“But maybe—and I’ve been thinking about this—maybe he had this pessimistic view because the one he loved had just been arrested. If they hadn’t arrested her, things would’ve been different for Kolya. Nadia’s arrest made him see everything through this dark lens.”
“So what are you saying?” Sasha hears irritation in her voice but does nothing to rein it in. “That he saw everything through a dark lens while in reality everything was rosy and light?”
“No,” says her mother and shakes her head, getting defensive. “What I’m saying is that maybe this personal trauma blurred his vision, so he wasn’t able to see reality the way it was.”
Sasha is already late for a rehearsal, and her anxiety about the role is only fueling her anger. “He was there; he was the only one who saw reality the way it was!” she shouts. “He was at the front, not our leaders. He fought for the motherland against the enemy, while they sent people to rot in camps.”
“Don’t boil over,” her mother says, her usual warning, but Sasha is already past the boiling-over point.
“You know what I think? After rereading his journal and after rehearsing Dawns? I think that all those ancient men in Moscow have simply usurped the war. They have wrestled the war, the heroism and the death, out of the hands of those who lived it, and now they are the ones who own it. And now they wave it like a red banner on Victory Day. After all, they think they are the ones who made the victory happen, the Party and the KGB, and not the tens of millions who were murdered, by the Germans and by our own.”
She bangs her plate and fork into the sink, angry because she is in a hurry and doesn’t have time to fight with her mother; angry because no matter how hard she tries, she can’t drive this simple understanding into her mother’s head; angry at another looming proof of her professional unfitness.
“I don’t have the time now,” she spits out, “to argue. And you know what?” She pauses for a second, glancing at her mother’s fallen face, but the words have already formed in her mouth, ready to bubble out. “You’re hopeless, as hopeless and retrograde as Grandpa. As blindly patriotic. That’s why it was so easy for the Party to hijack the war and the victory from those who had fought for it. That’s why we live the way we live, wallowing in lies, like pigs in mud. Because of fools like you.”
35
It’s opening night for Quiet Dawns, and Sasha is onstage, flying through the forest as if she had wings, on an assignment from Sergeant Gleb to go back to their base and report that a regiment of Germans is laying mines around the lake. Gleb and Liza had a little time to talk after he told her how to retrace her steps back to the base: first through the forest, then through the swamp （make sure you take the birch pole we left by the big pine on the way here）， and then across the field just before the base where they came from. There was a song they sang in their village, he said, a song Liza started to hum because she knew it well. Gleb pressed his hand to her mouth to silence her because the Germans were getting close, and for a few moments, he kept his palm on her face before he pulled it back. This is all that she is thinking of right now: his hand, the smell of it, tobacco and warm skin, the smell that is now propelling her through the forest.
Thinking of that moment, she flies past the tall pine where they left the birch pole, not realizing it until it’s too late to go back. There are scores of big, dead branches scattered in the puddles on the brink of the swamp, and she quickly chooses one. Then she takes off her skirt, ties it to the top of the pole, and steps into the swamp.
At first, the swamp is not very deep, and Sasha even calms down a bit as she waddles along the sloshy path. She thinks of her mother breaking the military order when she operated on a civilian at the front, a nine-year-old boy, before she was born. It took her mother a second to evaluate the alternative between the military rule and a child’s life before she chose life. She didn’t hesitate to disobey the commissar and do what she knew was right. So why does she apologize for the heartlessness of their motherland, for the long shadow of that commissar today?
Onstage, she walks, connecting the firm hillocks with her feet, until there is only the last few hundred meters of dirty ooze left before her, the most difficult stretch. The quivering depths of all her insecurity and fears, of all her losses and guilt. How does she locate firm ground to support her and lend her some understanding? How can she fight back the feeling that she is standing on nothing at all?