Our crew had been short on joy recently; Mama and Aunt Tamara would come home from the factory, reeking of cleaning supplies, and the fathers and Misha would follow after, covered in soot and sweat, utterly drained, Papa having long forgotten his promise to take me there. We could not help but laugh as the little fur ball explored the premises while we ate our meal as slowly as possible to make it feel more expansive than it was. Once he had sniffed all four corners and the bunk beds and curtains and circled the stove a few times, he settled by my sister’s side and licked her hand again, and so she named him Licky.
“You be careful, now,” Mama warned her, studying him more closely. “He’s no ordinary cat. He’s a bobcat. He must have wandered out of the woods, poor thing.”
“He’ll be a big boy one day, you’ll see,” said Papa, his lips spreading into a thin smile. “A baby lion. You’ll be riding him all over town.”
“Don’t be silly, Papa,” Polya said, batting his arm. I rolled my eyes at Misha and he gave me a small shrug to show he agreed my sister was senseless, but what can you do?
Papa loved indulging my sister’s childishness. He spoke to her like she was about three instead of thirteen, treating her like the baby she wanted to be around him. He remained oblivious to how aware Polya was of her powers, how she batted her eyes at men if she wanted something, like an extra radish from the old radish brothers at the market, another day to complete a homework assignment from her teacher, or a flower from the groundskeeper’s meager garden back home. Papa would never deign to make such witless comments to yours truly; he knew I was reasonable.
Of course Polya would never be able to ride the cat, no matter how big he got, unless she shrank considerably. She looked so blindly happy, getting licked by her new friend, teased by Papa, that it was hard to focus on nibbling my bread crust. That night, Polina carried her new pet into her bed above me, cradling him like he was a baby, but he did not protest, though he seemed more eager to ardently lick his mangy fur than to be rocked to sleep. I could hear the foul creature licking and scratching as I tried to drift off. At the time, of course, I only saw the beast as a distraction, a nuisance. I had not a clue he would be my family’s undoing.
September turned to October, which was not the October I had known in Kiev. In Kiev, October was when the trees changed colors, when you could stroll through Mariinsky Park as the maples and chestnuts turned from green to majestic red and orange and gold. In Lower Turinsk, October meant the trees would change colors for a week or so before unceremoniously shedding their leaves. Papa and Uncle Konstantin rode to a neighboring village on horseback, returning with a sack of potatoes and two shubas, a white one for Polya, and a brown one for me, and by November, we lived within the confines of these thick coats. There was no use denying that we were in for a long stay by then, and the fathers’ late-night grumblings about the state of the Red Army brought no hope. Millions of soldiers had died or been captured already, and the Germans were only fifty kilometers away from Moscow, advancing toward our capital.
I lived for my reading sessions with Misha in his family alcove after dinner, while Bogdan horsed around with my sister and Licky or went off to his food expeditions. I was breathless to find myself alone with handsome Misha, though Mama would “check in” on us once in a while. Misha’s voice was firm and commanding, though his hands shook when he turned the pages, which pleased me because it suggested that I made him nervous. The shaking hands were his only weakness; since he started working at the factory, he seemed even more capable and grown-up, the soot behind his ears making him look like a true man.
And besides, reading with him gave me far more intellectual stimulation than I got from my new cruel teacher, Yana Nikolaevna, who was offended by the students who left class after the daily free lunch. “Filling your empty minds is more vital than filling your empty stomachs,” she had declared, and followed this charming comment up with the fact that she would not bother learning the names of the new students until she saw who was going to “stick around.”
By January, Misha and I were done with Demons and had moved to another favorite, Onegin. We had just finished the chapter where Tatyana dreams of being chased by a bear and entering a party where Onegin stabs Lensky and wakes up scared and confused. I recited my favorite part of the dream for good measure:
Misha gave me an unreadable smile. The weight he shed gave his face an older, more dignified look, which suited him.
“What?” I said.
“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head.
“What is it?”
“I just find dreams in literature to be a bit silly, don’t you? I mean, if it didn’t really happen, then why write about it?”
“None of it really happened. The dream is what makes Onegin Onegin. The rest of the book—the duel, the spurned love, none of that is so very unique, is it? Of course, the narrator has a sharp wit—but in this passage, he abandons that wit, and yes, perhaps he’s mocking Tatyana a bit, but he must believe in it on some level, or he wouldn’t describe it so vividly.”
“He can’t help himself. He’s a writer. I’m just saying—I find the dream a bit frivolous, far less interesting than the outcome of the duel between Onegin and Lensky.”
“Can’t it just be a beautiful interlude?”
“I didn’t know you were such a dreamer, Larissa.”
“Some occasions require it.”
Misha just shook his head. “Pure silliness.”
“It’s not silly at all,” I insisted, but there would be no changing his mind.
He gave me an intense look that made me uneasy. Did our argument stir some passion within him? Of course I had been trying to will him to kiss me for months, but I was uncomfortable, afraid. He looked at the book and back at me and his lips drew a straight line. Had he kissed girls before? He always seemed so competent and knowledgeable that until that moment, I never considered that perhaps he had not, that he was just as clueless as I was when it came to romantic matters. He kept looking at me, waiting for me to say something that would direct him, one way or another.
I looked down at my enormous shuba and recalled the bones and knobs and blue-green veins on the body inside it. Would anyone really want to kiss someone in my awful state? I hardly felt like a woman anymore. My womanly visitor had not returned since we arrived in the mountains. Mama had to stitch Polya’s and my pants to keep them on our waists. Hairs sprouted on my chest to keep me warm and my voice was so weak, I didn’t sound like myself. My clothes floundered on my body, reminding me of a happier time when Polya and I paraded around in Mama’s enormous dresses when she and Papa left us home alone.