Garima Adhikari
The sun does not rise in Vyborg. At least not in the way it used to. It merely bleeds through the smoke– an anemic smear through the soot-stained clouds. The air in Vyborg is heavy too, with silence deeper than the sunken eyeballs of the ordinary. The clatters of boots on frostbitten cobblestones echo on narrow alleyways, mingling with the hiss of boiling stew and sobs of children clinging to their mothers’ aprons. Each breath drawn by the labourers feels heavy, as if they’re inhaling through grief itself. Each of their step lingers forward in the frail hope of survival – some kopeks to be earned for some mouths at home to be fed.
In the city square, everyone is rushing but their voices remain low, hushed, as if volume itself has become dangerous. Mothers scold their children in clipped tones while weighing potatoes and counting kopeks while their eyes flick constantly, scanning the crowd as though the chaos itself conceals something watching. Children tug at sleeves and point at sweets they cannot afford. No one dares to speak aloud. The silence is a soundscape of survival.
Beside a squat, gray building hunched at the edge of the market square; the cobblestones are uneven, stained with boot greases. There, a small patch of ground, barely wider than a doorframe, serves as the makeshift stall for a young woman. She sits cross-legged on a frayed wool blanket, her knees aching from the cold stone beneath. Her fingers move with quiet urgency, looping yarn into mittens that would never warm her own children. A baby, six months old, pressed warm against her chest, let out a muffled whimper, while her six-year-old daughter tugged at her sleeve, voice rising in a quarrelsome whine.
“But why can’t we have that sweet bread, Mama? That girl has one – look!”
The mother hushed her gently, her voice full of weariness. “Shh, moya khoroshaya,” she whispered, brushing a thumb across the child’s cheek wiping her little beads of tears.
“Not today. We’ll have our own feast when the snow melts, you’ll see.”
But the girl’s lip trembled, her small fists clenched in quiet protest. The mother drew the child close, her arms folding around her like a warm blanket against the cold, and pressed her calloused lips to the girl’s forehead. The touch was rough, but it carried softness, a kind of promise that didn’t need words. The sweet bread was still out of reach, but love was not.
Once her sorrow had softened into quiet acceptance, the little girl wandered off, tracing playful paths through the snow with her boot. But the mother’s eyes drifted downwards, through the blur of shuffling feet and bundled coats, past the clatter and barter of the market square. Her gaze fell into the hollow spaces between people and guilt pressed against her ribs. She couldn’t afford to weep, for silence was cheaper than grief. And her fingers kept on knitting, hiding sorrow in every stitch, because the silence could not feed them, but maybe the mittens would.
By evening, the light had thinned into a pale smear across the rooftops, and the cold had softened into damp. She had sold some socks and a pair or two of mittens which gathered coins enough for their weight to be felt in her apron fold. Her fingers, red from cold and work, tucked the last coin into it and they rose slowly from their patch of cobblestone. The mother shifted the asleep baby against her chest, and the little girl brushed slush from the hem of her coat that had forgotten what clean felt like. The little girl helped her mother tuck the unsold items into an old canvas bag. When her mother gave the bag to her, she clutched it close against her chest with the care of someone handling something more fragile than wool.
The market square was thinning now, the light dimming into a smoky amber as evening crept in. Vendors packed up their stalls with the same caution they had used to set them up. The mother and daughter walked up to the bread vender. At the stall, the mother leaned in with a voice low and firm, bargaining for the coarse loaves of rye and some beet stew. The little girl stood by her side in silence, eyes drifting to the ground. The snow was melting in patches where the boots of passersby had trampled it, glistening in the weak evening light like her fragile hope. She remembered the promise of the feast but dared not utter a word again. Her fingers tightened around the bag as she pictured a time when all the snow would melt, and there would be sweet bread on the table.
The thought lingered at the back of the girl’s mind as they moved through the thinning crowd and bustling wind, slipping past crates and coal carts towardss the coal storage building at the station’s edge, where their small, shadowed room waited. The mother’s steps were brisk and her grip firm on the little girl’s hand, the baby pressed close to her chest. The crowd near the train station murmured as always, but this time the air was sharper – charged with news of an attack. “A Kadet struck by the Red Army,” someone said, “in Petrograd.” Voices rose and fell like half-whispers laced with urgency and restrained fury yet tight-throated, bitter, and bruised.
A sharp sting of memory struck the mother in her chest. She knew the revolution intimately, as a wound which could never be truly healed. The crowd’s whispers of Petrograd and the Kadet attack scraped against her ribs, but it wasn’t the news that hurt. It was the echo.
She remembered the chaos of that March coup – being eight months pregnant, breath ragged, clutching her six-year-old daughter as she frantically ran through the streets of the city echoing with gunfire and grief. She left the girl at a neighbor’s room in a kommunalka beside where they lived, pressed a kiss to her forehead, and bolted into the storm to search for names. Names of the dead. Names of the disappeared. Her husband’s name was among them.
No body. No last word. No grave. Just a name on a list and the silence that swallowed everything after.
She didn’t know that the absence of a man would be harder than the presence of a war. Her husband had been a miner, a quiet man. He spoke of revolution and equality to her– the ideas that defied the Tsars, but he was no Bolshevik. Just a man who felt the need for change, but his instinct was dimmed by the daily weight of providing for his family.
When the revolution came, it didn’t knock. It tore through – Petrograd first, then the rail lines, then the mouths of neighbors who used to whisper but now shouted in slogans. It didn’t offer choices. It swallowed them. Men were pulled from doorways, from bread lines, from the quiet corners where they had once believed they could stay unnoticed. Into marches. Into militias. Into moments that didn’t wait for understanding.
“May this be for the greater good, rodnáya!”, he said as they parted. Neither of them knew for certain it was the last time. But both felt the weight of it – like a farewell spoken through threadbare hope. Hope, not to surrender, but to shield each other from the truth they already feared. The words weren’t uttered to reassure, nor to deceive, but to hold back the flood of knowing, as if naming the end would make it real.
After he left, feeding herself and her daughter became a daily act of desperation. Pregnant women weren’t allowed to work in the mines, and the mines paid better. He had worked there, once. But he was gone, and she endured on the mercy of neighboring women. They fed her what they could – scraps from their scraps, and wrapped her in borrowed warmth. She labored in her room thick with coal dust, held by the same women who had known grief longer than they had known themselves. And when the child came, they all wept. Not for joy, but for the miracle of survival; that she had birthed life into the world that tried to take away hers.
Weeks scraped by in a haze of soot and heartbreak. The silence of grief slowly began to fracture with life creeping back in – in through the little cries of the child. The women still came, though less often now but still with eyes that understood. And slowly, she began to knit again. She sold what she could. A pair of socks. A scarf. Enough for a crust of bread, a ladle of soup.
One evening as they sat beside the fire, the elder girl asked, “Where is Papochka?”
Instead of answering the question that had no answers with some made-up fantasies, the mother looked at her right in the eye, mustered all the strength, and asked in return, “Why do you need him?”
The question was startling and unexpected for the child, but she saw through what her mother was trying to hide; the crack in her voice, and how her eyes filled. She hesitated to answer.
“F-fo-for my bedtime stories.”
“I shall tell those to you myself, moya khoroshaya.”
And slowly, the girl learned not to ask again. Not because she forgot, but because she saw what the asking did.
Then the mother never spoke of it. Not to her daughters. Not to anyone. And now, as the crowd murmured of Petrograd, she gripped her little girl’s hand tighter and walked faster, dragging them towards the coal-dark room at the edge of the station.
“Mama, slow down,” the little girl panted, her boots slipping slightly on the worn stone. “Why this fast?”
The mother didn’t look back. “I’m hungry, my dear,” she said, voice steady. “Let’s be there soon, and I shall continue the story of Finist the Bright Falcon.”
And for a moment, happiness flickered across the girl’s face as they moved through in haste.
The mother indeed was aware of the revolution, but she also knew how dangerous words could be – how they could unravel a life faster than hunger. So she said nothing. Instead, she filled the silence with stories of fairies, princesses, and gentle endings, hoping they might leave traces in her daughter’s heart – even if only a fleeting glimpse of a world beyond soot-streaked walls and the sharp scent of coal.
They reached the building just as the wind began to bite harder, the mother pulling the child through the cracked door that moaned on its hinges. She laid the baby gently into the old crib in the corner, its wood worn soft with years. Knitted things sat folded nearby in a dusty pile. Those which were neat once, now slumped and forgotten. Without a word, she slipped the last kopeks into an old wallet hidden beneath the clothes.
The elder daughter lingered near the crate they used as a table, eyes fixed on the bread, waiting for it to be halved and handed over. Potatoes lay scattered across the floor, dulled by dust. The room had no windows, no trace of brightness. Even the door behind them was cracked and splintered, which whispered its eerie creaks into the silence.
The mother sat down slowly, brushing coal dust from the crate’s edge before placing the bread between them. The baby slept in the crib, and the elder child waited, eyes wide – not just for the bread, but for the story.
The mother began again, her voice low and steady with the story threaded in gloom, right from where she had left it the day before, “So, after the girl received the red flower, she waited. And one night, Finist came to her window, glistening like moonlight, his wings bright as frost. She gave him the red flower she had. Then, he saw her kindness, her longing, and he took her flying – far from the cold, far from the dark.”
The girl’s eyes sparkled.
“She gave him a red flower?”
The mother nodded, smiling faintly.
“Yes. Red like the sun when it sets. Red like love. Red like courage.”
The girl blinked, first in wonder, then again – slower this time, as if something had just settled behind her eyes. Her voice came soft, but certain, like a truth she hadn’t meant to find.
“She had something beautiful, didn’t she? The beautiful red flower. That’s why he came for her.”
The mother didn’t answer at first. In truth, she couldn’t. The child’s words had struck something wordless inside her, something tender and raw.
“Mama… we don’t have anything beautiful as such, do we?” the girl asked again, her voice as feeble as a thread pulled taut with hope.
The question hung in the air like frost on glass. The mother’s mouth parted slightly in search of words to answer, but no sound came. Her hand, still resting on the crate, trembled slightly. The girl’s words had landed somewhere deep past hunger, past exhaustion.
Then, a flicker – her eyes lit, sudden and small, like a match struck in a cave.
“Wait… we had red too. You have red yarn, right?”
The mother’s heart turned cold and her mind reeled, her thoughts unraveling faster than any yarn she had ever spun. The moment her daughter uttered the word red, something crippled her spine – not fear, but the echo of his voice, the quiet goodbye, the door that closed. He had gone, because silence had begun to look like betrayal, and the revolution whispered just loud enough to make him choose her, the child, the belly not yet born. But red had followed, in flags and rumors and now in her daughter’s voice, asking if the rose would be red. And now, even the color asked questions she couldn’t bear to answer.
She had spoken too freely, let the warmth of the tale carry her into danger. Red like courage, she had said. Red like love. But here, in a town shadowed by the train station, where the kommunalka two houses down pulsed with quiet Soviet work and the White Army raided without warning, red wasn’t a color. Red wasn’t just a color – it was a signal. A risk. A reason. Her breath came shallow, her chest tight with the knowledge that she had planted something in her daughter’s heart that could bloom into suspicion. She needed to undo it. She needed to stitch silence where longing had begun.
She turned towards the yarn basket, careful not to glance at the corner where the red yarn lay buried in shadow. Her voice followed, steady and smooth, the kind of smooth that only fear could polish.
“The red yarn is finished, solnyshko. I used the last of it three days ago – for the mittens I sold at the station.”
She lifted a white ball of yarn, letting it catch the light.
“But this is better, really. White is softer, brighter. I can make anything you want from it.”
The child’s smile faltered a little.
“Red is finished?” she asked again, her voice quieter now, as if hoping the answer might change.
The mother nodded, eyes steady.
“Yes. All gone.”
The child looked down, then up again – her gaze accepting, but dimmed.
“I wanted a red rose. Like the princess gave Finist.”
Then she looked at the white yarn in her mother’s lap. It wasn’t red. But it was something.
“But if red is gone… if it’s really gone…”
She paused, then slowly nodded, tucking her hope away like a petal.
“Then maybe white can be brave too. Please make a beautiful rose out of it.”
The mother didn’t answer right away. She reached out and touched her daughter’s cheek lovingly, brushing away a curl that had fallen across her brow. The daughter had accepted the lie, not with joy, but with the quiet grace of someone learning to live without what they truly wanted. That kind of surrender was harder to bear than tears. The mother and daughter both knew it.
Later, when the pot had cooled and the children had slept, the mother moved through the room like a shadow. She lit a candle. She sat by the door, her back to the coal bucket where the red yarn lay buried deeper now, hidden beneath a folded rag and the weight of her own fear.
She began to knit.
Her fingers moved slowly, loop by loop. Each loop was a breath held, a quiet promise stitched through exhaustion. She thought of her daughter’s voice, asking for beauty in a world that punished color, and courage. And so she knit.
When her eyes began to blur and her shoulders sagged with the weight of the day, she folded the yarn gently and set it aside. Knitting a flower, even a palm-sized one – would normally take hours, and she knew she didn’t have that kind of time. Not in one stretch.
The next morning, the daughter rose early with bright hope in her eyes. She remembered the way her mother’s hands had moved all day long the day before, and also the way her shoulders had sagged by evening. So she asked softly,
“Did you start knitting it?”
The mother nodded and pointed to the single petal resting in the basket, pale and quiet.
“I’ll knit the petal one by one each night, alright?”
The daughter smiled bright.
Each night, the mother sat by the door religiously with the white yarn in her lap. Her fingers moved slowly, deliberately. The red yarn lay buried beneath the coal bucket, untouched, glowing in her memory like a wound.
Some nights, she knit alone, the silence thick around her, broken only by the creak of the door and the occasional rattle of the night train. The candle burned low, and the walls seemed to listen.
Other nights, the daughter stayed up beside her, eyes wide with anticipation, watching each loop form as if magic might bloom from her mother’s hands. She would ask questions – How many petals will it have? Will it look like the princess’s rose? – until sleep tugged at her lashes and she curled up on the floor, dreaming of bright flowers.
Outside, the air had begun to change – not just with winter, but with something sharper. Words drifted in from the market: Petrograd was burning. The revolution had cracked open the capital. Trains rattled through the night, carrying men in boots and with rifles. The White Army was on the move. The Bolsheviks too. So were the others. No one said their names aloud.
But inside, the mother kept knitting. She knit for bread. She knit for silence. And now, she knit for her daughter’s joy – a joy untouched by the rattle of trains or the muttering of crowds.
Each morning, the daughter would rush to the basket, breath caught in anticipation and ask if the rose had a new petal.
And the mother, weary but steady, would nod and show her progress.
The days passed like the yarn stitches – one loop, one petal, one breath at a time. The petals grew, soft, careful spirals of yarn and with each one, the girl’s joy deepened, as if the flower were blooming just for her, untouched by the world outside.
But the world did not stay outside.
Some mornings, the bread line was shorter, not because there was more bread, but because there were fewer neighbors. The coal man no longer whistled. Trains passed without song, their silence heavier than steam. The mother said it was winter coming early, though the windows stayed warm with breath and the trees still clung to their last gold.
By the eleventh day, the rose had begun to look full. The daughter tilted her head and asked if it would be finished soon. The mother smiled, but her hands slowed. Two petals remained. The yarn was thinning. So was the silence.
That night, the girl didn’t sleep. She sat beside the candle, with her eyes fixed on her mother’s hands, and the candle flame flickering. She shook the baby’s crib gently, not to wake her, but to share the secret – the rose was nearly ready.
On the twelfth night too, she returned to the same spot, legs tucked beneath her, heart thudding with quiet joy. Outside, the wind scraped the shutters. Inside, the needles clicked. The mother knit in silence. The girl watched, praying the final petal would come before the world did.
On the thirteenth morning, the girl woke early, eyes still heavy with candlelight. The rose lay in the basket, nearly whole. She asked her mother, voice hushed with hope, “How much more?”
“Just one petal left,” the mother said. “Most likely today, solnyshko.”
The girl’s heart leapt. She clapped and whispered the joy to her baby sister nestled in the crib. She hovered near the basket all morning, humming to herself, glancing often at her mother’s hands.
They went about the day as they always did – bread fetched, water boiled, coal stacked. But the air was heavier than it had been from days. Neighbors spoke in half-sentences. Eyes lingered too long. Rumors crept through the alleys: men slipping past the Finnish border, fleeing Petrograd, no one knowing who could be the White and who could be the waiting.
By evening, the streets had emptied early. Doors shut with more finality. Even the dogs had gone quiet.
Inside, the candle was lit.The mother sat crouched in her short wooden chair, legs crossed tightly beneath her, back bent low, eyes locked on the yarn. Her fingers moved with practiced rhythm, the needles clicking softly making the same sound they had made for thirteen nights, but tonight it felt like it was echoing off something waiting.
The girl was more than awake. She knelt beside the crib, shaking it gently, whispering to her baby sister, who sat blinking in the candlelight, not quite awake, not quite dreaming. Small sounds rose from her – soft hums, tiny sighs, just enough to blur the edges of the quiet.
The wind whistled. Something stirred. Faint, far off. Not footsteps, not voices. It was just noise. The kind that doesn’t ask to be understood, or maybe it could not be. The mother paused, listening. But the baby’s sounds folded into it, masking the rhythm. She couldn’t tell if it was real or imagined. The girl didn’t notice at all. Her world was the crib, the candle, the rose.
Outside, the noise thickened. A distant wail. Then another. Not words but just voices, rising like smoke. The mother paused, needle mid-air. The baby let out a soft hum, and the moment passed.
Then boots. Sharp. Shrill. Like metal dragged across stone. Not close. But enough to make the candle flicker.
The girl didn’t hear them. She was watching the rose.
The mother did. Her fingers resumed, slower and more alert now. The yarn tugged. The candle flickered.
Then – a crack. Distant. Splintering. A gunshot, maybe. Or something breaking.
This time, the girl noticed. She paused, turned her head, eyes wide, listening.
The mother didn’t flinch. She bent lower, stitching the final petal like it was the only thing left she could finish before the world arrived.
She looked at her mother, who hadn’t moved.
Then she looked back at the rose.
She knelt again, closer than before, hands folded tight, as if her stillness might help the petal form faster.
The baby was sound asleep now – sound, with her breath soft and steady beneath the blanket. The girl sat close to the crib, eyes flicking between her sister and mother, between the candlelight and the door.
The voices outside slowly sharpened. Military commands, clipped and loud, echoed through the coal building’s stone. Threats followed – barked at someone on the first storey. The boots weren’t passing anymore. They had stopped. They were here.
The girl turned to her mother, voice barely audible with fear. “Who are they? What’s happening?”
The mother couldn’t answer right away. Her jaw clenched. Her eyes stayed on the yarn. Her fingers didn’t stop.
“Nothing much,” she stuttered, gulping her own fear hard. “Just some drunk men, maybe. Don’t worry.”
But her throat moved again. Not words. Not truth. Just fear.
The needles clicked on. Slower now. The final petal was almost there.
The candle flame leaned sideways, then stilled. A shout rose from below, followed by the scrape of metal. A crash. The girl leaned closer to the crib, as if her sister’s sleep could shield them.
They were climbing now – boots fast, sharp, echoing up the stairwell like metal teeth on stone. The coal building groaned with it. Shouts bounced off the walls, clipped commands, the kind that didn’t wait for answers. Someone screamed. Then silence. Then more boots.
The girl turned from the crib, eyes wide, voice barely a whisper. “Mama…”
The mother whispered, “Shhh. Nothing will happen.”
And her fingers kept moving, but slower now – not from calm, but from the weight pressing in from all sides. She wanted to stop. Her hands ached to freeze. But she didn’t.
The girl could do nothing now but look at her mother. Her eyes were wide, her breath shallow. The crib was still. The baby slept on.
The boots now reached the third storey.
The voices were no longer muffled. They scraped through the walls, loud and sharp with commands, accusations, the clatter of arms against stone. The coal building had become a mouth, swallowing every sound but theirs.
The mother glanced at her daughter – once, then again. Her hands were trembling as she tried to stitch faster. The yarn snagged and the needle clicked. Her jaw clenched.
The door creaked.
And the boots stopped just outside.
A man sounded, low and certain: “Sir, there’s another room in here.”
The mother froze. She turned to her daughter, gave a faint smile that asked for silence, that lied gently – and nodded once.
The girl didn’t move. Couldn’t. Her eyes stayed on her mother, who bent lower still, trying to stitch but only kept strangling.
“Open the door,” came a voice. Sly, sharp, and low. It wasn’t clear if it was meant for the men outside or the people within. But it didn’t matter.
A boot answered.
The door blasted open, crashing against the wall with a sound that split the room in two. The candle shuddered. The girl gasped. The baby slept on.
Silhouettes filled the doorway – broad, heavy, armed. Their coats were thick with frost and dust, their boots were loud even on the rug.
They came in fast. One of them, a bit taller, broader and built like a commander – stepped forward and swept the room with his eyes. He didn’t speak. Just raised a hand, and the others moved.
Drawers were yanked open. Blankets tossed. A stool overturned. The sound of things breaking filled the small space like smoke.
The mother didn’t dare look up. She couldn’t. Her hands had stopped, the yarn limp in her lap. But she stayed bent, still, as if the posture itself might shield them. Her eyes flicked sideways, to the girl, who hadn’t moved.
The commander paced slowly, boots thudding like a clock counting down. The mother’s breath was shallow. Her fingers twitched, but the needles didn’t rise.
The commander stepped closer.
His boots slowed, then stopped just beside the mother’s chair. He leaned in – not fast, not loud, but close enough that his breath brushed her cheek. The candlelight caught the edge of his coat, the glint of metal at his chest.
He looked down.
The white rose lay almost-formed in her lap, its petals stitched with care, its center still waiting. His eyes narrowed in what seemed like curiosity. “White”, he murmured to himself as he glanced at the child.
The girl shrank back, more petrified now, as if the word itself had teeth.
A grunt came from the far corner. One of the men had dropped to a crouch, rummaging beneath the low shelf. His hand emerged with something clenched – not a weapon, but worse.
Red yarn. Two balls of it, tucked deep beneath the folded linens.
He held them up without a word, arm extended like a verdict. The room stilled.
The commander’s eyes snapped to the red. The faint glint of admiration vanished. His face hardened, jaw tightening, breath sharpening. The rose in her lap was no longer a flower but a question, and now, an answer.
The mother’s breath hitched.
She knew then. Knew what they were. The Whites. The ones who raided the other kommunalka. The ones who hated the red – not just the color, but the cause. The red was too loud, too loyal, too communist. And now it was here, in her home, in her thread.
Her hands hovered above the yarn and her eyes flicked to her daughter, both useless now.
The girl’s eyes moved from the red yarn in the soldier’s hand, to her mother’s lap, to her mother’s face.
Then back again.
She didn’t speak. Didn’t cry. But something shifted inside her, a feeling she couldn’t name. Not anger. Not sorrow. Just a tightness, like something had been hidden from her, and now wasn’t.
The girl didn’t know what the red meant. Not fully. Only that it was bad now. That it made the men louder, fiercer. That it made her mother smaller.
The candlelight caught the red. It glowed like a wound.
The commander stepped forward again, slow and deliberate, the red yarn still dangling in his peripheral vision like a verdict.
His face was calm now – too calm. The kind of calm that held back a storm with a single thread. His eyes scanned the room again, then settled on the mother. Bent. Still. Watching.
He leaned in. Voice slick as glass, too smooth to be kind:
“Why were you knitting a flower,” he said, eyes flicking to the girl, “when your child needs socks?”
She looked at the rose in her lap. Then at her daughter. Then at the red yarn in the soldier’s hand.
Her voice came out thin, cracking at the edges.
“I… I was going to make mittens. With the red. For her. For the cold. I–” She swallowed. Her fingers twitched. “I didn’t mean… it’s just yarn. Just thread.”
The commander didn’t move. His eyes stayed on her.
She looked down again, at the white petals. Her voice dropped lower, barely more than breath.
“The flower… it’s fo-for softness. For her. So she remembers something gentle. Not just – ”
The word hung unfinished, trembling in the air.
The commander’s eyes didn’t blink. His jaw shifted. Something in his face darkened – not rage, not yet, but the edge of it. He turned slightly, just enough to glance at his men.
No words passed between them.
Just eyes.
Brows raised. A flick of a glance. A nod too small to be called a gesture.
Agreement.
Suspicion.
The commander straightened, slow as frost. His gaze lingered on the red yarn, then on the unfinished rose, then briefly – on the girl.
He knew.
Not everything. Not yet. But enough.
Because this wasn’t the first bit of red. Not the first symbol. Not definitely the first defiance.
There had been others.
Just days before, the October coup had cracked Petrograd open like a shell. And some Bolsheviks had fled – some north, some west, some into the stone veins of Vyborg. They carried nothing but breath and memory. And riddles. Code riddles.
Riddles were passed like bread between hands. Questions that made no sense unless you knew the answer.
The riddles were simple. Local. Easy to remember. But deeper was their purpose – a way to know who belonged to the same stem.
But the Whites had caught some. Not all. Just enough.
They spied them. Quietly. And learned the code.
Now they were here – not just to punish, but to count. To measure the spread. To see how many petals of the red bloom had rooted in this quiet town.
How many still sheltered the disguised Bolsheviks.
And how many workers still knew the answer.
The commander’s silence broke. Not with a shout, not with a blow, but with a question.
His voice was calculated and his gaze on the mother wasn’t kind. Not unkind either. Just…. precise.
“Chto khodit bez nog, kormit bez rta?”
The question hung in the air.
The mother stayed silent. But her mind reeled.
She knew the answer. Of course she did. It had lived in her bones since the childhood. A breath of play tucked between shifts and soot. She had grown up in a working-class family, where riddles were passed with laughter, like warmth in a cold room. They were the small joys carved out of struggle, the cleverness that made poverty bearable.
The answer was right there, on the tip of her tongue. It had always been there.
But now, it was a danger rather than a means of comfort.
She looked at the commander first – slowly, carefully, as if his face might offer a map. But it didn’t. His face was unreadable. Stone cold. Too neutral to trust. Too still to predict. His eyes held nothing she could read. No threat, no mercy – just waiting.
Was silence safer?
Or was the truth?
She couldn’t tell.
Then she looked at her daughter.
The girl’s eyes met hers. They were wide, unblinking, pleading. Not with words, but with a child’s silent cry for safety. For her mother to do the right thing, whatever that was.
And something shifted. Not loud. Just a breath drawn deeper than the last.
She decided. Not with her lips. Not yet.
But somewhere behind her ribs.
She would answer.
Because silence could cost more than words.
Her fingers stayed clenched around the needle. Her legs still crossed, her body crouched low in the chair, as if smaller might mean safer.
The silence pressed in.
And then – her voice tore it through.
Thin. Trembling. But there.
“O…ogo..ogonyok v shakhte.”
It stuttered out of her like a breath through cracked glass – not defiant, not bold, but not broken either. As a thread of hope, frail but still holding.
She didn’t look up.
But she felt it.
Something shifted.
She doesn’t know what it is.
The commander’s silence changed. The very air around him seemed to tighten.
He stepped forward. Slowly.
Then, with a motion so precise it felt rehearsed, he reached out and lifted her chin with the crook of his index finger.
Her face tilted upward.
Her eyes met his.
She felt her blood freeze with a physical sharpness, as if her veins had turned to glass.
He leaned in, just enough for their faces to share breath.
And in that split second while his gaze held hers, while her hands still clutched the needle and the final petal trembled in her lap – he made a signal.
A flick of the fingers. A gesture passed behind his back, unseen by her, but caught by the man standing just beyond the doorframe.
She didn’t see it.
She couldn’t.
All she saw was the commander’s face – still unreadable, still stone.
Then he moved.
Not away. Not out. Just to the side.
As if making space.
As if something else was about to enter the room. Or leave it.
Her head remained tilted, chin still lifted from where the commander had touched her. He had already stepped aside, but her body hadn’t registered it. She was frozen – not in fear alone, but in something deeper. A paralysis born of knowing too much and not knowing enough.
One of the men moved.
Slowly. Deliberately.
A revolver was drawn out – not with haste, but with the certainty of a decision already made.
The mother didn’t see it.
Her eyes still lingered upward, wide and unblinking, as if still searching the ceiling for a safer answer than the one she had given.
She didn’t see the commander’s subtle nod that sealed the moment.
And then came – the sound.
Sharp. Final. Loud.
For a split second, something inside her reached – not her body, not her voice, just a flicker of will; to turn her eyes towards the girl. To catch one last glimpse.
But the moment was already gone.
The men left without words.
Only the sound of boots remained – growing fainter, then fainter still, swallowed by the corridor, by the cold, by the silence.
The broken door creaked.
Her head hung down with a sudden loud snap, as if the thread holding her upright had been cut.
She still held the breath she had stopped taking.
Her eyes remained wide. Or perhaps – wider than ever. Now they hung downward, fixed towards her lap, the gaze frozen and the eyeballs distended, as if the final terror had etched itself into their shape.
There was a hole now. Right between her brows, where the bullet had entered and torn through to the base of her skull.
The girl was still at the corner. She hadn’t moved. Couldn’t.
Her eyes, once pleading, were now terrorized beyond tears.
Not crying. Not screaming. Just wide.
As if the world had stopped making sense.
The baby had been startled by the gunshot. So, from the crib, came a piercing cry.
The blood from the mother’s head dripped slowly. It pooled beside the chair, dark and fresh.
And one drop, then another, fell onto the final white petal of the unfinished rose.
The yarn began to soak. And the flower’s color began to change.
Thread by thread.
White to red.
**
Different Russian terms used in the story :
Kopeks: The smallest unit of Russian currency; 100 kopeks equal 1 ruble.
Solnyshko: A Russian term of endearment meaning “little sun,” often used for children.
Kommunalka: A communal apartment shared by multiple families, common in Soviet-era housing.
Tsars: Hereditary monarchs who ruled Russia until the 1917 revolution.
Bolsheviks: A radical socialist group that led the 1917 Russian Revolution and established Soviet rule.
Rodnáya: A term meaning “dear” or “native,” used to express deep affection.
Papochka: A diminutive form of “papa,” meaning “daddy”; conveys warmth and closeness.
What the riddle means?
Question: Chto khodit bez nog, kormit bez rta?
What walks without legs, feeds without a mouth?
Answer: Ogonyok v shakhte.
The little flame in the mine.
(Writer Adhikari is Studying at St. Xavier College, Maitighar Kathamndu. She writes poem, story and create paintings. garimaadhikarividhya@gmail.com)
