She used the pitch-black outhouse, then sat down on a homemade tree swing and looked at the moon again, its big-eyed, mournful face frozen in a cry or a grave request. Maybe Alek wasn’t so bad. He was short but good-looking enough, especially in the dress uniform he’d worn at graduation. His gray eyes were playful, his cleft chin optimistic, his wavy hair shiny like his parade boots. He drew well. He’d shown her an album of his caricature sketches before proposing.
No, Olya wanted something death couldn’t give her — a revenge on love and life, and on Kostya. She wanted to wear lipstick without the gawks from babushkas who sat cracking sunflower seeds on the courtyard benches all day, gossiping about the past and predicting the future. She wanted to be the mistress of her fate.
* * *
They married ten days later, on Alek’s twenty-third birthday. At the wedding Olya noticed with disappointment that his lower lip was sizably puffier than his upper lip, and five minutes after she lost her virginity, she threw up next to the bed. The physical act itself had revolted her, and she lay awake all night, wondering whether it would have been different with Kostya. At sunrise, she decided she needed to hurry up with her progress of love.
The day after the wedding Olya bought herself a lipstick the color of a ripe strawberry. It was the first object she had owned that wasn’t a hand-me-down, and putting it on felt as wondrous as she had imagined. In another ten days Alek went off to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to report for duty. She was to join him two months later, after he was done with training.
At first Olya wished she could’ve spent more time strolling down the leafy boulevards with her new husband, holding on to his arm and flashing her gold wedding band. Then, she realized she could enjoy her new status more without the discomfort of wifely duties. People no longer pushed her in lines, men gave up their seats on the bus, and everyone, even the grouchy babushkas, looked at her with respect and hope. Even her parents allowed her some leeway when it came to domestic chores and working on the vegetable plots. Olya sauntered around town with Dasha, talking about her plans. She would have her own kitchen, with her own pots and pans and knives and plates and a blue embroidered tablecloth, and she would cook whatever she wanted — however she wanted to cook it. And if Zoya didn’t like the taste of it, well, she wouldn’t be there to criticize her. She and Alek would vacation on the Black Sea, but not Odessa, of course. Odessa was an awful place. She would have a vanity dressing table in her bedroom and a separate little box with a cushion for each ring. Dasha looked at her with reverence. Just don’t tell Zoya, Olya said.
By the time Olya celebrated her nineteenth birthday and began to pack for Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, she found out she was pregnant.
An exuberant southern fall was lazily taking over Stravropol. Caught in a chestnut hail, the park hummed and groaned. Giant red maple leaves appeared on the sidewalks like tracks of phoenix the firebird, joining the green leaves that had been patiently waiting since early August. The city was rolling out a crunchy welcome carpet. The warm wind rustled the leaves and the nylon raincoats of the hurrying passersby, and Olya’s soul rustled too, anxiously and excitedly in her chest.
She packed everything she owned: three cotton dresses, a pair of woolen tights, a pair of shoes and old winter boots, a rabbit-fur coat, and her late father’s black doctor’s bag. Olya gave her fourth dress to Dasha, who had long coveted the yellow number with violet floral print and a lace collar.
“Won’t you need it there?” Dasha said. “For military dances?”
Olya threw her head back in laughter, the way she’d seen an actress do in a movie. “Trust me, I won’t need so many summer clothes in the Far East. It’s cold there. Besides, I’m sure Alek would buy me more if I ask.”
In the days before Olya’s departure, Dasha wore the dress nonstop. It looked beautiful on her but seemed to have a strange destabilizing effect. Usually dexterous and sure-footed, she dropped bags and parcels, cut herself while cleaning potatoes or chopping onions, and walked into furniture. And every time Olya took Dasha’s small, clammy hands and said to her, “Dashen’ka, my soul, I’m not leaving forever,” Dasha, her beauty a paler, once-copied version of Olya’s, burst into silent tears.
Zoya, meanwhile, acted like she didn’t care whether Olya left or stayed. A sturdy girl with orange hair and the same dark blue eyes that Olya had, she kept herself busy at the library of her teacher’s college and with her various Komsomol obligations. At home, her already upturned nose stuck up higher still. She was jealous of Olya’s marrying first, Olya concluded, and not just anyone — an officer. In a gush of magnanimity, Olya bought another tube of strawberry lipstick and tucked it under Zoya’s pillow, wishing for a quick improvement in her sister’s romantic life.
With the commotion of the wedding and excitement about the pregnancy, and now preparing to move across the country, Olya hadn’t completely forgotten Kostya. But she found that focusing on his treacherous double-cross made her feel she was doing the right thing.
Alek returned from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky with cans of red caviar and a mustache strip that looked like a pencil stain. He closed his matters at the local military branch, packed up the few possessions he’d stored at his mother’s, and on a bright mid-September morning headed with Olya and her family to the airport.
At the terminal, after offering last-minute words of wisdom and household advice, Dasha and her mother began to cry. Towering over him, Zoya briskly shook Alek’s hand, then turned to Olya and locked her in an iron hug, the way she used to tame Olya’s tantrums when they were children.
“Good luck, Olya,” she said. “You’re going to need it, but you’ll be all right. You’ve always been the luckiest of the three of us.”
“You’re going to need it, too,” Olya said, annoyed. She wasn’t lucky — she was brave. Courage was needed if you wanted to live your life and not just hold forth about it at meetings and demonstrations.
On the plane Alek sat straight, like a real officer. He looked out the bright window and for a moment his gray eyes washed out to almost-white. It frightened her.
“You are so beautiful,” he said and smiled shyly, as though she were not his wife but a fellow passenger at whom it was not polite to stare.
“You think everything will be fine?” One fears what one doesn’t know, her mother always said. Alek was a good man, Olya knew that much in her heart.
“The flight is long,” Alek said. His gray-again eyes glinted with mischief. “There’s a small chance we’ll crash. But don’t worry, you won’t miss much in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky.”
Alek took Olya’s hands in his. She liked his hands, with their long, thin pianist’s fingers, the river network of veins. They were a tall man’s hands.
* * *
They settled in ramshackle barracks in a military neighborhood across the bay from the city proper. The sparsely furnished room was tiny, but Olya was happy to share the bed with just one person. Alek left for work at dawn, came home for lunch and a nap, then returned in the evening, wolf-hungry and exhausted. During the day, he sent the soldiers from his squad, mere children themselves, to haul buckets of water from the neighborhood pump and chop firewood for the stove. They helped Olya with grocery shopping, too. She saw now that red caviar was the only thing one could bring from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky as a present. Pyramids of caviar cans stood on nearly empty shelves like miniature defense installations. There wasn’t much in the way of vegetables and fruits, compared to Stavropol, and she doubted she could maintain a garden in this cold, wet soil by herself. At least she didn’t have to carry that burden, too. Pregnant and therefore unhireable, Olya mostly stayed home. Something always needed cooking, cleaning, washing, ironing, darning. She liked gossiping in the communal kitchen with the other officers’ wives. The nights she was unable to fall asleep because of Alek’s snoring, she read — like her mother told her to — and thought of the nights back home. She and Dasha had often stayed up late waiting for Zoya to return home, and though they read different books, it felt like they were enveloped in the comfort of the same dream of other lives, of other possibilities. Back then, in their minds and bodies they were free.