“And you believed him! Here,” she said, thrusting Katya into his arms. “Meet your daughter.” Galina turned and followed her mother into the sparsely furnished room that served as the convent’s office.
Filip held the child gingerly, her head cradled in the crook of his elbow, as he imagined babies were to be held. When she squirmed in protest, he tightened his grip, afraid both of hurting her and of letting her fall. Somehow, he managed to raise her to a sitting position, perched on his arm, his free hand supporting her back. He held her away and looked at her.
Katya was thinner than he thought a baby should be, but not emaciated. Her perfectly round head was covered with a dark corona of impossibly fine hair that slipped between his fingers like dandelion fluff. She studied him, her large brown eyes—his mother’s eyes, he saw—reflected an unnerving calm, shining with life.
Talking with Galina the day before, he had learned something of their ordeal since the forced separation seven months ago. Something, but not much. Too much had happened in that short time to tell in a single emotional afternoon; it would take years to recount the stories of camp life, of the Danube crossing, of the weeks of tramping, which, though not unlike his own, held additional dangers when the refugees were women.
Filip and Katya regarded each other. For a moment, it looked as if she might cry but decided not to, the quivering of her plump lower lip subsiding into a cryptic bemused expression. “Shto?” he finally said. “What do you want from me?” He moved his arm in closer to his body, uncomfortable with the child’s steady stare. She let out a shuddering sigh and laid her head against his shoulder.
What, indeed? Until this meeting, his child had been an abstraction, linked to him, but only as an idea, a principle. Now here she was, breathing peaceably in his arms; he could feel the warmth of her head pulsing against his neck.
“Katya.” He tried out the name, aware, all at once, of the life in his hands, the concrete thread connecting him now to Galina in a whole new way. And to her family, to Ksenia, the new grandmother, and to Maksim and Ilya, who would never know this child, but whose legacy she embodied simply by being born.
She was not an idea. She was a person. A person who would soon outgrow the little hand-knit sweater that even now looked short on her thin arms. She would need food and a safe place to sleep and protection from all the dangers of the universe. Books, he thought. Where will I get books to teach her about the wonders of the world when I don’t even have a place to live?
He thought again about the previous evening, Ksenia having gone to get Katya from Galina’s friend Marfa, leaving Galina to ask—no, to beg—her landlady for permission to let him stay the night in their already cramped basement room.
“He is my husband, my baby’s father,” she had insisted, her eyes filled with frustrated tears.
“Today this one is the father. Tomorrow it will be another one. You girls have no pride. Bad enough we put up with the crying and your constant coming and going until late at night.” Before either of them could protest, they were facing a firmly closed door.
“She cries very little, our Katya,” Galina had said, shaking her head and stepping with him into the street. She told him that she cleaned guest rooms in the mornings; Ksenia worked afternoons and well into the evening hours in the tavern kitchen. “We arranged it so that one of us is always here. But sometimes Marfa, who is Katya’s godmother, helps us out, too.”
The burial took place on the third day. Ilya, washed and dressed in his freshly laundered clothes, lay in a plain coffin of new pine. The box, still redolent of aromatic resin, balanced on two chairs in the center of the church. People approached the casket to pay their respects to this man, a stranger yet one of them, a fellow traveler, a brother they had never known. They studied his pale face, the waxy skin now nearly colorless, as if at any moment it could melt away and reveal the bones underneath.
When the family came in, the small crowd parted to let them pass. They were dressed like everyone else, in the same travel-worn clothing as the day before, but were somehow different, marked by a dignity born of grief.
Filip recalled how that dignity had cracked two days ago, outside the infirmary. The women had made arrangements for the removal of the body, having first secured permission to wash and dress Ilya before moving him to the church. Payment, such as it was, had been settled. Through it all, they had maintained a detached reserve; he had been relieved at their businesslike demeanor, but suspected the emotional storm was yet to come.
And come it did. Once outside the convent gates, mother and daughter had collapsed into each other’s arms. Wailing and keening, they had stumbled along the road like a pair of drunks, giving in to a sorrow beyond words. The sounds they had made were unearthly, like the howling of wolves or the cries of shrouded night birds, morbid, timeless, and raw. Filip had stood apart, still holding his now sleeping child, speechless at the wrenching evidence of their dark suffering. He had felt like an intruder, a reluctant witness to something so private that it had left him shaken, his own mind filled with something like shame.
Now Ksenia appeared composed. She looked stately in her long black coat, her hair concealed under a dark-blue kerchief. Galina came in dry-eyed, but succumbed to silent weeping at the sight of her father. She handed little Katya to the ever-present Marfa and leaned heavily on Filip’s arm.
The service passed over him in a blur of monotonous prayers and repetitive incantations, the little church closing in on him in a haze of candle glow and incense. Filip’s mind wandered to contemplation. Why have funeral rites? Was it really imperative to gather like this, even among strangers, to speed the soul along to its mysterious destination? He saw again the dead piled near the railroad tracks, nameless and unmourned. Savko on the cement factory floor, his mouth filled with stone dust, his body consigned to cold-blooded incineration in the factory furnace. Borya, his remains tossed, no doubt, into a mass unmarked grave.
What was a soul? Was it more than the life force, that light in the eyes extinguished at the moment of death? Did a bear, a shrew, an ant have a soul, or was it coupled with a higher awareness, an ability to show mercy and compassion? He had sampled the works of philosophers, but wasn’t schooled enough to puzzle out these ponderous questions. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and, to his own embarrassment, yawned.
Father Stefan’s sonorous basso cut through Filip’s fruitless ruminations. In a voice both louder and brighter than before, the deacon intoned the words vechnyi pokoi, eternal peace, for the departed. Filip closed his eyes and heard the congregation join in the singing of the final words, in a rising minor motif of such mournful beauty that even he felt the pricking of tears behind his eyelids. Beside him, Galina’s clear voice rose above the others, then broke down, the last “Vechnaya Pamyat’” no more than a hoarse whisper between her barely stifled sobs. Eternal Memory.
Two men approached to secure the coffin lid. Ksenia held them back; with a swift, smooth gesture, she removed her wedding ring and slipped it onto her husband’s finger, the two slim bands resting against each other on his shapely hand. Someone gasped. “Mama…,” Galina whispered, but Ksenia silenced her, her steely face unreadable. Ksenia ignored all questioning glances and nodded to the men, who hammered nails into the soft wood with merciless finality.
Ilya was buried in the small but growing graveyard behind the church. Each person accepted a spoonful of Ksenia’s kutya, recognizing the traditional funeral dish of bulgur wheat sweetened with raisins and honey, and went on his or her way, leaving the family group huddled at the grave, while the sound of clodded earth hitting the casket echoed coldly in the late summer air.