Now my sister was whispering in Bogdan’s ear and his lips curled into a smile as he absorbed whatever secret message she was imparting to him, likely something related to me and Misha. That was the first time I wondered if they were more than friends.
“Our opinions are just fine,” she told me, when she caught me staring. “I’d rather watch a lake freeze than read that dull book again.”
“You’re too young to understand. There’s nothing dull about it,” I told my sister, and she rolled her eyes while swatting her stick.
“Of course, Larissa,” she said, almost singing the words. “You know everything by now, don’t you?”
I got distracted and forgot to defend myself against Misha’s attacks. He jabbed his stick into my palm. I cried out and pressed my hand to my chest, and Misha threw down his stick and ran over to me to see the blood blooming on the inside of my hand.
“I’m so sorry, Larissa,” he said, putting an arm around me. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
I could see it in his brown, brooding eyes—he meant what he said, and this was it, the most he would give me, and I could either take it or continue to hold a grudge, which was no easy thing in a time of war.
“I know that. I know you didn’t,” I said, and then he put an arm around me and led me back to his alcove, where I avoided my sister’s gaze. I didn’t owe her an explanation for my alliances any more than she needed to tell me why she, Bogdan, and Licky were running up and down the hallway like schoolchildren while Misha and I pursued higher matters. He picked up my Tsvetaeva tome, though we had not read much poetry together, and it was a bit subversive to be reading her at that point.
“Are you ready, Larissa?” he asked, and I could not resist him.
At the beginning of the summer, the government gave our families a crate of food as a reward for the fathers’ continued work on the T-34, which they claimed would end the war any day now; by fall, our family harvested our potatoes, sharing half with the Orlovs, because of course Aunt Tamara’s sliced potatoes did not sprout a lick. Though Papa called her “our Gregor Mendel,” he was not angry, reasserting his claim that we were all one family. The crate of food and potatoes helped us make it through the summer, but we would not have survived without Bogdan, our main supplementary source.
One day, in the fall, he brought home three eggs, a tiny onion, and even a live chicken, which Mama carried onto the balcony and decimated with one swift twist of the neck, a familiar gesture from her childhood days, when she would routinely kill chickens to help out her mean old restaurant-owning aunts.
The stew Mama and Aunt Tamara made afterward! I can still taste its warmth coating my shivering tongue. We were in the highest of spirits after that particular meal. The food had even relaxed Baba Tonya enough for her to fall asleep with her eyes open, a state of hers that always unsettled me; she sat with her hands on her lap, but from her glazed eyes I could see she had temporarily left us. Even my sister was cheered, though she was still the weakest among us, her sagging arm flesh still held together by twine.
I was feeling bold. Though it was against our unspoken rules to ask Bogdan about the source of his bounty, I was so drugged from the food that I could not help myself, so I tugged at his sleeve and asked him where the eggs had come from.
He winked at me, reminding me of the fuller-faced boy he had been, not this gaunt man before me. “Eggs come from hens,” he said. “Don’t you know that? I thought you were the smart one around here.”
“Such a joker,” I said, and he laughed. I thought I saw Mama’s face harden, though it was impossible to be certain because she had taken on such a permanently stony visage. Bogdan shook his head, smiled, and returned to playing with the kitty. Licky was the only one thriving among us, scarfing down mice and other rodents left and right. Many times he had trotted up to my sister with a bloody offering she would make Bogdan throw out—on one occasion, he even honored my sister by depositing a mouse on her pillow.
My question about the food seemed to awaken my grandmother. She rubbed her eyes and narrowed them at me. “Do they taste good?” she asked.
“Of course,” I said.
“Then why does it matter?” she said, adjusting her boa like she had somewhere to be.
“Can’t a person be curious?” I said.
“Not here,” Baba said. I could not remember the last time I was reproached by my grandmother. It was like being chided by a baby.
“Enough,” Mama said.
As the women cleaned up, Papa and Uncle Konstantin spoke grimly of Leningrad, how the starving, surrounded city could not possibly make it through another year. Uncle Konstantin tried to offer some optimism, saying that surely the war was turning in our favor, hoping that we would stave off the Germans in Stalingrad any day now. It was hard to believe his patriotic claims because he kept pausing to catch his breath, to stave off the dizziness that plagued him. He was a few years older than the other parents, and it was showing. Misha listened intently to the men’s talk and quietly chimed in when appropriate. It became clear that no one would answer my pressing question about Bogdan’s missions.
I didn’t get an answer until that evening, and the truth came from Polya, of all people. She told me when we gathered firewood from the edge of the woods. Or, rather, when I gathered wood and too-weak-to-help Polya and her faithful cat tagged along. A witchy smile flashed on my sister’s caved-in face. Licky trotted at her side, and I swore I could see the same expression on his stinky cat mug.
“I thought you knew everything,” she said, almost singing the words.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, nothing,” she said, smiling still. “I just assumed you knew where Bogdan got those eggs—and everything else.”
There was a mean edge to my sister that evening. The scraps of eggs and chicken had not sated her. She struggled to get them down, as if she were making a great sacrifice for the benefit of us all, when in reality we all would have killed for a bit more food. Now she stroked Licky’s head and turned toward the apartment as I filled my arms.
“Isn’t it obvious?” she said. “He gets them from the women in town. And the ones in the villages nearby. Women whose husbands are at war or at the factory or just plain dead, what-have-you. He does them favors.”
The firewood was impossibly heavy. I wobbled and set it down. “What kind of favors?”
My sister laughed sharply. “He’s not a bad-looking boy. He’s nearly fifteen. Close to being a man. Close enough for them anyway. Certainly better than nothing….”
My eyes filled with wild, dirty tears. So this was the thing my sister and all the adults, even my half-insane grandmother, knew as clear as day. Who was I to think Bogdan was paying attention to old bullfrog-looking me, with his winks and innuendos about beauty and dreams, when he was off servicing half the women in town? And how did I think he convinced Aunt Yulia to continue giving us extra food? He must have thought I was as chaste and idiotic as a little girl. If I wasn’t attempting to pick up my woodpile again, I would have smacked the remaining fat off my sister’s face. I tried to mirror her smug look, to give it right back to her and her idiot beast.
“Thank you for telling me the truth,” I said. “I don’t know how I could have missed it.”
I didn’t get a chance to ask Bogdan about the eggs until the next time we were alone together, after the winter had truly set in again. We went to the edge of the pines to gather wood and Licky followed along; my sister had stopped gathering wood or doing housework weeks before, after she disappeared, leading us on a goose chase all over the village, thinking she had perished. I found her passed out in a snowbank in her white coat, hugging her beloved white dog, Snowball, not far from the woods, while Licky circled the pair.