A Train to Moscow(14)
The principal covered her face with her hand because her mouth was trembling and she couldn’t utter anything else. Their math teacher, whom Sasha had seen sniffling on the stair landing, sidled up to the principal with her conveniently unfolded checkered handkerchief. The steel-like Natalia Petrovna was now weeping openly, as if all her teachers and pupils had been lined up and executed by the Nazis right in front of her, a scene from a war film they’d recently watched in their history class.
Sasha looked around surreptitiously, because they had been told to keep their heads down, and saw Marik’s mother’s dry face across the aisle. Her head was down, and her fingers were braided under her chest as if she were praying, although they all knew that praying was a rudiment of their dark tsarist past, along with serfdom and unemancipated women. Sasha was the only one in her line of vision, with the exception of Marik and his mother, who wasn’t crying or, at least, pretending to cry. She couldn’t see Andrei, who was two rows behind her, but she was sure his eyes were also dry. She could not imagine twelve-year-old Andrei, with hair as black as tar and arms strong enough to lift her into the air when the three of them played, casting his eyes down and shedding tears over Comrade Stalin’s sudden death.
She thought of her two friends, of Marik and Andrei and their constant competition, of how they exchanged punches and bragged about what one could do better than the other. Andrei could do a lot of things well, but Marik was good at something no one else was, not even Grandpa. Marik knew how to fish. “Where did you learn to be such a first-rate fisherman?” Grandpa had asked him when Marik brought home a pike big enough for a whole pot of soup. “My father taught me,” Marik had mumbled, embarrassed by the attention from the commander himself. Now everyone, including Andrei, was envious of Marik’s secret. The secret Marik had tried to teach Sasha last August, when they took an old rowboat out onto a small lake.
As the principal’s funereal speech droned on, Sasha thought of the rod Marik had handed to her, with a round bobbin painted half-red and half-white, of how he’d hooked a worm for her because it had been wriggling in an inch of water on the bottom of the boat and she didn’t want to impale it. He’d cast her line without getting up, without tipping the boat. The line had whistled in the air in a perfect arc and plunked down ten meters away. Then he’d hooked a worm on his own rod, his fingers black from digging in the compost pile, and cast it on the other side of the boat. They’d sat and waited, silently, because fish, as he’d explained, could hear the slightest sound you made, even your clearing your throat, even a dripping oar. The brown water around the boat had been swirling in small ripples, until the red half of her bobbin plunged beneath the surface and Marik whispered, “Pull.” She had pulled, astonished by how heavy the rod had become, leaning back so far that the boat tipped and the oars grated against their metal casings. He’d guided her arms until she could see the fish sparkle just a few centimeters below the surface. In a precise movement, he’d whipped the line, and the fish vaulted through the air and thumped to the bottom of the boat. It was small, too small for the force of the tug. She’d watched it thrashing against the boards, with a comb of spikes on its spine. Marik had grabbed the fish by the head, and she saw the hook in its open mouth as it gasped, gleaming down its perforated jaw. He’d yanked the hook down and out, and the fish stopped gasping and lay still. “A perch,” Marik had said. “Your first catch.” She’d picked up the perch and held it between her palms, its scales hard and glistening, its eyes like glass.
She stood with her head down, thinking of that fishing trip, staring at the back of a chair in front of her where “Igor + Tanya = love” was scratched with a nail into the wood. With almost all the teachers and students weeping, she felt a strange mix of fear and curiosity, as if something overpowering had just ended. The entire assembly was now waiting to see how life could possibly continue after this tragedy that had reduced their intrepid principal to tears. Or maybe it wasn’t as tragic as the principal thought. Maybe the absence of Stalin from their lives would bring back Marik’s father after the three years of absence and uncertainty. Maybe it would make Sasha’s mother less anxious about Uncle Kolya’s journal and curl her lips back into a smile that had been wiped off by the war, a smile Sasha only knew from the portrait on the wall of their room painted by her uncle before Sasha was born.
9
Andrei’s father comes back in 1955. Short, with gray stubble sprouting through his cheeks and a nose like a wilted red potato forgotten in the cellar, he sits on a bench by the shed all day long, smoking unfiltered cigarettes that he rolls in his gnarled fingers before he lights them.
Where did he return from? The war ended ten years ago, and Sasha is old enough to know he didn’t return from the war. Their neighbors who live in the other half of their house sometimes whisper the word ugolovnik, a convicted criminal, when they pass him on the way to the store.
She waits for Andrei to say something about his father, to tell her where he has been all this time, to let her know if his father’s return has made her friend happy. Would she be happy if her own father came back? She is not sure. From the way Grandma pursed her mouth when Sasha asked about his photo in the album, she sensed that there was something disreputable about him, something not to be discussed around the dinner table, something slippery and shameful.