“His body was preserved with formaldehyde,” her mother whispers into her ear, “the same way they preserve bodies in our anatomy department.”
She thinks of the dissection room at her mother’s medical institute, with its tall tables on which lie brown bodies—not at all frightening, full of revelations about what was previously hidden—with every nerve and capillary and membrane exposed by her mother’s skillful hands.
When they pass the table where Lenin lies under glass, her mother pushes her through the crowd to the first row. At this close range, Lenin is as uninteresting as she saw from a distance, yellowish skin stretched over his bony head, dead and undissected. But she must display proper solemnity, like the rest of the people who wrinkle their brows and pleat their mouths into mourning lines, as if he died only yesterday and not in 1924, when her mother was only seven.
It is early morning on May 1, and they are walking toward the Moskva River, behind Red Square, where Katya’s group from the telephone center is assembling before the demonstration. It is sunny and warm, perfect weather for International Workers’ Day, and the streets have been washed by blue trucks that Sasha saw earlier spraying water in heavy, blazing arches. She is between her mother and Katya, holding their hands, jumping over the puddles left by trucks. They are wearing their best dresses—a sunflower cotton shirtwaist for her mother and red polka dots for Katya. Today they don’t mind her jumping, and they hold hands and swing her over the wet pavement as long as she wants.
The people from Katya’s telephone center look as confident and bold as the workers with thick muscles from the poster of a Five-Year Plan they passed on the way here. They unfurl red banners on long wooden sticks and hoist up huge portraits of stern, unsmiling men.
Then everyone starts walking: people with banners and portraits and red carnations made from construction paper swaying on long wire stems. Her mother hoists her up onto her shoulders, so now Sasha is above the people’s heads, in the midst of a forest of swaying sticks with flags, banners, and portraits, of balloons and red carnations. She squints and peers to her left, where everyone else is peering. There, five columns of people away, a group of men stands on a granite platform against the Kremlin wall. In the center is a separate dark figure in what looks like a military uniform. She knows it is Stalin, their conscience and their revolutionary glory, as the radio reminds them every morning. He is the father to all of them marching in this square and gathered around radios from here to Kamchatka, across all their eleven time zones. Only he is so far away, she can barely see him. He looks tiny and ant-like, and there is nothing glorious about him.
Riding on her mother’s shoulders, Sasha tries to lean forward to see him better through the forest of portraits and flags. She cranes her neck to peek under a rectangular slogan on two poles, and for a few seconds, the tiny, dark figure flickers between the squares of red. But all she feels is disappointment. He looks nothing like the father they all know, grand and loving and immortalized in oil.
Then the ant-like figure raises his hand, and the square explodes. Every mouth in every lane of every column splits open in one unified roar, and the forest of banners and portraits jolts and sways, as if struck by a blast of wind as strong as the one that snapped Grandpa’s oldest apple tree in half last year. It is so terrifying that Sasha screams. But the May Day demonstrators are all safely below, and she is the only one trapped in the center of the storm. The poles of the slogan on her left are rattling by her ear; the sticks with portraits aim at her head from the right. Flags shake with crimson furor and hiss like flames, as if someone has plucked her by the skin of her neck and is about to toss her into the gut of a wood-burning stove. The roar peals over the square like thunder, the mouths fusing into one howling throat, one hungry set of jaws with rows of sticks for teeth, ready to crunch and chew and spit her out.
Sasha shrieks and sobs, all in vain, because her voice cannot be heard against the roaring square. She wails and hunches over and rubs tears around her face. With arms over her head, cowering and bawling, she rides to the side street, where her mother and Katya finally hear her cries and see the snot smeared all over her face.
Her mother pulls her down from her shoulders, takes out a handkerchief, and starts wiping Sasha’s cheeks. “She’s tired,” she says to Katya, patting Sasha on the head. “Getting up at six and all that walking.”
Katya opens her arms, and Sasha jumps up and wraps her legs around her, clutching at her shoulders and flattening herself against her polka-dot dress. Katya knows Sasha is not tired, and she rocks in rhythm with Katya’s steps, still wailing. She thinks of the three sisters, who wouldn’t be so desperate to get to Moscow if they could see the spectacle of the whole politburo shaking on sticks. She thinks of the tiny man against the granite wall, their father who could never be her father. She thinks about another life, at the only place where it is possible, Theater. She sobs on the trolley, in the courtyard, on the stairs; she sobs on the landing and in the apartment’s long, murky hallway.