Sima, the youngest in the family, had been stationed on the border with Poland before the war began, writing only one letter home when the post delivery still functioned, a triangle of gray paper Grandma still keeps in the bottom of a drawer. “They feed us well here, thick soup and boiled potatoes,” he wrote for Grandma’s sake. “Yesterday the sergeant said they might soon issue us guns.” Her mother says she could never understand why soldiers on the Polish border, right before the German blitzkrieg into Russia, did not have guns.
Unarmed and dazed by the sudden invasion of German planes and tanks on June 22, 1941, Sima, unlike most of his comrades, managed to survive. Six months later, he was wounded at the Belorussian Front and made his way back home to Ivanovo in 1942. This is how her mother remembers that day: It was January, and there was a knock on the door. When Grandma opened the latch, there stood Sima—in a military coat with burned bullet holes, on crutches, a torn ushanka hat tied under his chin. The hospital could no longer do anything, so they released him. Sima decided not to write home because he wanted to surprise everyone with his arrival. Grandma, wiping under her eyes and making sniffling noises, boiled water for him to wash, as Grandpa ordered Sima to take off his clothes immediately—everything down to the rags inside his boots—so he could throw the dirty heap outside, where it was minus twenty degrees Celsius, to save the rest of them from typhus and lice.
A piece of metal lodged in Sima’s lung had created an abscess and was beginning to cause an infection in his brain. It made her mother furious to think that a doctor at a front hospital had failed to operate properly, leaving a shard of a grenade in her brother’s body. Although Grandma spoke of his recovery, her mother was a doctor and knew he wouldn’t survive. But she had to pretend for the sake of her parents, and as Sima, blind and delirious, lay in the room where Sasha would grow up, she sat by his bed, with her big belly resting on her knees, taking his temperature and peering into his throat, making believe that whatever small medical procedures she performed could make a difference.
Was Sasha’s father lying in bed in their house, too, with his wet cough rolling in his chest like the cannonade they heard at least once a day? And when he began spitting up blood, was he admitted into the Ivanovo hospital, her mother’s alma mater? She must have consulted the head of the TB clinic, her former professor, who probably told her that after his release from the hospital, her father must leave, since he could not stay in the house with a newborn. Was her father relieved to leave Ivanovo and go back to his other daughter and his other wife? Or did he try to fool the doctors into letting him stay to see the arrival of his new daughter? And then, after he left, did he ever wonder about her?
Day after day, her mother sat by Sima’s bed thinking about her brother and her husband, both dying. She couldn’t cure them, so she concentrated on doing what she could do. She sold her ration of four hundred grams of bread and with that money bought fifty grams of butter, which, she hoped, might boost her brother’s and her husband’s chance for health.
Sima died at home on November 1, 1942. Her mother washed him and shaved him and dressed him for the funeral. Since she was eight months pregnant, Grandma and Grandpa decided that she should not go to the funeral, an invitation to premature labor. Her mother stood on the porch, watching Grandpa crack a whip, watching the horse snort and jerk forward as the cart with Grandma, slumped against Sima’s coffin, slowly bumped onto the road, rutted by recent rain.
Sasha’s father left soon after Sima’s funeral, probably on November 7—three weeks before she was born—on the day of the Great October Socialist Revolution, which in peaceful times is an occasion for a citizens’ parade, for people marching in rows and banners flapping in the wind. But before he left, he took both the butter and the bread, added a few bars of soap from Grandma’s closet, and sold them to buy himself a jar of moonshine. In the gray air pocked with drizzle, Sasha sees her parents walk through the ruins of the town and stand waiting for the train, her big-bellied mother and her husband, who would die of TB in his hometown on the other side of the Urals five years later, never having seen his daughter. When a plume of smoke billows out of the train’s stack and a spasm lurches through the cars, her mother takes a step toward the clattering wheels and raises her arm in a last goodbye. She waits until the train shrinks to toy size, until the only smoke she can see is a streak of soot rising from an apartment building bombed the day before.
Sasha feels affection for Liza and the Quiet Dawns story, but Liza, so far, is reluctant to let her close, to grant her the proximity she requires to become her. Sasha knows she hasn’t earned this closeness yet; she needs to do more work. The work unspools images from her Ivanovo childhood, from war descriptions in Kolya’s journal, the scarred pages that she hopes will help her find some solid ground underneath her feet.