Visiting Lenin’s Tomb

by Kathryn Aldridge-Morris

Tiyshe! No talking! The soldiers put fingers purple with cold to their cracked lips. You are here to pay homage! Da zdravstvuyet Leninizm! But this is your ex-husband’s house, not the dim lit mausoleum on Red Square, and those guards, eyes the colour of dill, mouths downturned sickles, your daughters. How they’ve changed but not changed since you were disappeared, and he threatened to section you, should you ever return. Exiled to the end of the Piccadilly Line, sixteen stops away from their entire childhood. Move along! Dvigatsya! You want to slow, to take in the red granite walls, the unfamiliar family photos, the smell of wet overcoat, but a celebrant with cyrillic curls for a moustache tells you to wait outside, it’s for the best, they don’t want a scene, and as you reach Lenin’s tomb —some honeymoon—you don’t yet know you’re shuffling through the few remaining days of Gorbachev’s Russia. You oblige and stand in the snow, but your nerves are in insurrection. How dare this stranger—yet another man—stand between you and your daughters? You grip the letters you’ll give them today, letters to you from their father, letters that prove the mind-games and control; control over what you wore, where you went, who you saw. You were a good mother! You did try to see them! The hearse pulls up, his coffin flanked by the floral tribute he picked out himself: BEST DAD. A crowd swells at the foot of Gorky Street. In weeks a drunk will climb on top of a tank to declare a new era, but for now your daughters turn their backs on you, light Kino cigarettes and leave iron blue contrails that dissipate in the cold Essex air.

About the Author

Kathryn Aldridge-Morris’ flash fiction and essays have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Fractured Lit, Stanchion Magazine, Paris Lit Up, Flash Frog, Splonk, New Flash Fiction Review and elsewhere. She has won several awards, including The Forge’s Flash Nonfiction competition and Manchester Writing School’s QuietManDave Prize, and her work has been selected for the Wigleaf Top 50. She is the recent recipient of an Arts Council England Award to write her novella, and her debut collection of flash fiction, Cold Toast, will be published by Dahlia Publishing in spring 2025.