A Train to Moscow(3)

“Do you know what could have happened?” she asks in a shrill, unfamiliar voice. “Do you understand how dangerous it is, to jump onto a moving streetcar?” The word dangerous hisses out of her mouth like an explosion.

Sasha knows she is guilty because she broke the rules, but she has also done something that made her fearless and proud, like her mother must have felt before she was born when, despite the military order that forbade treating civilians, she cut into the belly of a nine-year-old wounded boy with her surgeon’s scalpel and pulled out pieces of shrapnel, one by one. She and Marik did it, a small revenge for the bruises from the guard who took away her friend’s father, the bruises she never revealed to anyone at home.

“But nothing happened,” she pleads. “The streetcar is so slow here, right before the end of the route. It’s so slow, I can walk faster,” she says, stretching the truth so Grandma’s face will lose its sharpness and become soft and wrinkled again.

She wants to tell her about Andrei’s admiring stare and about Marik’s tense shoulders in front of her on the tail of the streetcar; she wants to brag about their accomplishment and newly earned respect, but Grandma paces back and forth, not listening to any of this. She blames herself and says she is an old fool who didn’t see what was happening because she was too busy in the kitchen boiling buckets of water for a load of laundry and wasn’t looking out the window as often as she should have been.

“Such a reckless thing to do,” she keeps saying. “And what if Andrei decides to jump off a cliff. Will you follow him, too?” she demands. “Mama was right when she refused to let him into the house. And what about Marik?” she asks. “Did he ride on the back of the streetcar, too?”

“No,” Sasha lies, wondering if the neighbor snitched on Marik, too, wondering if Grandma will save her from what awaits when her mother and Grandpa get home from work. She will never tell anyone about Marik riding the streetcar with her. They did it, and that’s enough.



She is on a bench, facedown, on her stomach. The wood surface is hard, made harder by her mother’s hands that are pressing on her legs and shoulders, holding her down. She turns her head and sees Grandpa pulling the belt out of his trousers, black and thick, with a round metal buckle. She tries to flail her arms and kick her legs, but her mother’s grip is like a vise. She turns her head, the only part of her body she can move, and sees Grandma standing by the door, the light from the electric bulb glaring off her glasses so she can’t see her eyes. The belt swishes above, and she hears it cut through the air before it lands on her behind and leaves a sting so painful, she wails. But she knows Grandpa won’t stop with only one strike, so she keeps wailing and screaming and wiggling under her mother’s hands as the belt does its swishing and stinging, as the tears on her face mix with snot and leave pathetic swirls of drool on the wood of the bench. “I won’t do it anymore!” she howls to halt the belt. “I won’t, I won’t, I swear I won’t!” she shrieks, in sync with its rhythm, and then there is no more swishing, and the air becomes whole again.

“Next time I’ll spank you with nettles,” says Grandpa and threads the belt through the loopholes on the waist of his pants.

Her mother’s hands open so she can scramble off the bench, past Grandma, whose eyes she still cannot see, and run to her bed and crawl under the blanket to pity herself and her punished behind, to think about injustice and the meaning of life.



At dinner, her mother talks about dangers. The dangers she saw at the front, where she was a surgeon until Sasha was born, and the dangers they all read about in Pravda or hear about from babushkas who sit on benches near the shed and chew on sunflower seeds. Mines in the fields and unexploded shells under the forest loam, whirlpools in the river where they go to swim in the summer, gangs of hooligans who get drunk on moonshine and break windows at the school and rip apples off Grandpa’s apple tree. There are already so many dangers lurking around that only an unthinking fool like Sasha would conjure up new ones.

“Do you understand what you did?” she asks, and Sasha nods silently because she can still feel the belt welts and doesn’t want to provoke any more punishment.

“Eat your soup,” says Grandma and pushes another slice of bread toward her.

Back in the under-the-blanket murk, Sasha decided she would not eat, so she shakes her head and presses her lips together to show she is serious.

“Eat,” demands her mother.

She sits with her hands on her knees, listening to her ailing backside.

“Are you deaf?” asks Grandpa.

“Just a couple of spoonfuls,” says Grandma in her regular soft voice.

“Did you hear me?” asks her mother. “What did I just say?”

“When I eat, I’m deaf and mute,” she answers, quoting one of Grandpa’s house rules.

“Then I’ll have to feed you like a baby,” says her mother and gets up. She sits next to Sasha on the bench, lifts a spoonful of soup from her own plate, and pushes it against Sasha’s lips. She tenses her mouth, but her mother pushes harder.

“Next time, it’s nettles,” says Grandpa and gives her a hard look from across the table. His eyes are blue, the color of the forget-me-nots he grows around the gate, with grooves of deep wrinkles radiating into his white hair. He was a peasant before the Revolution, but after 1917, when the people rose up with hammers and scythes to liberate themselves from the yoke of tsarist oppression, he became an engineer. Grandpa’s peasant ancestry is the reason they have three rooms and a kitchen all to themselves. Before the Revolution, the entire house belonged to Grandma’s father. He was a factory supervisor and because he hadn’t been exploited like workers or peasants, he didn’t deserve to keep the place where he lived. Now one half of the house is theirs, with three families of neighbors sharing the other half, one family in each room. Grandpa must have been a pretty important peasant because they have an indoor toilet on their side of the house, while the three other families all troop to the outhouse in the back. Sasha doesn’t understand why Grandma’s father deserved to be thrown out of his own house and then shot for supervising factory work, but she has a sense no one wants to talk about this, so she doesn’t ask.