Was that what worried her? That he would tell someone she prayed to God and the Virgin Mary? How silly, Filip thought, finally letting sleep take him. As if he cared about her secrets and incantations; as if they caused him anything but embarrassment.
“Well, you can join, for your father’s sake,” his mother had assented with obvious reluctance the next evening, and added, in a whisper, “as long as you don’t believe.”
But he did believe. He sang “The International” with something like missionary passion, believing in the anthem’s promise of a world ruled by peace and brotherhood. Never mind that his singing was wildly off-key; he made up for it in volume and enthusiasm. Russia’s youth would rise and lead the world toward the new dawn and he, Filip, would be among them.
It bothered him, though, when on Thursday mornings the Young Pioneers wore their scarves to school in preparation for the afternoon’s meeting, and Galina was one of the few children in his class whose neck remained bare. He had tried his best to persuade her to join. She had even asked her parents, timidly, for their permission and met with her mother’s fierce unequivocal refusal. “I will die first,” Ksenia had pronounced, the subject closed.
“I don’t want my mother to die,” Galina told Filip with sadness in her brown eyes. “Please don’t ask me anymore.”
And yet, in spite of his burgeoning patriotism, his fascination with the West remained undiminished. Filip saw no contradiction in this. Did not Peter the Great, the history of whose reign was the subject of the day’s exam, travel widely and bring back progressive ideas to raise eighteenth-century Russia out of her dark, superstitious morass, shoving the reluctant nation into a scientific future where knowledge ruled and merit was rewarded? Perhaps it was the richness of the international literature or the intriguing variety of the world’s stamps that ignited his curiosity. And now Soviet Russia had a message to share with the world, a kind of reversal of Peter’s accomplishment, a giving back, letting enlightenment flow in reverse for the liberation of people everywhere.
Filip wrote furiously, confident in his grasp of the material. He did not notice that Galina, who never once looked at the page slanted her way, had long ago laid down her pen and closed her exam booklet. She sat twirling her fingers around the end of the single braid she wore draped over one shoulder, the pale-blue ribbon woven through the amber strands reaching almost to her waist.
6
“WHAT IS THIS, GALINA?” Ksenia emerged from the kitchen holding a partly filled glass jar.
“Rice,” the girl said simply, her placid demeanor belied by the color rising from her neck, spilling across her face and under the roots of her hair.
She was standing behind Ilya, who sat shirtless, reading a newspaper in the tiny yard behind their rooms. Gently, she peeled her father’s sunburned shoulders. Her hand stopped in midair at her mother’s words, a longish translucent piece of dry skin clinging to her fingers until an erratic summer breeze lifted it away.
They had played this game, she and her father, since she was very small, no bigger than a toddler. Then, Ilya would lie on the beach, the sun drying the seawater on his burnished back while she picked away, exposing odd-shaped patches of new skin to bake and start the process all over again. Ksenia would shake her head, amused but mystified by this intimate ritual. She found it silly, but said nothing; there was no harm in something that gave both father and daughter so much pleasure.
But on this day everything was different. Ilya had refused to join the Communist Party, and had lost his job at the shipping office. He did whatever day work came along—any kind of painting, carpentry, or roadwork—for cash wages or extra food coupons, no questions asked. Between jobs, he started traveling to nearby towns along the coast, setting up his portable workshop anywhere people congregated: in market squares, near government buildings, along roads leading to the beach. He needed the travel time, he told his family, to reach new markets, and to recover from the effects of physical labor. “You know this digging and hammering make my hands tremble. If I do it all the time, I cannot practice my craft. One slip of the chisel and the piece is ruined. And new materials are hard to come by.”
Ilya used almost anything that came his way; even a broken Bakelite box could be cut up to become inexpensive jewelry. His eye grew quick at spotting bits of wire, beads, cord, anything that might be turned into a keepsake or gift. There was real satisfaction in this scrounging, turning discards into durable, and saleable, art. He enjoyed sifting through the trash of the newly privileged apparatchiks and committee members, finding scraps to resell to them as ornaments tweaking the noses of the same authorities who denied him legitimate livelihood.
But beach outings were rare now, all but forgotten in the daily scramble for a little money, something to trade, a meager share of the less and less available food. Ilya’s sunburn was now a hard-earned badge of his exertions, the feathery touch of his daughter’s cool fingers a balm to his wounded sensibilities, and a concrete reminder, if one was needed, of her steadfast love.
Looking now, speechless, from Ksenia’s icy gray eyes to Galina’s shamefaced expression, he waited for an explanation. Clearly, this was a grave matter; no crumb of food in the house escaped his wife’s frugal management.
“I can see that,” she said, giving the jar an ominous shake, the grains dancing against each other in a chilling parody of a baby’s rattle. “You will tell me now where it came from, and why it was in your dresser drawer.”
“It’s—I—you… Oh, Mama.” Galina dropped her arms to her sides, hung her head, and sobbed. Tears soaked the front of her dress and ran down her father’s bare back. For several minutes, no one moved. The depth of her distress was so unquestionably genuine, so touching, that no words of comfort or reproach seemed fitting. When the flood subsided, they moved into the kitchen to sit at the table and talk, away from the ever-present eyes and ears all too eager to know everybody’s business.
And so it all came out. How Ksenia, sick with the recurring bronchitis that had plagued her since childhood, too feverish to leave her bed, had sent Galina to the grocer with the family’s monthly rice coupon. How Nina Mihailovna, standing behind the girl in line had said, “Take mine too. They have children’s shoes across town, my little one needs them.”
“Nina Mihailovna is such a good neighbor, the way you sometimes combine your rations—her tea and sugar, your pie—to sit together and talk. I was sure she meant for us to have her rice, after I had told her how sick you were.” Galina wiped her face with a kitchen towel. “And I came home and made the soup that day. It was good, Mama. Didn’t you say it was good?” She twisted the towel into a thick rope around her slender wrist, then dropped it into her lap.
Ksenia’s voice rose in disbelief. “You used Nina Mihailovna’s rice? How—”