The solemn young couple committed signatures to a long life together, flanked by sundry relatives whose even grimmer faces and disappearance thereafter spoke of disapproval. Eyes specks behind horn-rimmed glasses, the etiolated groom craned over his petite betrothed in white dress and veil. Underneath the certificate the dress itself, folded Papa-style. Beyond ironing. Ditto his wedding suit. A silk-embroidered dancer’s leotard, pearly-white, pleated along the hem, lay beneath. Pale pink ballerina slippers, insoles rubbed through. A makeup kit with a silver shell clasp exuded a pressed-flower scent.
Anna studied the two smaller photographs – her mother’s warring angels. Good Tatiana at the registry table, only closer up pensive, troubled even. What to read into Tatiana’s hand clutching at her stomach? Alongside, Tatiana’s libertine alter ego in Armenian folk regalia, red and gold belted tunic, turret hat, backstage (a curtain rucked on one side). The second frame captured her side on, hair loose, laughing, head thrown back.
The photographs in turn concealed an ornate jade rubric of Tatiana’s death certificate, its salient details consistent with the other documents and, piecing together his evasions, the bare facts her father divulged. Assorted clothes formed the second last layer – a stole-trimmed coat, a green strapless muslin dress, some shapeless cotton underwear. At the very bottom were four LPs bound with perishing rubber bands: Swan Lake, a watercolour of a willow-fringed lake adorning its bevelled sleeve, Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Glinka’s folk opera Ruslan and Lyudmila, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. As she rummaged an icon rolled loose from inside the dress, tapping the steel bottom of the chest. Anna froze, closed the lid, and waited for any movements upstairs. She lifted it again and set about restoring the contents to their pristine state.
The study where he obsessed over blueprints, was also her father's bedroom. The one and only time she entered without knocking – she must have been six – he sprang from his chair, hands pincers. At first she laughed, thinking he was in a rare playful mood, Big Bad Wolf monstering Little Red Riding Hood in his lair. He kept advancing. Only when she screamed did he let his arms drop.
She eased the back door open and crept out into the torpid heat, stood on tiptoe to winkle a palmful of seeds from the sunflower, cracked each longways, and chewed two kernels at a time. Swinging her baskets, she took the doglegged path that diverged from the river, inert here, green algae encrusting the shallows where the May torrent had subsided. Ahead of her a bow-legged babushka carried a bucket to the spring. Anna froze, looked away. Parable held that if an old woman’s bucket were empty, misfortune awaited the beholder.
Kaluga had a ragged, grafted-on periphery, or rather peripheries. Up popped yet another apartment block, the surrounding area cleared for construction and left to thistle. Broken crescents of six-storey kommunalki on a low ridge, slapped together in post-war reconstruction haste, peeped over the swaying treetops. Whole families to a room, living space measured by centimetres. The sanitary norm was nine square metres per person. Queuing three hours to use the stove.
She passed her school, a two-storey red-brick rectangle. Further on The Museum of Atheism – church dismantled, iconostasis gutted and concealed with a flimsy cotton screen, cupolas lopped to four stalks like spent wicks of firecrackers. School groups were ushered in, lectured on the perfidy of religion, a farrago of superstition, the guide’s singsong rising to an accusing crescendo. This year’s sprightly veteran, jacket bedecked with medals, led them to the fresco of the Virgin Mary on a plastered pillar, space cut behind it. ‘Everyone know her?’ Without waiting for their answers, he sneered. ‘It is a miraculous Virgin. Why miraculous? Because it cries when you look at it. Watch this.’ He disappeared behind the painting. Tears soaked the Virgin’s cheeks. ‘Now come here,’ he ordered unseen. The class pondered a contraption fashioned from a bucket of water filled to the level of her forehead, a rubber ball and twin siphons with tubes to her eyes.
Yonder, hidden in a birch grove was Tsiolkovsky’s house. Over Anna’s right shoulder the museum to the eponymous father of Soviet rocket science, steel spire fingering the cosmos. By far her best day of school was the class excursion there in June last year, to mark the start of summer holidays. Inside the museum a dazzling assembly of Lunokhod space rovers, Vostok-1 modules, suited cosmonauts staring through visors, lenses, launchers, stations and consoles they took brief turns to manipulate. Lunch outside in the rocket park, where a bronze Gagarin smiled and spread his arms heavenward. On to Tsiolkovsky’s house, double storey like hers but airtight, anticipating his rocket prototypes. Riverside, a gorgeous corona of lilacs at their zenith. Visitors picked through the exhibits chronicling Tsiolkovsky’s achievements, galleys of his science fiction works and epitaph. Earth is the cradle of humanity but one cannot remain in the cradle forever. Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky himself, crusty and bespectacled like her father, a silky prophet’s beard. He and Anatoly Ivanovich would have hit it off splendidly.
The path skirted a sprawling junkyard of harvester wheels, inner tubes, braces, clapped-out gearboxes and sundry other tractor parts; detritus from an ancient flood. A century hence, archaeologists would salivate. On top of a hillock the road divided. A right turn went to the collective farm. Anna smiled at its freshly painted emblem – a Soviet man and woman, he holding aloft a hammer to her sickle – scarlet already tinged brown. The last hundred yards to the gate had been repaved for a visiting dignitary. Anna knew these fields too well, having been conscripted to potato harvests when seven. Low-slung physique a crucial advantage, she had plucked tubers from gluepot clay, tossing away those with insides rotten from burrowing grubs. Her tallies put to shame nine and ten-year-olds scrabbling behind her. At the end of the week, standing under potato avalanches waiting to roll, the farm manager presented her – the sole recipient – with a Little Octobrist medallion, a five-pointed star with Lenin’s visage commemorating the 1917 Revolution, and lauded her efforts at which point everyone clapped.
The left fork led back towards the Oka, past a rye field. A tractor reposed on the roadside, having mowed from the perimeter in concentric circles, back wheels chocked to the incline. Grass clods browned a lollypop with a fat green heart. A breeze stirred its waist-high stalks with a flat spoon. The path dwindled to a dirt track, angled towards the forest. Heavy spring rain promised a bounty she would stuff into jars, enlivening their winter diet. Those mushrooms left over she would hang on strings from the kitchen ceiling.
Approaching the river, dragonflies sparked the air blue. Wavelets lapped the disused boat shed, a notch in the three-way junction of grass, forest, and shore. Its intact front once served as a jetty for rowboats, now splintery wrecks providing just enough cover to change into her swimsuit. Her period due, she weighed up whether to swim. There would be other days – summer might last another month. On the other hand she would return with baskets groaning full, rebutting accusations of time squandered. Menses had arrived without warning, on the last day of school before June exams. She managed to stuff her handkerchief down there in the nick of time, and borrowed cloth from the school matron that she tore into strips, that evening rinsing away the evidence in the copper bathtub.
She waded in, mud oozing between her toes, braving the current until the water lapped her chin. Far bank a wavering thread, Moscow a hundred and fifty kilometres yonder. A bevy of swans flew wedge formation. The throbbing of their wings lingered, sent shivers through her. August seemed too early to migrate. En route to the other world, over a watery threshold? Letting her legs go from under her, she sank forwards, half rolled. She swam against the flow, then diagonally. Though slender she was strong through her core. A cold current from the depths deposited her on the bank. Standing in the shallows, she agitated silt from her swimmers, dried herself all over.