Like Sasha, Lara has seen her father only in photographs, but she mourns him nevertheless. “Had he been there, he would have protected me,” she says quietly, staring at the blanket. “He wouldn’t have let that happen.” That is a secret she hasn’t told anyone in Pskov, but now she is far enough from home to have the courage to uncage it. It is as dark as that Sunday in Ivanovo, the day Sasha and Andrei don’t talk about, either.
“It was my mother’s fortieth birthday,” Lara says and as she speaks, Sasha can see her friend’s apartment crowded with at least twenty guests: her mother’s coworkers from the local cafeteria, all women; and their neighbors, three war widows from the first and second floors; and a married couple, Zina and Oleg, from across the hallway. Oleg is the only man they know who returned from the front. He drags his left foot, which was struck by shrapnel, and he yells and flings things when he gets drunk, but his wife is grateful that he is back home, alive.
The night before the party, Lara says, Gennadii, her older brother who just graduated from high school, lugged in a case of vodka and a case of wine, stacking them up in the corner of the kitchen. A half a bottle of vodka per person, the standard calculation for any celebration.
After all the potatoes, beets, and carrots were boiled, chopped, and drowned in mayonnaise, after trays of pirozhki were pulled out of the oven, brushed with milk, and covered with towels to soften—just as they were in celebrations in Sasha’s house—Lara teased her hair and outlined her eyes with coal. She was still in ninth grade, but that night, she remembers she was feeling very grown-up. The sounds of the doorbell announcing guests buzzed joy into her heart. The two tables were pushed together, the eating surface extended with several boards propped on boxes. Every guest had to stand up and deliver a toast—to her mother’s health, to success in work and private life, to happiness, which seemed to everybody abstract and elusive—and Lara quickly drank two glasses of wine, or was it three? After two hours of toasts and chasers, of vodka and pirozhki, the tables were pushed against the wall, and someone put on a record of a popular song Lara liked.
“Remember the Rio Rita?” Lara asks. The popular song wailed from the record player, and Oleg, as one of the two men in the room, extended his hand to Lara’s mother and ceremoniously dragged her onto the dance floor. The rest of the women danced with one another, stumbling into the sultry rhythm, shuffling their tipsy feet on the linoleum, shouting over the music and laughing. Lara’s brother grabbed her by the shoulders and pulled her into the gyrating flux of bodies, into the delirious heat. His arms locked around her waist, and his face, hot and damp, pressed to her cheek. It was an important birthday, after all, and everyone was getting drunk. The women from the cafeteria were now in a circle, telling lurid jokes in loud, uncontrolled voices, bursting into fits of intoxicated laughter. Oleg, having tried to dance with every woman, was now propped against the wall by his wife, who gave him fierce looks, holding in check his inclination to yell and fling glasses at the guests.
“My brother poured me another glass of wine and spilled half of it on the floor. I don’t remember how I got into my mother’s bedroom.” All she remembers is the walls spinning and the ceiling pulsing above her head. All she remembers is her brother’s weight pressing her into the cover of her mother’s bed, his vodka breath smearing her face, his unyielding grip that left black marks pressed into her shoulders. All she remembers is the shame.
“I never told my mother,” Lara whispers. “I never told anyone.” She stares at her clenched hands and begins to pull at the skin around her fingernails. “After that, home was poisoned. I stayed late at school; I found every pretext to sleep over at my friends’。 I flunked my classes, almost every one of them, except music.” She smiles faintly, still staring down. “That’s why I am here, in Moscow. I couldn’t stay, despite my mother’s pleas. I had to leave, even though I knew that no college would accept me. I wasn’t good at anything. The only place where I stood a chance, I thought, was drama school.” She shifts on the blanket, straightening her back. “It’s still raw, like an abscess I’ve tried to squeeze out of my mind. I knew it was my fault. I was drunk. I am the one to blame.”
Sasha wraps her arms around Lara to hold her, but Lara stiffens, resisting her embrace. She has been trying to erase that from her memory, as if it had never happened. She thinks that if she empties her mind of that day, the event will disappear. She believes that pity will only cement it into her memory.