I looked over at him.
“I assure you, my offer is quite benign. Just an ear to listen,” he explained.
“Thank you, Comrade,” I said. It was one of the few times Vasilyev would show a more human side. “But I think I’d rather be alone.”
“Good night then. I shall pick you up at seven, Lieutenant.”
Without bothering to get undressed, I lay on top of the covers, staring at the ceiling. Another part of my life had just come to an end. Some time during the night, sleep finally claimed me.
PART II
It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.
—TOLSTOY
7
And so, I left all I knew behind me, my past, my homeland, my own identity. I had never been so far from everything I had known and loved. But it was much more than physical distance. I felt emotionally alone, isolated. My family gone. My comrades killed or taken prisoner, or off fighting the Germans, as I should have been. My beloved country under siege.
From the deck of the ship, I stared out at a sea that was a savage gray, riotous and unsettled as my own heart. A cold, driving rain out of the northwest pummeled the decks. The Poltava, a 25,000-ton dreadnought, slammed headlong into ten-meter swells, the ship’s engines shuddering each time the vessel crashed into another wall of water. I had to fight just to remain standing. Everything toward the horizon appeared a leaden void, the sort of dim netherworld I imagined inhabited by the blind soldier I’d read to in the hospital at Baku. The weather had taken a turn for the worse shortly after we’d passed the Faroe Islands. The previous night at dinner, the captain, a gregarious, silver-haired man seemingly too old for war, had said we should be thankful for such weather. It shielded us against the wolf packs that prowled the North Atlantic. I hardly felt fortunate, though. I could still only pick at my food, having spent the first several days of our voyage hunkered down in my cabin over a bedpan. As I now stood on the deck looking out at the vast, roiling grayness, my knees weak, my stomach still churning uneasily, I had the distinct feeling that this was a passage between worlds, like that which exists between the living and the dead.
We were six days out from Murmansk, the port we’d sailed from. The first four days I’d been confined to my cabin with sickness, until I’d gotten, as the sailors called it, my sea legs. Then we ran into weather, and the captain gave orders that we were to stay belowdecks, that it was dangerous to go topside. However, despite the wind and rain and rough seas, I finally had to get out of the stuffy, fetid air down below, which seemed only to make me sicker. When no one was watching, I slipped out of my cabin. I was able to get my hands on a poncho, which kept me from getting completely soaked in the lashing rain. I took cover in the lee of the ship’s starboard gun turret. From here, I could gaze out at the tenebrous world we sailed through.
When I wasn’t sick, I’d spend most of the time in my cabin reading, thinking about things. I’d found some books in a small footlocker beneath the bunk I slept on. A tattered copy of Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, which my father used to read to me when I was a girl. Gogol’s Dead Souls, whose title seemed almost a description of myself. Vasilyev had also given me a small American phrase book, with which I was to practice English. It had silly expressions like My favorite baseball player is Babe Ruth. Or, Where is the Empire State Building? Or, Please hand me the ketchup. Several times, Vasilyev would have Radimov instruct me. He turned out not to be a particularly good teacher. He was impatient and often short with me. “No, no, no,” he would cry, exasperatedly waving his cigarette about. “Not pleasant. You say, ‘It gives me great pleasure to meet you.’”
Or I’d pass the long hours of the voyage writing poetry. It was the first time since the war started that I was actually able to concentrate on writing without distractions. A strange calmness, that quiet introspection necessary for poetry, had seeped into my soul once more. You see, without realizing it I’d found myself changed again, altered in some incalculable fashion. These past several months—the weeks recovering at the hospital, the time in Moscow, the last several days aboard ship—had been an uncomfortable but necessary period of adjustment for me. I found I was no longer the person I’d been just a short time before, the warrior, the callous sniper who could shoot the enemy without batting an eye. Sometimes I would wake from nightmares about the German I’d killed in the cemetery in Sevastopol. I’d jerk awake as his hand gripped my wrist, his voice urgent. “Senta,” he’d cry. “Senta.” Then again, I certainly wasn’t that other woman I’d been prior to the war either, the wife and mother. Especially with the news of Kolya, that part of me was gone forever. Another casualty of war. I was in a gray area, neither fish nor fowl. And now I was leaving all that I’d ever known and heading off to an alien land, for what purpose I had no idea but about which I felt a strange foreboding. I told myself I still wanted to return to the fighting, to the brutal clarity of battle. But another part of me wondered how I could ever go back to placing men in my sights and coldly killing them. As much as I still hated the Germans for what they’d done—to me, to my country—I didn’t know if I could do that again.
One afternoon I had been in my cabin working on a poem. It was about Kolya.
I should have loved you better—
should have adored the quiet understanding in your eyes,
the tenderness that was the gift of solitude
you offered me like a bouquet of wilted flowers;
should have cherished the forgiving touch
on my naked shoulder those nights I turned away,
leaving you to your own desert thoughts.
Even now I hear the quiet sighs of rejection,
can taste the salt of your unshed tears,
can feel the broken heart beating inside your chest.
Does that heart still beat in some faraway trench,
or has it, too, been silenced by another sort of grief?
As I worked on the poem, I found myself rubbing the wedding band I had taken to wearing again. I don’t know why exactly I’d begun wearing it. I didn’t love him as a husband, of that I was certain. Perhaps it was out of guilt. Or maybe loyalty. Then again, maybe it was hope, the frail hope that if I wore it Kolya might still be alive. I wondered, had it not been for the war, if I would’ve stayed with him. Learned, as my mother had said, to love him. Or would I have turned into one of those old and embittered women whose frustration is visible in her eyes and mouth. Or would I have followed my heart and left him. But now with the news of his being missing in action, all that was just a moot point.
That’s when a knock came on my cabin door. It was Vasilyev, who had brought me a bromide he’d gotten from the ship’s infirmary.
“I’m told this will help your stomach,” he’d said.
“Thank you,” I replied, waiting for him to leave. He didn’t, though. Instead, he stood in the narrow doorway of my tiny cabin, filling it with his bulk.
“What is it you are writing, Lieutenant?”
“A poem.”
“I would very much enjoy hearing you read it.”
“No,” I said with more brusqueness than I’d intended. I could see his mouth take it as an insult. “What I mean is, it’s not done.”
“Of course,” he said. “But when you finish it, I would be honored if you wished me to peruse it.”
“Perhaps,” I said.
He remained standing in the doorway. “Lieutenant, regardless of what you might think, I am not the enemy,” he offered.
I stared silently at him.
“We are on the same side. We want the same things.”
“And what would those be?” I asked.
“For one, victory over the fascists. For another, a better life for our people. A place where poetry can flourish.”
I couldn’t help but smile.
“You don’t believe that?” he said.
“Not when our poets are thrown in prison.”
He nodded ruefully. “Of course, som
e minor setbacks are to be expected.”
“If you were one of them I don’t think you would call being sent to the camp a minor setback,” I scoffed.
“If it were up to me, poets would have much more freedom.”
“As they do in America?”
“Pfft,” he scoffed. “They have no poetry there. No real poetry, anyway.”
“Have you been there?” I asked.
“Yes, several times. The last was shortly before the war.”
“Did you like it?”
He shrugged. “It has, how shall I say, a certain appeal. They make excellent bourbon. And I enjoy New York. At least it has some culture.”
“How did you find the people?”
“They are very self-centered. Like children, they live for the moment. They have no sense of history. No understanding of class struggle. Even the poor bow down to Mammon. They’ve been duped into accepting the lie that is the ‘American dream.’”
I thought of what Madama Rudneva had told me about America. “But they have freedom,” I offered.
“Freedom!” he scoffed. “For the wealthy few perhaps. Not for the millions of workers who live in poverty. Or for their Negroes, who are still enslaved.”
“But they can live how they choose.”
He had snickered at this. “It’s all an illusion, Lieutenant. Marx said religion is the opiate of the people. For Americans it’s the opiate of success.”
To my right I heard someone say, “You really oughtn’t to be out here.” Startled, I turned to see Viktor Semarenko walking toward me, his feet splayed against the heaving of the ship, his legs rubbery as those of a drunken man. He was one of two other Soviet students headed to the conference in America with me. Viktor was tall and rawboned, with a long, equine face. A gaudy scar inched its way beneath his left cheek, where a German had cut him with a bayonet. The knotted scar drew his features to that side and gave him a slightly skewed expression.
“I needed some air,” I replied.
“So you’d rather freeze your balls off up here?”
“I don’t think I have to worry about that, Sergeant,” I kidded.
“Not from what I’ve heard. You have more mude than most men.”
Like me, Viktor had been a sniper, one who’d had over 150 kills to his credit. He’d fought at Kiev and Kharkov, was captured once and managed to escape. During the battle for Kharkov, he’d killed an entire platoon of Germans, for which he’d had his picture on the front page of Izvestiya and received the Gold Star and the Order of Lenin. And like me, he’d been paraded around, feted, accorded a hero’s status. However, I’d heard that he could be difficult, that he drank too much and had an eye for the ladies. There was a rumor that he’d gotten into some trouble involving the wife of a local Party leader. Unlike me, he eagerly looked forward to going to America, anything to get away from the war. Now he was interested only in having a good time, and he looked upon this trip as if he were going away on holiday. He joked that when he was there he wanted to ride in a convertible with a “big-bosomed blonde” who looked like Betty Grable sitting by his side. I had never heard of this Betty Grable, so he’d taken from his wallet a frayed picture of a long-legged blond woman in a bathing suit. “Not bad, eh? You don’t find legs like that back home.”
Viktor was coarse and foulmouthed, but also funny. He made me laugh, and I liked him for that. He played cards and traded with some of the sailors on the Poltava, for cigarettes and booze and German souvenirs. Despite his peasant language, he was actually pretty bright. In fact, before the fighting, he’d been studying to become a veterinarian. To him the war was just a stinking pile of der’mo, as he referred to it, something we should be grateful to be out of for now. He hated the way the Soviet high command had sacrificed the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers while the big shots back in the Kremlin lived like kings. And he couldn’t stand Vasilyev, called him “that fat swine.” I’d warned him he’d better be careful or his mouth would get him in trouble. “Fuck him,” he’d replied. “He needs us. What’s he going to do in America if he doesn’t have real war heroes to parade around?”
“How are you feeling, Lieutenant?” he asked me now.
“A little better.”
“Here,” he said, holding out a flask to me. “It’ll warm you up.”
“I don’t know if I should,” I explained, touching my stomach.
“It’ll settle your guts. It’s first-rate cognac. I won it off one of the sailors.”
He removed the top and took a drink. “Go on,” he said, offering me the flask. “You need to relax. That’s your problem, Lieutenant.”
Finally I gave in and took a small sip. At first, though, I regretted it, as I felt a new wave of nausea sweep over me.
“Give it a chance,” Viktor said. He was leaning against the base of one of the big guns, his ushanka pulled low against the rain. Water collected in the furrow of his scar and ran sideways down along his face.
After a while, my stomach did settle down as the cognac’s warmth fanned out throughout me. “That’s good,” I said.
“What did I tell you? I offered that little khuy Gavrilov a sip, and you know what he says?” Viktor asked me. “He says he doesn’t touch hard spirits. That it weakens the will and we need to remain firm against our enemies.”
As he repeated this, Viktor mimicked Gavrilov’s high-pitched, pedantic voice, and he stroked an imaginary goatee, exactly the way Gavrilov did when he talked. It made me laugh. Anatoly Gavrilov was the third member of our student entourage, some sort of official in Komsomol, the Party youth organization. Viktor didn’t like him and was always needling him. He called him that little khuy—a prick. I didn’t much care for Gavrilov either. A slight, bookish man who always had his nose in some Party tract, he was arrogant and condescending, like a precocious child in school, the one who was always vying for the teacher’s attention. He never just talked—he lectured, haranguing you about Party politics or Communist ideology.
“He is an annoying little bugger,” I agreed.
“He’s down there now, yakking with the fat swine. Christ, to hear Gavrilov tell it you’d think he’d seen all this action.”
“Where did he fight?”
“Huh!” Viktor snorted. “That’s just it, he didn’t. He spent the last year behind a desk in Moscow, writing propaganda for Komsomol’skaya Pravda.”
“Why is he going on this trip then?”
“My guess is he’s a stukach.”
A stukach was an informant for the government. Every factory or building or organization in the Soviet Union had them, and they curried favor of those above them by informing on their colleagues.
“You think so?”
“I’d bet on it. So watch what you say around him. Anything you say gets back to Vasilyev.” Viktor looked out to sea for a moment. He was a good-looking man despite the jagged scar across his cheek. When he turned back to me, he said, “Besides, he has his eye on you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He’s sweet on you.”
“Gavrilov?”
“You haven’t noticed?”
Gavrilov and I had had only a handful of conversations, and in those he seemed only to try to annoy me. Several times I happened to say something about the war, how badly it had been botched in Sevastopol, and he would take me to task on it. “Lieutenant, it is not up to us to question the strategies of our government,” he said to me once. “Ours is only to defeat the enemy.” As if the little sycophant had killed so much as one lousy German.
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“No. He’s quite taken by you,” Viktor advised. “So watch yourself, Lieutenant.”
“And Vasilyev?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“What’s his role in all this?”
Viktor snorted, as if the answer was all too obvious. “He’s secret police.”
“He told me he wasn’t. That he worked for something called the Ideological Departm
ent.”
“Horseshit,” he scoffed. He hawked together some phlegm and spit it over the side of the ship. “He’s NKVD, all right. The other day, I happened to be passing his cabin, and I overheard him in there talking with those two chekisty pricks. He was giving them hell about something.”
“Over what?”
“I couldn’t make out what they were saying, but you could tell they were afraid of him. They don’t fart unless he okays it.”
“Why do we even need them along? We’re just going to a student conference.”
Viktor stared at me, the corner of his mouth twisted into that partial smile of his.
“Don’t be so naïve, Lieutenant,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not sure what Vasilyev has up his sleeve, but this is not just about some student conference.”
“How do you know that?”
“Think about it, Lieutenant. It doesn’t make sense. They send three people halfway around the world, on a fully manned battleship when they need every fucking vessel to fight the krauts. Just to go to some peace conference?”
“I was told our presence might get the Americans to be more willing to open a second front,” I offered.
Viktor rolled his eyes.
“Do you really think the Yanks are going to give a damn what we have to say? A couple of Russian vanyas. When they don’t listen to the Old Man himself.”
“Then what do you think our purpose is?”
He shrugged, took a final drag of his cigarette, and flicked it over the side. “I don’t know. And to tell you the truth, I don’t give a shit. They want to take me away from the front, let me sleep in a soft bed and give me plenty to eat, I say fine. But I tell you, they have something up their sleeves.”
“Whatever their reasons, Vasilyev told me I could return to the front as soon as it’s over.”
“You can go back to the fucking war. Me,” he said, “I just might decide to stay.”
I glanced over at him. He stared out to sea, his brown eyes squinting, as if trying to sight something in the thick mist.
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