He is glad to see me, too, and he points to the vodka left in his tin cup, the ration dispensed by our commander who sent us to fight the German tanks. “There’s more,” says Seryoga and waves in the direction of the commander’s dugout.
I down what was left in his cup. The vodka burns its way to my stomach, warming every centimeter of my gut on its way, then shoots up to my head and makes it light. Seryoga hands me a chunk of bread and stands up to bring more.
We drink and get drunk because there is nothing to eat except for two hundred grams of bread and because we want to erase what we’ve seen from our memory.
“I did what you told me,” I say.
“What?” Seryoga asks and hiccups.
“You told me to toss a grenade into the ass of the tank,” I say. “Remember?”
Seryoga looks at me with glazed eyes and shakes his head.
“And then I shot the two Fritzes when they scrambled out.” The words feel heavy in my mouth, and it takes extra time to send them into the air. “The one on the right first, then the one on the left.”
Seryoga nods. “Molodets. Good for you.”
We drink more, which isn’t nearly enough. I still remember the two figures jerking when my bullets hit them, then going limp and collapsing on the field.
“They didn’t kill you, so you killed them,” Seryoga says. “It’s war.”
Seryoga is right. It is that simple: we won because they died and we didn’t. I take another gulp from the mug, but it still does not convince me that I won. I don’t feel like a winner. The vodka may have cleansed my insides, but on the outside, I reek of exploded guts, shattered bones, and dried blood. I feel like a butcher.
When she finishes reading and the images fade, Andrei enfolds her, pressing her face into his neck, her shoulders twitching and her pale lips trembling, just like Turgenev’s Lisa in Lavretsky’s arms. Their embrace smells of damp soil and Andrei’s father’s filter-less tobacco. Her face is so close to Andrei’s that his features have blurred, but he lets her know where his mouth is when she feels it on her lips. He tastes like the bittersweet cough medicine Sasha had to swallow when she had bronchitis, one gulp of which made her feel delirious and silly.
She slides her fingers over Andrei’s face, and he slides his fingers over hers, as if they needed to add another sense to what they already know about each other: a sense of touch, without which, from now on, no understanding could be possible between them.
13
It was utter stupidity to kiss on the riverbank where anyone in Ivanovo could have seen them, so Andrei now meets her on the edge of the park where it begins to turn into the forest. This is where they are: on the edge between the delineated pathways of the park and the wild, unchartered danger of the woods.
They meet in the evening, when Andrei comes back from work and before she has to go home for supper. For half an hour, they lie in the grass and talk and kiss and stare into the sky. Although it isn’t even six, the air becomes grainy with gathering dusk. Or maybe it only feels like twilight in their bed fringed by tall grass: sturdy stems of chamomile flowers and thick, oily leaves of yellow cups everyone calls “chicken blindness.” They are in their own space now, screened out from the sun, darkened and hushed. The space determines how much light reaches the roots of the plants around them and how willing the field is to accept their intrusion into its midst. Sasha looks to her left and sees the bluish band of the forest lit by the fading sun, as it stood watching the three of them, Marik, Andrei, and her, on that Sunday in March, collecting dead branches and then watching a fire consume them.
Andrei and Sasha never talk about that day in the woods, about the moment that changed everything. Does Andrei wake up and stare into the night, as she does, wishing he could make things go back to the way they were? Does he mourn the loss of his rival as much as she mourns the loss of her friend? But there is a darker question that Sasha would never ask anyone: Was Marik’s death necessary for the two of them to be lying in this field, the required conduit to their growing affection? What they don’t talk about is as dangerous as the forest itself, a secret they have kept out of sight, on the lowest shelf of their hearts.
Instead, they talk about Sasha’s school drama club and Andrei’s new job, safe topics unlikely to shake the earth on which they lie. She knows she has to tell him, sooner or later, that she is going to go to Moscow to study acting, and she has even tried to devise in her mind what she will say, but the words always seem to get stuck on their way out, as if caged by an invisible force inside her head.