A Train to Moscow(10)
The front also killed both her mother’s brothers. Sima was wounded in battle and died in the back room of their house. Kolya, an artist, who studied in Leningrad and whose paintings hang on their every wall, is still missing in action. They haven’t heard anything from Kolya since the war began—not a letter, not a note, not a word from any of those who have already returned—but Grandma is still waiting for him, running outside at every creak of the garden gate, certain that Kolya has finally made his way home all the way from Berlin.
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.
The loft is packed with piles of old magazines full of pictures of elegant women in long dresses, holding open fans, parasols, and leashes attached to small dogs in their long, ringed fingers. The pages also show plump jars of cream to make your skin soft as velvet, right alongside elongated bottles of liquid guaranteed to turn your hair thick as a horse’s mane. She sits straining her eyes in the scarce light that sifts from the entranceway, stooping over articles describing the best way to handle your maid’s lack of sewing ability when you’re invited to a ball or the least expensive menu for a formal Christmas dinner to hand to your cook. The words maid and cook, she knows, are bourgeois and retrograde, atavisms of the tsarist past that the Revolution extracted from their society, like a cancer. She couldn’t hear her grandfather use these words without irony, but Grandma somehow seems to fit in with those parasols, hats, and long, flowing skirts, and Sasha often imagines her free of glasses and wrinkles, giving instructions to cooks and maids in her low, patient voice.
There are also poems in these magazines by writers whose names, although she is almost eleven, she has never heard before, names absent from their literature textbooks and even from the catalog of the entire Ivanovo library. It is, she knows, because those poets wrote about unsocialist things, devoting every line to feelings rather than the workers’ accomplishments, which was clearly selfish and individualistic from the point of view of their new progressive communist collective.
Since they both learned how to read at five, Sasha has shared all these books and magazines with Marik in the loft, where the two of them have crouched for hours in the dusty murk. She often wishes she could share these hidden stories with Andrei, too, so that all three of them would play Robinson Crusoe or Mowgli or Don Quixote, but she knows this is only a dream, because Andrei, who does not come from an intelligentny family, is not allowed into their house.
Behind the books is a round box, upholstered in fabric that was shiny many years ago, but is now the color of muddied cream. She undoes the faded ribbon that is tied around the box and lifts the top, placing it on the pile of books. Inside there is a woman’s wide-brimmed hat, white with a green ribbon and a small white rose, a hat from a time when women worried about their hair and gave their cooks instructions for formal Christmas dinners. She carefully places the hat on her head and sits for a few minutes in its soft prerevolutionary embrace, wishing that she had a mirror to see what young Grandma might have looked like. She imagines her stepping out of a carriage, holding up her skirt so that the hem wouldn’t sweep against the wheel of the droshky covered with Ivanovo dust; she imagines her asking a maid to set up a samovar for family friends, thinking of a different life. Has she ever dreamed of a life other than the life she has lived in Ivanovo? Has Sasha’s mother?
She puts the hat back into the box, closes the lid, and ties it with ribbon, as if she had never been here to let the tsarist past crammed with unnecessary luxuries invade their simple unaccessorized present.
Behind the hatbox with Grandma’s prerevolutionary hat, she sees something else, something that looks like a school notebook. Its light-blue cover is faded and frayed, pocked by stains and streaks, as if it had been lying somewhere by the road in a ditch, splashed with mud by passing horse carriages and trucks. She weighs it in her palm: there is a lot of heft to these crinkled pages with their torn-off corners, which look as though they had been dropped in water and dried more than once, which look as though they had been scarred by fire. On the front page, in an angular, masculine hand, are the words that almost stop her heart, Kolya Kuzmin, her uncle missing in action.
She opens the notebook and begins to read.
January 9, 1942
The first time I saw a German up close was three months ago, in October. The five of us were retreating from the enemy advancement when a band of our soldiers, the remnants of an artillery battery, emerged from the woods after sunset. That’s how I met Seryoga. He took a sip from a flask with a Bronze Horseman on the cap, and right then I knew he was from Leningrad. He’d studied chemistry at the university, he said, a few steps away from my art academy. 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.
By dawn, we’d walked about ten kilometers. The road went up a hill covered with rickety aspen and birch trees. On the other side sat an empty armored car with a 45 mm cannon, and an artillery lieutenant, who looked no older than twenty, announced that we were going to set a trap for the advancing Germans. He was a professional soldier, not an NKVD officer, and his mind was attuned to war. I had no doubt he had received high grades in his military classes, too diligent to have allowed himself to receive anything less, impatient to get to the real battle he had studied for in class. We were all in the middle of a war, but we were amateurs, trying to avoid a bullet or a land mine, trying to balance our weight on the wire between life and death.