“I would like you to be my wife,” he said, and then I laughed, because it was clear this was what he was after, and then I kissed him. I knew the poor boy had been planning to kiss me at last, and he seemed so scared that I wanted to take some of the pressure off him. His kiss was warm and comforting—it was like holding his hand, only better. I had never been kissed before but I could tell he wasn’t exactly Vronsky—it wasn’t the world’s most romantic display of affection, but it was hardly the time for romance. And besides, if Vronsky was to be a signpost, then I knew where too much romance would get you.
“I would like that very much,” I said.
He smiled and kissed me once more and squeezed my hand. He seemed utterly exhausted by the effort and soon settled into sleep.
But I had been wrong about one thing. Not everyone in the car had been asleep that night. Not long after Misha climbed into his bed, Bogdan turned around from where he had been resting with Polina in his arms and gave me a wicked wink. What did it mean? He had heard the entire clunky proposal and wanted me to know that he knew? That scoundrel. But what was I supposed to do with this knowledge? I shook my head at him and closed my eyes and pretended to drift off until I was certain he had turned back to my sister.
Misha was eager to announce the happy news the next morning, insisting it was the good and proper thing to do. I told him we should wait until we were all settled back in Kiev, but he believed the news would bring some necessary joy to our otherwise bleak lives. I didn’t see the point in fighting him; everyone would know eventually, wouldn’t they? I didn’t mention that his brother already knew, which likely meant that Polya did also. After everyone finished their tea and black bread, he stood, cleared his throat, and clasped my hand in his.
“We’re getting married,” he told everyone. “Once the war is over, of course.”
“It’s true,” I added.
It took everyone a moment to collect themselves, proving that I had been right, that it was not the time for such information. My face flushed as I saw the self-satisfied grin spread on Polya’s face as she confirmed her belief that I was under Misha’s spell; she thought he was spineless ever since he failed to defend us when we stole the chocolate and nothing he did could change her opinion of him. Bogdan stood completely still, for once, like the information did not reach his ears, this time around. He didn’t look at me or his brother, though I continued to stare at him, hoping for a smile, another wink, any kind of acknowledgment of the news being made public, until the first of the adults reacted.
“A joy,” Mama said, clasping her hands together.
“A wonderful union,” said Aunt Tamara.
“Many happy returns,” said Uncle Konstantin.
“Welcome news,” Polya muttered, as if she were forced under torture to say something.
“A useful alliance,” said Bogdan, so very pleased with himself.
No one else seemed to care that it sounded like he was talking about Hitler and Mussolini instead of two teenagers in love, like he was going to jump into more governmental critique then and there. Everyone took turns hugging us, but Polya barely touched me when hers came, it was like hugging air. Bogdan hugged me tightly, far too tightly, just to make a mockery of the entire thing. He released me at last, giving me a nod to make it clear he did not take my engagement seriously. But again, no one else seemed to notice anything awry. Perhaps I was just imagining things, I told myself, and tried to focus on the promising developments in my threadbare life. Not only had I become a woman, but I would soon be a wife.
* * *
—
I was restless the night before our train was to arrive in Kiev. While everyone else slept, I looked out the window near the empty bed in our car, not knowing what I was looking for. The farms slowly ceded to villages and hints that a city was looming on the horizon. Though I had been longing for Kiev since we left, I was terrified to return, though comforted by the fact that I would be doing so as Misha’s lifelong companion.
“It is hard to believe we’re only hours from the city.”
I did not jump at the sound of Bogdan’s voice. I had been waiting for him all along, though I did not know it until that moment. He had been the one I was searching for as I observed the dark night.
“As if our years in the mountains were a bad dream,” I said.
“A nightmare,” he added, “with some bright moments.”
I searched his face. He was gaunt but had grown nonetheless. His hair was long and greasy and I wanted to push it out of his eyes, to make him look more civilized. What did he want from me? Certainly he was not planning to congratulate me on my engagement.
I had the urge to ask him something, though I wasn’t sure what. Had he really meant it when he said he preferred me over my sister? Did he still feel that way, even if his actions suggested otherwise? Was he jealous of my “useful alliance,” or was he just being ornery? What were his designs on my sister? Would he continue his nightly escapades in Kiev, or were they truly a means to an end? What would the future hold for us all?
I gazed at the landscape again, a row of houses facing the station, a tractor gleaming in the distance, as if it could tell me what to say to him.
“That night when we were leaving Kiev on this very train—what were you shielding me from?”
His face fell. Clearly he had been expecting a question of a different nature, perhaps a romantic one, not for me to remind him of whatever darkness he had seen long ago. I must admit that I, too, was a bit shocked by my line of questioning.
“A pile of corpses,” he said.
“A pile of corpses?” I repeated, too loudly though no one stirred, and even surprised myself by laughing. “Is that all?”
He swallowed and took a step away from me. “It was something at the time.”
Then he seemed to reconsider. He grabbed my face with both hands, and planted a big, mean kiss on my lips. He even jammed his tongue in my mouth, which was the first time I had ever tasted a stranger’s tongue. I let it linger for a moment out of curiosity before pushing him away. The kiss did not exactly repulse me, but it angered me. The fact that he had gone from discussing a pile of corpses to kissing me showed that he was compelled by aggression, not affection. Additionally, he knew I was marrying his brother and didn’t honor our union. And he was entangled with my sister—disrespect all around. I pushed him away and kicked his ankle.
“What fire,” he said, putting a hand to his cheek and shaking his head, as if I were some coquette, as if the whole thing had not been his idea.
“What gall,” I said, but he just turned away and climbed back in bed with my sister.
He left me standing there, facing the window, confused and not knowing whether to laugh or cry at the prospect of my second kiss trailing my first by only a day. After a while, I was fairly certain I had hallucinated the kiss, that Bogdan couldn’t have possibly kissed me then, just like he couldn’t have possibly declared his feelings for me when my father had gone missing.
But this was all nonsense, to be put behind me at once. I pledged not to think of his sneaky, dirty kiss just as I told myself never to think of poor Licky once he was converted into stew. I also pledged not to think about my poor father, or even my wicked grandmother. And so I pressed my face up against the glass thinking about all the things I promised myself never to think about again until I saw Kiev looming in the distance and realized it was morning.
* * *
—
What else is there to say? Mama, Polya, and I returned to our communalka, which was largely intact except that some Germans had lived there and left with the Dimitrev cabinets and Stella and Ella, having taken them for brides. Aunt Mila’s husband went the way of Papa, and the Kostelbaums from below fared much worse. Even our groundskeeper, Maxim, who had once told my sister she could be a film star, had been purged. The empty rooms in my family’s
apartment were quickly filled with other families who returned from the war whose homes had been blighted, and Aunt Mila resumed fighting with them over her territory as she had done in a previous life, which lifted her spirits. But thankfully, I did not have to spend long in the apartment, which would never feel like home again.
Over a year after our return, Hitler was defeated, Misha and I were married, and I shed the Volkov name for good, becoming an Orlov and severing my tie to my dear father. Courtesy of Uncle Konstantin, Misha and I moved into a commodious single-family apartment on the Khreschatyk. Though it lacked a parquet or chandeliers, it was a palace compared to my old apartment, and I never felt quite comfortable in it. I visited Mama and Polya several times a week, where things were quiet but companionable, as they drank tea on the balcony and listened to the radio and brushed each other’s hair without any need for conversation. Though once, I walked into the house to hear my sister singing one of my grandmother’s ditties to Mama, the two of them laughing; I would have been less shocked if I had found my grandmother herself sitting on the pink divan.
Though I was relieved my mother had fallen back into her work and housework routine, my sister was more unknowable to me than ever, looking even more alien when she decided to chop off her pretty red hair not long after I married Misha, as if she hung on to it as a favor to me to avoid ruining our wedding photos with images of her short, boyish bob. When I first walked into the apartment to find my sister looking like a deflated asylum escapee, I backed up against the wall and took a deep breath before I offered my compliments.
My sister was still weak, prone to bouts of dizziness, and could hardly make it through her schooldays: the famed three Annas were just fine, it turned out, healthy-looking, even, but Polina showed little interest in reconnecting with them, and they stopped coming around. She was as lean as a birch tree, while I generally began to resemble a woman again and even had my monthly visitor return to me after a while, that reminder of my body’s purpose—I had not the slightest inkling over whether my sister ever menstruated at all.
When Polya wasn’t with our mother, she was either volunteering at a center for stray dogs run out of some abandoned schoolhouse or attending revolutionary meetings with Bogdan. It seemed that all of his late-night whispering after my grandmother’s death had its desired effect, and she was fully consumed by his impulsive ideals. If he had whispered that they should be trapeze artists and join the circus back then, then she would have been practicing her routine instead of criticizing the government by now. Her prewar indifference toward me had moved into slight hostility as she believed I was becoming frivolous, just because occasionally Misha would take me to the theater, a man whom she refused to truly acknowledge or respect, seeing him as the boy who stood by and did nothing when we were chastised over chocolate in the mountains, way back when. Other times, I wondered if it had nothing to do with Misha or my new lifestyle, and if she had seen me kissing Bogdan on the train, but I doubted it, and reminded myself that we were just falling back into our old ways. We were never friends, and it was as much my fault as hers.
But who needed Polina or Bogdan? I had my dear, sweet Misha. No matter how long the days were, we would read in bed at night, in a far more comfortable environment than the alcove of our mountain days. Our first year back in Kiev, we blew through Oblomov and War and Peace and Crime and Punishment, and I loved him more than ever, wondering at how, just four years earlier, I fantasized about him in my tiny home and now had him all to myself in a big, warm bed. But a few months after we were married, he put a stop to our nightly ritual. After a long day at the Institute and a quiet dinner, he asked if we could listen to the radio instead.
“I thought you loved reading as much as I did,” I said. He kissed me and said, “I liked it, of course. But I am so worn out with work that I need to unwind in the evenings, not stir myself up with literature. Besides,” he added with a twinkle in his eye, “reading was what got me close to you, and now I have you.” I could not tell him it was not a matter of having or not having but of renewing that having day after day, and so there he went, severing the thread that tied us together. I tried to be sympathetic to the immense pressure he felt at the Institute, knowing he would one day follow in his father’s golden footsteps—if listening to the radio at night helped him relax, then so be it. He was still prone to the bouts of melancholy that would leave him staring at the ceiling while I read in bed, as if the answers to the world’s ills could be found there. I did not offer any choice passages to him as comfort; I did not conjure Akhmatova’s own suffering and cry, “It drags on forever—this heavy, amber day!/How unsufferable is grief, how futile the wait!” because I knew it was best to leave him alone. At first, I used the folded parchment with the Tsvetaeva poem he had used to win me over as a bookmark, until one day, it disappeared, and I did not go searching for it.
I did, however, go searching for my pretty former teacher, Marina Igorevna. After Misha’s betrayal, I was desperate to see her. I found her in the same classroom where she had taught me after school, and she gave me a bewildered glance when I knocked on her door, taking a moment to place me, which stung. “Of course,” she had said eventually. “My little reader.” I told her I was a literature student now, that reading all those books out in the mountains had kept me from going mad. She said she, too, had evacuated with her family, and from the look in her eyes, I had the sense she had lost someone or everyone. She looked out the window and then back at me, and patted my hand. “I’m happy you’re still reading. Keep your chin up now, dear Lyudmila,” she said, and I thanked her and walked out, understanding she would not be my reading partner either.
I stopped brooding over Misha’s betrayal eventually—I had more pressing concerns. I was expecting. Soon I would have a little child on my hands with whom I could read for hours every night, filling the void my husband created. But almost eight months into my pregnancy, I had an unwelcome distraction from my enormous belly. When the Orlov family and mine sat down to dinner for Uncle Konstantin’s sixtieth birthday, Bogdan stood under an enormous chandelier and said he had an announcement. We all assumed it was that he and Polya were getting married, but instead, he said that their papers finally went through and they were moving to Rome the following week. I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. “It’ll be an adventure,” said my sister, flashing a big, dumb smile. I had to restrain myself from bursting into tears or slapping my sister—I was already a puddle of hormones—for being such a thoughtless, selfish girl. I didn’t care a lick if she or Bogdan stuck around, but what about our poor mother?
Rome! A place of such unimaginable romance that I could not picture it at all. It belonged to the list of lush, Western cities that my grandmother might have fled to during the Revolution, so remote from the snowy Kiev landscape that they might as well have been moving to Jamaica. Bogdan said he knew some people there, which meant he had revolutionary buddies, of course. His parents acted as if a demon had possessed their son, but Mama just wiped her face with a napkin and said, “Whatever makes you happy, dears.” I should not have been as surprised as I was. Bogdan was the one who stood under the moonlight with me and Licky when he revealed the cat’s fate to me and said, “We all want to roam.” And he did whisper to my sister that he wanted to leave the country, but I believed it was just fantasy; the son of the director of the Industrial Engineering Institute could not stray far from home. But what did I know? Uncle Konstantin moved toward the gold-railed balcony. “I don’t know you,” he muttered, without turning around to face his son.
A week later, I was at the station to see my sister and Bogdan off with the rest of the family. The Orlovs stood with Mama, who had convinced them to come in spite of their anger at Bogdan, as well as Aunt Mila, Mama’s favorite non-Polina companion; the parents had already hugged the defectors goodbye and took two steps back, ceding the stage to me and Misha, though I didn’t have the faintest idea of what I was expected to sa
y. I tried to ignore Mama’s stony face, the face of someone who had lost her husband and now her daughter, and told myself I should end things on a good note. Who knew when Polina and I would see each other again?
My sister was pale and dead-eyed, with her short limp hair wilting below her ears, though its fiery color could not be denied. She looked like a bedraggled, slightly unstable boy. I recalled the old Polina with two braids in her hair, hugging the three Annas goodbye in our courtyard the night before we left for the mountains, looking absolutely lovely as she wept for them, a porcelain doll in mourning. When her friends parted, she sank to her knees to emphasize her struggle, in case any stray men were watching. I never denied her beauty, though she drove me mad with her vanity, but now I wondered if she could have used just a bit of it.
I cupped her pale face in my hands. “You are still beautiful,” I told her. “Just—take care of your hair a bit more….”
“Beautiful?” she said with a cruel little laugh. “You think I still care about any of that?” She gave me a steely gaze, studying the new shoes and sturdy wool coat Misha had procured for me; I was eight months pregnant, for heaven’s sake, not some elegant starlet, but it was true, my clothing did look nice in comparison to my sister’s worn coat and scuffed boots.
“You can care a little bit about appearances,” I told her. “It won’t kill you.”
“Is that right, Larissa? Our grandmother cared about appearances, didn’t she? And look where it got her.”
Her point was valid, but why did she have to bring it up now? Our grandmother, who threw herself under a train just like the one that had stopped before us over a dumb necklace. My sister peered at it like she could see through it, like she was the newly hardened girl standing at the edge of the tracks looking down on our mangled grandmother. And if she were still with us, then who knew, perhaps Polina would have remained frivolous and avoided getting caught up with Bogdan’s antics. Her eyes bore into me and I took a step back, not wanting to end our last meeting for a long time on this sour note. I looked back at the parents, who thankfully didn’t seem to hear us over the bustle. Bogdan and Misha, who did hear, did nothing.
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