Sasha thinks of a day when she was six or seven, when Grandma took her to get their bread rations and look for lines. If there was a line, she said, you must always join it because there is food at the other end.
They walked along the tracks, away from the loop where the streetcar ended its route, past the gray wooden houses lining their street, past the fences hiding black currant and gooseberry bushes next to what in the summer would be beds with beets, carrots, and dill.
Near the center of the town, behind rows of barbed wire, a group of men in faded military uniforms was clearing debris from a square of wasteland that used to be a school or a store; Sasha was too young to remember. They were German soldiers, prisoners of war, those enemies who had invaded their land. Only they didn’t look like enemies or invaders; they looked like the rest of them: sharp-faced and hungry, exhausted by the war.
Grandma stopped by the barbed-wire fence where several men were driving shovels into a pile of dirt spiked with jagged pieces of cement. Their movements were mechanical, as if under their coats, they all had hidden creaky motors that lifted their arms and bent their legs. The German closest to the fence looked up and met her eye. Grandma dipped her hand into her bag, unfolded her ration of bread carefully wrapped in a handkerchief, and fit her arm between the rows of wire, a small brown cube in her open palm. For a moment, the German hesitated, looking around furtively, as if accepting the bread could result in being saddled with more digging, then took it with his muddy fingers, as gnarled as the claws of an ancient bird from Sasha’s book of folktales. His eyes were the color of the frozen ditch on the side of the road, surprised and bewildered.
“Why did you give him your ration?” she asked as the German hastily stuffed the bread into his mouth.
Grandma rewrapped what remained in the handkerchief and put it back into her bag. The words came out gently, as soft as her wrinkles, as sad as her eyes. “He is someone’s son, too,” she said and motioned for Sasha to move on, probably thinking of her own son Kolya, the one still missing in action, hoping that he was alive somewhere in a foreign land, hoping that someone would offer him a piece of bread.
39
It is three days past Grandma’s name day—Elena’s day, the day her name saint was born and the day Grandma was buried. This is always the time when lilacs burst into bloom, and through the kitchen window, Sasha can see a bush frothed in purple, branches swaying in the breeze. The kitchen now has a faucet—when did they lay down pipes for running water? An old nylon stocking used to wash dishes, crisscrossed by runs beyond repair, sits on the lip of the sink next to a bar of laundry soap, just as it did when she was a girl. She picks it up and closes her hand around it to feel the greasy silkiness Grandma felt only days earlier. Is she hoping that some of her warmth has remained in this rag that touched her hands daily, for decades, more often than anything else in the house?
The dining room table is littered with issues of Pravda and a scattering of handwritten receipts, a sight Grandma would never have allowed in her house. Sasha looks up at the wall with Kolya’s paintings she remembers so well. One of them, The War Ration—a slice of black bread and a small fish, as dark and dry as the bread—is hanging at an angle, revealing a patch of blue wallpaper underneath, bright as a cornflower, not discolored by light. She straightens the frame, and the original deeper blue of the wallpaper disappears. It is back to its washed-out color, the wear of time. It’s back to order now, as Mama would say.
Mama and Grandma are both gone. And how many are left of those who used to inhabit this house? Sima is buried in Ivanovo; Grandma is there, as well, although on the other end of the cemetery that burst beyond its original boundaries decades ago; Kolya, most likely, under layers of mud and other bodies at the Leningrad Front; Mama in Leningrad. Besides Grandpa, she is the only one left.
The door to her grandparents’ room is open, and she walks in as she used to when she was a child and wanted to play under Grandpa’s drafting table that is still jostling for space with the armoire. The bed is in the corner, its hand-crocheted cover Grandma knitted pulled on hastily and crumpled in places. Sasha straightens it, ironing out the white lace with her hand, just as Grandma would have done. Then she steps to the armoire and opens its heavy door, something she has never done before, something she was never allowed to do. She feels she is allowed now. Grandma’s dress is still hanging inside, the dark-blue cotton dress with little white stars and a white collar she remembers so well, the one that always gave her the woody smell of home. Sasha holds the soft fabric between her fingers, then buries her face in it, sniffs the smell out of the collar and the sleeves, inhales whatever is left of Grandma, now all ephemeral, all fleeting. All gone.