I don’t remember going down the stairs and walking out of the university, but I must have walked over the Palace Bridge because soon I was on Nevsky Prospekt. The day was mercilessly long—in a couple of weeks, the sun would barely bother to touch the horizon before springing back up. Fog hung over the oily surface of the Griboyedov Canal, mixing with the low gray clouds, obliterating the sky.
I walked because I had to walk, cursing the secretary of the philology department, cursing the two men who had arrested Nadia’s father. I cursed the neighbor and the vigilant friend who ratted on Naum Semenovich for something he didn’t say. I cursed everyone who denounced Nadia and her mother because they were Jews or because—as a reward for being vigilant—they hoped to get their apartment that was so brazenly better than their own communal hovels.
If I believed in God, like Raphael or Michelangelo, I would have cursed God. In the absence of God, I cursed my motherland. It was supposed to nurture and protect us, the people it had inspired to its revolutionary ideals of a meager life and hard work, and while we had been busy keeping our end of the bargain, our motherland, like a courtyard thug, had turned around, pulled out a switchblade, and stuck it under our ribs.
I walked past the peeling facades of French classicism and Italian baroque draped with the red banners of our bright future. I thought of those in the stratosphere of the Kremlin, dressed in generals’ uniforms and party suits, puffing on pipes at their desks, debating the fate of our lives between sips of cognac, issuing search warrants, signing decrees of death. Sitting like judges at their engineered trials, pounding gavels with their meaty hands: death, death, death. What made their hearts beat, what pushed through their veins instead of blood was the sludge of paranoia and betrayal. Who is not with us is against us, their eyes instruct us from the portraits hanging in every office. We do not arrest good people, they say. We’re simply protecting our motherland from its enemies with the help of other good people, all those neighbors with properly attuned ears, insufficient living space, and healthy socialist envy.
I thought of the night when they came for Nadia. How terrified she must have been, how desperate and lost. I saw the two men stalking around their apartment, picking out things they liked, packing them into their bags. “You won’t be needing this anymore,” one may have said, lifting a bronze writing set off her father’s desk. “And this,” said the other thug, taking off the wall an old pendulum clock that belonged to Nadia’s grandmother. They had probably cut the pillows open, as they always do, so feathers must have been flying everywhere in a surreal blizzard in early May.
And where was Nadia now? In a stone coffin of a solitary confinement cell? On the third tier of plank beds among fifty other suspected traitors and spies? Being interrogated by a sadist in an NKVD uniform, who is shouting that she is automatically guilty because she didn’t inform on her father?
I had to blot those thoughts out of my mind, for they spawned monstrous images of humiliation and medieval torture, of fingers broken in doorjambs, of nipples stabbed with sharpened pencils, of hot irons sizzling the skin. Had I allowed my mind to wander along this path, I know I would have gone mad. So I kept trudging along the streets and circling whole blocks in a pointless search for answers. My thoughts were racing; I couldn’t focus; my mind was a toxic tangle of awful possibilities.
I thought of Volya, my uncle arrested in 1937 for telling a joke. I thought of the poet Osip Mandelstam, who died in the camps for doing his job, writing poetry. I thought of my art professor, the one who showed us Picasso’s work that seemed to challenge the laws of socialist realism yet was so charged with life, who one day simply failed to show up to teach our seminar. “Do not try to investigate his disappearance,” cautioned the dean, a dire warning to my class of twelve that we obediently followed.
I thought of my mother: of her round glasses, her hair pulled back in a bun, her soft cotton dress. She wasn’t at all as steely and tough as our motherland; she was, in fact, the opposite—forgiving and kind. She was someone I would die for, without hesitation. She and Nadia.
I turned and walked along the canal embankment, cutting through the fog that began to feel like drizzle. On the other side of the street, the door leading to a store was open. I crossed and walked inside.
On the shelf to my right, a few candlesticks made of jade and brass stood next to a lamp with a flowery cloth shade. In a cabinet of dark wood with glass shelves, a tea service with round cups and a teapot boasted its cobalt net of classic imperial design. A pile of spoons glimmered beside the saucers. Bigger pieces occupied the space in the back of the store: a set of four chairs with curved legs stacked up before a round dining table, a couple of mismatched stools, two nightstands with the surface of polished wood. The secondhand shop, selling the contents of people’s former lives.