“How can I not?” Vera says. All her life she has understood what it is to be a good Soviet, how to follow the rules and keep one’s head down and make no move that draws attention. But this . . . how can she blindly do this thing?
“Comrade Stalin has eyes everywhere. He is surely watching the Germans, and he knows where our children can go so that they will be safe. And all workers’ children must go. That is all there is.”
“What if I don’t see them again?”
Mama peels back the cover and gets out of bed, crossing the tiny space between them. She gets into bed, takes Sasha’s side, and pulls Vera into her arms, stroking her black hair as she used to when Vera was young. “We women make choices for others, not for ourselves, and when we are mothers, we . . . bear what we must for our children. You will protect them. It will hurt you; it will hurt them. Your job is to hide that your heart is breaking and do what they need you to do.”
“Sasha told me I would have to be strong.”
Mama nods. “I don’t think men understand, though. Even your Sasha. They march off with their guns and their ideas and they think they know courage.”
“You’re talking about Papa now.”
“Maybe I am.”
They lay for a while longer without talking.
For the first time in a long time, she is thinking about her father. As much as it hurts, it is better than dwelling on what is to come. She closes her eyes and in the darkness she is on the street in front of their old apartment, watching her papa leave.
Her fingers are freezing beneath her woolen gloves and her toes tingle with the cold.
“I want to come to the café with you,” she pleads, tilting her face up to him. A light snow is falling around them; flakes land on her bare cheeks.
He smiles down at her, his big black mustache beetling above his lip. “This is no place for a girl, you know this, Veruskha.”
“But you’ll be reading your poetry. And Anna Akhmatova will be there. She is a woman.”
“Yes,” he says, trying to look stern. “A woman. You are still a girl.”
“One day,” he says, pressing a gloved hand to her shoulder, “you will write your beautiful words. By then they will be teaching literature again in our schools instead of this terrible Soviet realism that is Stalin’s idea of progress. Be patient. Wave to me when I’m across the street, and then go inside.”
She stands there in the snow, watching him go. Tiny kisses of white fire land on her cheeks, almost immediately turning to spots of water that slide downward, slipping like cold fingers beneath her collar.
Soon he is only a blur, a smear of gray wool moving in all that white. She thinks perhaps he has stopped to wave to her, but she cannot be sure. Instead, she sees how night falls on the snow, how it changes the color and textures, and she tries to place this in her memory so that she can describe it in her journal.
“Do you remember when I used to dream of being a writer?” Vera says quietly now.
It is a long time before her mother says, even more softly, “I remember all of it.”
“Maybe someday—”
“Shhh,” her mother says, stroking her hair. “It will only hurt more. This I know.”
Vera hears the disappointment in Mama’s voice, and the accep tance. Vera wonders if one day she will sound like that, too, if it will seem easier to give up. Before she can think of what to say, she hears Leo in the kitchen. No doubt he is talking to the stuffed rabbit that is his best friend.
Vera thinks, It has begun. She feels her mother’s kiss, hears words whispered at her ear, but she cannot understand them. The roar in her head is too loud. She eases out from the bed and sits up. Although this morning is warm, as was the night before, she is dressed in a skirt and a sweater. A battered pair of shoes waits at the end of the bed. They are all sleeping in their clothes now. An air raid can come at any time.
The sound of movements overtake the small apartment: Olga whines that she is still sleepy and her arms ache from loading art into boxes; her grandmother blows her nose; Anya informs everyone that she is hungry.
It is all so ordinary.
Vera swallows the lump that has formed in her throat, but it will not go away. In the kitchen, she sees Leo—the spitting image of his father, with angelic golden curls and expressive green eyes. Leo. Her lion. He is laughing now, telling his poor one-eyed, tattered rabbit that maybe they will get to feed the swans in the Summer Garden today.
“It is war,” Anya says, looking impossibly superior for a five-year-old. Her lisp turns the sentence into something softer, but all of Anya’s fire is in her eyes. She is pure steel, this girl; exactly how Vera once imagined herself to be.
“Actually,” Vera says. “We are going on a walk.” She feels physically ill when she says it, but her mother comes up behind her; with a touch, Vera can go on. She crosses the room and picks up their coats. Last night, Vera stayed up late, sewing money and letters into the lining of her babies’ coats.
Leo is on his feet in an instant, gleefully clapping his hands, saying, “Walk!” over and over. Even Anya is smiling. It has only been five days since the announcement of war, but in those days their old life has disappeared.
Breakfast passes like a funeral procession, in quiet glances and lowered gazes. No one except Mama can look at Vera. At the end of the meal, her grandmother rises. When she looks at Vera, her eyes fill with tears and she turns away.
“Come, Zoya,” her grandmother says in a harsh voice. “It does not look good to be late.”
Vera can see that her mother’s lip is bleeding from where she has bitten it. She goes to her grandchildren and kneels down, taking them in her arms and holding them.
“Don’t cry, Baba,” Leo says. “You can walk with us tomorrow.”
Across the room, Olga bursts into tears and tries immediately to control herself. “I am going now, Mama.”
Mama lets go slowly and gets back to her feet. “Be good,” is the last thing she says to her grandchildren. She hands Vera one hundred rubles. “It is all we have left. I’m sorry. . . .”
Vera nods and hugs her mother one last time. Then she straightens. “Let’s go, children.”
It is a beautiful sunny day. The six of them walk together for as long as they can; Mama and Baba leave first, turning toward the Badayev food warehouses where they both work; Olga leaves next. She hugs her niece and nephew fiercely and tries to hide her tears and she runs toward her trolley stop.
Now it is just Vera and her children, walking down the busy street. All around her, trenches are being dug, shelters are being built. They stop in the Summer Garden, but the swans are gone from the pond and the statues are sandbagged. There are no children playing here today, no bicycle rings bleating out.
Smiling too brightly, Vera takes her children by the hands and leads them to a part of the city where they have never been.
Inside the building that they enter there is pandemonium. Queues snake through the hall in every direction, flowing away from desks overrun with paperwork, manned by Party members in drab clothing with dour, disappointed faces.
Vera knows they should go directly into the first processing queue and wait their turn, but suddenly she is not as strong as she needs to be. Taking a deep breath, she takes her children to a corner. It is not quiet here—the sounds of people are everywhere—footsteps, crying, sneezing, begging. The whole place smells of body odor and onions and cured meat.
Vera kneels down.
Anya is frowning. “It smells in here, Mama.”
“Comrade Floppy doesn’t like this place,” Leo says, hugging his bunny.
“Do you remember, when Papa went off to join the Peoples’ Volunteer Army, he told us we would all have to be strong?”
“I’m strong,” Leo says, showing off a pudgy pink fist.
“Yes,” Anya says. She is suspicious now. Vera sees that her daughter is looking at the coats in Vera’s arms and the suitcase she has brought from home.
Vera takes the heavy red woolen coat and puts it on Anya, buttoning it up to her throat. “It is too hot for this, Mama,” Anya whines, wiggling.
“You’re going on a trip,” Vera says evenly. “Not for long. Just a week or two. And you might need your coat. And here . . . here in this suitcase I have packed a few more clothes and some food. Just in case.”
“You are not wearing a coat,” Anya says, frowning.
“I . . . uh . . . I have to work and stay at home, but you will be home before you know it and I’ll be waiting for you. When you get back—”
“No,” Anya says firmly. “I don’t want to go without you.”
“I don’t want to,” Leo wails.
“We have no choice. You understand what this means? War is coming, and our great Comrade Stalin wants you children to be safe. You’re going to take a short train ride south until our Red Army triumphs. Then you will come home to Papa and me.”
Leo is crying now.
“You want us to go?” Anya asks, her blue eyes filling with tears.
No, Vera thinks, even as she nods. “I need you to take care of your brother,” she says. “You are so strong and smart. You will stay with him always, and never wander off. Okay? Can you be strong for me?”
“Yes, Mama,” Anya says.
For the next five hours, they stand in one queue after another. The children are processed and sorted and sent to other lines. By the end of the afternoon, the evacuation center is literally overrun with children and their mothers but the place is strangely quiet. The children sit as they are told, their faces shiny with sweat in the coats they shouldn’t need, their legs swinging in front of them. None of the mothers look at each other; it hurts too much to see your own pain reflected in another woman’s eyes.
And finally the train arrives. Metal wheels scream; smoke billows into the air. At first the crowd just sits there—no one wants to move—but when the whistle pierces the silence, they run like a herd, mothers bustling past each other, elbowing hard, trying to get their babies seats on the train that will save them.
Vera pushes her way to the front of the queue. The train seems alive beside her, breathing smoke, clanging. Party members patrol the area like sharks, forcing mothers to part with their children. Leo is sobbing, clutching Vera. Anya is crying, too, but in a silent way that is somehow worse.
“Take care of each other and stay together. Do not give your food to anyone else. There is money sewn into your pockets if you need it, and my name and address, too.” She pins little name tags on their lapels.
“Where are we going?” Anya asks. She is trying to be grownup; it is heartbreaking in one so young. At five, she should be playing with dolls, not standing in lines to leave her home.
“To the country, a summer park near the Luga River. You will be safe there, Anya. And in no time, I will come for you.” Vera plays with the tag pinned to Anya’s lapel, as if touching the little piece of identification will help.
“Get on board,” a comrade yells out. “Now. The train is leaving.”
Vera hugs her daughter, and then her son, and then she straightens slowly, feeling as if her bones are breaking as she does it.
