Sasha pauses to look at the drawing on the bottom of the page, a girl’s thin face marred by a burn on paper. Was it a cigarette that Kolya was smoking? Or a spark from the fire that kept him alive in a frozen trench?
We met on the Palace Bridge, the only place we could have met: she lived on the left bank of the Neva, and I lived on the right. It was the end of October, with winter making an early entrance that year, blowing black clouds into the city sky, churning the water around the pillars of the bridge. She stood by the banister leaning over the river, looking down at where the wind tossed a knitted yellow hat with a pom-pom in the waves, her face as unprotected as her head, stunned by the sudden force that so suddenly had ripped her hat from her. I stopped. I had to stop: there was too much fragility in her posture to pass her by, too much need. She looked at me and smiled a sad smile, accepting the loss of her hat, shrugging, pulling her scarf up to her ears. If I’d been a real man, I thought, a character from one of our heroic Soviet books, I would have torn off my coat and jumped into the waves. I would have snatched her hat out of the wind’s jaws and fought my way against the current back to the granite steps where she would be waiting for me, awed by my bravery and physical strength, grateful. Instead I looked into her face, her eyes the color of tarnished gold, and said something foolish, the first thing that came to my mind. “It’s gone,” I said, and she nodded. “I know.”
I draw Nadia’s room, the room I know so well, with its oak armoire and heavy curtains that screened us from the outside with their gray and yellow squares of wool. Her mother, like my own, was simply a mother, defined only by her family rather than an outside job she never held. It was only during the rare blissful hours when Evgeniya Iosifovna took a streetcar to Vladimirsky Market or a bus to the garishly decorated turn-of-the-century Eliseyev delicatessen that we had the apartment all to ourselves. To avoid the rush-hour crowds, she went shopping in late morning or early afternoon, and that was when we would cut our classes （Nadia would make an excuse to slip out of a seminar on lexicology at the philology department of the university, and I would creep out of the lecture on ancient art） to meet on the Palace Bridge and hurry to Isaac’s Square and her building on Herzen Street. We would run up the four flights of stairs and spend an hour on the leather divan behind the drawn window curtains that made the room humid and dark, where we were as naked as those prehistoric people on the walls of the ancient caves of my textbook. For an hour once or twice a week, Nadia’s divan, with its lumpy surface and arms worn from wear, was ours, an accomplice to our transgression. We were too impatient to pull the sheets out of the armoire, and the old leather felt warm under our skin as if holding us in its embrace, as if watching over the clumsy reaches of our arms and legs, the fumbling delirium of our lips and fingers. Then we lay pressed into each other in the seam between the seat and the back as though we were one, locked inside each other’s arms and taking almost no space at all, the brown leather stretching before our eyes like the carefully raked top layer of a plowed field. From that strange angle, with all that leather between us and what was beyond, Nadia’s room was the microcosm of a world where life seemed full of wonder and promise.
Does one need love, Sasha wonders—the forbidden kind of love no one talks about, the fiery love, hot and ruthless as the tongues of flame in their stove—to see life as Kolya saw it, full of wonder and promise?
10
“Hey, kike,” yells a boy from a stoop as Marik and Sasha are walking home from school. “If you weren’t ugly enough before, you’re certainly ugly now.”
The boy is a year younger than they are, and Sasha has seen him in the hallways of their school, always with a runny nose and scabs on his elbows. She knows it is not a noble thing to strike someone younger than you, but this boy surely deserves it. She lunges to the stoop and pummels him with her schoolbag, on the head, right and left, and then a few more times on his shoulders and his chest. Luckily, the schoolbag is heavy, since they have a lot of homework today, and it thumps against the boy’s head, two times for each of the uglies and some extra pounding for the kike.
From the boy’s widened eyes, she knows that he did not expect this: he has heard and uttered the insult so many times before that to his ear, the word may have lost its pungency and now sounds just as bland as anything their principal may say in their monthly Pioneer meetings. After a little arm flailing, he scrambles up and escapes inside the house, but when he is out of her reach, when he knows she can no longer whack him, he yells “crazy bitch” and thrusts his arm in her direction, as if he were throwing a rock.