She is so small, wrapped as she is in her bright red coat and wearing the valenki that are too big for her feet.
“Mama?”
“I can’t leave Leo here,” I say, hearing the break in my voice. He can’t die alone is what I want to say, but how can I say such a thing to my five-year-old? Does she know I am making a choice no mother should ever have to make? Will she someday hate me for this?
Her face scrunches in a frown so familiar it breaks my heart. For a second, I see her as she used to be. “But—”
“You are my strong one. You will be okay alone.”
She shakes her head, starts to cry. “No, Mama. I want to stay with you.”
I reach into my pocket and take out a piece of paper. It still smells of sausage and my stomach churns at the scent of it. I write her name on the paper and pin it to her lapel. “P-Papa will be waiting for you in Vologda. You find him. Tell him we’ll be there by Wednesday. You two can meet Leo and me.”
It feels like a lie. Tastes like one. But she trusts me.
I don’t let her hug me. I can see her reaching, reaching, and I push her back, into the crowd that is lining up around us.
A woman is standing close. Anya hits her and the woman stumbles sideways, cursing softly.
“Mama—”
I push my daughter at the stranger, who looks at me with glassy eyes.
“Take my daughter,” I say. “She has papers. Her father will be in Vologda. Aleksandr Ivanovich Marchenko.”
“No, Mama.” Anya is wailing, reaching for me.
I mean to push her away so hard she stumbles, but I can’t do it. At the last moment, I yank her into my arms and hold her tightly.
The train whistle blows. Someone yells, “Is she going?”
I unwrap Anya’s arm from around my neck. “You be strong, Anya. I love you, moya dusha.”
How can I call her my soul and then push her away? But I do. I do.
At the last minute, I hand her the butterfly. “Here. You hold this for me. I will come back for it. For you.”
“No, Mama—”
“I promise,” I say, lifting her up, putting her in a stranger’s arms.
She is still crying, screaming my name and struggling to get free, when the train doors slam shut.
I stand there for a long time, watching the train grow smaller and smaller, until it disappears altogether. The Germans are bombing again. I can hear the explosions all around, and people shouting, and debris thumping on metal roofs.
I hardly care.
As I turn toward the hospital, it feels as if something falls out of me, but I don’t look down, don’t want to see whatever I’ve lost. Instead, I walk through the raining dirt and snow toward my son.
Loss is a dull ache in my chest, a catch in my breathing, but I tell myself I have done the right thing.
I will keep Leo alive by the sheer force of my will, and Sasha will find Anya in Vologda and the four of us will meet up on Wednesday.
It is such a beautiful dream. I keep it alive one breath at a time, like a timid candle flame in the cup of my hands.
Back at the hospital, it is dark again. The smell of the place is unbearable. And it is cold. I can feel the wind prowling outside, testing every crack and crevice, looking for a way in.
In his narrow, sagging cot, Leo is sucking in his sleep, chewing food that isn’t there. He coughs almost constantly now, spasms that spew lacy blood designs across the woolen blankets.
When I can stand it no more, I crawl into the cot and pull him into my arms. He burrows against me like the baby he once was, murmuring my name in his sleep. His breathing is a terrible thing to listen to.
I stroke his hot, damp forehead. My hand is freezing, but it is worth it to touch him, to let him know I am here, beside him, all around him. I sing his favorite songs and tell him his favorite stories. Now and then he rouses, smiles sloppily at me, and asks for candy.
“No candy,” I say, kissing his sunken blue cheek. I cut my finger again, let him suck on it until the pain makes me draw back.
I am singing to him, barely able to remember the words, when I realize that he is not breathing anymore.
I kiss his cheek, so cold, and his lips, and I think I hear him say, “I love you, Mama,” but of course it is only my imagination. How will I ever forget how this was—how he died a little every day? How I let him. Maybe we should never have left Leningrad.
I think I will not be able to bear this pain, but I do. For all of that day and part of the next, I lie with him, holding him as he grows cold. In ordinary times perhaps this wouldn’t have been allowed, but these are far from ordinary times. Finally, I ease away from his little body and get up.
As much as I want to lie with him forever, to just slowly starve to death with him, I cannot do it. I made a promise to Sasha.
Live, he’d said, and I’d agreed.
So with empty arms and a heart turned to stone, I leave my son there, all by himself, lying dead in a cot by the door, and once again I start to walk. I know that all I will ever have of my son now is a date on the calendar and the stuffed rabbit that is in my suitcase.
I will not tell you what I did to get a seat on the train going east. It doesn’t matter anyway. I am not really me. I am this wasted, white-haired body that cannot rest, although I long just to lie down and close my eyes and give up. The ache of loss is with me always, tempting me to close my eyes.
Anya.
Sasha.
These are the words I cling to, even though sometimes I forget of whom I am even dreaming. From my place on the train, I see the ruined countryside. Bodies in heaps. Scars on the land from falling bombs. Always there is the sound of aircraft and gunfire.
The train moves forward slowly, stopping in several small towns. At each stop, starving people fight to get on board, to be one of the glassy-eyed grimy crowd heading east. There is talk, whispered around me, of heavy fighting in front of us, but I don’t listen. Don’t care, really. I am too empty to care about much of anything.
And then, miraculously, we arrive at Vologda. When the train doors open, I realize that I did not expect to make it here.
I remember smiling.
Smiling.
I even tuck my hair into my kerchief more tightly so Sasha will not see how old I have become. I clutch the small valise that holds all of my belongings—our belongings—and fight through the crowd to get to the front.
Out in the cold, we disperse quickly; people going this way and that, probably looking for food or friends.
I stand there, feeling the others peel away from me. In the distance, I hear the drone of planes, and I know what it means. We all know what it means. The air-raid alarm sounds and my fellow passengers start to run for cover. I can see people flinging themselves into ditches.
But Sasha is there, not one hundred yards in front of me. I can see that he is holding Anya’s hand. Her bright red coat looks like a plump, healthy cardinal against the snow.
I am crying before I take my first step. My feet are swollen and covered with boils, but I don’t even notice. I just think, My family, and run. I want Sasha’s arms around me so badly that I don’t think.
Stupid.
I hear the bomb falling too late. Did I think it was my heart, that whistling sound, or my breathing?
Everything explodes at once: the train, the tree beside me, a truck off to the side of the road.
I see Sasha and Anya for a split second and then they are in the air, flying sideways with fire behind them. . . .
When I wake up, I am in a hospital tent. I lie there until my memory resurfaces and then I get up.
All around me is a sea of burned, broken bodies. People are crying and moaning.
It is a moment before I realize that I can see no colors. My hearing is muffled, as if there is cotton in my ears. The side of my face is scraped and cut and bleeding, but I hardly feel it.
The red-orange fire is the last color I will ever see.
“You should not be up,” a man says to me. He has the worn look of someone who has seen too much war. His tunic is torn in places.
“My husband,” I say, yelling to hear my own voice above the din. There is a ringing in my ears, too. “My daughter. A little girl in a red coat and a man. They were standing . . . the train was bombed . . . I have to find them.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, and my heart is pounding so hard I can’t hear anything past, no survivors . . . just you . . . Here—
I push past him, stumbling from bed to bed, but all I find are strangers.
Outside, it is snowing hard and freezing cold. I do not recognize this place. It is an endless snowy field. The damage done by the blast is covered now in white, though I can see a heap that must be bodies.
Then I see it: a small, dark blot on the snow, lying folded up against the nearest tent.
I would like to say I ran toward it, but I only walk; I don’t even see that my feet are bare until the burning cold sets in.
It is her coat. My Anya’s coat. Or what is left of it. I cannot see the bright red anymore, but there is her name, written in my own hand, on a scrap of paper pinned to the lapel. The paper is wet and the ink blurred, but it is there. Half of the coat is missing—I do not want to imagine how that happened—one side is simply torn away.
I can see black bloodstains on the pale lining, too.
I hold it to my nose, breathing deeply. I can smell her in the fabric.
Inside the pocket, I find the photograph of her and Leo that I’d sewn into the lining. See?I’d said to her on the day we’d hidden it—that was back when they were first evacuating the children, it feels like decades ago—Now your brother will always be with you.
I take the tiny scrap of paper with her name on it and hold it in my hand. How long do I sit there in the snow, stroking my baby’s coat, remembering her smile?
Forever.
No one will give me a gun. Every man I ask tells me to calm down, that I will feel better tomorrow.
I should have asked a woman, another mother who had killed one child by moving him and another by letting her go.
Or maybe I am the only one who . . .
Anyway, the pain is unendurable. And I do not want to get better. I deserve to be as unhappy as I am. So I return to my bed, get my boots and coat, and I start walking.
I move like a ghost through the snowy countryside. There are so many other walking dead on the road that no one tries to stop me. When I hear gunfire or bombing, I turn toward it. If my feet hurt less, I would have run.
I find what I am looking for on the eighth day.
It is the front line.
I walk past the Russians, my countrymen, who call out for me and try to stop me.
I pull away, wrenching if I need to, hitting, kicking, and I keep going.
I walk up to the Germans and stand in front of their guns.
“Shoot me,” I say, and I close my eyes. I know what they see, what I look like: a crazy, half-dead old woman holding a banged-up valise and a dirty gray stuffed rabbit.
Twenty-six
But I am not a lucky woman,” Mom said with a sigh.
Silence followed that last, quietly spoken sentence.
Nina wiped the tears from her eyes and stared at her mother in awe.
How could that pain have been in her all along? How could a person survive all that?
Mom stood up quickly. She took a step to the left and stopped; then she turned to the right and stopped. It was as if she’d suddenly awakened from a dream only to find herself in a strange room from which there was no escape. At last, with her shoulders rounded slightly downward, she went to the window and stared outside.
