A Train to Moscow(15)

But Andrei doesn’t talk about his father. He doesn’t talk to him, either, at least outside: when his father smokes on the bench by the shed, Andrei is nowhere to be seen, although the shed has been the place for the three of them to meet for years. Maybe Andrei was expecting a different father, someone taller and shaved, someone less scary and more heroic. Maybe he thought that his father would immediately go to work and break all records, like those workers in street posters: coal miners with faces dusted in soot or steelmakers peering into a furnace, a red glow of liquid metal reflected in their goggles. Andrei’s father’s only occupation seems to be rolling cigarettes, smoking by the shed, and yelling curses at Andrei’s mother, who every day beats the dirt of the courtyard with a broom, muttering to herself and whipping up clouds of dust as she nears the shed.



Sasha notices that Andrei is now a head taller than she is, and when he stands next to her, her eyes are at the level of his mouth. For some strange reason, she notices his mouth, the way it curls when he speaks or wraps around a cigarette he steals from his father and smokes behind the lilac bushes at the end of the streetcar route. She notices the thick, stubborn curl of hair that falls across his forehead and makes him jerk his head to get it out of his eyes, which makes him look cavalier and almost grown-up. She notices that when she grabs his arm or holds her hands around his neck in their old game of War, he tenses as if in pain, as if she stepped on his injured toe.

She notices that her other friend, Marik, no longer looks or sounds like the old Marik. His voice doesn’t seem to know if it wants to remain at the height of hers or descend to the depth of Andrei’s, and when it dips and soars in the course of a single sentence, Marik often tears his glasses off and starts wiping them in a nervous, angry movement. She also notices that Marik’s forehead has erupted in pimples, and his bones seem to have grown too big for his skin, bulging at his ankles and his wrists. Thinking about the changes in her friends, Sasha wonders if they also notice changes in her.

More and more often, when no one is home, Sasha steals into the storage loft, where Kolya’s journal is telling her about forbidden things, about what her mother and her teachers refuse to talk about.

February 7, 1942

I draw Nadia as I remember her: narrow hands with elongated fingers, a pianist’s hands; high cheekbones, a drop of Tatar blood in everyone born in Russia; thick eyebrows, the right slightly higher than the left, which gave her face a surprised look, as though she were in constant wonder. She lived on Herzen Street in a three-room apartment that was not communal, an obvious luxury for a family of three. Her father, Naum Semenovich, taught physics at the University of Leningrad, and, in her words, she inherited none of his scientific mind. Only his nose, she used to say with a sigh.

Sasha pauses to look at the drawing on the bottom of the page, a girl’s thin face marred by a burn on paper. Was it a cigarette that Kolya was smoking? Or a spark from the fire that kept him alive in a frozen trench?

We met on the Palace Bridge, the only place we could have met: she lived on the left bank of the Neva, and I lived on the right. It was the end of October, with winter making an early entrance that year, blowing black clouds into the city sky, churning the water around the pillars of the bridge. She stood by the banister leaning over the river, looking down at where the wind tossed a knitted yellow hat with a pom-pom in the waves, her face as unprotected as her head, stunned by the sudden force that so suddenly had ripped her hat from her. I stopped. I had to stop: there was too much fragility in her posture to pass her by, too much need. She looked at me and smiled a sad smile, accepting the loss of her hat, shrugging, pulling her scarf up to her ears. If I’d been a real man, I thought, a character from one of our heroic Soviet books, I would have torn off my coat and jumped into the waves. I would have snatched her hat out of the wind’s jaws and fought my way against the current back to the granite steps where she would be waiting for me, awed by my bravery and physical strength, grateful. Instead I looked into her face, her eyes the color of tarnished gold, and said something foolish, the first thing that came to my mind. “It’s gone,” I said, and she nodded. “I know.”

I draw Nadia’s room, the room I know so well, with its oak armoire and heavy curtains that screened us from the outside with their gray and yellow squares of wool. Her mother, like my own, was simply a mother, defined only by her family rather than an outside job she never held. It was only during the rare blissful hours when Evgeniya Iosifovna took a streetcar to Vladimirsky Market or a bus to the garishly decorated turn-of-the-century Eliseyev delicatessen that we had the apartment all to ourselves. To avoid the rush-hour crowds, she went shopping in late morning or early afternoon, and that was when we would cut our classes (Nadia would make an excuse to slip out of a seminar on lexicology at the philology department of the university, and I would creep out of the lecture on ancient art) to meet on the Palace Bridge and hurry to Isaac’s Square and her building on Herzen Street. We would run up the four flights of stairs and spend an hour on the leather divan behind the drawn window curtains that made the room humid and dark, where we were as naked as those prehistoric people on the walls of the ancient caves of my textbook. For an hour once or twice a week, Nadia’s divan, with its lumpy surface and arms worn from wear, was ours, an accomplice to our transgression. We were too impatient to pull the sheets out of the armoire, and the old leather felt warm under our skin as if holding us in its embrace, as if watching over the clumsy reaches of our arms and legs, the fumbling delirium of our lips and fingers. Then we lay pressed into each other in the seam between the seat and the back as though we were one, locked inside each other’s arms and taking almost no space at all, the brown leather stretching before our eyes like the carefully raked top layer of a plowed field. From that strange angle, with all that leather between us and what was beyond, Nadia’s room was the microcosm of a world where life seemed full of wonder and promise.