She stood with her head down, thinking of that fishing trip, staring at the back of a chair in front of her where “Igor + Tanya = love” was scratched with a nail into the wood. With almost all the teachers and students weeping, she felt a strange mix of fear and curiosity, as if something overpowering had just ended. The entire assembly was now waiting to see how life could possibly continue after this tragedy that had reduced their intrepid principal to tears. Or maybe it wasn’t as tragic as the principal thought. Maybe the absence of Stalin from their lives would bring back Marik’s father after the three years of absence and uncertainty. Maybe it would make Sasha’s mother less anxious about Uncle Kolya’s journal and curl her lips back into a smile that had been wiped off by the war, a smile Sasha only knew from the portrait on the wall of their room painted by her uncle before Sasha was born.
9
Andrei’s father comes back in 1955. Short, with gray stubble sprouting through his cheeks and a nose like a wilted red potato forgotten in the cellar, he sits on a bench by the shed all day long, smoking unfiltered cigarettes that he rolls in his gnarled fingers before he lights them.
Where did he return from? The war ended ten years ago, and Sasha is old enough to know he didn’t return from the war. Their neighbors who live in the other half of their house sometimes whisper the word ugolovnik, a convicted criminal, when they pass him on the way to the store.
She waits for Andrei to say something about his father, to tell her where he has been all this time, to let her know if his father’s return has made her friend happy. Would she be happy if her own father came back? She is not sure. From the way Grandma pursed her mouth when Sasha asked about his photo in the album, she sensed that there was something disreputable about him, something not to be discussed around the dinner table, something slippery and shameful.
But Andrei doesn’t talk about his father. He doesn’t talk to him, either, at least outside: when his father smokes on the bench by the shed, Andrei is nowhere to be seen, although the shed has been the place for the three of them to meet for years. Maybe Andrei was expecting a different father, someone taller and shaved, someone less scary and more heroic. Maybe he thought that his father would immediately go to work and break all records, like those workers in street posters: coal miners with faces dusted in soot or steelmakers peering into a furnace, a red glow of liquid metal reflected in their goggles. Andrei’s father’s only occupation seems to be rolling cigarettes, smoking by the shed, and yelling curses at Andrei’s mother, who every day beats the dirt of the courtyard with a broom, muttering to herself and whipping up clouds of dust as she nears the shed.
Sasha notices that Andrei is now a head taller than she is, and when he stands next to her, her eyes are at the level of his mouth. For some strange reason, she notices his mouth, the way it curls when he speaks or wraps around a cigarette he steals from his father and smokes behind the lilac bushes at the end of the streetcar route. She notices the thick, stubborn curl of hair that falls across his forehead and makes him jerk his head to get it out of his eyes, which makes him look cavalier and almost grown-up. She notices that when she grabs his arm or holds her hands around his neck in their old game of War, he tenses as if in pain, as if she stepped on his injured toe.
She notices that her other friend, Marik, no longer looks or sounds like the old Marik. His voice doesn’t seem to know if it wants to remain at the height of hers or descend to the depth of Andrei’s, and when it dips and soars in the course of a single sentence, Marik often tears his glasses off and starts wiping them in a nervous, angry movement. She also notices that Marik’s forehead has erupted in pimples, and his bones seem to have grown too big for his skin, bulging at his ankles and his wrists. Thinking about the changes in her friends, Sasha wonders if they also notice changes in her.
More and more often, when no one is home, Sasha steals into the storage loft, where Kolya’s journal is telling her about forbidden things, about what her mother and her teachers refuse to talk about.
February 7, 1942
I draw Nadia as I remember her: narrow hands with elongated fingers, a pianist’s hands; high cheekbones, a drop of Tatar blood in everyone born in Russia; thick eyebrows, the right slightly higher than the left, which gave her face a surprised look, as though she were in constant wonder. She lived on Herzen Street in a three-room apartment that was not communal, an obvious luxury for a family of three. Her father, Naum Semenovich, taught physics at the University of Leningrad, and, in her words, she inherited none of his scientific mind. Only his nose, she used to say with a sigh.