As the adults watched, Slava checked the unfamiliar words in the bricktionary. “Annual percentage rate.” “Layaway.” “Installment plan.” “One time only.” “For special customers like you.” The senior Gelmans waiting, Slava was embarrassed to discover himself mindlessly glued to certain words in the dictionary that had nothing to do with the task at hand. On the way to “credit card,” he had snagged on “cathedral,” its spires — t, h, d, l — like the ones the Gelmans had seen in Vienna. “Rebate” took him to “roly-poly,” which rolled around his mouth like a fat marble. “Venture rewards” led him to “zaftig,” a Russian baba’s breasts covering his eyes as she placed in front of him a bowl of morning farina. Eventually, he managed to verify enough to reassure the adults that, no, it didn’t seem like a letter from James Baker III. The senior Gelmans sighed, shook their heads, resumed frying fish.
Slava remained with the bricktionary. Hinky, lunker, wattles. Taro, terrazzo, toodle-oo. “Levity” became a Jewish word because Levy was a Jewish surname in America. “Had had”—knock-knock — was a door. A “gewgaw” was a “gimcrack,” and a “gimcrack” was “folderol.” “Sententious” could mean two opposite things, and wasn’t to be confused with “senescent,” “tendentious,” or “sentient.” Nor “eschatological” with “scatological.” This language placed the end of the world two letters away from the end of a bowel movement.
Russian words were as stretchy as the meat under Grandmother’s arm. You could invent new endings and they still made sense. Like peasants fidgeting with their ties at a wedding, the words wanted to unlace into diminutives: Mikhail into Mishen’ka (little Misha), kartoshka into kartoshechka (little potato). English was colder, clipped, a brain game. But English was brilliant. For some reason, in the bedroom, all this gave him skin against Grandfather.
Grandfather grunted and, avoiding Slava’s eyes, rose. Downstairs, a salsa had started up, the dull bass making the same point over and over. Moving toward the door, Grandfather shuddered and lost his stride, reaching out his arms as if he were going to slip. But seeing no help rushing from his grandson, he got his hand on the bureau, righted himself, and walked out.
3
The east-facing wall of the Spartak Dance Club was not, strictly speaking, any longer a wall. Three quarters of Minsk had been bombed into rubble, which explains why it’s so ugly today, rebuilt after the war in the socialist style. But even before victory was declared over the Germans, the Saturday-night dances at the Spartak Dance Club had resumed. The people needed dances as much as bread, Stalin had said. The entire country rushed to reopen its dance halls, those villages without one scrounging to convert something, anything, that could hold a gramophone and a dance platform. Two months after V-E Day, the Spartak Dance Club in Minsk was back in regular operation despite remaining in possession of only three walls, which meant that Sofia Dreitser’s older sister Galina wouldn’t be attending the Saturday-night dances because, in her view, the other walls could go crumbling at any moment, and then that would be a pretty costly dance, wouldn’t it.
But Sofia loved to dance. She had to be more careful nowadays, with no father or brother or mother to look after her, and men back from the war with a hollowed-out look in their eyes and a hunger that even a woman’s hand paled beside. So she danced by herself or with a female friend. That was the concession Galina had managed to extract from her wild younger sister; Sofia would go to the dances only if accompanied by Rusya, the Slav girl next door, who joked to Galina with her characteristic coarseness, “You don’t mind your sister dead if the walls crumble, so long as she doesn’t get raped?” But Rusya went along, and twirl she and Sofia did, casting longing glances at the army captains back from the front in their uniforms, and at the neighborhood boys, who in the span of four years had become men. There was Misha Surokin, the half-moon of a scar running down the right side of his face; and Yevgeny Gelman, the hooligan from Sofia’s neighborhood, looking as unserious as she remembered him; and Pavlik Sukhoi, a facial tic he had acquired in the war making him wince twice a sentence. They were the same but not the same.
And so when the waltz started up on this Saturday night, it was Sofia and Rusya, approximating the moves best as they could from the films they had seen before the war, imagining themselves in some grand castle in Austria, switching up the lead every minute or so, Sofia pretending strict indifference toward the men leering from the perimeter of the dance club, Rusya sending them coquettish smiles.
But it was Sofia whom the men were looking at, unblemished skin and two ponytails like cables — Rusya had been blessed with a farmer’s fearlessness but also a farmer’s face. During a break for boysenberry punch (no alcohol was served, which meant the men had to sneak it in flasks and seltzer bottles, going outside for swigs out of respect for the women), while Rusya was distracted by a bowlegged lieutenant, one of the army captains wandered over to Sofia.
It was as the rule has it: It’s the brave ones who get the girl, and bravery has nothing to do with looks; they had the courage to approach. Captain Tereshkin had one such plain face, his chin fading imperceptibly into his neck, halfhearted stubble crowning his jowls. No matter the searing July heat, even starved evacuees sporting healthyish tan glows, Tereshkin was as pale as snow. Who knows what overtook Sofia in that moment; we nurture our defenses, and in a moment of consequence, they simply don’t show. Maybe she wanted to feel a man’s arms around her; maybe she felt sorry for Tereshkin, because probably he was motherless, sisterless, childless; maybe she simply got tired of saying no. All she knew was that she was dancing the next dance with him, a Rosner jazz tune, Rusya all eyes at her lieutenant, whose own eyes were beginning to wander. Even Sofia, busy with Tereshkin, could see that.
When the curfew bell rang — it was ten o’clock, things still on edge — Captain Tereshkin asked if he could escort Sofia home. It was dark, barely any functioning streetlamps. Maybe that was all he wanted, a gentleman, and Galina would be home in case he tried to push his way in. The way there was long, however, and Sofia wasn’t about to take chances. She had danced with him, yes, but because a woman danced with a man, that meant she had to thank him with her body? All the same, she didn’t want to insult the captain — because she had danced with him all evening, because maybe he had meant nothing by it, because she was a little bit scared. That was when the idea came to her. She disliked it almost as much as she disliked the idea of having pale-faced Captain Tereshkin accompany her home, and she minced in place, smiling dumbly at Tereshkin while she tried to think of something else. But nothing else would come — her cleverness tended to abandon her these days, as if she had used up her life’s allotted supply during the war, staying alive. What a pitiful amount she had been granted, she thought. It hadn’t been enough to save anyone but her and her sister. All these thoughts — comically, stupidly — flashed through her mind. Oh, Captain, she thought, if only you knew what you were taking on — an orphan with one dress between her and her sister, because the rest of their clothes, given them by the Red Cross, had been stolen and pawned by the Belarusian collaborator who continued to occupy half their home. Sofia wore it now, not so much a dress as a sarafan, the kind of thing her mother wore before the war to clean the house.