“Do you talk to him? I know how you feel about idle conversation, but can you not talk as one man to another?”
“There is no common ground. What do I know of his experience? And he doesn’t care about my life or interests.”
“Common ground? Common ground?” Galina’s voice held a rising note of sarcasm. “How much more common ground do we need? Are we not all in this, this… dreadful time together? Together,” she repeated.
Filip had no answer. He had heard Ksenia say more than once how important it was for a family to stay together, mind its own business. Keep your head down and your mouth shut. All around them, people were disappearing, taken off the streets by patrolling troops, vanishing without a word. Their own little household was as if charmed, held together by the force of his mother-in-law’s indomitable will. Unless there’s something we don’t know about Ilya’s frequent absences, and all those Germans who come to the door to pick up their purchases. He shook his head, but the thought had struck him unawares and would not be banished.
Outside the theater entrance, Galina stopped and laid a hand on his arm. “Please. Please try.”
A few days later, on a warm, clear afternoon when everyone was out of the house—Ilya to make and sell his crafts in the park, Galina to the toy shop, Ksenia to stand in line for whatever was available—Filip set his chess set up on a little folding table in the courtyard. At his elbow he had a book and a few sheets of paper he had cut and folded into a pocket-sized notebook. He studied the board intently, shifting the occasional piece, taking a pencil from behind his ear to record the move.
He was so absorbed in the game he did not notice his brother-in-law standing in the kitchen doorway until Maksim limped over to the bench by the wall and lit a cigarette. “Oh, hello,” he said, glancing up. “I didn’t know you were up.”
“Mother does not like me to smoke in the house,” Maksim replied, as if to justify his presence in the yard. He blew a fine plume of smoke, watching it dissipate in the sunlit air.
“But you do it anyway,” Filip observed. “When it suits you. You have another? Mine are inside.”
Maksim tucked the cigarette into the corner of his mouth, thumbed his case open, and passed it to Filip. The case was Ilya’s work, two halves of scrap plastic joined with a wire hinge and latched with a diminutive hook. “Mother is a saint. We should not provoke her.”
Filip said nothing. Why bother? he thought. His mother-in-law was frugal to a fault, and no one in the house went too hungry for long, yet he suspected there was always a little more, something extra held in reserve for the beloved invalid son and the husband returning from his travels. Well, I have a saintly mother, too, he thought, remembering the extra sugar cubes, the occasional tin of caviar Zoya saved for him—treats he devoured avidly, alone, with no shred of guilt.
They smoked in a silence if not exactly companionable, at least tolerant of the other’s presence, each understanding the other’s pleasure in the habit. “There’s one advantage of your father’s doing business with the Germans,” Filip observed, stubbing out his cigarette and tossing the butt into a clay flowerpot kept for that purpose. “We never lack for smokes.”
“Pravda. True enough.” Maksim did the same.
“I mean, these European brands are far superior to our homegrown ones, right? Especially that stuff the peasants smoke. Mahorka. Have you tried it?” Filip warmed to his subject. He felt compelled to keep talking, egged on by his brother-in-law’s monosyllabic reticence.
“I have. It is vile.”
“When? With the army?”
“With the Partisans.”
“Oh.” It was the end of conversation. Not that Filip wasn’t curious, but he feared belying his neutrality by knowing too much.
And Maksim would not talk about it. How to describe people whose patriotism suffered no compromise, who would fight to the death against self-serving invaders masquerading as liberators? People who were determined to protect the only country they had, however flawed and unjust? He could not talk about their fierce resolve, the acts of suicidal sabotage, the missions propelled by hard, hot fury. He could not. Not least because he knew that even if he had been whole, with two arms, and capable of rapid movement, he lacked the cold blind courage to do the necessary acts of violence. Mining roads, blowing up trains, burning villages—these actions caused people to die. He could not be a part of that; his mission was to save life, to heal.
I am a doctor, he thought, or nearly. I cannot be an instrument of death. So he had traded them his boots and socks, taking moldy bread, cold salted fish, and a handful of foul tobacco mixed with sawdust in exchange. How to describe the feeling of desolation and, yes, fear, when the Partisans moved off during the night, so quietly he never heard a twig snap, leaving him alone in a forest where even the predawn singing of birds had an ominous coded quality. They could have, should have, killed him, to guard against betrayal of their names and whereabouts. He would never know why they had not. He had picked up his pitiful bundle and made his way home, relying on compassionate acts of strangers for his survival.
“Hey, friend,” Filip tapped him on the shoulder. Maksim recoiled as if stung. “Why so jumpy? You know chess, yes? Could you move some pieces? You don’t have to play seriously if you don’t want to. It’s so damn hard to work out these moves alone.”
“I know how to move the pieces. But no one calls me friend.” He half-turned on the bench, studied the board a moment, and advanced a black pawn.
Filip consulted his book, jotted something in his notebook. After some deliberation, he moved his knight into position, preparing to threaten the black queen in the next move. Maksim advanced another pawn and lost the queen.
They went on like this for another quarter hour, Maksim playing a quick, desultory game, Filip agonizing over every decision, chin in hand, pencil at the ready. “Ah, I understand!” he muttered. “It’s all about the bishop, you see?”
Maksim stood, jarring the board, sending black and white pieces into an irretrievable jumble. “This is a waste of time,” he announced, and retreated into the house.
“And what you do is not?” Filip flared up, unable to stop the words. I tried, Galya, he thought. I tried. Who does he think he is?
Soon after the chess incident, Maksim took to his bed, refusing nearly all food. Ksenia, too, ate less and less, as if in solidarity with her son’s suffering. She moved silently about the house, wiping at invisible dust, straightening pristine coverlets, obsessively polishing her spotless stovetop. Some days, she sat at his bedside while he slept, interlacing the fingers of her large, restless hands, studying the ethereal beauty of his gaunt features, taking some small comfort in the regularity of his breathing.
She had not watched him sleep since he was a very small boy, a toddler in short pants. They had lived in the country then, in a little house of their own, with a kitchen garden, a few chickens and a goat in back, a fig tree at the front gate. He had slept with innocent abandon after a day of playing outside, his tousled hair smelling of sweat and earth and sunshine. As a young mother, she had inhaled this sweet, slightly rancid aroma with wonder and delight, marveling at the way this child’s arrival had changed her status in the world. When the revolution finally reached them and everything changed, she and Ilya had their hands full just staying together and alive in a country they no longer recognized. No time then to indulge in the luxury of watching a child sleep.