A Train to Moscow(53)

“You’ve said enough to get yourself ten years in the camps, back under Stalin,” says her mother from the other side of the sheet, and Sasha can hear that she has a rueful smile on her face. “But these are vegetarian times, thank God,” she adds. Neither of them believes in God, but they both know that the vegetarian times of Khrushchev are the times of milder, less brutal repressions than the carnivorous times of Stalin. She bends over the tub, moving slowly, as if trying to avoid what she is going to say next.

“Do you remember the head of the Ivanovo anatomy department, Moisey Davidovich Zlotnikov?” she asks.

Sasha remembers. She was a little afraid of him when her mother took her to her institute, where she sat among jars with organs floating in formaldehyde, copying a diagram of lungs with blue-and-red vessels tangled up inside a faceless man’s chest. Dr. Zlotnikov always greeted her with a handshake, as if she were an adult. He had a small, graying beard, a balding forehead, and a pince-nez, too old to be anyone’s father, too unsmiling, too stern.

“After the war, when you were nine or ten, I was summoned to the Ivanovo NKVD headquarters,” her mother says from the other side of the sheet. “He was my PhD adviser, and they demanded that I inform on him.” Sasha hears a sharp intake of breath. “Every month, I would come to this secret apartment and write the most mundane, innocuous things I could think of: a conversation about the percentage of enlarged thyroids at the Ivanovo textile factory, a shortage of scalpels at a dissection class, a lab assistant’s alcoholic son.” She pauses, and Sasha waits. “Those were still Stalin times, carnivorous times. I couldn’t refuse. Once a month, I came to that apartment, as though to an illicit, sordid rendezvous that had to be kept secret from the honest world. A young, plain-clothed man sat there, on the other side of the room, and watched me write. He always smiled when he saw me, a wide, open smile that dimpled his cheeks. But even though what I wrote was harmless and benign, I was always afraid that something I wrote would be twisted and used against Dr. Zlotnikov. Every day at work, I waited for them to come and arrest him, and then he would only need to take one look at me and he would know who was to blame.” She pins the last nightshirt on the rope and wipes her wet hands on the apron she is wearing. “This lasted for one year. Then Stalin died.”

Sasha follows her mother to the kitchen, her hefty figure leading the way through the hallway, past the refrigerator and the coatrack. She has always led the way, but Sasha hasn’t always followed. She has escaped from Ivanovo, and for all these years, she has wanted to think that its provincialism had not left a permanent mark on her soul, that the air of Moscow and Leningrad allowed her to draw a clear line between truth and pretense, between the heroic textbook story of the war and what Kolya lived through at the front.

In the kitchen, her mother boils water for tea and spoons out of a jar the strawberry jam from Grandpa’s Ivanovo garden. Frankly, Sasha doesn’t know how to react to her mother’s story. She thinks she would feel better if she hadn’t told her, if she didn’t know that her mother was an informer. She wonders if having this knowledge makes her a coconspirator, if she is now complicit in the deed. This knowledge has raised more questions than she knows how to answer. If she were in her mother’s place, would she have done the same thing? Would she have come to an NKVD apartment every month and concocted reports about her teacher, no matter how benign? And although she wants to think that she would never succumb to spying, how can she know this for certain? And if she refused—if her mother had refused—what would have happened then, to her and to Sasha?

Her mother drops two cubes of sugar into her cup and slowly circles her spoon around until they dissolve. Kolya’s journal is between them at the center of the table, a stark reminder of their past, marking the gap between their ways of thinking.

“We wrote to Leningrad to find out about Kolya,” her mother says. “Right after the war and then again, at least three more times. It was always the same answer: not listed among the dead or the living.” She takes a sip of the tea from her spoon, then pours it into the saucer because it is too hot to drink from the cup. “I even went to the island of Valaam soon after Stalin died. There was a holding pen for war invalids in the old monastery there, men without arms or legs, some without both arms and legs—they called them samovars. I don’t know how those people got there. There was a rumor they were rounded up at night in the streets and railroad stations of the cities where many of them begged for a living. They put them in cattle cars, the rumor went, and brought them to this faraway island on Lake Ladoga so people wouldn’t have to see their deformities and be reminded of the war. Anyway, that’s what we heard.” She lifts the saucer to her lips and takes several sips of the tea. “And then there were some who chose to go there because they didn’t want to be a burden on their families after the war.” She pauses. “This is what Kolya would’ve done, I thought, if he’d been badly wounded. So I took a train to Leningrad and boarded a boat—they had excursion boats going to Valaam once a day. It’s a serene island, with a striking northern nature, stark and beautiful. I knew they didn’t let tourists visit the invalid home, and even giving someone directions could cost you your job. So I’d packed my white doctor’s coat and hat. The monastery wasn’t difficult to find—it was the tallest structure on the island. The white coat worked: the nurses and doctors all wore white gowns, as I knew they would.”