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Secrets that are stashed in letters tied with ribbons under Grandma’s bed, tucked away into the upper shelves of the armoire Sasha cannot reach, hidden in the dusty space of the storage loft above the front door.
To shrink the waiting, they kick the dust, although they know they shouldn’t, because it will ruin their shoes, and getting new ones is an event almost as big as overthrowing the tsar.
“When I eat, I’m deaf and mute,”
«Когда я ем, я глух и нем»
His eyes are blue, the color of the forget-me-nots he grows around the gate, with grooves of deep wrinkles radiating into his white hair.
Sasha doesn’t know what Jews are and how they are different from the rest of them, but from the way people lower their voices when they say yevrey, a word that is spat out like a wormy chunk of apple, she guesses Jews are worse than they themselves are in some dark and hidden way they cannot discuss in public.
“They don’t put innocent people in camps, Grandpa said. Stalin knows who is with us and who is against us. Stalin—our leader, our father, the successor of our great Lenin. The engineer of our thunderous victory over Germany.”
The jagged tear in the linoleum, in their imagination, is a river, and the torn edges of plastic are its banks.
The music swells, and Grandma’s voice does, too, soaring and then descending, the lyrics compelling her to remember her distant youth when she still naively believed in love.
But she must display proper solemnity, like the rest of the people who wrinkle their brows and pleat their mouths into mourning lines, as if he died only yesterday and not in 1924, when her mother was only seven.
She is thinking about another life, a life in Theater. She is thinking about the true make-believe, the only pretending that makes sense. She wants to be part of it more than she has ever wanted anything, desperately, and she will dream about it every night. She will be stoic and patient, enduring their long days and long lines and gray streets with empty horse-drawn carts inching along through the dust. She will wait until she finishes school; she will live with Theater smoldering in the corner of her soul.
It smells of dust and mice, an odor of abandonment and desolation, as if this corner of the extinguished world ceased to exist because of her absence. This is her hiding place, her safe place, and today she is hiding from the present.
The war ended eight years ago, and even if Berlin were on the other side of the earth, Sasha doubts it would take Kolya this long to make his way back home. But she knows she can’t say this to Grandma, who still sets a cup and saucer from her prerevolutionary tea service for Kolya every year on May 9, Victory Day.
Now, instead of walking along the Griboyedov Canal, we were trudging through the woods loaded with a rifle, six grenades, a handgun, two cans of sprats, ten slices of dried bread, and a flask with water.
“This is what’s required here,” Seryoga’s eyes seemed to be saying. “Our main objective is to kill people. Or those people will kill us.”
Babbling is dangerous; it’s only one step from treason.”
No Michelangelo or El Greco can shield you from machine guns. No Pushkin, or Turgenev, or even Tolstoy, who knew all about war, can protect you from a shell fragment piercing your back or a tank crawling over your trench.
We attack, and after the first waves of us are mowed down, there are always more bodies to throw into the maw, more amateur soldiers to be fed to the meat grinder of battle by the decisions of our military commanders.
Our own troops stationed in the rear, shooting all of those with weak nerves, those whose minds are clouded by seeing too many human guts wound around tank turrets, too many bodies with heads blown off, a bloody mess instead of legs, too much death. For fleeing death, they get death. Traitors is the word now attached to their corpses. What’s real is the only thing that matters at the front.
Was she also a traitor, she wonders, when she didn’t feel upset, like everybody else, at the news of Stalin’s death?
my father was pleased when I was mobilized into the army and sent to the front in September 1941, since in his eyes the war has plucked me out of the sissy world of art, the untrustworthy world of make-believe, and dropped me into the trenches, where everything is real.
The teacher, a chinless woman with graying hair and a squirrel face, is lecturing about lishnie lyudi, or useless people. There is a whole gallery of such people in Russian literature. Today it is Turgenev’s Lavretsky, who failed to challenge the serf-owning nobility because he couldn’t find enough willpower to tear himself away from the spoiled society that produced him.
It is not the heroic war they learned about in history class, with soldiers humming patriotic songs and attacking under a red banner with a hammer and sickle to overwhelm the Fascists with the sheer willpower of their belief in the approaching future. What she hands to him is the opposite of myths concocted by the state to make them feel better when they leaf through history textbooks and read about the millions who died at the front or starved to death in besieged cities. The war narrative they learn in school, she now knows, is crammed with as many fairy tales as the stories in Grandma’s
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There is a soldier, one of the four of us, slumped on the bottom against the wall, his chin touching what used to be his chest and is now just a red porridge of flesh and bone. His eyes stare straight ahead, and his hand sits in the middle of the crater in his chest, as if he were trying to stop the bleeding in his last few seconds of life. Only an hour earlier, I saw him reading a letter from home.
“This is for you, Seryoga,” I want to say, but I don’t, because the words refuse to leave my throat. They are caught inside, together with the taste of trench dirt, together with the smell of warm blood; they almost gag me. I no longer have words.
“They didn’t kill you, so you killed them,” Seryoga says. “It’s war.”
She slides her fingers over Andrei’s face, and he slides his fingers over hers, as if they needed to add another sense to what they already know about each other: a sense of touch, without which, from now on, no understanding could be possible between them.
What they don’t talk about is as dangerous as the forest itself, a secret they have kept out of sight, on the lowest shelf of their hearts.
She takes a breath and tries to release what has been stuck inside her for too long, but the words still refuse to clothe themselves in sound. She sits with her mouth open, silent. She knows that what she is not able to utter yet will catch him as off guard as an expert solar plexus strike and will be just as devastating. She also knows that soon—despite the pain it is bound to inflict on both of them—she will have no choice but to tell him she is leaving.
The thought that she may fail makes her anger blaze even hotter.
Was her mother right when she called her an egoistka? An egomaniac basking in her freshly discovered power while plunging a knife into the heart of someone she purports to love.
Lara’s father was killed in Poland in 1944, when the tide of the war had already turned and Russian troops were advancing west, when the word victory had already begun to form on people’s lips. “1944, when no one should have been killed,”
Even at seven, she knew that what drove the babushkas to flap their arms and fuse together into what looked like a murder of crows was envy.
He smoked by the porch, taking long and deliberate breaths so he didn’t have to say anything. Her mother stood next to him, waiting for something other than a nicotine cloud to emerge from his mouth, her eyes surveying the ground around her feet.
She is still astonished, after all these years, by the grace of his sentences written in the trenches.
But it’s impossible to run. There are corpses everywhere, frozen in piles covered by the recent snow. Some are still fighting a fight that has now become eternal. A Russian soldier is clutching at the throat of a German whose hand still holds a knife dug into his enemy’s back. A sailor who was struck as he was throwing a grenade, frozen, like a monument to himself, towering with his raised arm, rooted into the ice, the copper buttons on his black jacket sparkling in the sun. An infantryman, already wounded, started bandaging his leg and froze forever, struck by a bullet he never saw. It won’t
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Imagine this picture, the professor said: tens of thousands of bodies strewn across the battlefield, the ground soaked with blood, half the Russian Army killed in one day. And the most surreal thing of all is that we claimed victory.
“It’s still raw, like an abscess I’ve tried to squeeze out of my mind. I knew it was my fault. I was drunk. I am the one to blame.”
It breaks my heart and boils my blood how women continue to blame themselves for being taken advantage of
She has been trying to erase that from her memory, as if it had never happened. She thinks that if she empties her mind of that day, the event will disappear. She believes that pity will only cement it into her memory.
“Give it to me right now,” she hears herself say four years too late, knowing that he would have done what she asked because he would have done anything for her. It seems so simple now, putting herself in control of a split second before everything changed, before everything slid off its base and collapsed.
She looks away, but her head turns back, like a ball of iron attracted by a magnet, and the tugging pain of the year without him suddenly swells inside her and makes her walk in his direction, as if hypnotized.
It seemed impossible that her gnarled hands, big and full of calluses, could have produced the tiny filigree stitches on the doily, but that was the heart of Andrei’s house—and maybe of Andrei himself—roughness stitched into beauty.
She thinks of how much she misses him, of all the sadness she has hidden away in the darkest corner of her soul’s storage loft, where no one can find it unless they crouch and rake through years of discarded junk.
We both knew what I would never tell her, what could not be acknowledged if we wanted to stay sane and go on with our lives.
By the end of that month, she knows not only her role from the beginning of the novel to its end, but also the complete novel itself, almost by heart. And what she can’t find in the novel, she creates: every event and every character, no matter how small, now has a story that precedes their appearance on the page. She knows every person’s routines and habits; she knows what they crave to eat and what hides behind the doors of their armoires. She sees their wrinkled foreheads and pursed lips; their hair, carefully arranged or disheveled and unwashed; their stooped shoulders, their straight
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The more she cries, the more she needs to, as if these tears are cleansing some grime inside her, as if they could deliver some kind of understanding of what has just happened. Or maybe she simply feels sorry for herself because she has just given away the most valuable part of her, something visceral and deep without which her life will no longer be the same.
And now she is completely empty. Empty of everything she has learned, everything she has stored inside her, everything she has created. Yet she knows that this emptiness is fertile; it is the blank canvas to draw her future roles, the soil from which her characters will grow. One thing is obvious: something significant has just come to an end, and she is standing at a threshold. From this moment on, she will have to start everything anew.
They are the words that should be directed at someone else, someone who would appreciate their generosity, someone who would love this upcoming revelation and, by extension, love him. They are words completely wasted on her thick, impermeable skin.
It was supposed to nurture and protect us, the people it had inspired to its revolutionary ideals of a meager life and hard work, and while we had been busy keeping our end of the bargain, our motherland, like a courtyard thug, had turned around, pulled out a switchblade, and stuck it under our ribs.
What made their hearts beat, what pushed through their veins instead of blood was the sludge of paranoia and betrayal.
He survived, but he might as well have died. It was all in his face, the camps. He had the face of a corpse.”
