A Train to Moscow(33)
Does she feel a connection to Lara because they both grew up in small towns in the provinces and both left for the capital? Did the two of them sense that Ivanovo and Pskov were too suffocating, that both wanted more than their homes could offer? Is Sasha’s search for a different life in Moscow simply an extension of her looking for a father, someone noble and heroic, someone whose name wouldn’t make Grandma frown? Has Lara, all this time, been looking for a father, too? It is probably to fortify the growing bond between them that Sasha tells her the story from her childhood.
Sasha’s mother, who told her that her father died during the war, never specified how he died, and this vagueness created a vacuum that, in her seven-year-old mind, gradually filled with plots of nobility and valor. Some men in her fantasies turned out more heroic, tossing a grenade at a tank and dying in an explosion of flames, while others perished more slowly, like partisans living in the woods in the middle of winter, sleeping in log-reinforced trenches below the ground, hidden under a meter of snow.
She doesn’t remember when she realized it was useless to wait for her father to return, but at seven, Sasha knew one thing: if she wanted a father, she had to take matters into her own hands and find him.
So the next time her mother took her to the town park on Sunday, Sasha didn’t waste time on the sandbox or the swing. Leaving her mother on a bench under a tree, she ran around the park looking for a handsome, brave man to be her father. It took her only ten minutes to discover that there weren’t many handsome men around. Another few minutes revealed that there weren’t many men of any kind.
She took a path that ran past a kiosk where a round woman in a stained apron and henna hair presided behind cones with fruit drinks, and that was when she saw him. He stood by the kiosk with a glass of golden liquid in his hand, his resplendent uniform cinched by a belt with a shining buckle, his black boots reflecting the sun. Two women on a nearby bench undoubtedly saw him, too; they whispered to each other, covering their faces with their hands as they spoke, and each gave him a quick, furtive glance. But Sasha had an advantage: she was already on the path, skipping toward him, pretending to be drawn to the multicolored drinks sparkling in their vats.
When she was about a meter away, she stopped. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw that the women ceased whispering; they were now silent, their hands sternly in their laps, their eyes latched onto her—cold and hostile, like the eyes of behind-the-wall neighbors who didn’t have an indoor toilet.
“Zdravstvuite,” she said politely, as if he were her teacher. The man swallowed what was left in the glass, and she saw the sharp bone in the front of his neck move up and down. He looked at her, and his eyes crinkled, golden and liquid, as if the juice he’d just swallowed, instead of going down his throat, went up and lit his eyes from within.
“Do you want to be my father?” she asked, and from the way his smile spread across his face, she knew he did, even before he could open his mouth. “Come,” she said and grabbed him by the hand. “I’ll take you to Mama.”
They walked past the two women on the bench, stiff and silent, past the empty-sleeved invalid and the drunk sleeping under a tree. She saw her mother on a bench near the sandbox, where a bunch of nursery-school girls in berets were digging a ditch that looked like a war trench.
She clasped her mother’s hand and set it down onto the man’s broad palm. Her mother’s face was open and unprotected, lit by surprise. “Here,” Sasha told her. “I want him to be my father.”
The next few weeks were light and breathless, like the anticipation of a New Year’s Eve. The man’s name was Alexei, Lyosha for short, and he was a military pilot. On his first visit, he came to their door dressed in his uniform, which temporarily melted the icy blue stare of Grandpa, who didn’t trust strangers. His word for strangers was chuzhoi, as opposed to svoi, our own. The same words Vera in their drama school uses to separate actors from those on the other side of the curtain. You can only trust svoi, said Grandpa, a small bunch that included their immediate family here and Grandma’s sister who lived in Kineshma, ninety kilometers away. Sasha was not sure she liked Grandpa’s philosophy. If what he said was true, she couldn’t trust Marik, or Andrei, or Marik’s mother, who taught them about Pushkin. If they couldn’t trust anyone but their family, how could they even get on a streetcar without risking their lives? And what about those radio reports of tons of grain they never saw? When it came to the radio, did Grandpa not trust the news, either?
The reason he wasn’t sure if he could trust Lyosha, she thought, was the melting gaze in her mother’s eyes when Lyosha looked in her direction. That was when she forgot about Grandpa, which instantly stripped him of his command status because, as they all knew, a commander could never be ignored.
Sasha liked Lyosha’s strong arms that lifted her onto his shoulders, from where everything seemed smaller. Surveying the familiar from above, she sailed over their yard, past the envious eyes of Andrei and Marik sitting on the roof over the garbage dump; past the babushkas on a bench, who stopped chewing on sunflower seeds and burst into furious whispers; past the fences bleached gray by the winter and the rain that had recently turned their street into an alley of mud. Even at seven, she knew that what drove the babushkas to flap their arms and fuse together into what looked like a murder of crows was envy. Lyosha was not an invalid and not a drunk, with arms and legs intact, and that made him a rare commodity in postwar Ivanovo. He could have been the only man with extremities and a smile to roam their streets in the last five years.