by Kelli Stuart
Mama nodded, her head moving slowly down and then back up, her eyes never leaving his. He looked at the book again, then glanced down at us huddled by her feet.
“Are these your children?” he asked. He didn’t wait for her to answer but took a step toward us. His eyes fell on me and they softened for a brief moment. I tried to be brave like my Mama, lifting my chin to return his gaze. But my lower lip started to shake, so I shifted my eyes back down.
He turned back to Mama. “Can you also write?” he asked.
Mama hesitated, then nodded again. He tucked the New Testament into his front pocket.
“Report to the front gate tomorrow morning and tell them you have an appointment to see Commander Nikolayev. Bring the children with you.”
Mama opened her mouth to ask a question, but he held up his hand.
“Do not speak a word,” he barked. “I could have you sent into the camp for this,” he tapped his breast pocket, which held the book. “But I won’t do that if you do exactly as I say. Tomorrow morning, go to the front gate.”
Mama nodded once more and the man spun around, climbing out of our shelter and disappearing into the night. Murmurs coursed through barrack as people tried to dissect what had just happened. Some of them looked at us with pity, clucking their tongues and shaking their heads. I heard snippets of conversation that left me terrified.
“Sent to the camp.”
“Lose her children.”
“What a pity.”
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to block out their words as mama lay down next to me.
“Sshh...It’s alright children,” she whispered. “God will take care of us. Have faith, my darlings.”
I wanted to scream at her to stop saying those things, but she was my mama and I loved her too much to contradict her. So I fell into a fitful sleep and waited for daylight to break.
The next morning, we arrived at the front gate where Mama spoke quietly with a young guard who eyed us all suspiciously. He stared down at us with steely dark eyes, his square jaw free of any stubble. He looked young, all smooth and clean like Dima. He was tall and thin, and I found myself staring, wondering how a boy came to be dressed like a man and if that would ever happen to Dima. The guard jutted his chin toward a small bench in the corner and told us to wait there.
Finally, after what seemed a lifetime of waiting, Commander Nikolayev arrived. He put us all in the back of his car and sped us past the barbed wire gate and out of the camp. For the first time in nearly a year, I saw a land outside the gulag holding camp. The grass was still brown, but I could see signs of life peeking through the trees, the ending winter giving way to a world waiting to bloom.
The car ride was short, perhaps only ten minutes, but long enough to ignite in my young heart a longing for more. I had forgotten what freedom tasted like, or perhaps I had never really known it at all. I remembered a feeling of awe at the expanse of the world around me, and I wanted more.
Commander Nikolayev established Mama as his personal secretary. She was responsible for typing and mailing all of his notices, setting his appointments, and keeping his calendar in order. She started immediately that morning, and Commander Nikolayev took me, Dima, and Tanya upstairs to a room above his office where he told us to be still and quiet.
“We will figure out what to do with you soon,” he said. He glanced at me and winked, and a knot formed in my stomach. His stare didn’t feel kind. It felt scary and dangerous. Dima saw his wink and he stepped in front of me, placing himself as a barrier between the two of us. The commander stretched his thin lips into a wry smile and offered Dima a terse nod.
“There are papers and pencils in the corner,” he said pointing at a small table against the wall. “You can draw if you’d like. You will see your mother when she breaks for lunch.”
He left us then, and Dima sat on the floor with Tanya, clapping his hands in front of her face and eliciting delighted giggles. He glanced at me, and I saw in his eyes the same hardness that had covered him in the schoolhouse under the glaring gaze of Valerya Sergeyevna. With a sigh, I walked to the table and sat down. I picked up a pencil and let my hands start moving across the page. As my fingers drifted back and forth, small strokes of the pencil filling in the white spaces, my mind wandered to the car ride here. I thought of the vast expanse of land that surrounded us, and I wondered if the whole world was this big and wide, or if this was the only place that existed and we were living in a small bubble. My tongue stuck out of the corner of my mouth as I colored, not even thinking about what I was doing. I didn’t hear Dima and Tanya playing on the floor. I didn’t think of Mama sitting at a desk downstairs, and I didn’t notice the gnawing hunger in my belly. I let myself get swept away, my imagination dictating the world around me instead of the other way around.
It wasn’t until the door to the room opened that I stopped drawing. I looked up to see a young woman standing in the doorway, a tray of dark, black bread in her hands. Beside the bread were three little cups, steam rising from them, dancing in tendrils up toward her kind eyes.
“My father said to bring you all something to eat,” she said. She smiled at me, and I liked her instantly. Her face was soft and sweet. She looked young, perhaps only nineteen or twenty, and when she smiled, a small dimple formed in her cheek. Dima scrambled to his feet, brushing his hands nervously on his pants. The girl nodded at him, then walked to the table and set down the tray in front of me. She glanced at my paper and gasped.
“Did you draw this?” she asked, leaning over my shoulder. I nodded, my eyes frozen on the plate of bread.
“May I hold it?” she asked. When I nodded my consent, she picked the paper up and walked over to the window. She held my drawing up to the light and studied it closely. It was at this moment that I also got a good look at what I had drawn. It was a copy of the landscape outside the window. I hadn’t realized that I was doing it, but there I saw the stroke marks of the paper outlining the rolling hills and trees that dotted the horizon. I’d drawn a few birds floating lazily in the sky, and small flowers dotted the forefront of the page.
The drawing was by no means professional. The unsteadiness of my young hand was obvious and apparent, but the image was a discernible copy of the outside world. The girl turned back and looked at me for a long time. She turned her gaze to Dima.
“Has she always been able to draw like this?” she asked.
Dima cleared his throat. “Yes,” he answered, his voice cracking nervously. He blushed and coughed. “She loves to draw. She doesn’t even know what she’s drawing half the time, though. She just lets her hand wander on the page.”
The girl looked back at me thoughtfully. She put the paper back down on the table and patted my head.
“You have a special gift, little one,” she murmured. “We’re going to see what we can do with this.”
That was the beginning of my studies in the home of Commander Nikolayev. His daughter, Svetlana, met me and Tanya every morning after that, and she brought us back to her house where she had an art teacher come twice a week and give me lessons in drawing and painting. On the other days, she worked to teach me how to read and write, as well as how to cook, clean, and sew. Svetlana became more dear to me than anyone else had ever been. While Tanya played quietly in the corner, Svetlana taught me how to be a young woman.
Dima was sent to work back in the camp. Every morning, Commander Nikolayev drove him back inside the barbed fence where Dima was forced to work hard labor among men twice his age. He didn’t complain, but he came home each day exhausted, too tired often to talk. He would only eat, shoving as much food into his mouth as he could without choking, then fall asleep on the floor in front of the fire.
This was how our life moved in our second year of captivity, and for awhile it was acceptable to me. I enjoyed our new arrangement, despite worrying about Dima during the days while he was gone. Two months into our move, however, everything changed.
It started the day that Commander Nikolayev
returned home for lunch rather than eating at the office like usual. He sat at the head of the small table that he shared with his daughter, and ate his food slowly, staring at me as I shrank back as far as I could into the wooden chair. Tanya sat in Svetlana’s lap, babbling and kicking her way through the meals while Svetlana told her father of all the things we accomplished that morning. And through it all, he stared at me and chewed his food.
A week after he began coming home for lunch, he also started returning in the late afternoons.
“I’ll take the girls back to their Mama now,” he told Svetlana. “The weather will begin to turn and it will be easier and quicker for me to drive them over there than for you all to walk.” Svetlana didn’t seem to mind this chore being taken off her plate, and so it was that I ended up sitting next to Commander Nikolayev in his car. It was a short drive to our little house outside the gulag, perhaps only five minutes. But a lot can, and did, happen in five minutes. Within a month, it became apparent that our stability and relative comfort outside the camp were all contingent on my willingness to cooperate with his wandering hands. If I kept quiet, we could stay where we were. But if I told anyone of the things he said and did to me, we would go back to our hole in the ground, and with another winter looming before us, I decided that secrecy was our only hope of survival.
On our third drive home, he slipped Mama’s book into my hands just before I exited the car. I could still feel the heat of his touch on my body, and I trembled sitting next to him.
“This is the forbidden book I caught your mother reading, little one,” he murmured. “This is the book that brought you to me.” His lips turned up into the nasty smile that made my stomach churn.
“I’ll give it back to you and let you decide what you want to do with it—what you want to do about your mother’s rebellion.”
That was the day that I began to resent my mother. I hid her book, just like I hid what was happening to me at the hands of Commander Nikolayev. I didn’t really want to keep either secret, but what choice did I have?
I wanted my mother to figure it out on her own. I lay in my bed at night and willed her to sense the danger, but she didn’t. She missed it all. For a long time, I blamed her for the things that happened during our time in Commander Nikolayev’s care. But eventually I came to believe that it must have been my fault. I had her book, and I never showed it to her, never let her know I had taken it. Perhaps I was just as rebellious as she, and my punishment was the Soviet Commander with his wandering hands and hot breath.
At night, when the darkness left me terrified and alone, I accepted what seemed to be the only logical truth. What happened with the commander had to be my fault. Why else would it have happened to me?
I was just too good at keeping secrets.
Nina
Be ready! Always ready!
Nina flips down the mirror and glances at her reflection, nervously fluffing her hair. She stares into her own eyes, shaking her head slowly.
“What are you doing?” she whispers. She closes the mirror and stares out the windshield at the restaurant in front of her. It’s one of those quiet, intimate Italian restaurants that seats its patrons at candlelit tables and plays soft music in the background, all of which feels awkward and uncomfortable. She suddenly wishes she had suggested they just meet for coffee.
Nina’s thoughts drift to her mother and how elated she would be at the prospect of this first date, and a tremor pushes through her body. Then she thinks of Annie going out with Toby, a boy she has never known but who has forever altered her daughter’s life, and suddenly Nina is overwhelmed by it all.
“This is ridiculous,” she mutters. “I can’t have dinner with this man tonight.” She reaches in to her purse to find her phone and text a hasty apology to Viktor when a sharp knock on her window causes her to yelp. She swings her head to the left and looks into Viktor’s smiling eyes, and her throat tightens.
She drops her phone back into her purse and pushes open the door, stepping out into the cool, night air. “You startled me!” she says with a forced smile. Viktor smiles back, the lines around his eyes deepening in the handsome elegance that befalls men as they get older. His look is distinctly Russian, with dark eyes and a broad face. His brown hair is thinning just slightly, but still covers the top of his head. He’s stronger than she realized, his crisp suit-shirt tucked neatly into black slacks. He is handsome, and Nina feels a blush warm her cheeks.
“You look lovely,” Viktor says, holding out his arm so that she can tuck her hand into the crook of his elbow. Nina blinks, and offers a thin smile as she tries to push all thoughts of her mother and daughter out of her mind.
“Thank you,” she says with a duck of the head. The two walk inside and get settled at a table in the back corner. It’s dim and secluded, and when Nina sits down, her eyes dart from side to side. She tries to work out some excuse to shorten this evening, to get back to the life that so heavily presses down on her. Viktor watches her with a bemused expression.
“Are you alright?” he asks.
Nina looks up, almost as though she’s surprised to still see him there. “What?” she asks. “Oh. Yes, of course. I just have a lot on my mind.” She forces a smile and Viktor nods.
“You know,” he says, leaning in to her. “This could be a nice evening away. We can talk about anything and everything that has nothing to do with your mother.”
Nina smiles again, this time a little more freely. “It would be nice to leave it all behind for a little while,” she concedes.
Viktor nods. “Consider me your reprieve.”
Nina reaches out and takes a sip of the water in front of her, then takes a deep breath. She looks again at the restaurant, and her eyes crinkle in an unexpected grin.
“What is it?” Viktor asks, leaning forward so that the candlelight perfectly illuminates his own twinkling eyes.
Nina shakes her head. “It’s...it’s nothing,” she says with a wave of the hand.
“No, come on. Something made you smile like that—what was it?” Viktor presses.
Nina takes a deep breath. Something about his gaze sets her at ease, and she finds herself slowly pushing back the thoughts of Elizaveta and Annie and settling into her evening.
“When did you come to the States?” she asks. Viktor leans his elbows against the table and looks up thoughtfully.
“Let’s see,” he begins, “I was 16 years old. My father worked as a Soviet diplomat. One evening he told my mother and I to pack one bag each, that we were going on a trip with him. We flew to Germany, and instead of leaving the airport as we were supposed to, we boarded a second flight to the United States. My father sought asylum with the U.S. government, and we never went back. That was in 1981, so I’ve been here thirty-seven years now.”
Nina takes a sip of her water before responding. “Were you a part of Young Pioneers when you were in grade school?” she asks.
Viktor shrugs. “Of course. We didn’t have a choice. Weren’t you a Young Pioneer?”
Nina smiles and thinks of her days wearing the bright red kerchief around her neck, the pin of a young Lenin proudly displayed on her uniform. She remembers the thrill she felt when she was first inducted into the Pioneers, the communist training group required for all students beginning in the third grade. She’d watched as the teachers locked the door of the assembly hall after filing them all inside, ensuring that no student could leave until after they attended the mandatory meeting. It was so exciting at first. Her chest puffed with pride as the senior Pioneer member pinned her shirt and tied her kerchief. She’d recited the Solemn Promise at the start of the meetings fervently and pridefully, and when greeted by fellow Pioneers with the hearty “Bud goty! Be ready!” Nina returned the salutation with a firm “Vsegda gotoy!” Always ready!” And she was always ready...until it all got predictable and boring.
“Yes, of course,” she answers. “I was just remembering one of the meetings I went to. I must have been 12 or 13. The Komsomol member
who spoke was in her early 20’s, and was one of those zealous inductees who took it all very seriously.”
Viktor nodded knowingly.
“She spoke at the beginning of the hour about the horrors of capitalism, and how it would destroy us all if we didn’t thwart its spread. I remember her specifically mentioning the capitalist’s love of food, and how he would gorge himself on it at restaurants whenever he got the chance. ‘This is why all capitalists are fat and ugly,’ she told us.” Nina raised the pitch of her voice to mock the girl whose memory is so seared into her brain.
“I was just thinking about how ironic it is that we are here preparing to gorge ourselves at a restaurant like a couple of capitalists. I guess the indoctrination didn’t stick all that well, did it?”
Viktor laughs, a hearty sound that fills the room. He raises his glass of water and holds it toward her.
“Tchestnoye pionerskoye,” he says with a wink, stating the most popular Pioneer exclamation. The honesty of the pioneer. It was a confirmation that Pioneers never would or could tell a lie. Nina smiles and clinks her water glass on his.
“To capitalism,” she replies, and they both drink.
The waitress approaches the table, and they order, Viktor indulging in a large steak, and Nina in a bowl of soup and a salad, unsure if he was planning to pay or if she should pay for herself. After placing their orders, Viktor leans back toward her.
“Well, I was never one to be appreciated or lauded by my teachers or group leaders,” he says with a wry smile. “I was a bit of a troublemaker, much to my parents’ dissatisfaction. And my grandmother thought me an outright menace to society until the day I called her to tell her I’d become a doctor. Apparently that white coat is magic.” He smiles, and Nina nods in return thinking of her own mother’s disappointment in her career choice.
“My father was a natural skeptic, though,” Viktor continues. “He doubted everything, including the regime he worked for, and he voiced his doubts about the Soviet leadership enough at home that I knew better than to take anything they said in those meetings very seriously. Somehow, I think my father knew that part of my problem was simply that I was his son.”