A Train to Moscow Read online

  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.

  At night, lying on the divan next to her mother, Sasha thinks about the three sisters and the actresses who played them. She thinks about how they believed the words Chekhov had written, pretending to be Olga, Masha, and Irina. But it isn’t the same as pretending to want to be a teacher or an engineer so that no one suspects that she really wants to be an actress. This is the true pretending. It is Theater, the real make-believe, exciting and magical, not at all like the everyday make-believe they all have to live by.

  In the morning, Katya takes them to see Moscow by trolleybus, and they get off in front of the central food store. Inside, behind the heavy doors of glass and oak, it feels like the rooms of Ivanovo’s only art gallery. But it doesn’t have the odor of a museum. It smells of the flour that hangs in the air of the bakery department, where bricks of black bread and loaves of white bulka are stacked on shelves like firewood, of milk that an aproned saleswoman ladles into aluminum vats that people pass to her over the counter, of cookies with patterns of the Moscow spires embossed on the front. The glass displays show three different kinds of cheese: a dense brick called Soviet, an anemic-looking wheel of Russian, and a cube of punctured Swiss—all real, all for sale. In front of the glass, as if guarding all this treasure, are chocolate bars called Soviet Builder in paper sleeves with a picture of a muscular man brandishing a hammer.

  Even Sasha’s mother, who was a surgeon during the war and doesn’t surprise easily, stops in front of a meat counter to gawk at the signs for beef and pork, at the bones piled in rows, at livers and kidneys, dark and glistening, perfect for the sour pickle soup they haven’t had since Sasha was four.

  But the most unbelievable thing of all is not how much they have in Moscow. It is how little they buy. In Ivanovo, when Grandma and Sasha have stood in line from noon until her mother returns from work, they always buy kilograms of whatever it is they are standing in line for. They buy as many kilograms as the store is willing to dispense, as many as they can carry home. That’s why when Grandma goes to the store, she always takes Sasha and sometimes even Grandpa. Here a woman in a felt hat is frivolously asking for a hundred grams of ham, sliced, please. A hundred grams? If ham magically turned up on the counter of their Ivanovo store, Grandma would never think of buying only a hundred grams, and their saleswoman, Aunt Dusya, certainly wouldn’t waste time slicing it.

  “You have a good life here,” concedes her mother, who doesn’t usually have an opportunity to talk a
bout good things. “All this food and no lines.”

  “No lines?” says Katya, laughter dimpling her cheeks. “I’ll show you a line.”

  They meander along a narrow cobblestone street that deposits them next to a wall made of shining granite panels. A half a block away, where the granite turns a corner, a thick line of people hugs the wall and disappears into the next street. They join the line, which moves in slow thrusts, like a purple rainworm across their compost pile, and wait with everyone else.

  “It’s Lenin’s mausoleum,” says her mother. “You must behave.”

  She must have forgotten that Sasha has been behaving since December.

  Two hours later, they reach the doors guarded by two soldiers with guns. The line heaves forward and around the platform on which lies Lenin, eternally alive. Only he doesn’t look alive. He looks dried up, with the head and face of a bird. He looks eternally dead.

  “His body was preserved with formaldehyde,” her mother whispers into her ear, “the same way they preserve bodies in our anatomy department.”

  She thinks of the dissection room at her mother’s medical institute, with its tall tables on which lie brown bodies—not at all frightening, full of revelations about what was previously hidden—with every nerve and capillary and membrane exposed by her mother’s skillful hands.

  When they pass the table where Lenin lies under glass, her mother pushes her through the crowd to the first row. At this close range, Lenin is as uninteresting as she saw from a distance, yellowish skin stretched over his bony head, dead and undissected. But she must display proper solemnity, like the rest of the people who wrinkle their brows and pleat their mouths into mourning lines, as if he died only yesterday and not in 1924, when her mother was only seven.

  It is early morning on May 1, and they are walking toward the Moskva River, behind Red Square, where Katya’s group from the telephone center is assembling before the demonstration. It is sunny and warm, perfect weather for International Workers’ Day, and the streets have been washed by blue trucks that Sasha saw earlier spraying water in heavy, blazing arches. She is between her mother and Katya, holding their hands, jumping over the puddles left by trucks. They are wearing their best dresses—a sunflower cotton shirtwaist for her mother and red polka dots for Katya. Today they don’t mind her jumping, and they hold hands and swing her over the wet pavement as long as she wants.

  The people from Katya’s telephone center look as confident and bold as the workers with thick muscles from the poster of a Five-Year Plan they passed on the way here. They unfurl red banners on long wooden sticks and hoist up huge portraits of stern, unsmiling men.

  Then everyone starts walking: people with banners and portraits and red carnations made from construction paper swaying on long wire stems. Her mother hoists her up onto her shoulders, so now Sasha is above the people’s heads, in the midst of a forest of swaying sticks with flags, banners, and portraits, of balloons and red carnations. She squints and peers to her left, where everyone else is peering. There, five columns of people away, a group of men stands on a granite platform against the Kremlin wall. In the center is a separate dark figure in what looks like a military uniform. She knows it is Stalin, their conscience and their revolutionary glory, as the radio reminds them every morning. He is the father to all of them marching in this square and gathered around radios from here to Kamchatka, across all their eleven time zones. Only he is so far away, she can barely see him. He looks tiny and ant-like, and there is nothing glorious about him.

  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 thi
s 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.

  The front also killed both her mother’s brothers. Sima was wounded in battle and died in the back room of their house. Kolya, an artist, who studied in Leningrad and whose paintings hang on their every wall, is still missing in action. They haven’t heard anything from Kolya since the war began—not a letter, not a note, not a word from any of those who have already returned—but Grandma is still waiting for him, running outside at every creak of the garden gate, certain that Kolya has finally made his way home all the way from Berlin.