The Nesting Dolls

by Alina Adams

  Chapter 13

  “Are these real?” Daria waited until after they’d returned home—doors locked, lights dimmed—before showing Adam the papers she’d been given. She’d left the administrator’s office in a daze, forcing her face into an expression of unremarkable neutrality so that when she stepped back into the office, no one might suspect what had just happened. She didn’t dare meet anyone’s gaze. Which was fine, nobody was dying to meet hers, lest that be enough to implicate them in whatever crime she’d been accused of. Daria wouldn’t even look at Adam, afraid she might give something away. He picked up on her reticence and went along with it, the relief of Daria coming back none the worse for wear—never a guarantee—replaced by fear about what had transpired, and what might come next as a consequence of it.

  Adam studied the documents Daria spread out in front of him, jiggling Gosha on one knee to keep the toddler from grabbing at them. Daria’s hands were shaking so badly, she’d been afraid of dropping the boy if she tried to hold him.

  “They look authentic,” Adam said.

  Daria collapsed into a chair, unsure why confirmation should feel so good and so terrible at the same time.

  “How did this happen?” Adam asked.

  “My father-in-law.” Daria still refused to mention Edward by name. She stuck to a more indirect descriptor. She pointed to the signature of the KGB official who’d authorized her release. “He’s a music lover. Isaak Israelevitch used to leave him concert tickets, even for sold-out shows.”

  Adam could figure out the rest. After all, po blatu was how he’d gotten Edward and Alyssa out. It was how the entire Soviet system operated.

  “When do you leave?” Adam asked. Not “will you” but “when.” Daria didn’t blame him for phrasing it that way. Adam was the only person who’d ever expressed a preference for staying in Siberia. Naturally, he expected her to leap at the opportunity. Who wouldn’t? Nonetheless, Daria couldn’t help feeling a slight disappointment that he appeared so indifferent about it.

  “As soon as I can buy a ticket.”

  He nodded thoughtfully.

  Daria wanted to grab him by those broad shoulders, to shake him until his teeth rattled, to scream in his face and demand to know how he could let her go like this after . . . everything?

  Staying behind with Adam had been the most painful, debilitating, momentous act of Daria’s life, and here Adam was acting like it meant nothing—to him. She supposed it didn’t, not like it did to her. If she’d said no two years ago, he’d have carried on as before; he had nothing to lose. She was the one who gave up everything. And now he was expecting her to do it again.

  That final, unbidden thought percolated to the edges of Daria’s consciousness and, horrified by its implication, she shoved the notion down. The process took less than a second. She didn’t hesitate or wonder whether it warranted more careful consideration.

  But that instant was also enough time for Adam to say, in the measured, take-it-or-leave-it tone he employed with obdurate customers who believed bargaining might be an option, “Go whenever you like. Gosha stays with me.”

  Daria had spent two years watching Adam turn a deaf ear on those who pleaded with him about prices, begging Adam to accept in trade an item he’d already said he had no use for. Now, she found herself in the same position. And on the receiving end of the same response.

  She tried to reason with him, she also begged, she even broke down in tears, something she once swore to herself she would never let him see her do, much less drive her to. In desperation, she threatened. Only to get her own back in kind.

  Adam reminded, “You’ve seen the women who had their children taken away, sent to be raised in state orphanages because their mothers can’t be trusted to turn them into proper Soviet citizens. I stopped them doing that to us. Take Gosha, and I will make them reconsider.”

  “You wouldn’t risk it,” she challenged.

  “And once you’re declared unfit to raise him, what do you think will happen to your other child? You’ve already lost one; how many more are you willing to sacrifice?”

  “You son of a bitch!” Daria flung her entire body at him, ready to deliver all the blows she’d held back from delivering in the past. “You bastard!”

  “Accurate on both counts.” Adam grabbed Daria by the shoulders and held her at arm’s length.

  “You’re making me choose!”

  “You’ve chosen. I’m making you admit it.”

  She could call his bluff. She could stay. Daria’s document granted her permission to leave Siberia and resettle in Odessa. It didn’t force her to go. But then the door would close permanently, and Daria would never see Edward and Alyssa again. At one point, she had resigned herself to that fact. But that was when she believed she had no other choice. Now that she held it in her hand, how could she turn it down? What would it make her? She’d promised Alyssa she’d come home as soon as she could. Gosha was her child, too, but she’d made no promises to him. And the one she’d made to his father, she’d kept. Daria never promised to stay with Adam forever. It was obvious he had never expected her to.

  “Will you tend Anya’s grave?” Daria attempted to force at least one, face-saving demand from Adam, but her words came out as a plea.

  Adam was in the process of lifting their boy onto his shoulders. “Of course.”

  “Tell Gosha he has two sisters. One here with him, and one away with his mother.”

  At this, Adam nodded. Daria had no option but to trust his word.

  Daria understood that pride, and concern for Edward, should have kept her from packing up the clothes and other personal items Adam had procured for her over the years. But she had no idea in what circumstances Edward was now living. She couldn’t afford to sacrifice any item that might come in handy. So she packed the spare dress and woolen stockings. She wore her other set along with her coat, hat, gloves, scarf, and boots. And that was it, the extent of her presence in Adam’s life. Except, of course, for Gosha.

  She said goodbye to him at the house. There was no point in dragging a one-year-old out into the frigid cold. Even if Gosha watched Daria’s train pull away, he wouldn’t understand what it meant. And he wouldn’t remember her, in any case. Daria wished now that she’d had at least one photograph taken. A copy to leave with him; a copy for her to take. There was a camera available. It was designated for official purposes, but a bribe could get you a personal portrait. Daria had never seen the need before to document a life she resisted living.

  She had nothing to leave Gosha as a reminder. Nothing she could say that he’d still recall by nightfall, much less into adulthood. So Daria knelt in front of her son, hugged him until he squirmed, tweaked his nose in a way that made him giggle, then returned it to him, which made Gosha laugh even harder.

  She had nothing to say to Adam. Or rather, she had much to say, except she had no words with which to say it. He’d saved her life, and now he was crippling it. Daria had no idea why, in either case. She wanted to ask him. But she also didn’t want to know. Because she already knew.

  Adam escorted her to the door. Daria turned around to take one last look. It didn’t appear much different from how Daria first glimpsed it, the night she came to beg for Adam’s help with Anya. The house was the same. Daria was the one who was different.

  Once, she’d been afraid of Adam. Now, she lifted a hand as if to wave goodbye.

  And smacked him across the face with all her might.

  He’d barely had time to process what had happened when, in the next breath, Daria stretched up on her toes and brushed her lips against the red mark her palm had left along Adam’s cheek.

  And then she walked out the door.

  Daria arrived at the depot early, even though the westward-bound train that passed through every few weeks was inevitably late, sometimes by hours, sometimes by days. It was used to ship oil, coal, and lumber from Siberia, and to bring in the industrial machinery necessary for its excavation.

  As Daria
waited, she watched the latest cattle car, perhaps the same one she’d arrived on three years earlier, discharge its inhabitants. Mostly men, but some women and children, too. All of them stumbling on shaky, long-unused legs, hugging themselves or pressing together to fight the cold, looking around in confusion, attempting to catch the attention of someone in authority to explain that a terrible mistake had been made. They hadn’t done anything wrong.

  Daria knew half of them would be dead before the year was out. The rest would somehow find a way to survive. Whichever way they chose, Daria felt no judgment. It would be like judging a person for opting to breathe.

  She caught sight of her own train rounding the bend that would bring it into the station. The red star welded on its front declared this yet another product of Comrade Stalin’s ingenuity and inspired leadership. It was supposed to be her salvation, but it prompted a spasm of panic. The last time Daria had gotten onto a train, she’d had no idea where she was going and what might be waiting for her there. She felt the same way now.

  “Daria!” Adam so rarely called her name—when he did deign to speak, he simply began—that Daria didn’t initially recognize his voice. It wasn’t until she turned and saw him hurrying up to the depot, Gosha on his back, that she experienced her second moment of panic—mixed with hope.

  Adam arrived as the train was pulling in and, not stopping to take a breath, shoved Gosha into Daria’s arms. She clutched at the boy, even as she looked up at Adam in confusion. He handed her a small leather bag, frayed, the metal clasp broken and bound together with twine. And then a piece of paper folded in fourths. “His travel documents.”

  Daria understood and asked, “You, too?”

  Adam shook his head. He rifled in the depths of his coat pocket, his hand emerging with a pair of gold hoop earrings. Her ochi chernye earrings. Daria briefly speculated how many pairs of hands they’d passed through since the guard took her clothes from her that first day and what they’d been bartered for, inside the camp and out of it, before they landed in Adam’s. She wondered how he’d gotten them. She wondered why he was giving them to her now.

  “In case you have any trouble,” he muttered, “back home. Food, place to live. You can sell them. They belong to you, anyway.”

  How did he know that? Had he observed her wearing them in Odessa?

  Adam stuffed the earrings into Daria’s hand. He bent briefly to kiss Gosha. And then, less briefly, Daria. It was, she realized, the first time that Adam had ever reached out to her without cover of darkness to protect them both. And that it would be the last.

  Chapter 14

  He didn’t stay to see them off, though Daria urged Gosha to wave bye-bye to Papa through the train’s window. Their designated seat was in the unheated passenger car, the wood benches covered with frayed red velvet, loose springs and stuffing burrowing through the seams. Luckily, the car was sparsely occupied. Daria noted a handful of soldiers either heading home or on leave. An older woman sat knitting in the back, while a man wearing a suit studied blueprints on his lap. At least there would be room to lie down at night. Daria had planned to sleep sitting up if it came to that. What she hadn’t planned on was keeping a toddler occupied for multiple days. Or fed. Or clean.

  Adam had attempted to help her, packing, along with Gosha’s clothes, the toy duck he loved, some tins of condensed milk, a loaf of black bread—half rye, half sawdust, all Kyril—and scraps of dried, salted venison. Daria had brought food along as well, but she’d known in advance it wouldn’t be enough. And it certainly wouldn’t be enough for two.

  Her more immediate concern, however, was the lavatory. Gosha was mostly toilet-trained, but not at night and, if she were honest, not always during the day. If he got distracted by something, or was frightened—as was the case now—he might forget to warn Daria and soil his pants. This had been difficult enough at home, where he’d had only one pair of woolen tights, but where Daria could repurpose old sheets and torn clothes into diapers, and where she had a tub of water to soak them and a fireplace for drying. Here, there was a public toilet at the end of the row of cars, but that proved too long to ask Gosha to hold it. She was forced to remove Gosha’s tights, leave him wearing only pants, and cover him with her coat for warmth, while Daria wrung out the tights as best she could by hand and stretched them out on the seat to dry. The man with the blueprints wrinkled his nose at the smell.

  Their food, despite careful rationing and two tantrums from Gosha about how hungry he was, ran out on the fourth day. Luckily, the train made a stop to refuel, and passengers were allowed to disembark briefly at the station. There, Daria attempted to buy food, but the locals brushed by her. They knew better than to engage with someone either going to, or even coming from, the East.

  Desperate, Daria grabbed Gosha by the hand to keep him from running off and, in the middle of the crowded train station, sank to her knees, crossed herself, and began to pray. She didn’t know what she was saying, but she’d heard kulak and German women whispering the words to themselves in the barracks, and she’d memorized enough to give an adequate performance, as long as no one listened closely. That wasn’t a problem. Her actions prompted a majority of those rushing by to give Daria an even wider berth. But after a few minutes, an old woman materialized out of the crowd and dropped a carrot as wizened as she was into Daria’s skirt, before quickly hobbling away. Some bread appeared. A man slipped Daria a tin can of fish.

  The bounty proved enough to feed Daria and Gosha until the next stop. As she prepared to get off and hope long-banned Christian charity lived in this town, as well, one of the soldiers they’d been riding with for over a week sneaked away from his compatriots and guiltily, looking over his shoulder the entire time, forced a pair of hard-boiled eggs into her hands.

  “For the boy,” he said. Then added, “I’m going home to see my boy. I hope he’s big and strong like yours. I have a photograph.” He showed Daria a black-and-white snapshot of a child with oval eyes and dark hair whom, in that moment, Daria the non-Christian nonbeliever deemed her patron saint.

  Procuring food and rushing Gosha to the toilet, then dealing with the consequences of their arriving too late, took up the majority of Daria’s time. Followed by keeping him entertained for the rest of it. There was only so long an active toddler could stare out the grimy window at the barren and dull countryside. Daria and Gosha took endless walks up and down the aisles. She tried to distract him from bothering the other passengers, more and more of whom were getting on now that they’d left the tundra, or from sticking his fingers into every fixture and licking every surface. Exhausted as she was at the end of the day, when Gosha finally fell asleep on Daria’s chest, asking for Papa and home, Daria remained wide awake, listening to the jagged syncopation of the rattling train tracks drawing them closer and closer to Odessa, and wondering how in the world she was going to explain Gosha to Edward.

  Everything had happened in such a rush, Daria had barely a moment to consider it the first time, when Adam forbade her from leaving with the child. Before Edward had departed, Daria had told him as little as she could get away with about her deal with Adam. She doubted Edward, in his state, had heard or understood half of it. But now that time had passed, Edward must have wondered about Daria’s life in Kyril. And Gosha’s existence told the whole story. There were women in the camp who’d had no one to protect them, who’d been raped or had prostituted themselves out of hunger and desperation, with resulting children, too. If Daria told Edward the same had happened to her, she had no doubt he would believe her. Daria could even, with certain details left out and others looked at from a different perspective, convince herself that it was true. She was blameless; she’d had no choice. Except Daria knew that, for some things, she’d had a choice. Adam might never hear what she told her husband about him, but Daria still refused to damn him with the lie.

  Their train pulled into the Odessa voksal a mere day and a half later than scheduled. Daria had sent Edward a telegram before leaving Kyril
, telling him which line she’d be on, but even if the train had arrived on time, she’d departed before he had the time to cable back.

  The remaining passengers disembarked. Gosha began jumping with excitement. He grabbed Daria by the fingers, pulling her toward the door. She stumbled after him, attempting to balance her bag and the one Adam had packed for Gosha, without tripping. At the steps, she plopped Gosha on her hip and grabbed the satchels’ handles with her other palm.

  Stepping onto the platform, legs unsteady from weeks of train travel, Daria was assaulted by a multitude of impressions. First, it was the noise. She’d forgotten what a city sounded like. Kyril had been a muffled world. It wasn’t the vast emptiness, or the cushioning of snow. It was that no one dared call attention to themselves. They even breathed more quietly.

  Next came the bright light. The sun nearly blinded her. She raised her palm to shield her eyes and winced. Gosha was doing the same, rubbing his lids with both fists, unable to understand what was happening. It was warmer, too. She’d been aware of the train car growing less freezing as they traveled southwest, but the sensation of a wind on her skin that didn’t ice on contact startled Daria. She felt a forgotten heat on her face, her neck, the backs of her hands.

  And then there was Edward, slowly approaching her across the platform. He looked older, and she realized she’d unreasonably been expecting Odessa not merely to heal the broken husband she’d sent home, but to restore the young musician she’d first met. Edward’s once ebony hair was now salted with gray, his skin fluttering loose off the bones of his freshly shaved face. He walked hunched, with short, shuffling steps, hesitating before he set either foot on the ground, as if asking permission. His shoulders swallowed his neck, hands bunched in his pockets, elbows pressed close to his body to avoid jostling anyone. And yet, when he looked up and smiled at her, he was the same man he’d always been. The one who made Daria’s heart speed up as she realized that she was, at long last, home.