Every time Sergey runs his hand across her back, she thinks of Andrei. She thinks of how much she misses him, of all the sadness she has hidden away in the darkest corner of her soul’s storage loft, where no one can find it unless they crouch and rake through years of discarded junk.
Everything is so much simpler with Sergey. He has the soft chest of an older man, and he enfolds her in his arms, grateful that she has agreed to come to his apartment, that she is almost twenty, that she listens with attention when he speaks about himself and the Theater. Every time they meet, he buys her a pastry filled with whipped cream from the best bakery in Moscow and watches reverentially as she bites into it and then licks the sweet cream off her lips. In addition to good cognac, he introduces her to the Hungarian Tokaji in round bottles with elongated necks you can’t find behind the counters of Soviet wine stores. He is always there, leaving messages with Aunt Sonya at the entrance to her dorm, and if he suddenly disappears for a week or two, she knows that his opera singer wife is back home from a Bolshoi tour.
But there are two quintessential Russian questions she asks herself: Who is to blame? and What is to be done? Raised in the nineteenth century by classical writers Herzen and Chernyshevsky, these questions were flung at all of them by her eighth-grade teacher, the one with the squirrel face and admiration for books with simple answers to questions fraught with infinitives.
Eighth grade, when everything was simple, when Marik was still alive, when Moscow was only a dream. Is it her fault that she is in the capital and Andrei is still in the provinces, that he has chosen to work for the Party, that he cannot marry an actress? Is she the cause of her own misery?
Having to consign Andrei to the emotional storage loft fills her with the same despair she felt when she found Kolya’s journal. Yet, in the absence of letters from Andrei, the war journal is the only tangible connection she has to him. She rereads the story of Kolya and Nadia they read together, the story of a happier love Sasha envies, as though her uncle’s words could rebuild the bond between the two of them, bring Andrei closer, make him open up to her and no one else. As though her uncle’s journal could shed a glimmer of light on Andrei’s baffling betrayal.
February 13, 1942
I saw Nadia only cry once, when she told me about her father’s arrest. There was a knock on the door of their apartment, a loud, demanding knock. A knock that always comes at three in the morning because this is the time when a person is in bed, undressed and most vulnerable.
After the arrest, I came to her apartment almost every day, and what I saw was a different house. It looked bigger and emptier, a place where every noise seemed to echo against the high ceilings as if there were nothing soft left in the apartment to absorb the sound, as if all that was left amounted to stone. Evgeniya Iosifovna’s face also seemed to have turned to stone, and so did Nadia’s. They sat in the kitchen in front of cups with tea that had turned cold, staring at the pattern of the oilcloth on the table, sunflowers smudged from wear. I think I was the only one who came to visit Nadia and her mother after Naum Semenovich’s arrest. Her house might as well have been stricken by the plague, and their friends and neighbors, those who were not informers, were afraid to catch the deadly infection.
It was April 1941, and to distract Nadia, I took her to look at the melting ice on the Neva, at the gray slabs being thinned and weakened by the zinc water whirling below. We stood on the Palace Bridge, the place where we met eighteen months earlier, staring at the funnels of whirlpools around the stone pillars of the bridge, pulling our wool hats over our ears to protect them from the icy gusts of Baltic wind.
“What would you do if something happened to me?” she asked, her voice so soft that I could barely make out the words, almost as though she didn’t want me to hear them.
But I did hear her, and I knew exactly what she was asking. I wanted to tell her that nothing bad was going to happen to her, that I would kill any bastard who would so much as attempt to touch her, that I would always be there to protect her. But we both knew that if the NKVD came for her and her mother, the same way they came for Naum Semenovich, there would be nothing I could do to stop them. We both knew what I would never tell her, what could not be acknowledged if we wanted to stay sane and go on with our lives.
“Nothing bad will happen to you,” I said. “I promise.”
She didn’t respond, still looking down into the water raging under the bridge.
I took her by the shoulders and made her look at me. “I promise. Do you hear me? I promise.” Her eyes seemed dark and set deeper in her head, eyes of an older person full of sad wisdom. “I will always be here to protect you.”