Winter Garden (33 page)

I unwrap Anya’s arm from around my neck. “You be strong, Anya. I love you, moya dusha.”

How can I call her my soul and then push her away? But I do. I do.

At the last minute, I hand her the butterfly. “Here. You hold this for me. I will come back for it. For you.”

“No, Mama—”

“I promise,” I say, lifting her up, putting her in a stranger’s arms.

She is still crying, screaming my name and struggling to get free, when the train doors slam shut.

I stand there for a long time, watching the train grow smaller and smaller, until it disappears altogether. The Germans are bombing again. I can hear the explosions all around, and people shouting, and debris thumping on metal roofs.

I hardly care.

As I turn toward the hospital, it feels as if something falls out of me, but I don’t look down, don’t want to see whatever I’ve lost. Instead, I walk through the raining dirt and snow toward my son.

Loss is a dull ache in my chest, a catch in my breathing, but I tell myself I have done the right thing.

I will keep Leo alive by the sheer force of my will, and Sasha will find Anya in Vologda and the four of us will meet up on Wednesday.

It is such a beautiful dream. I keep it alive one breath at a time, like a timid candle flame in the cup of my hands.

Back at the hospital, it is dark again. The smell of the place is unbearable. And it is cold. I can feel the wind prowling outside, testing every crack and crevice, looking for a way in.

In his narrow, sagging cot, Leo is sucking in his sleep, chewing food that isn’t there. He coughs almost constantly now, spasms that spew lacy blood designs across the woolen blankets.

When I can stand it no more, I crawl into the cot and pull him into my arms. He burrows against me like the baby he once was, murmuring my name in his sleep. His breathing is a terrible thing to listen to.

I stroke his hot, damp forehead. My hand is freezing, but it is worth it to touch him, to let him know I am here, beside him, all around him. I sing his favorite songs and tell him his favorite stories. Now and then he rouses, smiles sloppily at me, and asks for candy.

“No candy,” I say, kissing his sunken blue cheek. I cut my finger again, let him suck on it until the pain makes me draw back.

I am singing to him, barely able to remember the words, when I realize that he is not breathing anymore.

I kiss his cheek, so cold, and his lips, and I think I hear him say, “I love you, Mama,” but of course it is only my imagination. How will I ever forget how this was—how he died a little every day? How I let him. Maybe we should never have left Leningrad.

I think I will not be able to bear this pain, but I do. For all of that day and part of the next, I lie with him, holding him as he grows cold. In ordinary times perhaps this wouldn’t have been allowed, but these are far from ordinary times. Finally, I ease away from his little body and get up.

As much as I want to lie with him forever, to just slowly starve to death with him, I cannot do it. I made a promise to Sasha.

Live, he’d said, and I’d agreed.

So with empty arms and a heart turned to stone, I leave my son there, all by himself, lying dead in a cot by the door, and once again I start to walk. I know that all I will ever have of my son now is a date on the calendar and the stuffed rabbit that is in my suitcase.

I will not tell you what I did to get a seat on the train going east. It doesn’t matter anyway. I am not really me. I am this wasted, white-haired body that cannot rest, although I long just to lie down and close my eyes and give up. The ache of loss is with me always, tempting me to close my eyes.

Anya.

Sasha.

These are the words I cling to, even though sometimes I forget of whom I am even dreaming. From my place on the train, I see the ruined countryside. Bodies in heaps. Scars on the land from falling bombs. Always there is the sound of aircraft and gunfire.

The train moves forward slowly, stopping in several small towns. At each stop, starving people fight to get on board, to be one of the glassy-eyed grimy crowd heading east. There is talk, whispered around me, of heavy fighting in front of us, but I don’t listen. Don’t care, really. I am too empty to care about much of anything.

And then, miraculously, we arrive at Vologda. When the train doors open, I realize that I did not expect to make it here.

I remember smiling.

Smiling.

I even tuck my hair into my kerchief more tightly so Sasha will not see how old I have become. I clutch the small valise that holds all of my belongings—our belongings—and fight through the crowd to get to the front.

Out in the cold, we disperse quickly; people going this way and that, probably looking for food or friends.

I stand there, feeling the others peel away from me. In the distance, I hear the drone of planes, and I know what it means. We all know what it means. The air-raid alarm sounds and my fellow passengers start to run for cover. I can see people flinging themselves into ditches.

But Sasha is there, not one hundred yards in front of me. I can see that he is holding Anya’s hand. Her bright red coat looks like a plump, healthy cardinal against the snow.

I am crying before I take my first step. My feet are swollen and covered with boils, but I don’t even notice. I just think, My family, and run. I want Sasha’s arms around me so badly that I don’t think.

Stupid.

I hear the bomb falling too late. Did I think it was my heart, that whistling sound, or my breathing?

Everything explodes at once: the train, the tree beside me, a truck off to the side of the road.

I see Sasha and Anya for a split second and then they are in the air, flying sideways with fire behind them. . . .

When I wake up, I am in a hospital tent. I lie there until my memory resurfaces and then I get up.

All around me is a sea of burned, broken bodies. People are crying and moaning.

It is a moment before I realize that I can see no colors. My hearing is muffled, as if there is cotton in my ears. The side of my face is scraped and cut and bleeding, but I hardly feel it.

The red-orange fire is the last color I will ever see.

“You should not be up,” a man says to me. He has the worn look of someone who has seen too much war. His tunic is torn in places.

“My husband,” I say, yelling to hear my own voice above the din. There is a ringing in my ears, too. “My daughter. A little girl in a red coat and a man. They were standing . . . the train was bombed . . . I have to find them.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, and my heart is pounding so hard I can’t hear anything past, no survivors . . . just you . . . Here—

I push past him, stumbling from bed to bed, but all I find are strangers.

Outside, it is snowing hard and freezing cold. I do not recognize this place. It is an endless snowy field. The damage done by the blast is covered now in white, though I can see a heap that must be bodies.

Then I see it: a small, dark blot on the snow, lying folded up against the nearest tent.

I would like to say I ran toward it, but I only walk; I don’t even see that my feet are bare until the burning cold sets in.

It is her coat. My Anya’s coat. Or what is left of it. I cannot see the bright red anymore, but there is her name, written in my own hand, on a scrap of paper pinned to the lapel. The paper is wet and the ink blurred, but it is there. Half of the coat is missing—I do not want to imagine how that happened—one side is simply torn away.

I can see black bloodstains on the pale lining, too.

I hold it to my nose, breathing deeply. I can smell her in the fabric.

Inside the pocket, I find the photograph of her and Leo that I’d sewn into the lining. See?I’d said to her on the day we’d hidden it—that was back when they were first evacuating the children, it feels like decades ago—Now your brother will always be with you.

I take the tiny scrap of paper with her name on it and hold it in my hand. How long do I sit there in the snow, stroking my baby’s coat, remembering her smile?

Forever.

No one will give me a gun. Every man I ask tells me to calm down, that I will feel better tomorrow.

I should have asked a woman, another mother who had killed one child by moving him and another by letting her go.

Or maybe I am the only one who . . .

Anyway, the pain is unendurable. And I do not want to get better. I deserve to be as unhappy as I am. So I return to my bed, get my boots and coat, and I start walking.

I move like a ghost through the snowy countryside. There are so many other walking dead on the road that no one tries to stop me. When I hear gunfire or bombing, I turn toward it. If my feet hurt less, I would have run.

I find what I am looking for on the eighth day.

It is the front line.

I walk past the Russians, my countrymen, who call out for me and try to stop me.

I pull away, wrenching if I need to, hitting, kicking, and I keep going.

I walk up to the Germans and stand in front of their guns.

“Shoot me,” I say, and I close my eyes. I know what they see, what I look like: a crazy, half-dead old woman holding a banged-up valise and a dirty gray stuffed rabbit.

But I am not a lucky woman,” Mom said with a sigh.

Silence followed that last, quietly spoken sentence.

Nina wiped the tears from her eyes and stared at her mother in awe.

How could that pain have been in her all along? How could a person survive all that?

Mom stood up quickly. She took a step to the left and stopped; then she turned to the right and stopped. It was as if she’d suddenly awakened from a dream only to find herself in a strange room from which there was no escape. At last, with her shoulders rounded slightly downward, she went to the window and stared outside.

Nina looked at Meredith, who looked as ruined as Nina felt.

“My God,” Maksim finally said, turning off the tape recorder. The click sounded harsh in the quiet room, reminded Nina that the story they’d just heard was important not only to their family.

Mom remained where she was, her splayed hand pressed to her chest, as if maybe she thought her heart would stop beating, or tumble right out of her body.

What was she seeing right then? Her once-sparkling Leningrad turned into a frozen, bombed-out wasteland where people died in the street and birds fell from the sky?

Or maybe it was Sasha’s face? Or Anya’s giggle? Or Leo’s last heartbreaking smile?

Nina stared at the woman who had raised her and saw the truth at last.

Her mother was a lioness. A warrior. A woman who’d chosen a life of hell for herself because she wanted to give up and didn’t know how.

And with that small understanding came another, bigger one. Nina suddenly saw her own life in focus. All these years, she’d been traveling the world over, looking for her own truth in other women’s lives.

But it was here all along, at home, with the one woman she’d never even tried to understand. No wonder Nina had never felt finished, never wanted to publish her photographs of the women. Her quest had always been leading up to this moment, this understanding. She’d been hiding behind the camera, looking through glass, trying to find herself. But how could she? How could any woman know her own story until she knew her mother’s?

“They take me prisoner instead,” Mom said, still staring out the window.

Nina almost frowned. To her, it felt as if half an hour had passed since Mom’s last sentence and this one, but really it had been only minutes. Minutes in which Nina had glimpsed the truth of her own life.

“Prisoner,” Mom muttered, shaking her head. “I try to die. Try . . . Always I am too weak to kill myself. . . .” She turned away from the window at last, looked at them. “Your father was one of the American soldiers who liberated the work camp. We were in Germany by then. It was the end of the war. Years later. The first time he spoke to me, I was not even paying attention; I was thinking that if I’d been stronger, my children would have been with me on this day when the camp gates opened, and so when Evan asked me my name, I whispered, Anya. I could have taken it back later, but I liked hearing her name every time someone spoke to me. It hurt me, and I welcomed the pain. It was the least of what I deserved. I went with your father—married him—because I wanted to be gone, and he was the only way I had to leave. I never really expected to start over—I was so sick. I expected, hoped, to die. But I did not. And, well . . . how can you not love Evan? There. That is it. Now you know.” She reached down for her purse and picked it up, swaying slightly, as if balance were something she had lost in the telling of her story, and started for the door.

Nina was on her feet in an instant. She and Meredith moved in tandem without a word or a look. They bookended Mom, each taking hold of one arm.

At their touch, Mom seemed to stumble harder, almost fall. “You shouldn’t—”

“No more telling us what to feel, Mom,” Nina said soft ly.

“No more pushing us away,” Meredith said, touching Mom’s face, caressing her cheek. “You’ve lost so much.”

Mom made a sound, a little gulp.

“Not us, though,” Nina said, feeling tears sting her eyes. “You’ll never lose us.”

Mom’s legs gave out on her. She started to fold like a broken tent, but Nina and Meredith were there, holding her upright. They got Mom back to her chair.

Then they knelt on the floor in front of her, looking up, just as they’d done so often in their lives. But now the story was over, or mostly told, and from here on, it would be a different story anyway. From now on, it would be their story.

For all of her life, when Nina had looked at her mother’s beautiful face, she’d seen sharp bones and hard eyes and a mouth that never smiled.

Now Nina saw past that. The hard lines were fought for, imposed; a mask over the soft ness that lay beneath.

“You should hate me,” Mom said, shaking her head.

Meredith lift ed up just enough to put her hands on Mom’s. “We love you.”

Mom shuddered, as if an icy wind had just blown past. Tears filled her eyes, and at the sight of them—the first tears Nina had ever seen in her mother’s eyes—Nina felt her own tears welling.

“I miss them so much,” Mom said, and then she was crying. How long had she held back that simple sentence by force of will, and how must it feel to finally say it?

I miss them.

A few little words.

Everything.

Nina and Meredith rose again, folding Mom into their arms, letting her cry.

Nina learned the feel of her mother then, and realized how much she’d missed by never being held by this remarkable woman.

When Mom finally drew back, her face was ravaged by tears, her hair was askew, and strands were falling across her red-rimmed watery eyes, but she had never looked more beautiful. She was smiling. She put a hand on each of their faces. “Moya dusha,” she said quietly to each of them.

At Vasily’s bedside, Maksim rose and cleared his throat, reminding them that they weren’t alone.

“That is one of the most amazing accounts of the siege of Leningrad I’ve ever heard,” he said, taking the tape from the machine. “Stalin kept the lid on it for so long that stories like yours are only lately beginning to surface. This will make a real difference to people, Mrs. Whitson.”

“It was for my daughters,” Mom said, straightening again.

Nina watched her mother strengthen and she wondered suddenly if all of the Leningrad survivors knew how to harden themselves like that. She supposed so.

“Numbers are difficult, of course, coming out of the government, but conservatively, over one million people died in the siege. More than seven hundred thousand starved to death. You tell their story, too. Thank you.” Maksim started to say something else, but Vasily made a croaking, chirping sound in the bed.

Maksim leaned closer to his father, frowning. “What?” He leaned even closer. “I don’t understand. . . .”

“Thank you,” Nina said quietly to her mother.

Mom leaned forward, kissed her cheek. “My Ninotchka,” she whispered. “Thank you. You were the one who wouldn’t let go.”

Nina should have felt pride at that, especially when she saw Meredith nodding in agreement, but it hurt instead. “I was only thinking about me. As usual. I wanted your story, so I made you talk. I never once worried about how much it could hurt you.”

Mom’s smile lit up her still-damp eyes. “This is why you matter to the world, Ninotchka. I should have told you this long ago, but I let your father be both our voices. It is yet another of my wrong choices. You shine a light on hard times. This is what your pictures do. You do not let people look away from that which hurts. I am so, so proud of what you do. You saved us.”

“You did,” Meredith agreed. “I would have stopped her story. You got us here.”

Nina didn’t know until then how a word like proud could rock your world, but it rocked hers, and she understood love in a way she hadn’t before, the all-consuming way of it.

She knew it would change her life, this understanding of love; she couldn’t imagine living without it—without them—again. And she knew, too, that there was more love out there for her, waiting in Atlanta, if only she knew how to reach for it. Maybe tomorrow she would send a telegram, say, What if I said I didn’t want to go to Atlanta? What if I said I wanted a different life than that, a different life than everyone else’s, but I wanted it with you? Would you follow me? Would you stay? What if I said I loved you?

But that would be tomorrow.

“How will I go again?” she said, looking at Meredith and her mom. “How can I leave you both?”

“We don’t need to be together to be together,” Meredith said.

“Your work is who you are,” Mom said. “Love makes room for that. You will just come home more, I hope.”

While Nina was trying to figure out what to say to that, Maksim said, “I’m sorry to be rude, but my father is not feeling well.”

Mom pulled away from Meredith and Nina and went to the bed.

Nina followed.

Mom stared down at Vasily, his face left lopsided by the stroke; there were tears on his temples and water stained the pillow where they’d fallen. She reached down and touched his face, saying something in Russian.

Nina saw him try to smile and before she knew it, she was thinking of her father. She closed her eyes in prayer for perhaps the first time in her life. Or maybe it wasn’t a prayer. Actually, she just thought, Thanks, Daddy, and let it go at that. The rest of it, he knew. He’d been listening.

“Here,” Maksim said, his frown deepening as he offered Mom a stack of black cassette tapes. “I’m pretty sure he wants you to deliver these to his former student. Phillip Kiselev hasn’t worked on this project in years, but he has a lot of the original material. And he’s not far from here. Just across the water in Sitka.”

“Sitka?” Mom said. “We’ve already been there. The boat won’t be going back.”

“Actually,” Meredith said, looking at her watch. “The boat left Juneau forty minutes ago. It will be at sea all day tomorrow.”

Vasily made a sound. Nina could tell that he was agitated and frustrated by his inability to make himself understood.

“Can he not mail the tapes?” Mom said, and Nina wondered if her mother was afraid to touch them.

“Phillip was his right hand for years in this research. His mother and my father knew each other in Minsk.”

Nina looked down at Vasily and thought again of her father and how a little thing could mean so much. “Of course we’ll deliver the tapes,” she said. “We’ll go right now. And we’ll have plenty of time to catch up with the boat in Skagway.”

Meredith took the stack of tapes and the piece of paper with the address on it. “Thank you, Dr. Adamovich. And Maksim.”

“No,” Maksim said solemnly. “Thank you. I am honored to have met you, Veronika Petrovna Marchenko Whitson.”

Mom nodded. She glanced briefly at the stack of black tapes in Meredith’s hands and then leaned down to whisper something in Vasily’s ear. When she drew back, the old man’s eyes were wet. He was trying to smile.

Nina took Mom’s arm and led her to the door. By the time they reached the front door, Meredith was at Mom’s other side. They emerged three abreast, linked together, into the pale blue light of a late spring day. The rain had stopped, leaving in its wake a world of sparkling, glittering possibility.

They arrived in Sitka at seven-thirty.

“I could be in Los Angeles by now,” Nina said as she followed Meredith out of the plane.

“For a world traveler, you complain a lot,” Meredith said, leading the way up the dock.

“Remember when she was little?” Mom said to Meredith. “If her socks were wrinkled inside her shoes, she’d just sit down and scream. And if I put too much ketchup on her eggs—or not enough—out would come the lip.”

“That is so not true,” Nina said. “I was the good daughter. You’re thinking of Meredith. Remember that fit she threw when you wouldn’t let her go to Karie Dovre’s slumber party?”

“It was nothing compared to the way you made us all pay when Mom didn’t wave good-bye to you before that soft ball tournament,” Meredith said.

Nina stopped in the middle of the dock and looked at Mom. “It was the train,” she said. “You couldn’t put me on a train and watch it go, could you?”

“I tried to be strong enough,” Mom said quietly. “I just couldn’t watch . . . that. I knew it hurt you, too. I’m sorry.”

Meredith knew that there would be dozens of moments like this between them. Now that they’d begun the reparation process, memories would have to be constantly reinterpreted. Like the day she’d dug up Mom’s precious winter garden. It was as if she’d pulled up headstones and thrown them aside. No wonder Mom had gone a little crazy. And no wonder winters had always been difficult.

And the play. Meredith saw it all through the prism of her new understanding. Of course Mom had stopped them from going forward. She and Jeff had been blithely acting out Mom’s love story. . . . The pain of that must have been awful.

“No more apologies,” Meredith said. “Let’s just say it now—once—we’re sorry for all the times we hurt each other because we didn’t understand. Then we’ll let it go. Okay?” She looked at her mom, who nodded, and then at Nina, who nodded, too.

They walked into Sitka and found rooms at a small bed-and-breakfast at the edge of town. From their decks, they could look out over the placid bay, to the green humps of the nearby islands, and all the way to the snowy peak of Mount Edgecumbe. While Nina took a shower, Meredith sat out on the deck, with her feet up on the railing. A lone eagle circled effortlessly above the water, its dark wingspan a sliver coiling around and around above the midnight-blue water.

Meredith closed her eyes and leaned back in her chair. As had been true all day, her mind was a jumble of thoughts and memories and realizations. She was reassessing her childhood, taking the pieces apart, reexamining them in light of her new understanding of her mother. Strangely, the strength she now saw in her mother was becoming a part of Meredith, too. Jeff’s comment, You’re like her, you know, took on a new significance, gave Meredith a new confidence. If there was one thing she’d learned in all of this, it was that life—and love—can be gone any second. When you had it, you needed to hang on with all your strength and savor every second.