My memoir, the unofficial version: “Lyonya, we should talk . . .”
“YOU’RE STILL MARRIED?” my new lover repeated for the third time.
“Only technically.” I took a deep breath, trying to calm the flutter in my stomach—we were sitting at the rickety little table in his dugout, two days after our first night together, and the topic I’d been dreading was spilling out all over the table like a messy, invisible oil slick. “The divorce was never finalized.”
Lyonya scratched his jaw. “But divorces are so easy to get.”
“My father made things complicated.” I sighed. “He can be old-fashioned . . . He didn’t entirely approve of my leaving Alexei. Papa let me move home but asked me to wait and think about the divorce, make sure it was the right choice. I let it go because I thought Alexei would divorce me, one of those no-fuss postcard legal splits—what I should have realized was that having an absentee wife he didn’t have to support suited him just fine.” All the freedom in the world to mess about with young girls and then say mournfully, I can’t marry you, kroshka, I’ve already got a marital noose around my neck. “Then before I knew it, Slavka was four and the new laws came through.” The laws requiring payment of a fifty-ruble fine, and the presence of both parties before officials to dissolve the marriage. I explained how Alexei had missed every appointment I set.
“So you put it off till later?” Lyonya guessed. “When things weren’t so busy?”
“But when you’re juggling a child and factory work and night school, and then university classes, and then a researcher job, well, things are always busy.” There had never been a day I thought, Now is just the right time to pay money I can’t spare to wrangle my husband whom I can’t stand into an office he’ll pretend he can’t find, to sign papers he has no intention of signing. And it hadn’t made any difference to my daily life or Slavka’s, whether Alexei was divorced from me or merely separated.
Only now I was sitting opposite a man who wanted to marry me . . . and I felt myself wanting to say yes. I scanned Lyonya’s face, looking for signs of anger, but he leaned across the table and kissed me, smiling. “This does put a wrinkle in my wedding plans, I admit.”
“You’re not upset?”
“Upset? I’m relieved. I thought maybe you didn’t want to marry me. If it’s just a matter of a still-living husband, well, I can work with that.”
I raised an eyebrow. “What, do you mean to kill him?”
“I’m not ruling it out,” Lyonya said cheerfully, going to the stove to heat up some tea. “It would cost the Red Army a good surgeon but save on the paperwork. And if he’s such a schoolgirl-chasing swine, we’d be doing the world a favor.”
“It’s not funny,” I protested, but found myself laughing anyway. It was Lyonya’s gift, I’d already come to realize—he could bring laughter like a stray thread of sunshine to brighten even the most shadowed room. He grinned over his shoulder, and I grinned back, propping my chin in my hand. “What really isn’t funny is that you started all that front-line marriage paperwork for nothing,” I said, enjoying the sight of his broad back under his uniform tunic. “What’s that, sixteen pages in triplicate?”
“I’m sure there’s another sixteen pages I can fill out in triplicate, which formalize a nonlegal front-line union so you can billet here with me. I’ll find out.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Surely there isn’t paperwork to document who’s living as your dugout girlfriend?”
“Milaya, this is the Soviet Union.” Lyonya pushed a tin mug into my hand—tea, hot and sugared just the way I liked it. “There’s paperwork for everything.”
“For the love of—”
“Don’t worry, we’ll handle Alexei one way or another—later. For the moment, I’m due back at the command post.” Lyonya bent down and kissed the corner of my mouth. “See you in the morning. Kill lots of Nazis. Don’t die.”