by JV Love
The others either answered yes or nodded their head.
"Good," Kyra said, "we're done then. Now let's get out of here and enjoy this beautiful weather!"
Papers were hurriedly shoved in bags, books were shut with loud snaps, and the doors to the outside were flung open with abandon. Kyra began skipping and singing and raising her arms toward the bright blue sky. "Oh, how I love spring!" she exclaimed. She set her books and bag down and sprawled out in the grass. The others shared cigarettes and told jokes around a bench under a big oak tree.
Igor sat down on the grass next to Kyra, pensively looking at the passing cars and trolleys on the street. Kyra squeezed his ankle to get his attention. "Kiss me," she said.
Igor smiled, then leaned over and touched his lips to hers. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him down so that he fell on top of her, and they both laughed for a long time.
"You're going with us for the picnic, right?" Kyra asked. "We're celebrating Sasha's eighteenth birthday. We'll go right after the parade."
"No, I can't," Igor answered. "I've got other plans today."
Kyra pretended to frown. "Oh, you're no fun," she said.
Igor felt hot in the sun and rolled his sleeves up beyond his elbows. He had hard muscular forearms. Kyra ran her fingers along them.
"You're at least coming to the party tonight, aren't you?" she asked.
He stood up. "Yes, I'll be at the party."
"You better be," she said as Igor started to walk away.
On his way past the others gathered around the bench, Igor plucked a half-finished cigarette from his best friend's lips, then smoked it himself as he continued on.
"I'll get you for that," his friend jested. "Just when you least suspect it too."
"Eight o'clock sharp, Igor!" Kyra called out after him. "You better not be late!"
A lone white cloud floated in the sky and Igor shielded his eyes from the sun to take a peek at it. Today was a special day - May 9th - Victory Day. The whole country took this specific day of every year off to celebrate their victory over the Nazis in WWII. May 9th meant even more than that to Igor though. It was the day he chose to give thanks to a person who had changed his life.
He passed under a tree full of blooming white flowers and thought of a story Katya had told him about a tree and how it was never really born and would never really die. The thought was comforting to him because it made him realize somehow that he wasn't alone in the world. There were others out there who believed as he did in the oneness and connectedness of everything. They may be hundreds of miles away or they may be next door; they may speak Japanese or Swedish or English or Swahili - or even German! But they were out there, and he knew it. He was not alone. Kyra was proof of that. Kyra, with her child-like laugh and spontaneity. She believed as Igor did, and that's what had drawn them to one another.
The ten-foot-tall iron gates of the cemetery were wide open and Igor walked in and turned to the right. There was a bush on top of a small hill that bloomed bright pink flowers whose fragrance would sometimes be carried his way by the breeze. He liked the smell. It was familiar to him, though he couldn't quite place it. He went up to the bush and broke off a small branch of the flowers.
As he walked among the graves and tombstones, he thought back to that horrible time when nearly half of the city's population perished due to starvation or cold or the enemy's bombs. The number still staggered him - over one million people dead in such a short amount of time.
The Great Patriotic War, as it was now called, had been a war like no other. Unprecedented in its savagery, and so too, in its bravery. Igor pulled out the medal he'd been given as a survivor of the blockade. Every Leningrader who had made it through that hell had been given one. He held it tight in his hand and thought of how many times the Red Army had tried to break the blockade. He thought of the Ice Road and how there were as many as sixty routes over it at one time. They'd even built an entire railroad over the frozen Lake Ladoga one winter. For 900 days they'd endured the siege, until the tide finally shifted irrevocably and the Soviet Army burst forth and didn't stop until it reached Berlin.
Igor saw a lone figure kneeling by the tomb he was headed for. He knew who it was. He saw him there on this day every year. It was Felix Varilensky. Everyone knew him - the decorated war hero wounded on nine separate occasions and returned to fight each time. Old ladies kissed him on the cheek. Children sang nursery rhymes about him. A poster of him receiving the Order of Lenin medal adorned the interior of nearly every Post Office building in the city.
All to his embarrassment, Igor knew. They talked once or twice a year and one thing Igor was always amazed at was Felix's humbleness. He didn't like all the praise and attention, and didn't think he deserved it. He wasn't proud of what he'd done in the war, but neither did he regret it. It was something that had happened and it was over. "Why can't we just leave it at that?" Igor had heard him say more than once.
Not wanting to intrude, Igor stopped and leaned against a tree to wait. Felix was sitting on the grass in between two graves. He was speaking in a soft voice and rubbing his eyes with the backs of his hands. He made the sign of the cross, then folded his hands together in front of him and stayed that way for a long time.
An attractive young woman with brown, shoulder-length hair, a light-blue dress, and a yellow sun hat approached in the distance. She held two small children - one boy and one girl - by the hand. She was walking slowly so they could keep up. Each child held a dandelion with their free hand. The sky was a soft blend of blue and white, and the lone cloud Igor had seen earlier was gone.
When the woman got close enough, the children let go of her hand and started running. "Daddy! Daddy!" they yelled.
Felix caught them in his arms, then picked them up and spun around in circles while they laughed and squealed. The woman came up and gave Felix a kiss on the lips, then the four of them started to walk away.
Igor started toward the grave. When he got there, Felix looked over his shoulder and saw him. Igor waved, and Felix shouted to him to stop by for dinner sometime next week.
The grave was covered with fresh-cut flowers: red roses, purple lilacs, white daffodils, and two yellow dandelions. Igor added to the mix the pink flowers he'd picked from the bush, then he sat down and pulled a small brown book from his bag.
He thought back once more to those days that so changed his life. The misery, the despair, the destruction. And yet through it all, he remembered mostly just the kindness of one person.
He held the book up in front of him. "You see," he said aloud. "I told you last year that I would get your poems published. It's been receiving great reviews since it came out last month. Anna Akhmatova herself even wrote a glowing review of it."
He opened the book and began reading from the beginning. He read for an hour and a half, not stopping until he reached the last part of the last poem, his favorite:
I follow the path and come across a great lake of joy,
and see it's fed by this abundant river of sorrow.
This maddening dichotomy has evaded me for so long:
One cannot exist without the other.
He left the cemetery and strolled leisurely along the Neva. Everywhere one looked now there was new life: birds singing as they flew from tree to tree, green buds sprouting from the dark soil, trees and bushes overflowing with young flowers. A light breeze picked up the scent of linden trees which were just coming into bloom. A pigeon on the sidewalk in front of him hooted softly and then flew away.
People were lined up along the bridges and riverbanks to watch the ice from Lake Ladoga pass through. It was an annual event that every Leningrader loved to watch. Igor found an empty spot along the railing and stopped for a minute. The gray water was full of ice floes of various sizes that shifted and squeezed and forced their way downriver.
Igor watched as a group of small children, no more than four years old, passed by him. They each held part of a rope being pulled by a short, th
ick-waisted woman. A group of ducks were gathered nearby, and a little girl with brown eyes and brown hair let go of the rope and ran after them.
"Katya!" the woman at the front of the rope yelled at her. "Come back here!"
The little girl stopped, looked back, started to frown. Then the frown turned into a mischievous grin and she turned and ran for the ducks again just as fast as her tiny legs could carry her.
Igor smiled as he watched the little girl run and giggle and the short woman chase after her. There was a large oak tree next to the river, its brown leaves still clinging to the branches, just as they had all winter long. A breeze picked up and one of the leaves finally let go. It sailed slowly toward the ground, gracefully coming to rest on a large ice floe making its way out to sea.
~ ~ ~
Resources
The following excellent books have been referenced in the writing of this novel:
Erickson, John & Ljubica, The Eastern Front, Carlton Books Limited, 2001.
Salisbury, Harrison E., The 900 Days: The Siege of Leningrad, Da Capo Press, 1985.
Shostakovich, Dmitry, Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitry Shostakovich, Harper & Row, 1979.
Skrjabina, Elena, Siege and Survival: The Odyssey of a Leningrader, Southern Illinois University Press, 1971.
Wayne, Kyra Petrovskaya, Shurik: A Story of the Siege of Leningrad, Lyons & Burford, 1970.