The Distance Between Us

The kitchen smelled of boiled cabbage and damp wood, and his mother wrote like she was afraid.

Jan had noticed this for years without ever finding the right words for it. The way she pulled her chair closer to the table before picking up the pen, almost as if she were instinctively trying to make herself smaller. The way she leaned over the page, not hunched from exhaustion but curled around the letter protectively, the same way people shielded a flame from the wind. She wrote slowly and with extraordinary care, pausing whenever a truck rolled past outside and rattled the kitchen window in its frame, her pen hovering above the paper until the sound faded completely.

He was twelve years old and he did not understand any of it yet.

Still, he remembered it. He remembered everything.

“Who is the letter to?” he asked.

“Your aunt.”

“In Odessa?”

“Yes.”

He watched her dip the pen again.

Odessa existed in his mind as a collection of disconnected images rather than a real place. A funeral during winter. Wet coats hanging beside a radiator. Grey apartment blocks rising endlessly into a pale sky. His aunt pressing a hard candy into his hand before telling him he had inherited his grandfather’s ears, although Jan had barely known his grandfather long enough to understand whether that was supposed to be comforting.

“Why do you write so quietly?” he asked after a moment.

His mother did not look up immediately. Instead, she adjusted the page slightly beneath her hand as though she were chasing better light, despite the weak yellow bulb above the kitchen table remaining exactly the same.

“I’m not writing quietly,” she said. “I’m writing carefully.”

Jan frowned. “What’s the difference?”

This time, she finished the sentence first, then placed the pen gently across the top of the page, the same way someone might set down a tool they intended to keep using for many years.

“Carefully means you think before you say something,” she replied. “Quietly means you’re afraid.”

Only then did she finally look at him.

“I am not afraid.”

There was nothing dramatic in the way she said it, which somehow made the sentence feel heavier. She simply picked the pen back up afterward and continued writing as though the conversation had already ended.

Jan sat quietly across from her, staring at the shape of the letter rather than the words themselves. Her handwriting was small, precise, almost unnaturally even, every line perfectly spaced as if she had measured them beforehand with invisible rulers. Nothing was wasted. The sentences stretched tightly toward the edge of the page before folding downward into the next line.

Letters arrived often from other cities, other republics, relatives scattered across a country so large that Jan could not properly imagine its borders. His mother always read them in the same posture she used while writing them, leaning slightly inward, one hand resting lightly across the paper as though the contents belonged only partially to the outside world. When she finished reading them, she never placed them inside drawers. Instead, she tucked them carefully into books around the apartment, different books every time, chosen seemingly at random.

Jan had never asked her why.

At least not directly.

“Does Aunt Vera write back?” he asked.

“Sometimes.”

“How long does it take for the letter to get there?”

“Four days. A week if the sorting is slow.”

A week.

Jan tried imagining the journey in his head. Trucks carrying sacks of envelopes across cracked roads. Trains moving through snow-covered stations. Men in grey uniforms sorting letters beneath fluorescent lights that buzzed softly overhead. A single envelope leaving this kitchen and slowly crossing the Soviet Union just to reach a woman living in an apartment building with a broken lift.

And then another week for the reply to return.

Two weeks just to have a conversation.

Two weeks in which people could change their minds, fall sick, disappear, stop loving each other, or simply decide the thing they once wanted to say no longer mattered.

“What if something is urgent?” he asked.

“Then you use the telephone.”

“We don’t have a telephone.”

“Then you go to the post office. They have one.”

“And if it’s the middle of the night?”

That made her pause again.

This time, when she looked at him, there was something in her expression he lacked the life experience to fully understand. Something old and dry beneath the tiredness, but not unkind.

“Then you wait,” she said softly. “Until morning.”

Outside, the truck had already passed. The rattling window settled back into silence. Somewhere farther down the street, a dog barked once before abruptly falling quiet again, and the village of Fastiv seemed to exhale into the strange controlled stillness of a Soviet evening, a silence that never quite felt peaceful because it always carried the faint sensation of somebody listening from the other side of the wall.

Jan watched his mother continue writing.

Years later, this exact memory would return to him in moments that made no immediate sense. Sitting alone inside a server room in Sunnyvale, long after midnight, while exhausted fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Waiting in the plastic chair of a Kyiv hospital corridor with cold coffee in his hands. Parked outside a government building in Mountain View while his fingers still shook around a pen.

He would think about how long it once took for words to reach the people who needed them.

And how much could disappear while they traveled.

The urgency. The tone. The fragile emotional weight of something said exactly when it mattered instead of weeks after the moment had already passed.

There has to be another way, he would think years later.

But that belonged to another life entirely. Another country. Another version of himself that did not exist yet.

Tonight, he was only twelve years old in a kitchen in Fastiv while cabbage cooled forgotten on the stove and his mother wrote a letter to Odessa beneath weak yellow light.

Outside, a second dog briefly joined the first before falling silent too, as though even animals understood instinctively that walls in this country remembered sounds longer than people did.

“Go to bed,” his mother said without looking up.

“I’m not tired.”

A faint smile touched her mouth, gone almost immediately.

“I know,” she replied. “Go anyway.”

Jan finally stood and disappeared into the darkness of the apartment. Lying awake in bed afterward, he listened to the scratching sound of the pen continuing through the wall, steady and careful and patient, while he thought about all the things in life that could not survive waiting weeks to be said, and all the people who had no choice except to wait anyway.

He was still thinking about it when he finally fell asleep.