Good People (29 page)

LENINGRAD–SOCHI

WINTER 1939–1940

Glowing trails of the city's last lights swirled in orange and gold on the train windows. Why was she pressing her face to the cold glass like a peasant woman whose world ended where the potato fields end? Perhaps because she hadn't left the city in more than two years. Throughout her childhood she had sworn that by her twenty-first birthday she would be skipping through the streets of Paris and Berlin. At least Paris. Sasha looked up at the surprisingly starry sky, where gigantic columns of smoke and dust rose between her and the city. Far off in the fields she could just see a wagon driver, with two flaming torches fastened to the sides of his wagon. He was whipping a pair of black oxen. Next to him sat a boy, or perhaps a sack of potatoes.

While her eyes groped in the darkness, her mind cast a light over the snowy shores of those tiny islands whose names she had loved to roll on her tongue: Aptekarsky, Krestovsky. Her grandfather had owned a dacha on Krestovsky. ‘It wasn't luxurious,' her mother admitted, ‘but very useful.' That dacha was stolen from them in 1912,
when her grandfather quit the Okhranka. ‘We were lucky that when the Bolsheviks took Petrograd we didn't own anything except our house,' her grandfather explained.

Her hair tickled her nape. She gathered it in her right hand and in the same movement fastened it into a bun. Now her neck felt strange, naked. Her husband's fingers, still greasy from the
pirozhki
he had gobbled down before falling asleep, touched the tips of hers. A whisper fled from his dream. He touched the white bandage. Every time he came near that bandage, she was stricken with a rage he couldn't comprehend. He liked to find little things to be stubborn about, where he could refuse to compromise—possibly to show his strength and possibly, as in this instance, because he was convinced that the bandage was like a sacred thing for her. Once she had even hit him with her right hand and shouted that he must never dare to touch that bandage again.

It was odd to have to do everything more or less one-handed, and even the simplest thing had to pass the test: getting dressed or undressed, picking something up, writing, leafing through a book, any action involving water. When she first came out of hospital, she refused to go near water, and it did no good to implore or explain. Helpless, Maxim swallowed his pride and invited Stepan Kristoforovich to their apartment to speak heart to heart with her, and remind her how anxious the department was for her to return to work. After that he amused her with stories about the new orders from the Kremlin regarding morning exercises. Concern for the workers' bodies was now official, and even comrades on the verge of retirement were required to keep fit; he, for example, had been signed up for a course in jujitsu. The new boss of the NKVD, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, liked it. After Styopa's visit, she allowed Maxim to wash her in cold water, having wrapped her hand in several layers of cloth. She wouldn't go near the samovar, and every time she saw steam rising, even someone drinking tea, her mind seethed with images of the water bubbling furiously onto her body. There were days when she imagined that the rain was boiling.

His fingers were stroking the bandage, that was clear. She removed
her hand and pressed it against her belly. The train slowed; the smell of makhorka tobacco and heavy cigarette smoke descended on her. She got up and stepped over the sleeping passengers wrapped in their furs, looking for fresh air. Two girls sat at the back of the coach and chatted. Their legs, in tight white stockings, rested on the seats in front of them. They whispered, laughed and gave her a cheeky glance. She was tempted to sit and chat with them, to bridge, if only for a moment, the chasm that had formed with bewildering speed between girls like them and herself, a married woman employed by the NKVD. Just a year ago she had sat with Zhenya in a tram, wearing her thin beaded dress, as happy as those girls were and even more insolent.

Two soldiers complained that the toilet was locked. They offered her a cigarette and asked where she worked. She refused the cigarette and asked where they were stationed. They were both army doctors. One of them had fought in Khalkhin Gol during the summer, on the Japanese front, and his arm had been wounded.

‘He was hit two hours into the war,' his friend laughed. ‘Then he lay in the hospital for a month, sitting in a sauna and having the time of his life.'

She congratulated them on the brilliant victory and stood near the window, which was covered in frost. Cold air blew on her face through the unsealed edges.

All that day images of her first trip to Moscow raced through her memory, shattering into fragments, gathering together again, then scattering into atoms and striking her like a sandstorm. How many times a day could the same memory assail her?

She is sixteen, it's late at night, she walks hand in hand with Father. They approach the platform. She has goosebumps in anticipation of the great moment—her first trip on the
Red Arrow
, the greatest train in the world. In school they had devoted an entire lesson to the achievements of the engineers and planners, followed by stupid mathematical riddles: Sasha rides on the
Red Arrow
. Ulla Kleiss travels on a new German train, the
Flying Hamburger
. Because of friction on the tracks, the German train decreases speed by four per cent, while the Russian
train slows down by two per cent, and there are all sorts of other variables too. (In the end she plays the smart aleck and submits a calculation that has the German kid arriving first, and at recess the boys threaten to beat her up. The truth is that her father told her that the
Flying Hamburger
leaves us far behind.)

Father places the suitcase on the platform and wiggles his fingers, which have turned red from the effort of carrying it. She looks at his hand, amazed at how small it is. His fingers and hers are the same size. Her mind is still wearing itself out with dreadful scenarios in which something goes wrong at the last moment—her mother gets sick, there's a crisis at the institute, she vomits on the platform. Meanwhile Father is impressed by the train: seventy kilometres per hour, one of the fastest on the continent! It looks gigantic and splendid to her. You could fit the entire city into its coaches. Father boasts again about Soviet industry, which is catching up to the West at an astonishing pace: ‘We've paid a high price, no doubt, but the achievements are enormous.'

Soldiers in tunics, with raspberry-coloured squares on their lapels, ask for their travel documents, and Father shows them. Now it's happening, Sasha is panicked. They'll send us back home. But the soldiers are actually nice and wish them a pleasant journey.

When they start checking other people, Sasha says to her father, ‘I want a beer,' expecting he will be shocked, get angry and lecture her: little girls don't drink beer. But he'll have to acknowledge that she has drunk beer in the past, and she's still here, and everything is fine. She's not such a little girl anymore.

‘Beer?' he answers distractedly. ‘There's no time for that now.'

She gets annoyed, and as if by accident she digs her fingernails into his hand. He loosens his grip. An aggressive thought provokes her: Okay, Father, that doesn't seem to have been enough for you, maybe beer is a trivial thing, and she's almost tempted to tell him about that morning, or actually about the day before, when she and Maxim Podolsky lay naked in his parents' bedroom. A warm breeze blew through the window, and the sun gilded his muscular body. And she
would immediately explain, listen, Father, we didn't mean to cause a scandal, we just wanted to feel the breeze, and you can't see the bed from the neighbouring apartments, Maxim checked. Aside from that, true, we were naked, but I only let him lick the upper part of my body, and I only kissed him on the lips. Mother taught me to be careful with boys: you have to refuse as soon as they ask, otherwise you're swept along. It was so nice when Maxim licked my belly and my hips and my back. You always said those Chekists were thorough guys, so look, their sons are too.

But she doesn't have the courage to speak up, and says something under her breath about being in Maxim's parents' bed, until he scolds her, ‘Stop mumbling!'

‘Okay, Father, I didn't mean to,' she says softly, and they board the train.

She went back to her seat. One of the girls had fallen asleep, and the other was playing with a piece of string, looking bored. That was what being young was like: after high spirits comes tedium, and all the mood swings make you dizzy. You can't get off the roller-coaster, and the only thing that ever changes is how much you doubt your sadness and joy. She didn't envy their youthful lack of self-consciousness. How much time was left for them? She sat down next to Podolsky, who was snoring lightly. He buried his cheek in the hollow between her shoulder and her neck. He smelled her body in his sleep.

She pushed him a little. He breathed hot air onto her neck, woke up, rubbed his eyes and complained that the coach wasn't heated. ‘Stepan Kristoforovich should have reserved seats for us in the international coach. There you sit four to a compartment, the seats are upholstered in plush, and waiters serve you wine and cake.' She didn't answer, and he fell asleep again. Saliva dripped from the corner of his mouth.

On the right, the platforms of Novgorod station shone, and their light fell into the coach. It disturbed some of the dozing passengers: arms were stretched, there was coughing and nose-blowing, faces numb
with sleep turned to the right and left, people groped in valises. Her husband slept on.

The train stopped. The two girls got off without any bags, and the soldiers followed them. From the platform passengers bundled up in coats stormed the train, carrying heavy suitcases, pursued by whistling gusts of wind. A short man in stained overalls held the hands of two young girls wearing hats whose ribbed edges hid their eyes. Tattered wool blankets were wrapped tightly around their bodies. They tried to push through the dozens of people mobbing the train and were shoved back again and again. What scrawny girls! She was alarmed for them, wanted to shelter them from the wind, sit them down at a table in a warm room and fill their plates. Maxim! She remembered him greedily eating that
pirozhki
while tens of thousands of children went hungry in this country. The cold pierced her; she knew the deceptively drowsy pace of the cold cruising through you, from toe to temple, till suddenly you couldn't move.

The girls in blankets disappeared, and she decided to look for them in the rear coaches after dawn. She wrapped herself in Vlada's old grey officer's coat, balled up her pullover, placed it against the window and leaned her head on it.

Waiting for sleep to dissolve her vexations, she remembered that Maxim had asked her to wake him at Kalinin. It hadn't even occurred to her that she might sleep. Since their marriage, in fact since the day they met, he had hardly ever been awake while she slept. Only in the hospital—while she was stunned with sedatives he sat next to her bed at night and read the newspaper. When she woke up, he would read her articles he found interesting, until she asked him to stop, just to read her the science stories. One night he told her that Stepan Kristoforovich and Reznikov had spoken to a reporter for
Leningradskaya Pravda
and urged him to publish a story about the brave young investigator who had turned her back on the Leningrad Group, including her parents, who had joined up with the enemies of the people, and was attacked cruelly by one of the traitors. The reporter loved the idea. ‘We have found the twin sister of young Pavlik Morozov,' he shouted,

‘and she was wounded in the struggle!'

‘I've never heard such an idiotic comparison,' she grumbled, trying to look amused to hide her horror. ‘Even the name Pavlik Morozov nauseates me: I would never have testified in court against my parents, or say that my father wasn't my father.'

Maxim withdrew. ‘Of course, of course,' he soothed. ‘I told them that the comparison was out of place.'

‘Maxim,' she said. ‘Never mention that name to me, do you understand?'

‘Of course, of course, dear.' He leaned over to kiss her shoulder.

The smoothness of his tongue aroused her. In her imagination her fingernails scratched his plump and perfumed flesh, plucked his copper moustache, which grew redder every day.

Once she heard Father tell Mother, after another dinner when Vlada had talked like a madman, ‘That boy is our misfortune. He's made from the same stuff as that filthy Pavlik Morozov.' Mother shushed him at once; Vlada did talk wildly sometimes, but in his heart he truly believed in the party, just like his friends. He might say harsh things at home, but he would always be loyal to his parents. ‘He's disappointed with us and with our friends, and he has to express his opinion, don't you agree?'

Sasha also remembered Nadyezhda pulling a face at Brodsky, brandishing a newspaper story in which it was reported that Gorky had called Pavlik Morozov a ‘shining example' and proposed building a monument in his honour. Nadyezhda had screamed, ‘And you praise Gorky, that piece of filth?'

Why had Maxim mentioned that dreadful name? Since his first visit to the hospital—dressed to the nines, brow furrowed, bearing roses and chocolates—she suspected he was pleased about what had happened to her, even if her punishment had been too severe. He was satisfied like a teacher who had warned a disobedient student. The next day, when he told her that he had taken care of the matter of the newspaper interview, her body shook with rage. How he loved to be patronising, her husband!

The two girls returned to the coach, and one of them was holding a little teapot full of boiling water. When they passed by her, she couldn't help flinching, and dug in behind Maxim's body. The train emitted a loud whistle and started moving with rhythmic clicking on the rails. She seemed to hear the girls tapping the teapot with their nails and giggling again. The two doctors came back and sat behind her, where they peeled hard-boiled eggs, and cursed their antiquated army equipment. One of them said that maybe the time had come to write a letter to ‘the doctors' best friend'.