They had set out on foot, as before, a loose band held together by a common purpose: to find their men and, somehow, to live. Someone had heard of a high-level meeting—America’s Roosevelt, Britain’s Churchill, and the despised Stalin segmenting Germany like an orange, creating zones of influence and administration while they began to dismantle the Nazi regime. It was up to them now, the women, to discover where these zones lay, and to determine where they might be safe.
When Galina’s pregnancy was near term, she and her mother had first heard the word asylum. It was balm to their dispirited souls, a source of strength they could draw on to dispel the perpetual weariness with which they moved their feet along the road. Keeping the Danube on their right, they tramped ever south, scavenging or begging for food and shelter from the chilly spring nights, their efforts met with hostility or indifference as often as with acts of ordinary kindness. Bread. A boiled potato. A cup of milk.
Little by little, in ones and twos, the other women fell away, each following her own path, whether by guesswork or calculation, to the rest of her life. By the time they reached the outskirts of Regensburg, they were alone. It was time to stop for the birth of the child.
Ksenia found work in a beer hall kitchen, scrubbing pots and washing dishes. “My daughter, she can also help in the kitchen,” she ventured cautiously, eyes lowered, knowing she might compromise her own job by asking for more.
“We have enough cooks now,” the beer hall woman, middle-aged, red faced, her complexion chapped by a chronic skin condition, snapped. “She can clean the guest rooms and help with the laundry. One meal a day, no pay, and she can share your room until the baby comes. Then, raus. No screaming baby in my house.”
The room was an unheated garret space with sloping walls that revealed rough aged roof beams. The women took turns sleeping on the narrow cot, using their coats on top of their own thin blanket for warmth. It was more than acceptable. They had shelter and food, and work, not charity. They were in a town filled with activity, people coming and going, busy rebuilding their world, trading information. And they were near the hospital.
“Bist du…?” The nurse repeated her question, to which Galina, still uncomprehending, offered a puzzled smile. The nurse turned on her heel and walked away.
“Du. T’y, as we say,” Ksenia, who had just arrived, echoed. She sat down on a straight-backed wooden chair near the bed. “Such a simple word. And yet…”
Galina passed a finger over the baby’s downy head, as if exploring a curious new object. “We’re less than nobody here. Did you think they would address us any other way? V’y or Sie, as if we were respectable strangers? Why do you bring it up?”
“Because it’s changing. After the revolution, anyone could approach you on the street and address you rudely, the way landowners once spoke to their serfs of any age as if they were children.” She took a pair of knitting needles from her cloth satchel, the wood rubbed to a dark sheen by years of handling. “But there’s more to it than that.”
“What are you talking about?” Galina yawned. Who cares? she almost said. We have more urgent things to worry about.
Ksenia picked up her knitting, winding the pumpkin-colored yarn around her fingers to even out the tension, working the little sweater sideways, all in one piece. “When I was a young woman,” she began, in a tone that promised a story, her voice soft, as if eroded around the edges by the passage of time, taking her back to the clear center of a reminiscence. “I was only a few years married. Your brother was a baby, not two years old, and you were not yet born. We lived in Simferopol, where your father worked as a clerk in a shipping office and practiced his craft at every opportunity. If he had a day or two free from his job, he traveled to nearby towns, following the mountain tourist trade, selling his pins and carvings. He made a decent living, and I was busy with the house—the garden, the hens, my little child.”
“I wish we had a better color for Katyusha’s first sweater,” Galina interrupted.
“We use what we have, my dear. It’s soft and clean, and I’m grateful to Frau Herzen for giving me her old vest to rework, and for allowing me to rent her room. She is a good woman, gruff but not unkind. Just today she told me of a room nearby for you and Katya. She agreed to pay you a little for working mornings while I watch the baby.”
“Oh, Mama. Thank you.” Galina sighed, her body relaxed as if eased of a crushing burden; the worry lines around her mouth smoothed out. “Thank you.” She looked up with renewed attention, captivated by her mother’s narrative in spite of herself, caught up in the description of bygone times. “Weren’t you lonely then, with Papa away?”
Ksenia picked up the thread of her story. “Sometimes, yes, I may have been lonely. Maybe so. I did not think about my life that way. We were young; so much had happened. Your father had suffered gas poisoning in the war, so we had made our way south, for the mild climate and healing waters.”
“And the revolution? That had just happened?”
“Yes. Who knew what would come next? We wanted no part of it, just wanted to live in peace. Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, they were all scoundrels, angling for power, using the people’s suffering as a way to advance their own ambitions. We just wanted to live, and to worship in freedom.”
Galina began to see where this was going. She didn’t remember those early years, before Stalin ordered most churches closed and services outlawed. Her parents had refused to participate, would not join the Communist Party, and had paid for that decision: precarious employment, sporadic pay, lower food and clothing rations—these were part of the cost of standing with their beliefs. But if there was a church, they found it, and the icons in their own home had always remained defiantly on view.
Katyusha finished nursing and slept. Galina settled the baby in her basket and laid her own head back against the pillow. “What does all this have to do with t’y and v’y?” she asked. “We were talking about forms of address and how conventions were changing.”
“I remember. How impatient you are! A few years before, when we wanted to marry, we lived in Kostroma. It was too far north; we needed to be closer to the sanatoriums where your father could begin treatment for his condition. We had filed our civil marriage papers already, but it was unthinkable to travel together unless we were man and wife in the eyes of the Church. Do you see?”
No, Galina thought, but kept silent.
“My Ilya went to see Father Matvei, the new priest assigned to the one church left open in our part of the city. It was early spring, I remember, but still cold, with snow on the ground.
“‘You must wait another month,’ the priest said. ‘It is Lent now; no weddings are permitted without dispensation from the bishop.’ He was our age, recently ordained and married according to our Orthodox rules; his matushka was expecting their first child.
“‘Even now, in these times?’ Ilya protested.
“‘Especially now. If we let ourselves stray from the right path, ignore the laws set down by our holy fathers, then we are no different from the atheists.’
“Then your father did the unthinkable: he told a lie. ‘Father Matvei,’ he said. ‘We are believers, Ksenia and I. We live by Church law as much as we can. But, you see, it is important to Ksenia that we marry now.’ And he cast his eyes down, unable, as he told me later, to continue in his deception. Clearly, he did not think he could convince the priest that our immediate need to travel together was enough reason to bend the rules.