The ability to honor martyrs similarly distinguishes them from the animals. Kent and Tarzan revere Aleksandr Matrosov. In 1943, Matrosov covered a Nazi gunner’s pillbox with his chest, and this feat of bravery enabled his unit to carry out the commander’s order and capture a nearby village. For this, he was posthumously awarded the Gold Star Medal of the Hero of the Soviet Union.
Every Soviet citizen knows of Matrosov and his feat. Streets are named after him, as are schools and young pioneer palaces. Even the horrible colony for young criminals where Kent met Tarzan is called the Matrosov Colony for Underaged Criminals.
In the thirties, Matrosov, too, spent four years there for attempted theft. They said he tried to pick a pocket but was stopped. How is that possible? Either you pick a pocket or you don’t. Of course, he was railroaded, picked up for being a wandering, homeless youth like Kent and Tarzan.
At the colony, they said that Matrosov led a daring escape, digging a tunnel out of the furniture factory that operated in the zone. It would have worked, but somebody snitched. Even at the colony, Matrosov sacrificed himself for the good of all. Would a nosed one be capable of such a feat?
Is the motherland about to summon Tarzan and Kent for service as well? Will they get their chance to gum up the enemy guns with their fragile, tattooed bodies? Will they be given an opportunity to demonstrate their love for their people? Will they, too, bathe in blood and glory?
* * *
Kima Yefimovna Petrova is unable to fall asleep.
She lives in a corner of an eight-square-meter room, which she sublets from one of the many war widows in the barracks.
The corner is blocked off with an armoire and a curtain. Inside, there is room for everything Kima needs: a cot with a straw mattress; a cardboard suitcase atop a chair; a sack with laundry, which also serves as a hiding place for the thin, pamphlet-sized books lent to her by Kogan, most of which are banned; and, in the corner, another borrowed treasure — a pair of Finnish skis that she presumes belong to Kogan’s wife.
Her section of the wall is bare, except for a pinned photo of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a Red Army commando who went out into the snowy night almost exactly eleven years ago to demolish a Nazi stable. She was captured, tortured, and hanged.
* * *
Railroad workers all over the USSR have a nickname for themselves—mazutniki, axle grease people. Heavy black grease saturates their clothing and covers their hands and faces. A worker at one of the depots of the Kazan railroad line is just as likely to call himself a negritos, a slang word for Negro. At nights, as negritosy in the barracks cook their grub, drink, quarrel, and curse the Jews, Kima finds peace by gliding through darkness in the woods, or — lately — alongside the gorge, within sight of the railroad tracks.
In the past, Kogan joined her. His skis are of American Lend-Lease vintage, put to good use in the war, then sold on the black market.
When they were side by side, they talked about literature, medicine, wars.
One evening, in the forest, at the base of a steep hill, Kogan recited Akhmatova:
It is good here: rustling and crackling;
It freezes harder every day,
The brush bending in a white blaze
Of dazzling, icy roses.
Taking a deep breath, he broke away, sprinting madly to the top, then slowing down, allowed her to catch up, then shouted out the rest of the poem:
And on the splendid, magnificent snow
There are ski tracks, like the memory of how,
In that somehow far-off century,
We passed this way together, you and I.
Some of his stories and most of his poems cause her chin to jut forward to that forty-five-degree angle that she thinks suppresses and disguises tears, yet Kima is always eager to join Kogan in the woods and, to Kogan’s amazement, never turns back when conversations cause pain.
Once, after a Sunday in the woods, Kima offered herself to him. It was a verbal offer, a gift, really.
“I am an admirer of a different sort,” he said, and quickly returned to Akhmatova.
She kissed him on the cheek, and he teared up when she left his house that night, and that was the full extent of their physical contact.
Kima is a formidable challenge for Kogan. He has no training in psychology or psychiatry. Everything he knows about Freud and psychoanalysis has to be gleaned from ideological screeds attacking this approach. Its focus on the individual, as opposed to class, is deemed anti-Marxist and therefore appeals to Kogan immensely. Interpretation of dreams in 1953 brings a death sentence.
Though Kogan has never seen Kima’s corner of the barracks, he would understand why the photo of Zoya hangs above her bed.
He would see the evolution:
In 1942, Kima would have wanted to be like Zoya, and by offering her life to the motherland, she would have hoped to demonstrate that, her enemy lineage notwithstanding, she was a patriot. She wanted her country to love her.
In 1953, it’s about something else: confronting evil and savoring martyrdom.
Undoubtedly, this path of change would make Kogan cringe, for it represents a journey from one form of pathology to another, a psychiatric equivalent of the nasty mutations he can so adeptly identify with his microscope. (He has a lab and is interested in pathology.)
Kogan is subtly didactic in his treatment plan. The ski outings and poetry are intended to allow the patient to abandon fear of her feelings, particularly grief. Surely, he knows that his attention will inevitably lead Kima to sexualize their relationship. A polite, firm rejection is intended to illustrate that his attention to her is not a form of courtship and will continue, just as it did before, without sex.
Now Kogan is holed up in his house, staying out of sight, and Kima takes her ski runs alone, usually alongside the gorge. There is no more poetry. She is counting trains, observing them, like the martyred Zoya observed the Nazi troops in the forests around Moscow.
She has heard and watched them come for weeks, a freight train every hour, maybe more, usually heading toward Moscow, rarely back. She knows those trains from the inside. She has been cargo time and time again. Now, they are back, to take away … She learned that concept in 1937, the night they took her father.
His image is now dim: thick glasses beneath a karakul hat, a leather overcoat.
Night. Strangers in the house. A slap across his face, his broken glasses. A woman screaming. Her mother. Then, hours alone in a small room. A pantry? She thinks she drew snakes on walls. It was dark. Drawing with fervor, her life at stake. A song was the last thing she heard. In a language she would later recognize as Germanic, it projected pain, condemnation, power. Was this her father’s final message to her? How would she recognize that song again?
When the door opened, her father was gone. No farewell. His books, his papers, gone. Mother collapsed on a settee. The wood on it was red. She would never see such wood again. A big, overheated hand on her small back …
Is this a fantasy? Did this happen? Maybe. Why now the tears? She knows how to hold back that sort of thing. To live this life, you can’t have tears. Never a sob, not even when she found her mother’s corpse four years later, with half a face. No tears while reading the blood-soaked, typed note. One sentence was about “unbearable remorse for having borne an enemy’s child.” She begged the state to raise her daughter. The suicide note was a carbon copy. There was no gun and no typewriter.
If they have killed your parents and raised you like a cub, it may be better to find a way to set it all aside, to pack it, seal it, and throw it in the river, or snakes will eat your guts.
* * *
Oleg Butusov, a night guard, spends much of the early morning of February 25 on the steps of the dry goods store near the kolkhoz market.