He ran a tongue over his dry lips, his heart pounding. “Sure, Babushka.” Her brown eyes, set deep, lit up like candles inside an earthen pot. “Please help me into that building there. My old bones can’t make the steps.” She gestured with her head to the church across the street.
Vadeem stared at the building and felt something heavy crash into his chest. He swallowed. “Ladna.” He shoved the diary into his pocket and angled out his elbow.
They shuffled across the street, toward the church, Vadeem’s feet weighing a thousand kilograms each. He helped her up the stairs, and breathed considerably easier when she opened the door.
It swung in. He glimpsed Pyotr in front, standing between two endless rows of pew benches crammed with bodies. The familiar smell of body heat, aged wood, and dust rushed back to Vadeem. His head started to spin.
The babushka shuffled in, her hand knotted in his jacket. She seemed to have forgotten him, her eyes on the pastor. Vadeem put a hand on hers, intending to work her grip free before he passed out, or worse, lost the battle with his churning stomach and delivered the borscht he had for lunch onto the sanctuary floor.
No one turned around, thankfully. His heart lodged in his throat when she stopped at a back pew and gestured for him to enter. He looked at her, unable to voice his horror.
She pushed him, powered by some mystical babushka force that wielded him helpless. He found himself stumbling into the pew, his feet taking a mind of their own. He tried to turn around, to force his way back, but the babushka shuffled in behind him, blocking him in, sandwiching him between herself and a padded crony in a brown wool shawl and green headscarf. His legs betrayed him again and he sat, hard.
The room spun, and Vadeem focused on Pyotr in a desperate attempt to keep from dropping to the floor. This was some sort of psychological reaction to the fear he’d bottled for twenty-five years. He just had to clench his teeth and bear it out, just like he’d endured basic training and a hundred life-risking missions.
It didn’t help that Kat sat in the front row, like a lighthouse, her eyes glued to Pyotr. If she knew Vadeem was sitting in the sanctuary, a mere fifteen rows behind her… well, she was liable to jump the pews and drag him to the front.
Pyotr opened his Bible, and the plump babushka beside Vadeem handed hers to him. It smelled of wisdom. He shook his head, but she shoved it into his hands. He gave a half-grunt of thanks.
John eleven. The pages crackled as he turned them, not needing to read the words. The story came back to him like a fresh breeze on a hot day. The miracle of Lazarus. He closed his eyes and tried to block out Pyotr’s voice as he read.
“This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory, so that God’s son may be glorified through it all.”
Vadick what have you done? His father stood in the doorway, holding the pin, his face contorted with a pain Vadick had never before seen. Vadick’s heart dropped to his knees, and his legs wobbled. He tried to find words, but they locked in his chest, along with his breath. His father shook his head. “Son, you already belong to a brotherhood of believers.” His voice seemed mournful, like when Babushka Nina had passed on without the “saving grace of God.” Vadick’s eyes burned.
“You don’t need this.” His father dropped the pin and ground it into the dirt with the heel of his boot.
“Papa, no!” Horror drove Vadick to his knees. He scrabbled after the mangled emblem.
His father caught him in his meaty, gentle hands. “The way of the Pioneers ends in death, boy. Don’t be duped.”
“A man who walks by day will not stumble. For he sees by this world’s light. It is when he walks by night that he stumbles, for he has no light.”
Vadick buried his hand in his pocket, his fingers curled around the mangled pin. His face burned under Sergei’s stare. “Where is it?” his friend repeated.
Vadick couldn’t bear to voice the truth. He didn’t have to. Sergei grabbed his hand, pried open his fingers, and horror was written in his expression. “Father Lenin’s face is…” Sergei’s eyes widened. “You’re in big trouble.”
Vadick snatched back the pin. “We’ll fix it. I’ll hammer it back together. Color in Lenin’s eyes.”
Sergei shook his head, his voice low. “Who did it, Vadick? Your pop?” Only Sergei, his dearest friend, comrade, Pioneer brother, could have read Vadick’s wretched expression. Sergie’s face darkened and the Pioneer creed flashed through Vadick’s mind. “Protect the Motherland”… The pin, ruined in his pocket.
“Don’t Sergei. Don’t tell. Please.”
“Lazarus is dead, and for your sake, I’m glad I was not there, so that you may believe.”
Vadick hung his feet over the wooden-edged pew, playing with his wool shopka. The pastor’s words droned on, now a blur in the boy’s mind. Spring beckoned outside. A fresh and hopeful spring with the smell of apple and lilac blossoms thickening in the air. The kind of spring that made a boy tear off his boots and run through the muddy fields, earth squishing between his toes, oblivious to the switching he’d earn—
The back door to the small house church slammed open. Vadick turned, his mind ripped off springtime whimsies, and his heart froze at the sight of NKVD officials, silver tanagers in their grips. “This church is an unregistered body. Everyone is under arrest.”
Vadick tried to become a millimeter small as Comrade Korillovich stepped out from the cluster of black-coated men and stared at him. A smile tweaked the Pioneer leader’s cheeks.
Vadick glanced up at his father, who’d gone white, and suddenly he wanted to cry.
“I am the Resurrection and the Life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies, and whoever lives and believes in me will never die.”
The mud squished up between his boots, into the knees of his pants as Vadick crouched behind the fence, watching, hiding after he’d snuck out in the confusion of threats and violent arrests.
Papa never looked more fierce. He stood, facing the NKVD officials, his dark eyes challenging, on fire. His gaze moved beyond the soldiers and fixed on Vadick.
Vadick thought he might go up in flames.
Then came a scream, a collective moan, and a torch sailed through the air. It landed atop the church. The roof whooshed into flames.
“No! The Bible!” Mama’s voice, high above the crowd, sent terror through Vadick’s veins.
“Save the Bible!” Vadick heard his father’s voice, or maybe his own. The family Bible, left on the rough-hewn pew. The Bible with the copied pages, the three-generation Bible.
Vadick left his senses behind the fence and scrambled toward the burning church. He dashed behind a NKVD guard, and dove into the building.
Screams behind him. Heat blistering his face. Save the Bible. Then an arm grabbing him, hauling him out.
“When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jew who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled”
Vadick sprawled on the ground, eyebrows singed, watching paralyzed as the NKVD guard wrestled Papa to the ground. Knee in his back, the soldier held a gun to Papa’s head. “Wreckers die.”