“Too scared to sleep?” Bogdan said, his lips twisting into a mean smile.
“Of course not,” I snapped. “Stalin will protect us from Hitler,” I added, pointlessly echoing something Papa said to calm us down. “There’s no reason to be scared.”
He snorted. “You think Hitler is worse than Stalin?” he said, lowering his voice. He scooted closer to me, so our knees were touching. “Stalin knew Hitler was coming for us months before he did, but he was too proud to prepare his army to fight him. He couldn’t believe his so-called ally would defy him. He felt so humiliated by this that he called any of his cronies who warned him traitors and had them shot. If it wasn’t for him, Kiev, Leningrad—we’d all be safe. And now if any soldier doesn’t want to walk into a German death trap, Stalin will have him shot and his family arrested. It’s ridiculous.”
“Be quiet with that kind of talk,” I said, lowering my voice even more. He could go to prison for the things he was saying. And even if everyone around us appeared to be sleeping, you never knew who was listening. “What would your father think?” I added.
He shrugged at his sleeping father. “He can’t hear me now, can he? Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin—all murderers and hypocrites. We just happened to be born under Stalin.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And that being the case, we must root for Stalin.”
He patted my hand as if I had missed the point completely. “And that’s just what we’re doing, darling.”
“As we should be,” I said, but my head was spinning. I considered myself a patriot, and knew it was idiotic to voice any doubts about our government. From my parents’ late-night whispers, I had the idea that they had found our leader less than perfect, but who wasn’t? My parents would never critique Stalin at a regular volume because you could not trust the phones, the wires, your neighbors, your colleagues, or anyone who wasn’t family. But what was this he was saying about Stalin, and where did it come from? He was taking it too far, much further than my parents ever had.
I wished I were sitting with the more serious, melancholy Misha instead of this rascal with slicked-back hair, who acted like a smug lord looking over the commoners. He had managed to dispel all the goodwill I had sent his way for playing with Yaroslava with this little speech. Besides, his favorite playmate had gotten sick the day before, so perhaps he was just bothering me out of boredom. Aunt Yulia was very worried, but Mama assured her it would pass, that the feverish child was just hungry, though I did not know exactly how it would pass when there seemed to be no hope of better food on the horizon. The girl rested in her parents’ laps, and her hair was damp and matted to her head.
“How do you know all this anyway?” I finally asked.
“I hear Papa talking, that’s how,” he said.
“And does your father—share your perspective?”
“Of course not,” he said. “You think you can learn everything from your books, but the only way to truly know the world is to hear what people are saying.”
“I don’t read to learn,” I said, uncertain as to how the conversation had turned from Stalin to literature. I would often bring novels to our families’ gatherings and would hide off in a corner to escape to my beloved pages. But I did not know Bogdan paid enough attention to see what I was doing.
“Oh?” he said, looking genuinely surprised. “Then why do you do it?”
“I like to read….” I said, realizing I did not have a good answer. I knew it had something to do with making me feel less lonely, to connect me to lost souls from generations ago, many of whom came from the same place, but this was difficult and embarrassing to articulate. I said, “Because language is beautiful, even when it’s ugly.”
If Bogdan expected me to say more on the subject, then he would be sorely disappointed. I could not entertain him the way the little girl had, and I wasn’t one of the neighborhood boys who called him outside to engage in mischief whenever my family visited. This was the longest conversation we had ever had. Until then, our talk had been limited to asking each other to pass the potatoes. He always had that look about him, of a person on the hunt for something more exciting to do, but for once he was calm, perhaps because there was nowhere to go.
I turned away, toward the window, where the vast fields were illuminated by a bright, nearly full moon. I had hardly been staring out for a moment before he pulled me toward him and shielded my eyes. I was so stunned by the gesture—we had not done so much as shake hands until then—that I stayed there instead of protesting. I did not know if I wanted to be held or to see. If the thing he shielded me from was so awful that it warranted shielding. I could feel his heart beating against my cheek. When he released me, the fields were as vacant as ever.
“What on Earth was that?” I said.
“Nothing,” said Bogdan, but I could see he was ruffled, that his jaw was set and he was struggling to maintain composure. “Just a few dead cows. Starvation. It was very unpleasant.”
“That’s all?” I said. I most certainly did not believe him. Or, I mostly did not. Or perhaps I wanted to believe him so badly that I decided to. A few dead cows did not a tragedy make.
“That’s all,” he said, giving my arm a squeeze, not looking me directly in the eyes either. Had he looked me in the eyes to begin with? It was hard to say.
“We’re the same age, you know. I don’t need protecting. I’m not a child.”
“I never said you were,” he said, and he was quiet after that. I stared out at the vast emptiness, where I could detect no farms, which made the likelihood of dead cows quite low. Bogdan did not leave me, either because he felt I needed further comfort or because he did not want to be alone after spotting whatever dark thing had been lurking outside.
Soon enough my savior was asleep, tilting his head closer and closer toward mine until he collapsed on my shoulder. I did not move, wanting to shake him off but also not wanting him to wake up finding himself in this compromised position, so I sat there, rigid as a lamppost. From that angle, one that allowed me only to see his thick, haphazard hair and the top of his head, he was once again indistinguishable from his brother. So that was what I did then, I pretended Misha was resting his head on my shoulder and closed my eyes and leaned my head against his, at last settling into something resembling sleep.
Misha and I were reading The Idiot when the book began to quiver in my hand, and then the train shook violently. A siren rang through the cars and the train came to a halt, pitching us into the wall. Papa grabbed Polya and Baba Tonya’s hands and Mama grabbed mine, everyone was grabbing everyone and the Orlovs and Garanins were shouting, too, come on, let’s go, hurry up, hurry up, get off this train, take nothing with you, and even in the chaos it registered that there were explosions overhead coming from the formerly empty sky, making me question why exactly we were leaving.
“Come on, now, quickly, girl,” said Mama, and we jumped out of the wagon and crawled right under the train, hid down in the warm darkness, scared white pupils blinking in the blackness, reminding me of the eyes of Timofey lighting up our courtyard as the dawn broke.
It was the Germans, of course. I did not need Papa to confirm this, though he did, or to explain to the group that though it may seem ridiculous to stay right under the train when the bombs were falling down on it, it was the safest place for all of us to be, since it was our only shelter in the vast steppe and the steel of the trains over our heads would provide more protection than the open fields could. We crouched in the muck, covering our ears; the Orlovs were silent and dignified while Polya and my grandmother whimpered. The old woman’s boa was filthy and she looked so ridiculous that I wanted to choke her with it, or even to rip off her rubies and toss them out from under the train so she would get bombed while running after them. I was so terrified that it took me a moment to see that Papa was not beside us, that he had rushed into the fields to bring back a few rogue passengers who fled the train.