Marik is marked by another scar everyone knows about, an event Sasha can still see in her mind as if it happened only yesterday. In addition to being a Jew, he is now the son of a prisoner. After that morning, Sasha thought that Marik’s father had missed a bell and come late for work—solid grounds for an arrest, according to her mother—but then she heard her attach the word politichesky to his name. Her mother uttered the word in a low voice when they were all at the table slurping cabbage soup.
“They don’t put innocent people in camps, Grandpa said. Stalin knows who is with us and who is against us. Stalin—our leader, our father, the successor of our great Lenin. The engineer of our thunderous victory over Germany.”
Andrei expressed a similar view, only in less pompous words. “He must have done something if he got arrested,” he muttered, sharpening a branch with his pocketknife as they sat on the roof of the shed after Marik’s mother called him home.
Andrei’s father is not here, either, but according to Grandpa, he has a better chance of coming home than Marik’s father because he is not a politichesky. Maybe Andrei’s mother, as she sweeps the yard, also turns her head at the creak of the gate, just like Grandma has done since the end of the war, still waiting for her son Kolya to come back from the Leningrad Front.
It is her grandpa’s birthday, which means a samovar is puffing on the dining table and Grandma is standing over a frying pan, her hands white with flour, making pancakes. Marik and Sasha are under the table, where the old linoleum is torn, revealing boards worn through by many prewar and maybe even prerevolutionary feet. While the guests, all intelligentny, are busy eating boiled potatoes with pickled cabbage, the children are out of their sight, playing a game while waiting for tea, when they can load slices of bread with spoonfuls of strawberry and apple jam from the fruit in Grandpa’s garden.
They are separated from real life by the linen tablecloth that almost touches the floor. The jagged tear in the linoleum, in their imagination, is a river, and the torn edges of plastic are its banks. They just finished reading a book of Andersen’s fairy tales, and the story they are playing is about a one-legged tin soldier. The brave warrior survives a fall from a window and the raging waves of a waterfall, only to die in a fire at the end. He is silently in love with a paper ballerina, who, in the soldier’s mind, has only one leg, too. She has a pretty tinsel rose pinned to her dress. Does she know about the soldier’s love? The hole in the linoleum is the river that will rush forward and drag the tin soldier to its depths, the river that will sink his boat and deposit him into the stomach of a big fish.
Marik is the soldier, and Sasha is the paper ballerina. The soldier is terrified of the darkness inside the belly of the fish, but he is too proud to cry for help because he wears a uniform. Through the scraps of ripped linoleum, the river roars until it becomes a waterfall, the boat made from newspaper disintegrates, and the water finally closes over the soldier’s head.
“Farewell, warrior! Ever brave,
“Drifting onward to thy grave,” recites Marik from the book.
Marik is as brave and proud in real life as the tin soldier is in the story, and, Sasha knows, he doesn’t really believe that he is drifting to his grave.
Then, beyond the tablecloth, the din of voices quiets and the piano chords burst into the air before Grandma’s voice, trained in a prerevolutionary opera school and called a mezzo-soprano, begins to sing about fragrant bunches of white acacia flowers. The music swells, and Grandma’s voice does, too, soaring and then descending, the lyrics compelling her to remember her distant youth when she still naively believed in love.
Sasha now hears the clinking of dishes, which means the table is being cleared of the dinner plates to get it ready for tea and jam, so she knows she has to be fast. “And back in the same room, the soldier saw the ballerina, still balancing on one leg.” She extends her leg, like the dancer in the story, although she has to crouch not to hit the top of the table. “And then the boy threw the soldier into the stove. And the ballerina, caught in the draft, fluttered into the fire, too.” She pauses. “They both melted, by the flames or by their love, no one knew.”
There is applause on the other side of the tablecloth curtain and requests for more songs, accompanied by the clinking of teacups against the saucers.
“The ballerina was made from paper,” says Marik. “So there was nothing left of her.”
“Not true!” Sasha cries out. “A tinsel rose from her dress the maid found in the ashes.” Despite the approaching tea with sweets, she can’t let the dancer disappear without a trace.