“‘Ksenia—’ he started to say, but I would hear no more.
“‘Father Matvei, if I did as you ask, if I dared address you in this way, even once, it would be an unforgiveable transgression. To elevate myself to your level, or bring you down to mine, would be a vulgar vanity. Please forgive me.’”
Galina covered her mouth, trying to stifle the yawn that would no longer be suppressed. Is that all? she wanted to say. Are we not all equal before God? Only you would make so much of this chastity of spirit, this earthly protocol. “Were you tempted, though?” she asked instead.
Ksenia looked out the window at the barren yard, her knitting loose in her lap. A pair of trees swayed almost imperceptibly in the faint breeze, their bare limbs studded with buds, refusing to be fooled by the caressing sun into untimely bloom. Birds flitted about, engaged in the urgent business of their own survival. Finally, she spoke.
“There was an instant, when we parted, of hesitation. Later, sleepless, I thought, Why not? What difference would it make to anyone if I did this simple, harmless thing that might touch a man’s troubled soul with a spark of joy? I knew his matushka, of course, the small kerchiefed priest’s wife who sang the responses and read the prayers during services, but I knew nothing about his life.”
She picked up the knitting and worked a few stitches, then put it down again, stroking the half-finished garment with the palm of her hand. “But it does matter. We are not all the same. Even with the new forms of address—comrade this and citizen that—some get more than others: better apartments, more rations, travel permits. If we give in, if we strip away all the conventions of order and respect, then they, the Communists, will have defeated us. We will be nothing but cogs in their new social order, keeping the machinery working for the benefit of a few thugs at the top. We’ll be a nation of serfs again, faceless, nameless, and poor.”
She worked to the end of the row, turned the piece, and gave a quiet, bemused laugh. “What am I saying? I care nothing for politics. These thoughts came to me later, after Father Matvei was gone. They did come for him, within the week. He had not asked me to commit a political act, to play along with the new fashion of equalization. He wanted a moment of intimacy, a clean, brief heart-to-heart connection. T’y. Such a simple word, meaning nothing and everything. I could not do it, Galya. Not then, and probably not now. Do you see?”
Galina, her face pillowed on one arm, mouth slightly open, slept.
3
AND STILL IT RAINED.
How many days now? Four? Six? It hardly mattered. In the rough camp of tented blankets and fallen-branch lean-tos, no spot sheltered enough for a cooking fire remained, or the wood dry enough to light one. The refugees huddled in morose silence, waiting, gnawing raw potatoes, swallowing moldy bread, if they had any.
They were on their own. The war was over, the Nazi labor camps plundered and closed down. Somewhere, victorious Allied commanders were deciding who would rule which piece of Germany, rolling out maps and plans, shifting the now destitute homeless workers about like pawns on a cratered chessboard.
Galina and Marfa found each other again purely by chance. When their eyes locked across a sea of faces, they rushed forward, embraced in joyful silence followed by a torrent of words. How are you? Where did you go? Where are you going? Let me see your baby.
Now they sat, their bodies touching to conserve warmth, each holding her wrapped infant close to her own skin. The babies, miraculously, slept.
“The heavens weep,” Marfa said, “for our sins and misdeeds.”
“Our sins? What could we possibly have done to deserve this endless rain? And what kind of God would drown the innocent along with the sinners?” Under the tented blanket, Galina moved slightly, out of the line of droplets dripping rapidly onto her neck. “You, for instance. How can you be to blame for anything that happened?”
“I was not unwilling. He said he needed me, he would help me. He called me lovely. Can you imagine? I believed. I wanted to believe.”
Marfa lifted her head. Galina looked at her heart-shaped face, with its pointed chin, small close-set eyes, and wide mouth, framed with brittle unruly hair the color of flaking rust. Lovely? More like a cruel joke, nature at play, falling just short of sketching in her features in pleasing proportions. Her character, too, that self-effacing meekness that worked against her, provoking, if she was noticed at all, a kind of fury that led to abuse from men. Marfa had told her how her own widowed father could not help browbeating her, while also enjoying the domestic labor of her hands; neither, it seemed, could the aging Fascist who had fathered her child.
“You were deceived! And anyway, you said he was a high-ranking officer, used to command, older and stronger than you. He didn’t have to wait for you to make up your mind. You in his rooms all the time, cleaning, serving his food. It was only a matter of time. The sin is on his head, not yours.”
Galina fell silent, her head troubled with memories. If she had worked for Franz, if she had washed his shirts and cooked his meals, the way Marfa had served her officer, how would her life have turned out? How brave she had been, and how foolish. Walking away from him and his marriage proposal, trusting that he would not pursue, not insist, not shoot her down right there in the street. And knowing, in her heart of hearts, that she, too, could have been “willing.” She shuddered, not from the cold and damp but from the burden of her secret, the tinge of guilt that lay like a shadow, light but undeniable, across her soul. Unlike Marfa, she had not succumbed, and yet… You are right; we are all sinners, she thought, and squeezed her friend’s hand.
“At least you have a husband. Your Katya has a father, somewhere. My Tolik, my own little boy, he is a…” Marfa hesitated, unable to say the word. “He is alone in the world.”
“He has us.” Ksenia declared, opening the sodden flap that served as a door to their shelter. “As long as we stay together.” She sat down heavily on the trampled grass. “I have bread, and news.”
She produced the quarter loaf she had kept nearly dry beneath her sweater, tore it in uneven thirds, handed the young women the larger share. “We can’t stay here,” she began, leaning in to keep the rain from running down her back. “The locals are impatient to have us gone, and who can blame them? They have enough on their hands without having to deal with bands of impoverished vagrants. Food is short. Destruction is everywhere—”
“Yes, yes, Mama,” Galina cut in. “We know. But where can we go? Three women with two babies, wearing nothing but these soggy clothes and carrying a few shabby things, our men who knows where.”
As if on cue, both infants woke and wailed while thunder rolled like punctuation in the distance; the lightning that followed lit the circle of worried faces, then plunged them back into the dusk.
“I heard there would be refugee camps,” Marfa’s thin, high voice offered. She ducked her head as if she had spoken out of turn in class.
“Where did you hear this?” Galina demanded. “You didn’t tell me.”
“Some women talking.” She busied herself with the baby at her breast, stroking his cheek, pulling her sweater close around his shivering body.
“It’s true,” Ksenia nodded. “They’re calling us DPs now—displaced persons. The British and Americans—the French, too, I heard—are dividing Germany into zones and setting up processing centers.”