She took the time now, whenever she could, her thoughts moving like summer wind over ripe grain, this way and that, stirring up memories. Once when he awoke she pleaded, “Tell me. I have lived through revolution, witnessed the execution of my father. When you were small, we suffered through the years of civil war and the horror of famine. I know these things, in my own mind and body; I will not forget them. But we survived all that; we are alive. We must have hope.” She paused, placing her hand over his brittle fingers. “Share your sorrow with me. Your silence is breaking my heart.”
“Tell you?” Maksim took his hand away, raising himself on his elbow. “Mama, what should I tell you? Shall I describe the mayhem of life at the front, the chaos of conflicting orders or breakdown of communication, the paralyzing fear of making a fatal mistake? Or would you like to hear about the swift, questionable justice of field executions, to stop the wave of desertion, neither the runners nor the shooters knowing what is right or wrong?” He took a sip of water from the glass Ksenia held out for him, and fell back heavily on his pillow.
“How can I tell you what it is like to be a medic with no supplies, no blankets, no safe or sanitary place to even try to save a life? I cannot make you hear the voices in my head, grown men crying for their mothers, boys who should be dancing with their sweethearts caught in the agony of slow, relentless death.”
Ksenia closed her eyes but could not stop the tears. “We can pray,” she said. “God will—”
“God will what? Erase the memory of mud, excrement, and blood, a stench for which there is no word? It permeates your clothing, your hair, clings to your skin; you eat it with your daily kasha and moldy bread, drink it with your foul water, breathe it in what passes for sleep. Is this the God we should pray to? The one who watches and allows such beastliness?” Maksim turned his face to the wall.
Ksenia wept. For the wasted lives, the needless stupid sacrifice, the crazed suffering from which there was no return to ordinary humanity. For the damaged, the broken, the shattered, the vanished. For the son she was losing, the son she had already, she knew, lost.
He lingered a few more days. One morning Galina sat with him, holding a cup of hot rice broth she knew he would not drink. Their parents were out; Filip was with his mother.
“Look.” Maksim sat up abruptly. He pointed at the tapestry on the opposite wall. “There, do you see? There is a figure in that bush, a man, crouching. I never noticed it before.”
“What man? Which bush?” Galina got up to examine the familiar woodland scene. “This one? I see nothing there.”
“Yes, yes, you have your finger on it. But is he watching or hiding? I don’t know.” He sank back down on his cot, then turned to his sister, his eyes clear and bright. “I was hallucinating. It’s the end,” he said softly, as if some lucid corner of his brain remembered the sure signs of imminent death—the surge of energy, the visions, the momentary sharpened awareness.
“What? No,” Galina said. “You’re not hallucinating. There’s just nothing there.”
But he was no longer listening. His eyes dulled. His breath came quick and ragged, then stopped and resumed, knocking against his chest and throat like a trapped creature, and was still. “Death rattle,” she said aloud to the empty room. “Gone.”
Galina sat down carefully on the edge of the bedside chair. She sat a long time through the gathering dusk, still holding the cup, while evening fell all around her with crushing emptiness and the broth cooled in her hands.
PART IV
Germany
A New Life
1
“WHAT DO YOU DO with these doilies?” Filip stroked the latest addition Zoya had placed in her basket, this one with lacy scalloped edges and an intricate pineapple design.
She hesitated, colored slightly. “I sell them,” she finally replied. “Or trade them for things we need.”
“At the bazaar?” He couldn’t imagine his demure, diminutive mother among the aggressive sellers hawking whatever goods they had in a cacophony of voices to rival the squawking of seagulls competing for a dead fish.
“No. No one would notice me there,” she confirmed. “I just choose a street corner. Late afternoon and early evening seem to be the best times. People buy. I don’t know why, but I’m grateful.”
“Because your work is beautiful.” He smoothed the piece, aligning the edges with the ones underneath. “Mother, what shall I do?”
Zoya looked up, struck by the anguish in her son’s voice. She was not used to being so formally addressed, as if they were characters in an ancient Russian folk tale, in which the wise elders always had the answers. Filip slumped in his chair, unseeing eyes fixed on the book open on the table in front of him.
“What is it, son? You’ve become so gloomy. Has something happened?”
Yes, he wanted to say. Yes. My best friend was hanged for defending his country, and I do nothing. Day after day, I do nothing, wondering if his death was my fault. Had he ever held anything back from his mother, anything important? He didn’t think so. But he knew she would find a way to bring God or the Virgin Mary into it, might try to persuade him to pray. That, to his mind, was no solution at all. He couldn’t tell her.
“I’ve heard that young married men are to be taken to Germany now, with or without their wives. So no one will be exempt except small children and old people. The university exam has been postponed.”
“Is there no work for you here?” Zoya’s hands moved smoothly, her crochet hook darting in and out of the delicate piece taking shape under her fingers.
He had tried to find work, if only halfheartedly. And what, really, could he do? He thought the library might hire him, but in the end that opening went to someone older, with some experience. “No.”
They sat silent for a while, she at her needlework, he turning pages without reading them.
“Ksenia Semyonovna—I can’t call her ‘Mama’—has proposed we go sign up for Germany. She says those who go voluntarily get better placements and are allowed to stay together.” He spoke without looking at her.
Zoya glanced at her son, put her work down in her lap. “I have heard that, yes.”
“You know my father-in-law was detained by the city police. Something about his travel permit. It turned out they were looking for someone else, a different Ilya—Ilya Zorin. Mistaken identity. So they let him go.” He took a deep breath, held it a moment before exhaling, remembering the fear that had gripped the household; Ilya’s release had only increased the sense of imminent danger. “We all know they didn’t have to. They could have locked him up whether he was the right man or not.”
“I know,” Zoya said calmly. “Your father put a word in for him.”
Filip stared at her, stunned. How much more was there he did not know? He was not a child. Yet it seemed he had no grasp at all of the ominous things going on around him every day. He felt adrift, incompetent. Maksim had died, sacrificed, however unwittingly, to the Soviet cause. Borya’s execution was another casualty of the same struggle. Why did he, Filip, not feel part of that struggle? Where did he belong? If anything, the catastrophic events that brushed against his life filled him with ambivalence, a debilitating malaise that left him powerless to act.
Who was the enemy? It seemed clear enough that the invading forces of a foreign nation should be expelled at any cost, and yet… He remembered his father—was it just a few years ago?—a postal inspector with a fresh Communist Party card, refusing to talk at home about his work, even as his mother grew more secretive about her religious outings. This was in peacetime, he himself aglow in his Young Pioneer membership, until even he recoiled at the increasing pressure to tell on the activities within his home and neighborhood. Why was Stalin so afraid, the fear cascading in paranoid ripples through every aspect of everyone’s life? It was far safer to take refuge in chess and stamps and music when the nation’s leader was at war with his own people.