A Train to Moscow: A Novel, page 23
Grandpa met her at the train station. Sasha saw him even before the train pulled to a stop, from her compartment, through the haze of the locomotive smoke and window grime. She saw him standing in the middle of the platform, trying to gauge where her car would pull to a stop, his white hair long and wispy, tangled by the breeze, his shoulders stooped. It suddenly became clear to her that Grandma was the one who cultivated his image of a commander. The power he projected, his weight, his authority Sasha was so intimidated by, his permanent seat at the head of the table—all existed because of Grandma. Like a sculptor, she molded him into a stern father and grandfather, a protector, the hard-edged face of the family everyone feared and respected, maybe so that she herself could remain gentle and kind and still survive in the heartland of their heartless motherland. And now, with her no longer there, he simply disintegrated down to his essence: an old man, lost to the point of being extinct, squinting at the numbers on the train cars, hobbling up the platform as the train chugged and clattered forward and sighed its last breath.
It only took seconds, as the front door gave a familiar creak and Sasha stepped over the threshold of the house, for memories to spill over and flood the senses. She had to prop herself up against the cupboard made from dark wood that only turned darker over the years. It was where Grandma kept the everyday plates on the lower shelf and the tea service with red roses they used for holidays—her family’s gift for their wedding—on top. The plates were all there, neatly stacked up, the holiday service probably not touched since May 9, Victory Day, when she always pulled out the cups and saucers with roses, two extra sets on the table for Sima and Kolya.
Sasha thinks of a day when she was six or seven, when Grandma took her to get their bread rations and look for lines. If there was a line, she said, you must always join it because there is food at the other end.
They walked along the tracks, away from the loop where the streetcar ended its route, past the gray wooden houses lining their street, past the fences hiding black currant and gooseberry bushes next to what in the summer would be beds with beets, carrots, and dill.
Near the center of the town, behind rows of barbed wire, a group of men in faded military uniforms was clearing debris from a square of wasteland that used to be a school or a store; Sasha was too young to remember. They were German soldiers, prisoners of war, those enemies who had invaded their land. Only they didn’t look like enemies or invaders; they looked like the rest of them: sharp-faced and hungry, exhausted by the war.
Grandma stopped by the barbed-wire fence where several men were driving shovels into a pile of dirt spiked with jagged pieces of cement. Their movements were mechanical, as if under their coats, they all had hidden creaky motors that lifted their arms and bent their legs. The German closest to the fence looked up and met her eye. Grandma dipped her hand into her bag, unfolded her ration of bread carefully wrapped in a handkerchief, and fit her arm between the rows of wire, a small brown cube in her open palm. For a moment, the German hesitated, looking around furtively, as if accepting the bread could result in being saddled with more digging, then took it with his muddy fingers, as gnarled as the claws of an ancient bird from Sasha’s book of folktales. His eyes were the color of the frozen ditch on the side of the road, surprised and bewildered.
“Why did you give him your ration?” she asked as the German hastily stuffed the bread into his mouth.
Grandma rewrapped what remained in the handkerchief and put it back into her bag. The words came out gently, as soft as her wrinkles, as sad as her eyes. “He is someone’s son, too,” she said and motioned for Sasha to move on, probably thinking of her own son Kolya, the one still missing in action, hoping that he was alive somewhere in a foreign land, hoping that someone would offer him a piece of bread.
39
It is three days past Grandma’s name day—Elena’s day, the day her name saint was born and the day Grandma was buried. This is always the time when lilacs burst into bloom, and through the kitchen window, Sasha can see a bush frothed in purple, branches swaying in the breeze. The kitchen now has a faucet—when did they lay down pipes for running water? An old nylon stocking used to wash dishes, crisscrossed by runs beyond repair, sits on the lip of the sink next to a bar of laundry soap, just as it did when she was a girl. She picks it up and closes her hand around it to feel the greasy silkiness Grandma felt only days earlier. Is she hoping that some of her warmth has remained in this rag that touched her hands daily, for decades, more often than anything else in the house?
The dining room table is littered with issues of Pravda and a scattering of handwritten receipts, a sight Grandma would never have allowed in her house. Sasha looks up at the wall with Kolya’s paintings she remembers so well. One of them, The War Ration—a slice of black bread and a small fish, as dark and dry as the bread—is hanging at an angle, revealing a patch of blue wallpaper underneath, bright as a cornflower, not discolored by light. She straightens the frame, and the original deeper blue of the wallpaper disappears. It is back to its washed-out color, the wear of time. It’s back to order now, as Mama would say.
Mama and Grandma are both gone. And how many are left of those who used to inhabit this house? Sima is buried in Ivanovo; Grandma is there, as well, although on the other end of the cemetery that burst beyond its original boundaries decades ago; Kolya, most likely, under layers of mud and other bodies at the Leningrad Front; Mama in Leningrad. Besides Grandpa, she is the only one left.
The door to her grandparents’ room is open, and she walks in as she used to when she was a child and wanted to play under Grandpa’s drafting table that is still jostling for space with the armoire. The bed is in the corner, its hand-crocheted cover Grandma knitted pulled on hastily and crumpled in places. Sasha straightens it, ironing out the white lace with her hand, just as Grandma would have done. Then she steps to the armoire and opens its heavy door, something she has never done before, something she was never allowed to do. She feels she is allowed now. Grandma’s dress is still hanging inside, the dark-blue cotton dress with little white stars and a white collar she remembers so well, the one that always gave her the woody smell of home. Sasha holds the soft fabric between her fingers, then buries her face in it, sniffs the smell out of the collar and the sleeves, inhales whatever is left of Grandma, now all ephemeral, all fleeting. All gone.
The shelves on the left are filled with packs of aspirin and tetracycline, with rolls of bandages and cotton, with knitting needles and a rainbow of crocheting thread, the same things Mama kept in their Leningrad armoire. The top shelf seems to be empty, and for no reason whatsoever, she stands on tiptoe and shoves her hand up to swipe around its bottom. Her hand slides over what feels like a small box, but she is too short to close her fingers around it, so with the help of a stool from the dining room, the box is now in her hands, and she is back on the floor.
From the window, Sasha sees Grandpa in the courtyard, pulling the yellow bursts of dandelions out of a bed of radishes, as she holds the box like a stone weighing on her palms, something she already knows she shouldn’t have taken down from its deliberate hiding place. Something that ought to have stayed out of sight where it belonged, where someone placed it not to be found. But it is too late. It is in her hands now, claiming its space with sudden urgency, deliberate and jarring.
She lowers herself onto the stool and peers out the window again, as if looking away would make the box in her hands vanish back into its shelter on the top shelf of the armoire. Grandpa has pulled out the last dandelion and is now cranking the rusty handle of the courtyard well, waiting for the bucket to creak its way up from the echoey darkness into daylight. A watering can is waiting at his feet, ready to be carried to the bed of carrots and beets. Sasha pulls up the lid of the box. Inside is a book-size square wrapped in the kind of cloth Grandma used to make cottage cheese. Inside the cloth, after she untangles it, is a piece of cardboard bent in two, held by a rubber band. Someone has made an effort to disguise what is inside, trying to hide it not only from an outsider accidentally stumbling onto it but also from himself.
She weighs the folder on her palm, as if its heft could determine its importance, as if the act of staring at its brown cover could reveal what is contained inside. Behind the window, Grandpa is lugging a watering can in one hand and a bucket in the other, his shoulders stooping under their weight, his knees nearly buckling. She didn’t know he was so old. Or did he suddenly get old because Grandma is no longer here to fill him with reasons to go on, reasons beyond the garden with its watering and weeding?
The rubber band around the folder crumbles under her fingers, but the creased cardboard doesn’t spring open, kept folded for years. How many years—five, fifteen, twenty? How long has this box been sitting on the top shelf of the armoire, away from anyone’s reach?
Sasha doesn’t want to wedge herself between the past and present again; she doesn’t want to become complicit in another secret. But with the empty box in her hand, she knows she already has.
She straightens the crease and tries to massage away the years of storage with her fingers. The inside feels about a centimeter thick. She thinks of the storage space above the kitchen where years ago she found Kolya’s journal, of its cramped interior that smelled of dust and old shoes and that held so many secrets. She closes her eyes and sees the magazines with poetry by the writers no longer recognized by the state, recipes for dishes whose ingredients have long vanished from their store shelves, hats—the objects of frivolity and luxury—that women gave up wearing decades ago. She thinks of the small things that made up their life here: Mama helping Grandma shred heads of cabbage, then pouring salt over the crunchy layers that were stuffed into a barrel until the slivers of thick leaves reached the brim; of Grandma singing as she knitted another sweater or another pair of mittens; of Mama sorting strawberries and currants before she poured them into copper bowls to make jam; of the life Sasha so deliberately left to be an actress. And now the question stares her in the face: Was it worth it? Have her performances and her acting changed anything or anyone? Have they brought back the forbidden writers, or the forgotten foods, or even women’s hats that all those years before the Great Terror had kept her grandmother elegant and young?
Inside the folder is an envelope, long and narrow, with foreign stamps and red-and-blue airmail stripes around the edges. It is not at all like one of the Russian envelopes, plain and square. It is addressed to her grandparents, in a handwriting that is definitely Russian in the way it effortlessly loops the letters together, the way they taught them cursive writing in first grade, through hard work, repetition, and shame. On the other side is the return address that makes the blood drain from her veins: Nikolai Kuzmin, 41 Grand Street, New York, USA. A letter from Kolya.
The stamp on the envelope is a washed-out blot of black ink, the post date dissolved, impossible to make out. The top of the envelope is neatly cut open with a knife, the way Grandpa opens all mail, and Sasha yanks out the folded pages, the date glaring from the top right corner: 15 of April, 1956. Twelve years ago.
40
My dearest mamochka, papochka, Galochka, and Sashenka (whom I’ve never met but who should now be thirteen).
For a second, she raises her eyes and looks at Grandma’s dress hanging in the armoire, its little white stars beginning to twirl in a wild dance before her eyes, together with the whole room. I am now twenty-five, she wants to scream to him. I have lived my entire life with your paintings and your journal; with your disdain for the lies of our motherland; with your story of Nadia and the war, which to a large extent has defined my life. I have lived with your memory but without you, because you were dead. You were the first to leave us, before Mama, before Grandma, maybe even before Sima, who died in this house in 1942. You were our conscience, our truth. Just like Theater is for me. So why did you not return after the war? Why weren’t you here to give me guidance, to protect me from floggings and old neighbors’ gossip, to stand in for my father? Why did you abandon me?
As tears blur her vision, she sniffles them away and continues reading.
It took me so long to write because I was afraid to send you a letter from the United States. For all these years, I’ve been torn apart by not being able to contact you, to tell you that I am alive and well because of what we hear about Stalin and his terror. I’ve heard that a letter from the West could land someone in prison, and I didn’t want this to happen to any of you, so I decided to keep silent, as difficult and heart-wrenching as it was. But after Stalin’s death, and particularly after Khrushchev’s speech, things seem to be different, so I’m hoping this letter will reach you and cause you no harm.
I sent you my journal from the Leningrad Front, with a soldier who was demobilized and going back home to Ivanovo. Did you get it? I only received one letter from you, addressed to the Leningrad Front, where you wrote about Sashenka’s birth and Sima’s death in 1942, only a few weeks apart. I cried, tears of joy and tears of sorrow. I was lucky to survive when so many others didn’t. All these years since the war ended, eleven endless years, every day I fought with myself not to tell you I was alive, not to write to you, to send you a telegram, to call. It was a struggle, and I had to remind myself that I couldn’t selfishly announce what I wanted you to know because it would hurt you, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted so much to be with you, but I couldn’t be there. I miss all of you terribly; I miss the dusty road that led to our house, the brown oilskin of the river, the smell of pirozhki Mamochka always baked for my birthday. And I couldn’t write to you; I couldn’t even tell you how much I missed you all.
If you’re reading these lines, please know that all I think about is you, my dearest mamochka and papochka, you Galochka, and Sashenka, whom I’ve never met but who so often comes to me in my dreams. She is always little, four or five, in a navy-blue dress and canvas shoes rubbed with chalk to make them whiter, the way I remember Galochka was dressed for our family photograph when she was that age.
Sasha looks up from the letter and takes a breath. What was true only a few minutes earlier—Grandma’s fresh grave dug by the same two drunks with veiny faces who have dug every grave she can remember, the cotton dress that still holds her smell, Grandpa watering and weeding as if this routine would erase this last week from his memory and grant him peace—is no longer real. Reality seems to have shifted, the past and the present bleeding into each other, the straight timeline crumpling into an accordion of chaos, making everything muddled and disorderly, something Mama would have hated. But she is no longer here to tell Sasha how unruly all of this is or how much she abhors this bedlam.
Sasha looks down at the boards of the floor, scuffed almost white by their feet, by the intertwined lives now all happening at once. She sees her five-year-old mother in a navy dress, a picture she remembers from Grandma’s photo album. Did Sasha also have a dress like this, with a white sailor’s collar stretched over her shoulders, complete with the canvas shoes rubbed with chalk? She begins to feel the weight of its thick, heavy cotton on her arms. Was it her mother’s dress or Sasha’s? She lifts her eyes and through the window she sees Kolya standing by the apple tree, in round glasses that make his features even softer, trying to reach an apple dangling on the highest branch, laughing at his own clumsiness when the branch he is holding slips out of his hand and whips him in the face. As images flood her consciousness, the present and the past jostle for space, crowding the room like pieces of furniture from her childhood, bending and breaking the paths of their lives she has always assumed to be linear. She stares down at the letter in her hands, at her and her mother’s names written twelve years ago with such fierce urgency somewhere on the other side of the world.
When the Leningrad Front moved west, I moved with it. So much death had passed before my eyes by then that I couldn’t comprehend how my soul could still take more in. I was almost numb, and yet we had to keep walking, pulling our cannons and machine guns and carrying our backpacks filled with rations, ammunition, and unsent letters home. I walked and pulled cannons, like everyone around me. As the Germans retreated, they mined the roads, and we had to move carefully, inching forward. In my mind, I can still see an armored vehicle twisted into a tangle of metal parts, bodies of soldiers blasted out of the truck. A wounded cow baying by the side of the road, the image of a burning building reflected in its eyes. I still see a dog running across a charred field, a human bone in its mouth.
Somehow I survived the worst two years of the war, the Leningrad Front, and then I almost didn’t survive. One foolish misstep got me captured, although it should have cost me my life. Would it be better to have been killed than captured by the Germans? After being a soldier, would it be better to be dead or be a prisoner of war, with the big letters SU—Soviet Union—painted on the back of my military coat in indelible white paint? We were marched west, hundreds of prisoners, in our torn boots and uniforms infested with lice, until we arrived in a prison camp somewhere in Germany. It was as bad as you can imagine: yellow drinking water with stains of machine oil, dysentery, rotten turnips, routine beatings with a gun barrel, and yet I only grasped at one thing, life. I would have never known, even after three years at the front, how fiercely we claw for life, even life in a German prison camp.
