A Train to Moscow(63)
As she takes careful steps onstage, she is thinking about Kolya’s fears at the front, of Uncle Sima’s, and sometimes even her father’s. She should be grateful that at least it isn’t winter, when Kolya said the insides of your nostrils stick together and when your teeth ache from the cold. It is June 1942, one year since the invasion spilled east from their borders, toward the Volga and beyond, a chilly June when even the weather doesn’t feel like warming up, when the sun remains hidden behind the gray haze, refusing to shine light onto this ravaged land. She is as scared as Kolya was when he first saw Germans roaring across the countryside on motorcycles, in helmets and big glasses; as scared as Sima must have been when he ran in retreat, deafened by the blitzkrieg of tanks and planes on June 22, 1941; as frightened as her father when he first saw droplets of blood on the handkerchief he pressed to his mouth to cover his cough. Her fear is uncontrollable and primal, like a small animal with razor-sharp teeth and viselike claws that has gripped her insides and will not let go of them until they turn liquid, just like this swamp under her feet. The fear is that at any moment, despite your best effort to survive, you can be shredded by a grenade; or minced to a bloody pulp by a bomb; or burned to a cinder in a locked barn; or hoisted aloft with your hands tied behind your back so that your arms, with a splintering crack, dislocate from their sockets at the shoulders; or sucked under the oilskin of this bog. This is the fear of dying she now knows all too well—despite her youth and strength and all the joy and love she hasn’t yet had a chance to taste.
“How is Quiet Dawns going?” asks her mother. Sasha is in a hurry before a rehearsal, slurping soup in the kitchen, their usual place of conversation.
“I think I’ve got it,” Sasha says. “I think I’ve got Liza.” She says this for her mother’s sake, but she is not at all sure that she has mastered the role. The knot of insecurity and fear tightens under her ribs every day, and she knows that the nauseating feeling of failure won’t let go until opening night, if all goes well. She forces herself to finish the last spoonful of barley soup and gets up to gouge a little leftover macaroni from the pot on the stove. She knows she must eat, although her stomach aches and contracts in protest. “I’ve reread Kolya’s journal, and it helped.”
For a minute, her mother is silent, clinking the silverware in the sink. Then she turns and takes a breath. “Maybe he was too bitter, Kolya. Too disdainful about the country, about our way of life. Too negative.”
They have had this conversation before, an argument that never ends well.
“Too negative?” Sasha says, hearing her voice rise in tone. “He wasn’t negative enough! He wrote what he saw around him. He didn’t make anything up.”
“But maybe—and I’ve been thinking about this—maybe he had this pessimistic view because the one he loved had just been arrested. If they hadn’t arrested her, things would’ve been different for Kolya. Nadia’s arrest made him see everything through this dark lens.”
“So what are you saying?” Sasha hears irritation in her voice but does nothing to rein it in. “That he saw everything through a dark lens while in reality everything was rosy and light?”
“No,” says her mother and shakes her head, getting defensive. “What I’m saying is that maybe this personal trauma blurred his vision, so he wasn’t able to see reality the way it was.”
Sasha is already late for a rehearsal, and her anxiety about the role is only fueling her anger. “He was there; he was the only one who saw reality the way it was!” she shouts. “He was at the front, not our leaders. He fought for the motherland against the enemy, while they sent people to rot in camps.”
“Don’t boil over,” her mother says, her usual warning, but Sasha is already past the boiling-over point.
“You know what I think? After rereading his journal and after rehearsing Dawns? I think that all those ancient men in Moscow have simply usurped the war. They have wrestled the war, the heroism and the death, out of the hands of those who lived it, and now they are the ones who own it. And now they wave it like a red banner on Victory Day. After all, they think they are the ones who made the victory happen, the Party and the KGB, and not the tens of millions who were murdered, by the Germans and by our own.”
She bangs her plate and fork into the sink, angry because she is in a hurry and doesn’t have time to fight with her mother; angry because no matter how hard she tries, she can’t drive this simple understanding into her mother’s head; angry at another looming proof of her professional unfitness.
“I don’t have the time now,” she spits out, “to argue. And you know what?” She pauses for a second, glancing at her mother’s fallen face, but the words have already formed in her mouth, ready to bubble out. “You’re hopeless, as hopeless and retrograde as Grandpa. As blindly patriotic. That’s why it was so easy for the Party to hijack the war and the victory from those who had fought for it. That’s why we live the way we live, wallowing in lies, like pigs in mud. Because of fools like you.”
35
It’s opening night for Quiet Dawns, and Sasha is onstage, flying through the forest as if she had wings, on an assignment from Sergeant Gleb to go back to their base and report that a regiment of Germans is laying mines around the lake. Gleb and Liza had a little time to talk after he told her how to retrace her steps back to the base: first through the forest, then through the swamp (make sure you take the birch pole we left by the big pine on the way here), and then across the field just before the base where they came from. There was a song they sang in their village, he said, a song Liza started to hum because she knew it well. Gleb pressed his hand to her mouth to silence her because the Germans were getting close, and for a few moments, he kept his palm on her face before he pulled it back. This is all that she is thinking of right now: his hand, the smell of it, tobacco and warm skin, the smell that is now propelling her through the forest.