Misha turned away, the intense look gone, and he was quiet, gazing out the one tiny frosted window in his alcove, where a light snow was falling. By then I understood that his staring fits were not a mere indication of his solemn, poetic soul. His stillness could be attributed to melancholy, not simple awe at the wonders of the world. I never knew what to do when he disappeared like this. Should I leave? Try to bring him back to Earth? Ask what was on his mind? I was relieved when I did not have to find a solution, because Bogdan entered the room. I could not help his brother, but I could ask for a second opinion.
“What do you think of Tatyana’s dream in Onegin?” I asked.
As the smile curled on his wily face, I had a feeling that of course he would agree with me. How could he not? The boy was a bit of a dreamer, and he would have been taken by the imaginative interlude.
“It’s the best part,” he said. “Naturally.” I nearly gasped, putting a hand to my chest, and then he laughed wildly. “I tricked you, didn’t I? I don’t think I got that far in Onegin. There was a dream? I must have been playing hooky.”
“Don’t talk nonsense, brother. You must have read Onegin,” said Misha, who seemed more annoyed by his brother’s cavalier declaration than was justified.
“Then I suppose I don’t remember,” Bogdan said with a complacent shrug.
It was time for bed. By then, we had all given up on our individual beds and slept on a blanketed pile by the stove in the center of my family’s room, any need for privacy trumped by the flames flickering near our thawing limbs. We hunkered down by the stove and I found my usual place, next to my parents. I put a blanket over my shuba and relished the warmth, knowing I would wake up sweating the next morning but that I wouldn’t care, that it was a pleasure to know my body was capable of producing sweat. Just as I closed my eyes, somebody poked me in the back. Bogdan was looking right at me. His brother was sound asleep to his left, and my sister was dozing on his other side, her head resting on Licky’s haunches.
“The dream was pretty wacky,” he said.
“So you did remember after all.”
“No. I just read it over. Some wild stuff.”
“Indeed,” I said, and I was more touched by the fact that he had read it over than I cared to admit.
“It wasn’t much of a burden. There isn’t exactly a lot to do,” he said, patting my hand, making certain that he had not made me feel too important.
I closed my eyes and shifted closer to Misha, who had already fallen asleep, and felt his breath on my neck as I tried to settle into a slumber as wild and beguiling as Tatyana’s. But I woke up in the cold light of morning, my stomach rumbling, not having remembered a single thing I dreamed about.
Papa remembered his promise to take me to the factory by the dead of winter. It was a brutal time. Any minute I spent trudging to school or gathering wood was the cruelest torture, the frigid air stiffening my bones as my boots crunched through the snow. The windows were frosted with ice and the balcony door was sealed shut.
Twice, I had seen my father grab onto a piece of furniture to steady himself when he was on the verge of fainting. Aunt Tamara and my mother were shedding hair like summer pets. At dinner, I caught Uncle Konstantin squinting into his food like he could not remember how he got there. Baba Tonya took to sleeping with her eyes open, making me think she was dead the first few times she did it. As for Misha, when we delved into Karamazov, I understood that his hands shook due to hunger, not nervousness. Bogdan maintained his spirits and nighttime excursions, but he was as pale as a frozen lake. My sister’s body was deteriorating so fast that Mama had to wrap twine around her forearms to keep her arm meat from sagging. She no longer walked but drifted. I was fading, too, though nobody held me up. My fingertips were numb even beside the stove; my teeth chattered all day long.
I forgot all that as I followed Papa out. We bumped into Ivan, who was knocking the icicles off the front doorway. They had been hanging on the eaves of the apartment building like deadly dragon teeth for months, and recently Ivan had made the fatal mistake of slamming the front door hard enough to make one of them careen down and stab his forearm, turning it a ghastly black and blue. Now he was trying to protect the rest of us. He was accompanied by Snowball, a big white ownerless dog he regaled with garbage scraps and potato peels once in a while, whenever he came around.
I offered him my usual greeting. “Is the war over yet?”
“I’ll keep my ear to the ground for you,” he said with a mock salute, and winked at Papa as we walked on.
I was so thrilled the cold hardly stung me. I was used to it by now, having my limbs assaulted by the mean, relentless air. My heart skipped as we approached the factory, our boots crunching through the nasty snow. Going in would be a true privilege for a girl. Mama once told me that the only woman who ever went inside the actual factory was Marina Ivanovna, the old cook, to call the men for their lunch, and I would soon be among her sacred ranks.
But when Papa opened the central steel door to the monstrous edifice, I saw there wasn’t much to get excited about. It was not a magical, wild, and violent chamber of science and destruction but a dingy, dark room cramped with steel machinery, grime and oil, and rows and rows of greasy old tanks, which might be rendered obsolete by the new tank Papa and Uncle Konstantin were working on. Papa held my hand as I gazed at the high, sooty ceilings.
I knew factory life was no picnic, of course. The other day, I’d overheard Papa telling Mama that many of the younger men were practically begging to be sent to the front. At least at the front they would be given three substantial meals a day and would hardly be expected to work for twelve hours straight. And if they died, they would do so with honor in their hearts and food in their bellies. The factory had already lost two dozen men to hunger and exhaustion; one of them was Uncle Nikita, Aunt Yulia’s husband, whose death kept the new widow at home for one week before she returned to Madame Renata’s food store with glazed eyes; it was strange not to see Uncle Nikita, the former third in command, returning home from the factory between Papa and Uncle Konstantin. But I knew better than to mention that.
“This is where you spend your days?” I said.
He let go of my hand and looked defeated by the question. “What choice do I have?”
I followed him to the center of the factory, where a single tank stood in between a series of work benches. This one looked larger than the others, and several half-completed versions stood behind it. Papa ran a hand over the top.
“Here it is,” he said. “The T-34.”
The tank was dark green, with five wheels on each side and a long, narrow stock in the center and cylinders on either side. It didn’t look like much to me, or rather, since the only time I had seen tanks was at a distance, during state military parades, I couldn’t quite see what made this machine of destruction different from the ones that came before it, other than its more impressive size.
Papa’s eyes lit up as he explained how Uncle Konstantin had helped invent a process that allowed Soviet tanks to be made far more efficiently than the German ones. Previous methods of tank making led the tanks to be brittle because of the air that remained between the parts; Uncle Konstantin had the idea of plugging up these air holes with sand, which made the tanks come out hard and strong. Germans kept their tanks strong by using chisels, but this took ten times longer than the sand procedure.
“And that’s how we will triumph,” Papa said. “Uncle Konstantin’s tanks are going to end the war, once we build enough of them.” He patted the tank like it was a well-behaved child, but the light was extinguished from his eyes. I did not understand why. The quicker we killed the Germans, the sooner we could all go home. Then I recalled what Bogdan had said on the train, that we could have easily been living under Hitler or Mussolini instead, that war was a nasty thing with no winners.