All because of an announcement blaring loud from a speaker on the street just outside, cutting off the café chatter like a knife, informing everyone that at four this morning, Germany had invaded the motherland.
We all froze as if we had been shot. Outside it was the same, all heads turned toward the speaker, listening to Comrade Molotov. Each of us must demand from himself and from others the discipline, organization, and self-sacrifice worthy of a true Soviet patriot, in order to provide for all the needs of the Red Army, the Navy, and the Air Force, in order to ensure victory over the enemy. He sounded agitated, but firm. Victory will be ours!
He didn’t speak long. Just long enough to rearrange the world.
The buzz of conversation started immediately, but the four of us looked at each other around the table, stunned. Slavka, I thought. Slavka . . . No one moved until our platter of sizzling hot chebureki arrived on the table with a bottle of straw-pale wine, and suddenly we were all talking.
“How far have they advanced?” Sofya sounded sick. “The Hitlerites?”
“I’ll enlist,” said Grigory.
“You will not,” snapped Vika, eyes more buglike than ever with shock. “They won’t conscript artists—will they?—so don’t go throwing yourself in front of the guns.”
“Maybe I can enlist on the medical side,” Sofya said, trying to sound brave but only sounding scared. I just stared at my plate. Slavka . . . war brought such horrors into the lives of children. Bread lines, bombing raids, queues that stretched for blocks. My parents still spoke of the last war, and the terrible hardships that followed . . .
Vika slammed to her feet, glaring daggers at her brother. “I still have to dance in La Traviata tonight, invasion or not. I’ll see you all afterward.”
“Vika—” Her twin rushed after her, leaving Sofya and me staring at each other.
“We may as well go to the opera tonight,” my friend said at last. “Whatever happens, it’s not happening yet. Not here.”
But over the horizon—yes. Not so far over the horizon, either. I’d learn later that German air raids had pierced as far as Kronstadt near Leningrad; Sevastopol in the Crimea. Outside the café, Pushkin Street was filling up, people gathering under the speaker to argue.
Yet there were still mothers heading toward the beach with excited children, couples ambling hand in hand along Marine Boulevard. It was still a beautiful summer afternoon; no one wanted to skip their plans for the cinema, the theater, the concert hall just because of the outbreak of war. I couldn’t decide if it was blind stubbornness or just the Russian way, putting your head down and simply marching ahead, and I still couldn’t decide that night when Sofya and I settled in our seats in Box 16 of the dress circle at the Odessa theater, watching over the stage as the hushed opening strains of Verdi’s La Traviata whispered out over the theater. Such a beautiful theater, all gilded moldings and huge crystal chandeliers—a theater for us, ordinary students and citizens, when once people like me would have been left to scrabble at the door while the aristocrats swept inside.
But I couldn’t enjoy the opera, the soprano with her white frills and vocal fireworks, the swooning tenor. I stared blindly at the stage, hands flexing in my lap, my thoughts a jumble of random images laced with the ribbon of Comrade Molotov’s radio-flattened voice. My son eating hot blini with sour cream and apple jam . . . German troops have entered our country, without making any demands of the Soviet Union and without a declaration of war . . . The orderly rows of files I took such pleasure in organizing at the library . . . They have attacked our borders in many places . . . The nods from my history professors when I answered a question correctly: “Exactly right, Lyudmila Mikhailovna” . . . Hostile aerial attacks and artillery barrages have also taken place . . . Blue-violet shavings of implacably hard metal curling out from under a blade; a shot rocketing from my triggering finger to the center of a target . . .
The curtain descended to a crash of applause. Act I was over, the soprano had renounced love in favor of life （or had she?）， and I’d barely heard a note. All I knew was that something was building in my chest, building with implacable steadiness, and suddenly I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, couldn’t sit here through Act II and Vika’s strutting entrance in her red petticoats. “I need to go,” I told Sofya brusquely and rose from my seat, pushing down the great stairs toward the outside until I was taking in great gulps of the warm night air. I stood on the steps of the opera house for a moment, my blue crepe de chine dress stirring about my knees, then began to walk.