They started toward the door. Ilya’s breathing had evened out to a sleeper’s rhythm. When first his daughter, then his wife, kissed his forehead, he stirred but did not open his eyes. In the hall, with the door nearly closed, they heard him call out weakly, “Filip.”
“Thank you for finding my family.” Ilya’s voice was a hoarse whisper, his pale face once more painted with fever on both cheeks.
“I did nothing. It just happened,” Filip replied, ashamed at the truth of it, uneasy with the undeserved gratitude. But the old man was asleep, and did not hear him.
6
“WE PRAYED FOR HIM,” the young nun said solemnly. “But the Lord in his wisdom chose to end his suffering.”
“No.” Galina was firm. “Look, I have brought his granddaughter for him to see, if only through the window. He must see her. He must,” she insisted, ignoring Ksenia’s sharp glance. “I made a bookmark for his birthday. It was last month, but we were separated then.” She took a narrow strip of cloth from her sweater pocket, thrust it at the implacable sister. The faded scrap of shiny fabric, which Galina had embroidered with leaves and flowers using threads she had pulled from her own clothing, trembled in her hand.
“He sees us all, child.” The nun placed a cool hand on Galina’s arm. “Hold your father in your heart, and teach your daughter to know and love him.”
Galina turned away, repelled by the sanctimonious words and the woman’s air of meek superiority. What did she know? She had most likely lived out the war in hushed seclusion, protected from its daily horrors by her usefulness to all sides.
Galina spun around when Filip approached her and cupped her elbow with his hand. “Why is everyone touching me?” she demanded. “And you—were you not with him? Did you not see he needed help? After we opened our home to you—” She broke off, swiping angrily at her eyes with her free hand.
“I tried! The apothecary was closed.” His own anger rose to mirror hers. He could never admit to what had really happened, how he had abandoned his search and gone dancing. But he had paid for that with the guilt that gnawed at his remaining confidence, burdened by the knowledge of his own inadequacy.
Still, hadn’t all those unfortunate events led him here, where help was available even if it came too late? Where he had found the people Ilya loved and given them all at least a little time together, no matter how brief? No, he was not to blame for everything. “He wanted to just rest awhile, until he felt better. He did not want a doctor.”
“And you believed him! Here,” she said, thrusting Katya into his arms. “Meet your daughter.” Galina turned and followed her mother into the sparsely furnished room that served as the convent’s office.
Filip held the child gingerly, her head cradled in the crook of his elbow, as he imagined babies were to be held. When she squirmed in protest, he tightened his grip, afraid both of hurting her and of letting her fall. Somehow, he managed to raise her to a sitting position, perched on his arm, his free hand supporting her back. He held her away and looked at her.
Katya was thinner than he thought a baby should be, but not emaciated. Her perfectly round head was covered with a dark corona of impossibly fine hair that slipped between his fingers like dandelion fluff. She studied him, her large brown eyes—his mother’s eyes, he saw—reflected an unnerving calm, shining with life.
Talking with Galina the day before, he had learned something of their ordeal since the forced separation seven months ago. Something, but not much. Too much had happened in that short time to tell in a single emotional afternoon; it would take years to recount the stories of camp life, of the Danube crossing, of the weeks of tramping, which, though not unlike his own, held additional dangers when the refugees were women.
Filip and Katya regarded each other. For a moment, it looked as if she might cry but decided not to, the quivering of her plump lower lip subsiding into a cryptic bemused expression. “Shto?” he finally said. “What do you want from me?” He moved his arm in closer to his body, uncomfortable with the child’s steady stare. She let out a shuddering sigh and laid her head against his shoulder.
What, indeed? Until this meeting, his child had been an abstraction, linked to him, but only as an idea, a principle. Now here she was, breathing peaceably in his arms; he could feel the warmth of her head pulsing against his neck.
“Katya.” He tried out the name, aware, all at once, of the life in his hands, the concrete thread connecting him now to Galina in a whole new way. And to her family, to Ksenia, the new grandmother, and to Maksim and Ilya, who would never know this child, but whose legacy she embodied simply by being born.
She was not an idea. She was a person. A person who would soon outgrow the little hand-knit sweater that even now looked short on her thin arms. She would need food and a safe place to sleep and protection from all the dangers of the universe. Books, he thought. Where will I get books to teach her about the wonders of the world when I don’t even have a place to live?
He thought again about the previous evening, Ksenia having gone to get Katya from Galina’s friend Marfa, leaving Galina to ask—no, to beg—her landlady for permission to let him stay the night in their already cramped basement room.
“He is my husband, my baby’s father,” she had insisted, her eyes filled with frustrated tears.
“Today this one is the father. Tomorrow it will be another one. You girls have no pride. Bad enough we put up with the crying and your constant coming and going until late at night.” Before either of them could protest, they were facing a firmly closed door.
“She cries very little, our Katya,” Galina had said, shaking her head and stepping with him into the street. She told him that she cleaned guest rooms in the mornings; Ksenia worked afternoons and well into the evening hours in the tavern kitchen. “We arranged it so that one of us is always here. But sometimes Marfa, who is Katya’s godmother, helps us out, too.”
The burial took place on the third day. Ilya, washed and dressed in his freshly laundered clothes, lay in a plain coffin of new pine. The box, still redolent of aromatic resin, balanced on two chairs in the center of the church. People approached the casket to pay their respects to this man, a stranger yet one of them, a fellow traveler, a brother they had never known. They studied his pale face, the waxy skin now nearly colorless, as if at any moment it could melt away and reveal the bones underneath.
When the family came in, the small crowd parted to let them pass. They were dressed like everyone else, in the same travel-worn clothing as the day before, but were somehow different, marked by a dignity born of grief.
Filip recalled how that dignity had cracked two days ago, outside the infirmary. The women had made arrangements for the removal of the body, having first secured permission to wash and dress Ilya before moving him to the church. Payment, such as it was, had been settled. Through it all, they had maintained a detached reserve; he had been relieved at their businesslike demeanor, but suspected the emotional storm was yet to come.
And come it did. Once outside the convent gates, mother and daughter had collapsed into each other’s arms. Wailing and keening, they had stumbled along the road like a pair of drunks, giving in to a sorrow beyond words. The sounds they had made were unearthly, like the howling of wolves or the cries of shrouded night birds, morbid, timeless, and raw. Filip had stood apart, still holding his now sleeping child, speechless at the wrenching evidence of their dark suffering. He had felt like an intruder, a reluctant witness to something so private that it had left him shaken, his own mind filled with something like shame.
Now Ksenia appeared composed. She looked stately in her long black coat, her hair concealed under a dark-blue kerchief. Galina came in dry-eyed, but succumbed to silent weeping at the sight of her father. She handed little Katya to the ever-present Marfa and leaned heavily on Filip’s arm.
The service passed over him in a blur of monotonous prayers and repetitive incantations, the little church closing in on him in a haze of candle glow and incense.
Filip’s mind wandered to contemplation. Why have funeral rites? Was it really imperative to gather like this, even among strangers, to speed the soul along to its mysterious destination? He saw again the dead piled near the railroad tracks, nameless and unmourned. Savko on the cement factory floor, his mouth filled with stone dust, his body consigned to cold-blooded incineration in the factory furnace. Borya, his remains tossed, no doubt, into a mass unmarked grave.
What was a soul? Was it more than the life force, that light in the eyes extinguished at the moment of death? Did a bear, a shrew, an ant have a soul, or was it coupled with a higher awareness, an ability to show mercy and compassion? He had sampled the works of philosophers, but wasn’t schooled enough to puzzle out these ponderous questions. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and, to his own embarrassment, yawned.
Father Stefan’s sonorous basso cut through Filip’s fruitless ruminations. In a voice both louder and brighter than before, the deacon intoned the words vechnyi pokoi, eternal peace, for the departed. Filip closed his eyes and heard the congregation join in the singing of the final words, in a rising minor motif of such mournful beauty that even he felt the pricking of tears behind his eyelids. Beside him, Galina’s clear voice rose above the others, then broke down, the last “Vechnaya Pamyat’ ” no more than a hoarse whisper between her barely stifled sobs. Eternal Memory.
Two men approached to secure the coffin lid. Ksenia held them back; with a swift, smooth gesture, she removed her wedding ring and slipped it onto her husband’s finger, the two slim bands resting against each other on his shapely hand. Someone gasped. “Mama . . .,” Galina whispered, but Ksenia silenced her, her steely face unreadable. Ksenia ignored all questioning glances and nodded to the men, who hammered nails into the soft wood with merciless finality.
Ilya was buried in the small but growing graveyard behind the church. Each person accepted a spoonful of Ksenia’s kutya, recognizing the traditional funeral dish of bulgur wheat sweetened with raisins and honey, and went on his or her way, leaving the family group huddled at the grave, while the sound of clodded earth hitting the casket echoed coldly in the late summer air.
7
IT WAS MARFA who resolved their housing dilemma.
“Why not take my room, Filip Vadimovich?” she suggested politely. “I think the owners would not mind. And I could stay with Ksenia Simyonovna, if she will have me.” Her gaze fluttered over the assembled group, like a bee among blossoms, flitting from one to another but lighting on none.
Filip found her strange, her presence ghostly; he did not yet know her story. She looked even more angular and plain next to Galina’s beauty. Her small, dark, close-set eyes seemed to absorb the light rather than reflect it; there was no life in them. But the women were kind to her, and her attachment to Katya seemed genuine, so he said nothing about her constant presence. Soon, when there was time to talk, he might learn the reasons.
The solution pleased everyone, not least the two landladies—one who would be rid of the child’s crying, and the other who could offer the little family an adjoining alcove in addition to their attic room, at double the rent.
“You will need new papers, too, whether you look for work here or decide to move on.” Ksenia stood in the windowless alcove, her head bent sideways to keep from hitting the slanted ceiling. Filip and Galina sat at either end of a small table, sipping tea they had been permitted to brew in the kitchen.
“We are all Yugoslav now,” Galina explained, setting Katya on her lap. “Comrade Stalin wants us back, but the Americans don’t ask for much proof of citizenship. Learn a few words of Serbian, tell them your things were destroyed in Dresden, and you will have your stateless passport. That’s what we did.” She dipped a crust of bread into her cup and fed it to the child.
“I know.” Filip nodded. He was a collector; he had kept the worthless claim stub from the Dresden train station. Now this piece of personal memorabilia could help verify his story. He and Ilya had burned their Soviet passports in the woods after escaping the American DP camp, leaving nothing behind to identify them as Russian citizens, but they had left without their false papers. Time to make myself a new history. Why not?
It was even easier than the first time. The young GI at the American processing center for displaced persons barely glanced at him, his head bent low over the single-page application form. Filip had practiced several useful Serbian phrases, but need not have worried; the soldier was no linguist. He conducted the interview in English larded with bits of bad German. Clearly, this boy knew nothing of Slavic languages, and his superiors seemed to have little interest in cooperating with Stalin’s repatriation orders.
At the line for occupation, he had his answer ready. “Electrician,” he said, with barely a tremor at the lie. The soldier wrote it down. Within a week Filip had a temporary work permit to go with his new passport.
What he needed now was the work.
It was harder to come by than he had expected. Even with the wandering and hiding days behind them, refugees performed only the most menial jobs. Filip soon realized that his lack of reliable electrical knowledge would not be put to the test; those in a position to hire skilled workers gave overwhelming preference to citizens of their own country. What could he do? He couldn’t continue to depend on his wife and mother-in-law for support.
But even without a useful trade he felt at home, here in Germany, on Regensburg’s medieval streets. Home, he now understood, was the space you created around yourself, filled with people who wished you well. A sheltering place from which came strength, confidence, endurance. Galina, returning from her morning’s cleaning work, would pick up Katya. Marfa insisted on looking after the child, letting Ksenia rest, while Filip looked for work. It was a comfortable routine, practical and predictable, serving everyone’s needs without placing an undue burden on any one person.
Sometimes they ate a meal of leftovers from the tavern, reheated on the tiny wood stove in their room. More often they walked to the edge of town, their daughter bouncing happily in her cast-off baby carriage with the bent wheels, to the cafeteria where Ksenia now worked, where the food was hot, simple, cheap, and good. No more scavenged scraps or frostbitten vegetables. No begging or bartering. They put their coins down like everyone else and received soup, bread, tea.
More than just a dining hall, the restaurant was at the heart of Regensburg’s refugee community; part social club, part meeting hall, it had become a vital hub in the rapidly expanding communication network that helped people find work, housing, and news of loved ones. It was owned by a prerevolutionary Russian émigré couple in their sixties, with German citizenship, who had operated their modest establishment since well before the war, serving traditional Russian dishes to nostalgic expatriates and their Bavarian neighbors.
Filip grew increasingly curious about Marfa. “Why is she so . . . so absent?” he asked Galina. It was a Sunday afternoon in October. They had left Katya with her grandmother and walked into town, enjoying the chill in the air softened by brilliant sunshine, strolling with no special purpose. “It’s impossible to have a conversation with her, the way her eyes are always somewhere else. The only one she really looks at is Katya. What happened? Was she violated?”
“Not raped, no. Seduced and abandoned, by a Nazi officer.” Someone like Franz, they both thought, but neither spoke the words out loud. “There was a baby. Tolik.”
“Where is the baby now?” Filip stood in front of a bookshop window and looked longingly at the tidy shelves visible in the darkened interior. When was the last time he had read anything more than a newspaper? He had a bit of money in his pocket, but Regensburg was a Catholic city and took the Lord’s day seriously. The shop was closed.
“She lost him in the Danube crossing. Poor little Tolik. Marfa tried to rescue him, but the currents were too strong. She almost drowned. We held her back, Mama and I, pulled her out half-dead herself.” Galina spoke without emotion, as if recounting the passing of an ordinary day.
But she stared at the books stacked on a counter just inside the shop door with unseeing eyes.
Filip was silent. He had heard about the Danube crossing from Ksenia and Galina; the moonless night, the wild stormy weather, the merciless river currents that spun and roiled around people desperate enough to take a chance on death by drowning, just to be free. Why had they not mentioned Marfa’s child? Either they thought him completely insensitive or the subject was still too painful, the memory too raw.
He reached for Galina’s hand; they continued down the main street, walking in step with one another. “Listen,” Galina exclaimed, as if eager to move on to other topics. “Mama says the restaurant owners have received news of work. Many men are needed.”
“What kind of work?” Filip asked cautiously. If many were needed, it could not be especially desirable. “Where?”
“In Belgium, just across the border. The men are to go first, start working, and get settled. The families are to follow in a separate transport a few weeks later.” She gave a little skip, catching up to his longer stride.
“In Brussels? That sounds like construction work. I’m not much good at that, but there may be other opportunities, in a city . . .” He envisioned himself at a desk or drafting table, apprenticed to an engineer, an architect. He would need to learn French, but that was not a problem.
“Not Brussels. In the country, with housing provided. Anyone can sign up, as long as he’s able-bodied.”
“I’m not able-bodied; I’m able-minded.” Filip smiled ruefully at her. “Able-minded but undereducated, therefore completely useless.”
“Don’t say that!” She freed her hand from his, grasped both his arms at the elbows, and shook him like a disobedient child. “Everything is changing. We must take what we can, for now. Soon we will have choices. I just know it! You can go to university, find a good starting position, be what you want to be.” She spoke earnestly, her voice wavering on the verge of tears.
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