And now here I was at the beach on a beautiful day, and it wasn’t as beautiful as it could have been because my son was so far away.
Vika was still complaining. “Ballet variations in operas are just a lot of swishing about in red petticoats. A waste of my training—”
“Give it a rest, Vika. You’re not being asked to perspire over a lathe in a factory!”
“Ugly sweat work either way!”
“I worked a lathe in a factory,” I protested. “It wasn’t ugly. Almost beautiful, actually.” The days when Slavka had been a baby, barely weaned—as I’d worked the lathe, brushing tungsten dust out of my tight-braided hair and wondering if I’d ever be able to go back to school again, I realized how lovely I found the sight of those blue-violet metal shavings curling out from under the blade.
“Beautiful?” Vika looked scornful.
“No matter how hard the metal, it yields to human strength,” I retorted. “Everything does. All you have to do is devise the right weapon.”
The dancer snorted, but her twin raised his eyebrows. “Speaking of weapons—”
“I’m not going to shoot a hole in a playing card to win you a bet,” I said, heading him off at once. I took regular range practice after earning my advanced certificate, to keep my skills sharp, but I still didn’t like showing off. Shooting deserved more respect than that.
“Come on, Mila!” Grigory grinned, dimples showing. He’d been flirting with me all day, and he was certainly good-looking, with those marvelously muscled legs all dancers had . . . but he was still a boy, just eighteen. There was so much difference between eighteen and twenty-four! Becoming a mother so young meant that by the time I’d gone back to school, my fellow students were all five or six years my junior—at times I felt like an old crone in comparison. I went out to plenty of dances and parties now, but none of the men I met there had ever become a long-term prospect. The university boys who invited me to films after Komsomol meetings had nothing more in their minds than fun, whereas I had a child and a future to plan for. As for the older men I sometimes met, they were too trenchantly set in their own futures, and they made it clear they expected me to give up mine if our romance got serious.
Romance later, I told myself whenever the pangs of loneliness stung too sharp. University degree now. Once a few more mistake-free stops on my train journey had been safely logged, once the matter of my still-pending divorce had been finalized . . . Alexei hadn’t showed up for the third divorce appointment any more than he had for the first two, but when I had a little breathing room after university to finally settle all that, then I could turn an eye to finding a suitable man to share my life and Slavka’s. When my feet were on firmer footing there would be time for men, family, more children—all the rest of it.
When you’re young and you’ve known nothing but peace, you assume there will always be time for everything.
“Let’s get lunch.” Sofya gave me a swack with her towel. “Or I’m going to eat Vika, bony mosquito legs and all. Come on . . .”
That day! A cluster of sandy, laughing young people buttoning summer dresses and old jackets over damp swimsuits, packing up their towels and trailing off to the cheburek café on Pushkin Street. Waiting for a platter of flaky fried meat pastries to arrive, mouths watering; Vika announcing she wasn’t going to eat anything because if she gained so much as a gram she’d lose her title role in next year’s Cavalry Maiden; her brother telling her if she kept complaining about grams and kilos he’d drop her on her head in their next pas de deux; Sofya sipping cold birch juice through a straw; me remembering a footnote I needed to add to my dissertation. All of us surrounded by the noisy, happy clamor of café diners and beach-goers, sticky children and their sunburned mothers. The last day, the last moment, before it all went to hell; before the wheel turned and flung all of us into the air, our careful plans shivered into diamond shards and raining down around us. Vika wasn’t going to dance the Cavalry Maiden next year; Grigory wasn’t going to partner her through any more grand jetés; Sofya would have no sunny afternoons to linger over pale green birch juice, and I wasn’t going to defend my dissertation on Bogdan Khmelnitsky, the Ukraine’s accession to Russia in 1654, and the activities of the Pereyaslav Council. Within the year, half the people at our table would be dead.