While those two carried on, Bogdan monkeyed around with little Yaroslava, for whom he always had a certain fondness.
“Of course dogs can marry cats,” he told her. “Where do you think rabbits come from? They’re as soft and fluffy as cats and as fast as dogs, naturally. It’s science, silly girl.”
“But who do rabbits marry? Do they marry each other?” the clever girl asked.
“Almost never,” Bogdan replied solemnly.
Aunt Yulia was amused by his antics but pretended not to be. “Don’t let him fill your head with nonsense,” she told her daughter, who only giggled in response and turned back to her dubious mentor.
When the fathers were done conferencing, Misha patrolled the aisles, attempting to look helpful. When he could not find a function for himself, he stood at the window and watched the landscape for what seemed like eternity without even a twitch in his jaw, impressing me once more with his stillness. Mama and Papa returned eventually and crawled straight into bed though the sun had hardly had a chance to sink below the horizon.
The train traversed the distant land, which was far more remote than the fields surrounding the Orlovs’ immense dacha on the outskirts of the city. I watched the wan grass, the occasional cracked huts, the thin-looking cows wandering here and there munching at the grass, the horses swinging their wild ancient tails.
Baba Tonya had fallen asleep and Polya returned to my side. She seemed to have forgotten our earlier fight and was only tired and frightened. Her stomach growled as she moved closer to me, tugging on my sleeve.
“I’m scared, Lara,” she said, chewing on a strand of fiery hair.
“Well,” I snapped. “Don’t be!”
But this did not ward her off. She studied the dark fields as if they contained the answers she wanted. “What do you think will happen to us—out there?”
A tear fell down her pink, round cheek. I almost felt sorry for the girl. There were no suitors to ogle her here, and our parents were too busy to lavish upon her the praise and love she expected. Her other joy was hearing our grandmother’s stories of soirees, and the old woman was too distraught to offer those. And her formerly gorgeous red hair was greasy and wilted. I considered noting that we were less likely to get blasted to pieces if we got the hell out of Kiev, but I didn’t want to make her cry over her friends again.
“We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?” I said, patting her hand.
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“This isn’t about what you like and don’t like.”
I noticed something strange on the landscape, which I mistook for planks of wood and then understood were suitcases, strewn about without reason. Was it a sign people had been carted away and forced to leave their things behind—or had they decided to drop them because they were too heavy to carry?
My sister was sniffling beside me, and it was a sad sight to behold. I wiped the snot under her nose with the back of my hand. Across from us, the Orlov brothers rested facing the wall. The backs of their dark heads were identical from that particular angle, there was no telling who was who.
“Fine, fine, Misha might have a crush on me, are you happy now?”
She smiled the smile of a flatulent baby. “I knew it.”
I shook my head at this ridiculous notion, but I allowed her this small victory.
“Come on, now, let’s go to sleep,” I said, and she rested beside me.
I wondered: was it true? Did Misha have any feelings for me, or was he just trying to help in a time of crisis? As I observed Misha’s sleeping form rising and falling across from me, I tried to tell myself that our destination would not be completely bleak, because he would be there. Being near him during our evacuation and resettlement tinged the uncertain future with an aura of romance. It would be a thrilling adventure, not a descent into chaos. There would be an entire steppe just for me and Misha, whispering sweet nothings across a snowy divide.
* * *
—
When Bogdan sat beside me in the middle of the night, I was surprised but not annoyed. Hunger had gnawed away at all of us just a few days into our trip—our extra bread and honey and Aunt Mila and Uncle Igor’s marmalades were long gone—and I would take any distraction that I could get. Everyone else was sound asleep except for us. I was wide-awake, sitting on my bed and staring out the window, fogging up the glass with my breath. I was hungry and hot, already feeling filthy, and there was no chance my body would relax. I was a poor sleeper in general, finding one thing or another to worry about long before the war began. Would I pass the chemistry test? Why was Anna so harshly punished for her love of Vronsky? Would I ever find such a love? Would Papa keel over from helping all those strangers? There was no relief from the onslaught.
“Too scared to sleep?” Bogdan said, his lips twisting into a mean smile.
“Of course not,” I snapped. “Stalin will protect us from Hitler,” I added, pointlessly echoing something Papa said to calm us down. “There’s no reason to be scared.”
He snorted. “You think Hitler is worse than Stalin?” he said, lowering his voice. He scooted closer to me, so our knees were touching. “Stalin knew Hitler was coming for us months before he did, but he was too proud to prepare his army to fight him. He couldn’t believe his so-called ally would defy him. He felt so humiliated by this that he called any of his cronies who warned him traitors and had them shot. If it wasn’t for him, Kiev, Leningrad—we’d all be safe. And now if any soldier doesn’t want to walk into a German death trap, Stalin will have him shot and his family arrested. It’s ridiculous.”
“Be quiet with that kind of talk,” I said, lowering my voice even more. He could go to prison for the things he was saying. And even if everyone around us appeared to be sleeping, you never knew who was listening. “What would your father think?” I added.
He shrugged at his sleeping father. “He can’t hear me now, can he? Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin—all murderers and hypocrites. We just happened to be born under Stalin.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And that being the case, we must root for Stalin.”
He patted my hand as if I had missed the point completely. “And that’s just what we’re doing, darling.”
“As we should be,” I said, but my head was spinning. I considered myself a patriot, and knew it was idiotic to voice any doubts about our government. From my parents’ late-night whispers, I had the idea that they had found our leader less than perfect, but who wasn’t? My parents would never critique Stalin at a regular volume because you could not trust the phones, the wires, your neighbors, your colleagues, or anyone who wasn’t family. But what was this he was saying about Stalin, and where did it come from? He was taking it too far, much further than my parents ever had.
I wished I were sitting with the more serious, melancholy Misha instead of this rascal with slicked-back hair, who acted like a smug lord looking over the commoners. He had managed to dispel all the goodwill I had sent his way for playing with Yaroslava with this little speech. Besides, his favorite playmate had gotten sick the day before, so perhaps he was just bothering me out of boredom. Aunt Yulia was very worried, but Mama assured her it would pass, that the feverish child was just hungry, though I did not know exactly how it would pass when there seemed to be no hope of better food on the horizon. The girl rested in her parents’ laps, and her hair was damp and matted to her head.
“How do you know all this anyway?” I finally asked.
“I hear Papa talking, that’s how,” he said.
“And does your father—share your perspective?”
“Of course not,” he said. “You think you can learn everything from your books, but the only way to truly know the world is to hear what people are saying.”
“I don’t read to learn,” I said, uncertain as to how the conversation had turned from Stalin to literature. I would of
ten bring novels to our families’ gatherings and would hide off in a corner to escape to my beloved pages. But I did not know Bogdan paid enough attention to see what I was doing.
“Oh?” he said, looking genuinely surprised. “Then why do you do it?”
“I like to read….” I said, realizing I did not have a good answer. I knew it had something to do with making me feel less lonely, to connect me to lost souls from generations ago, many of whom came from the same place, but this was difficult and embarrassing to articulate. I said, “Because language is beautiful, even when it’s ugly.”
If Bogdan expected me to say more on the subject, then he would be sorely disappointed. I could not entertain him the way the little girl had, and I wasn’t one of the neighborhood boys who called him outside to engage in mischief whenever my family visited. This was the longest conversation we had ever had. Until then, our talk had been limited to asking each other to pass the potatoes. He always had that look about him, of a person on the hunt for something more exciting to do, but for once he was calm, perhaps because there was nowhere to go.
I turned away, toward the window, where the vast fields were illuminated by a bright, nearly full moon. I had hardly been staring out for a moment before he pulled me toward him and shielded my eyes. I was so stunned by the gesture—we had not done so much as shake hands until then—that I stayed there instead of protesting. I did not know if I wanted to be held or to see. If the thing he shielded me from was so awful that it warranted shielding. I could feel his heart beating against my cheek. When he released me, the fields were as vacant as ever.
“What on Earth was that?” I said.
“Nothing,” said Bogdan, but I could see he was ruffled, that his jaw was set and he was struggling to maintain composure. “Just a few dead cows. Starvation. It was very unpleasant.”
“That’s all?” I said. I most certainly did not believe him. Or, I mostly did not. Or perhaps I wanted to believe him so badly that I decided to. A few dead cows did not a tragedy make.
“That’s all,” he said, giving my arm a squeeze, not looking me directly in the eyes either. Had he looked me in the eyes to begin with? It was hard to say.
“We’re the same age, you know. I don’t need protecting. I’m not a child.”
“I never said you were,” he said, and he was quiet after that. I stared out at the vast emptiness, where I could detect no farms, which made the likelihood of dead cows quite low. Bogdan did not leave me, either because he felt I needed further comfort or because he did not want to be alone after spotting whatever dark thing had been lurking outside.
Soon enough my savior was asleep, tilting his head closer and closer toward mine until he collapsed on my shoulder. I did not move, wanting to shake him off but also not wanting him to wake up finding himself in this compromised position, so I sat there, rigid as a lamppost. From that angle, one that allowed me only to see his thick, haphazard hair and the top of his head, he was once again indistinguishable from his brother. So that was what I did then, I pretended Misha was resting his head on my shoulder and closed my eyes and leaned my head against his, at last settling into something resembling sleep.
* * *
—
Misha and I were reading The Idiot when the book began to quiver in my hand, and then the train shook violently. A siren rang through the cars and the train came to a halt, pitching us into the wall. Papa grabbed Polya and Baba Tonya’s hands and Mama grabbed mine, everyone was grabbing everyone and the Orlovs and Garanins were shouting, too, come on, let’s go, hurry up, hurry up, get off this train, take nothing with you, and even in the chaos it registered that there were explosions overhead coming from the formerly empty sky, making me question why exactly we were leaving.
“Come on, now, quickly, girl,” said Mama, and we jumped out of the wagon and crawled right under the train, hid down in the warm darkness, scared white pupils blinking in the blackness, reminding me of the eyes of Timofey lighting up our courtyard as the dawn broke.
It was the Germans, of course. I did not need Papa to confirm this, though he did, or to explain to the group that though it may seem ridiculous to stay right under the train when the bombs were falling down on it, it was the safest place for all of us to be, since it was our only shelter in the vast steppe and the steel of the trains over our heads would provide more protection than the open fields could. We crouched in the muck, covering our ears; the Orlovs were silent and dignified while Polya and my grandmother whimpered. The old woman’s boa was filthy and she looked so ridiculous that I wanted to choke her with it, or even to rip off her rubies and toss them out from under the train so she would get bombed while running after them. I was so terrified that it took me a moment to see that Papa was not beside us, that he had rushed into the fields to bring back a few rogue passengers who fled the train.
“Get back here, Fedya!” Mama screamed, but the sounds of the crashing bombs were so loud that I doubted if anyone heard her but me. But it was instinctual with Papa. He saw people who needed saving, so he went out to save them, forgetting that he had a family waiting for him under the train. Mama muttered that his orphanage instincts were kicking in again, this flagrant caring for others. But I was just glad he had returned to us.
Polya was crying and Baba Tonya was crying and Mama was comforting them both, while Papa met my gaze and nodded.
“My big girl,” he said. “My stalwart.”
“Let them just take me now,” Baba was muttering. “Let this be it. Haven’t I suffered enough?”
It got wearying after a while, though, the bombs, the hands on the ears, the thighs burning from all the crouching, the gravel and dirt digging into my knees, the hunger weakening my joints, the foul stench of the unbathed passengers. I opened my eyes and saw that Bogdan the rascal had stopped the assumed crouching position and even looked quite jolly for some reason, which turned out to be because little Yaroslava, who had not only grown weaker in recent days but who had also begun to chatter her teeth and look alarmingly pale, was looking at him with a trembling expression somewhere on the brink of bursting into sobs or hysterical laughter. Her golden pigtails mingled with the muddy ground.
Bogdan was amusing her by making a monkey face, and he reached into his pockets and pulled out two tiny teacups he must have stolen after a tea service and put them to his eyes and bobbed his head from side to side and stuck out his tongue. This image was so absurd, what with everyone else crouching and the bombs dropping from overhead planes, the sound of them raining down on our only mode of conveyance, that even I had to hold back a chuckle.
Yaroslava laughed first, and then, little by little, as others began to squint their eyes open, which had coincided with the sound of the bombs dissipating a bit, more passengers began to laugh, first Polya and then the Garanin parents and even Baba Tonya had a sliver of a smile emerge on her puckered face. Then Polya laughed completely, wildly, just as hard as Yaroslava, because she needed the release, and her laughter was so pure and singular that it even made Bogdan laugh at himself. Misha was the least amused. I could feel it from how his arm had stiffened around me, which was when I realized he had his arm around me to begin with. I did not know how long it had been there. His body emanated calm, unlike the manic energy that surrounded his brother when he had covered me in the train car.
“Enough clowning around, brother. We’re at war,” Misha said.
Bogdan removed the teacups from his eyes, offered his brother a goofy smile, and replaced them there. “War, what war? I don’t see a war! Why didn’t anyone tell me there was a war?” he said, pretending to search the ditch with the teacups still over his eyes, generating more rumblings of reluctant laughter. “Did you know there was a war?” he said to little Yaroslava.
The girl laughed hardest of all, and her weary parents were so grateful to him. I wondered if he could see something the rest of us could not, if perhaps he was t
he only one acting appropriately under the circumstances, embracing the absurdity of it all, understanding how badly the girl needed a bit of laughter. This feeling was only heightened the next day, when the girl was so feverish that she could hardly speak, whimpering in her mother’s arms while Bogdan sat beside her father, holding her hand.
Yaroslava died and was buried the next morning, when the train made its next stop. I was not allowed to help, none of the women were, but as I watched Bogdan cover the girl with earth and tuck a teacup down there with her, I found myself having a strange thought I suspected was summoned by disorientation and hunger: that one day, this boy, who perhaps understood the world better than anyone else on the train did, would make a good and decent father.
* * *
—
A few days later, Mama shoved me and Polya awake in the middle of the night. At first, I thought we had reached our destination—we were supposed to get there any moment—but as I looked out at the barren fields, I saw this was not the case, that everyone else was asleep. What was going on—another raid? Did we have to run under the ghastly train again, and get caked in mud and dirt once more? No, no, this made no sense, it was not a raid, because it would mean everyone else would be up and alert. But only the three of us were awake while everyone else slumbered on, the train chugging its mean chug below us, the sky dark and unwelcoming above.
Mama helped Polya climb down to my bed and covered us with her shawl, an intimate gesture that trapped in our bodily stink.
“What? What is it?” said Polya, rubbing sleep from her eyes. Even in her dreaminess, even in the musk of the train, she looked like an angel and I hated her for it. Mama put a hand over her mouth and lifted the finger of her other hand in the air. Her face was solemn and purposeful, the same sharp squint I saw in her eyes when she sewed a button back on a dress for me late in the evening.
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