Her mother picks up a duvet cover twisted like a rope and begins to unwind it.
“So what do we do now?” Sasha asks. “After we both know what Kolya went through at the front, after what they did to Nadia’s family, after all those arrests and murders? How many? Thousands? Millions? And for what?”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” says her mother. “This isn’t the theater.” She shakes out the duvet and adjusts it over the rope. “Mistakes were made; we all know that. There was an abuse of power, a cult of personality. But look what we’ve built: a country that the whole world respects.” She hangs the pillowcase over the rope and clips it with a wooden clothespin. “And they admitted their mistakes,” she says. “Don’t you remember Khrushchev’s speech in 1956? They admitted they were wrong, and they released political prisoners. That was a start.”
Sasha smirks, but she feels the anger tightening her chest. “This is laughable. Uncle Volya, Marik’s father, Nadia and her parents. I’m twenty-one, and I know of five people who were murdered by the state. And Uncle Seryozha. He survived, but he might as well have died. It was all in his face, the camps. He had the face of a corpse.”
“You have to have patience,” her mother says, her usual refrain. “This is what Russia has survived on, century after century—patience and perseverance. We work, we wait, and we hope. And we believe. We have to believe in something. Before the Revolution, there was God. Now it’s our better future.”
She has heard all this before—from everyone in Ivanovo, even from Grandma—a pitiful excuse that absolves nothing.
“I work hard, but I don’t know what I’m waiting for.” Sasha wants to show her mother that she is wrong, to let her know that she now lives in Leningrad, where such views are as provincial as chickens in a courtyard or piles of firewood stacked under the roof of a shed. “I swear, it’s no different from the pretending I learned from Aunt Polya at the lunch counter in first grade.” Aunt Polya is still as clear in her memory as she was fifteen years ago, pouring milk and dispensing soup, ordering them to chew and swallow and not waste a single crumb. Sasha remembers how she watched them to make sure they finished the bread and the milk and the soup. “I knew she was watching me, and she knew that I knew, and I knew that she knew that I knew. We played this little game every day: she would give me an unexpected glance, and I would chew diligently, pretending I didn’t know she was looking.”
Sasha shakes out a few pillowcases, which make a loud slurping noise. “I never know if the play we’re rehearsing will be closed by the Ministry of Culture because someone high up thinks that the playwright’s words are aimed directly at those in power.” She pauses to help her mother spread the sheet over the rope, so there is now a wall of wet laundry between them. “Look, I know it’s probably better now than it was under Stalin, but this is not enough,” she says, her words addressed into a barrier of wet cotton. “How am I supposed to live in a country where everything is based on lies? Our national game isn’t hockey. It is lying and pretending.”
“You’ve said enough to get yourself ten years in the camps, back under Stalin,” says her mother from the other side of the sheet, and Sasha can hear that she has a rueful smile on her face. “But these are vegetarian times, thank God,” she adds. Neither of them believes in God, but they both know that the vegetarian times of Khrushchev are the times of milder, less brutal repressions than the carnivorous times of Stalin. She bends over the tub, moving slowly, as if trying to avoid what she is going to say next.
“Do you remember the head of the Ivanovo anatomy department, Moisey Davidovich Zlotnikov?” she asks.
Sasha remembers. She was a little afraid of him when her mother took her to her institute, where she sat among jars with organs floating in formaldehyde, copying a diagram of lungs with blue-and-red vessels tangled up inside a faceless man’s chest. Dr. Zlotnikov always greeted her with a handshake, as if she were an adult. He had a small, graying beard, a balding forehead, and a pince-nez, too old to be anyone’s father, too unsmiling, too stern.
“After the war, when you were nine or ten, I was summoned to the Ivanovo NKVD headquarters,” her mother says from the other side of the sheet. “He was my PhD adviser, and they demanded that I inform on him.” Sasha hears a sharp intake of breath. “Every month, I would come to this secret apartment and write the most mundane, innocuous things I could think of: a conversation about the percentage of enlarged thyroids at the Ivanovo textile factory, a shortage of scalpels at a dissection class, a lab assistant’s alcoholic son.” She pauses, and Sasha waits. “Those were still Stalin times, carnivorous times. I couldn’t refuse. Once a month, I came to that apartment, as though to an illicit, sordid rendezvous that had to be kept secret from the honest world. A young, plain-clothed man sat there, on the other side of the room, and watched me write. He always smiled when he saw me, a wide, open smile that dimpled his cheeks. But even though what I wrote was harmless and benign, I was always afraid that something I wrote would be twisted and used against Dr. Zlotnikov. Every day at work, I waited for them to come and arrest him, and then he would only need to take one look at me and he would know who was to blame.” She pins the last nightshirt on the rope and wipes her wet hands on the apron she is wearing. “This lasted for one year. Then Stalin died.”