Galina’s dolls looked unquestionably homemade, but her work was neat, the little hand-stitched faces sweet in their simplicity. “I could never do this,” Ksenia said, turning her daughter’s handiwork this way and that in her broad hands. “I was always clumsy with a needle. I’d rather chop wood.” She took the dolls to the market, along with her wild berry jam, to sell or trade. And Galina, through her father’s introduction, went to work at the toy shop.
The figurines sold well. People liked their uniqueness, the carefully carved details, the way Ilya’s skilled hand made a scrap of wood look like fur or feathers, adding a realistic eye, an inscrutable expression, with a touch of his knife.
“Can you make toys that move?” Zinaida Grigoryevna asked him, paying now in advance for another delivery of forest creatures. “You know, bears sawing wood, chickens pecking? Peasant toys. The Germans like to send them home to their families.”
The first time Franz came into the toy shop, Galina was dusting the nearly immaculate shelves, her back to the door. She was half-singing a new song she had heard in the park, filling in the spaces between words with uncertain humming. My heart, it is not peace you want… hmm hmm my heart…
“Spasibo, siertze,” he prompted, causing her to spin around in surprise, the dust cloth clutched to her chest. One of Ilya’s carved squirrels fell to the floor behind her.
“Ai,” she said, “it’s broken. Zinaida Grigoryevna will be angry.”
“May I see it?” Franz took the pieces from her hand and examined the break, tentatively fitting the tail back onto the plump body. “It is nothing. A little glue only is needed. I will buy it, Fräulein.”
“But—”
“My grandfather says squirrels are just rats with fluffy tails, because they chew everything and do much damage. I will send it to him. It will be amusing.”
After he left, the figurine pieces tucked securely in his shirt pocket, she stood a moment, recalling the touch of his fingers against her palm, and the way he nodded politely at the door, waiting until he stepped outside to put the cap back on his head. Siertze, kak horosho na svete zhit’. The lyrics rushed in from some recess of her memory.
“What nonsense,” she said aloud. How good it is to be alive, indeed. Try to remember that when in line for a half-kilo ration of worm-eaten potatoes, the skins creased like walnuts and about the same size, too.
He came again, always when Galina was working alone.
“The shop is too small to need two attendants at one time,” Zinaida Grigoryevna had declared, conceding that the younger woman’s charm was good for business. “I will open in the mornings; you come later and stay until closing.”
The merchandise was displayed, one of each item, in polished prewar cabinets placed against two walls and the front window. Additional stock was kept on shelves behind the counter, in a haphazard order whose logic was known only to the eccentric owner. But Galina caught on quickly, handling the simple housekeeping and occasional customer with ease.
“When this war ends…,” Zinaida Grigoryevna would sigh, picking up the previous day’s receipts or bringing in a few more handmade toys. She never finished that sentence, to Galina’s growing irritation. Things will return to the way they were? People will have time to play? Children will stop pointing sticks at one another in mock battle and return to the innocent joys of spinning tops and long-haired dolls? She found it increasingly hard to imagine a world without troops in the street, shortages in the shops, fear, and the dull reality of perpetual hunger.
None of this seemed to affect Zinaida Grigoryevna, who had lately discovered the solitary pleasure of writing poetry. In her airy room above the shop, she filled page after page of her old school notebooks, gazing at the familiar view of the Caucasus Mountains sheltering the inland sea. She marveled at the play of light on the Black Sea, watching the sun, wind, and clouds arrange themselves in a stunning infinity of variations.
She composed everywhere, repeating phrases in her head while standing in line for chicken, birds so scrawny some suspected their allotments consisted of the rapidly diminishing pigeon population. She used the rough butcher paper to jot down the words before she lost them. Never stopping to consider whether the work had any value, she contemplated and wrote, day after day, leaving Galina more and more to run the shop alone.
“Will you sing again soon, Fräulein Galina?” Franz put down the bear he’d been playing with, its brightly painted teacup raised halfway to its open mouth, a diminutive samovar resting on a tree stump table. She finished wrapping another soldier’s purchase before turning to answer him.
“Friday evening. We have a new play, a comedy. I will sing before it begins.”
“Ach, I am on duty until ten o’clock. A pity.” He walked around the small room, examining the contents of the cabinets as if for the first time. “If you will permit me a very”—he paused, searching for the word—“humble suggestion.”
“About my singing?”
“Nein, nein, the singing, it is perfect. It is about the merchandise, the—how do you say it—the stock.” He studied the disorganized shelves behind the sales counter. “How do you know where things are?”
Galina reddened. “I know where things are,” she shot back. “It’s my job to know.”
“Forgive me, Fräulein. I did not mean…” Franz stepped back, holding both hands palm outward before his chest as if to deflect her protest. “If you had only a little tag, perhaps, with each toy on display, and a number that you could match on the shelf behind you… it would be a system, you see?” He spoke softly, but his voice had a firm edge, a certitude she found irritating. What next? she thought. Numbers on people, maybe, eliminating the need to carry flimsy pieces of paper that could be lost, destroyed, or forged? Is that where this kind of thinking will end?
“We are a country at war, sir. Under enemy occupation. We need food and work and peace. We do not, right now, need a system for arranging toys.” She stopped, shocked by her own foolish audacity, as if she had forgotten that this man, this suave, innocent admirer, could have her detained, arrested, and executed.
“Ach, you are angry. Forgive me. I want only to help a little. In my country, too, things are hard. People suffer, and many have died. Auf Wiedersehen,” he started to say, then caught himself. “Do svidanya.” Franz backed out of the shop, his face showing confusion and a hint of regret.
But she was not looking at him. She closed the door, drew the shade, flipped the sign to CLOSED, and turned off the light. Out in the street, she locked up, deposited the key in Zinaida Grigoryevna’s mailbox, and turned to leave.
He was still there, his back against the building, cap in hand. “May I walk with you?” he asked.
“No!” Did he not understand what kind of girls walked with enemy soldiers, especially with officers? Everyone knew them, the girls who traded the comfort of their bodies for a box of chocolates or a piece of cloth or a pair of stockings only the most daring “companions” had the nerve to wear in the street.