“I too knew nothing about Stalin’s crimes,” Inna puts in ever so quietly, nervously stroking her immaculate chignon. “But I hated him for taking my mother away.” What she means is that her fanatical mother devoted her every breath to the Party. “On the day she noticed me, hugged me, and promised to mend my socks, I went to bed the most euphoric child on the planet,” Inna tells us. Her mother never did mend the socks. When she was forced to relinquish her Party ID card because Inna was emigrating, “she howled like an animal.”
The ladies finish their champagne and Mom’s Soviet-style truffles and prepare to depart. “Living under Stalin,” Inna reflects at the door, “we censored our thoughts, terrified when anything bad crossed our minds. Then when he died, we kept on censoring, purging any traces of happiness from our childhoods.” Everyone nods.
The autumn cold of 1939 ended Mom’s fire escape music lessons. She and her pal Ninka found a different occupation: helping older kids in the building chase spies. All children in paranoid Russia played at chasing spies. Anyone could be a suspect. The lift lady, for instance, with her single odd metal coat button. Comrades wearing glasses, or fedora hats instead of proletarian caps.
Along twisting lanes, through dim podvorotni (deep archways), into silent, half-hidden courtyards—Mom and the gang pursued would-be evil betrayers of Rodina (Homeland). Mom liked the podvorotni. They smelled, not unpleasantly, of piss and decaying fall leaves. Under one of them a babushka in a tatty beret stood hawking an old doll. Forty whole rubles she was asking. Unlike the usual bald, grinning Soviet toy babies, this doll had flaxen hair, a frayed velvet dress, and melancholy eyes out of a tragic Hans Christian Andersen tale. In late November Naum relented; at home Mom inhaled the doll’s musty mystery. The next morning Naum went away on a trip.
December brought soft, flaky snowfalls, the resinous aroma of fir trees, and invasions of gruff out-of-towners in stores. New Year’s festivities were still new to Soviets. Some simply hung their trees with walnuts in tinfoil; Liza propped a bright Kremlin star on top of their tree and bought presents for Larisa and Yulia. Mom only wanted things for her doll. There was no news from Naum, and Liza’s face had assumed a grim, absent expression. Silently she stood in lines for toy washboards and miniature versions of the dinner sets depicted in Mikoyan’s parsley-green cookbook.
Every day Mom consulted the cookbook for dollhouse decoration. Every day Liza perused its pages, churning out panfuls of kotleti and trays of cottage cheese korzhiki (biscuits). Uncharacteristically, she baked elaborate dried apricot pies—listening intently to the rattle of the approaching elevator. But it was usually Dora or the composers next door. Ninka and the Pokrass children ate most of the pies—their cheerful chewing filling Mom’s heart with toska.
For New Year’s Eve Liza draped a brand-new tablecloth over the table. It was deep red like a theater curtain, as plush as a teddy bear’s cheek. Naum didn’t come home to admire it. The Sovetskoye champagne stood unopened as fireworks exploded above the Kremlin clock.
“Nichevo, mozhet nichevo.” (Nothing, maybe it’s nothing.) Their neighbor Dora had been whispering this lately to Liza while Mom hid under the table chewing on the tablecloth tassels.
“Nichevo, nichevo,” Mom whispered to her doll, licking tears off her face. The doll’s eyes said that she understood everything: the worm of despair in Mom’s stomach, the mystery of her father’s absence, her gnawing suspicion that the Radiant Future was passing them by. Stroking and braiding the doll’s flaxen hair, Mom desperately wanted at least to make her silent friend’s life happy, abundant, and cheerful. She had an inspiration. With Liza out of sight, she reached for her scissors. The first piece of tablecloth she cut off didn’t fit, so she kept cutting more: for the doll’s tablecloth, for her toy bedspread. When Mom was done the doll’s house was draped in red velvet, golden tassels lining its floor.
Seeing Mom’s handiwork, Liza flailed a dishrag at her, but without her usual vigor. That day, and for days after, she kept looking for the key to Naum’s desk. She was trying to decide if now was the time to read Larisa and Yulia the letter he had written and locked in a drawer. The letter that urged his children to love him, love their mother, and love their Rodina—no matter what might suddenly have happened to him.
CHAPTER FOUR
1940s: OF BULLETS AND BREAD
On the weekend of June 21, 1941, in honor of the official arrival of summer, Liza finally switched from listless hot winter borscht to the chilled summer version. Tangy and sweet, the soup was alive with the crunch and vitality of the season’s first cucumbers and radishes. Following a short cold spell, Saturday’s weather was heartbreakingly lovely. Sun beamed on the lipstick-red tulips and dressy white lilies at the Pushkin Square flower beds; petunias scented the Boulevard Ring. Girls in their light graduation dresses floated past couples embracing on the Moskva River embankment. Summer plans, stolen kisses, blue and white cans of Mikoyan’s condensed milk packed for the dacha. Even the babushkas who hawked fizzy water with cherry syrup at parks somehow looked decades younger. The happiness in the air was palpable, stirring. Or so it seemed to my mother on her Saturday stroll with Yulia and their father.
Naum was back with them—for a brief while at least. Ever since his alarming disappearance in 1939, when Liza thought him arrested or dead, his absences had gotten more prolonged and frequent. One morning Liza sat on the narrow cot that Mom shared with Yulia and explained Papa’s job.
“Soviet spy?” Mom squealed with glee.
“Nyet, nyet! Razvedchik (intelligence worker).”
That too sounded thrilling. To protect their dad’s secrets from enemies of the people, Mom and Yulia took to stealthily eating his papers. They’d tear them into confetti, soak them in milk, and dutifully chew, handful by handful. This felt heroic—until Naum threw a fit after they swallowed his sberkassa (savings bank) documents.
The girls now learned to put the names of foreign countries to his absences; they learned where their presents were coming from. The Russo-Finnish war of that winter in 1940—a hapless bloodbath that sent Russians home badly mauled but with a strategic chunk of the chilly Ladoga Lake—yielded Larisa and Yulia a festive tin box of Finnish butter cookies. Bright yellow neck scarves of fine flimsy cotton were the girls’ trophies from the ugly Soviet occupation of Estonia in July of 1940. From Naum’s intelligence missions in Stockholm came sky-blue princess coats with fur trim. Scandinavia and the Baltic were Naum’s specialties. He never mentioned the ugliness.
There were six of them now sharing two communal rooms in the house of composers. Liza’s widowed dad from Odessa was living with them, snoring in the living room where the girls slept. Dedushka Yankel was obliging and doleful. A retired old Jewish communist shock-worker (pre-Stakhanovite uberlaborer), he hated the Talmud and detested the Bible. Mom liked to tug at the wispy clumps of hair on his temples as he sat in the kitchen copying The Short Course of the History of the All-Union Communist Party into his notebook over and over and over. He knew it by heart, Stalin’s Party catechism.
Sashka, their new baby brother, was noisier. Liza had him in May while Naum was in Sweden, and her heart nearly broke in the maternity ward when she saw the nurse carry a huge bouquet of pink roses to some other lucky new mamochka. “For you,” said the nurse, smiling. “Look out the window.” Below, Naum waved and grinned. Since the baby was born he hadn’t left Moscow.