A Train to Moscow(20)
Since the word war first sputtered on her mother’s lips, death has been all around them. Her uncle Volya, who was arrested in 1937 for telling a joke. Uncle Volya’s daughter Nina, who volunteered for the front in 1942, a futile attempt to avenge her father’s death. Uncle Sima, who had been stationed on their border with Poland when German troops crossed into Russia on June 22, 1941, and was buried in Ivanovo a few weeks before she was born. Her father. Probably her uncle Kolya, who is still missing in action twelve years after the war.
But all these deaths had no lives attached to them. Sasha didn’t know them when they walked to work, or waited in lines, or stood with a fishing rod by the river. She only knew them dead. Marik is the first person who stopped existing right in front of her eyes. The person who told her she was good at acting, who made her smile. For fourteen years, they played the same games; for ten years, they read the same books; for eight years, they went to the same school and practiced the same piano pieces. And only a day before that Sunday, behind their shed, did he take Sasha’s hand in his, in a different way than they’d held hands before. She tensed the moment his fingers met hers. His touch was clammy and shaky, and there were drops of sweat on his forehead despite the cold outside. For a few seconds, he held her hand as if trying to decide what to do with it; then he took a breath and asked if he could kiss her.
And now Sasha wishes she’d said yes.
12
How do people fall in love, one of Turgenev’s characters asks in A Nest of Nobles, which they are reading at school. The moral conflict of Turgenev’s novel is between personal happiness and duty, says her teacher. A year has passed since Marik’s death, a long year full of struggle between personal happiness and duty inside her. The teacher, a chinless woman with graying hair and a squirrel face, is lecturing about lishnie lyudi, or useless people. There is a whole gallery of such people in Russian literature. Today it is Turgenev’s Lavretsky, who failed to challenge the serf-owning nobility because he couldn’t find enough willpower to tear himself away from the spoiled society that produced him. Must Sasha make a choice between her own personal happiness and duty, between Andrei and Marik’s memory?
Sasha imagines herself as Lisa and Andrei as Lavretsky. It is nighttime, and they are in the orchard—all classical Russian novels have an orchard as vast and dense as a forest—and Andrei is kneeling at her feet. Her shoulders begin to twitch, and the fingers of her pale hands press even closer to her face. Andrei, of course, understands what these twitching shoulders and tears mean. “Is it possible that you love me?” he whispers. “I am frightened,” she says, looking at him with moist eyes. “I love you,” he says. “I’m ready to give up my life for you.” She trembles and lowers her eyes; he quietly stands and pulls her toward him, and her head falls on his shoulder. He moves his head away and kisses her pale lips.
How do people fall in love? Maybe she was never attracted to Marik because they were too alike: he was intelligentny, he took piano lessons, and his mother was a teacher. He read the same books. Andrei, on the other hand, was always from a different group of blood, as her mother calls him. Is it his otherness that feels so thrilling, his green eyes that regard her with admiration, his hair the color of tar, innocent of barber conventions, his arms strong enough to lift heavy sacks of sugar or whatever else the freight train brings every afternoon to the railroad station where, after finishing school, Andrei unloads train cars for a ruble a day? Or is it her mother’s disdainful sighs at the mention of Andrei’s name that fuel the attraction?
She is only sixteen, almost two years after Marik’s death, when she can no longer resist Andrei. Does she trust him more than she trusts her mother? She is under the spell of literary trysts in moonlit orchards, and she needs a pledge that will demonstrate her love, a gift that will unite the two of them forever. What is the biggest, most sacred secret she can lay down at his feet?
She finds Andrei on the riverbank, standing on the little dirt beach, skipping stones into the brown water. He is as good at skipping stones as he is at skating, making fires, and just about everything else. She looks at his silhouette etched against the darkening sky, a body that fits so well into the perfect frame of nature, a body that intrigues and frightens her. She wishes that they could still play War, but in her soul, she knows those days are over.
He turns around and peers at her, his eyes all black because he stands against the light.
“It’s my uncle Kolya’s war journal,” she says, handing him the notebook. “The uncle who was an artist, whose paintings hang all over our house. The one still missing in action.”
She doesn’t know how Andrei will feel when he reads the journal. It is not the heroic war they learned about in history class, with soldiers humming patriotic songs and attacking under a red banner with a hammer and sickle to overwhelm the Fascists with the sheer willpower of their belief in the approaching future. What she hands to him is the opposite of myths concocted by the state to make them feel better when they leaf through history textbooks and read about the millions who died at the front or starved to death in besieged cities. The war narrative they learn in school, she now knows, is crammed with as many fairy tales as the stories in Grandma’s prerevolutionary book about saints they no longer believe in.
“Tell me about it,” Andrei says.