“Galina Kirillovna, do you by any chance do card readings?” Mama asked.
“Card readings? Of course. I do everything.”
“I wouldn’t trust the cards with such matters,” Babushka said but didn’t make a move from the table. She handed Galina Kirillovna the payment and took another honey cake.
“Alinochka, drink this and go lie on my bed. You need to rest now,” Galina Kirillovna said and gave me a cup of tea. Its bitter herbal smell made me sneeze.
My eyelids became heavy once I lay down. The bed didn’t feel as uncomfortable anymore. Through the syrup of sleep I heard the familiar incantations of the fortune-telling: For you, for the home, for the soul. What was. What will be. What will calm the heart.
* * *
I woke up in the back of our Zhiguli on the way home, nauseous again, this time from hunger. Babushka drove, occasionally dropping her head forward to stretch her neck. Beneath the neckline of her striped red dress she had a small fatty hump. Mama was asleep in the front seat, her face turned to me. Her lips were smiling. But whatever had calmed her heart was most likely a lie or a mistake. This Galina Kirillovna could be a healer witch or an evil witch, like the one in Babushka’s story. Or not a witch at all.
The morning is wiser than the evening, Vasilisa’s doll always said. And if the doctors can’t help and the witches can’t help, and Papa and Babushka can’t — who else is left?
The ink of the night was leaking from the corners of the sky onto the day’s bright canvas, as Galina Kirillovna would have probably said. She liked talking about the ink. Maybe she’d make a better poet than a witch.
Birches, birches, birches forever. The notches on their white trunks looked like sad black eyes. They had long tired of staring at the world without blinking, but they could never close and go to sleep.
Strawberry Lipstick, 1958
Olya lay in bed between her younger sister, Dasha, and her older sister, Zoya, feeling that, at eighteen, her life was over. For what was life without love? A never-ending shift at a factory assembly line. Left and right, her friends went to the dances at the Palace of Youth, fell in love, and got married. They moved out of their parents’ tiny apartments and no longer shared a bed with their sisters. They lived real lives. Plus, as married women, they could wear lipstick without attracting judgmental stares from nosy babushkas on the street. Olya was dying to wear lipstick.
The room was hot and stuffy even with the windows open. She sat up and looked at her sleeping sisters. Dasha’s lips were pinched by a secret smile. She always seemed so much happier in her sleep. Zoya gripped her corner of the sheet and ground her teeth with the same intensity she applied to her waking activities, from stirring sugar into a cup of tea to expounding the virtues of the Party over dinner. Olya was fed up with Zoya’s lectures, fed up with the poverty and having to put in hours and hours of work at the three different vegetable plots her parents had. She was fed up to death with everything in this town.
She climbed out of the bed and tiptoed into the living room. The old wooden floor creaked in betrayal. On the pullout couch, her mother and stepfather groaned in their sleep. She’d already heard one of them use the chamber pot — a big metal bucket in the hallway — earlier in the night. She was sick to death of that bucket. The nighttime deed made the kind of shameless trickling sound Olya imagined woke the neighbors not only in their house but also on the other side of the courtyard. It gunned the message into the metaclass="underline" I am alive and I don’t care what you think of me.
Which was very different from Olya’s current state of mind. First, the love of her life, Kostya, had jilted her. Second, she had been denied admission to the Nutrition Institute in Odessa, where Kostya was now stationed. And third, she’d just found out that her tall and handsome Kostya, the dark-haired and green-eyed Kostya, a newly graduated officer of the Stavropol Military Academy, witty Kostya, guitar-playing and campfire song — singing Kostya, had married Olya’s former classmate — she wasn’t even that pretty — and taken her with him to Odessa.
On top of this, another graduate of the military academy, a certain Alek, whom Olya had met just two weeks ago, had unceremoniously proposed to her. He was a communications officer and had been assigned to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a port city on the Kamchatka Peninsula nine hours away by plane. He didn’t have to say it, but this was his last chance to secure a wife before the lonely military life in the Far East swallowed him whole. Olya always had so many friends, so many admirers from school and the academy. She was the most popular girl in her neighborhood and the star at the dances. How had it happened that her choice now came down to this?
Zoya laughed when she heard of the proposal.
“He can’t be serious about this,” she said. “He hardly knows you.”
“So what? A man can’t fall in love with me at first sight?”
“A boy. You don’t know him at all.”
Olya had known Kostya well, and where did that get her?
So she considered ending it all.
She could cut her wrists, she thought now as she put on her sandals. A slow and painful way to go. That bastard Kostya wasn’t worthy of so much suffering. She could jump off a building. It would have to be high enough so that she perished instantaneously. Life as an unmarriageable invalid was even worse than death.
She could hang herself, but she’d have to rummage in the closet for a rope or a belt, which would wake everyone up. It would certainly wake Dasha. Dasha thought Alek’s proposal was romantic. Poor Dashen’ka, she would never get over her death. Eventually the news would reach Kostya in Odessa. He probably would be too busy with his new wife to give poor, dead Olya a second thought. Such a possibility set off another wave of self-pity.
Olya knew she shouldn’t grumble at her personal circumstances. The war had ended only thirteen years ago, and everyone still incanted: “Anything but the war, anything but the war.” And her current life could hardly be compared to her parents’ life before the war, at the height of the Terror and famine. Her mother was accused of stealing a loaf of bread from the grocery store where she worked. For this, she was arrested and sent to a work colony in Turkmenistan, where Olya and Dasha would be born. Her father, who had worked at the Anti-Plague Institute as a medical researcher in charge of developing vaccines, was accused of spying for the Japanese. He was tortured, his nails peeled off to the all-deafening accompaniment of a song from the film The Children of Captain Grant: “Captain, captain, smile! For a smile is the flag of the ship!” After several years in the Gulag, he returned home a sick and broken man. Throughout childhood, when Olya and her sisters would, in their ignorance, break into the ever-popular song at home, their father would pale, and their mother would scream at them to stop. She didn’t explain why until each girl turned eighteen, and then only in a whisper and after swearing them to secrecy. Dasha still didn’t know. Their father lived for another four years.
Stalin was dead now; food was almost plentiful. People had finally taken a deep breath.
But Olya had had enough of such reasoning.
She found a flashlight and picked up a cloth bag with cut-up newspapers kept by the door for trips to the outhouse. Two flights of stairs later, she plunged into the warm cocoon of the summer night. Her own building was too low for a fatal jump. The almost full butter-yellow moon hung in the sky like a giant river pearl. It seemed to her she could smell a hundred different flowers — most ardently, jasmine. Two opposite windows were lit up on the dark faces of the ancient izbas. Perhaps secret lovers had stayed up all night to relay messages via curtain Morse code, Olya mused, though she knew that those windows belonged to two querulous old hags. Either way, it was a night for secret rendezvous with one’s sweetheart, for kissing so long you didn’t need red lipstick, for not being able to fall asleep. Not suicides. In her small, crowded home she felt forsaken.