She tells him about two later works, painted when Kolya came from Leningrad, during a break between semesters at the art academy, the time when the word front had already begun to gather strength during the war with Finland: a painting called Ration, a slice of black bread and a small dried fish, scaly and parched, lying on an open page from Pravda and an oil painting of a soldier throwing a grenade at a tank, the soldier’s back tense and determined, the tank halted by yellow flames waving at the sky.
She tells him about a painting that used to frighten her when she was little. A tiny skeleton of an unborn child her mother brought from her anatomy museum stands next to a mirror where Kolya’s face is reflected, a violin leaning against the mirror’s frame. She was afraid to enter her grandparents’ room when she first saw it, until Grandma said she shouldn’t be. The strange painting, she explained, showed Kolya as he saw himself, between the violin that was art and the skeleton that was death. As soon as she said it, the picture snapped into focus in Sasha’s mind, and she felt stupid that she hadn’t seen it herself. It became transparent, but it didn’t stop being eerie. With his pencil and his brush and his own proximity to death, Uncle Kolya infused it with power, as dark and insidious as the word front.
She tries to imagine Leningrad, where Kolya studied painting, with the Neva flowing through its center, the river shackled in its granite embankments. She tries to imagine the Winter Palace, the home of the tsars who, by their staggering opulence and their indifference toward the workers, had oppressed the country for centuries before they were deposed as a result of the workers’ revolutionary intervention. Dictatorship of the proletariat, Grandpa says in a deep, proud voice, although she is not sure, since he used to be a peasant, how he fits into this dictatorial plan.
She can’t see Kolya talking proudly about the dictatorship of the proletariat, or about any other dictatorship. She knows this from her mother’s portrait, from the light in her eyes and her ironic smile she sees only on Kolya’s canvas. She knows this from Grandma’s effervescence in the family painting, where her grandfather needed to hold her down so that she wouldn’t sail into the sky. Kolya was an artist and could see things others couldn’t see. His soul, his dusha—the word Sasha learned from Grandma—was exposed, unprotected by the things they all wrap around themselves like winter clothes. This is what probably killed him: the war and his naked soul.
There is no doubt in her mind that Kolya knew about the life of make-believe, the life of art. Sasha is convinced he would not question her desire to go to Moscow and apply to the best drama school in the country, a plan she has harbored in her soul since she was seven and hasn’t mentioned to anyone yet, a plan that will undoubtedly cause a seismic tremor when her mother and Grandpa hear about it. As she stares at the pages of the journal, she sees Kolya’s face, as round and soft as Grandma’s, his eyes smiling from behind the glasses, looking at her from a photograph in the family album, from the depth of time. She wishes she had been born a few years earlier, before the war, when he was still here. She wishes she had a father like him—not like the blond man in the photograph no one wants to talk about; not like Dr. Zlotnikov, who fixes her mother with his eyes behind a pince-nez when she talks to him about her dissertation; and certainly not like Andrei’s father. She wishes Kolya were here now to tell her about the life of make-believe, the life he understood because he lived it.
To give Andrei a sense of the real Kolya, she opens the journal and reads a few pages.
March 22, 1942
Seryoga and I are pulling a cannon, harnessed like the horses in Ivanovo that used to pull loaded carts along the main road when I lived there. Only here, the ground is maimed with bomb craters and pocked with shrapnel, and no horse would be able to make its way forward. The whistle of mines and the louder roar of artillery shells rip through the air, and we roll into a trench, into something viscous on the bottom. From the explosions, we are almost buried by the falling dirt, but we are still alive. I try to move my arms and legs, still there. I can see Seryoga digging himself out, spitting out dirt, wiping his eyes of the muck from the bottom of the trench. We’ve survived this time. We get up.
The sticky stuff on the bottom of the trench is someone’s guts and blood, but it isn’t ours. The wind rains shrapnel, and we bend to get back into our harness when the lieutenant crawls out of a bomb crater next to us. His face is black from dirt, the fringe of his coat is burned over his knees, but he is brandishing a handgun.