Writing

An excerpt from Geras' forthcoming historical fiction novella.

 

AGAINST THE TIDES

 

NOVOZYBKOV, RUSSIA - 1907

As Flora turned the tarnished brass doorknob to open the front door, she stepped over the threshold and into the awaiting world. She could already feel the warm soft breeze greet her skin. She hurried herself across the fertile, expansive land she called home.

From the family sunroom, she had seen the aging familiar white horse, and glimpsed the blue uniform of the postman in the distance. She knew that she may hear from him soon; and at this point, that was the only thing that mattered to her any longer.

Flora raised a gentle hand to her growing stomach as she passed the rapidly blooming lilac trees on the farm. Their scent was growing more intoxicating by the day, and Flora allowed herself to momentarily ponder just how many afternoons she had spent reading poetry amongst those delicate pillowy flowers throughout her childhood.

As she continued down the uneven slate path, careful not to scuff her black leather boots, she passed the newly freed serfs. Each of whom nodded towards her in deference as they toiled with their vegetable seeds in the fresh spring dirt.

She smiled at the men and women. She had known each of them her entire life. Some of the young women she even called friends. Although she could never admit to it aloud, as far as Flora was concerned; the workers were as much a part of this land as she was.

The horse that was carrying a large brown leather satchel and the old shriveled Ivan Ivanovich came to a slow halt, just as Flora made her way to the unpaved and dusty road in front of her home. Flora’s mother looked on from a second story window, observing her daughter’s elation at the possibility of a letter arriving for her.

She was partially obscured from view by the heavy purple floral drapery in her bedroom. As she watched her young daughter trade pleasantries with old Ivan the postman, she was able to make out the exchange of a letter. Flora’s joy was palpable in that moment.

Almost immediately and quite unexpectedly, her eyes swelled with tears and she began to dab carefully at her face with an embroidered handkerchief. She could sense that this was indeed the long awaited letter from Andrew. The time had finally arrived.

Anna Petrova Khachanova felt her body grow weak and her head started to spin. She quickly moved to sit down in her favorite blush colored velvet and mahogany chair, worried that she may

From the corner of her room, Anna could not see Flora’s unbridled happiness — grasping the letter to her chest — her smile so wide that even Ivan Ivanovich allowed his typically pursed lips to turn slightly upwards as he regained his seating on the horse. He rode off with a stiff wave and wished Flora well as he made his way to the next stop on his long delivery route.

Several moments later, the familiar chiming of the bells hanging on the inside door signaled Flora’s return to the home.

“He wrote Mama, he wrote!”, Flora yelled out. “I knew that he would soon!”, she said as she looked around the drawing room for her mother who was nowhere to be found.

Flora could feel an absolute dread rise up from the pit of her pregnant belly, she experienced the emotion so intensely, she knew it sought to extinguish all of her joy in that moment.

“Oh why, oh why, am I so apt to dwell on life’s ‘what ifs?’," she silently wondered.

In this moment, all Flora wanted was to believe that it was the letter she had so patiently longed for. The letter from the man who was so many thousands of miles away, but so close in her heart that every breath felt like it happened solely for him.

He was her husband — of barely a year, and the man she had so seldom seen since their wedding, but he had become her everything. He held all her life’s promises and hopes, and now, she held a new life that she carried within her.

During a time of such upheaval surrounding the country, these were the only things she knew with certainty anymore; and she clung to them with all her strength. It was all she had to believe in now.

But this letter — this letter was real, Flora thought as she moved the fine ecru paper between her fingertips. This letter was something tangible, and it could potentially signal so much more — or,sadly she thought, it could just state more of the same; just more waiting. What had now come to feel like an endless and senseless exercise in hopelessness.

“Open it”.

Flora looked up from her melancholy thoughts to see her mother at the top of their staircase. Anna was holding her Grandmother’s black rosary beads and quietly, almost inaudibly, repeating Orthodox prayers.

“I’m scared Mama," Flora cried out. “What happens if the time for me to join Andrew in the United States has finally arrived?”

She paused and then looked up to meet her mother’s concerned gaze, “How can I leave you and Papa? How can I move so far away from everything I known — especially now? We can all feel what is coming on the horizon here at home!”

Flora wanted to remain strong. She wanted to maintain some sense of hope, but the events of the last two years began to swell inside her. She felt herself sink into the familiar abyss that accompanies the unknown. An almost physically painful feeling of fear gripped her internally, and Flora began to weep.

The light blue linen dress that was billowing around her caught each quiet and streaming tear that fell from her face as she slowly sat down on the brightly colored, hand-woven Tartar rug. Suddenly Flora found that her breathing was beginning to quicken as the uncertainty of her situation grew more real to her with each passing moment.

Anna rushed down the stairs toward her youngest daughter, her baby of only sixteen years old. She couldn’t deny her daughter her fears; because Anna held the very same ones. There was nothing that she could say in that moment, so instead she held Flora’s radiant, soft face in her hands. Flora’s pale blue eyes met her mother’s own, and the two sat in silence, allowing their tears to flow together as one.

After what felt like an eternity; Flora, hands slightly trembling, began to slowly separate the envelope’s lip from its seal.