Sasha tries to imagine a woman who had to beg her father to make someone marry her against the man’s will. Or was it really against the man’s will, after all, if the man agreed to the marriage?
“But you allowed your arm to be twisted. You did what they wanted you to do.”
“It wasn’t that simple.” She hears him shift on the bench, as if with his weight he could substantiate this claim. “There were things done that couldn’t be undone. There were things said and choices made. It’s always about choices, dead ends and mistakes.” She hears him inhale as if he were preparing to say more. “Do you want to hear a little story about my father-in-law’s choices? The story he told me a couple of weeks ago when I visited him at his dacha. Maybe it was his cancer diagnosis that helped loosen his tongue about his past, but once he set the vodka down and started talking, my only job was to sit back and listen.”
She is too tense to sit back, but she is willing to listen.
Andrei leans forward, staring at his shoes. “Toward the end of the war, they chose Vadim to work at the NKVD. The Party trusted him to do important work, he said, as important as killing Germans at the front. He hated Germans. They were the enemy who had to be killed. And when he killed them, they screamed in German, in their foul language of bandits and invaders. But his prisoners, the ones he interrogated in the NKVD cellars, screamed and begged in Russian. Not in that alien language he couldn’t understand. The language he was speaking to me, our mother tongue.” Andrei speaks evenly, almost monotonously, not allowing any opening for an interjection.
“Every day by noon, he was covered in blood. He reeked of blood, despite a bucket of cologne they brought in at the end of the day. Even his dog refused to come near him at home. He had to wipe his hands on his hair to keep the gun from slipping out of his grip. But that was his work. That was his duty, he said, and he was a soldier. They told him to serve, and he served. They told him to execute, and he executed.
“Every day, by the end of the shift, he had pulled the trigger so many times that his index finger became numb. It hung limp as a whip, completely useless. But they had a monthly plan, like any factory, a plan that had to be fulfilled. So they brought medical experts to advise them what to do. Physicians in white coats armed with notepads sauntered along the hallways, furrowing their brows and watching them interrogate the prisoners. The result? Twice a week, each of them was to get a massage of the right hand. A massage of his trigger finger, as my father-in-law called it. So after that, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, during lunch hour, a terrified-looking woman slinked into his office. A new one every time. I’ll spare you the details. But at the end of the month, the quotas were met. The NKVD even gave him a plaque for ‘living up to the special task of the Party.’ He has a cabinet full of those plaques.”
Andrei stops, and she sees he isn’t going to say more.
They both remain silent for a minute or so. What is Sasha going to do with this story? What is she going to do with the fact that Andrei did not walk away from that conversation, from his father-in-law and his dacha, from that life? What kept him there, drinking and listening?
“Congratulations on being related to someone who can brag about such a glorious Soviet past,” Sasha says. But what she really wants is something much more selfish than this grand moral condemnation. “So you allowed yourself to be bought for a cushy job and a pair of nice shoes,” she says.
He turns to her, his face contorted with sudden anger. “You weren’t around, remember? I was alone, with nobody there. You left. My parents were dead, my house burned to the ground, and all you could think of was yourself and the theater.” He gets up and strides out of the courtyard. She follows, trying to catch his words. “I told my father-in-law things he could use against me. Things he could put me in the camps for. Stuff I did.”
Sasha grabs his elbow to prevent him from walking away. “What did you do?”
He struggles out of her grasp but stops. For a minute or so, they stand under the arch, silently, and she can hear him breathe hard. “What I did is too late to fix. Years too late. There is nothing anyone can do now.” He starts walking back to Nevsky Prospekt.
Without saying a word, they walk toward the blustery Neva that lets them know it is close as they tense against the heavy gusts of wind. They walk past rows of darkened windows, on the sidewalk that is already a gruel of dirty snow until the spire of the Admiralty becomes visible against the sky, until the Hermitage steps out of the dark like a photographic image floating in developing solution. They make their way to the river through the grip of an early winter, contemplating what has just transpired between them, thinking of their ruined lives.