Snow in May: Stories (9 page)

Zoya laughed when she heard of the proposal.

“He can’t be serious about this,” she said. “He hardly knows you.”

“So what? A man can’t fall in love with me at first sight?”

“A boy. You don’t know him at all.”

Olya had known Kostya well, and where did that get her?

So she considered ending it all.

She could cut her wrists, she thought now as she put on her sandals. A slow and painful way to go. That bastard Kostya wasn’t worthy of so much suffering. She could jump off a building. It would have to be high enough so that she perished instantaneously. Life as an unmarriageable invalid was even worse than death.

She could hang herself, but she’d have to rummage in the closet for a rope or a belt, which would wake everyone up. It would certainly wake Dasha. Dasha thought Alek’s proposal was romantic. Poor Dashen’ka, she would never get over her death. Eventually the news would reach Kostya in Odessa. He probably would be too busy with his new wife to give poor, dead Olya a second thought. Such a possibility set off another wave of self-pity.

Olya knew she shouldn’t grumble at her personal circumstances. The war had ended only thirteen years ago, and everyone still incanted: “Anything but the war, anything but the war.” And her current life could hardly be compared to her parents’ life before the war, at the height of the Terror and famine. Her mother was accused of stealing a loaf of bread from the grocery store where she worked. For this, she was arrested and sent to a work colony in Turkmenistan, where Olya and Dasha would be born. Her father, who had worked at the Anti-Plague Institute as a medical researcher in charge of developing vaccines, was accused of spying for the Japanese. He was tortured, his nails peeled off to the all-deafening accompaniment of a song from the film
The Children of Captain Grant:
“Captain, captain, smile! For a smile is the flag of the ship!” After several years in the Gulag, he returned home a sick and broken man. Throughout childhood, when Olya and her sisters would, in their ignorance, break into the ever-popular song at home, their father would pale, and their mother would scream at them to stop. She didn’t explain why until each girl turned eighteen, and then only in a whisper and after swearing them to secrecy. Dasha still didn’t know. Their father lived for another four years.

Stalin was dead now; food was almost plentiful. People had finally taken a deep breath.

But Olya had had enough of such reasoning.

She found a flashlight and picked up a cloth bag with cut-up newspapers kept by the door for trips to the outhouse. Two flights of stairs later, she plunged into the warm cocoon of the summer night. Her own building was too low for a fatal jump. The almost full butter-yellow moon hung in the sky like a giant river pearl. It seemed to her she could smell a hundred different flowers—most ardently, jasmine. Two opposite windows were lit up on the dark faces of the ancient
izbas
. Perhaps secret lovers had stayed up all night to relay messages via curtain Morse code, Olya mused, though she knew that those windows belonged to two querulous old hags. Either way, it was a night for secret rendezvous with one’s sweetheart, for kissing so long you didn’t need red lipstick, for not being able to fall asleep. Not suicides. In her small, crowded home she felt forsaken.

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.

One night, a month into her sojourn in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Olya woke up in alarm. She had distinctly felt something scurry over her pregnant belly. She jumped off the bed and turned on the lights just in time to see two rats rounding the corner.

“Alek!” she screamed. “Rats!”

“What! Who’s there?”

“A rat just ran over your future child. We have to move out of here. You have to talk to someone about this first thing in the morning.”

Alek made a sour face. “I’m still new here.”

“What does that matter?”

“Well, unfortunately it’s my duty to put up with the inconveniences. I’m a soldier first and an officer second,” he said without conviction.

“Yes, that might be the soldier’s duty, but not his wife and child’s. There is no war going on. I didn’t follow you here like some—” She wanted to say “Gulag prisoner’s wife” but caught herself. It wasn’t safe to yell such things in the middle of the night, especially when the walls were thin enough for rats to chew through. “Like a Decembrist’s wife! Do you want your baby to be eaten by rats?”

Alek put his head in his hands and stayed like that for so long, Olya thought he’d gone back to sleep. He wore a holey undershirt, which she hadn’t yet mended, and, generally, did not look like a husband at all.

“Why don’t
you
talk to them?” Alek said through his hands, then looked up. “It will be more effective. They’ll take one look at you—your condition—and do anything you say.”

Olya went to the housing office the following morning and yelled at the director, a bald, glistening fellow in an ill-fitting uniform. She never did pay much attention to rank. He listened, leering at her thin shoulders, legs, ankles. He even grinned when Olya said she was afraid to go to bed at night because of the rats. She almost threw up in disgust after leaving his office.

A week later they were moved into a room in the two-room communal apartment with a shared kitchen. Their neighbor was an old army doctor, Vasily Petrovich, who kept to himself. This place was newer and had no rats, just cockroaches. It even had an indoor toilet, though no running water.

*   *   *

I love it here very much. It’s not for the weak of heart …
Olya described her new life in vivid detail in her letters home. She knew her mother would read them aloud over dinner, and she hoped her parents, overwhelmed by pride, and Zoya, dumbfounded by jealousy, would talk about her in the stores’ waiting lines and at the Komsomol meetings, and eventually the news would reach Odessa. She didn’t love Kostya anymore, but she wanted him to know that her life didn’t end when he left. On the contrary, it had only properly begun.