* * *
—
One morning, my sister and I had a chance to remedy some of our pain. When the adults were out, we checked Madame Renata’s door again and saw that she had left it unlocked. It was a weekend. The women were at the market and the men were conferencing at Uncle Ivan’s. It was so quiet I could hear the distant drip of a faucet downstairs. We crept down the dark hallway, which felt endless, a plank over a raging sea. I knew the penalty: if we were caught, it would mean the end of Aunt Yulia’s supplementary parcels.
“My God,” my sister said, when we stepped inside. “All this time…”
“And we were so grateful for her sacks of onion and moldy bread.”
The place was a veritable grocery store. I could not believe its bounties. She seemed to possess everything: sausages, batons of bread, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, bunches of dill, bowls of individually wrapped chocolates and even chocolate bars. I never had much of a sweet tooth, but in that moment I would have died for chocolate. I looked at Polya and saw that this was what had also caught her eye.
“We’re starving under the woman’s nose. And she doesn’t care for us at all!” she said.
“I don’t know how she can live with herself,” I said, reaching a trembling hand toward the chocolate. I didn’t care that the woman’s daughter and husband had died. If she had walked in at that moment, I might have tried to end her life as well.
“Lara,” Polya whispered. “There is so much chocolate in there. They will hardly miss it….”
“Stealing is wrong,” I said uncertainly. “We could get in trouble. What if she stops giving us extra food?”
“There are no rules during war.”
My sister said it so stonily that the words sounded utterly right, making me feel like she was the older one, though she was likely echoing something she had heard Bogdan say.
Wherever her words came from, it was hard to argue with them. There was an unconscionable amount of chocolate in that apartment.
We grabbed two pieces of chocolate from the bowl, and then we carried them to the main apartment and ate them slowly, luxuriously, like careful birds. When we finished, smacking our lips and smiling like lovesick fools, I briefly adored my little sister. She wasn’t perfect, but who was? We were blood, after all. We fell asleep holding each other, but this sweet moment did not last, because I woke up to screaming.
“They are thieves! Thieves! They stole my chocolate. I know they did! There were twelve pieces in that bowl when I left—now there are only ten!”
Aunt Yulia’s eyes were filled with venom; she had run in from outside and brought the chill with her, her cheeks still rosy. This angry woman had nothing in common with the soft woman I remembered guiding her daughter onto the train, yet there she was. Apparently Polya and I were not the most sophisticated criminals; we had left her door open. Mama and Papa stood beside her, looking troubled, while the Orlovs were near the balcony, gazing at the floor. Bogdan looked particularly upset by this turn of events, since he was the closest to Aunt Yulia on account of her daughter. Misha stood beside him, his hands by his sides, and I wanted him to rush over to protect me, but he didn’t do a thing.
“Is this true?” Papa asked us. I could hardly look at him.
I said nothing. Polya began to cry, instantly giving us away like the dimwit that she was. Once she nodded, I saw no use in denying it.
“We are starving, and you have all the food in the world. Have you no shame?” I said to Aunt Yulia.
Mama smacked me across the face, my cheek stinging wildly. “Are you mad, child? If it were not for Aunt Yulia’s generosity, we would be cold in the ground by now!”
“Thieves! Thieves!” the woman kept crying, ignoring my accusation.
Polya tried giving her the expression that predated our stay in the mountains, a certain batting of the eyes and pouting of the lips that typically worked like magic.
“Don’t look at me that way,” Aunt Yulia said to her, shaking her head. “I have seen you give that look to every man in your path. But you know what, child? Look in the mirror. That doesn’t work here. You don’t have your looks to fall back on anymore—none of us do. You need your brains, child, and you have not used them!”
Baba Tonya gasped. No one else had dared mention my sister’s waning appearance directly up to that moment. Aunt Yulia had diagnosed my sister perfectly. Polina could not forget the fawning gaze of Dimitrev senior, of her schoolboy walking companions, and she hadn’t yet accepted that she was just another starving girl. Bogdan was the only boy who noticed her, but their relationship was not romantic.
“You disgusting woman,” my grandmother said to Aunt Yulia. “She is hardly more than a child!”
“There are no children among us,” Aunt Yulia said, softening a bit, and I nearly pitied her, recalling her sweet daughter.
“Please, Antonina Nikolaevna,” my mother said to Baba Tonya, who stood behind a trembling Polya with her hands on her shoulders. “My deepest apologies, Yulia,” Mama said. “I promise you, my girls will be punished.” She gave her a roll of bread, which was to constitute most of our dinner, and the vile woman snatched it up and walked out, pivoting on her heel. How could she live with herself—walking out with her fat rear while two girls starved in her midst! Bogdan hesitated, and then he followed her down the hall. They spoke in low voices, but Polya’s cries drowned out their conversation. I hated my sister for being so weak.
Mama grabbed a rolling pin and raised it over our heads. She did not often hit us, and when she did, we usually deserved it. Mama smacked the pin into her hand several times. Polya did not seem terrified. In fact, she stepped closer, wanting to get the punishment over with. She even held out her hands, palms up.
“You are both hopeless!” Mama said with a sigh, tossing the pin on the floor. Her face contorted and I did not realize what was happening until a tear escaped her eye. Papa put a hand on the divan to steady himself, like he was going to faint. The moment was over before Mama could notice, and he put his arm around her and stroked her hair. He looked so small compared to her, and it seemed impossible that he could bring her anything resembling comfort.
“That Garanina woman is a tyrant,” muttered my grandmother.
“Nasty,” agreed Polya.
“Hideous,” I added, just for sport.
“Ruined,” said Mama.
“Broken,” Papa said.
“Doing her best to get by,” Bogdan said quietly from the doorway, venturing back into the room.
The Orlov parents stayed quiet, not certain how to weigh in. Of course the woman was a monster, but she gave us food. Even Misha still said nothing, which disappointed me. Did he care at all about how Polina and I were treated? Bogdan was close to Aunt Yulia, but what was Misha’s excuse? And yet, in spite of his twisted alliances, Bogdan put an arm around my sister. My grandmother stood on her other side and put a hand on her head.
Just then, Licky trotted in from the outdoors and nuzzled my sister’s legs. He was her biggest protector, and he continued to grow larger than any domestic cat I had ever seen, nearly reaching our waists, as if he were gaining all of the weight my sister had lost. Though Polya did not ride the creature all over town, as Papa had suggested, I was certain she could have. When he walked beside her as she weaved her way through the apartment buildings, he was truly her protector. Sometimes, old white Snowball would trot along with them, and the three of them painted quite a picture. And now she knelt down and wrapped her arms around him, like he was her prince, the only one who understood her.
Mama had stopped crying and collected herself and Papa followed suit.
“Foolish girls,” Papa said. “Nobody is angry with you, all right?”
“Nobody but your mother, it seems,” said Mama, toughening up now.
“Please, do not do this again,” said Papa. “There could be real
consequences for all of us. We must maintain cordial relations with that woman, don’t you understand?”
I understood nothing. I mumbled an apology and marched to the door with my sister. The adults seemed so defeated that I knew the discussion was over, that “there are no rules during war” would not impress at that juncture. I passed Misha on my way out, and I did not realize how angry I was with him until he reached out his useless hand and put it on my shoulder.
“Why didn’t you do anything?” I said.
“If there was something to do, I would have done it,” he said. “The best course of action was not to act, so I followed it.”
“You’re a coward.”
“Not at all,” he said. “It takes bravery to know when to restrain yourself.”
Polya wiped her face and laughed meanly. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” she said, and Misha lurched back, but he said nothing more. He looked away from me, down at the floor. My sister laughed darkly as she linked her arm through mine and led me away from him.
* * *
—
When winter finally released its icy grip on us, the brothers, Polina, and I celebrated by dueling with sticks near the woods. The government had given each family a sack of potatoes to plant after the final frost, and Mama and Aunt Tamara were planting their allotted share behind our building; however, Aunt Tamara had gotten it into her head that if she cut her potatoes in half, her family could eat half now and more would sprout when harvest came. Though Mama tried to dissuade her, there was no reasoning with the woman, and the mild air put everyone in such good spirits that she did not push the issue. The fathers were also out, smoking and muttering about our losses in Crimea and Kharkov; Licky and Snowball circled us as we played. We knew we were too grown for these escapades, but we were too happy to be outdoors to care.
Spring was almost upon us; a few bits of grass had clawed their way through the earth, still soggy from the melted snow. I was relieved to be outside, but I was still hurt that Misha had done nothing to defend me against Aunt Yulia, though I did not say anything about it; after all, he was my only companion, and what was I supposed to do? I knew Polina judged me for it, but she preferred the company of her cat, the dog, our grandmother, Bogdan, our parents—basically everyone’s over mine, so who was she to tell me who to spend time with?
“Fyodor Mikhailovich takes too long to get to the point,” Bogdan was saying, while fighting his brother. Though Misha and I had finished Karamazov just last week, and Bogdan snatched the book away from us afterward. And now he was claiming to have read it already. There was no way he could do it without skimming.
“You’re a dunce,” Misha said, but his brother was making him laugh. “He needs to take his time because his ideas are complex.”
“They seemed pretty simple to me. All that suspense over whether or not Father Zosima’s corpse would stink—I knew it would stink to the high heavens all along!”
“Aren’t you clever?” I said, switching off from fighting my sister to fighting Bogdan.
“I didn’t say I didn’t enjoy it,” he said. “I just said it took too long,” he said, flashing a smile.
“Dostoevsky has more to say about family and art in one sentence than you could ever say in your whole life,” I told him.
“I don’t know about that,” he said with a shrug. “You and your beauty of literature. Maybe I’m just too pedestrian.”
I stopped stick fighting him for a moment because I was stunned that he remembered what I said on the train so long ago.
“Perhaps,” I said, and I could see Misha watching the two of us, not liking what he saw.
“Besides, there weren’t any dream sequences,” Bogdan said with a wink, and now my sister was confused, feeling left out.
“All of it is boring nonsense,” she grumbled, and then she shoved me out of the way to fight Bogdan, leaving me to fight Misha.
“Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, even if that opinion is wrong,” Misha said, and we hit sticks, kicking up dirt. His nose was red and there was dirt in his hair, and I was still so very angry with him for not defending me, and for not even apologizing for it afterward. Meanwhile, Bogdan talked to Aunt Yulia and made her promise to continue giving us her extra food at the end of every week. But I had aligned myself with Misha. It was too late to turn back, but I had been hoping for some confirmation that I had made the right choice.
Now my sister was whispering in Bogdan’s ear and his lips curled into a smile as he absorbed whatever secret message she was imparting to him, likely something related to me and Misha. That was the first time I wondered if they were more than friends.
“Our opinions are just fine,” she told me, when she caught me staring. “I’d rather watch a lake freeze than read that dull book again.”
“You’re too young to understand. There’s nothing dull about it,” I told my sister, and she rolled her eyes while swatting her stick.
“Of course, Larissa,” she said, almost singing the words. “You know everything by now, don’t you?”
I got distracted and forgot to defend myself against Misha’s attacks. He jabbed his stick into my palm. I cried out and pressed my hand to my chest, and Misha threw down his stick and ran over to me to see the blood blooming on the inside of my hand.
“I’m so sorry, Larissa,” he said, putting an arm around me. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
I could see it in his brown, brooding eyes—he meant what he said, and this was it, the most he would give me, and I could either take it or continue to hold a grudge, which was no easy thing in a time of war.
“I know that. I know you didn’t,” I said, and then he put an arm around me and led me back to his alcove, where I avoided my sister’s gaze. I didn’t owe her an explanation for my alliances any more than she needed to tell me why she, Bogdan, and Licky were running up and down the hallway like schoolchildren while Misha and I pursued higher matters. He picked up my Tsvetaeva tome, though we had not read much poetry together, and it was a bit subversive to be reading her at that point.
“Are you ready, Larissa?” he asked, and I could not resist him.
* * *
—
At the beginning of the summer, the government gave our families a crate of food as a reward for the fathers’ continued work on the T-34, which they claimed would end the war any day now; by fall, our family harvested our potatoes, sharing half with the Orlovs, because of course Aunt Tamara’s sliced potatoes did not sprout a lick. Though Papa called her “our Gregor Mendel,” he was not angry, reasserting his claim that we were all one family. The crate of food and potatoes helped us make it through the summer, but we would not have survived without Bogdan, our main supplementary source.
One day, in the fall, he brought home three eggs, a tiny onion, and even a live chicken, which Mama carried onto the balcony and decimated with one swift twist of the neck, a familiar gesture from her childhood days, when she would routinely kill chickens to help out her mean old restaurant-owning aunts.
The stew Mama and Aunt Tamara made afterward! I can still taste its warmth coating my shivering tongue. We were in the highest of spirits after that particular meal. The food had even relaxed Baba Tonya enough for her to fall asleep with her eyes open, a state of hers that always unsettled me; she sat with her hands on her lap, but from her glazed eyes I could see she had temporarily left us. Even my sister was cheered, though she was still the weakest among us, her sagging arm flesh still held together by twine.
I was feeling bold. Though it was against our unspoken rules to ask Bogdan about the source of his bounty, I was so drugged from the food that I could not help myself, so I tugged at his sleeve and asked him where the eggs had come from.
He winked at me, reminding me of the fuller-faced boy he had been, not this gaunt man before me. “Eggs come from hens,” he said. “Don’t you kn
ow that? I thought you were the smart one around here.”
“Such a joker,” I said, and he laughed. I thought I saw Mama’s face harden, though it was impossible to be certain because she had taken on such a permanently stony visage. Bogdan shook his head, smiled, and returned to playing with the kitty. Licky was the only one thriving among us, scarfing down mice and other rodents left and right. Many times he had trotted up to my sister with a bloody offering she would make Bogdan throw out—on one occasion, he even honored my sister by depositing a mouse on her pillow.
My question about the food seemed to awaken my grandmother. She rubbed her eyes and narrowed them at me. “Do they taste good?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said.
“Then why does it matter?” she said, adjusting her boa like she had somewhere to be.
“Can’t a person be curious?” I said.
“Not here,” Baba said. I could not remember the last time I was reproached by my grandmother. It was like being chided by a baby.
“Enough,” Mama said.
As the women cleaned up, Papa and Uncle Konstantin spoke grimly of Leningrad, how the starving, surrounded city could not possibly make it through another year. Uncle Konstantin tried to offer some optimism, saying that surely the war was turning in our favor, hoping that we would stave off the Germans in Stalingrad any day now. It was hard to believe his patriotic claims because he kept pausing to catch his breath, to stave off the dizziness that plagued him. He was a few years older than the other parents, and it was showing. Misha listened intently to the men’s talk and quietly chimed in when appropriate. It became clear that no one would answer my pressing question about Bogdan’s missions.
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