A Train to Moscow(51)

I walked past the peeling facades of French classicism and Italian baroque draped with the red banners of our bright future. I thought of those in the stratosphere of the Kremlin, dressed in generals’ uniforms and party suits, puffing on pipes at their desks, debating the fate of our lives between sips of cognac, issuing search warrants, signing decrees of death. Sitting like judges at their engineered trials, pounding gavels with their meaty hands: death, death, death. What made their hearts beat, what pushed through their veins instead of blood was the sludge of paranoia and betrayal. Who is not with us is against us, their eyes instruct us from the portraits hanging in every office. We do not arrest good people, they say. We’re simply protecting our motherland from its enemies with the help of other good people, all those neighbors with properly attuned ears, insufficient living space, and healthy socialist envy.

I thought of the night when they came for Nadia. How terrified she must have been, how desperate and lost. I saw the two men stalking around their apartment, picking out things they liked, packing them into their bags. “You won’t be needing this anymore,” one may have said, lifting a bronze writing set off her father’s desk. “And this,” said the other thug, taking off the wall an old pendulum clock that belonged to Nadia’s grandmother. They had probably cut the pillows open, as they always do, so feathers must have been flying everywhere in a surreal blizzard in early May.

And where was Nadia now? In a stone coffin of a solitary confinement cell? On the third tier of plank beds among fifty other suspected traitors and spies? Being interrogated by a sadist in an NKVD uniform, who is shouting that she is automatically guilty because she didn’t inform on her father?

I had to blot those thoughts out of my mind, for they spawned monstrous images of humiliation and medieval torture, of fingers broken in doorjambs, of nipples stabbed with sharpened pencils, of hot irons sizzling the skin. Had I allowed my mind to wander along this path, I know I would have gone mad. So I kept trudging along the streets and circling whole blocks in a pointless search for answers. My thoughts were racing; I couldn’t focus; my mind was a toxic tangle of awful possibilities.

I thought of Volya, my uncle arrested in 1937 for telling a joke. I thought of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in the camps for doing his job, writing poetry. I thought of my art professor, the one who showed us Picasso’s work that seemed to challenge the laws of socialist realism yet was so charged with life, who one day simply failed to show up to teach our seminar. “Do not try to investigate his disappearance,” cautioned the dean, a dire warning to my class of twelve that we obediently followed.

I thought of my mother: of her round glasses, her hair pulled back in a bun, her soft cotton dress. She wasn’t at all as steely and tough as our motherland; she was, in fact, the opposite—forgiving and kind. She was someone I would die for, without hesitation. She and Nadia.

I turned and walked along the canal embankment, cutting through the fog that began to feel like drizzle. On the other side of the street, the door leading to a store was open. I crossed and walked inside.

On the shelf to my right, a few candlesticks made of jade and brass stood next to a lamp with a flowery cloth shade. In a cabinet of dark wood with glass shelves, a tea service with round cups and a teapot boasted its cobalt net of classic imperial design. A pile of spoons glimmered beside the saucers. Bigger pieces occupied the space in the back of the store: a set of four chairs with curved legs stacked up before a round dining table, a couple of mismatched stools, two nightstands with the surface of polished wood. The secondhand shop, selling the contents of people’s former lives.

Behind the first room was another, to the left, and I made my way there without thinking, as if someone had grabbed me by the elbow and pulled me forward. I stepped inside and froze in place. Against the wall, between two lamps with hideous curlicues, stood a divan I remembered so well. I hoped that the vision would disappear, but there it was still, an object whose pattern of wear was forever imprinted in my brain, whose scratches and bumps I knew with every fiber of my body—our divan, Nadia’s and mine.

I stood in front of it, emptied of feeling, numb. Before me was Nadia’s past, for sale, her family’s past turned to merchandise in a secondhand shop. It only confirmed the worst scenarios hurtling through my mind, the dark scenes I’d been trying to banish so I wouldn’t go mad. It only validated the toxic fear that there were no more Goldbergs. It only pressed into my brain the monstrous, vomit-tasting probability that there was no more Nadia.





30


“So after that,” Sasha asks, pointing to Kolya’s scorched notebook, “what do we do?”

“After that, soup with cat,” her mother says, a saying she invokes when the future presents itself as nebulous and murky, as opposed to the unclouded version offered by the Pravda, or when she doesn’t even want to think about the future. She has just lumbered in with a load of wet laundry that she begins to pin on two clotheslines that crisscross the room.

“I have to tell you something,” Sasha says. “I’ve read all this already. I found this journal in Ivanovo, when I was eleven, stuffed into the storage loft, behind Grandma’s prerevolutionary hat.”

Her mother unbends from the aluminum tub with the heap of laundry and for a minute stands there silently, looking at her, waiting for an explanation.

“Our house was full of secrets.” “Full of lies,” Sasha wants to say but doesn’t. “And this journal was just one of them. A secret, I knew, you didn’t want me to know.” She walks over to the wall and tightens the sagging clothesline around the nail. “I hated you and Grandpa when I found it. You hid the truth Kolya saw at the front, and that was another lie added to a mountain of lies about our glorious past. It made me feel complicit, this adult secret I had to carry all those years. It almost felt like an initiation, a required rite of passage into our life of lying and pretending. The guilt that we pass down from one generation to the next.”