“Mat’ moya!” she had exclaimed, hurriedly crossing herself against this specter of evil in her house. “What are you saying?”
“It might be a good idea, Zoya,” his father had cut in. “Just last week a postal clerk at our office was let go for exhibiting ‘monarchist nostalgia.’ It seems he spoke a little too warmly about old times.”
“So you think this might help you keep your job? By sacrificing our son, our only child?” She had laid a protective hand on Filip’s shoulder.
“It is not sacrifice. It may be survival, ours and his.” He had looked at his son with a sympathetic smile. “What do they do, the Pioneers?”
“They meet after school. They sing songs and march in parades,” Filip repeated, not knowing what else to say.
He had been sent to bed without an answer. He lay sleepless on his cot, straining to hear the conversation in the kitchen, trying to decipher, if not the words, then at least the direction of the argument. But his parents were adept at keeping adult matters from his curious ears, a skill honed by cramped postrevolutionary living conditions. He had caught the occasional word—club . . . no harm . . . children—in his father’s even tone. His mother’s voice was higher, more agitated, lapsing into a whiny drone that signaled, to Filip, her extreme distress. And then, a breakthrough; a whole sentence rang out, clear and sharp in the evening stillness: “They teach them to be godless informers!” Zoya had exclaimed, each word distinct as hail in a storm. It got quiet then, with only his mother’s soft sobbing, his father repeating “Dovol’no, dovol’no,” in an effort to calm her down. Enough.
Was that what worried her? That he would tell someone she prayed to God and the Virgin Mary? How silly, Filip thought, finally letting sleep take him. As if he cared about her secrets and incantations; as if they caused him anything but embarrassment.
“Well, you can join, for your father’s sake,” his mother had assented with obvious reluctance the next evening, and added, in a whisper, “as long as you don’t believe.”
But he did believe. He sang “The International” with something like missionary passion, believing in the anthem’s promise of a world ruled by peace and brotherhood. Never mind that his singing was wildly off-key; he made up for it in volume and enthusiasm. Russia’s youth would rise and lead the world toward the new dawn and he, Filip, would be among them.
It bothered him, though, when on Thursday mornings the Young Pioneers wore their scarves to school in preparation for the afternoon’s meeting, and Galina was one of the few children in his class whose neck remained bare. He had tried his best to persuade her to join. She had even asked her parents, timidly, for their permission and met with her mother’s fierce unequivocal refusal. “I will die first,” Ksenia had pronounced, the subject closed.
“I don’t want my mother to die,” Galina told Filip with sadness in her brown eyes. “Please don’t ask me anymore.”
And yet, in spite of his burgeoning patriotism, his fascination with the West remained undiminished. Filip saw no contradiction in this. Did not Peter the Great, the history of whose reign was the subject of the day’s exam, travel widely and bring back progressive ideas to raise eighteenth-century Russia out of her dark, superstitious morass, shoving the reluctant nation into a scientific future where knowledge ruled and merit was rewarded? Perhaps it was the richness of the international literature or the intriguing variety of the world’s stamps that ignited his curiosity. And now Soviet Russia had a message to share with the world, a kind of reversal of Peter’s accomplishment, a giving back, letting enlightenment flow in reverse for the liberation of people everywhere.
Filip wrote furiously, confident in his grasp of the material. He did not notice that Galina, who never once looked at the page slanted her way, had long ago laid down her pen and closed her exam booklet. She sat twirling her fingers around the end of the single braid she wore draped over one shoulder, the pale-blue ribbon woven through the amber strands reaching almost to her waist.
6
“WHAT IS THIS, GALINA?” Ksenia emerged from the kitchen holding a partly filled glass jar.
“Rice,” the girl said simply, her placid demeanor belied by the color rising from her neck, spilling across her face and under the roots of her hair.
She was standing behind Ilya, who sat shirtless, reading a newspaper in the tiny yard behind their rooms. Gently, she peeled her father’s sunburned shoulders. Her hand stopped in midair at her mother’s words, a longish translucent piece of dry skin clinging to her fingers until an erratic summer breeze lifted it away.
They had played this game, she and her father, since she was very small, no bigger than a toddler. Then, Ilya would lie on the beach, the sun drying the seawater on his burnished back while she picked away, exposing odd-shaped patches of new skin to bake and start the process all over again. Ksenia would shake her head, amused but mystified by this intimate ritual. She found it silly, but said nothing; there was no harm in something that gave both father and daughter so much pleasure.
But on this day everything was different. Ilya had refused to join the Communist Party, and had lost his job at the shipping office. He did whatever day work came along—any kind of painting, carpentry, or roadwork—for cash wages or extra food coupons, no questions asked. Between jobs, he started traveling to nearby towns along the coast, setting up his portable workshop anywhere people congregated: in market squares, near government buildings, along roads leading to the beach. He needed the travel time, he told his family, to reach new markets, and to recover from the effects of physical labor. “You know this digging and hammering make my hands tremble. If I do it all the time, I cannot practice my craft. One slip of the chisel and the piece is ruined. And new materials are hard to come by.”
Ilya used almost anything that came his way; even a broken Bakelite box could be cut up to become inexpensive jewelry. His eye grew quick at spotting bits of wire, beads, cord, anything that might be turned into a keepsake or gift. There was real satisfaction in this scrounging, turning discards into durable, and saleable, art. He enjoyed sifting through the trash of the newly privileged apparatchiks and committee members, finding scraps to resell to them as ornaments tweaking the noses of the same authorities who denied him legitimate livelihood.
But beach outings were rare now, all but forgotten in the daily scramble for a little money, something to trade, a meager share of the less and less available food. Ilya’s sunburn was now a hard-earned badge of his exertions, the feathery touch of his daughter’s cool fingers a balm to his wounded sensibilities, and a concrete reminder, if one was needed, of her steadfast love.
Looking now, speechless, from Ksenia’s icy gray eyes to Galina’s shamefaced expression, he waited for an explanation. Clearly, this was a grave matter; no crumb of food in the house escaped his wife’s frugal management.
“I can see that,” she said, giving the jar an ominous shake, the grains dancing against each other in a chilling parody of a baby’s rattle. “You will tell me now where it came from, and why it was in your dresser drawer.”
“It’s—I—you . . . Oh, Mama.” Galina dropped her arms to her sides, hung her head, and sobbed. Tears soaked the front of her dress and ran down her father’s bare back. For several minutes, no one moved. The depth of her distress was so unquestionably genuine, so touching, that no words of comfort or reproach seemed fitting. When the flood subsided, they moved into the kitchen to sit at the table and talk, away from the ever-present eyes and ears all too eager to know everybody’s business.
And so it all came out. How Ksenia, sick with the recurring bronchitis that had plagued her since childhood, too feverish to leave her bed, had sent Galina to the grocer with the family’s monthly rice coupon. How Nina Mihailovna, standing behind the girl in line had said, “Take mine too. They have children’s shoes across town, my little one needs them.”
“Nina Mihailovna is such a good neighbor, the way you sometimes combine your rations—her tea and sugar, your pie—to sit t
ogether and talk. I was sure she meant for us to have her rice, after I had told her how sick you were.” Galina wiped her face with a kitchen towel. “And I came home and made the soup that day. It was good, Mama. Didn’t you say it was good?” She twisted the towel into a thick rope around her slender wrist, then dropped it into her lap.
Ksenia’s voice rose in disbelief. “You used Nina Mihailovna’s rice? How—”
“Let her finish,” Ilya interrupted, raising a conciliatory hand. “Then what?”
“Well, a few days later, I saw her in the courtyard, at the water pump. ‘Did you get my rice, Galya? Was there enough to go around?’ What could I say? I could not lie to her. I told her I would return her ration to her myself, from our share.”
“But you could lie to me,” Ksenia said quietly, her voice a cold sharp knife.
“I did not lie! I took a little from our rations and put it away; there is almost enough now,” she picked up the jar and put it down again, pushing the silent witness to her crime away from herself, toward her mother. “In another week, everything would be all right. Nina Mihailovna would have her rice, and you would have no reason to be angry. But now everything is ruined, and I am the stupidest girl in the world, and everyone will know it.” She buried her face in the sodden towel, bony shoulders shaking with fresh sobs.
“Galya, dochenka.” Ilya moved toward the child, but this time Ksenia stopped him, a firm hand restraining his arm.
“You did not tell the truth. That is the same as lying. No different. If you go to confession and do not tell the priest all your transgressions, does that mean you did not commit them? No, the sin is on your head and in your heart until you make it right.” She pointed an unforgiving finger at her daughter.
Then her face softened, just a bit; the clench of her jaw relaxed a little. She lowered her hand and leaned forward, her voice a whisper. “We live in a sea of falsehoods, child. This godless regime steals from the people and lies with every breath. How can we survive as a family if we do not tell each other the truth?”
“Mama, I am so sorry. It was my mistake, but I thought I could fix everything, and no one would have to know. You were so sick!” Galina stopped talking, remembering her mother’s face, drained and drawn, her tall thin frame racked by deep fits of bronchial coughing. Please, please don’t die, Galina had begged, repeating the silent mantra while she cooked the soup. Only a carrot and some wild parsley, but thickened with the extra rice, it had a comforting texture that reminded her of better times. She had inhaled the starchy aroma with almost sensual pleasure, ladled the soup into Ksenia’s bowl like a healing potion, taking care not to spill a drop, watching her mother eat, then lean back on her pillow and sleep.
And it had worked, hadn’t it? Within two days, Ksenia was up, the fever gone, the rumbling cough a lingering annoyance, the household back in her strong hands.
They were interrupted by Maksim bursting into the kitchen from the front room, flushed and breathless. “I have passed the entrance examination, Mama,” he announced, ignoring his sister and father. “I start university in September.” He looked around, catching the tension in the room. “What has happened?”
Ksenia rose. “Nothing, son, we were just talking. Galina, take this rice to Nina Mihailovna right now. Tell her she will have the rest next week. Ilya, where is your shirt?” She turned to Maksim. “Tell me everything.”
Ilya walked his daughter through the front room to the apartment door. “Hurry back,” he winked. “I have an itchy spot between my shoulder blades.”
7
“MY BROTHER IS the most boring person alive,” Galina said. “He keeps his nose in a book and his head in the clouds.”
She loved her brother. Of course she did. Even if Maksim, four years her senior, was a stranger to her. From a young age he had grand plans for his own future: he would be a doctor. He would wear a white coat, heal the sick, make a contribution to the science of medicine, advance the knowledge of disease. People would treat him with respect.
If he had political opinions, he kept them to himself; his only focus was on how to take advantage of the new opportunities the Soviet educational system offered young people. You no longer had to be well born or a landowner to realize your potential. It helped to have connections to powerful people, but if you had ability and managed to steer the right course through the bureaucratic maze of tests and forms, you received your reward—an education second to none in Europe, based on recognition of your gifts.
In spite of his gifts, or maybe because of them, Galina could not recall a single interesting conversation with him. He found her so intellectually inferior that they simply dismissed each other, occupying the same cramped space but living utterly separate lives.
The living space had been a point of conflict between them for years. Try as she might to obey his demand for privacy, his side of the room drew her like a magnet. The seashells in his collection looked no different from any she had picked up and discarded on the beach. Why had he chosen these? He kept insects in another box, with little cardboard dividers between them, and labels inked in a precise hand, as if anyone didn’t know this was a cicada, this a moth or a bee.
No matter how careful she was to put things back where they belonged, Maksim always knew when she had trespassed on his side of the room, as if her eyes had left tracks along the shelves.
Still, things remained cordial between them, until the day she dropped the mouse skeleton. She had only wanted to see it better, reaching in among the skulls ranged along the back edge of his desk. Weasel, squirrel, rabbit, vole, sheep—each carefully labeled, frightening with their vacant eye sockets and bared teeth. The mouse was on a little paper tray, partially obscured by the tail of a faded translucent snakeskin.
She had picked it up, daring to touch, ever so carefully, the minuscule head, imagining the weightless spine covered with sleek gray fur, the rib cage concealing a tiny beating heart.
“Galya,” her mother had called from the kitchen, “come help me with this.” Galina had turned, startled and guilty; the mouse slipped from her hand, landing on the floor with no more than a whisper of impact.
“What have I done?” she wailed softly, scooping the mangled remains up into their tray, her fingers coated with bone dust. “What have I done?”
Maksim had been beside himself, of course, harboring a cold fury that degenerated into contempt only after many weeks had passed. At first, she understood, accepting the burden of fault her carelessness had caused. As time wore on, though, and no detente seemed possible, she lost her patience.
“I’m your sister,” she reminded him. “The only one you have. There might not be much food, but there are still plenty of mice.”
“That’s true,” he conceded. “Though one of you is more than enough. Just stay out of my things, will you, while I’m away at school.”
*
When Maksim entered university, and Galina was nearly fifteen, he persuaded his parents of his need for a private room. “I need more than a curtain separating my cot from hers. When I’m at home, I need a place to study,” he maintained, “and a place to keep my books away from prying eyes. Mama, forgive me for showing you such things, but do you want Galya exposed to this? Look.” He opened a medical textbook and flipped through the pages, slowly enough to allow Ksenia to glimpse the graphic anatomical cutaways and diseased body parts rendered more gruesome by stark unretouched photography.
Together, mother and son added a small room to their apartment, stealing a corner of the already tiny inner courtyard, scrounging for scrap building materials through the neighboring streets.
Ilya could not help with the work. His one attempt at framing the outside wall made him unable to complete a jewelry order by the promised delivery date. In the days it took for his hand tremors to subside, the general’s daughter’s birthday passed, and Ilya was forced to accept reduced payment for the lovely brooch carved meticulously with the girl’s name.
“It looks like the rest o
f you must do the hammering if I’m to continue working.” He smiled ruefully at his assembled family, stirring the weak tea in his glass as if there were sugar in it.
“You’ve already done enough, Father,” Maksim replied. “I never expected my new room would have a window.”
“Yes, imagine that! A window!” Galina chimed in, ignoring the look of pained annoyance that crossed her brother’s face when she began to speak. She scooped a teaspoonful of mulberry jam onto stale bread, then scraped most of it off before Ksenia could voice the disapproval evident on her face. Galina tapped the excess jam back into the jar but could not resist licking the spoon.
By the end of the week, the room was done. Ilya, with his aesthetic sense, advised them on the best way to fit the disparate pieces into firm, solid-looking walls. He took his toolbox downtown and set up his traveling workbench near a building repair project. In two days, he looped wire into YALTA 1940, and enough ANNA, ELISAVETA, and MARIA pins for the workmen to trade for a small bucket of fresh plaster. They could have used two, but with Ksenia’s careful hand it covered the three inside walls enough to seal any spaces between planks and give the room a fresh, cheerful appearance.
“Good thing we live in a mild climate,” she said, nailing a decorative rug over the fourth wall to conceal the rough exterior surface of the main house. “With the roof in one piece, you and your books will be safe and dry here. And for most of the winter months, you will be in Kharkov, at university.”
“Is there snow in Kharkov?” Galina asked. She had come in through the new outside door, carrying her brother’s desk chair. When no one bothered to reply, she left the room, coming back with a stack of notebooks.
“Is there snow in Kharkov? More than the few flakes we see here—blink and it has melted away?” She poked Maksim in the back with the corners of the books in her arms.
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