A Train to Moscow(4)
With her mother trying to feed her, Sasha can see she is at a disadvantage, just like when she was pinned to the bench, so she relaxes her lips and lets the spoon spill its contents into her mouth. She holds it there, warm, salty water with potato chunks and grains of barley, as her mother repeats the motion three times and then goes back to her seat. Maybe she realizes Sasha is not going to swallow it, or maybe she is simply tired and hungry after work and wants to finish her own food. When all the plates are emptied but Sasha’s and she is finally released from the table, she goes outside and, her body still aching from the policeman’s shove and her grandfather’s belt, spits out the soup into Grandpa’s gooseberry bush.
3
Marik is intelligentny, a word Sasha’s mother uses to characterize people. It is a salad mix of education, culture, intelligence, and manners, and all their neighbors and acquaintances have been divided into intelligentny and not intelligentny. Somehow the first group always comes out much smaller than the second. Not intelligentny: the three families who live in the other half of their house; every saleswoman in every grocery store, including Aunt Dusya from the bakery, with her carbon-penciled eyebrows and a kitchen voice; Sasha’s friend Andrei because his mother is a janitor who finished only the seven compulsory grades of secondary school and now wears a burlap apron over her cotton dress when she sweeps the yard with a bunch of twigs attached to a stick. Intelligentny: Irina Vasilievna, who gives piano lessons in her house two blocks away; Marik and his mother, pale and freckled and, as rumor has it, a Jew.
Sasha doesn’t know what Jews are and how they are different from the rest of them, but from the way people lower their voices when they say yevrey, a word that is spat out like a wormy chunk of apple, she guesses Jews are worse than they themselves are in some dark and hidden way they cannot discuss in public. She knows only one other Jew—Moisey Davidovich Zlotnikov, the head of the anatomy department of her mother’s medical institute and the adviser of her dissertation. Sasha has seen Dr. Zlotnikov only once, when her mother took her to work because Grandma’s heart was hurting, and he didn’t look different from any other person in Ivanovo. He had glasses and a goatee, and he rose from his desk and bent down to shake Sasha’s hand as if she were an anatomy professor and not a first grader with two skinny braids.
Marik is marked by another scar everyone knows about, an event Sasha can still see in her mind as if it happened only yesterday. In addition to being a Jew, he is now the son of a prisoner. After that morning, Sasha thought that Marik’s father had missed a bell and come late for work—solid grounds for an arrest, according to her mother—but then she heard her attach the word politichesky to his name. Her mother uttered the word in a low voice when they were all at the table slurping cabbage soup.
“They don’t put innocent people in camps, Grandpa said. Stalin knows who is with us and who is against us. Stalin—our leader, our father, the successor of our great Lenin. The engineer of our thunderous victory over Germany.”
Andrei expressed a similar view, only in less pompous words. “He must have done something if he got arrested,” he muttered, sharpening a branch with his pocketknife as they sat on the roof of the shed after Marik’s mother called him home.
Andrei’s father is not here, either, but according to Grandpa, he has a better chance of coming home than Marik’s father because he is not a politichesky. Maybe Andrei’s mother, as she sweeps the yard, also turns her head at the creak of the gate, just like Grandma has done since the end of the war, still waiting for her son Kolya to come back from the Leningrad Front.
It is her grandpa’s birthday, which means a samovar is puffing on the dining table and Grandma is standing over a frying pan, her hands white with flour, making pancakes. Marik and Sasha are under the table, where the old linoleum is torn, revealing boards worn through by many prewar and maybe even prerevolutionary feet. While the guests, all intelligentny, are busy eating boiled potatoes with pickled cabbage, the children are out of their sight, playing a game while waiting for tea, when they can load slices of bread with spoonfuls of strawberry and apple jam from the fruit in Grandpa’s garden.
They are separated from real life by the linen tablecloth that almost touches the floor. The jagged tear in the linoleum, in their imagination, is a river, and the torn edges of plastic are its banks. They just finished reading a book of Andersen’s fairy tales, and the story they are playing is about a one-legged tin soldier. The brave warrior survives a fall from a window and the raging waves of a waterfall, only to die in a fire at the end. He is silently in love with a paper ballerina, who, in the soldier’s mind, has only one leg, too. She has a pretty tinsel rose pinned to her dress. Does she know about the soldier’s love? The hole in the linoleum is the river that will rush forward and drag the tin soldier to its depths, the river that will sink his boat and deposit him into the stomach of a big fish.
Marik is the soldier, and Sasha is the paper ballerina. The soldier is terrified of the darkness inside the belly of the fish, but he is too proud to cry for help because he wears a uniform. Through the scraps of ripped linoleum, the river roars until it becomes a waterfall, the boat made from newspaper disintegrates, and the water finally closes over the soldier’s head.
“Farewell, warrior! Ever brave,
“Drifting onward to thy grave,” recites Marik from the book.