“Nu, nu,” says her mother, but Sasha still clings to Katya, sniffling into her shoulder. As long as she is in Katya’s arms, the Red Square teeth will not be able to get her. Katya is her shield because she is from Moscow and she knows what they, living in Ivanovo, are too far away to see.
Then an old man comes out of Uncle Seryozha’s room, peels her off Katya, and carries her somewhere in his tobacco-smelling arms. She lets him because he is also from Moscow so he also knows. He puts her on the divan in Baba Yulia’s room and sits next to her and brushes her head with his hard hands full of calluses. But they feel good, these hands, so she stops crying and for the first time looks into his face, unshaved and ravaged, into his colorless, unsmiling, frozen eyes. It seems strange, the difference between his hands, warm and alive, and his dead eyes, but it isn’t stranger than the eternally dead, birdlike Lenin lying under glass or Stalin, their leader and revolutionary glory, who turned out to be an ant.
They sit like this for a long time, Uncle Seryozha and Sasha, not saying a word, not moving. His face is hard and pitted, like their roads in Ivanovo when there is no rain. She doesn’t know what he is thinking. Maybe about this place Magadan, where he was lucky to have spent only ten years; maybe about his illness that makes him hate all holidays; maybe about the ten special screws that got him sick in the first place.
She is thinking about another life, a life in Theater. She is thinking about the true make-believe, the only pretending that makes sense. She wants to be part of it more than she has ever wanted anything, desperately, and she will dream about it every night. She will be stoic and patient, enduring their long days and long lines and gray streets with empty horse-drawn carts inching along through the dust. She will wait until she finishes school; she will live with Theater smoldering in the corner of her soul.
6
She climbs into the darkness of the storage loft in their Ivanovo house, a magic place filled with the secrets from another life. Sasha hasn’t been here in a year, since her tenth birthday. It smells of dust and mice, an odor of abandonment and desolation, as if this corner of the extinguished world ceased to exist because of her absence. This is her hiding place, her safe place, and today she is hiding from the present.
She is hiding from Grandpa, from the thick leather belt he flogs her with when she breaks his strict house rules. She is hiding from the radio reports announcing the biggest-ever harvests that never reach their stores and from her mother’s warnings about danger when she speaks about the war, when the word front rumbles out of her mouth, sputters on her lips, and detonates in Sasha’s ears, ending with a dead t.
Her mother saw the front when she was a war surgeon. The front killed Sasha’s father, who, she says to their neighbors, perished in the Great Patriotic War. There is a photo of him in the family album, a blond man in a uniform cinched with a belt. But from Grandma’s sighs and the neighbors’ smirks, Sasha senses that the noble war death is simply another story, another lie. She knows she is too young to be told the truth, but she is patient.
The front also killed both her mother’s brothers. Sima was wounded in battle and died in the back room of their house. Kolya, an artist, who studied in Leningrad and whose paintings hang on their every wall, is still missing in action. They haven’t heard anything from Kolya since the war began—not a letter, not a note, not a word from any of those who have already returned—but Grandma is still waiting for him, running outside at every creak of the garden gate, certain that Kolya has finally made his way home all the way from Berlin.
The war ended eight years ago, and even if Berlin were on the other side of the earth, Sasha doubts it would take Kolya this long to make his way back home. But she knows she can’t say this to Grandma, who still sets a cup and saucer from her prerevolutionary tea service for Kolya every year on May 9, Victory Day.
The loft is packed with piles of old magazines full of pictures of elegant women in long dresses, holding open fans, parasols, and leashes attached to small dogs in their long, ringed fingers. The pages also show plump jars of cream to make your skin soft as velvet, right alongside elongated bottles of liquid guaranteed to turn your hair thick as a horse’s mane. She sits straining her eyes in the scarce light that sifts from the entranceway, stooping over articles describing the best way to handle your maid’s lack of sewing ability when you’re invited to a ball or the least expensive menu for a formal Christmas dinner to hand to your cook. The words maid and cook, she knows, are bourgeois and retrograde, atavisms of the tsarist past that the Revolution extracted from their society, like a cancer. She couldn’t hear her grandfather use these words without irony, but Grandma somehow seems to fit in with those parasols, hats, and long, flowing skirts, and Sasha often imagines her free of glasses and wrinkles, giving instructions to cooks and maids in her low, patient voice.