A few months ago, my boyfriend proposed we watch a movie in the evening. He wanted to see the Antichrist, and as a devoted cinephile, I agreed, having heard how controversial the movie was.  We dimmed the lights in our basement studio apartment and laid down on the bed in front of the TV. I only watched the first 15 minutes before I asked him to stop the movie. Something inside me was unable to watch the young couple struggling through the loss of their child. 

Over the next few days, strange things started happening to me - I would suddenly be overcome by intense sadness and break into tears that progressed into weeping. Whatever it was inside of me, my unconscious was now spitting it out. 

Then, one day, a memory came back to me, something I pushed to the corner of my mind, leaving it there to be forgotten. 

I once had a brother whom I never met and whom my mother only referred to as “ the boy” as if he did not have a name. It is not unusual for my family to not use names for those who died: my grandmother never uttered the name of her father, who starved during the siege of Leningrad in 1941, my other grandmother never knew the name of her grandparents, shot by the Soviets in forced Collectivization in the 1920s.  

When I was 14 years old I got my first UTA in the middle of dark and wet December. I did not know where it came from, but I was overwhelmed by shame and guilt as if I was making assumptions about myself. For about two weeks, I endured the discomfort, hiding my body behind a thick layer of black clothes while sitting through long classes of Math and Russian. It seemed to get worse with every day, every hour, every second. When I finally told my mother, I was barely keeping it together, running to the bathroom constantly. I was on my period, which made it much worse. 

On a gloomy and cold winter evening, my mother drove me to a small provincial hospital near our house to see a urologist. It was New Year’s Eve, and the waiting room was empty of patients. My mother confidently walked in, her red hair glowing in the hospital lights, not bothered by the late hour of our arrival. A young male nurse was playing a mobile game in the back room. The lady at the registration desk seemed sleepy under the bright light, unhappy to be there.  “Are you sexually active? Are you a virgin?” she asked me.  I waved my head no to those questions, blushing and hiding my hands in the big pocket in front of my hoodie. The nurse squinted suspiciously at my blue-colored hair and then turned to my mother, who was standing next to me. “ Which pregnancy is Vasilisa?”, she asked routinely, ready to record the answer on her paper pad. 

My mother froze and hesitated with her answer. Then, if letting something huge out of her body, she exhaled her answer.

“ Third”

She tried not to look at me.

Third? 

I had an older half-brother who was in his thirties and a younger sister. That made me the second pregnancy. Was my mother’s math wrong? Was there someone else?

On our way back home, I asked her what she meant by that answer. Eyes fixed on the road, her face flashed by the headlights of the oncoming traffic, she inhaled and said “ We had a baby before you were born but he died. It is in the past. There’s nothing to talk about.” 

I knew I was not supposed to ask any more questions. I nodded silently and we did not say another word the rest of the way. I felt nothing; I was completely numb.

A few months after that, my dad made a clumsy comment about my mother seeing a ghost of a little boy around the house. And that was it for anyone ever mentioning my brother until the summer I was 25, when I finally learned to ask questions. 

That summer I packed my suitcase, kissed my boyfriend goodbye and headed to the airport. 

I felt confident that I deserved to know the truth. 

 When I arrived home, I demanded that my mother tell me this part of family history. She agreed to take me to my brother’s grave. 

It was a sunny and overwhelmingly bright day, unusually hot for Saint Petersburg. We drove to the city’s crematorium. The parking lot was full, but it seemed like there was nobody around as we walked by the graveyard hand in hand. It took my mother some time to remember the way.   

Here he was, in a niche, buried among strangers in a columbarium wall. I finally saw the proof that he was once real, the words and numbers stuck on a small square, surunded by other squares with unfamiliar names on them. 

“ He was in the hospital for months after he was born”, my mother said quietly. “ I found out about his death by accident, by finding a death certificate in your dad’s laundry. He buried him without me. I never asked him why..” 

We put two red carnation flowers in his niche, placing them in a protective criss-cross. His name, the same as my father's, was printed right there on the stone between them. Andrey Ikonnikov.