A Train to Moscow(11)
Just beneath the road, there was an abandoned water pipe, and inside it, the soldiers stretched a cable all the way to the armored car behind which we all hid. The sun was rising, and there were columns of smoke on the horizon. Aside from the armored car and the cannon, it looked like any mushroom-hunting morning at the edge of the woods near our house in Ivanovo.
It was around six when we heard the engines, and out of the morning smoke emerged motorcycles with sidecars. They stopped now and then, and the riders peered into binoculars and shot at whatever they thought looked suspicious. The sidecars were carrying MG 34s. The Germans wore metal helmets and large glasses covering half their faces. Martians, I thought, they look just like Martians. Round metal heads, big glass circles for eyes, all black. An unpatriotic thought rose to the surface of my mind: This is the war of the worlds, just as in H. G. Wells’s book, and our world is losing. There was something invincible and mighty about the Germans’ movements, in their bizarre, alien appearance, in the way they sliced through the damp air over the fields. There was an arrogance and a luxury in the way the machine guns occupied the sidecars as though they were passengers, as though those iron contraptions were human beings deserving to spread their weight across the black leather seats, hitching a ride along a dusty road of an alien country.
Then in a desperate, teenage voice, the lieutenant shouted, “Fire!” and the road exploded into a mash of body parts and twisted steel.
Sasha stops reading and examines a drawing penciled in the middle of the page: a man with a long, thin neck, yelling.
Screams ripped through the air; clouds of smoke rose up and screened the rising sun; gasoline mixed with blood poured onto the ground. The explosions were so powerful that the fire blew into our faces and scorched our skin. The blast ushered in a familiar smell of heat from rusted radiators mixed with the alien stench of burned human flesh. Martians, Martians, Martians was beating in my temple as the motorcycles in the back turned around to drive away.
“That was lucky,” said Seryoga and rubbed his singed eyebrow with the heel of his hand.
On the lieutenant’s orders, some of us killed the wounded and others set fire to the undamaged motorcycles. I knew Seryoga saw that I was relieved when I was ordered to kill the motorcycles rather than the wounded Germans. He gave me a sideways look of disappointment, the look my sister, Galya, had when I walked out of the morgue at her medical school the first time I saw corpses floating in wooden tubs of formaldehyde. “This is what’s required here,” Seryoga’s eyes seemed to be saying. “Our main objective is to kill people. Or those people will kill us.”
7
She stops after the first entry, closes the notebook, and stares at its violated cover. Everything is quiet downstairs. She is relieved that no one is home, but Grandpa or her mother could be back from work any minute. Sasha holds her breath and listens.
She is not yet ready to confront her mother and fling her anger into her face, her slow-boiling indignation at the way her mother treated her brother’s war journal. And what about Grandma? Does she even know that her son’s notebook has been hidden in this loft full of junk, behind a box with her prerevolutionary hat?
Why isn’t there a monument to Kolya in their house, Sasha thinks, the same way there is a monument to all those war heroes in Ivanovo’s main square? Why don’t they light candles to celebrate his courage, the way Grandma lights a candle by the icon in the corner of her room depicting the gaunt face of someone from the religious canon Sasha cannot even name?
She hides the notebook under her sweater and slips out of the empty house into the yard. A rooster the color of rust, marked across the neck with Grandpa’s indelible pencil, struts under the clothing line full of their neighbors’ underwear blowing in the wind. A neighbor is smoking on a bench by the shed, the visor of his cap over his eyes so that she can only see his nose swollen with purple veins.
She unhinges the gate and sees her mother at the end of the street, walking home from work. The notebook feels rough against her skin, urging Sasha to right the injustice of confining her uncle’s war journal to a place with old shoes and mice, to right the dishonor, yet she knows that her mother could be the one who put it there.
She starts walking toward her, not ready to confront her yet. As the two of them approach each other, Sasha decides not to say anything about the war journal, to keep quiet. She pretends that she is simply strolling in her mother’s direction to help her carry a string bag with potatoes because she is almost eleven, old enough to know what would happen if she pulled the notebook from under her sweater.
Her mother’s smile would be instantly wiped off her face. “What is this?” she would ask, stopping and lowering the string bag to the ground.
“You know what it is,” Sasha would say theatrically. “Why was it in the storage loft, behind all that forgotten junk?”
“Let’s go home,” her mother would respond in her teacher’s voice, her eyes fixed on the notebook in Sasha’s hand, as if she were trying to melt it down to nothing with her gaze, to make it disappear from the vision of the neighbors peeking through the openings in the fence.
In the house, her mother would shut the front door and double lock it behind them.
“Who asked you to climb into the storage loft and nose around there?” Her voice would be metallic, moving up the scales. “It’s not for you or anyone else. There is a reason why it has been hidden.” Her nostrils would flare, and her eyebrows would mash together, her ire approaching the thunderous heights of Grandpa’s.