Who could say my grandmother did the right thing? When I was a kid, I didn’t understand who the random men were who came to the sea with us; I thought they were cousins, and only when I was maybe eleven did Baba tell me that it was best I didn’t mention uncle this or that to my grandfather, when I understood what was happening when she told me to “explore the beach” on my own one evening. Though the men visited less often as she got older, the last one I remember was the summer after Mama died, when Baba had the nerve to invite one of them over even though it was supposed to be the summer of grieving and Papa was sleeping in the next room. That was the only time I addressed it, waiting up for her at the kitchen table like my mother had done for me: “Do you have to right now?” I had asked, trying to look strong, to keep my face free of Mama-related tears. She gave me a long, resigned shrug and said, “People die, the heart wanders, life goes on,” and marched toward her room, filling the cottage with her snores almost instantly while I stayed up, furious with her and missing Mama hard.
The sun is already peeking through the window, and Tally starts whimpering, which means it’s six and time to start my day, though I’m pretty sure I haven’t slept a wink. As I nurse her, I’m thinking pointless thoughts like how long did Mama even nurse me for, why don’t I even know this most basic thing, would Baba know, why did it matter how long she stuck it out for when she’s nearly twenty years dead? And I can’t help but wonder: how would Mama take it, me putting on this play? Would she tell me to start shoveling cat shit instead, or would Mama—the late, final-days singing version of Mama, not the cold, college-application-focused Mama I remember from most of my days—be proud of me for trucking on?
Then again, Mama was always opposed to my pursuits of anything vaguely artistic, or even literary, and wasn’t particularly thrilled when Baba gave me a stack of books every year on my birthday and set a date for when I would discuss each one, from the plays of Chekhov to Tsvetaeva. Mama found this to be a distraction from my studies, not understanding that they would be neglected anyway. She would see me reading Baba’s books and would raise a brow, saying, “For hours you’ll read Chekhov, but you can’t be bothered to study for your biology exam….” “Chekhov was a doctor,” I told her once, which actually got her to laugh and even stick out her tongue at me, throwing her hands up at the situation, one of the rare times anything I said to her was met with approval.
After Tally’s done nursing I do my mom things, trying not to wake up Stas, I down a banana and take my girl out for a stroll, my head in a fog the whole time. Tally is sleepy and full and smiling at me, so utterly content from something as simple as milk from my boobs. When we get back, Stas is having his breakfast cigarette on the balcony, preparing to listen in on my Baba call. I put Tally down in her crib while Yuri still sleeps like the dead, and curl up for a bit next to him before it’s time for Baba, though I need to brush my hair, at least. But there’s no time, my Skype is dinging already, so I just run a hand through my hair and sit at my little desk and answer, ready to spend some time away from my own shit.
Baba looks put-together as usual, her hair in a long braid and pearls on, and she squints at me, like she has smelled something foul beyond the cigarette smoke around her.
“What’s the matter now?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I tell her. “I couldn’t sleep last night.”
“Who can?” she says, and this manages to make me smile.
I’m already emotional as fuck and seeing my grandmother at that kitchen table makes me want to weep, especially because she’s leaving Kiev for good tomorrow, and the furniture will be gone for good too. That wobbly little table is the only plain piece of furniture in her apartment, where I would sit with her and Dedya whenever I visited, eating our kasha and eggs, though there was a big dining room with a glass table around the corner my grandfather liked more. My grandmother insisted the little table was more cozy, and I didn’t mind, I liked it, how we all knocked elbows as Baba pushed more sweets on us, all that morning light flooding our faces. “More sweets for my sweet,” my grandfather would say, while I would wrinkle my nose and tell him, “It’s too early.” Would it have killed me to eat a jam-filled pastry or two instead of being a surly, weight-obsessed teenager? It would have made my grandfather so happy, though I guess it doesn’t matter now. “Never too early for dessert,” my grandmother would always say.
“Are you ready for your big move?” I ask her.
“As much as one can be, I suppose.”
“You won’t miss the apartment?”
“There is always something to miss about a place,” she says, and I know she means the kitchen in particular.
Tally’s crying again, and I take her out of the room where Yuri is blissfully sleeping; he wouldn’t bat an eye through Armageddon, that bastard. I sick her on my boob and stroke her cheek as I watch Baba watching us. Stas is on his phone on the balcony, but I won’t wait for him.
“A good little thing,” Baba says, gesturing at my girl.
“You could see her in person,” I try again. “You can see what a good girl she is. You can see me and Yuri too. That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” I know it’s pointless, but you can’t keep me from trying. And if I really do put on this play, then she really has to come.
She smiles slowly. “It would be something unbelievable,” she says, but she’s not really listening.
Then her face relaxes, her eyes softening as she looks away from the screen, out her kitchen window, easing into remembering.
PART III
Happy Wife
Larissa
Uncle Pasha arrived about a month after Licky’s death to embark on his journey to find food in a neighboring village with Papa. Two years had passed since I saw him, and he was, of course, greatly diminished. I’d always thought of him as a diminished version of my father, but now he was objectively smaller, like a boy playing dress-up in a man’s clothes, his broken nose even more severe because the rest of his face had sunken in so much. Papa clung to him for a long time when he and I greeted him at the station, and as they spun and hugged, for a brief moment, they were restored.
My uncle arrived to our apartment in a buoyant mood, and all of us were cheered in his presence. Even Polina deigned to leave the bed where she had been moping ever since Licky died to join us. My uncle could see the dire state my sister was in. “My darling princesses are more radiant than ever,” he tried, gesturing at us both, but my sister barely mustered a smile.
Polya hardly spoke to any of us except my grandmother since the Licky incident. While the rest of us fattened up on her cat’s meat, she spent most of her time curled up in bed, vomiting air, moaning, clutching her stomach, and pulling at her hair and sweating as if the spirit of her cat were still contained within her body and she was desperate to exorcise every last bit of the creature. Occasionally, she would step out on the balcony, as if she spotted her resurrected cat wandering out of the woods once more, eager for another trot around town with her. But since her cat would not come back from the dead, my sister did her best to avoid the living.
Uncle Pasha got her to eat her dinner, at least, and she seemed genuinely amused when he jumped up and down like a child, demonstrating a performance he and my father had put on when they were kids in the orphanage. But Mama was not amused by his antics, for once. She was quiet that evening, pulling out strands of her already-thinning hair. She was worried about their trip.
“We had the whole dance perfected,” Uncle Pasha said, jumping around and clicking his heels, oblivious to my mother’s fragile state. “We could have taken it on the road.”
“You should have,” Polya said, giggling as he danced like a nincompoop, shocking all of us with her laughter.
“The reward was seeing the joy on the children’s faces. There was no price on that,” Papa said, and then he laughed sadly. I understood it: he had a better time in the orphanage than he
did here, because there, he was able to help the other children by cheering them up. Or at least to feel like he had done something for them. Now he hardly felt equipped to help his own family.
They continued to laugh for a long time while the rest of us watched and even tried to join in, though the thing between them, their brotherhood and their memories of orphan times, was impossible to penetrate. And this act of theirs was perhaps their way of gearing up for the journey ahead.
As they spoke of the war, Uncle Pasha was on edge. This was because though his city of Kharkov had been recaptured by the Red Army, the Germans, though depleted, were knocking at his city’s door yet again. My grandmother tried comforting him about his adopted city, putting a hand on his knee, but he just shook her off. He didn’t address her directly until the very end of the night, as the adults were preparing for bed. “Exhausted, Mother?” he said with a cruel smirk, and she told him that indeed she was.
That night, I couldn’t sleep. I tried reading Tsvetaeva by candlelight, but it did me no good, reading about another woman’s obsession with the abyss and sleeplessness. I snuck into Mama and Papa’s room, where Mama and Uncle Pasha were sound asleep, while Papa was missing from his bed. I went to the balcony and spotted him outside, standing under his favorite linden tree, staring out at the dark woods. I threw on Mama’s coat and stepped out. I didn’t realize it was still so cold in the middle of the night, this far into the spring.
My father looked small from a distance, not like anybody’s husband or father. His breath clouded around him and for a moment I thought he was smoking, though Papa did not smoke. He did not look like he wanted to be disturbed, but I could not help myself.
“Larissa,” he said. “You should be in bed.”
“I’m having trouble sleeping.”
“Your father is also having some trouble, I’m afraid.”
He put an arm around me and kept staring into the woods like there was something in there I couldn’t see. Papa had aged considerably since we arrived in the mountains. He looked at least ten years older than he did on the day when we arrived and he compared our new home to his orphanage. He looked almost like a grandfather, the gray roaming in his still-thick hair and the skin sagging under his eyes and neck.
“Papa?”
“Yes, darling,” he said, his voice heavy.
“Are you all right?”
“Of course,” he said, but then he lowered his head in his hands.
“Lara, dear,” he said. “When I look back on my life, do you know what makes me the most proud?”
Papa’s eyes made me think I was not expected to answer. What, that he rose out of the nothing of the orphanage to become second in command to the most powerful engineer in Ukraine? That he did not let his mother defeat him? That he married a strong woman like Mama?
“It is not my work on the T-34, I will tell you that,” he said. He patted the top of my head. “You,” he said. “You and Polina. Of course your mother is my world, but I am most proud of the girls we have raised. Everything else is just wind through the trees,” he said, repeating his favorite expression.
“What if I’m happy on my own, like Uncle Pasha?” I asked, this time unafraid to challenge his declarations about family life. My dear uncle, who was peacefully sleeping inside while my father fretted, always seemed lighter on his feet than Papa.
Papa stopped in his tracks. His eyes brimmed with terrible longing. “Your uncle is missing the greatest joy of life, dear Larachka. One day, you will have a family of your own, it’s no question,” he said. “And you must be true to them. And when it comes down to it, you must forget everybody else. Life isn’t long enough, the heart isn’t large enough, to contain love for all of humanity, even if that makes you a bad Communist,” he added with a lowered voice. He nodded toward the apartment. “Your sister is struggling,” he said. “She needs you. You may not see it, but she does.”
“Why can’t you and Mama take care of her? She hates me,” I said, crossing my arms, but he already looked so defeated on the eve of his journey that I didn’t want to complicate matters. I wanted to take him by the hand and lead him back to the stove, where I could nestle against his chest like I did when I was a little girl, drifting off to the sound of his calm, even breath.
“She loves you deeply, Larissa. She’s your sister. It’s plain as day. Just do your best to be kind to her, little dove. Do you promise?”
“I promise,” I said, though I didn’t mean it, not truly. I squeezed his hand and added, “You’re doing all you can for our family, Papa. And so much more.”
But this brought him no comfort. He just shook me away and lifted his head back up, in the direction of the forest. I wondered if he, too, wanted to run away like the partisans, but begging him to stay would do no good, I knew. I kissed him on the cheek and gazed into those woods one last time, as if I could see whatever it was out there that haunted him so much, but there was nothing, just dark pines under the moonlight, clouded by Papa’s white breath.
* * *
—
I fell into a cold panic after the third day passed without Papa and Uncle Pasha’s return. I was certain they were not coming back, that they had contracted a fatal illness or got killed by Nazis or hit by bombs or had met their fates in some other tragic manner. Misha and I were revisiting Onegin during that period—by then we had memorized most of it—and while imagining a frivolous life of country soirees and petticoats had helped me through the dark winter months, it felt like an absurd indulgence after Papa had left. After a night of distracted reading, Misha put a hand on my wrist and said, “We don’t have to do this right now.” I thanked him and got up, and when he tried to follow me, I told him I’d like to be alone. I kept seeing Papa at the edge of those woods, wondering if there was anything I could have said to dissuade him from making the journey, to keep him at home, with us, where he was needed.
After Papa had been gone for five days, I went out in the middle of the night, after Baba Tonya and Polina had finished another round of nonsense. I stood under the linden tree and stared at the dark sky. I did not believe in God, of course. Nobody in my family or in the apartment believed in God or anything ludicrous like that, but I could not help but wonder where people go when they are no longer on Earth. It seemed cruel and unusual for us to turn to dust and corpses, to be reduced to memory and anecdote, and I longed for something more. I wondered if my father and Uncle Pasha were somewhere up with the moon and the stars, not with gods, but just, I don’t know, floating around.
“What are you thinking?”
Bogdan materialized beside me. I wasn’t really surprised to see him. He was coming back from one of his late-night exploits. I tried not to get close to him, to avoid the scent of another woman’s sweat or perfume.
I sighed. “I can’t take any more of this waiting.”
“I can’t imagine,” he said. He moved closer to me, but I did not smell the smelly ladies of his trysts. He grabbed my hand and said, “If you need anything, I am always here.”
“How so?” I said. I could not take his kindness. “What, you think I am one of your middle-aged ladies? I don’t have any eggs for you.”
He was quiet for a beat. I had never acknowledged his ladies before, though I assumed he knew I knew by then. He said, “I am only doing what I need to do to help the family. You think I enjoy myself out there?”
“I don’t want to think about what you do out there.”
“Well, it’s not exactly something I look forward to,” he said, shaking his head. Then his face broke into a playful smile. “Just very occasionally. There is one number—” he began, and I punched his chest. He had so much vigor I did not expect him to be so bony. He saw I was in no mood for jokes and continued on. “If we make it out of here alive, I’m getting the hell out of Kiev.”
I didn’t really believe him, but I indulged him anyway. “Whe
re will you go?”
“Far from the Soviet Union. Somewhere more—civilized. This place is shit. Do you even know what’s going on back home? Half of Leningrad has starved, and most of the Jews have been wiped out by our own people. Even the children, they don’t spare anyone.”
I looked out at the empty field ahead, searching for my father’s figure. Of course, in theory, I felt very sorry for the people who were even hungrier than we were in Leningrad, though it was hard to picture them. And I was sorry for the Jews too, especially my downstairs neighbors, if what he said was true, but the fact remained that my stomach was groaning and my father was missing.
But he went on. “But things are taking a turn for the better. I wouldn’t be surprised if we took Kiev back any day now,” he said, and this was so shocking to me that I could not even fathom it. I didn’t bother asking how he knew all this; I didn’t want to hear him mysteriously whisper “my sources,” with an added wink. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of thinking he knew more than I did about anything.
Bogdan put an arm around me and I shook him off. Polina was the one he preferred and touched, not me.
“You don’t have to be nice to me,” I said. “Why don’t you go comfort my sister instead?”
“Has it ever occurred to you that I’m not just being nice to you? That I might even prefer you over your sister?” he said. I was startled by his rising voice. He was finally angry. I was horrified and thrilled that I had managed to produce this effect.
“Why would you do that, now?”
He shrugged. “It’s just a feeling.”
I looked away, my eyes smarting, missing my father, still convinced Bogdan was only saying these things to cheer me up. What gave him the nerve to declare this now? I thought once more of how different he was from his courteous, conscientious brother, who would never overstep his bounds or bring on this emotional assault during such a turbulent time, who was waiting for the perfect conditions to declare his love.
Something Unbelievable Page 14