“You disgusting woman,” my grandmother said to Aunt Yulia. “She is hardly more than a child!”
“There are no children among us,” Aunt Yulia said, softening a bit, and I nearly pitied her, recalling her sweet daughter.
“Please, Antonina Nikolaevna,” my mother said to Baba Tonya, who stood behind a trembling Polya with her hands on her shoulders. “My deepest apologies, Yulia,” Mama said. “I promise you, my girls will be punished.” She gave her a roll of bread, which was to constitute most of our dinner, and the vile woman snatched it up and walked out, pivoting on her heel. How could she live with herself—walking out with her fat rear while two girls starved in her midst! Bogdan hesitated, and then he followed her down the hall. They spoke in low voices, but Polya’s cries drowned out their conversation. I hated my sister for being so weak.
Mama grabbed a rolling pin and raised it over our heads. She did not often hit us, and when she did, we usually deserved it. Mama smacked the pin into her hand several times. Polya did not seem terrified. In fact, she stepped closer, wanting to get the punishment over with. She even held out her hands, palms up.
“You are both hopeless!” Mama said with a sigh, tossing the pin on the floor. Her face contorted and I did not realize what was happening until a tear escaped her eye. Papa put a hand on the divan to steady himself, like he was going to faint. The moment was over before Mama could notice, and he put his arm around her and stroked her hair. He looked so small compared to her, and it seemed impossible that he could bring her anything resembling comfort.
“That Garanina woman is a tyrant,” muttered my grandmother.
“Nasty,” agreed Polya.
“Hideous,” I added, just for sport.
“Ruined,” said Mama.
“Broken,” Papa said.
“Doing her best to get by,” Bogdan said quietly from the doorway, venturing back into the room.
The Orlov parents stayed quiet, not certain how to weigh in. Of course the woman was a monster, but she gave us food. Even Misha still said nothing, which disappointed me. Did he care at all about how Polina and I were treated? Bogdan was close to Aunt Yulia, but what was Misha’s excuse? And yet, in spite of his twisted alliances, Bogdan put an arm around my sister. My grandmother stood on her other side and put a hand on her head.
Just then, Licky trotted in from the outdoors and nuzzled my sister’s legs. He was her biggest protector, and he continued to grow larger than any domestic cat I had ever seen, nearly reaching our waists, as if he were gaining all of the weight my sister had lost. Though Polya did not ride the creature all over town, as Papa had suggested, I was certain she could have. When he walked beside her as she weaved her way through the apartment buildings, he was truly her protector. Sometimes, old white Snowball would trot along with them, and the three of them painted quite a picture. And now she knelt down and wrapped her arms around him, like he was her prince, the only one who understood her.
Mama had stopped crying and collected herself and Papa followed suit.
“Foolish girls,” Papa said. “Nobody is angry with you, all right?”
“Nobody but your mother, it seems,” said Mama, toughening up now.
“Please, do not do this again,” said Papa. “There could be real consequences for all of us. We must maintain cordial relations with that woman, don’t you understand?”
I understood nothing. I mumbled an apology and marched to the door with my sister. The adults seemed so defeated that I knew the discussion was over, that “there are no rules during war” would not impress at that juncture. I passed Misha on my way out, and I did not realize how angry I was with him until he reached out his useless hand and put it on my shoulder.
“Why didn’t you do anything?” I said.
“If there was something to do, I would have done it,” he said. “The best course of action was not to act, so I followed it.”
“You’re a coward.”
“Not at all,” he said. “It takes bravery to know when to restrain yourself.”
Polya wiped her face and laughed meanly. “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard,” she said, and Misha lurched back, but he said nothing more. He looked away from me, down at the floor. My sister laughed darkly as she linked her arm through mine and led me away from him.
When winter finally released its icy grip on us, the brothers, Polina, and I celebrated by dueling with sticks near the woods. The government had given each family a sack of potatoes to plant after the final frost, and Mama and Aunt Tamara were planting their allotted share behind our building; however, Aunt Tamara had gotten it into her head that if she cut her potatoes in half, her family could eat half now and more would sprout when harvest came. Though Mama tried to dissuade her, there was no reasoning with the woman, and the mild air put everyone in such good spirits that she did not push the issue. The fathers were also out, smoking and muttering about our losses in Crimea and Kharkov; Licky and Snowball circled us as we played. We knew we were too grown for these escapades, but we were too happy to be outdoors to care.
Spring was almost upon us; a few bits of grass had clawed their way through the earth, still soggy from the melted snow. I was relieved to be outside, but I was still hurt that Misha had done nothing to defend me against Aunt Yulia, though I did not say anything about it; after all, he was my only companion, and what was I supposed to do? I knew Polina judged me for it, but she preferred the company of her cat, the dog, our grandmother, Bogdan, our parents—basically everyone’s over mine, so who was she to tell me who to spend time with?
“Fyodor Mikhailovich takes too long to get to the point,” Bogdan was saying, while fighting his brother. Though Misha and I had finished Karamazov just last week, and Bogdan snatched the book away from us afterward. And now he was claiming to have read it already. There was no way he could do it without skimming.
“You’re a dunce,” Misha said, but his brother was making him laugh. “He needs to take his time because his ideas are complex.”
“They seemed pretty simple to me. All that suspense over whether or not Father Zosima’s corpse would stink—I knew it would stink to the high heavens all along!”
“Aren’t you clever?” I said, switching off from fighting my sister to fighting Bogdan.
“I didn’t say I didn’t enjoy it,” he said. “I just said it took too long,” he said, flashing a smile.
“Dostoevsky has more to say about family and art in one sentence than you could ever say in your whole life,” I told him.
“I don’t know about that,” he said with a shrug. “You and your beauty of literature. Maybe I’m just too pedestrian.”
I stopped stick fighting him for a moment because I was stunned that he remembered what I said on the train so long ago.
“Perhaps,” I said, and I could see Misha watching the two of us, not liking what he saw.
“Besides, there weren’t any dream sequences,” Bogdan said with a wink, and now my sister was confused, feeling left out.
“All of it is boring nonsense,” she grumbled, and then she shoved me out of the way to fight Bogdan, leaving me to fight Misha.
“Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, even if that opinion is wrong,” Misha said, and we hit sticks, kicking up dirt. His nose was red and there was dirt in his hair, and I was still so very angry with him for not defending me, and for not even apologizing for it afterward. Meanwhile, Bogdan talked to Aunt Yulia and made her promise to continue giving us her extra food at the end of every week. But I had aligned myself with Misha. It was too late to turn back, but I had been hoping for some confirmation that I had made the right choice.