“What is it like working for the Young Communist League?” she asks instead. After delivering mail and unloading freight trains, Andrei now has a respectable job, working in the center of Ivanovo, where he takes a streetcar every morning six days a week. This new job makes Grandpa, for the first time in his life, greet Andrei when he crosses paths with him outside. “Good morning, young man,” he says, looking up from an apple tree branch he is dusting with DDT and nodding, but barely, not to let Andrei think he is too special. But Andrei is special. He now wears a navy sports jacket he bought at the secondhand store near the bus station, which sharpens his shoulders and makes him look handsome and important.
“Much better than carrying sacks. I shuffle papers and sometimes the phone rings, so I answer it. Sometimes I go to meetings. Not a bad job overall.” He fumbles in his jacket pocket and shakes a cigarette out of the pack. It is a filtered cigarette, not like the rough filter-less Belomor that hangs on the lip of every Ivanovo man. He strikes a match and blows out the smoke, letting her breathe in its vaguely pleasant, adult smell. “They have accepted me, just as you did. It didn’t matter where I came from, as long as I believed in them.”
Sasha thinks of Grandpa, who believes all the news he hears on the radio, and of her mother, who believes that the war was all heroism and valor. Or maybe she doesn’t completely believe it. After all, she worked in a hospital one kilometer from the front, and she must have seen what Kolya saw. But she is no longer sure what Andrei believes in. He has become a mystery, and maybe this is precisely why she is here, lying in the grass next to him. He is like a tough equation she has to solve in math class. She knows she has to unravel the variables that will allow her to learn who he really is, to get down to the X he harbors at his core.
He looks down, shakes the cigarette ash into the grass. “The Young Communist League has saved my life. I was going nowhere, and they gave me a sense of purpose; they made me one of them.” He pauses and peers down into the grass teeming with grasshoppers and ants. “My whole life, people have been looking at me and smirking. I’m not stupid; I know what they whisper behind my back: There goes the loser, the son of a street cleaner. The one who is likely to end up in jail, just like his alcoholic father. But with them, for the first time in my life, I have a future.”
He looks away, toward the forest, considering the heft of what he has just said. When he turns back to her, his face has lightened. “And they also tell me I look a lot like Mayakovsky,” he says and chuckles.
He does look like Mayakovsky, whose poems they were all made to memorize in eighth grade, a high-cheekboned poet who glared down from the wall of every literature classroom, with his piercing eyes and a square chin, handsome in his seriousness about the Revolution. She cups her hands over Andrei’s ears and peers into his face. “You have his coal-like eyes,” she whispers, drawing so close that she has no choice but to kiss him. They stay immersed in this tobacco-scented kiss until he pulls away, takes her by the shoulders, and separates their bodies carefully and deliberately, as if his was a stick of dynamite and hers a lighted match.
“And there is one more thing about my job,” says Andrei, as if to certify that he has changed the subject. “We have a special store with decent food.”
She doesn’t know why the Komsomol town committee workers have access to decent food when the rest of them stand in lines for bread and milk, but this is when Andrei unwraps a newspaper parcel he brought and pulls out a sweet roll. She has never seen a sweet roll so gleaming with glaze and studded with poppy seeds and raisins, so plump in its freshly baked glory. He orders her to take a bite, and she obeys with pleasure. The only sweets she has at home are cubes of sugar they drop into their cups of tea and a little glass vase with sucking candy Grandma keeps on the bottom shelf of the buffet. The roll melts in her mouth, warm from the sun, decadent and sweet, magnificent in its special Komsomol deliciousness.
She is grateful to Andrei for the poppy seed roll, for wrapping it in newspaper and bringing it here. She kisses his salty eyelids to thank him. She runs her fingers through his black hair; she presses her cheek into his damp neck. This is all she is ready for; this is all she wants so far. She knows this is all he wants right now, too. He is happy to tolerate her touch because he says he loves her.
No one has ever said they loved her before, either outside her family or within it. In their house, they don’t talk about love. Days are filled with more pressing matters: sheets needing to be boiled, chickens needing to be fed, wood needing to be split for their furnace. Every day, they stand in lines for milk and bread and carry buckets of water to Grandpa’s beds of potatoes and dill. In July, they make jams from strawberries and currants; in September, they shred head after head of cabbage and layer them with salt and cranberries to fill a barrel for the winter. There is no time for talking about love. So she feels guilty lying with Andrei in this field swarming with grasshoppers and ants, talking about love, instead of digging up radishes for salad or lugging water from the well for Grandma’s nettle soup.