Tatiana would have liked to get in a few hours of reading. She had just started Mikhail Zoshchenko’s sadistically funny short stories on the ironic realities of Soviet life, but her instructions from her father had been very clear. She looked at her book longingly. What was the hurry anyway? The adults were behaving as if there were a fire. The Germans were two thousand kilometers away. Comrade Stalin would not let that traitor Hitler get deep into the country. And Tatiana never got to be home alone.
As soon as Tatiana had realized there was going to be no immediate evacuation, she became less excited about the war. Was it interesting? Yes. But Zoshchenko’s story “Banya”—”The Bathhouse”—about a man going to the Soviet bathhouse and washing his clothes there, too, and losing his coat checks, was hilarious. Where is a naked man to put those coat checks? The checks were washed away during the bath. Only the string remained. I offer the string to the coat attendant. He won’t take it. Any citizen can cut up string, he says. There won’t be enough coats to go around. Wait until the other customers have gone. I’ll give you whatever coat is left.
Since no one was evacuating, Tatiana read the story twice, lying on the bed, her legs up on the wall, weak from laughter by the second time.
Still, orders were orders. She had to go out and get food.
But today was Sunday, and Tatiana did not like to go out on Sundays unless she got dressed up. Without asking, she borrowed Dasha’s high-heeled red sandals, in which Tatiana walked like a newborn calf with two broken legs. Dasha walked better in them; she was much more used to them.
Tatiana brushed out her very blonde long hair, wistfully wishing for thick dark curls like the rest of the family’s. Hers was so straight and blah blonde. She always wore it tied back in a ponytail or in braids. Today she tied it up in a ponytail. The straightness and the blondeness of her hair were inexplicable. In her daughter’s defense, Mama would say that she herself had had straight blonde hair as a child. Yes, and Babushka said that when she got married she had weighed only forty-seven kilos.
Tatiana put on the only Sunday dress she owned, made sure her face and teeth and hands were sparkling clean, and left the apartment.
A hundred and fifty rubles was a colossal amount of money. Tatiana didn’t know where her father got that kind of money, but it appeared magically in his hands, and it was not her place to ask. She was supposed to come back with—what did her father say? Rice? Vodka? She had already forgotten.
Mama did tell him, “Georg, don’t send her out. She won’t get anything.”
Tatiana had nodded in agreement. “Mama is right. Send Dasha, Papa.”
“No!” Papa exclaimed. “I know you can do it. Just go to the store, take a bag with you, and come back with—”
What did he tell her to come back with? Potatoes? Flour?
Tatiana walked past the Sarkovs’ room and saw Zhanna and Zhenya Sarkov sitting in armchairs, sipping tea, reading, looking very relaxed, as if it were just another Sunday. How lucky they are to have such a big room all to themselves, thought Tatiana. Crazy Slavin was not in the hall. Good.
It was as if Molotov’s announcement two hours ago had been an aberration in an otherwise normal day. Tatiana almost doubted that she had heard Comrade Molotov correctly until she got outside and turned the corner on Grechesky Prospekt, where teeming clusters of people were rushing toward Nevsky Prospekt, the main shopping street in Leningrad.
Tatiana could not remember when she had last seen such crowds on Leningrad streets. Quickly she turned around and went the other way to Suvorovsky Prospekt. She wanted to beat the crowds. If they were all going to the Nevsky Prospekt stores, she was going the opposite way down to Tauride Park, where the grocery stores, though understocked, were also underpatronized.
A man and a woman walked by, stared at Tatiana in her dress, and smiled. She lowered her gaze but smiled, too.
Tatiana was wearing her splendid white dress with red roses. She had the dress since 1938, when she had turned fourteen. Her father bought it from a market vendor in a town called Swietokryst in Poland, where he had gone on a business trip for the Leningrad waterworks plant. He went to Swietokryst, Warsaw, and Lublin. Tatiana thought her father was a world traveler when he came back. Dasha and Mama received chocolates from Warsaw, but the chocolates went a long time ago—two years and three hundred and sixty three days ago. But here Tatiana was, still wearing her dress with crimson roses embroidered on the thick, smooth, snow-white cotton. The roses weren’t buds; they were blooms. It was a perfect summer dress, with thin shoulder straps and no sleeves. It was fitted through the waist and then billowed out in a flowing skirt to just above her knees, and if Tatiana spun around fast enough, the skirt whirled up in a parachute.
There was only one problem with this dress in June 1941: it was too small for Tatiana. The crisscross satin straps at the back of the dress that Tatiana could once tie completely closed had to be constantly loosened.
It vexed Tatiana that the body she was increasingly uneasy with could outgrow her favorite dress. It wasn’t as if her body were blossoming to look like Dasha’s, full of hips and breasts and thighs and arms. No, not at all. Tatiana’s hips, though round, remained small, and her legs and arms remained slender, but the breasts got larger, and there was the problem. Had the breasts remained the same size, Tatiana wouldn’t have had to leave the straps loose, exposing her bare spine under the crisscrosses from her shoulder blades to the small of her back for all the world to see.
Tatiana liked the notion of the dress, she liked the feeling of the cotton against her skin and the stitched roses under her fingers, but she did not like the feeling of her exploding body trapped inside the lung-squeezing material. What she enjoyed was the memory of her skinny-as-a-stick fourteen-year-old self putting on that dress for the first time and going out for a Sunday walk on Nevsky. It was for that feeling that she had put on the dress again this Sunday, the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
On another level, on a conscious, loudly-audible-to-the-soul level, what Tatiana also loved about the dress was a small tag that said fabriqué en france.
Fabriqué en France! It was gratifying to own a piece of anything not made badly by the Soviets, but instead made well and romantically by the French; for who was more romantic than the French? The French were masters of love. All nations were different. The Russians were unparalleled in their suffering, the English in their reserve, the Americans in their love of life, the Italians in their love of Christ, and the French in their hope of love. So when they made the dress for Tatiana, they made it full of promise. They made it as if to tell her, put it on, chérie, and in this dress you, too, shall be loved as we have loved; put it on and love shall be yours. And so Tatiana never despaired in her white dress with red roses. Had the Americans made it, she would have been happy. Had the Italians made it, she would have started praying, had the British made it, she would have squared her shoulders, but because the French had made it, she never lost hope.
Though at the moment, Tatiana walked down Suvorovsky with her dress uncomfortably tight against her swelling adolescent chest.
Outside was fresh and warm, and it was a jolt to the consciousness to remember that on this sunny lovely day full of promise, Hitler was in the Soviet Union. Tatiana shook her head as she walked. Deda had never trusted that Hitler and said so from the start. When Comrade Stalin signed the nonaggression pact with Hitler in 1939, Deda said that Stalin had gone to bed with the devil. And now the devil had betrayed Stalin. Why was that such a surprise? Why had we expected more from him? Had we expected the devil to behave honorably?
Tatiana thought Deda was the smartest man on earth. Ever since Poland was trampled over in 1939, Deda had been saying that Hitler was coming to the Soviet Union. A few months ago in the spring, he suddenly started bringing home canned goods. Too many canned goods for Babushka’s liking. Babushka had no interest in spending part of Deda’s monthly pay on an intangible such as just in case. She would scoff at him. What are you ta
lking about, war? she would say, glaring at the canned ham. Who is going to eat this, ever? I will never eat this garbage, why do you spend good money on garbage? Why can’t you get marinated mushrooms, or tomatoes? And Deda, who loved Babushka more than a woman deserved to be loved by a man, would bow his head, let her vent her feelings, say nothing, but the following month be back carrying more cans of ham. He also bought sugar and he bought coffee and he bought tobacco, and he bought some vodka, too. He had less luck with keeping these items stocked because for every birthday, anniversary, May Day, the vodka was broken open and the tobacco smoked and the coffee drunk and the sugar put into bread and pie dough and tea. Deda was a man unable to deny his family anything, but he denied himself. So on his own birthday he refused to open the vodka. But Babushka still opened the bag of sugar to make him blueberry pie. The one thing that remained constant and grew by a can or two each month was the ham, which everyone hated and no one ate.
Tatiana’s task of buying up all the rice and vodka she could get her hands on was proving much harder than she had anticipated.
The stores on Suvorovsky were empty of vodka. They carried cheese. But cheese would not keep well. They had bread, but bread would not keep well. The salami was gone, the canned goods, too. And the flour.
With a quickening pace Tatiana walked down Suvorovsky, eleven blocks in all, over a kilometer, and every store was empty of canned or long-term provisions. It was only three o’clock.
Tatiana passed two savings banks. Both were closed. Signs, hastily handwritten, said closed early. This surprised her. Why would the banks close early? It’s not as if they could run out of money. They were banks. She chuckled to herself.
The Metanovs had waited too long, Tatiana realized, sitting around as they did, packing Pasha, bickering, looking dejectedly at one another. They should have been out the door in an instant, but instead Pasha was sent to camp. And Tatiana had read Zoshchenko. She should have been out an hour earlier. If only she had gone to Nevsky Prospekt, she could be standing in line right now with the rest of the crowds.
But even though she strolled down Suvorovsky disheartened at not being able to find even a box of matches to buy, Tatiana felt the warm summer air carrying with it an anomalous scent of provenance, a scent of an order of things to come that she neither knew nor understood. Will I always remember this day? Tatiana thought, inhaling deeply. I’ve said that in the past: oh, this day I’ll remember, but I have forgotten the days I thought I would never forget. I remember seeing my first tadpole. Who would have thought? I remember tasting the salt water of the Black Sea for the first time. I remember getting lost in the woods by myself the first time. Maybe it’s the firsts you remember. I’ve never been in a real war before, Tatiana thought. Maybe I’ll remember this.
Tatiana headed toward the stores near Tauride Park. She liked this area of the city, away from the hustle of Nevsky Prospekt. The trees were lush and tall, and there were fewer people. She liked the feeling of a bit of solitude.
After looking inside three or four grocers, Tatiana wanted to just give up. She was seriously considering going back home and telling her father she wasn’t able to find anything, but the thought of telling him she had failed in the one small task he had assigned her filled her with anxiety. She walked on. Near the corner where Suvorovsky met Ulitsa Saltykov-Schedrin, there was a store with a long line of people stretching out into an otherwise empty street.
Dutifully she went and stood behind the last person in line.
Shifting from foot to foot, Tatiana stood and stood, asked for the time, stood and stood. The line moved a meter. Sighing, she asked the lady in front of her what they were standing in line for. The lady shrugged aggressively, turning away from Tatiana. “What, what?” the lady grumbled, holding her bag closer to her chest, as if Tatiana were about to rob her. “Stand in line like everybody else, and don’t ask stupid questions.”
Tatiana waited. The line moved another meter. She asked for the time again.
“Ten minutes after the last time you asked me!” barked the woman.
When she heard the young woman in front of the grumpy lady say the word “banks” Tatiana perked up.
“No more money,” the young woman was saying to an older woman standing next to her. “Did you know that? The savings banks have run out. I don’t know what they’re going to do now. Hope you have some in your mattress.”
The older woman shook her head worriedly. “I had 200 rubles, my life savings. That’s what I have with me now.”
“Well, buy, buy. Buy everything. Canned goods are especially—”
The older woman shook her head. “Don’t like canned goods.”
“Well, then buy caviar. I heard one woman bought ten kilos of caviar at Elisey on Nevsky. What’s she going to do with this caviar? But it’s none of my business. I’m buying oil. And matches.”
“Buy some salt,” the older woman said wisely. “You can drink tea without sugar, but you can’t eat porridge without salt.”
“Don’t like porridge,” the younger woman said. “Never liked it. Won’t eat it. It’s gruel, that’s what it is.”
“Well, buy caviar then. You like caviar, don’t you?”
“No. Maybe some sausage,” the younger woman said thoughtfully. “Some nice smoked kolbasa. Listen, it’s been over twenty years that the proletariat has been the tsar. I know by now what to expect.”
The woman in front of Tatiana snorted loudly. The two women ahead of her turned around.
“You don’t know what to expect!” the woman said in a loud tone. “It’s war.” She gave a mirthless grunt that sounded like a train engine sputtering.
“Who asked you?”
“War, comrades! Welcome to reality, brought to you by Hitler. Buy your caviar and butter, and eat them tonight. Because mark my words, your two hundred rubles will not buy you a loaf of bread next January.”
“Shut up!”
Tatiana lowered her head. She did not like fighting. Not at home, not on the street with strangers.
Two people were leaving the store with big paper bags under their arms. “What’s in them?” she inquired politely.
“Smoked kolbasa,” a man told her gruffly, hurrying on. He looked as if he were afraid Tatiana would run after him and beat him to the ground to get his cursed smoked kolbasa. Tatiana continued to stand in line. She didn’t even like sausage.
After thirty more minutes she left.
Not wanting to disappoint her father, she hurried to the bus stop. She was going to catch bus Number 22 to Elisey on Nevsky Prospekt, since she knew for sure they sold at least caviar there.
But then she thought, caviar? We will have to eat it next week. Surely caviar won’t last until winter? But is that the goal? Food for the winter? That just couldn’t be, she decided; winter was too far away. The Red Army was invincible; Comrade Stalin said so himself. The German pigs would be out by September.
As she rounded the corner of Ulitsa Saltykov-Schedrin, the rubber band holding her hair snapped and broke.
The bus stop was across the street on the Tauride Park side. Usually she got bus 136 from here to go across town to visit cousin Marina. Today bus 22 would take her to Elisey, but she knew she needed to hurry. From the way those women were talking, soon even the caviar would be gone.
Just ahead of her, Tatiana spotted a kiosk that sold ice cream.
Ice cream!
Suddenly the day was filled with possibilities. A man sat on a little stool under a small umbrella to shield himself from the sun as he read the paper.
Tatiana quickened her pace.
From behind her she heard the sound of the bus. She turned around and saw her bus in the middle distance. She knew if she ran, she could catch it easily. She stepped off the curb to cross the street, then looked at the ice cream stand, looked at the bus again, looked at the ice cream stand, and stopped.
Tatiana really wanted an ice cream.
Biting her lip, she let the bus pass. It’s all right, she
thought. The next one will come soon, and in the meantime I’ll sit at the bus stop and have an ice cream.
Walking up to the kiosk man, she said eagerly, “Ice cream, yes?”
“It says ice cream, doesn’t it? I’m sitting here, aren’t I? What do you want?” He lifted his eyes from the newspaper to her, and his hard expression softened. “What can I get you, dearie?”
“Have you got . . .” She trembled a little. “Have you got crème brûlée?”
“Yes.” He opened the freezer door. “A cone or a cup?”
“A cone, please,” Tatiana replied, jumping up and down once.
She paid him gladly; she would have paid him double. In anticipation of the pleasure she was about to receive, Tatiana ran across the road in her heels, hurrying to the bench under the trees so she could eat her ice cream in peace, while she waited for the bus to take her to buy caviar because war had started.
There was no one else waiting for the bus, and she was glad for the fine moment to feast on her delight in seclusion. She took off the white paper wrapping, threw it in the trash can next to the bench, smelled the ice cream, and took a lick of the sweet, creamy, cold caramel. Closing her eyes in happiness, Tatiana smiled and rolled the ice cream in her mouth, waiting for it to melt on her tongue.
Too good, Tatiana thought. Just too good.
The wind blew her hair, and she held it back with one hand as she licked the ice cream in circles around the smooth ball. She crossed and uncrossed her legs, swung her head back, lolled the ice cream in her throat, and hummed the song everyone was singing these days: “Someday we’ll meet in Lvov, my love and I.”
It was a perfect day. For five minutes there was no war, and it was just a glorious Sunday in a Leningrad June.
When Tatiana looked up from her ice cream, she saw a soldier staring at her from across the street.
It was unremarkable in a garrison city like Leningrad to see a soldier. Leningrad was full of soldiers. Seeing soldiers on the street was like seeing old ladies with shopping bags, or lines, or beer bars. Tatiana normally would have glanced past him down the street and moved on, except that this soldier was standing across the street and staring at her with an expression Tatiana had never seen before. She stopped eating her ice cream.
The Bronze Horseman Page 3