Collaboration with @silmarilz1701
Svetlana knew how to play the game. She'd been caught in the political drama of Stalin's inner circle since birth. The only child of one of Stalin's closest friends, she grew up in the limelight, scrutinized by frie...
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Epilogue Four
...chasing that american dream...
June 6, 1955
Zhanna had planted her dreams. While others had failed, a good crop of them had sprung up over the years. Maybe they weren't castles or great oak doors but they were soft blue doors opening onto a hall of photographs, pooling out to rooms of light and air. Pressed blooms of poseys and daisies pasted to white paper hung in dark frames beside photographs of smiling families and happy faces.
Zhanna didn't need a castle, a hundred empty rooms or big oak doors to block out the world anymore. She planted her dreams in America, transplanting from New Jersey to Virginia to finally settle in Pennsylvania earth, the tangible life that grew slow and strong was safer than any corner she had dared imagine. They grew light as the feathers of doves, sturdy as the flowering pear tree that cast its shade and fruit over the truest form of her wartime dreams.
The garden was Zhanna's pride and a source of joy. Bottled and administered to the carefully instructed and dutifully remembered words of Agata Polyakova, she had spent hours trowel in hand and knees buried in the dirt settling her nerves and her flora into their homes.
Sunflowers bobbed in the warm breeze, Zhanna's hair brushing against her bare cheek, kept short now. It would only slip into her eyes when she leaned forward, a curtain to draw against the world when she needed it. Her herb garden thrived, the rosemary and thyme swaying.
Maybe it wasn't a castle but it was home and that was more than she had ever hoped for at the end of that war. Birds flitted on her pear tree, hopping from branch to branch, shaking the plump fruit loose and casting them to the ground below. She could fetch them but that would require ceasing the gentle rocking of her swing. The pears would keep for a little while longer.
Nothing could persuade her to rise from her perch on the swing that hung by rustic rope from her tree, the grass soft beneath her feet. The world that mattered to her was in this picket fence. Why would she rise from it and disturb the quiet peace?
Peace had altered it's form as she had grown older. Zhanna's dreams turned into Janna's reality. Being Russian, Polish, or foreign was still an undesirable identity in the land of the free but she had retained her fluency in survival. Zhanna's dreams were now Janna's reality and she didn't want to do anything to disturb it.
It hadn't always been back to the sun and face to the earth as she toiled over her plants. Sink's offer had proved too good to refuse for too long. Her work in the Capitol was short lived but effective. Zhanna had proved Svetlana Samsonova's use in the war and where her true loyalty had been found. Maybe it was too little too late but Janna had found sleep at night with her work. She had found peace and now she didn't dare disturb it by moving a muscle. Janna could scarcely breathe for fear of changing or altering it.
