by Ellen Litman
They attempt to decline, but the host is insistent, almost dismayed at their reluctance to join in, and it’s true they haven’t eaten much today, and what they’ve got in their bags is just hot dogs, potatoes, and milk.
In the large central room the lights are off and there’s dancing. Two rooms over, a small crowd has gathered around a modest dinner table. There are some empty vodka bottles and a couple that are still half-full. Some bread and sardines. A cracked dish with the dregs of a potato salad.
“Howdy,” says a hulking lad dressed in a sailor’s shirt, who seems to be the instigator here. Their host has dissolved as suddenly as he appeared, and they’re left at the mercy of these folks. The sailor boy tells them to sit. “Better to be cramped but with no sore feelings.” He orders the rest to make room. They crowd onto a battered couch: Nikita, Kat, the sailor, a country bumpkin boy with a guitar, a surly girl with streaked and bristly hair.
The sailor, Kat thinks, is kind of handsome (though definitely not her type), dark-haired, square-jawed, green-eyed. He’s like an actor in a movie—a Red Army commissar or the skipper of a mutinous ship—though his features are a tad too heavy. He speaks in a slurry, lisping way, and Kat can’t tell if it’s a real speech impediment or whether he just does it to be silly.
He pours her vodka in a faceted glass, before passing the bottle to Nikita. “Drink,” he says. “Drink up. Booze is our riches.” He is looking at her with approval, at her miniskirt (Jules’s), her low-cut lilac sweater (Anechka’s), her legs in sheer nylon hose; and though he’s nobody and she’s got Nikita, his admiration pleases her.
She hasn’t eaten anything since breakfast, but she picks up her glass gamely and takes a midsize gulp. The horridness, the burn of it, knocks out her breath for a few seconds, but soon the warmth begins to spread inside her chest, and suddenly her problems begin to seem fuzzy and distant. So what if her mother is having an affair? So do hundreds of women and men. She doesn’t need her mother anyway. She’s not a baby.
Nikita says to go easy. She smiles in a dopey, already drunken way—not that she’s drunk, she can’t be yet.
“She’s a pro,” says the sailor, “a real Russian girl who knows her liquor.”
Kat takes another, smaller, sip.
“What college do you go to?” she asks.
The sailor grins. “The Institute of Alcoholic Engineers.” The surly girl bares her teeth (is she the sailor’s girlfriend?) and the country bumpkin nods like he agrees.
Kat is squeezed on the couch, Nikita’s arm around her shoulders, her knee bumping the sailor’s knee. Without the drink, it would be awkward. She takes careful swigs of her vodka—like swallowing fire, but worth it—and laughs at the sailor’s dumb jokes. When she hears a rock song she knows, a manic underground song she’s only heard a couple times before, she tells him it’s her favorite.
“Mine too,” he says. “Let’s dance.” He pulls her to the dark room with the stereo. She looks back to Nikita, who just shrugs. Doesn’t he want to have some fun, to be one of these drunk, uncomplicated people?
The song is boisterous and fast. Kat abandons herself to the music, swivels her hips, extends her arms, and it seems like for once in her life she can be normal.
The next song comes and it’s a slow one, and now the sailor clutches her too close. He twists her at the waist in crude, exaggerated motions, grinding his hips into hers. She tries to draw back, but he won’t release her. “You’re such a fox,” he mumbles. “What’s that kid doing with a foxy thing like you?”
“Let go of me,” she says. He acts as if he doesn’t hear her.
He runs his hands over her back, and he must sense its weirdness, because all of a sudden he loosens his grip.
She wriggles free and rushes to Nikita. She says, “I’m such an idiot.” He holds her, lets her whisper her apologies into the warm skin of his neck, that spot where the skin meets the rough yarn of his sweater, the faint trace of cough drops, aftershave, and sweat. Without him she’s nothing, a drunk girl at a party, motherless, homeless, easy and physically flawed.
“Take me to bed,” she says. “Make love to me.”
INSTEAD OF going to school that week, Kat stays at the apartment. On a couple of mornings she sneaks home, to shower and pack fresh clothes, then dashes back to their small room. She lets herself in with a key Nikita gave her. Most days the apartment is empty; only she and Nikita are there. Nikita makes their dinner—eggs, hot dogs, fried potatoes. He asks her if she’s hungry. “Starving,” she says. They eat cross-legged on the floor, a pot or frying pan steaming between them, and later they move to the mattress, to nap, talk, or make love. He jots down notes for his fledgling historical play, which features both Stalin and Peter the Great. Or he reads Natan Eidelman, his favorite Jewish historian, who seems to have defied all odds.
“Did you know he went to Moscow State University?”
Kat says that that was the fifties, a totally different time.
“He stuck to his guns,” says Nikita, “while I, like a coward, backed down before giving it a try. And now look where my caution has got me. The exact place I was so eager to avoid.”
“Yes, but you haven’t been drafted yet—”
He says, “It’s going to happen.”
“Maybe they’ll somehow miss you, or give you a deferral of some sort, and then when summer comes you’ll go for the History and Archives.”
“Oh, you!” he says, hugging her. “You’re such a dreamer.” And yet he must need her assurance, the strength of her devotion and her love. No matter what happens, she knows she will stay with him.
They talk about Sumgait and Kratovo and what it means to be a Jew, to live in a world so hostile and random. “What I’ve learned,” says Nikita, “is that you can’t betray your conscience. Better to take a risk and crash, go to prison or into the army, than lie low like a reptile all your life.”
Reptiles, Kat thinks, and then she thinks of Anechka and Misha. She used to believe they were heroes, dissidents, risking their lives every day. But were they really? They never left a trace or signed any important letters, and when they published anything, in small samizdat magazines, they always used fake names. Was it such a big risk to copy manuscripts or watch a demonstration from across the street? True, they spread the word among their students, they had those illicit gatherings where they played Okudzhava and Galich songs and read Solzhenitsyn’s works aloud. There was danger in that, she supposed. A slight danger. A student could have blurted out the truth to someone and then they would have lost their jobs. But they stopped the gatherings around the time Kat got sick. It was all in the past, in the seventies.
“Don’t be unfair,” says Nikita. “They’re human, they did what they could. Most people in their place did nothing.” It seems that he still worships them a little, still trusts in their bohemian, freewheeling ways, unwilling to accept that it’s a sham or a magic trick, at best—a beautiful illusion.
Some nights Nikita goes out to the phone booth, since the apartment has no phone, and then one night he goes home. His parents, he says, want to speak to him. He tells Kat to be careful, to lock the door and stay inside their room. She hates being there without him.
“Playing house?” Jules asks when Kat calls her on Saturday. “How long are you planning to live in that dump?”
“It’s not a dump. We both happen to like it.”
“We?” Jules says, in her sarcastic voice. “I thought he was getting drafted. Just do me a favor and don’t get knocked up.”
“We’re being careful,” Kat says, though she doesn’t really know if they are or not. She just takes it for granted that Nikita’s doing something, and if they fail then so be it. She pictures it sometimes, becoming pregnant with his child. Working by day, studying by night, living in squalor while Nikita’s in the army. It seems like something from a movie, a dignified if taxing life.
She does return to school the following Monday, because Nikita says she must. There’s no sense in her ge
tting kicked out of eighth grade, in both of them becoming failures. She misses him terribly, though he comes to see her twice that week. She wonders what he does without her. Does he stay in their room or with his parents? Read, study, or work on his play? Or does he give in to despair?
School is torture, everyone a stranger shooting Kat sneering, mean looks, though Jules insists she just imagines it. “You missed a week of school—it’s not that weird. They probably think you had flu.” But Kat knows better. Never before has she felt like such a misfit. She can’t conceive of speaking to these people, trusting them enough to tell them something true. It’s like she and Nikita have their own language. Even Jules wouldn’t get it, the sort of things the two of them discuss. Whenever Kat mentions being Jewish, Jules turns dismissive, brusque, as if she finds the fact embarrassing.
All week Kat keeps avoiding Misha, fleeing his classroom after literature and grammar, hiding in crowded hallways, even ducking into the bathroom when she sees him advancing her way. It goes on like this for a few days, until they bump into each other at the canteen entrance, Kat leaving, Misha going in.
“Are you all right then?” he says, stumbling, not daring to look her in the eyes.
“Couldn’t be better,” she answers.
“You want to maybe talk about it?”
“About what?”
He shakes his head. “You know, life.”
“Life’s shooting up like a fountain,” she says, being a jerk. But it’s all she can think of at the moment: song lyrics, adages, clichés. “Life is not a picnic.” “Life is not a bowl of cherries.” “Don’t feel down, pal—your life is still ahead of you.” “If you live with wolves, you have to howl like one.”
Of course, he has to know that she left home and that she missed a week of school. And yet, once again, he does nothing. How like Misha to avoid the slightest conflict, to descend into utter passivity, to suppress, even obliterate himself. She could step in front of a bus tomorrow and he’d make no move to save her.
“How’s Anechka?” she asks him pointedly.
“There’s nothing wrong with her,” he says.
“Is that so? You spoke to her? You know where she’s staying?”
Misha says, “Stop it.” He raises his hand as if trying to defend himself.
“She left,” Kat says, “and you—you let her go!” But Misha won’t listen; he just walks away.
Jules says she is wasting her energy. She should be thinking of her future. It’s just a few months until their graduation, and Kat’s been acting stupid and so far made no plans. On the way to Kratovo that Sunday, Jules makes a list of schools Kat should apply to: two English schools, one with a strong humanities curriculum, plus Anechka’s lyceum, which she adds despite Kat’s protests. Local schools, Jules says, are for plebs and nobodies, and Kat is way too smart to go there. Nor can she stay at their current school, because that would be hell.
Kat didn’t want to go to Kratovo this morning. She’d missed the last two Sundays and it seemed easier to skip this one as well. She woke up on Nikita’s mattress, her forehead pressed against his back, and thought, why can’t they stay like this all day? But soon enough he stirred and said he had to meet his brother—he’d promised to help him with something, a move, a room, a broken-down car—and that he’d see Kat in the evening, after it was done.
So now she’s stuck on this train, and Jules keeps nattering on about Kat’s lack of motivation, while Serge gazes out the window, as if he can’t be bothered with either of them. He’s been disapproving about Kat’s absences, incensed that she’d behave in such a reckless way, and as for Jules’s plans, he probably thinks them a fantasy. She fully expects him to ask what’s wrong with their current school, why it’s good enough for him but so detestable fo Kat. She wouldn’t know how to answer.
“There’s this school I heard about,” he says, still focused on the passing scenery. “Part of the Gnesinsky or something.”
“Acting?” Jules asks. “Kat has no interest in acting.”
Serge says, “I thought she might. But what do I know? I’m your village idiot, your holy fool.”
“Touchy,” Jules observes. “Fine, I’ll add it.”
“Gnesinsky or something,” she scribbles at the bottom of the list, reading it aloud as though to pacify him.
Kat thinks how easy it must be for the pair of them to give advice. To live in a world with no limits, where no one will squint at your passport. To become a diplomat, journalist, historian—or even an actress, if you’re so inclined—because, as the famous song goes, all roads are open to our youth! Unless you’re a Jew, of course. In which case you find yourself just like Nikita, standing in the admissions office and being told about quotas.
It occurs to Kat now how much she must have changed. She’s a different person—a better person, to be sure, but also wearier and older. In just a few months, her world has grown simple: it’s her and Nikita and no one else. So what does it matter what school she might attend next year, or if she’s going to stay in school at all? They’ll take it day by day. They’ll figure it out together.
It’s clear, though, that for Jules school is important, so maybe it’s not that surprising when later that afternoon, she turns to speak to Alexander Roshdal.
“I’m so grateful, Alexander Pavlovich. My parents, too—they say I’ve made tremendous progress. But you see, I’ve only got two months before my interview, and the school is simply too competitive. They’ve been doing geography in English. Next year it’s modern history and math. So my father’s made arrangements with another tutor. I hope this doesn’t upset you.” She trails off, looks down at her plate.
“Thank you, Jules,” Roshdal says. “I appreciate your candor. Of course you must do what is best for your work.”
“You’re quitting just like that?” Kat says. She’s hurt that Jules didn’t think to tell her. But now she sees that it’s Valentina who’s the most upset. She seems unsettled, almost frantic, looking from Jules to Kat to Serge, as if afraid she’s missing something. “Jules,” she says, “darling, you won’t be coming next weekend?”
“I’m sorry,” Jules says, “I’ll really miss my time with you.”
“What about the rest of you, children? Surely you’re coming back.”
“They’re always welcome here, Valechka. I think they know that.”
Serge jumps in to say that they’ll see them both next Sunday.
But how can he promise that? Doesn’t he know that they won’t be coming back? Or they might—for a birthday or berry-picking in the summer, but not like they used to and not every weekend. Life has already scattered them to their respective corners.
She’s about to say she can’t make it when Serge catches her eye. Don’t do it, he seems to be asking her. Don’t tell them yet.
Kat drops her head and mutters that she has to check her schedule—school has gotten so busy, what with the upcoming exams.
Serge rolls his eyes theatrically. “That’s Kat for you. Always fretting about her grades.”
“Grades are important,” Roshdal says. “Maybe next week you both should take a break and study.”
“We’ll see about that,” Serge says, and what a perfect little scene they’ve just enacted. The three of them, they ought to be on stage. Valentina leans back in her chair, relieved. What good children they are, Serge and Kat. What good actors.
JULES CATCHES the subway to Taganka, leaving the two of them together on the platform. Serge probably expects to go with Kat, to shadow her home like he always does. She could have thought of an excuse, but she’s too tired now. Tired of faking it. Tired of hopping on and off trains. All she wants is to climb into bed. Except there isn’t even a bed where she’s going, just the old saggy mattress that makes her back cramp.
“I’m not going home.”
“Where are you going?” Serge says.
“Nowhere,” she says. “It’s personal.”
“Really, Kat. What are you doing? You don’t e
ven look like yourself.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It’s not a compliment,” he says. “You look haggard, like some consumptive woman. Like Bones on a bad day.”
“Shut up, Serge. That’s a horrid thing to say.”
“It’s like you’re not the same.” He touches her elbow briefly. “You used to be, you know, driven. You used to read that acting book.”
“That was ages ago. All girls dream of becoming actresses, all boys, astronauts and firefighters. It’s something we all outgrow.”
“I never wanted to be a firefighter. A taxi driver, maybe, but just for a short spell.”
“I’m being serious,” Kat says.
“Okay, but what about your father? He’s been so sad and lonely lately—”
“Why don’t you ask him to adopt you then?”
She regrets it the moment it’s out. Something changes in Serge: he stands taller, his face becomes more angular. He gives her a sharp, chilly look. “I’m good with what I’ve got. I never asked for charity.”
“That’s not what I meant—” Kat begins, but he’s already gone. She runs after him, but he’s dissolved into a crowd of passengers, amidst steep staircases and intricate walkways. A slight, quick-moving boy in a thin coat, who learned years ago how to vanish.
18
NIKITA DISAPPEARS AT THE END OF APRIL. ONE Saturday Kat shows up at the apartment and he’s already gone. Except she doesn’t realize he’s gone. She thinks he’s out getting groceries for them or staying the night with his parents. Or maybe he’s straightening things out at the institute, filing a last-minute appeal. Maybe his brother is helping him. Normally he tells her in advance, or leaves a note, if he’s spending the night elsewhere, but tonight she can’t find anything. She stays up as late as she can manage before sliding the door latch closed, and even in her sleep she listens for his footsteps on the stairs.
Next day the apartment is empty again. Kat goes to the phone booth and rings his home number, but no one picks up. She walks to the subway and waits outside the entrance. All she’s eaten today is an apple and she’s got no money to buy food. She knows he wouldn’t just abandon her, so it must be something urgent, something bad. An illness or, God forbid, an accident. Or maybe he’s been drafted? Maybe that’s how it happens, with no grace period or note. She tries to call twice more, but the phone rings and rings and there’s no answer. She doesn’t know how to reach Nikita’s brother, or even where his parents work.