother’s hand.

“I know now, Mother.”

Several weeks later the article was published. Letters came from the whole country. Some called Xenia a heroine, while others asked why she had kept silent for so long. She answered every question calmly.

“Because survival also has its price,” she said.

Dmitri’s trial ended several months later. His guilt was confirmed, but Xenia’s words remained in the courtroom the longest.

“I am not asking for revenge. I am asking that you no longer allow anyone to cover a mother’s love with the name of betrayal.”

After the verdict, Irina took her mother home. We redid her room on the sunny side. We removed the old heavy furniture and put a low table by the window. Xenia’s photographs were arranged there.

One day, only one thing remained in the empty wardrobe—the white shawl with the purple cross.

Irina took hold of it.

“I will not throw this away.”

“Nor should you,” I told her. “Everything began on the day your mother covered you with it.”

Xenia smiled.

“No. Everything began on the day she looked at me for the first time.”

Four months passed. Xenia turned one hundred and four. On her birthday, Irina baked a small cake and made a purple cross from sugar on top. Xenia looked at the candles and said with laughter:

“So many candles for one cake is unfair.”

Irina held her hand.

“And you endured injustice.”

“I did not endure it alone.”

That evening I returned to the city and began working at a small publishing house instead of the old archive. I did not hang Xenia’s photograph on the wall. I only wrote one of her sentences on a sheet of paper: “You will not take my child’s name away.”

Every morning, before I began writing, I read these words.

A year later Irina sent me a child’s drawing. It showed a little girl holding a white shawl. Beside her it said: “The grandmother who waited for me.”

I placed the drawing on the table.

That same week I received a final letter from Dmitri. It was short.

“I want you to speak to me at least once. Now I have lost everything.”

Irina read the letter and went to the window. Spring rain was falling outside.

“What should we answer?”

“What you have in your heart.”

She thought for a long time. Then she wrote:

“I am no longer going to save you. But I will not carry your hatred either. Live with the truth you created yourself.”

She sent the letter and folded the shawl on the table.

The purple cross came exactly to the middle.

Xenia picked it up, pressed it to her face, and closed her eyes.

“Now I can rest,” she said.

Irina rested her head on her mother’s shoulder.

And I understood that the strongest secret in this story had been neither a document, nor a recording, nor Dmitri’s downfall.

The greatest secret was that love sometimes lives silently for years, until someone finally gives it its true name.

The first snow fell on the window.

The purple cross could still be seen on the white shawl.

And this time no one hid it anymore.