A Train to Moscow(9)
Riding on her mother’s shoulders, Sasha tries to lean forward to see him better through the forest of portraits and flags. She cranes her neck to peek under a rectangular slogan on two poles, and for a few seconds, the tiny, dark figure flickers between the squares of red. But all she feels is disappointment. He looks nothing like the father they all know, grand and loving and immortalized in oil.
Then the ant-like figure raises his hand, and the square explodes. Every mouth in every lane of every column splits open in one unified roar, and the forest of banners and portraits jolts and sways, as if struck by a blast of wind as strong as the one that snapped Grandpa’s oldest apple tree in half last year. It is so terrifying that Sasha screams. But the May Day demonstrators are all safely below, and she is the only one trapped in the center of the storm. The poles of the slogan on her left are rattling by her ear; the sticks with portraits aim at her head from the right. Flags shake with crimson furor and hiss like flames, as if someone has plucked her by the skin of her neck and is about to toss her into the gut of a wood-burning stove. The roar peals over the square like thunder, the mouths fusing into one howling throat, one hungry set of jaws with rows of sticks for teeth, ready to crunch and chew and spit her out.
Sasha shrieks and sobs, all in vain, because her voice cannot be heard against the roaring square. She wails and hunches over and rubs tears around her face. With arms over her head, cowering and bawling, she rides to the side street, where her mother and Katya finally hear her cries and see the snot smeared all over her face.
Her mother pulls her down from her shoulders, takes out a handkerchief, and starts wiping Sasha’s cheeks. “She’s tired,” she says to Katya, patting Sasha on the head. “Getting up at six and all that walking.”
Katya opens her arms, and Sasha jumps up and wraps her legs around her, clutching at her shoulders and flattening herself against her polka-dot dress. Katya knows Sasha is not tired, and she rocks in rhythm with Katya’s steps, still wailing. She thinks of the three sisters, who wouldn’t be so desperate to get to Moscow if they could see the spectacle of the whole politburo shaking on sticks. She thinks of the tiny man against the granite wall, their father who could never be her father. She thinks about another life, at the only place where it is possible, Theater. She sobs on the trolley, in the courtyard, on the stairs; she sobs on the landing and in the apartment’s long, murky hallway.
“Nu, nu,” says her mother, but Sasha still clings to Katya, sniffling into her shoulder. As long as she is in Katya’s arms, the Red Square teeth will not be able to get her. Katya is her shield because she is from Moscow and she knows what they, living in Ivanovo, are too far away to see.
Then an old man comes out of Uncle Seryozha’s room, peels her off Katya, and carries her somewhere in his tobacco-smelling arms. She lets him because he is also from Moscow so he also knows. He puts her on the divan in Baba Yulia’s room and sits next to her and brushes her head with his hard hands full of calluses. But they feel good, these hands, so she stops crying and for the first time looks into his face, unshaved and ravaged, into his colorless, unsmiling, frozen eyes. It seems strange, the difference between his hands, warm and alive, and his dead eyes, but it isn’t stranger than the eternally dead, birdlike Lenin lying under glass or Stalin, their leader and revolutionary glory, who turned out to be an ant.
They sit like this for a long time, Uncle Seryozha and Sasha, not saying a word, not moving. His face is hard and pitted, like their roads in Ivanovo when there is no rain. She doesn’t know what he is thinking. Maybe about this place Magadan, where he was lucky to have spent only ten years; maybe about his illness that makes him hate all holidays; maybe about the ten special screws that got him sick in the first place.
She is thinking about another life, a life in Theater. She is thinking about the true make-believe, the only pretending that makes sense. She wants to be part of it more than she has ever wanted anything, desperately, and she will dream about it every night. She will be stoic and patient, enduring their long days and long lines and gray streets with empty horse-drawn carts inching along through the dust. She will wait until she finishes school; she will live with Theater smoldering in the corner of her soul.
6
She climbs into the darkness of the storage loft in their Ivanovo house, a magic place filled with the secrets from another life. Sasha hasn’t been here in a year, since her tenth birthday. It smells of dust and mice, an odor of abandonment and desolation, as if this corner of the extinguished world ceased to exist because of her absence. This is her hiding place, her safe place, and today she is hiding from the present.
She is hiding from Grandpa, from the thick leather belt he flogs her with when she breaks his strict house rules. She is hiding from the radio reports announcing the biggest-ever harvests that never reach their stores and from her mother’s warnings about danger when she speaks about the war, when the word front rumbles out of her mouth, sputters on her lips, and detonates in Sasha’s ears, ending with a dead t.
Her mother saw the front when she was a war surgeon. The front killed Sasha’s father, who, she says to their neighbors, perished in the Great Patriotic War. There is a photo of him in the family album, a blond man in a uniform cinched with a belt. But from Grandma’s sighs and the neighbors’ smirks, Sasha senses that the noble war death is simply another story, another lie. She knows she is too young to be told the truth, but she is patient.