Her Daughter Left to Study in Moscow and Never Returned. Her Mother Waited for Her for Thirty Years—Then Saw a Familiar Face on Television
Anna Stepanovna waited for her daughter every Saturday.
It had begun so long ago that the neighbors had already lost count. Every Saturday, regardless of the weather—rain, snow, or muddy slush—Anna Stepanovna put on her best coat, tied a scarf around her head, and walked to the bus stop. It was an old Soviet-era shelter made of concrete slabs that had once been painted blue. The paint had peeled away long ago, and now the shelter resembled an old woman dressed in rags.
The bus from the district center arrived at noon. Once a day. Anna Stepanovna always came half an hour early. She sat on the bench if no one else was using it. If it was occupied, she stood.
And waited.
The bus would pull up, rattling and coughing through its ancient engine. The door would open. People would step out. Anna Stepanovna studied every one of them. Every face. Every female figure.
And each time, she found no one.
The bus would drive away. Anna Stepanovna would remain standing there for a while. Then she would turn around and walk home—across the entire village, past the neighbors’ houses, past the old community center, past the crooked fences.
As she walked, she always thought the same thing:
“Perhaps next Saturday.”
This continued for thirty years.
Her daughter’s name was Lena. Or, as she later began calling herself, Alena. Then Alena Sergeyevna. Eventually, simply Alena—and she had a different surname by then, not her father’s, but some elegant, city-sounding name that Anna Stepanovna could never remember.
Lena left for Moscow in 1992 to apply to university. She was seventeen. A thin girl with a long light-brown braid, wearing a cotton-print dress Anna Stepanovna had sewn herself.
Her father had already been dead for three years. His heart had failed when he was forty-seven, right in the middle of a field during the hay harvest.
The entire village came to see Lena off. The neighbors gathered by the bus. Aunt Klava brought pies. Grandpa Mikhei gave her a small bag of dried blueberries. Uncle Pavel handed her three hundred crumpled rubles he had collected from his pockets.
Lena stood on the bus steps, looking back and crying.
“Mom, I’ll come home for the holidays! The very first ones! And I’ll write to you! Every week!”
Anna Stepanovna nodded and smiled. She stroked her daughter’s hair and kept repeating:
“Take care of yourself, my darling. Take care of yourself.”
The bus began to move, raising a cloud of dust.
And Lena left.
At first, letters arrived frequently. Once a week. Then once every two weeks. Then once a month.
Lena wrote about Moscow, the dormitory, her exams, and her new friends. She wrote that life was difficult. That she did not have enough money. That she had taken part-time jobs—washing floors and handing out leaflets near the metro.
Anna Stepanovna read those letters and cried. She imagined her thin daughter standing in the wind in a light coat, handing out pieces of paper to strangers.
She sent Lena everything she could. Money. Packages filled with potatoes, pickled cucumbers, jam, and dried fish. She deprived herself of everything. She kept only the bare minimum—potatoes, onions, and bread.
Everything else went to Moscow.
Then the letters began arriving less often. Once every six months. Once a year.
And then they stopped altogether.
Anna Stepanovna continued writing. She wrote often—two or three letters every month.
“My darling daughter, where are you? What has happened to you? Are you alive? Are you healthy? Please answer me. I cannot find any peace.”
There were no replies.
So Anna Stepanovna went to Moscow herself.
It was 1997. She sold her cow—the last animal that provided her with food—and bought a train ticket. She traveled for almost an entire day in an open sleeper carriage, lying on the upper bunk and clutching a bag of gifts for her daughter against her chest.
Moscow overwhelmed her.
The crowds. The noise. The metro.
She had never seen an underground railway before. She descended beneath the ground and became completely lost. People pushed past her and overtook her. Someone cursed at her. She stood in the middle of the station entrance and had no idea where to go.
She had the dormitory address written on a scrap of paper. It was old and worn, copied from Lena’s last letter, which had arrived three years earlier.
Eventually, she reached it. Almost crawling from exhaustion, she finally found the building.
“There’s no one by that name here,” the dormitory attendant said. “She moved out. A long time ago.”
“Where did she move?”
“I don’t know. They all move away eventually. Moscow is enormous. Go and look for her.”
And Anna Stepanovna looked.
She visited various offices. The university administration was closed. Its reception hours were only twice a week. The police were no help. Lena was no longer a minor. She had turned eighteen. She was an adult, and if she had decided not to write, that was her right.
Five days later, Anna Stepanovna returned to the village.
Without her daughter.
Without her cow.
Without any money.
And without hope.
But she did not stop waiting.
The years passed. The village emptied. Young people left—some for the district center, some for Syktyvkar, some for Moscow.
Only the elderly remained.
The houses deteriorated. The community center closed. The village school merged with the school in the neighboring settlement, and the children were taken there by bus. The farm collapsed. The shop opened only two days a week.
Anna Stepanovna continued living.
She tended her vegetable garden. She heated the stove. She walked to the bus stop.
The neighbors had long since given up trying to reason with her.
“Anya,” Aunt Klava would say when she came over to borrow some salt, “you should stop torturing yourself. Your Lena is gone. Perhaps she isn’t even alive anymore…”
She would stop herself, but Anna Stepanovna understood.
“She’s alive,” Anna Stepanovna replied. “A mother’s heart cannot be deceived. She’s alive.”
“All right, then. She’s alive. But what difference does that make? If she wanted to, she would have written. She would have come home. Or called. We have a telephone now.”
They really did have a telephone. The village council had installed a line. Anna Stepanovna placed a telephone in her house—an old black one with a rotary dial.
And she waited for it to ring.
But the telephone remained silent.
Only Aunt Klava called, and even she did so only once a month to find out whether Anna Stepanovna was still alive.
One day, sometime around 2005, Anna Stepanovna asked a neighbor’s son, who knew how to use the internet, to search for Lena.
The young man searched for a long time. He found an Alena with a similar surname, but she lived in Saint Petersburg rather than Moscow. Her surname was different, and so was her patronymic.
“Could this be her?” he asked.
Anna Stepanovna looked at the screen, at the blurry photograph of a woman in a business suit. She studied it carefully.
Her heart skipped a beat.
“I don’t know,” she said. “She looks like her. But I don’t know.”
The young man wrote to that Alena.
The reply was brief:
“You’ve made a mistake. I’m not from Komi. I’m a Muscovite. Don’t write to me again.”
That was all.
Anna Stepanovna hid the printed photograph in her chest of drawers.
And continued waiting.
Many more years passed.
Anna Stepanovna turned seventy-five. She still lived in the same house. She still heated the stove. She still worked in the vegetable garden.
Only now, she no longer walked to the bus stop every Saturday. Her legs hurt, and her back would no longer straighten.
But once a month, she always went.
Out of habit. Out of inertia.
Because she could no longer imagine not going. To stop would mean admitting that Lena would never return.
And Anna Stepanovna could not admit that.
One winter evening in early January, she was sitting in front of the television. It was an old, bulky cathode-ray television, but it still worked.
The news was on. Anna Stepanovna did not like the news, but she did not turn it off. She wanted to hear a voice in the house so the silence would not feel quite so heavy.
The presenter was talking about a conference. Something about business. Something about women in business. Something about the importance of developing the regions.
“And now, an interview with one of the forum participants,” the presenter announced. “Alena Vorontsova, founder of a charitable foundation…”
Anna Stepanovna raised her head.
A woman appeared on the screen.
She was beautiful and well-groomed. She wore an expensive suit. Her hair was professionally styled, and her makeup was immaculate. She sat in a television studio surrounded by bright lights, speaking about social responsibility. About helping children. About how she herself had come from a simple provincial family but had managed to achieve everything on her own.
The camera moved closer to her face.
Anna Stepanovna froze.
The eyes.
She would have recognized those eyes among thousands. Among millions. Even from beyond the grave.
Gray eyes, just like her father’s.
And a small birthmark above her left eyebrow, shaped like a teardrop.
It was Lena.
“Lenochka,” Anna Stepanovna whispered. “My Lenochka.”
She stood up and approached the television. She reached toward the screen and touched the cold glass with her fingers.
Her daughter smiled from the screen.
She spoke about her childhood “in a small northern town.” She said that her parents had been “ordinary people who passed away when she was young.” She explained that she had been forced to make her own way in life.
Anna Stepanovna listened and could not believe her ears.
A simple family.
A small town.
Her parents had died.
Not one word about the village.
Not one word about her mother.
Not one word about her father, whose heart had given out in a field.
“My darling,” Anna Stepanovna said. “Why would you say that? I’m still alive. I’m still waiting for you.”
The program ended. A commercial began.
Anna Stepanovna turned off the television, sat down on a stool, and remained in the darkness for a long time.
The following morning, she went to see Aunt Klava, the only friend she had left who was still alive.
“Klava,” Anna Stepanovna said, “I saw Lena.”
“In a dream?”
“On television.”
Aunt Klava put down her knitting, removed her glasses, and crossed herself.
“Dear Lord. Are you sure it was her?”
“Those were her eyes. And her birthmark. I wouldn’t lie about something like that.”
“And what happened? Did she mention you?”
“She did,” Anna Stepanovna said after a pause. “She said her parents were dead. She said she had made it on her own. That she came from a small town.”
Aunt Klava remained silent for a long time. Then she sighed.
“So that’s how it is. A small town. Apparently our village doesn’t even count as a place anymore. She must be ashamed of us.”
“It appears so.”
“What are you going to do now?”
Anna Stepanovna looked out the window.
Snow was falling outside. Large flakes. Slowly. Beautifully.
“Nothing,” she said. “I’ll keep waiting.”
“But…” Aunt Klava hesitated. “She buried you. While you were still alive. What is there left to wait for?”
Anna Stepanovna turned toward her friend.
And in her eyes, Klava saw something she had never seen during those thirty years: a final, calm, cold understanding.
“She buried me,” Anna Stepanovna said. “But I’m still alive. And as long as I’m alive, I’m her mother. A mother cannot stop waiting. You can stop waiting, Klava. She can stop waiting. But I cannot.”
Another two years passed.
Anna Stepanovna no longer went to the bus stop. Her legs had stopped obeying her altogether.
But everything in her house was still prepared for her daughter’s arrival. Lena’s childhood dress hung in the wardrobe. Her old schoolbag lay on top of the chest of drawers. Inside a photo album were yellowing photographs: Lena in kindergarten, Lena with ribbons in her hair, Lena on her final day of school.
Sometimes Anna Stepanovna looked through the album. Sometimes she spoke to the photographs. Sometimes she simply sat silently by the window, watching the road.
The road was overgrown with grass. Almost no one drove along it anymore.
Then one summer day—it was July, hot and stifling—a car pulled up beside the gate.
It was expensive, from a brand no one in the village had ever seen.
A woman stepped out. She was beautiful. She wore an expensive dress, carried an expensive handbag, and had dark sunglasses covering her eyes.
She stood by the gate for a moment and looked around. Then she pushed the gate open and walked toward the house, awkwardly balancing on high heels along the uneven village path.
Anna Stepanovna saw her through the window.
Her heart began pounding.
She stood up, straightened her apron, and adjusted her headscarf.
The woman entered the house and removed her sunglasses.
Anna Stepanovna saw those same eyes.
“Mom,” Lena said. “Hello.”
Anna Stepanovna said nothing. She simply stared.
Then she slowly lowered herself onto a stool.
“Hello, my daughter,” she said. “That was a long journey.”
“Thirty years,” Lena replied.
Her voice sounded unfamiliar. Urban. Professionally trained, like the voice of a television presenter.
“Forgive me.”
“What is there to forgive? You weren’t employed by me.”
“I…” Lena hesitated. “I couldn’t do it. Do you understand? I couldn’t come back. I wanted so badly to escape. I wanted so badly to become someone else. Not a village girl. Not someone from the middle of nowhere. I thought that if I came back, it would be the end. I would be trapped here forever. So I decided it would be better never to return. To cut everything off. Forever.”
Anna Stepanovna nodded.
“So you cut it off.”
“Mom…”
“Why have you come back now?”
Lena began to cry.
Her beautiful face twisted. Tears ran down her cheeks, and she sobbed like a little girl—just as she had at the bus stop thirty years earlier.
“I’m ill, Mom. Seriously ill. The doctors say I have a year. Perhaps two. I spent my entire life building this… this career. This foundation. This image. I lied to everyone and told them I was an orphan. That I came from a town. That I had achieved everything on my own. And when the doctors told me about the diagnosis, I realized that I wanted to see you. If that’s still possible. If you still…”
“You foolish girl,” Anna Stepanovna said. “I waited for you for thirty years. Every Saturday. I would have waited another thirty.”
She stood, walked over to her daughter, and embraced her.
The two women—an elderly peasant woman wearing a cotton headscarf and an elegant lady from the capital—stood in the middle of the old wooden house and cried.
They cried for a long time.
Silently.
The way only mothers and daughters can cry.
Then Anna Stepanovna went into the kitchen, put the kettle on, and said:
“Sit down. I’ll fry some potatoes with mushrooms. You always loved them.”
Lena lived with her mother for a year and a half.
A year and a half instead of thirty years.
It was a strange life.
They hardly spoke about the past. What would have been the point? The past could not be changed.
They simply lived.
Together.
Anna Stepanovna taught her daughter the things she had not been able to teach her before: how to heat the stove, milk a goat, and ferment cabbage.
Lena learned. She was surprised. She laughed.
At first, the villagers looked at her suspiciously. But they soon let it go.
What was the point of holding a grudge?
Life was already short enough.
The doctors in Moscow had been wrong. Lena lived not one year, but almost two.
She died quietly in her sleep.
Anna Stepanovna found her in the morning. She closed her daughter’s eyes and sat beside her for a long time.
Then she went to Aunt Klava.
“Lena is gone.”
Aunt Klava crossed herself.
“May she rest in peace. At least she spent her final days with her mother.”
“She did,” Anna Stepanovna said.
Lena was buried in the village cemetery beside her father.
Two months later, Anna Stepanovna also passed away quietly—as though she had been waiting for only one thing: for her daughter to return home.
Even like this.
Even forever.
The entire village came to the funeral.
Someone remembered:
“Anya walked to that bus stop for thirty years. Every Saturday. Thirty years. Can you imagine?”
The people stood beside the two graves—the mother’s and the daughter’s—and each thought about something different.
About those they were waiting for.
About those who never returned.
About how a mother’s heart does not know how to forget.
Even when all the deadlines have passed.
Even when there is no hope left.
Even when your own child has declared you dead on television.
