A Train to Moscow(52)
Her mother is bent over the laundry, taking a long time to unwind the nightshirts from the towels.
“Why did you keep it there, with all that old, discarded junk?” Sasha asks, watching her mother’s deliberately slow movements, watching her straighten a towel to fit over the rope.
“You still don’t understand,” her mother says and sighs. “It was the only safe place in the house. It was the only place they didn’t turn upside down in 1937, when they arrested Uncle Volya.”
Sasha had to know this: the storage loft was not a place of disgrace but safety. The only place to hide prerevolutionary and unpatriotic things. She is chagrined by her unnecessary question, yet there is still more she needs to know. “But how did this journal get to you in Ivanovo? All the way from the Leningrad Front?”
For a few moments, her mother pats the hanging towel, ironing the wrinkles. “A man came to our door in 1943. He may have been in the same platoon with Kolya; I don’t know. The man was demobilized; he had been wounded in the head. He could barely remember his own name, but he had our address written with indelible pencil on the inside of his shirt. Kolya Kuzmin asked me to give this to you, he said and handed me the notebook. Of course, we immediately brought him into the house, Grandma boiled tea, pulled out every scrap of food we had. He didn’t touch a thing. He didn’t even sit down. He paced the room from corner to corner, shaking, his teeth clattering, as if he had a high fever. Then he would suddenly stop and look around. We asked him where he had been; we asked about Kolya. He didn’t answer any questions. He only mumbled about some peasants from a tiny village he’d been ordered to shoot in the woods.”
“What was his name?” Sasha asks.
“Anton, he said, after we repeated the question five times at least.” It wasn’t Kolya’s pal Seryoga. No easy coincidences here, no missing pieces conveniently fitting into an unfinished puzzle. “His shoes were all torn, and his feet were bloody. I tried to clean and bandage them, but he pushed me away. He gave us his address, somewhere on the other end of the town, but when I went there a month later, there wasn’t a trace of him. A family, evacuated from Kalinin, had just moved in, a woman with two children and a sharp-elbowed mother-in-law. They hadn’t heard of a wounded man who returned from the war. They had their own two men still fighting, the woman’s husband and brother, and they didn’t want to hear anything about someone who had just been demobilized and sent home.” Her mother pauses. “After that, we sent Kolya several letters addressed to the Leningrad Front. I don’t know if they ever reached him. We wrote that his brother Sima had died. We wrote that you were born. But we never received anything from him again.”
Her mother picks up a duvet cover twisted like a rope and begins to unwind it.
“So what do we do now?” Sasha asks. “After we both know what Kolya went through at the front, after what they did to Nadia’s family, after all those arrests and murders? How many? Thousands? Millions? And for what?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” says her mother. “This isn’t the theater.” She shakes out the duvet and adjusts it over the rope. “Mistakes were made; we all know that. There was an abuse of power, a cult of personality. But look what we’ve built: a country that the whole world respects.” She hangs the pillowcase over the rope and clips it with a wooden clothespin. “And they admitted their mistakes,” she says. “Don’t you remember Khrushchev’s speech in 1956? They admitted they were wrong, and they released political prisoners. That was a start.”
Sasha smirks, but she feels the anger tightening her chest. “This is laughable. Uncle Volya, Marik’s father, Nadia and her parents. I’m twenty-one, and I know of five people who were murdered by the state. And Uncle Seryozha. He survived, but he might as well have died. It was all in his face, the camps. He had the face of a corpse.”
“You have to have patience,” her mother says, her usual refrain. “This is what Russia has survived on, century after century—patience and perseverance. We work, we wait, and we hope. And we believe. We have to believe in something. Before the Revolution, there was God. Now it’s our better future.”
She has heard all this before—from everyone in Ivanovo, even from Grandma—a pitiful excuse that absolves nothing.
“I work hard, but I don’t know what I’m waiting for.” Sasha wants to show her mother that she is wrong, to let her know that she now lives in Leningrad, where such views are as provincial as chickens in a courtyard or piles of firewood stacked under the roof of a shed. “I swear, it’s no different from the pretending I learned from Aunt Polya at the lunch counter in first grade.” Aunt Polya is still as clear in her memory as she was fifteen years ago, pouring milk and dispensing soup, ordering them to chew and swallow and not waste a single crumb. Sasha remembers how she watched them to make sure they finished the bread and the milk and the soup. “I knew she was watching me, and she knew that I knew, and I knew that she knew that I knew. We played this little game every day: she would give me an unexpected glance, and I would chew diligently, pretending I didn’t know she was looking.”
Sasha shakes out a few pillowcases, which make a loud slurping noise. “I never know if the play we’re rehearsing will be closed by the Ministry of Culture because someone high up thinks that the playwright’s words are aimed directly at those in power.” She pauses to help her mother spread the sheet over the rope, so there is now a wall of wet laundry between them. “Look, I know it’s probably better now than it was under Stalin, but this is not enough,” she says, her words addressed into a barrier of wet cotton. “How am I supposed to live in a country where everything is based on lies? Our national game isn’t hockey. It is lying and pretending.”