A Train to Moscow(73)

If you’re reading these lines, please know that all I think about is you, my dearest mamochka and papochka, you Galochka, and Sashenka, whom I’ve never met but who so often comes to me in my dreams. She is always little, four or five, in a navy-blue dress and canvas shoes rubbed with chalk to make them whiter, the way I remember Galochka was dressed for our family photograph when she was that age.

Sasha looks up from the letter and takes a breath. What was true only a few minutes earlier—Grandma’s fresh grave dug by the same two drunks with veiny faces who have dug every grave she can remember, the cotton dress that still holds her smell, Grandpa watering and weeding as if this routine would erase this last week from his memory and grant him peace—is no longer real. Reality seems to have shifted, the past and the present bleeding into each other, the straight timeline crumpling into an accordion of chaos, making everything muddled and disorderly, something Mama would have hated. But she is no longer here to tell Sasha how unruly all of this is or how much she abhors this bedlam.

Sasha looks down at the boards of the floor, scuffed almost white by their feet, by the intertwined lives now all happening at once. She sees her five-year-old mother in a navy dress, a picture she remembers from Grandma’s photo album. Did Sasha also have a dress like this, with a white sailor’s collar stretched over her shoulders, complete with the canvas shoes rubbed with chalk? She begins to feel the weight of its thick, heavy cotton on her arms. Was it her mother’s dress or Sasha’s? She lifts her eyes and through the window she sees Kolya standing by the apple tree, in round glasses that make his features even softer, trying to reach an apple dangling on the highest branch, laughing at his own clumsiness when the branch he is holding slips out of his hand and whips him in the face. As images flood her consciousness, the present and the past jostle for space, crowding the room like pieces of furniture from her childhood, bending and breaking the paths of their lives she has always assumed to be linear. She stares down at the letter in her hands, at her and her mother’s names written twelve years ago with such fierce urgency somewhere on the other side of the world.

When the Leningrad Front moved west, I moved with it. So much death had passed before my eyes by then that I couldn’t comprehend how my soul could still take more in. I was almost numb, and yet we had to keep walking, pulling our cannons and machine guns and carrying our backpacks filled with rations, ammunition, and unsent letters home. I walked and pulled cannons, like everyone around me. As the Germans retreated, they mined the roads, and we had to move carefully, inching forward. In my mind, I can still see an armored vehicle twisted into a tangle of metal parts, bodies of soldiers blasted out of the truck. A wounded cow baying by the side of the road, the image of a burning building reflected in its eyes. I still see a dog running across a charred field, a human bone in its mouth.

Somehow I survived the worst two years of the war, the Leningrad Front, and then I almost didn’t survive. One foolish misstep got me captured, although it should have cost me my life. Would it be better to have been killed than captured by the Germans? After being a soldier, would it be better to be dead or be a prisoner of war, with the big letters SU—Soviet Union—painted on the back of my military coat in indelible white paint? We were marched west, hundreds of prisoners, in our torn boots and uniforms infested with lice, until we arrived in a prison camp somewhere in Germany. It was as bad as you can imagine: yellow drinking water with stains of machine oil, dysentery, rotten turnips, routine beatings with a gun barrel, and yet I only grasped at one thing, life. I would have never known, even after three years at the front, how fiercely we claw for life, even life in a German prison camp.

We escaped just before the camp was liberated in April of 1945, those of us who were still alive, everyone ecstatic and free, no longer prisoners of war. We were ready to go back home. Or were we? There were fifty-six nationalities in the camp, but I only made friends with two men. Yura was from Pinsk and slept on the bunk below mine. He was captured just as I was, on a reconnaissance mission, stalking through the woods right into the enemy position. My other friend from the bunk above was John from Saint Petersburg, America, who was captured in Normandy. Saint Petersburg, can you imagine? We were born on different sides of the world and yet our cities had the same name. He taught me some English, and I taught him some Russian, so he called me Nick and I called him Vanya. Yura didn’t trust him, accusing him of being a capitalist spy. But one look at John’s face—freckles and a gap between his front teeth—made me laugh off Yura’s warning, despite Yura being a veteran and having served in the Finnish War.

Yura told me stories about that war, about him witnessing how our prisoners were exchanged for captured Finns. He saw them marching in columns toward each other, the Finns reaching their comrades first, embracing and kissing them. When our captured soldiers reached our side, Yura and thirty or so other soldiers were ordered to encircle and escort them to a nearby barrack behind rows of barbed wire. One of the released soldiers tried to embrace Yura, who fought off the soldier’s hug as if he were contaminated. The lieutenant’s command was clear. ”Freeze!” he yelled. “One step and we’ll shoot.” Those prisoners of war, so happy to be back on their home soil, were now our enemies. We all knew what Stalin said: “Soviet soldiers do not surrender. There are no prisoners of war. There are only traitors.”

There were no trials. There were days of interrogation, all ending in the same verdict. They were all declared traitors for having been captured and were given six years in labor camps in Vorkuta.