The next air attack blew up the engine. We gathered our things and walked for several days, keeping to wooded areas as much as possible. Along the way we passed a few deserted burned-out villages. In one of them, the charred house timbers were still smoldering, giving off a pungent, acrid smell for miles. The roads were choked up with people, some dragging carts or herding farm animals. They told us that things were far worse up north; Moscow was under constant attack, day and night. Most of the fires had been started by our Partisans, to make the enemy’s inevitable retreat more difficult. Just like Napoleon in 1812, forced to go back the way he came, unprepared for our winter and demoralized by failure. Many seem sure the German retreat is yet to come, but as of now the Nazis are still advancing on Moscow and people are fleeing any way they can.
I met a group of nurses on their way to a field hospital and decided to travel with them. I don’t think I can resume my studies until the fighting dies down, so I might as well help care for the wounded. The nurses told me that whole factories, along with all their workers, have been evacuated to the east, so they could continue to manufacture munitions and other military necessities.
Theatrical companies, the Bolshoi Ballet, and many thousands of ordinary citizens have also been moved out of range of enemy air raids, although enough remained to continue mounting performances and showing films to determined, appreciative audiences. It sounds crazy, but I heard it first-hand from people who had experienced this phenomenon—actors in their overcoats (it is now seriously cold), performing French comedies in unheated theaters to amuse frightened, hungry Muscovites and military personnel.
Somewhere in the confusion, I lost the bundle of clothing you had so lovingly prepared for me. I can only hope that it will help save the life of some other person; the need is universal and immeasurably desperate. My documents were safe in my breast pocket, though, and I kept my dwindling food supplies with me at all times. I wore the boots, too, and have bleeding blisters to prove it, after all this unexpected hiking.
I will write again, when I have an address to receive your letters. Be strong, Mama, be strong.
Your son,
Maksim
18 November 1941
Dearest Mama,
Here is what happened. On my arrival at the field hospital, I was immediately inducted into the army. Like every conscript, I was given a few days’ rifle and grenade training and a military regulations manual to study. Since I am medical personnel, though not officially a doctor, I was not issued a weapon. Truly, I am not sure that I could use one against another human being, no matter what his national allegiance.
I cannot begin to describe the horror of this place, the young men who come here with maimed and broken bodies, the innocence I still see in their dying eyes. There is no real medicine practiced here; we have a drastic shortage of medication and supplies. We patch up the ones we can and send them back into the inferno. And they go, for the most part, resigned to their fate in the service of their homeland. We have heard stories of desertion, both individuals and entire units, frustrated by poor communication, conflicting orders, and debilitating lack of food and supplies. They say many thousands have been taken prisoner, their future now uncertain. Even if liberated, their actions will remain suspect, tainted by perceived lack of courage and contact with the enemy.
Winter is here in full force, with no thaw expected until March. The patient barracks are mostly unheated. The sick huddle under blankets and greatcoats, their heads and feet wrapped in rags. Clothing from fatalities is immediately snatched up by survivors, with savage fights breaking out over a fur cap or decent pair of felt boots.
Do not send packages; they will not arrive. All I ask for is a letter from you, to warm my heart. You can write care of my regiment. I hope to receive your letter eventually, even if the hospital is moved. I long for news of home and my dear family.
In my dreams, I sit with you in our clean, orderly kitchen, drinking tea, waiting for Father’s return from his travels. Galya is there, too, singing her sentimental songs, interrupting our conversation in her usual mindless manner. I see now that it is only a sign of her inexperience. She knows nothing of life, nothing at all.
I send you all my love.
Your son,
Maksim
5
ZINAIDA GRIGORYEVNA KNEW how fortunate she was. If it were not for her father’s status as a beribboned hero of the revolution, there would have been no toy shop to occupy the time of her now certain spinsterhood. She had long since stopped asking exactly what his function was; she only knew that he traveled freely and extensively throughout the Soviet Union and, occasionally, abroad. Something to do with industry, visiting factories, submitting reports, attending conferences in Kostroma, Stalingrad, Vladivostok.
He had served with enough distinction to earn a spacious Moscow apartment and the privilege to call on an Italian tailor from time to time. If his luggage held two or three carefully wrapped porcelain dolls or a fairy-tale marionette (for the grandchildren he would never have), no customs clerk would presume to question their presence, any more than they would cast more than a passing glance at his doeskin gloves or hand-sewn shoes.
Zinaida Grigoryevna was not politically inclined; she did not delve into questions of economic models or political ideologies. Her personal needs were modest, and running the shop had never been about money. She simply loved toys.
And she loved Yalta. Her father’s Party status and her mother’s poor health had created the opportunity for her to visit the renowned resort several times while growing up. When her mother’s advanced condition had reached a stage beyond the help of salt air, healing mineral baths, and a climate as close to paradise as one could find in the northern hemisphere, the two of them stayed on, away from the capital’s dark bone-chilling winters. Her father visited them when he could, dividing his time between Moscow, his bureaucratic obligations, and his sad little family.
When Zinaida Grigoryevna was twenty-six her mother died. A large, ungainly, plain young woman with close-set eyes, a small mouth, and big feet, she claimed to have no interest in marriage at all, especially since no likely candidates seemed to be forthcoming. She convinced her doting father to help her turn a lifelong passion for playthings into a livelihood, securing a choice spot on the broad avenue facing the picturesque seawall.
It turned out to be a wise decision. The new nation struggled to define itself, putting the turmoil of the revolution and civil war behind, looking ahead to an uncertain future marked by agrarian mismanagement and political infighting. In the famine years of the 1930s, life was hard, bread was scarce, meat almost nonexistent. Toys were, and always had been, universal—harmless and, in their own way, necessary. Enjoying the protection of a prominent Party member had its advantages. It was good for business when, inevitably, some comrades proved to be more equal than others.
Before long, Stalin’s isolationist policies made access to imports all but impossible, even for Party members. Official rhetoric worked hard to convince the people that desire for foreign goods was not only decadent but also dangerously unpatriotic. If domestic windup toys or music boxes did not perform as well as their Swiss or Austrian counterparts, blame fell on the perpetual shortage of quality materials and the collective failure to meet production standards. Roll up your sleeves, work harder, show the capitalist enemy what Soviet society can do, went the official line.
When World War II started, factories adapted. Die-cast cars became shell casings; real tanks took precedence over toy models. Undeterred, Zinaida Grigoryevna turned her attention to local artisans.
The toy shop was small, only a single room in one of the still-elegant prerevolutionary two-story houses that lined the main boulevard in Yalta’s business district. Convenient to all the resort attractions—the health spas, the beach, the guest cottages, and the once grand hotels—it continued, even in wartime, to attract a modestly reliable level of trade. The tourists were gone, naturally, but some people still had a little
money, no matter how bad things were, and a few seemed to have quite a bit.
Unlike food and clothing, toys were not rationed. The Red Army had been good for business for a while. Now they were in retreat, replaced by homesick German occupation troops with time on their hands and money in their pockets.
“These figurines are well made,” Zinaida Grigoryevna told Ilya, fingering his menagerie of miniature carved bears, squirrels, rabbits, and foxes. “But the rag dolls, no. Tell your wife to sell them in the bazaar.”
Ilya gathered up the unwanted dolls, saying nothing about his young daughter’s, not his wife’s, painstaking work. Who cared about her little hoard of cloth scraps, pieces too small for any other purpose except maybe patchwork, which she did not enjoy doing? The child in her still wanted to play, to lose herself in a world of her own making, singing to herself while she shirred and gathered a bright bit of cloth into a traditional sarafan, adding a wide contrasting hem, pulling a colorful thread to use for embroidery.
Galina’s dolls looked unquestionably homemade, but her work was neat, the little hand-stitched faces sweet in their simplicity. “I could never do this,” Ksenia said, turning her daughter’s handiwork this way and that in her broad hands. “I was always clumsy with a needle. I’d rather chop wood.” She took the dolls to the market, along with her wild berry jam, to sell or trade. And Galina, through her father’s introduction, went to work at the toy shop.
The figurines sold well. People liked their uniqueness, the carefully carved details, the way Ilya’s skilled hand made a scrap of wood look like fur or feathers, adding a realistic eye, an inscrutable expression, with a touch of his knife.
“Can you make toys that move?” Zinaida Grigoryevna asked him, paying now in advance for another delivery of forest creatures. “You know, bears sawing wood, chickens pecking? Peasant toys. The Germans like to send them home to their families.”
* * *
The first time Franz came into the toy shop, Galina was dusting the nearly immaculate shelves, her back to the door. She was half-singing a new song she had heard in the park, filling in the spaces between words with uncertain humming. My heart, it is not peace you want . . . hmm hmm my heart . . .
“Spasibo, siertze,” he prompted, causing her to spin around in surprise, the dust cloth clutched to her chest. One of Ilya’s carved squirrels fell to the floor behind her.
“Ai,” she said, “it’s broken. Zinaida Grigoryevna will be angry.”
“May I see it?” Franz took the pieces from her hand and examined the break, tentatively fitting the tail back onto the plump body. “It is nothing. A little glue only is needed. I will buy it, Fräulein.”
“But—”
“My grandfather says squirrels are just rats with fluffy tails, because they chew everything and do much damage. I will send it to him. It will be amusing.”
After he left, the figurine pieces tucked securely in his shirt pocket, she stood a moment, recalling the touch of his fingers against her palm, and the way he nodded politely at the door, waiting until he stepped outside to put the cap back on his head. Siertze, kak horosho na svete zhit’. The lyrics rushed in from some recess of her memory.
“What nonsense,” she said aloud. How good it is to be alive, indeed. Try to remember that when in line for a half-kilo ration of worm-eaten potatoes, the skins creased like walnuts and about the same size, too.
*
He came again, always when Galina was working alone.
“The shop is too small to need two attendants at one time,” Zinaida Grigoryevna had declared, conceding that the younger woman’s charm was good for business. “I will open in the mornings; you come later and stay until closing.”
The merchandise was displayed, one of each item, in polished prewar cabinets placed against two walls and the front window. Additional stock was kept on shelves behind the counter, in a haphazard order whose logic was known only to the eccentric owner. But Galina caught on quickly, handling the simple housekeeping and occasional customer with ease.
“When this war ends . . . ,” Zinaida Grigoryevna would sigh, picking up the previous day’s receipts or bringing in a few more handmade toys. She never finished that sentence, to Galina’s growing irritation. Things will return to the way they were? People will have time to play? Children will stop pointing sticks at one another in mock battle and return to the innocent joys of spinning tops and long-haired dolls? She found it increasingly hard to imagine a world without troops in the street, shortages in the shops, fear, and the dull reality of perpetual hunger.
None of this seemed to affect Zinaida Grigoryevna, who had lately discovered the solitary pleasure of writing poetry. In her airy room above the shop, she filled page after page of her old school notebooks, gazing at the familiar view of the Caucasus Mountains sheltering the inland sea. She marveled at the play of light on the Black Sea, watching the sun, wind, and clouds arrange themselves in a stunning infinity of variations.
She composed everywhere, repeating phrases in her head while standing in line for chicken, birds so scrawny some suspected their allotments consisted of the rapidly diminishing pigeon population. She used the rough butcher paper to jot down the words before she lost them. Never stopping to consider whether the work had any value, she contemplated and wrote, day after day, leaving Galina more and more to run the shop alone.
“Will you sing again soon, Fräulein Galina?” Franz put down the bear he’d been playing with, its brightly painted teacup raised halfway to its open mouth, a diminutive samovar resting on a tree stump table. She finished wrapping another soldier’s purchase before turning to answer him.
“Friday evening. We have a new play, a comedy. I will sing before it begins.”
“Ach, I am on duty until ten o’clock. A pity.” He walked around the small room, examining the contents of the cabinets as if for the first time. “If you will permit me a very”—he paused, searching for the word—“humble suggestion.”
“About my singing?”
“Nein, nein, the singing, it is perfect. It is about the merchandise, the—how do you say it—the stock.” He studied the disorganized shelves behind the sales counter. “How do you know where things are?”
Galina reddened. “I know where things are,” she shot back. “It’s my job to know.”
“Forgive me, Fräulein. I did not mean . . .” Franz stepped back, holding both hands palm outward before his chest as if to deflect her protest. “If you had only a little tag, perhaps, with each toy on display, and a number that you could match on the shelf behind you . . . it would be a system, you see?” He spoke softly, but his voice had a firm edge, a certitude she found irritating. What next? she thought. Numbers on people, maybe, eliminating the need to carry flimsy pieces of paper that could be lost, destroyed, or forged? Is that where this kind of thinking will end?
“We are a country at war, sir. Under enemy occupation. We need food and work and peace. We do not, right now, need a system for arranging toys.” She stopped, shocked by her own foolish audacity, as if she had forgotten that this man, this suave, innocent admirer, could have her detained, arrested, and executed.
“Ach, you are angry. Forgive me. I want only to help a little. In my country, too, things are hard. People suffer, and many have died. Auf Wiedersehen,” he started to say, then caught himself. “Do svidanya.” Franz backed out of the shop, his face showing confusion and a hint of regret.
But she was not looking at him. She closed the door, drew the shade, flipped the sign to CLOSED, and turned off the light. Out in the street, she locked up, deposited the key in Zinaida Grigoryevna’s mailbox, and turned to leave.
He was still there, his back against the building, cap in hand. “May I walk with you?” he asked.
“No!” Did he not understand what kind of girls walked with enemy soldiers, especially with officers? Everyone knew them, the girls who traded the comfort of their bodies for a box of chocolates or a piece of cloth or a pair of stockings only the most dari
ng “companions” had the nerve to wear in the street.
“Please, bitte, I just want to say . . .” He looked away, as if studying the purple evening sky was the most important thing he needed to be doing at that moment.
“Well?” Galina glanced around. The few people about seemed not to notice them, hurrying to finish their errands in the gathering dusk. She heard the rudeness in her own voice, regretted it. But this was no time or place for polite conversation.
“You are a fine young woman, hardworking and talented, and so beautiful.” Franz brought his gaze back to her face and spoke faster, as if aware of her growing discomfort. “I can get papers for you and your family. Work papers. Germany needs help with farming. Here.” He took a photograph from the black leather billfold in his breast pocket. “Look. Das ist meine Mutti. My mother. She is alone now, with my grandfather. She needs some help.”
Galina started to walk away, then, her curiosity piqued, stopped to glance at the picture. A short, pretty, youthful woman looked back at her, unsmiling, her face framed with tendrils of light wavy hair. “It is a small farm,” he went on. “Near Munich. My father was an engineer before he was killed in the fighting. Now everyone with even a little land must grow some vegetables or grain to help for the war. My mother has little experience of farming, but the need for food is great in my country, too.”
Not just here. Galina decided to ignore the implication.
For the first time since their meeting at the theater, she noticed how young he was, how like a boy, far from home, holding a picture of his mother for her to see. She looked at it again, this time taking in the whitewashed cottage with lace curtains at the window and roses, yes, roses, blooming on a trellis near the open door. Something in her rankled at the bucolic cliché the scene portrayed. This was no picture of need or hardship; it had no relevance to the bleakness of her life at all. She shook her head, took a step back.
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