“Do you girls need anything?” he asked. His hair was slick and resolute, like the rest of him.
I looked around the compartment, with everyone rustling about and trying to unpack and create some order to face this unknowable day and the ones that would come after it. We were as beaten down and sunless as mushrooms stocked away deep in a forest.
“What more could we need?” I said, and this got him to smile.
“Of course,” he said, giving me a nod as he walked toward his father and Uncle Nikita. “Well, you know where to find me.”
The boy was more handsome than his father, but he had the same imposing nose and broad shoulders; I could see him one day manning a factory, a tank, a platoon. Our situation had hardened his jaw and he was even more appealing under duress. And now he was hoping the men would let him into the adult sphere as they conferenced about the bombs falling on Leningrad, speculating that the worst would come for the city once winter set in because the Germans had surrounded it; even if its people didn’t run out of food, they could freeze to death.
When he was just out of earshot, my sister batted her eyes at me and lowered her voice. “Do you need anything?” she said, imitating Misha in a husky voice and giggling at herself. She had teased me about Misha before, but I did not mind it until that moment. Normally, I enjoyed the flattery, even if I did not quite believe her. Not many boys had paid attention to me the way they did to Polya and it did not hurt to have it pointed out. But her joking around just then was downright inappropriate.
“Shut up, idiotic girl,” I said. “He was just trying to help.”
“Are you kidding? Misha is so in love with you. Now more than ever,” she said.
“Who can think of love at a time like this?” I said, smacking her scrawny arm harder than I intended. “Silly girl, we could die any minute, and here you have your head in the clouds.”
Her bottom lip trembled and I braced myself for the floodgates to open, but they did not. “I have to keep busy somehow, don’t I?”
“Read a book,” I told her, and then I reached into my bag and pulled out The Idiot, perhaps to justify hefting such a heavy tome to the mountains.
But she did not ask to borrow a book. She just crossed her arms and pouted for an impressively long time. She let me see her hurting, just to punish me. Eventually, she joined our grandmother, who was fanning her face and muttering, “This will not do, this will not do….”
Polya put her arm around her and said, “We’ll be fine, Baba, you’ll see.” It was strange to see my sister in the caretaking position, but perhaps that was why she liked being with my grandmother instead of me, feeling like the stronger one under these circumstances.
While those two carried on, Bogdan monkeyed around with little Yaroslava, for whom he always had a certain fondness.
“Of course dogs can marry cats,” he told her. “Where do you think rabbits come from? They’re as soft and fluffy as cats and as fast as dogs, naturally. It’s science, silly girl.”
“But who do rabbits marry? Do they marry each other?” the clever girl asked.
“Almost never,” Bogdan replied solemnly.
Aunt Yulia was amused by his antics but pretended not to be. “Don’t let him fill your head with nonsense,” she told her daughter, who only giggled in response and turned back to her dubious mentor.
When the fathers were done conferencing, Misha patrolled the aisles, attempting to look helpful. When he could not find a function for himself, he stood at the window and watched the landscape for what seemed like eternity without even a twitch in his jaw, impressing me once more with his stillness. Mama and Papa returned eventually and crawled straight into bed though the sun had hardly had a chance to sink below the horizon.
The train traversed the distant land, which was far more remote than the fields surrounding the Orlovs’ immense dacha on the outskirts of the city. I watched the wan grass, the occasional cracked huts, the thin-looking cows wandering here and there munching at the grass, the horses swinging their wild ancient tails.
Baba Tonya had fallen asleep and Polya returned to my side. She seemed to have forgotten our earlier fight and was only tired and frightened. Her stomach growled as she moved closer to me, tugging on my sleeve.
“I’m scared, Lara,” she said, chewing on a strand of fiery hair.
“Well,” I snapped. “Don’t be!”
But this did not ward her off. She studied the dark fields as if they contained the answers she wanted. “What do you think will happen to us—out there?”
A tear fell down her pink, round cheek. I almost felt sorry for the girl. There were no suitors to ogle her here, and our parents were too busy to lavish upon her the praise and love she expected. Her other joy was hearing our grandmother’s stories of soirees, and the old woman was too distraught to offer those. And her formerly gorgeous red hair was greasy and wilted. I considered noting that we were less likely to get blasted to pieces if we got the hell out of Kiev, but I didn’t want to make her cry over her friends again.
“We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?” I said, patting her hand.
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“This isn’t about what you like and don’t like.”
I noticed something strange on the landscape, which I mistook for planks of wood and then understood were suitcases, strewn about without reason. Was it a sign people had been carted away and forced to leave their things behind—or had they decided to drop them because they were too heavy to carry?
My sister was sniffling beside me, and it was a sad sight to behold. I wiped the snot under her nose with the back of my hand. Across from us, the Orlov brothers rested facing the wall. The backs of their dark heads were identical from that particular angle, there was no telling who was who.
“Fine, fine, Misha might have a crush on me, are you happy now?”
She smiled the smile of a flatulent baby. “I knew it.”
I shook my head at this ridiculous notion, but I allowed her this small victory.
“Come on, now, let’s go to sleep,” I said, and she rested beside me.
I wondered: was it true? Did Misha have any feelings for me, or was he just trying to help in a time of crisis? As I observed Misha’s sleeping form rising and falling across from me, I tried to tell myself that our destination would not be completely bleak, because he would be there. Being near him during our evacuation and resettlement tinged the uncertain future with an aura of romance. It would be a thrilling adventure, not a descent into chaos. There would be an entire steppe just for me and Misha, whispering sweet nothings across a snowy divide.
When Bogdan sat beside me in the middle of the night, I was surprised but not annoyed. Hunger had gnawed away at all of us just a few days into our trip—our extra bread and honey and Aunt Mila and Uncle Igor’s marmalades were long gone—and I would take any distraction that I could get. Everyone else was sound asleep except for us. I was wide-awake, sitting on my bed and staring out the window, fogging up the glass with my breath. I was hungry and hot, already feeling filthy, and there was no chance my body would relax. I was a poor sleeper in general, finding one thing or another to worry about long before the war began. Would I pass the chemistry test? Why was Anna so harshly punished for her love of Vronsky? Would I ever find such a love? Would Papa keel over from helping all those strangers? There was no relief from the onslaught.