Snow in May: Stories (10 page)

Olya found much to like about Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. Yes, its streets and squares were not as wide and lush with trees as those of Stavropol. Even the standard five-story
khrushchyovkas
seemed lower than back home, huddled together in tight neighborhoods to take cover from the long winter’s callous wind. Yet she felt invigorated and alive in a city surrounded by active volcanoes. Anywhere she looked, she saw their pyramidal outlines in scarves of clouds, white and mystical against the blue sky. During her first earthquake, the ceiling lamp swung wildly and the teacups tumbled from the table. Alek had warned her that mild earthquakes happened about once every three months, and after that first one Olya was thrilled like a rookie sailor after his first big storm. Nothing this exciting ever happened in Stavropol.

Alek came back from flights to inspect the radio towers in the mountains full of admiration for Kamchatka’s nature. Such beauty! Such romance! He told her about the Uzon Caldera, the site of a giant extinct volcano. The hollow, surrounded by steep walls, was a veritable museum of Kamchatka, with poisonous mud cauldrons, hot springs, and bogs. Enormous bears bathed in the cold rivers and swans honked near the small, warm lakes. One time, as a very special present, Alek snuck Olya with him on one of these trips. It was strictly forbidden for civilians, but the commander of the helicopter owed him a big favor, Alek had said. When Olya saw from the air the famous Maly Semyachik, she held her breath and thought of her sisters. On the one hand, she felt guilty that they couldn’t see the crater, with its black beach and the unimaginably bright, sometimes turquoise, sometimes green acid lake. They had never even been off the ground. On the other hand, she was vigilantly possessive of her new experiences. Maybe that made her a bad person—a selfish Soviet citizen in the eyes of Zoya—but now that Olya was married, she wanted to be the first in everything, she wanted every sensation for herself. Her soul, dislocated from its warm nest, had become a more sensitive instrument. Back in town, she would pick up on a deep underwater humming whenever she approached the bay. She felt it churn the blood in her veins, raising her body temperature and levels of optimism. She thought it was the surge of adrenaline due to the rapid changes in her life: the pregnancy, the marriage, the new city. Decades later, after declassification, she would find out that Russia’s largest atomic submarine base had been just across the bay.

Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky’s seasonal capitulation was sudden and intense. The surrounding tundra burned with scarlet until October, and the birch forests stood drenched in gold. The temperature dropped overnight. On her way to the grocery store in the mornings, Olya could hear the hoar-frosted leaves falling with a jingle. The gusting wind brought the scent of sea and winter. First snow fell in early November.

In the first few months of marriage Olya learned the following about Alek. One: his father had died on the last day of the war. His mother, doubting she could raise two boys by herself, had sent Alek and his brother to the Stavropol branch of the Suvorov Military School, not uncommon for so many fatherless boys of the postwar years. Two: as long as there was hot dinner on the table and a pack of Belomorkanal cigarettes on the bureau, Alek was content. And three: he loved to play
preferans,
which his mother had taught him on his breaks from the military school. One of his card buddies was the helicopter commander who had flown Olya over Maly Semyachik.

When Alek won, he came home cheerfully tipsy, with presents for Olya—usually chocolate bars with white, blotchy coating from the canteen on base. He gave her all his winnings, danced her around their little room, and felled her on their little bed. His veiny hands hovered centimeters above her swollen stomach, then slid between her legs. His eyes filled with glassy determination. His paltry mustache tickled her unpleasantly, and she kept whispering, “Not so loud, just not so loud, please. Vasily Petrovich will hear.”

After Alek fell asleep, she crashed back into her sore body. She must not have been in love just yet. But she would be soon, when the baby came—at the latest. It was hard to think of either Dasha or Zoya doing this with a man, and even more impossible and revolting to imagine them enjoying it. And yet she couldn’t stop thinking about it. She was scared for them to find out the truth on their own and blame her for not warning them.

If Alek came home with a short smile and headed right for the kitchen, Olya knew that he’d lost. He smoked in the dark, without taking off his overcoat. He didn’t look up at her even when she held his head against her round stomach—which, she knew, he didn’t like touching—and stroked his black, wavy hair. She felt disappointment but also a kind of power in his guilt. She assumed that Alek would either quit when the losses became too big, or go on losing a little and winning a lot. She didn’t mention his gambling to her family. It seemed unpleasant but manageable, like the flu. Besides, what could they do? She was already up to her elbows in marriage. Aside from the cards, it was hard to pick on Alek. He hadn’t cheated or raised his hand to her. Not when he was sober, not when he was drunk. Not even after a loss. A gambler but an officer nevertheless.

Every few weeks Olya received a thick envelope from home. Her mother’s letters were full of recipes and stories from Olya’s childhood, stories Olya had heard a hundred times before. Her stepfather wrote about the vegetables he and her sisters were planning to plant on the plots. Dasha’s pages about the new school year, her last one, were streaked with tears. She already missed her classmates and she missed Olya even more. From Zoya, Olya expected lecturing. Instead Zoya sent proverbs.

To marry is not to put on a bast shoe. Bride has an axe, groom is barefoot
.

Olya didn’t know what to make of it, though she didn’t think about it too hard. Her pregnancy was going well. She felt strong; she could haul water from the pump by herself when Alek and his soldiers were gone on training assignment or to inspect and repair the radio towers.

The winter dragged along. After the first blinding snowstorm in December, she understood the purpose of the ropes that had appeared stretched between buildings at certain strategic crossings. You couldn’t make any progress in the sudden whiteout without holding on to something solid, a wall or a rope. You could freeze to death meters from home. There were days in the perpetual twilight of January and February when Olya didn’t leave their room at all, relying on Alek’s soldiers for sustenance, water, and wood. She had her own small army to take care of her, she wrote in her letters. Alek, too, stayed home more often, his passion for cards having gone into winter hibernation. Some snowy evenings, Olya looked away from her knitting of baby socks and watched contentedly as he read a newspaper in the yellow glow of the floor lamp, his brows drawn in concentration but his mouth bunched to one side in a smirk, as though, as entertained as he was by all the lies, he could see through to the truth. One day she might even admire him, she thought—when he rose through the ranks and stopped gambling. One day.

The baby was born in mid-April. The labor was short and easy, the only thing that came easy to her, Olya would say in the years to come. The girl—they named her Marina—had eyes of indeterminate color, chipmunk cheeks, and a full head of chestnut hair. Olya spent hours staring at her small face, hardly believing that Marina was real and hers. Sometimes, she wondered what her child with Kostya might have looked like, but the only image that rose in her exhausted mind was that of her new daughter.

In a recent letter from home, Olya was shocked to learn of the romantic developments in both of her sisters’ lives. Zoya was seeing a Party functionary fifteen years her senior, her mother wrote with palpable glee. Dasha, meanwhile, confessed on her own that she’d met an engineering student. They had danced at the Palace of Youth and gone on long walks around the melting city together. She wrote with so little of her habitual shyness about how much she adored her suitor that Olya became suspicious. Her little sister was changing in her absence. She tried hard to be happy for Dasha and Zoya, and for her mother.

Husband with fire, wife with water,
Zoya wrote in her letter without mentioning her new boyfriend.

*   *   *

One rainy Saturday night in May, Alek stumbled home late from a card game, the drunkest Olya had ever seen him. Marina had been screaming for hours, and Olya, in her delirium, was ready to throw the baby out the window. Her arms were sore. Her headache had wiped out all the emotions besides anger and frustration. Vasily Petrovich, the army doctor, had already come twice to their room to complain about the noise and attempted to calm the baby. Marina’s silky face was scrunched like a soiled handkerchief as she continued to screech.

Alek took several uncertain steps toward Olya. The corners of his eyes still flickered with his usual impishness, but the pupils were black holes of fear. He stretched his arms to the baby, and Marina stopped crying. Olya gave the stunned baby to her father. Alek and Marina stared at each other for a moment, as if confused who the other one was and what had brought them to this cramped, cold room. Then Alek began to cry, soundlessly but with a boyish abandon. His daughter resumed wailing. He returned her to Olya and shuffled to their lumpy little couch, where he continued to cry with his eyes closed. Soon he passed out in his coat.

Olya worried all night. Had his mother died? Was another war about to begin?

She found out in the morning. Several exceptionally good players, new to the group, had ganged up to squeeze Alek down to the last ruble. A month’s salary in one night.

“I don’t understand. What are we going to live on? And the baby.” It was both a relief and worse than she thought.

Alek was sitting at the table in their room, eating a piece of buttered black bread with tea. His hair was dirty and matted.

“I’ll quit as soon as I pay off my debt,” he said, not looking at her.

“And what are we going to live on, Alek?” Olya heard herself say again. “Meanwhile.”

“They can’t just come over here and raid your wallet. Although, they’re such dogs, they could. We’ll hide it under the mattress in Marina’s crib.”

“I don’t keep our savings in my wallet.”

“We have savings? Where?”

“In the birch-bark box, in the bureau,” Olya said. His cluelessness shocked her. But she was also moved by his neediness, his complete, childish trust in her.

“How much?” Alek said into his tea.

“For food, another two weeks, maybe. Please don’t play anymore. Or maybe without betting so much. Can you?” She put her arms around him from behind, like a good wife would do.

Alek turned back, clasped her hips, and pressed his head to her stomach, which he was no longer afraid of.

“Such a shame,” he said through his teeth. “I’m a good player, I am. If my mother found out…”

One less girl, one more broad
.

“Are you deranged? You can’t bet on winning. You’re an officer, for God’s sake. You’re educated. How can you be so stupid? If you don’t stop playing, I’ll leave you. I’ll take Marina and go.”

“I’m doing this for Marina and you.”

She slammed the table with her fist. Alek’s cup of tea jingled in its saucer. He lifted his head and stretched his lips, as though getting ready to smile. Did he think this was a joke? She struck the table again; she didn’t know what else to do. Marina began to cry and Olya ran to her. Alek followed and stood close without touching either Olya or the baby. The smell of alcohol and cigarettes and acrid male sweat was making her sick. She was afraid he wanted to sleep with her.

“Wash yourself,” she said.

“We don’t have any water.”

“Bring it then!” The echo of Zoya’s righteousness in her voice made her shudder, but the results were swift. In a few moments Alek was clunking with the buckets in the kitchen. Before going out to the pump, he came up to her.

“I will stop, Olya, I promise. I promise this time,” he repeated until she told him not to talk to her for the rest of the day.

She cleaned up the dirt in the hallway while Alek heated up the water and splashed in the bathroom. She wished she could complain to someone. She knew that her mother, despite teaching her girls to count only on themselves, was relieved that Olya got married. One less mouth to feed, one less body to clothe. A village girl, she had married Olya’s father at sixteen and found out at the civil registry office on their wedding day that he was twenty-five years her senior, when she saw his passport for the first time. She had said nothing. She was grateful to him for pulling her out of the peasants and into the intelligentsia. Olya wished that they could have talked heart to heart about those early days of her mother’s marriage—and about everything. Her mother had worked around the clock when the girls were growing up and never had time for much more than a good thrashing or an occasional saying. One of her favorites was:
Live with your husband for a century but never show your backside
. But how could she not? Olya was at a loss. She wanted to be a good and honest wife.

She couldn’t disappoint Dasha, she couldn’t spoil her new romance with the engineer. As for Zoya: her voice with the proverbs was running through Olya’s head almost nonstop.
A wife is not a gusli; you can’t hang her up on the wall after playing.

That day, in self-imposed penance, Alek washed the dishes and changed Marina’s diaper for the first time in Marina’s life.

*   *   *

Nothing changed. Alek kept playing and losing. He came home drunk; often he didn’t make it to the bed. He didn’t defend himself when Olya yelled. He didn’t complain or hit her back when she came at him first with her fists, then with pots and pans or anything else within her reach, and he no longer promised to quit. She was ashamed when Vasily Petrovich caught them fighting in the kitchen or in the bathroom. Zoya’s proverbs crawled, like roaches, out of the cracks in the walls, from the corners of the cupboards and the holes in their socks, from the cold bubbles in Olya’s dishwater, screeching their nonsense. Couldn’t anyone else hear them?
The thread follows the needle. The thread follows the needle
.
The thread follows the needle.