Little Suns

****

I often remembered the old communal apartment in St. Petersburg where my childhood passed. That very beautiful and very dilapidated building, the well courtyard, the dark archway through which we would emerge from our gloomy little world into the big noisy city.

My parents moved there after my grandmother died. She, in turn, had received the apartment right after the war, having moved from Moscow. And my childhood in the eighties of the last century was truly happy. Next door to us lived another young family with a boy my age. We quickly found common ground and became friends. His name was Dimka. He was very calm and didn’t especially like the active games the rest of us played in the courtyard. But he had a whole heap of books and drew very well, gladly teaching me, though I turned out to be rather clumsy. Later, in high school, Dimka switched to poetry and wrote somewhat strange and “druggy” but definitely talented poems. Sadly, around that time my family moved to a newly built district, I got twin sisters, preparatory courses for university began, and we lost touch. Later I was told his family also moved somewhere. I never managed to find his contacts, though I miss him and those days when we were friends very much.

Dimka’s room was far more interesting than ours. Old dark wardrobes stuffed with books—his grandfather’s legacy—stood there, and in a nook between one of them and the wall was Dimka’s bed. It made a sort of nest, which we would also curtain off with a blanket and sit there as if in a little house. Dimka told me all sorts of stories he’d read in his grandfather’s books, and in that dusty half-dark they sounded especially good.

In the center of the room stood a round table with several mismatched chairs. At that table we drew, did homework, hid underneath it by pulling the tablecloth down to the floor and then got our ears boxed by Dimka’s parents.

All in all, it really was a very happy time. But I digress. I wanted to tell about one winter evening that stuck in my memory especially.

We were about ten, I think. Only a few days remained until New Year’s, and our parents often went off to visit friends, leaving us, as if we were grown-ups, alone sometimes for the whole night. We were terribly proud of such trust and behaved well. Our neighbor Aunt Katya fed us reheated dinners our mothers had prepared in advance, and then we were left to ourselves. We never got bored, believe me.

That evening we stayed up late. Our parents promised to return only the next morning, so we weren’t in a hurry to go to bed. Snow was falling outside, and a clock ticked sleepily in the room. We sat at the table with only the lamp above it on, drawing a tank battle. Or rather, I was drawing, and Dimka was advising me, trying to give my scribbles historical accuracy and at least some artistic value. Darkness came quickly; dense shadows settled in the corners of the room. Strangely, we were never afraid of those shadows, nor of the darkness in our apartment in general. Even after that incident.

“That’s it, I’m tired,” I said, pushing the album away and leaning back in my chair. “Maybe a round of dominoes?”

Dimka shrugged and climbed into the dresser for the box of dominoes. We played for about half an hour, then I decided to finish the drawing after all. I pulled the album toward me… and found a sun drawn above the battlefield. An ordinary one—yellow and a bit crooked, with thick sausage-like rays. Despite my mediocrity in drawing, I had moved past such suns back in second grade. Dimka even earlier. The question remained—who drew this sun if there were only the two of us in the room?

“Dim?.. What’s this?”

Dimka pulled the album toward himself.

“Oh, that’s Sasha. She came.”

“Who?..”

Dimka shrugged.

“Sasha. She lives here. Lived.”

I already said we were never afraid of the dark and that I personally, I don’t know about him, considered this apartment the safest place on earth? Well, at that moment I felt uneasy for the first time and moved my chair closer to the table, pressing my stomach against it so hard it even hurt a little.

“What Sasha?”

“A normal one.”

“Dimka, come on!”

He smiled.

“Alright, alright. You’re impatient, as always. So… Sasha and her parents used to live in this apartment. In the room where Aunt Katya lives now. Then the war and the blockade happened. Sasha’s father went to the front, and her mother worked at a factory. Sometimes she wasn’t home for days. And Sasha came here, to my grandfather. He was little then too. They sat together and drew. Well, you understand, they had no paints, of course, and no paper, so they drew with charcoal from the stove on whatever they could. Somewhere my grandpa had a book whose pages they had filled with drawings. He kept it very carefully and let me look at it a couple of times. Then came that very cold and difficult winter when lots of people died. Sasha, unfortunately, also… died.”

He sighed, bit his lower lip, and seemed to shrink in on himself. Then he sighed again and continued.

“From hunger, like many others. Grandpa saw her in the last days when she couldn’t get up anymore. He went to her himself. She was very cold and very scared. And he brought her charcoal, and she drew suns. She said charcoal comes from fire, so suns made from it are real, and she feels warm. Anyway, later, when the war ended, her parents left the city somewhere to the Far East. Aunt Katya’s family moved into the room. And the very next winter the suns began to appear. Always late in the evening or at night, on any sheet of paper—drawn with whatever was at hand.”

Dimka looked at the drawing again and continued:

“I noticed it long ago. And got used to it. What of it, she’s also… little. Let her draw. I don’t mind. You know, I talk to her sometimes. She doesn’t answer, but I know she listens. And it’s less scary for her that way.”

I silently looked at him and couldn’t find what to say. Until that day I didn’t really believe in such things. Sure, it was fun in a dark room to tell stories about corpses in the basement and the ghost of a tormented high schooler in the boiler room, but when leaving I always remembered that the sun shone outside, the floor creaked because the house was old, and the shadows in the corners were just shadows.

“Don’t believe me?” Dimka’s question made me flinch.

“I don’t know,” I admitted honestly.

“I’ll ask her now. Sasha, draw another one. Please.”

He tore a sheet from the album and pushed it closer to the empty chair standing opposite me. We began to wait. Dimka calmly, and I in fascination.

On the sheet of paper, a crooked little yellow sun with thick sausage-like rays slowly began to appear. As if a small child were drawing with a finger smeared in paint.

I think my mouth opened by itself. The chair was completely empty, no one touched the paints, but the sun—there it was. I wasn’t afraid, no. I felt… Even now I can hardly describe what I felt then. I wanted to say something to Dimka, but he pressed a finger to his lips.

“Shhh, quiet.”

In the silence we heard faint slapping footsteps on the wooden floor moving away from us toward the door. I don’t know what made me do it, but I jumped up and rushed after them:

“Sasha, wait, Sasha!”

But all I found by the door were prints of a small child’s hand smeared in yellow paint on the doorframe.

“She never stays. She draws, sits for a bit, and leaves. I don’t know why. If it snows tomorrow, she’ll come again. Grandpa said she doesn’t like it when it snows. That’s when she, well… died.”

I stood there silently looking at the print by the door.

After that she came more than once or twice. We got used to it. We even left paint and clean paper for her on purpose. Then we carefully put the suns into a folder bought specially for them. There were many of them, but we chose a large folder.

And now I’m standing on the threshold of that apartment. I bought it a week ago. I don’t care that it has no renovation and almost no furniture. I have with me the rather worn folder with the drawings, miraculously preserved through all the moves. I’ll go into the room where Sasha comes and hang her suns on the walls. After all, today the weather service promised heavy snowfall.