“I’m working on my dissertation.” I was flipping through my notes at the desk, since we had no patrons to wait on. Not long after getting my advanced marksmanship certificate, I’d passed my fourth-year university exams, all Excellent to Good. I took my results out and looked at them whenever I needed a little internal fortitude. Mila Pavlichenko might have become a mother at fifteen, but her life was firmly back on course, chugging along like a patient little train hitting a predetermined progression of stations. First stop: graduating from Kiev University. Second stop: this assignment to the Odessa public library as a senior research assistant while I sent money home for Slavka every week. Next stop: finishing my dissertation . . .
“The sea, Mila,” Sofya cajoled. “It’s calling your name, you horrid little bookworm.”
“Bogdan Khmelnitsky is calling my name.”
“Do not quote your dissertation at me. I do not want to hear one more word about Bogdan Khmelnitsky, the Ukraine’s accession to Russia in 1721—”
“—actually 1654.”
“—or the activities of the Pereyaslav Council.”
“It is fascinating history,” I said a little huffily. All the library staff were well acquainted with my dissertation topic by now, but somehow no one was excited by it. Sofya regularly threatened to toss my dog-eared pages into the incinerator; I threatened to cram her lipstick up her nose; it was that kind of friendship. “Without the alliance of the Cossack Hetmanate to the centralized Russian state, we would never see a properly unified nation of—”
“Mila, no one cares. Come swimming tomorrow.”
So here we were at the beach, striped towels spread out under the sun, a fraying basket full of lemonade bottles parked in the sand. Children careened past shrieking, sand flying up from their feet, but I just flopped back in my navy blue swimsuit that sagged at the thighs. Face turned to the sky, I drowsed to the sounds of the waves, dreaming of the day my dissertation would be done, my degree would be awarded, and I would become a historian in Moscow. I’d have an apartment not far from Gorky Park, where I would take Slavka ice-skating, buy him sugar-dusted ponchiki in a paper cone . . .
“Let’s go to the opera tonight,” Sofya was saying, flicking sand off her legs. “La Traviata—Vika’s got extra tickets.”
“I’ve been loaned from Swan Lake to fill out the opera dancers for the Act II gypsy dance,” Vika said, rolling her eyes. She was a demi-soloist at the Odessa ballet, newly returned from the Bolshoi school in Moscow; she wasn’t even twenty, but she had one of those flowery nicknames dancers get—“the Nightingale” or “the Dragonfly,” I couldn’t remember which. I thought she looked more like a dragonfly, all bug eyes and endless twiggy limbs. “I hate those little ballets in operas,” Vika complained. “Substandard choreography—”
“Snob,” her brother Grigory teased, flicking sand at her. All of us found Vika a bit of a trial at times, but we adored her twin, who was also a dancer but wasn’t so everlastingly precious about it. “Let’s get dinner after the opera. I’m always so hungry after I get the greasepaint and tights off, I could eat Vika’s toe shoes.”
“Everything makes you hungry,” Sofya scolded, giving me a pang because it was something I was always telling Rostislav. My boy, nine years old now, sturdy and dark and bouncing, forever running up to show me a stone striated with quartz; a whorl in a slab of bark that looked like Comrade Stalin’s profile; a baby frog cradled in his gentle hands. I hadn’t seen him in months, since leaving Kiev to take up the researcher position at the Odessa library. I didn’t have to close my eyes to see him on the train platform with the rest of my family, clinging to my hand. “You could take me with you,” he pleaded. “I could help with your work.”
“It won’t be for long, morzhik,” I promised, hugging him tight, trying not to cry. I’d never been separated from him for so much as a fortnight, and this would be at least four months. But it would put me on the path toward the future I’d planned so carefully: the apartment in Moscow, the post as a historian; the independence and security. “It’s for you,” I told my son. “It’s all for you—” and heaved my bag of books onto the train before I could break down crying.