“Do you understand what you did?” she asks, and Sasha nods silently because she can still feel the belt welts and doesn’t want to provoke any more punishment.
“Eat your soup,” says Grandma and pushes another slice of bread toward her.
Back in the under-the-blanket murk, Sasha decided she would not eat, so she shakes her head and presses her lips together to show she is serious.
“Eat,” demands her mother.
She sits with her hands on her knees, listening to her ailing backside.
“Are you deaf?” asks Grandpa.
“Just a couple of spoonfuls,” says Grandma in her regular soft voice.
“Did you hear me?” asks her mother. “What did I just say?”
“When I eat, I’m deaf and mute,” she answers, quoting one of Grandpa’s house rules.
“Then I’ll have to feed you like a baby,” says her mother and gets up. She sits next to Sasha on the bench, lifts a spoonful of soup from her own plate, and pushes it against Sasha’s lips. She tenses her mouth, but her mother pushes harder.
“Next time, it’s nettles,” says Grandpa and gives her a hard look from across the table. His eyes are blue, the color of the forget-me-nots he grows around the gate, with grooves of deep wrinkles radiating into his white hair. He was a peasant before the Revolution, but after 1917, when the people rose up with hammers and scythes to liberate themselves from the yoke of tsarist oppression, he became an engineer. Grandpa’s peasant ancestry is the reason they have three rooms and a kitchen all to themselves. Before the Revolution, the entire house belonged to Grandma’s father. He was a factory supervisor and because he hadn’t been exploited like workers or peasants, he didn’t deserve to keep the place where he lived. Now one half of the house is theirs, with three families of neighbors sharing the other half, one family in each room. Grandpa must have been a pretty important peasant because they have an indoor toilet on their side of the house, while the three other families all troop to the outhouse in the back. Sasha doesn’t understand why Grandma’s father deserved to be thrown out of his own house and then shot for supervising factory work, but she has a sense no one wants to talk about this, so she doesn’t ask.
With her mother trying to feed her, Sasha can see she is at a disadvantage, just like when she was pinned to the bench, so she relaxes her lips and lets the spoon spill its contents into her mouth. She holds it there, warm, salty water with potato chunks and grains of barley, as her mother repeats the motion three times and then goes back to her seat. Maybe she realizes Sasha is not going to swallow it, or maybe she is simply tired and hungry after work and wants to finish her own food. When all the plates are emptied but Sasha’s and she is finally released from the table, she goes outside and, her body still aching from the policeman’s shove and her grandfather’s belt, spits out the soup into Grandpa’s gooseberry bush.
3
Marik is intelligentny, a word Sasha’s mother uses to characterize people. It is a salad mix of education, culture, intelligence, and manners, and all their neighbors and acquaintances have been divided into intelligentny and not intelligentny. Somehow the first group always comes out much smaller than the second. Not intelligentny: the three families who live in the other half of their house; every saleswoman in every grocery store, including Aunt Dusya from the bakery, with her carbon-penciled eyebrows and a kitchen voice; Sasha’s friend Andrei because his mother is a janitor who finished only the seven compulsory grades of secondary school and now wears a burlap apron over her cotton dress when she sweeps the yard with a bunch of twigs attached to a stick. Intelligentny: Irina Vasilievna, who gives piano lessons in her house two blocks away; Marik and his mother, pale and freckled and, as rumor has it, a Jew.
Sasha doesn’t know what Jews are and how they are different from the rest of them, but from the way people lower their voices when they say yevrey, a word that is spat out like a wormy chunk of apple, she guesses Jews are worse than they themselves are in some dark and hidden way they cannot discuss in public. She knows only one other Jew—Moisey Davidovich Zlotnikov, the head of the anatomy department of her mother’s medical institute and the adviser of her dissertation. Sasha has seen Dr. Zlotnikov only once, when her mother took her to work because Grandma’s heart was hurting, and he didn’t look different from any other person in Ivanovo. He had glasses and a goatee, and he rose from his desk and bent down to shake Sasha’s hand as if she were an anatomy professor and not a first grader with two skinny braids.