The shop was stocked with every kind of kitchen necessity; floor-to-ceiling shelves lined the walls, and bins, crates, and barrels crowded into the floor space, spilling out onto the sidewalk in good weather. From sugar, salt, and rice, to dried fruit, marinated herring, and fresh butter—Avram had it all, with the exception of meat and bread. He left those essentials to the butcher across the road, and Nikos the Greek baked enough bread to fill the neighborhood’s daily needs. One wall of the shop was devoted to basic implements—pots, bowls, everyday dishes, wooden spoons, inexpensive cutlery, knives, flour sack towels, even thimbles and sewing needles and scissors.
Filip burst through the open door at a full run, stopping short at the counter, his hands in front of his chest to brake the momentum. “It’s my birthday, Avram,” he announced. “Mama needs flour for the cake.”
Avram put down his newspaper. “Your birthday,” he said, his voice a slow, thunderous rumble. “And how old?”
“Seven. Now I can start school.” Filip bounced from foot to foot.
No need to tell Avram the other milestone this birthday represented: he would be old enough to have dour old Father Yefim hear his confession. Father Yefim was bearded, like Avram, but with mournful eyes and a downtrodden look that made children avoid him. Some women, like Zoya, Filip’s mama, attended the clandestine Orthodox church services he held in the basement of his tailor shop, but Filip could see no possible way this privilege of confession—of telling a stern adult what he had done wrong—could be good for him. Better to keep your mistakes to yourself, he thought, say you’re sorry if you must, and work harder at not getting caught.
“Seven.” The shopkeeper tapped the pitted countertop with a thick index finger. “Seven. Do you know, this is the most important birthday you will ever have? School changes everything in your life. You will now become an educated man.”
Filip giggled. “I can already do adding up. Papa showed me on the abacus.” He touched the beads on Avram’s ancient calculator, pushing them randomly back and forth on their thin wire rods, their surfaces burnished to a rich shine by constant use.
“But now you must learn adding up with a pencil. So, you will need this.” Avram reached up to a shelf behind him and took down a pencil box. “A present, for your birthday.”
The box was pale wood, big enough for half a dozen pencils, the top painted with Yalta’s most famous landscape—the cliffs over the Black Sea, a castle’s outline etched against a pale-blue sky perched precariously on the very edge. The lid slid back easily under Filip’s tentative finger, moving silently along the grooved edges of the box. “Oh,” he exhaled, raising wide brown eyes to the grocer’s solemn face. “Oh.”
Avram measured flour into a paper sack, weighed it, and folded down the top. He jotted down the transaction in the tattered account book with a stubby pencil. “Here,” he said, handing it to the boy. “Better get home, or there will be no cake.”
Filip was out the door before he found his voice, and his manners. “Thank you, Avram,” he said, then shouted it from the street. “Thank you!” He ran home, skirting the puddles, holding the gift close to his chest, barely remembering to stop for his sandals, the wilted azalea petals crushed, forgotten, in his pocket.
4
“PAPA, CAN WE GO to the dock? There’s a ship coming in right now.” Galina stood very still; only her dancing eyes revealed anticipation. As if on cue, a ship’s horn wailed its throaty announcement, waves of sound stirring the air with vibrations she could feel from the pit of her stomach down to her knees.
“Not today, dochenka, my daughter.” Ilya replied without taking his eyes from the wire he was bending with small sharp-nosed pliers. Under his fingers, the Russian letters ya and l were already formed. He turned the pin around, looping the wire deftly to form the t and a, then added a decorative flourish before starting on the date—1935.
Galina never tired of watching him work. Her earliest memories included the silhouette of her father bent over his worktable, framed by yellow lamplight, humming and occasionally talking to himself: “Careful, the antlers are tricky” or “Just a few more leaves” or “Vot. Finished.” She would fall asleep to the whisper of his chisel scraping against polished ivory, wake up to examine with delight the newest bracelet or brooch. Deer grazing in leafy meadows, birds in flight, exquisite flowers framed by impossibly delicate fern fronds—each unique, each, to her admiring eye, priceless.
Ilya spent his days clerking at the government procurement office in the harbor. Seeing a ship come in was entirely routine, requiring a flurry of paperwork that had long ago blunted for him the novelty or excitement of any arrival. Saturdays were spent outdoors in one of the city’s parks, or down by the quay, offering his work for sale, making up wire mementos on the spot for those who had money to buy them. These were mostly Party members on holiday, or traveling artists—film and theater actors, circus performers, members of opera companies or ballet troupes, who enjoyed more travel privileges than the average Soviet citizen.
Galina loved these weekend outings with her father. School was interesting, but she did not share, or understand, her friend Filip’s thirst for knowledge. She could see the value of knowing how to read, and learning arithmetic seemed practical enough, but in the end school was something you had to do until you were old enough to step into the stream of life.
Her brother Maksim was the studious one. Already, at thirteen, he talked about medical school. Galina was convinced that he spent hours at the library at least in part to avoid the household duties that fell, more and more, to her hands. But he was a boy, and the only son; more was expected of him. Her own reality of daily tasks was brightened by the singing that started and ended each school day, and by the time she spent with her father outdoors, away from their crowded rooms and the unavoidable intrusions of other people’s family dramas.
Family drama was common fare in the tenement, where every argument floated out into the open courtyard, unrestrained by thin walls, aided by the perpetually open windows. No arrival or departure escaped notice, though sudden disappearances tended to remain unasked about and unexplained. But ordinary gossip was fair game, especially when fueled by Uncle Zhora’s potent samagon, the fiery vodka he distilled from potato peels and exchanged freely for anything edible.
Uncle Zhora was a loner, and no one’s relation. He had been a corporal in the tsar’s imperial army as a young man, ending his service in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War with no particular distinction, but had suffered a leg wound that left him with a permanent limp and a cantankerous disposition. He lived at the rear of one of the apartments in a single small room that he never cleaned, coming and going through the back door that led, by way of a dark hallway, directly into one of the city’s narrow alleys. Along with the samagon, he supplemented his meager and irregular pension with sales of kvass, the tangy yeasty beer fermented from black bread crusts and a handful of raisins.
Except for one or two steadfast drinking companions, no one particularly liked the old man. He was short, unkempt, and taciturn, given to shouting obscenities at children who disturbed his morning sleep. He kept odd hours. Sometimes, late at night, his neighbors would hear him playing the bandura, strumming passable renditions of old Ukrainian love songs on its worn-out strings. “Who knows,” someone would sigh, “how much he has to remember, or regret? We are all strangers to one another.” So Uncle Zhora was tolerated, whether from a sense of charity toward the less fortunate, simple compassion, or the more practical desire to maintain a ready source of cheap intoxication.
Galina had wandered away while her father worked, up to the sanatorium—it was as far as she was allowed to go by herself. She took the wide marble staircase at a run, descending in skips syncopated to a private rhythm inside her head. She loved the grand old sandstone building, with its tall windows and red tiled roof, famous throughout Europe for its mineral baths.
Once, according to her teacher, Leonid Petrovich, it had served only the rich, who could afford
to travel to Russia’s riviera and partake of its legendary attractions. Now, the benefits of its healing waters were available to all who could take the time to enjoy them. It was an example, Leonid Petrovich said, of socialism at work, caring for the health needs of all the people, not just a privileged few.
She had never been inside, her mama always too busy for this kind of self-indulgence. Her father, who did go from time to time, described the palatial interiors beginning to show signs of neglect, the mats and towels growing ever more dingy and threadbare. The few remaining attendants had become efficient to the point of rudeness, as though it was now less important to serve the clientele than to guard the premises against looting.
But the steps were magnificent, and she ran up and danced down them again and again, until forced to sit on the cool cypress-shaded stone pediment, out of breath and panting with exhaustion. Then she was running with renewed energy down the path lined with cherry trees, dodging the strolling couples and babushkas with small children, skirting wandering groups of soldiers on leave, coming to rest under a sapling festooned with its first or second year’s blossoms.
Galina wrapped her hands around the slender trunk and shook the tree with all the strength in her nine-year-old body, covering her head and shoulders with a shower of petals. She ignored a passing elderly woman’s disapproving glance and ran again, leaving a trail of cherry blossoms in her wake, reaching her father’s side just as he finished the wire pin.
“Papa, is Uncle Zhora a wood-carver, too?” She picked up an oblong cherry wood plaque from Ilya’s tray, ran her fingers over the paper-thin rounded edges carved in an undulating design reminiscent of ocean waves.
“Uncle Zhora? That old goat? I doubt he has ever carved anything but the crusts off his bread rations. Why?” He put down his pliers and started polishing the YALTA pin with a scrap of chamois cloth.
“Oh, I don’t know. Will you put something in the middle here? HAPPY BIRTHDAY or something?” She stroked the plaque’s burnished center, vacant except for the subtly grained patina of the wood.
“Whatever the customer wants. You have something in your hair,” Ilya replied, reaching out to remove a petal nestled above her ear. Galina pulled back, cowering, her breath coming quick and sharp, surprising them both with the violence of her reaction.
“Shto s toboi? What is it? Have I ever hit you, even once?”
She stood still while he smoothed her hair, plucking out the petal and an errant leaf or two. “There,” he said, smiling the radiant smile that never failed to warm her heart. “A little less wild now.”
Galina turned away, blushing deeply, and fixed her eyes on the horizon, where the Black Sea breathed against the cloudless sky with a barely perceptible shimmer. “That’s what Uncle Zhora said,” she mumbled. “‘You have something in your hair.’”
Ilya laid the shiny pin in the tray, turned his daughter firmly by the shoulders to face him. “When?”
“The other day, when Mama sent me with a bowl of soup for him, to get kvass for your dinner.” She kept her head down, forcing him to lean closer to hear her words.
“And then? He touched your hair?” Ilya lifted her chin. “Look at me.”
“He . . . he said, ‘You have something in your hair.’ Then I felt the wood in his pants pocket, against my—here,” she said, touching her stomach. “Papa, he smelled so bad, and his eyes were all crazy. I was afraid.” Galina began to cry, leaning into her father, her face turned against his chest. Ilya embraced the shuddering child, holding her close until she stopped sobbing.
“Does your mother know?” His voice took on a hard edge.
“Nobody knows, only you. Mama will say I am too lazy, or that I don’t want to go because his room is so dirty. She says we should feel sorry for him because he was hurt in the war. But I don’t want to go there anymore.”
Ilya wiped her face with his handkerchief. “Blow your nose,” he said. “You will never go there again. I promise.”
He packed his things, and they walked down to the embankment, where they sat on a bench facing the sea, talking of this and that, until a passing commercial photographer came by and took their picture, which Ilya paid for even though he had sold nothing that day.
The picture showed Ilya seated on the bench in his white summer suit, one long leg crossed casually over the other at the knee, his captain’s cap pushed back to reveal a becoming disarray of dark hair. He is not smiling, but his face looks pleasant, relaxed. Galina sits at his side, hands in her lap, bony shoulders and skinny legs protruding from a simple sundress, her braided hair glowing in the last of the afternoon sun. She, too, does not smile, but looks contented, the traces of tears all but imperceptible on her solemn face.
5
IF HE TILTED his notebook just a few centimeters to the right, Filip thought Galina might be able to read his answers. She had never asked for his help, not even in history, where he knew she struggled with the dates and battles that seemed so important to Leonid Petrovich. But just in case, if it helped her get a better grade, at least on this written part of the exam, Filip wanted to make it easier for her. He couldn’t do much for her in the orals, but maybe her sweet disposition and pretty face would charm the old curmudgeon of a teacher enough to get her through.
Galina and Filip had been deskmates from the first day of school, apparently purely by chance. For one thing, from the age of seven until now, when they were both twelve, they had been almost exactly the same height. They did not know if this mattered, or if the placement followed some other arcane logic. In any case, fate or administrative will had given them a place halfway down the row of double desks nearest the wall, under the faded map of the world, and so it had stayed through a succession of teachers with only a change in fourth grade to a room with bigger desks.
The world map looked old and dull next to the bright new one of the USSR, which showed the changed city names and boldly outlined the borders with Europe, Asia, and the Arab countries, like a vast net holding in the nations of the Soviet Union against encroachment by unenlightened or aggressive neighbors. Filip had dutifully learned the names—Ossetia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Kazakhstan, the dreaded Siberia; he memorized the new cities, too—Leningrad, Murmansk, Gorky, Engels, Svobodny. Often, though, he found his eyes wandering with fascination into the forbidden shadowy West.
It was a world he could only access through classic literature and his growing stamp collection. He sank into all the European novels he could find: Dumas, Stendhal, Goethe, Cervantes. He devoured Shakespeare’s plays and anything else in translation that had evaded the censor’s hand. The stamps he bought from an outdoor stall at the weekly market, with pocket money his indulgent mother slipped him whenever she could. He especially prized the occasional stamp from France, Germany, even America, that his father, who worked for the postal service, was able to bring home from confiscated mail.
“What happens to the letters?” Filip asked once, admiring a new South American stamp: a woven cornucopia, representing fruit farming, with oranges, pears, peaches, cherries, a fine-looking melon, succulent grapes, all etched in muted blue, framed with a russet geometric border. Fruticultura, he read the inscription to himself, savoring the strangeness of the foreign words. Republica Argentina.
“The inspector takes them away,” his father replied, sipping his morning tea. He had the fine-boned fingers, keen intelligence, and taste for sweet treats that Filip had inherited. The dark eyes, olive complexion, and slight build Filip had from Zoya, his Greek mother, along with her capricious temperament.
“What if there’s money inside, or photographs?”
His father turned the page of the book he was reading. Filip knew the conversation was over. No loose talk was the law of survival in their world, especially in government matters. Questions about the reasons for repressive edicts were best kept buried deep in one’s own mind, like the little icon of the Virgin Mary his mother hid in the lining of her handbag, wrapped in a hand-embroidered handkerchief with
delicate crocheted edges.
“Mat’ moya,” his mother would say whenever some unpleasant situation arose: an uncommonly long line for bread, or the sharklike appearance of a black sedan at the end of their street, gliding silent and ominous, as if the car itself were endowed with superior powers of detection, capable of seeing into the shuttered rooms of your very soul. It was a common enough expression—Mother mine. Filip knew she was not invoking the grandmother who had died before he was born, but calling on the divine protector whose presence no edict could excise from Zoya’s life.
Filip looked on this outmoded obsession with amused indulgence, like a harmless if annoying habit that had nothing to do with his own life. He had long since refused to accompany Zoya to her secret meetings with other Orthodox celebrants, where they lit candles and chanted ancient prayers in whispered tones. It was no more than a witches’ Sabbath to him, a pointless throwback to bygone times that had kept the Russian people humble and penitent for centuries. He thought the promise of eventual reward in some other life a dubious prospect. Where was the evidence? If Jesus had indeed decreed that people must endure the harsh burden of farm or factory labor and embrace their poverty, while elegant, listless intelligentsia played their lives away in Finland, Monaco, Tuscany, and Paris, then he had no use for Jesus.
He was a modern boy. He washed and ironed his red scarf with meticulous care, its vibrant glow reflecting his own pride in being part of the ascendant Soviet future.
“I want to be a Young Pioneer,” he had told his parents shortly after his eighth birthday. “My friend Borya and just about all the other kids belong. They sing songs and march in parades, and wear a red scarf around their necks. I want a red scarf.” He spoke breathlessly, the words rushing from him in a single stream, not to be stopped by the look of horror on his mother’s face.
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