A Train to Moscow Read online

  ALSO BY ELENA GOROKHOVA

  A Mountain of Crumbs: A Memoir

  Russian Tattoo: A Memoir

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2022 by Elena Gorokhova

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542033879 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 154203387X (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542033862 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542033861 (paperback)

  Cover design by Holly Ovenden

  First edition

  For Marina Maltseva,

  a great Russian actress

  CONTENTS

  ACT 1 IVANOVO

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  ACT 2 MOSCOW

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  ACT 3 LENINGRAD

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  ACT 4 IVANOVO-LENINGRAD

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ACT 1

  IVANOVO

  1

  She immediately knows something is wrong. The door to Marik’s house is ajar, and there is a black car blocking the street just a few meters away. Not really a car—there aren’t many cars in Ivanovo. It looks more like the wagon that plucks drunks off the sidewalks on holidays and deposits them at the sobering station in the town’s center.

  Who is this wagon waiting for? Not for her friend Marik, for sure. Marik is seven, like Sasha, and no driver would waste time plowing through snow all the way to the edge of Ivanovo to stand by while a first grader pulls on his itchy uniform and tosses his books into a schoolbag. Despite the dusk of early mornings, Sasha has always savored this hour before school, from the moment she plunges out of the clouds of frost and into the warmth of Marik’s house to see his father leaf through Pravda over a glass of tea to the minute she curls her fingers around the piece of sucking candy his mother stuffs into her hand before they leave for class. But all those safe mornings, she can sense, are now in the past. Today, everything is different.

  When Sasha slinks in through the open door, she doesn’t see Marik right away. Instead, she sees an unfamiliar man in a black coat and ushanka hat ripping apart the bed, turning the mattress over, tearing off the sheet, and yanking the blanket out of its duvet cover. She sees another man shaking out every book from the shelves, cutting out the binding, and squinting down its spine, which must be taking a long time because Marik’s mother is a literature teacher and has a lot of books. Sasha sees her standing by the table, next to her husband, clutching the back of a chair with both hands as though she would collapse if she didn’t. The veins on the backs of her hands are swollen, thick as ropes. No one speaks, and the only sounds in the room are of tearing and slashing, the sounds of destruction. When the contents of the entire bookcase have finally been violated, another man, short and stumpy as a fireplug, snatches the briefcase of Marik’s father off a chair and rips it open. He scans the sheets of paper with mathematical formulas scrawled in a hurried handwriting, as if he could understand any of them. Then he lifts his eyes and stares at the wall.

  “Citizen Garkovsky, you are under arrest,” he announces.

  This is when Sasha sees her friend. Marik is crouching in the corner behind an armchair where he and Sasha usually read together after school. His head is between his knees, his red hair sticking out in all directions like taut little springs, so Sasha cannot see his face.

  “For what?” asks Marik’s mother in a ragged voice.

  “You’ll find out,” says the fireplug, avoiding her eyes.

  Marik’s mother gives him a hard stare, as though she were facing a student who had misbehaved the entire year and failed the course. “You were in my class a few years ago, weren’t you?” she says. “I remember you. You were a good student. You liked Lermontov.”

  The guard turns away and bangs the briefcase with papers on the table, as if it were the papers’ fault that in eighth grade, he liked Lermontov, that he was a good student, that now he is here to arrest his former teacher’s husband.

  “It’s all a mistake, just a misunderstanding,” Marik’s father says. He tries to speak in his usual manner, but his voice is cracking. It is a voice Sasha hears every morning, a voice of a mathematician from the Academy of Sciences, a voice that has always made her feel secure. She wants him to be right; she wants it all to be a mistake. She is in first grade and hasn’t read Lermontov yet, but how can someone who likes poetry, she wonders, arrest her best friend’s father? How can a good student of literature arrest anyone?

  The first policeman, a tall, gangling man, has finished ripping apart the slashed mattress and has turned to the pillows, unleashing a blizzard of feathers that rivals the snow falling behind the window. Having failed to find anything (Sasha can’t imagine what anyone could possibly hide inside a pillow), he strides to the table and pushes Marik’s father away from his wife and toward the door. It is a small push, but there is a pent-up force in it; while still restrained, it makes Sasha think that it may be a precursor to upcoming, less civilized shoves.

  This is when her friend Marik storms out of the corner where he has been cowering and flattens himself against his father, his arms like a vise around his father’s waist. For a moment, the taller guard freezes, uncertain of what to do, but then his features reassemble into the earlier official mask, and the moment of hesitation melts away, like snow on the roof of the police wagon outside. He grabs Marik and tries to wrench him off his father. But Marik doesn’t let him. He dives under the guard’s arms and punches him on his thighs and kicks him on his shins. “Leave my father alone, you scum, you asshole!” he yells at the top of his lungs, words that sound incompatible with Marik and his house, adult curses Sasha hears only from drunks behind the liquor store. That’s when she, too, plunges between Marik and the guard and tries to grip her friend’s arm to pry him away from the policeman, but the next moment, she and Marik are rolling on the floor, slammed against the wall. She hears Marik’s mother scream and sees her pound the policeman with her fists, even though it is evident that he is oblivious of her, pushing Marik’s father toward the front door, still open, as if the private life of her friend and his parents has already ceased to exist.

  “Put on your coat, Citizen Garkovsky,” says the former fan of Lermontov in a flat voice,
trying to normalize what has just happened. He stuffs the briefcase with mathematical formulas under his arm, his eyes flickering from Sasha and Marik on the floor to the police wagon in the window, still unable to look at his teacher.

  “Please don’t worry,” says Marik’s father to his wife and son, but also to Sasha. He stands by the door, scrambling to get his arms through the sleeves of the coat Marik’s mother holds out for him. “Go to school and make me proud,” he says to the children, who are clutching on to each other on the floor, braving the bruises that are just beginning to throb. “They will straighten this out soon,” he promises. “I will be back in a few days.” He is trying to stay composed, but his voice is quivering. “All will be well,” he says, even though his words sound hollow, lacking the weight required to ground them in Sasha’s mind, maybe even in his own.

  Should Sasha believe him? Despite the two policemen leading him out of the house, Marik’s father still looks like the hero from a film about the first Five-Year Plan they saw at school, imperishable and proud. Whom can she believe if she doesn’t believe him? She holds on to Marik to keep him from lunging after the guards, wishing that everything, as her grandma likes to say, would soon indeed turn out to be well.

  2

  Sasha stands next to Marik by the gate to the courtyard, checking that Grandma can’t see her. Her house, like Marik’s, sits on the outskirts of Ivanovo where the town streetcar ends its route behind a field, where every hour it crawls past Grandpa’s garden to come to a standstill farther down the street, by the cluster of lilac bushes. But Sasha is not thinking about the lilacs now. She is thinking about the streetcar clanging along the track, with sparks bursting on the wires above. The best manifestation of defiance is to jump onto the back of the streetcar and straddle the long piece of iron protruding like a tail, gliding past the clumps of nettles, past the envious glances of their friends, until the streetcar screeches to a stop and its driver rolls a cigarette between his fingers and cups his hands around a lighted match. So far, nine-year-old Andrei, two years older than Marik and Sasha, is the only one who has had the guts to ride on the streetcar’s metal tail, and he has been sauntering around with his hands in his pockets since, forgetting that the three of them are friends, whistling and gazing over their heads as if they’ve suddenly shrunk in size.

  She looks back to check that Grandma’s face has disappeared from the window and waits for the streetcar with thrill and trepidation, as if it were a final test at the end of school in May. She and Marik both wait, ready and determined, glancing back at Grandma’s house, which Sasha has always known is full of secrets. Secrets that are stashed in letters tied with ribbons under Grandma’s bed, tucked away into the upper shelves of the armoire Sasha cannot reach, hidden in the dusty space of the storage loft above the front door. They are secrets from the old life, the life before Sasha and Marik were born: before the country shuddered and convulsed into a new social order, before her mother’s two younger brothers became engulfed by the war. They wait and wait for their defining moment, their hands sweaty, their stomachs growling in protest to the daring plan they have concocted. To shrink the waiting, they kick the dust, although they know they shouldn’t, because it will ruin their shoes, and getting new ones is an event almost as big as overthrowing the tsar.

  And then, from around the corner, they hear the approaching rumble. The rattling of windows becomes louder as the streetcar turns and heaves in their direction and for a moment swallows them in its enormous wake. They let it pass and then run behind it on the track so that the driver can’t see them in his mirror. She sees Marik grab onto the iron tail and jump, straddling the metal bar, clutching its cold neck with both hands. She jumps, too, and the tracks begin to sail away from under her feet, just like she saw in a movie once, but she concentrates on holding on. Her hands are sweaty, and Marik’s must be, too, because she can see him grasp at the metal as his fingers keep slipping off. Is he as frightened as she is? Is his heart beating as fast as hers? To keep her own balance, she focuses on his tense back in front of her. Then the car lurches forward and slows to a crawl. Suddenly she can see Andrei from the corner of her eye, frozen against the fence. He glides past and disappears, but neither Marik nor she looks back because they can’t afford to lose their balance when the streetcar swings on another turn. Then, when the brown grass rolls into view and when they are both still on the back of the streetcar clattering past the lilac bushes, she knows that they have done it, that the two policemen didn’t win, that Andrei will never again gaze over their heads or spit out sunflower shells in their direction.

  When she opens the front door, she sees Grandma, who usually sails around the house, running from the kitchen with her mother’s speed. Her face, normally soft and wrinkled, has become sharp and angular, and her eyes behind round glasses burn with an anger Sasha has never seen. Grandma locks the door behind her and orders her to sit down.

  It turns out that Andrei was not the only one who witnessed her forbidden ride on the back of the streetcar. A neighbor saw it, too, probably peeping between the boards of the fence, and, being nosy as their neighbors are, ran to their house to tell Grandma. So now Sasha is forced to stay in until her mother and Grandpa come home, and then who knows what punishment such reckless disobedience will get her. Grandma shakes her head and walks up and down the room, wiping her hands on her apron.

  “Do you know what could have happened?” she asks in a shrill, unfamiliar voice. “Do you understand how dangerous it is, to jump onto a moving streetcar?” The word dangerous hisses out of her mouth like an explosion.

  Sasha knows she is guilty because she broke the rules, but she has also done something that made her fearless and proud, like her mother must have felt before she was born when, despite the military order that forbade treating civilians, she cut into the belly of a nine-year-old wounded boy with her surgeon’s scalpel and pulled out pieces of shrapnel, one by one. She and Marik did it, a small revenge for the bruises from the guard who took away her friend’s father, the bruises she never revealed to anyone at home.

  “But nothing happened,” she pleads. “The streetcar is so slow here, right before the end of the route. It’s so slow, I can walk faster,” she says, stretching the truth so Grandma’s face will lose its sharpness and become soft and wrinkled again.

  She wants to tell her about Andrei’s admiring stare and about Marik’s tense shoulders in front of her on the tail of the streetcar; she wants to brag about their accomplishment and newly earned respect, but Grandma paces back and forth, not listening to any of this. She blames herself and says she is an old fool who didn’t see what was happening because she was too busy in the kitchen boiling buckets of water for a load of laundry and wasn’t looking out the window as often as she should have been.

  “Such a reckless thing to do,” she keeps saying. “And what if Andrei decides to jump off a cliff. Will you follow him, too?” she demands. “Mama was right when she refused to let him into the house. And what about Marik?” she asks. “Did he ride on the back of the streetcar, too?”

  “No,” Sasha lies, wondering if the neighbor snitched on Marik, too, wondering if Grandma will save her from what awaits when her mother and Grandpa get home from work. She will never tell anyone about Marik riding the streetcar with her. They did it, and that’s enough.

  She is on a bench, facedown, on her stomach. The wood surface is hard, made harder by her mother’s hands that are pressing on her legs and shoulders, holding her down. She turns her head and sees Grandpa pulling the belt out of his trousers, black and thick, with a round metal buckle. She tries to flail her arms and kick her legs, but her mother’s grip is like a vise. She turns her head, the only part of her body she can move, and sees Grandma standing by the door, the light from the electric bulb glaring off her glasses so she can’t see her eyes. The belt swishes above, and she hears it cut through the air before it lands on her behind and leaves a sting so painful, she wails. But she knows Grandpa won’t stop with o
nly one strike, so she keeps wailing and screaming and wiggling under her mother’s hands as the belt does its swishing and stinging, as the tears on her face mix with snot and leave pathetic swirls of drool on the wood of the bench. “I won’t do it anymore!” she howls to halt the belt. “I won’t, I won’t, I swear I won’t!” she shrieks, in sync with its rhythm, and then there is no more swishing, and the air becomes whole again.

  “Next time I’ll spank you with nettles,” says Grandpa and threads the belt through the loopholes on the waist of his pants.

  Her mother’s hands open so she can scramble off the bench, past Grandma, whose eyes she still cannot see, and run to her bed and crawl under the blanket to pity herself and her punished behind, to think about injustice and the meaning of life.

  At dinner, her mother talks about dangers. The dangers she saw at the front, where she was a surgeon until Sasha was born, and the dangers they all read about in Pravda or hear about from babushkas who sit on benches near the shed and chew on sunflower seeds. Mines in the fields and unexploded shells under the forest loam, whirlpools in the river where they go to swim in the summer, gangs of hooligans who get drunk on moonshine and break windows at the school and rip apples off Grandpa’s apple tree. There are already so many dangers lurking around that only an unthinking fool like Sasha would conjure up new ones.

  “Do you understand what you did?” she asks, and Sasha nods silently because she can still feel the belt welts and doesn’t want to provoke any more punishment.

  “Eat your soup,” says Grandma and pushes another slice of bread toward her.

  Back in the under-the-blanket murk, Sasha decided she would not eat, so she shakes her head and presses her lips together to show she is serious.

  “Eat,” demands her mother.

  She sits with her hands on her knees, listening to her ailing backside.

  “Are you deaf?” asks Grandpa.

  “Just a couple of spoonfuls,” says Grandma in her regular soft voice.