Sasha lifts her eyes from the pages and takes a deep breath of the stale air of the storage loft. The dust of time, of war, of knotty love settles in her lungs. In their house and at school, where everything seems to be based on lies, is she a misfit, too?
It is December, and the three of them are at an ice field in the park behind the end of the streetcar route, tying skates to their valenki boots with ropes. “Tighter,” she says to Marik, whose right skate wobbles when he steps on the ice. She doesn’t have to say anything to Andrei: his knots are exacting, and he is the first to race to the other side of the field, his skates cutting through the ice with resolute lines. Marik and Sasha step onto the field with caution. It is their first outing of the season, and it feels as though they are trying to make sure that their grown arms and legs still remember the moves.
“Hey!” Andrei yells from the other side of the field. “Come over here and we’ll have a race.”
As she glides across the ice, her feet do their work, and her arms hold the balance just as they did the previous year. She’s not sure Marik is as confident. She hears him gouge the ice with the point of his skate behind her; she hears Andrei shouting, “Slabak!” from where he waits, calling Marik a weakling. But when she looks back, Marik has already leveled himself off, and all she sees are his cheeks red with cold and his eyes white with determination.
On the other side of the ice field, they get in positions: Marik on the right, Andrei next to him, and Sasha to the left of Andrei. She doesn’t care if she doesn’t win. It is Grandma’s superstition that if you keep your fists clenched so tightly that your fingernails dig into your palms, your wish will come true. She keeps her fingers clenched, wishing for Marik to keep up with Andrei, wishing for him not to stumble.
“On your mark, set, go!” yells Andrei, and they tear forward through the wind, all the way to the other end. She skews her eyes and gets a glimpse of Marik panting and rushing forward, moving ahead of Andrei, who is stabbing the air with his elbows in mad, desperate kicks. And then, a few seconds into this ferocious race, she hears a thump: a body padded with the wool and cotton of a winter coat hits the ice.
She grates to a stop and so does Andrei. They both stare at Marik curled by the edge of the field, stroking the ice around him and squinting, feeling for his glasses with his fingers.
“You pushed me,” he spits out as she hands him the glasses. “I was winning, and you pushed me.”
“No, I didn’t,” says Andrei. “You stumbled and fell. You always stumble and fall.”
“I didn’t stumble!” Marik shouts, but his voice betrays him, and the words come out in a thin falsetto, a mockery of his intended message. “He pushed me,” he whispers as he looks at her, a whisper that comes out as a hiss.
She wants to believe Marik, who is sitting on the ice, wiping his bloodied lip with the sleeve of his coat. She saw him winning, and then she saw him fall. She also wants to believe Andrei, who is standing and whistling, his hat in his hands, his black hair blown across his forehead. They are her friends, and she wants to believe them both, but Marik acts as if he wants her to make a choice. He keeps peering at her, tight springs of red hair framing his face, his eyes as liquid as they were when she beat up a stupid sixth grader. His eyes want to know if she believes him, if she is still as noble as that girl who avenged his dignity with a schoolbag full of homework.
“Be a man and face your defeat,” says Andrei, a phrase he undoubtedly lifted straight from The Three Musketeers Sasha gave him last summer so that the three of them could play the story out together. “And don’t whimper on devchonka’s shoulder.” He adds a sliver of his own wisdom. “Maybe you can catch a fish, but you skate like a girl.”
After a fifth grader with skinny braids bangs a Tchaikovsky étude on the keys of the school’s untuned piano, after a seventh-grade ballet group stomps around the stage in a Ukrainian folk dance, it is Sasha’s turn. She can feel her armpits drip with sweat and her stomach contract with cramps. The audience of students is noisy and resentful: they were detained after classes, herded into the auditorium to hear the principal’s speech about the achievements of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party. The concert is a perk, but at this point, no one cares. They all want to escape into the frosty sunshine of December, into the brilliant winter day that is already dimming into evening. None of them has a shred of interest in her acting, and except for first graders, all have seen the proverbial scene from Act 2 of Romeo and Juliet performed by the previous crop of the school’s drama club, the scene staged every year without fail. The only person who wants to see her act, she knows, is Marik.