A Train to Moscow(16)
Does one need love, Sasha wonders—the forbidden kind of love no one talks about, the fiery love, hot and ruthless as the tongues of flame in their stove—to see life as Kolya saw it, full of wonder and promise?
10
“Hey, kike,” yells a boy from a stoop as Marik and Sasha are walking home from school. “If you weren’t ugly enough before, you’re certainly ugly now.”
The boy is a year younger than they are, and Sasha has seen him in the hallways of their school, always with a runny nose and scabs on his elbows. She knows it is not a noble thing to strike someone younger than you, but this boy surely deserves it. She lunges to the stoop and pummels him with her schoolbag, on the head, right and left, and then a few more times on his shoulders and his chest. Luckily, the schoolbag is heavy, since they have a lot of homework today, and it thumps against the boy’s head, two times for each of the uglies and some extra pounding for the kike.
From the boy’s widened eyes, she knows that he did not expect this: he has heard and uttered the insult so many times before that to his ear, the word may have lost its pungency and now sounds just as bland as anything their principal may say in their monthly Pioneer meetings. After a little arm flailing, he scrambles up and escapes inside the house, but when he is out of her reach, when he knows she can no longer whack him, he yells “crazy bitch” and thrusts his arm in her direction, as if he were throwing a rock.
Sasha is not proud of beating up a seventh grader, but Marik is grateful. He looks at her with admiring eyes, as if she’d just single-handedly defeated a battalion of Germans. “You’re a real friend,” he whispers, blinking and squeezing her hand, not daring to trust his changing voice. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
She is not sure Marik is right that she is his real friend. More and more often, she finds herself being a buffer between Marik and Andrei, whose resentment of one another seems to be growing together with their muscles and bones. What happened to their games of Cossacks and Outlaws, when the three of them outwitted the other team of local kids and found the most unexpected places to hide, or to the game of War, where Marik and Sasha were heroic partisans, ready to withstand the most hideous threats from Andrei, the Nazi commandant? What happened to their Three Musketeers promise, the vow of “one for all and all for one” they took shortly after Marik’s mother gave her the volume by Alexandre Dumas for her birthday?
She searches for answers in Kolya’s journal.
February 21, 1942
Every day I think of Nadia, of the hollow of her collarbone where the skin seems almost transparent, where a web of tiny vessels is like a blueprint into a wondrous world inside her. I was glad she lived in Leningrad and not Ivanovo so I didn’t have to bring her before my family yet. I knew Mama would embrace her, take her by the elbow, and lead her to the armchair in the corner of the dining room, an honorary place where she greeted all important guests. It wasn’t Mama who darkened my mind when I thought of introducing Nadia as the woman I loved, my future wife. I thought of my father, who would only need one look at Nadia’s curly hair and skinny arms to know she was Jewish, to know that his son could do much better than entwine his life with an offshoot of the rickety intelligentsia that the Revolution of 1917 had succeeded in deposing. My father has always been a man of concreteness, not unlike the sergeant who detested fiction, and his lack of elevation from the mundane, his self-proclaimed earthiness, is what grounded him as a Bolshevik. “Collectivization and industrialization are what has made this country great,” my father would announce every time we sat down to dinner, as if reciting this slogan before a meal were his way of saying grace.
When my father learned I had applied to the art academy in Leningrad, his face contorted with fury. I thought he was going to hit me when I said I wanted to be an artist, and it was only Mama, by silently sliding into the leaden air between us, by standing in the middle of his wrath, who saved me from his blow. The knowledge that I would be studying painting—instead of engineering, like him, or medicine, like my sister—seemed to wound him almost physically. I have a suspicion that 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.
On the day Nadia and I met, the day of her hat bobbing in the waves under the Palace Bridge, I walked her back to her apartment because I knew the moment I saw her that she was going to be part of my life, when she suddenly stopped before the Admiralty and said that I should know something right away, before it was too late. It was already too late, but what was the purpose of telling her? She put her schoolbag down on a bench under a naked poplar tree and lowered her scarf from her face down to her neck.
“There is something I have to tell you,” she said. “I’m not very practical. I’m not like other women. I can’t sew, and I’m a terrible cook. Even standing in lines is a skill I haven’t fully mastered. Like my father, I was born without elbows. I feel more comfortable in a lecture on Cervantes than on a crowded bus.”
I stroked her hair shining in the light of a streetlamp, and she leaned her head into my palm. I kissed her cheek, then her lips. She didn’t resist.
“Maybe we are both misfits,” I said, “because I have a warning for you, too.” Her eyes were lowered, as if she were watching my mouth wrapping itself around the words. “I am not as strong and confident a man as you deserve. I’m only an artist. I can paint, but I can’t beat people up.”