A Train to Moscow(7)
5
“If you behave,” her mother says, “we’ll see about going to Moscow for the May Day parade.”
The if you behave phrase, she knows, is as deep as their drinking well, but for a few months, she can stay away from dangers and honor Grandpa’s house rules. She will behave. She will be like the three sisters from the play, dreaming and hopeful, waiting for Moscow, with its promise of another life.
On April 28, Sasha and her mother finally board the train at the Ivanovo junction. They stare at the birches and firs running behind the window; they drink tea out of glasses in metal holders the conductor with brass buttons on her uniform brings before they go to sleep, and then she wakes up in Moscow. The train lurches and exhales a cloud of steam, and she panics, afraid that she has slept through Moscow and now it’s too late. But her mother is folding up the blanket into a perfect square, and she realizes that her fear is silly, that Moscow is the last stop on the train route because there is nothing else beyond it.
They walk onto the platform in a crowd bristling with elbows. They walk past people sleeping on wooden benches, past a cistern with “beer” painted on its side and a woman in a white apron rinsing the only mug under a squirt of water, out into a street, as wide as a whole potato field but entirely paved.
Outside the station, Moscow explodes around her with stone facades that rise into the sky and block the sun; with rivers of asphalt that radiate in five different directions; with the whistle of a militiaman who wields a zebra baton to freeze the four lanes of traffic and then, like a magician, make them move again; with buses and trolleys circling around a statue of Lenin, as if performing a ritual dance, and then, on cue from the militiaman’s baton, vanishing into the tunnels of streets. It stuns her with its energy and bustle; it invades her senses; it pumps into her ears a loud, brazen invitation to a different life.
They are staying with Grandma’s cousin Baba Yulia, who is short and wide and has a puffy face. She lives with her son, Uncle Seryozha, and his twenty-year-old daughter, Katya. The apartment is a dark, long corridor with a kitchen attached to the one end and two rooms to the other. Instead of a pail and dipper, the kitchen has a faucet, and the stove blooms with the gentle petals of gas when her mother holds a lighted match to a burner. Their bed is set on a divan in the room where Baba Yulia and Katya sleep behind a yellow curtain that disperses dust and a smell of mothballs.
On the first day, they don’t even see Uncle Seryozha. The door to his room is shut, and no one is allowed in. “It’s his illness,” says her mother, but her eyebrows are mashed together, and Sasha knows that this illness is not as simple as measles or the flu.
In the evening, Baba Yulia and Katya set the table, on which, like in a fairy tale, appear pink slices of bologna, a hunk of perforated cheese, and a loaf of bread so soft, it gives under the weight of the butter she slathers on.
Baba Yulia, in an apron over a housedress, speaks somberly, but Sasha can see that she is happy to have them as sympathetic listeners. She tells them about Uncle Seryozha, who was an engineer at the Moscow automobile factory before the war. He was more than an engineer, Baba Yulia says; he was an inventor. He was the author of something called a patent that advanced the Soviet auto industry.
“This is what did him in,” says Baba Yulia. “His dedication. For a new car model he was building at home, he needed ten special screws.” She chews on her lip, and Sasha notices that she has only four teeth, three on the top and one on the bottom, all brown as crumbling stumps. “Stores didn’t have the screws. Stores didn’t have anything, but we looked anyway. We looked everywhere. His wife, Lusya, may she rest in heaven, took a day off from work to go all the way to a department store in Luzhniki.” Baba Yulia pauses and stares into space, as if she could see the heaven where Uncle Seryozha’s wife may be resting.
“I told him, leave this project be—work on something else until we find the screws.” Baba Yulia shakes her head. “But did he listen? He took the ten screws from the factory where he worked.” She stabs her fork into the boiled potato on her plate and mashes it down ferociously, as if it were the potato’s fault that Uncle Seryozha didn’t listen to her. “All I can say is he was lucky they arrested him on criminal, not political, charges. Ten years in camps, a year for each screw.”
“That’s the only reason he was able to come back last year,” Katya chimes in. “Had it been a political crime, he’d still be rotting in Magadan.”
“Where is Magadan?” Sasha asks, but her mother frowns. Maybe she thinks that it is impolite to ask questions about a place that makes people rot.
“In Siberia, on the other side of the Urals,” says Katya. She cuts off a slice of cheese and puts it on Sasha’s plate. She likes Katya. Her tight curls tremble when she speaks, and her round cheeks with freckles look as if someone splashed muddy water onto her face. She likes the sound of Katya’s job—telefonistka—an elegant and impressive title, a word that rolls off her tongue like a whistle.
“He’ll sober up in a day or two,” says Baba Yulia. “It’s the damned holidays, with all those banners and balloons. It’s all that cheer.” The door to Uncle Seryozha’s room is behind her, and Sasha can almost see him crouched by the keyhole, half-rotten, listening. Baba Yulia grabs their empty plates and, with a deliberate clatter, stacks them up on the oilcloth. “But what can you do?” she asks, addressing a ballerina in a porcelain tutu bending on the sideboard shelf. The ballerina doesn’t answer, and Baba Yulia picks up the plates and shuffles out, mumbling something through her four brown teeth.