In the kitchen, Deda Misha was pouring borsch into bowls. He’d made it Ukrainian style, with squares of lard floating on the scarlet surface. Sonya parted the curtains and rubbed the cold, frost-white window until a clear hole appeared on the glass. All three windows of Max’s apartment were dark. Where could he be? The basketball practice had finished hours ago, and he never went to bed early. Maybe at one of his teammates’ apartments. She’d heard of wild parties hosted by the girls in the B section; those girls were the most developed and grown-up in all of ninth grade. The booths by the theater would sell anything to anyone, even cheap vodka that made you go blind. And where was Max’s mother?
She closed the curtains and held on to the fabric for a second. She had recently decided, after much agonizing, that her first memory was of her mother hemming these curtains — Sonya distinctly remembered the pattern of blue and orange pears — and therefore, all the memories prior belonged to her previous lives.
She sat down at the table and began to fish the pieces of lard out of the borsch. Deda Misha put out a plate with black bread and sat down opposite her. He had thin knees and a formidable belly that was squared on top from the hernia he earned at fourteen, during the war. His white hair was thick and wavy — the best in the family.
“Tak, you say our maestro didn’t come?” he said and bit into a piece of garlic. He had excellent ivory teeth thanks to fearlessness of raw garlic and onion. “How old is he now, ninety?”
“Yes, ninety. The concert was for his birthday. Deda, tell me about him. Mama said you knew him.” Deda Misha’s eyes began to shine, so, in spite of herself, she added, “You know, Mama always adds beans to her borsch.”
“Your mama knows a lot about many things, just not the important ones. She is still young, we have hope.”
Sonya stared at the lard, itching to hit the table hard enough that the plate would flop over on the floor.
“Yes, Makin and I were friends.”
Deda Misha had arrived in Magadan full of stories, like a barrel full of pickled cabbage, and he was in a hurry to tell them. He had already gone through most of his childhood and adolescence, proving — Sonya had to concede — that his life at her age had been vastly more dramatic and historical. Deda’s mother had carried him out of Ukraine and into Chechnya to escape holodomor, the terror famine under Stalin. During the war, he had thrown twenty incendiary bombs off his apartment building with the help of giant metal pincers. He founded a club to grow silkworms and provide fabric for the military parachutes. Her own grandfather, contributing to the victory — it was incredible. She’d never heard of any of this before. He was drafted to help Russian soldiers catch horses, which the Chechens had released into the mountains before Stalin deported them to Kazakhstan and Siberia. He became a Young Pioneer, then a Komsomolets, and then joined the Party.
Sometimes, as Deda Misha talked, Sonya tried to imagine Max in Deda Misha’s stories, having his adventures. Max throwing bombs off the roof, Max rounding up the wild Chechen horses like a cowboy. Max was brave, there was no doubt about that. He’d once jumped off a five-story building into a giant snowbank on a dare. Then everybody else jumped after him. Then the police arrived and they ran away, except for Pet’ka, who had broken his leg.
“You could say I’d played a crucial role in Makin’s life,” Deda Misha said. “I’ll give you a garlic clove to gnaw on. It kills the microbes.”
“I don’t want a garlic clove. Do you know why he didn’t come?”
“Pride and stubbornness. He’s always been like that, stubborn as a crayfish. Now that he’s got the public’s attention, he wants to make a point. Eat up, Sonya.”
“What point?”
Deda Misha got up and put on a teakettle. Under his big square glasses, his eyes were slightly hooded. They said everyone in the world, and definitely everybody in Russia, had at least one gene from Genghis Khan. What if Deda Misha was Genghis Khan himself in his prior life? In the living room, her father had fallen asleep.
“To understand what happened with Makin, Sonya, I need to first tell you what happened with me, how I left Grozny after the Petroleum Institute and ended up in Magadan. ‘Magadan, Magadan, a windy city between two bays,’” he sang in a soothing baritone. “It’s already very late.”
“But I want to know about Makin, Deda, and you leave tomorrow. Was he really as famous as they say?”
“Yes, ‘okay,’ as you Americans say. I will begin from the beginning. First, you have to know I didn’t want to leave my mother all alone in Grozny. My father left the family eighteen years before, for another woman — she’d lied that she was pregnant. I went to him, we talked man to man, and I persuaded him to come back and live with Mother. You have to always take care of your parents, Sonya.”
“She just forgave him after eighteen years?” Sonya couldn’t imagine forcing her parents to be together.
“I don’t know if she forgave, but it was better this way, not to be alone. Your baba Mila and I arrived in Magadan in 1951. We took a train from Moscow to Vladivostok, and down to the port of Nahodka. Our ship was a German ocean liner named Russia, formerly Adolf Hitler. It was illegally seized by the USSR after the war and would have been arrested if it went into international waters. So it sailed to Magadan, Gulag country — the gateway to Hell, people called it then. The ship was very luxurious: plush carpets, mirrors, curved wooden staircases, German words everywhere. They’d managed to remove most of the swastikas.”
“You met Makin on the ship?”
The kettle began to whistle. Deda Misha took it off the burner and poured boiling water into the brew pot.
“I will get to Makin, Sonechka. He was already in Magadan. Listen. The closer we got to Magadan, the more horror stories our fellow travelers told us about our future hometown…”
Deda Misha talked about how the camps were everywhere, even in the center of Magadan. Sonya hadn’t known that. Barbed wire and dogs barking in the cold. If a prisoner lost a game of cards, upon release he had to kill on such and such date the tenth person he encounters on an evening walk. Or be killed. The Gulag’s criminal network reached everywhere. Released prisoners lived in flotsam shanties or manholes and stole food from first-floor kitchens. If a prisoner escaped, the whole town would be on lockdown while soldiers hunted him down.
“Tea’s ready,” Sonya said. She tried to imagine barbed wire in her neighborhood.
“Pour for us, Sonya, and ask if your father wants some.”
“He’s sleeping.” She poured the brew into two cups and added hot water. Her legs, from the knees down, were leaden. She parted the curtains again. Max’s windows were still dark.
“Tell me about Makin. Nothing scary, please.”
“Nothing scary, eh? When I arrived, the head of personnel talked to me, saw that I was Ukrainian — all the best petroleum engineers are Ukrainians — and decided not to send me to the mines … I will skip a few years. I became the director of the gas and petroleum depots in Magadan. I always preferred to be in the middle of the action, not in the office with the papers and the telephone. I traveled all over the region, and what situations I got into I can’t begin to describe. Some near-deaths even, in the beautiful and cruel far north. I worked hard, I love working. Back then there was real enthusiasm among the young people. They didn’t work just for the money. I’ve been lucky to meet many interesting people in my life, and I always stayed open-minded. People sense your interest and open up, Sonya. In Magadan, it wasn’t just Makin. The whole Kolyma was a living museum of Soviet history.”