“Normal.” Galina repeated the word as if considering it for the first time, trying to fathom its meaning. “Normal. And is it normal to stand in line for hours for paltry handouts? Is it normal to wonder what happened to your neighbors who were there yesterday and are gone today, without a word to anyone? Is it normal to share the streets and shops with bands of foreign soldiers who can do anything they please with us? What is normal now? Tell me.”
“I know. And I know that I cannot join the army. It’s not the politics. You know I’m neither a monarchist, like your parents, nor a Communist, like my father. I just can’t see myself fighting, at all. And I know the risks if I stay single, the almost certain conscription to work in Germany.” He took a deep breath, then raised his head and faced Galina. “But we haven’t even asked our parents. How will we live? And where?”
“Is that what worries you?” She twisted her mouth into a crooked smile. “If we ask our parents, they will say no. So I think we should just do this, and stay where we are, each with our own parents, for now. Don’t you? We are young, as you say, and there is nowhere we can go, but your legally married status will protect you from the work transport, at least for a while. Yes?” She placed a hand on his arm. The touch of her fingers, cool on his feverish skin, was feathery, tentative. Its intimacy sent a shiver through his entire body.
“Yes,” he said, finally meeting her eyes. Then, firmly, “Yes. Here comes Borya.”
They turned to watch their friend weave his way through the morning’s pedestrian traffic, everyone intent on some urgent mission, some personal business or family matter of great immediate importance. People barely spoke to one another, embracing a new kind of rudeness that seemed to exclude all civility. Galina reflected how, even a few short years ago, it had all been different. Life had been hard, but people had stopped, exchanged a few words, smiled. Or was it only because a few years ago she had been a child, protected from the worst of the famine years by her mother’s lifesaving frugality, her father’s tireless industriousness?
Galina stroked the brooch pinned modestly at her throat: a swallow in flight, every detail of beak, feather, eye, neatly forked tail etched impeccably into the polished ivory, ringed with intricately carved miniature flowers. An Easter gift, the work of her father’s hand. She knew he could easily have sold it, that someone else, a girl or woman far away, perhaps in another country, could be wearing it with casual pleasure, with no inkling of the dangers of life in an occupied city.
This premature marriage, this urgent mission, while it was clearly a desperate solution to an intolerable situation, surely there was something undeniably humane, something inevitable about it. We two were meant to be together, sooner or later, she thought. So why not now?
“Sorry to be so late,” Borya panted, coming to a stop in front of the waiting couple. “I—”
“Don’t tell me. You lost your papers,” Filip interrupted, tapping his friend’s shoulder playfully with the back of his hand.
“No. I… well, I overslept, actually,” Borya admitted. He pushed a lock of unruly hair out of his eyes and dazzled them with a sheepish smile.
They laughed then, deeply and joyfully, relieved at this most mundane of all excuses, feeling for an unguarded moment like the children they still were. “You will never succeed in today’s world if you persist in being so honest,” Filip said, pulling a stern face before dissolving into a new fit of laughter.
Still smiling, they approached the desk clerk in the vestibule. “We would like to get married,” Galina said, her confidence bolstered by good cheer.
The humorless matron behind the desk barely looked at the little group. “Which of you?”
“Filip—I mean, this… man and I,” Galina replied, tripping over the alien-sounding word and pointing to her speechless fiancé.
“Your papers?” The clerk held out her hand, took the documents, moved her eyes rapidly over the text. She glanced up sharply to compare the applicants with their photographs. “And your witness?”
“Here.” Borya placed his own document on the desk.
She studied the paper, folded it, and gave it back. “Due to wartime conditions, the Commissariat has permitted women to marry at seventeen,” she pronounced, oozing self-importance. “But the witness must be eighteen years of age, which you, Comrade, are not.” She skewered Borya with an accusing stare. “Therefore, your request is denied. Next?”
“But Madam, I mean Comrade,” Galina persisted, flustered but not ready to give up, “he will be eighteen in only one month. Surely—”
“Then come back in one month. Please step away from the desk. You are interfering with the business of others.”
Back in the street, they stood chastened, silent. What recourse did three adolescents have against this unfeeling bureaucracy?
Filip spoke first. “So we must wait. You may as well go, old man,” he said to his friend. “Thanks just the same.”
Yet no one moved; they didn’t know how to take up the rhythm of this singular day. Go to school, as if they, like Borya, had simply overslept, forced by their parents to accept the consequences? Or spend several hours at the beach or in the park, hoping not to be seen by anyone they knew, or noticed by anyone with the authority to question their aimless behavior?
Galina brushed the thought aside. Why should anyone care what they were up to? Everyone had something to hide, avoiding each other’s eyes whenever possible lest they give themselves away—from the merely shady to the fully illegal schemes and enterprises that kept people going from one day to the next.
She was no child. Even without chronological majority, she refused to surrender to helpless frustration. Something had changed in her when she told Franz, I am already married. Then, saying to the clerk this morning, We would like to get married, she had felt a strength rise in her, a buoyant sense of control that still simmered under the surface of her disappointment. It was as if, by voicing it, it was already done. She would not have her plan so easily thwarted.
“Next month, then?” Borya asked, ready to make his escape. “My birthday is on the twenty-seventh. At least I’ll never forget your wedding anniversary.” His smile, though still disarming, was more tentative now. His eyes held a question. Then he was gone, absorbed by the midmorning crowd.
“No,” Galina said softly. “Filip. We can’t wait. You cannot hide for six weeks. Any Fascist can check your papers, right now, today, and have you sent away.” She scanned the street, pivoting in all directions with a dancer’s grace. “All we need is a witness.”
“Exactly,” Filip started to say, “but—where are you going?”
Galina chose a clean-shaven middle-aged man wearing glasses and a gray fedora and carrying a scuffed leather briefcase. She was already deep in conversation with him when Filip approached them. He noticed the man’s slightly wrinkled trousers; his shirt, while clean, was fraying at the cuffs, his mismatched black suit coat shiny with wear. He heard the words war orphan… prisoner… disabled. Just what was Galina up to?
“And this is my Filip,” she said, extending her hand, drawing him closer. “My fiancé. He is quite alone in the world. No family left at all.”
“I see,” the man said, glancing from one to the other. The corners of his thin mouth twitched, as if not sure whether to be amused or suspicious. “That’s quite a tale you’re spinning here. But why the hurry? Why must it be today?”