Something Unbelievable

by Maria Kuznetsova

  Our crew had been short on joy recently; Mama and Aunt Tamara would come home from the factory, reeking of cleaning supplies, and the fathers and Misha would follow after, covered in soot and sweat, utterly drained, Papa having long forgotten his promise to take me there. We could not help but laugh as the little fur ball explored the premises while we ate our meal as slowly as possible to make it feel more expansive than it was. Once he had sniffed all four corners and the bunk beds and curtains and circled the stove a few times, he settled by my sister’s side and licked her hand again, and so she named him Licky.

  “You be careful, now,” Mama warned her, studying him more closely. “He’s no ordinary cat. He’s a bobcat. He must have wandered out of the woods, poor thing.”

  “He’ll be a big boy one day, you’ll see,” said Papa, his lips spreading into a thin smile. “A baby lion. You’ll be riding him all over town.”

  “Don’t be silly, Papa,” Polya said, batting his arm. I rolled my eyes at Misha and he gave me a small shrug to show he agreed my sister was senseless, but what can you do?

  Papa loved indulging my sister’s childishness. He spoke to her like she was about three instead of thirteen, treating her like the baby she wanted to be around him. He remained oblivious to how aware Polya was of her powers, how she batted her eyes at men if she wanted something, like an extra radish from the old radish brothers at the market, another day to complete a homework assignment from her teacher, or a flower from the groundskeeper’s meager garden back home. Papa would never deign to make such witless comments to yours truly; he knew I was reasonable.

  Of course Polya would never be able to ride the cat, no matter how big he got, unless she shrank considerably. She looked so blindly happy, getting licked by her new friend, teased by Papa, that it was hard to focus on nibbling my bread crust. That night, Polina carried her new pet into her bed above me, cradling him like he was a baby, but he did not protest, though he seemed more eager to ardently lick his mangy fur than to be rocked to sleep. I could hear the foul creature licking and scratching as I tried to drift off. At the time, of course, I only saw the beast as a distraction, a nuisance. I had not a clue he would be my family’s undoing.

  * * *

  —

  September turned to October, which was not the October I had known in Kiev. In Kiev, October was when the trees changed colors, when you could stroll through Mariinsky Park as the maples and chestnuts turned from green to majestic red and orange and gold. In Lower Turinsk, October meant the trees would change colors for a week or so before unceremoniously shedding their leaves. Papa and Uncle Konstantin rode to a neighboring village on horseback, returning with a sack of potatoes and two shubas, a white one for Polya, and a brown one for me, and by November, we lived within the confines of these thick coats. There was no use denying that we were in for a long stay by then, and the fathers’ late-night grumblings about the state of the Red Army brought no hope. Millions of soldiers had died or been captured already, and the Germans were only fifty kilometers away from Moscow, advancing toward our capital.

  I lived for my reading sessions with Misha in his family alcove after dinner, while Bogdan horsed around with my sister and Licky or went off to his food expeditions. I was breathless to find myself alone with handsome Misha, though Mama would “check in” on us once in a while. Misha’s voice was firm and commanding, though his hands shook when he turned the pages, which pleased me because it suggested that I made him nervous. The shaking hands were his only weakness; since he started working at the factory, he seemed even more capable and grown-up, the soot behind his ears making him look like a true man.

  And besides, reading with him gave me far more intellectual stimulation than I got from my new cruel teacher, Yana Nikolaevna, who was offended by the students who left class after the daily free lunch. “Filling your empty minds is more vital than filling your empty stomachs,” she had declared, and followed this charming comment up with the fact that she would not bother learning the names of the new students until she saw who was going to “stick around.”

  By January, Misha and I were done with Demons and had moved to another favorite, Onegin. We had just finished the chapter where Tatyana dreams of being chased by a bear and entering a party where Onegin stabs Lensky and wakes up scared and confused. I recited my favorite part of the dream for good measure:

  But suddenly a snowdrift stirs,

  And what from its recess appears?

  A bristly bear of monstrous size!

  He roars, and “Ah!” Tatyana cries.

  He offers her his murderous paw,

  She nerves herself from her alarm

  And leans upon the monster’s arm,

  With footsteps tremulous with awe

  Passes the torrent but alack!

  Bruin is marching at her back!

  Misha gave me an unreadable smile. The weight he shed gave his face an older, more dignified look, which suited him.

  “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said, shaking his head.

  “What is it?”

  “I just find dreams in literature to be a bit silly, don’t you? I mean, if it didn’t really happen, then why write about it?”

  “None of it really happened. The dream is what makes Onegin Onegin. The rest of the book—the duel, the spurned love, none of that is so very unique, is it? Of course, the narrator has a sharp wit—but in this passage, he abandons that wit, and yes, perhaps he’s mocking Tatyana a bit, but he must believe in it on some level, or he wouldn’t describe it so vividly.”

  “He can’t help himself. He’s a writer. I’m just saying—I find the dream a bit frivolous, far less interesting than the outcome of the duel between Onegin and Lensky.”

  “Can’t it just be a beautiful interlude?”

  “I didn’t know you were such a dreamer, Larissa.”

  “Some occasions require it.”

  Misha just shook his head. “Pure silliness.”

  “It’s not silly at all,” I insisted, but there would be no changing his mind.

  He gave me an intense look that made me uneasy. Did our argument stir some passion within him? Of course I had been trying to will him to kiss me for months, but I was uncomfortable, afraid. He looked at the book and back at me and his lips drew a straight line. Had he kissed girls before? He always seemed so competent and knowledgeable that until that moment, I never considered that perhaps he had not, that he was just as clueless as I was when it came to romantic matters. He kept looking at me, waiting for me to say something that would direct him, one way or another.

  I looked down at my enormous shuba and recalled the bones and knobs and blue-green veins on the body inside it. Would anyone really want to kiss someone in my awful state? I hardly felt like a woman anymore. My womanly visitor had not returned since we arrived in the mountains. Mama had to stitch Polya’s and my pants to keep them on our waists. Hairs sprouted on my chest to keep me warm and my voice was so weak, I didn’t sound like myself. My clothes floundered on my body, reminding me of a happier time when Polya and I paraded around in Mama’s enormous dresses when she and Papa left us home alone.

  Misha turned away, the intense look gone, and he was quiet, gazing out the one tiny frosted window in his alcove, where a light snow was falling. By then I understood that his staring fits were not a mere indication of his solemn, poetic soul. His stillness could be attributed to melancholy, not simple awe at the wonders of the world. I never knew what to do when he disappeared like this. Should I leave? Try to bring him back to Earth? Ask what was on his mind? I was relieved when I did not have to find a solution, because Bogdan entered the room. I could not help his brother, but I could ask for a second opinion.

  “What do you think of Tatyana’s dream in Onegin?” I asked.

  As the smile curled on his wily face, I had a feeling that of cour
se he would agree with me. How could he not? The boy was a bit of a dreamer, and he would have been taken by the imaginative interlude.

  “It’s the best part,” he said. “Naturally.” I nearly gasped, putting a hand to my chest, and then he laughed wildly. “I tricked you, didn’t I? I don’t think I got that far in Onegin. There was a dream? I must have been playing hooky.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense, brother. You must have read Onegin,” said Misha, who seemed more annoyed by his brother’s cavalier declaration than was justified.

  “Then I suppose I don’t remember,” Bogdan said with a complacent shrug.

  It was time for bed. By then, we had all given up on our individual beds and slept on a blanketed pile by the stove in the center of my family’s room, any need for privacy trumped by the flames flickering near our thawing limbs. We hunkered down by the stove and I found my usual place, next to my parents. I put a blanket over my shuba and relished the warmth, knowing I would wake up sweating the next morning but that I wouldn’t care, that it was a pleasure to know my body was capable of producing sweat. Just as I closed my eyes, somebody poked me in the back. Bogdan was looking right at me. His brother was sound asleep to his left, and my sister was dozing on his other side, her head resting on Licky’s haunches.

  “The dream was pretty wacky,” he said.

  “So you did remember after all.”

  “No. I just read it over. Some wild stuff.”

  “Indeed,” I said, and I was more touched by the fact that he had read it over than I cared to admit.

  “It wasn’t much of a burden. There isn’t exactly a lot to do,” he said, patting my hand, making certain that he had not made me feel too important.

  I closed my eyes and shifted closer to Misha, who had already fallen asleep, and felt his breath on my neck as I tried to settle into a slumber as wild and beguiling as Tatyana’s. But I woke up in the cold light of morning, my stomach rumbling, not having remembered a single thing I dreamed about.

  * * *

  —

  Papa remembered his promise to take me to the factory by the dead of winter. It was a brutal time. Any minute I spent trudging to school or gathering wood was the cruelest torture, the frigid air stiffening my bones as my boots crunched through the snow. The windows were frosted with ice and the balcony door was sealed shut.

  Twice, I had seen my father grab onto a piece of furniture to steady himself when he was on the verge of fainting. Aunt Tamara and my mother were shedding hair like summer pets. At dinner, I caught Uncle Konstantin squinting into his food like he could not remember how he got there. Baba Tonya took to sleeping with her eyes open, making me think she was dead the first few times she did it. As for Misha, when we delved into Karamazov, I understood that his hands shook due to hunger, not nervousness. Bogdan maintained his spirits and nighttime excursions, but he was as pale as a frozen lake. My sister’s body was deteriorating so fast that Mama had to wrap twine around her forearms to keep her arm meat from sagging. She no longer walked but drifted. I was fading, too, though nobody held me up. My fingertips were numb even beside the stove; my teeth chattered all day long.

  I forgot all that as I followed Papa out. We bumped into Ivan, who was knocking the icicles off the front doorway. They had been hanging on the eaves of the apartment building like deadly dragon teeth for months, and recently Ivan had made the fatal mistake of slamming the front door hard enough to make one of them careen down and stab his forearm, turning it a ghastly black and blue. Now he was trying to protect the rest of us. He was accompanied by Snowball, a big white ownerless dog he regaled with garbage scraps and potato peels once in a while, whenever he came around.

  I offered him my usual greeting. “Is the war over yet?”

  “I’ll keep my ear to the ground for you,” he said with a mock salute, and winked at Papa as we walked on.

  I was so thrilled the cold hardly stung me. I was used to it by now, having my limbs assaulted by the mean, relentless air. My heart skipped as we approached the factory, our boots crunching through the nasty snow. Going in would be a true privilege for a girl. Mama once told me that the only woman who ever went inside the actual factory was Marina Ivanovna, the old cook, to call the men for their lunch, and I would soon be among her sacred ranks.

  But when Papa opened the central steel door to the monstrous edifice, I saw there wasn’t much to get excited about. It was not a magical, wild, and violent chamber of science and destruction but a dingy, dark room cramped with steel machinery, grime and oil, and rows and rows of greasy old tanks, which might be rendered obsolete by the new tank Papa and Uncle Konstantin were working on. Papa held my hand as I gazed at the high, sooty ceilings.

  I knew factory life was no picnic, of course. The other day, I’d overheard Papa telling Mama that many of the younger men were practically begging to be sent to the front. At least at the front they would be given three substantial meals a day and would hardly be expected to work for twelve hours straight. And if they died, they would do so with honor in their hearts and food in their bellies. The factory had already lost two dozen men to hunger and exhaustion; one of them was Uncle Nikita, Aunt Yulia’s husband, whose death kept the new widow at home for one week before she returned to Madame Renata’s food store with glazed eyes; it was strange not to see Uncle Nikita, the former third in command, returning home from the factory between Papa and Uncle Konstantin. But I knew better than to mention that.

  “This is where you spend your days?” I said.

  He let go of my hand and looked defeated by the question. “What choice do I have?”

  I followed him to the center of the factory, where a single tank stood in between a series of work benches. This one looked larger than the others, and several half-completed versions stood behind it. Papa ran a hand over the top.

  “Here it is,” he said. “The T-34.”

  The tank was dark green, with five wheels on each side and a long, narrow stock in the center and cylinders on either side. It didn’t look like much to me, or rather, since the only time I had seen tanks was at a distance, during state military parades, I couldn’t quite see what made this machine of destruction different from the ones that came before it, other than its more impressive size.

  Papa’s eyes lit up as he explained how Uncle Konstantin had helped invent a process that allowed Soviet tanks to be made far more efficiently than the German ones. Previous methods of tank making led the tanks to be brittle because of the air that remained between the parts; Uncle Konstantin had the idea of plugging up these air holes with sand, which made the tanks come out hard and strong. Germans kept their tanks strong by using chisels, but this took ten times longer than the sand procedure.

  “And that’s how we will triumph,” Papa said. “Uncle Konstantin’s tanks are going to end the war, once we build enough of them.” He patted the tank like it was a well-behaved child, but the light was extinguished from his eyes. I did not understand why. The quicker we killed the Germans, the sooner we could all go home. Then I recalled what Bogdan had said on the train, that we could have easily been living under Hitler or Mussolini instead, that war was a nasty thing with no winners.

  “Do you believe in war, Papa?”

  “What a silly question,” he said, putting an arm around me. “Do I love the thought of using these machines to end the lives of men not much older than Misha or Bogdan, men who did nothing but get born in the wrong country? Of course not. But do I believe in doing what I can to keep my family safe, which means keeping my country as safe as possible? Of course I do.” He ran a hand over the tank again and then led me back outside, out of the factory, our white breath escaping into the cold air.

  “Family is everything,” he said, his eyes filling as he put an arm around me. “Everything else is just wind through the trees. One day, you’ll see.”

  I knew he was right: that one day I would have a fa
mily of my own. But I had to admit that my one example of solitary life, Papa’s brother, Uncle Pasha, made it quite appealing. When he visited us in Kiev, he always seemed more like a carefree older brother than an uncle. With his feathery hair, slighter frame, and narrow shoulders, it was difficult to see him as an adult, as my father’s near peer, especially when he slung me over his back and cried, “I’ve saved the princess! I’ve saved the princess! Back to her castle she goes….” before depositing me on the balcony. Uncle Pasha had no family to speak of and didn’t seem to want one. But this didn’t seem to be the time to bring this up.

  “I am trying my best to take care of you all—your mother, your grandmother, your sister…” he said, and when he mentioned Polina, his voice cracked. I was also struggling, but I was older and appeared sturdier, so no one pitied me the way they pitied her. And now here was my father, getting emotional because there wasn’t enough he could do for all of us.

  “You’re taking good care of us,” I told him. “Polya and I would have frozen to death without the coats you brought back for us,” I said, running a hand along my furry shuba, reminding him that he rode a horse to a distant village just to keep us fed and clothed, but this rolled right off him, and he just nodded vaguely. “Are you all right, Papa?”

  “Perfectly fine, darling. Just a bit worn out, that’s all. We’ve been working so hard.”

  “Thank you for showing me the factory, Papa,” I said, and I turned away, understanding that he needed to be left alone, though he could not stay out in the cold for very long.

  I tried not to cry as I began the long walk back to our apartment. I felt sorry for my debilitated father, but I was overwhelmed primarily by self-pity. The day had been a terrible disappointment. It was far from fair. All I wanted was for Papa to take me by the hand and show me his man’s world, one of drama and violence and machinations against the Nazis, filled with elements of far greater interest than my stinky school, and what I got was watching the grown man I loved more than anyone crying like a child.