“Do not mock your fate, son,” she replied, stern and unyielding. “Do you think you are the only one who suffers?” she shamed him. “You owe a debt, because you have been spared. A debt to the many who have died, who are dying even now.”
“A debt? What debt?”
“To live a productive life. To do what you can in the time you have. That is your obligation.” He made no answer, his gaze fixed on a point between his feet, so she pushed on. “Let’s see what comfort or relief medicine has to offer. Then we can talk about your future.”
“These words: comfort, relief, future—they mean nothing to me. But I will see the doctor, Mama, because you want it so. I want to put these questions to rest for you.”
“Horosho,” she said. “Good. Ilya? Fetch the doctor. I must finish this pie.”
*
Toward evening, Ilya returned with a middle-aged woman. She was solid, gray-haired, businesslike. “Maria Kirilovna.” She offered Ksenia a firm handshake, her own hand small and square. “I have been on staff at the sanatorium for the last twenty-two years. Many of my colleagues have been mobilized to treat the wounded at the front. The army determined that I could be spared to care for people here,” she explained.
“This way, Doctor.” Ksenia gestured toward the bedroom she shared with her husband. “My son sleeps here”—she indicated the curtained corner of the front room—“but our room will be more private for your examination.” Maria Kirilovna nodded, followed Maksim into the room, and shut the door.
Ilya followed Ksenia into the kitchen. “Did you notice her limp?” he whispered. “That may be why she was passed over for service. That, and her age.”
“As long as she knows doctoring.” Ksenia removed the towel from the rising meat pie, pricked the smooth doughy surface at regular intervals with a fork, and slid the pan into the oven.
She had just removed the pie and set it on the table to cool, an hour or so later, when Maksim and the doctor emerged from the bedroom, just as Filip and Galina came through the front door. Ilya put down the book he was reading. Everyone stood a moment in silence, inhaling the incomparable aroma of baking, an aroma that filled the whole apartment with an essence so rich it seemed capable, almost, of satisfying the very hunger it provoked.
Several people sighed; someone grunted appreciatively. Maria Kirilovna spoke. “Maksim is an exceptionally fortunate young man. Any delay or carelessness in treating his wound would surely have been fatal. He would have died of infection or loss of blood, or both. But he did not.” She sat down in the chair Ksenia offered, opposite Ilya. The pie steamed enticingly between them, Ksenia with a bread knife at the ready to cut into its burnished crust. The others stood around the kitchen, listening.
“The arm was amputated just above the elbow, as you know. It is possible, in my opinion, to have it fitted with a prosthesis, so that, with training, Maksim could regain some limited use of it. Unfortunately, unless you are members of the Politburo, that operation will have to wait; all medical resources are being focused on the war effort at present. Could I have some water, please?”
“Ach, forgive me. Galina, make some tea,” Ksenia exclaimed. She put down the knife and reached for the teakettle.
“No, no. Water will do. Thank you. Now, the limp. My own condition is congenital; I was born with one shorter leg. But that is not the case here, correct? Your son did not limp before he left home. My examination revealed no wound or other trauma to the legs, hips, or back. I must conclude, then, that there is no physical obstacle preventing a natural walk. There is, however, the possibility of psychological shock, which can manifest itself in unpredictable ways. I am not expert in this area, but that is my suspicion.”
Ksenia picked up the bread knife. Starting at the center of the pie and making the lightest tentative cuts, she marked off equal-sized portions along the edges of its rectangular surface at intervals so precise they would have stood up to mathematical measurement and been found accurate. She frowned. “What does this mean? That he is limping for no reason? He tells me there is pain.”
“There is a reason, but it is not physical. There is a wound, of the mind and spirit. Until this wound is healed, I believe Maksim will continue to limp. The pain is caused by the unbalanced use of leg and back muscles—in other words, by the limp itself. That, too, will cease when the underlying cause is no longer present.”
“So what can we do?” Ilya asked, his hands folded in front of him, fingers interlaced.
“I am not expert in this area,” the doctor repeated, “but I believe . . .” She stopped speaking. Ksenia had begun to slice the pie, cutting deeply at each mark, through the firm upper crust, the aromatic layer of meat, onions, and potatoes, and the thinner bottom crust, her knife scraping along the metal pan. Everyone watched, entranced, completely absorbed in her actions. She turned the pan around, sliced in the other direction, then raised her head, signaling Galina with her eyes. Galina handed her a plate.
Maria Kirilovna cleared her throat. “I believe,” she went on, “that the answer may lie in some meaningful activity. Maksim has suffered a grievous wound, it is true. But his heart is strong, and his intelligence is evident.” Again she stopped, and everyone watched Ksenia lift each perfectly formed square onto the plate, stacking them in a pyramid four layers high. The pie seemed to breathe on the chipped platter, the air above it alive with vapor, heat from the savory filling radiating into the room.
“Please, eat,” Ksenia invited, moving the plate closer to Maria Kirilovna. The doctor took a piece. Everyone followed suit. Ksenia watched them eat, her face aglow with intense satisfaction. After a moment, she also took a piece, crossed herself, and ate. It is like a sacrament, this food, she thought. How little we need.
Filip, standing near the door to the courtyard, wanted desperately to take a second piece, but did not dare. “What do you recommend, then, Doctor?” he said, trying to distract his attention from the pie and conclude the discussion. “What can he do?”
“Perhaps he can teach, or lead a youth group, give health and first aid instruction with someone else demonstrating the techniques. He has enough knowledge and experience to be useful at the sanatorium in some capacity. Or he could learn to use a typewriter and write for a journal or a newspaper.”
“He could play chess,” Filip suggested. “That only takes one hand.” Maksim glared at him. Filip shrugged, watching with profound regret as Ksenia arranged the remaining pie pieces on a clean kitchen towel, folding the edges in to make a neat package.
“Thank you, Doctor,” she said. “We can give you only a little money for your visit, and for your advice. But please also take this pie.”
Maria Kirilovna stood up. “I will accept whatever you can manage. Your pie is delicious and I thank you for sharing it with me. But I live alone, and cannot take this bounty away from your family. Maksim, you are a fine young man. I wish you the best possible recovery, but you must take your life into your own hands.” Realizing what she had said, she colored deeply and went quickly through the apartment and out into the night.
5
IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING the doctor’s visit, Maksim began to die. There was no sign of illness, no inexplicable cough, no sudden weakness or fever, just a profound crushing despair.
“Only a cup of tea, Mama,” he said quietly, pushing away the food she had fortified with every nutritious ingredient she could find. “Thank you,” he added with an anemic smile.
“Listen, we’re doing a comedy tonight. Come with us,” Galina encouraged. “Not much of a play, but you can see how Filip made a set out of practically nothing.”
“I had help,” Filip protested. “And people let us borrow things. Luyba’s lamp steals the show, with its decadent fringed shade.”
Maksim sighed. “No. Theater does not interest me. It never did, with or without lamps.” He left the table, going out to the inner yard to smoke.
No one spoke. They finished the meal quickly; Galina jumped up from her seat. “I will wa
sh the dishes, Mama, when I return.”
She and Filip walked, stepping around freshly formed puddles with inordinate concentration, as if navigating a minefield. Finally, Galina said, “What will happen to my brother? He is so unhappy.”
Filip said nothing, steering them clear of two German soldiers preoccupied with lighting their cigarettes in the evening breeze. But Galina wanted an answer. “Filip. How can we help him?”
“How do I know?” He spread his hands, palms up, and shrugged his shoulders. “He does nothing all day, sleeps and smokes, will not even try to help your mother in any way. Just smokes and stares into space.”
“Do you talk to him? I know how you feel about idle conversation, but can you not talk as one man to another?”
“There is no common ground. What do I know of his experience? And he doesn’t care about my life or interests.”
“Common ground? Common ground?” Galina’s voice held a rising note of sarcasm. “How much more common ground do we need? Are we not all in this, this . . . dreadful time together? Together,” she repeated.
Filip had no answer. He had heard Ksenia say more than once how important it was for a family to stay together, mind its own business. Keep your head down and your mouth shut. All around them, people were disappearing, taken off the streets by patrolling troops, vanishing without a word. Their own little household was as if charmed, held together by the force of his mother-in-law’s indomitable will. Unless there’s something we don’t know about Ilya’s frequent absences, and all those Germans who come to the door to pick up their purchases. He shook his head, but the thought had struck him unawares and would not be banished.
Outside the theater entrance, Galina stopped and laid a hand on his arm. “Please. Please try.”
A few days later, on a warm, clear afternoon when everyone was out of the house—Ilya to make and sell his crafts in the park, Galina to the toy shop, Ksenia to stand in line for whatever was available—Filip set his chess set up on a little folding table in the courtyard. At his elbow he had a book and a few sheets of paper he had cut and folded into a pocket-sized notebook. He studied the board intently, shifting the occasional piece, taking a pencil from behind his ear to record the move.
He was so absorbed in the game he did not notice his brother-in-law standing in the kitchen doorway until Maksim limped over to the bench by the wall and lit a cigarette. “Oh, hello,” he said, glancing up. “I didn’t know you were up.”
“Mother does not like me to smoke in the house,” Maksim replied, as if to justify his presence in the yard. He blew a fine plume of smoke, watching it dissipate in the sunlit air.
“But you do it anyway,” Filip observed. “When it suits you. You have another? Mine are inside.”
Maksim tucked the cigarette into the corner of his mouth, thumbed his case open, and passed it to Filip. The case was Ilya’s work, two halves of scrap plastic joined with a wire hinge and latched with a diminutive hook. “Mother is a saint. We should not provoke her.”
Filip said nothing. Why bother? he thought. His mother-in-law was frugal to a fault, and no one in the house went too hungry for long, yet he suspected there was always a little more, something extra held in reserve for the beloved invalid son and the husband returning from his travels. Well, I have a saintly mother, too, he thought, remembering the extra sugar cubes, the occasional tin of caviar Zoya saved for him—treats he devoured avidly, alone, with no shred of guilt.
They smoked in a silence if not exactly companionable, at least tolerant of the other’s presence, each understanding the other’s pleasure in the habit. “There’s one advantage of your father’s doing business with the Germans,” Filip observed, stubbing out his cigarette and tossing the butt into a clay flowerpot kept for that purpose. “We never lack for smokes.”
“Pravda. True enough.” Maksim did the same.
“I mean, these European brands are far superior to our homegrown ones, right? Especially that stuff the peasants smoke. Mahorka. Have you tried it?” Filip warmed to his subject. He felt compelled to keep talking, egged on by his brother-in-law’s monosyllabic reticence.
“I have. It is vile.”
“When? With the army?”
“With the Partisans.”
“Oh.” It was the end of conversation. Not that Filip wasn’t curious, but he feared belying his neutrality by knowing too much.
And Maksim would not talk about it. How to describe people whose patriotism suffered no compromise, who would fight to the death against self-serving invaders masquerading as liberators? People who were determined to protect the only country they had, however flawed and unjust? He could not talk about their fierce resolve, the acts of suicidal sabotage, the missions propelled by hard, hot fury. He could not. Not least because he knew that even if he had been whole, with two arms, and capable of rapid movement, he lacked the cold blind courage to do the necessary acts of violence. Mining roads, blowing up trains, burning villages—these actions caused people to die. He could not be a part of that; his mission was to save life, to heal.
I am a doctor, he thought, or nearly. I cannot be an instrument of death. So he had traded them his boots and socks, taking moldy bread, cold salted fish, and a handful of foul tobacco mixed with sawdust in exchange. How to describe the feeling of desolation and, yes, fear, when the Partisans moved off during the night, so quietly he never heard a twig snap, leaving him alone in a forest where even the predawn singing of birds had an ominous coded quality. They could have, should have, killed him, to guard against betrayal of their names and whereabouts. He would never know why they had not. He had picked up his pitiful bundle and made his way home, relying on compassionate acts of strangers for his survival.
“Hey, friend,” Filip tapped him on the shoulder. Maksim recoiled as if stung. “Why so jumpy? You know chess, yes? Could you move some pieces? You don’t have to play seriously if you don’t want to. It’s so damn hard to work out these moves alone.”
“I know how to move the pieces. But no one calls me friend.” He half-turned on the bench, studied the board a moment, and advanced a black pawn.
Filip consulted his book, jotted something in his notebook. After some deliberation, he moved his knight into position, preparing to threaten the black queen in the next move. Maksim advanced another pawn and lost the queen.
They went on like this for another quarter hour, Maksim playing a quick, desultory game, Filip agonizing over every decision, chin in hand, pencil at the ready. “Ah, I understand!” he muttered. “It’s all about the bishop, you see?”
Maksim stood, jarring the board, sending black and white pieces into an irretrievable jumble. “This is a waste of time,” he announced, and retreated into the house.
“And what you do is not?” Filip flared up, unable to stop the words. I tried, Galya, he thought. I tried. Who does he think he is?
Soon after the chess incident, Maksim took to his bed, refusing nearly all food. Ksenia, too, ate less and less, as if in solidarity with her son’s suffering. She moved silently about the house, wiping at invisible dust, straightening pristine coverlets, obsessively polishing her spotless stovetop. Some days, she sat at his bedside while he slept, interlacing the fingers of her large, restless hands, studying the ethereal beauty of his gaunt features, taking some small comfort in the regularity of his breathing.
She had not watched him sleep since he was a very small boy, a toddler in short pants. They had lived in the country then, in a little house of their own, with a kitchen garden, a few chickens and a goat in back, a fig tree at the front gate. He had slept with innocent abandon after a day of playing outside, his tousled hair smelling of sweat and earth and sunshine. As a young mother, she had inhaled this sweet, slightly rancid aroma with wonder and delight, marveling at the way this child’s arrival had changed her status in the world. When the revolution finally reached them and everything changed, she and Ilya had their hands full just staying together and alive in a country they no longer recognized. N
o time then to indulge in the luxury of watching a child sleep.
She took the time now, whenever she could, her thoughts moving like summer wind over ripe grain, this way and that, stirring up memories. Once when he awoke she pleaded, “Tell me. I have lived through revolution, witnessed the execution of my father. When you were small, we suffered through the years of civil war and the horror of famine. I know these things, in my own mind and body; I will not forget them. But we survived all that; we are alive. We must have hope.” She paused, placing her hand over his brittle fingers. “Share your sorrow with me. Your silence is breaking my heart.”
“Tell you?” Maksim took his hand away, raising himself on his elbow. “Mama, what should I tell you? Shall I describe the mayhem of life at the front, the chaos of conflicting orders or breakdown of communication, the paralyzing fear of making a fatal mistake? Or would you like to hear about the swift, questionable justice of field executions, to stop the wave of desertion, neither the runners nor the shooters knowing what is right or wrong?” He took a sip of water from the glass Ksenia held out for him, and fell back heavily on his pillow.
“How can I tell you what it is like to be a medic with no supplies, no blankets, no safe or sanitary place to even try to save a life? I cannot make you hear the voices in my head, grown men crying for their mothers, boys who should be dancing with their sweethearts caught in the agony of slow, relentless death.”
Ksenia closed her eyes but could not stop the tears. “We can pray,” she said. “God will—”
“God will what? Erase the memory of mud, excrement, and blood, a stench for which there is no word? It permeates your clothing, your hair, clings to your skin; you eat it with your daily kasha and moldy bread, drink it with your foul water, breathe it in what passes for sleep. Is this the God we should pray to? The one who watches and allows such beastliness?” Maksim turned his face to the wall.
Roads Page 14