The Turning by Gloria Whelan Page B

away from you, Mama. Let me have the pictures. I’ll take good care of them.” Reluctantly she took them from their frames and gave them to me.
    The troupe was to leave for Moscow on August nineteenth. We would take the overnight train to Moscow, remain in the capital for two days, and then fly to Paris. We were all excited, for none of us had been on a plane and most of us had never been to Moscow or even on a train. Since I had been packed and ready to go for weeks, there was little preparation. The hard part was saying good-bye to those I loved. Mama must have sensed something in my behavior, for the morning before I was to leave, as we were sitting at the table having a second glass of tea, she put her hand on mine. “Tanya, is there something you aren’t telling me?”
    I could feel my cheeks burning. “What do you mean?”
    “You seem so sad. I would have thought you would be thrilled at going on the tour.”
    “It’s just that I’ve never been away from home before.”
    “You will be back before you know it. A couple of weeks is nothing when you have so much excitement ahead of you. You must write down everything so that you can tell us all about it. Now Papa and I have a surprise for you.” Mama gave me a carefully wrapped package. Inside was a small camera. “There, you see. You’ll take pictures of everything, and you’ll be able to show us what you have seen when you get home.”
    All I could think of was putting pictures in an envelope and sending them back, and of what a rebuke that would be to Mama and Papa, who had sacrificed to buy me the camera.
    Aunt Marya brought me a lovely silk scarf. “It belonged to a friend of mine and will bring you good luck,” she said. “When you are in my beloved city of Paris, you must think of me.”
    Grandmother gave me a book of French poems. “They will help you understand the soul of the French,” she promised.
    Sasha came by for a final farewell. In front of the family we had to hide our two secrets: how much we cared for each other and our worry that we might never again see each other. When he left, he gave me a small parcel. “Open it when I’m gone. And keep it with you to protect you.” Inside I found a miniature of St. Vladimir, so small it fit into the palm of my hand. Sasha had made a perfect copy of Nadya Petrovna’s icon.
    Grandfather’s gift was the strangest gift of all, though it wasn’t exactly a gift. It was the early afternoon of the day I was to leave, only an hour or so before I was to meet the others at the theater, where we would board a bus for the Moscow train station. I had already said good-bye to Mama and Papa, who had both left for work. Grandmother was at a writers’ meeting. Grandfather and I were alone. He had been out and had just returned with a worried expression on his face. He began to pace back and forth in the tiny apartment. He was large and the apartment small, so the pacing took only a few steps each way. For the last two days Grandfather had acted strangely, all but looking over his shoulder as if he expected some calamity to appear. He had pored over the newspaper and spent long hours with his political friends, coming home late at night. He wore a worried frown all day long and was given to making gloomy predictions about the fate of the country.
    Mama had asked, “Papa, why the worried look? Your Yeltsin is president of Russia and gaining in popularity every day.”
    Grandfather replied, “The stronger Yeltsin gets, the more the old guard in the Communist party plot to get rid of him and take the country back.”
    As I was strapping on my backpack, Grandfather stopped his pacing and said, “I must have a word with you, Tanya. There is a moment each spring just before I jump into the Neva River with its chunks of ice when I think, ‘Georgi, you are a fool,’ but I take the plunge. This is such a moment. I had not wanted to involve you in something dangerous, but I must. You would not be my granddaughter