The next morning, she was up before him. Despite the comfort, Daria had found it difficult to doze off again. It wasn’t Adam’s snoring. She’d slept through far worse in the cattle car and barracks, not to mention when she’d shared a single room with her own parents. It was her certainty that Adam would wake up any moment and . . .
Maybe he’d been too worn out the night before? Or maybe it had slipped his mind? Surely, in the morning . . .
She was ready for him. Ready for anything. Except the grunt with which Adam greeted her. He slipped out of bed, dressed in pajamas a bit too close to a prison uniform for Daria’s comfort, likely surplus or maybe another case of supplies getting waylaid en route to their designated location. He headed for the outhouse she’d spied and taken advantage of earlier. The next time Daria saw Adam, he was wearing his street clothes, waiting by the door to take Daria to work.
Dresses appeared for her. Undergarments. Wool stockings. Boots. Not new by any means. But clean and more or less her size. She was issued a ration card for the closed-distribution general store and the cafeteria open to select workers. This allowed her to purchase—on credit; Daria had yet to receive wages to go with her new labor assignment, though nobody doubted her ultimate ability to make good—bread, tea, sausage, eggs, butter, and potatoes. When they were available, of course. Beer was also on the list but never in stock. It made Adam’s home-brewed vodka even more popular.
“Where did you learn to set up a still?” Daria asked, having learned that any conversation beyond bare necessities would need to be initiated by her. Otherwise, she and Adam could pass days working in the same building, living side by side, sleeping in the same bed, for goodness’ sake, and never exchange a word. It was worse than Edward’s silence. At least, with Edward, she’d realized he was traumatized. But with Adam, the situation was more confounding. Daria knew other women who’d taken “camp husbands.” Attaching themselves to one man with the power to retaliate, they escaped being raped by a succession of guards, supervisors, and fellow prisoners. Or, rather, they preemptively chose their own rapist. Daria thought she’d done the same. Except for one not-so-minor detail. The first few weeks, she’d lived every moment in dread of the inevitable. Now Daria simply lived in dread. She no longer even knew of what.
“My mother,” Adam said.
“The one you turned in?” Daria told herself the words had slipped out before she’d had time to think about what she was saying. But she knew that wasn’t the case. Adam’s taciturnity, coming as it did on the heels of Edward’s, had driven her into such an agitated state that Daria could think of nothing more satisfying than breaking through his infuriating reserve, making Adam suffer a bit of the agitation, not to mention the fury, he put her through daily. She couldn’t allow herself to be angry with Edward. And even if it were allowed, Daria had no right to express it, not after what she’d done. Daria had no such reservations regarding Adam. And this was the best way she could think of to do it. Her question was no accident. Though, whether it was a mistake was yet to be determined.
“Most people have only one mother,” Adam noted.
“Most people don’t turn them in to the NKVD.” Daria didn’t know if that was true. She certainly hoped so.
“My father left when I was a boy. Distilling vodka was how she supported us.”
Daria thought of Mama’s quest to position Daria for the best. And how her dreams had disintegrated. Mama deserved better than a daughter reduced to prostituting herself. Even if Daria’s prostituting wasn’t proving successful. That, too, seemed an insult to Mama. She’d given Daria everything she needed. Daria was the one who’d failed them both, in addition to Edward and the girls. Having nowhere else to vent her impotent fury, Daria burst out, “How could you do that to your mother?”
“She wanted me to.”
Daria snorted.
“My mother mopped floors at the old Jewish hospital. The doctors, they talked around her like she wasn’t a human being with ears. She heard things. She learned things. When doctors told her she was suffering from anemia, she realized they were lying. It was leukemia. She was dying. She had nothing to leave me. No money, no position. So she told me to turn her in. To say that she had been stealing medicine, selling it. She knew I’d be rewarded. It was my mother’s legacy to me.”
He was telling the truth.
Daria could have gone on asking questions, trying to poke holes in his story, denying it because it was too terrible. But Daria knew Adam was telling the truth. And that she was the only one he had ever told.
What she didn’t know was how to react to his confession. Condolences were hardly appropriate under the circumstances. Neither was pretending that what he’d said had no effect on her.
Adam didn’t appear to be waiting on any reaction from her. Yet Daria felt it was imperative that she offer him one. For both their sakes. She thought she was reaching out to take his hand, to squeeze it in a gesture of pure mutual humanity. But when she got close enough, to her surprise, she found herself rising up on her toes, which she wouldn’t need to do if she were still reaching for his hand.
Daria kissed him.
Adam didn’t appear surprised. Then again, Adam rarely appeared surprised by anything. He kissed her back as if his action, and hers, were the most natural in the world, despite their earlier five-minute conversation being, quite possibly, the lengthiest they’d ever exchanged. On the other hand, Daria couldn’t help thinking, how long had Edward glimpsed her before he decided she was worth pursuing? Maybe she was more tolerable in small doses?
Except Adam’s kiss proved anything but brief. He didn’t lay a hand on her. Yet Daria felt herself being pulled toward him, as if he were inhaling her. His lips were warm. After being surrounded by a piercing cold inside and out, this was as much of a jolt as anything else. He didn’t push; he pulled. And ultimately, he was the one who stopped.
And then Adam did one more surprising thing. He smiled.
Not menacingly, not condescendingly, not wearily. He simply smiled.
And, after that, everything changed.
Not all at once, of course.
Adam didn’t suddenly become a loquacious conversationalist. But he did start bidding Daria good morning as she wrapped her fingers around a tin mug and hurried to sip her tea before it froze like the rest of their surroundings. On their walk to the administrative offices, he began introducing Daria to citizens they bumped into on the street, residents who’d predated the internment camp and exiles who’d managed to build new lives there. She presumed they were customers of Adam’s and so went out of their way to be pleasant. Adam even made Daria laugh, spilling secrets about their former Odessa neighbors, like the couple who were cheating on each other, sometimes at the exact same time and literally next door, while proclaiming themselves the epitome of fidelity and urging the other couple, whom they suspected of carrying on with someone else, to heed their example. The deception got so convoluted that, listening to Adam tell it, Daria laughed until she cried. She hadn’t realized she still remembered how to do either.
Daria talked to Adam, too. She apologized for the way she’d treated him in Odessa. He pointed out she’d hardly been the only one. She apologized for the way she’d treated him here. He pointed out they had greater concerns than maintaining good manners. She apologized for what she’d thought about him opportunistically turning in his mother.
Adam said, “She would be happy to know her plan worked.”
Daria asked Adam to tell her about his mother. She started by telling him about hers. They agreed the pair wouldn’t have gotten along. Daria’s mother would have found Adam’s common; Adam’s mother would have deemed Daria’s pretentious.
They talked about her daughters, too. Adam, Daria realized, was one of the few people who was familiar with her girls, the way they’d once been. Adam filled Daria in on instances she hadn’t known about, like the time Alyssa, with Anya obediently tagging along, sneaked into the rubbish bins. They’d begged Adam for scraps they could use to play buried treasure. He’d given them an old herring tin and a wedge of a broken plate, which they buried in a shallow hole in the courtyard and swore Adam to secrecy. With memories all she had now, this new one proved as precious to Daria as the booty her daughters once hoarded.
Daria never tired of talking about them. She even invited Adam to Anya’s grave. So many of the exiles had buried their loved ones there that it had turned into a de facto formal cemetery. A few of the German speakers had attempted to erect makeshift markers, using two sticks tied with twine to form a cross. Daria certainly hadn’t wanted that, yet she was at a loss for what might prove appropriate. It was Adam who’d dredged up a stone wedged into the foundation of his home—he swore he could replace it. Using a sharpened nail, he scratched in Anya’s name alongside the years of her truncated life. After a guard, without warning, mowed down the illegal crosses, the rest of the survivors followed suit, etching their own stones, this time with Communist-approved symbols.
“My Anya,” Daria had chuckled. “A trendsetter.”
The one subject that she and Adam never broached, however, was Edward.
Edward had become, like so many others in the USSR, an unperson. Talking about Alyssa and even Anya brought the girls to some version of life as happy, thriving children whom Daria could pretend were in the next room, giggling and plotting mischief, waiting for their mother. Edward lived in Daria’s head. She didn’t try to guess his life in Odessa or imagine his growing older, as she did with her girls. The Edward Daria had fallen in love with existed in the past and the present, superseding any other, including the version she’d last spied guiding Alyssa up the departing train’s steps. Edward was a chimera. Adam was real.
His presence was everywhere, lingering in the air, not quite a sight, not quite a sound, not quite a smell, but rather a heaviness she breathed in and out whenever Adam left the room. Daria found herself watching him, never head-on, always out of the corner of her eye, hoping to disguise the compulsion. She walked by him more than she needed to. She asked him questions to which she knew the answers. At first, she’d told herself, it was her way of making him acknowledge her, her way of fighting becoming invisible, her way of remembering that, despite the daily humiliations, she was still alive, she still existed, she hadn’t been erased like so many others. But eventually, Daria was forced to concede that she was doing it because Adam’s ongoing sexual rejection frustrated and confounded her to no end.
Daria was not used to being overlooked. The guard who’d stripped her that first morning—she’d been able to understand his actions then better than Adam’s now. Daria remembered Mama schooling her that men were to be tortured by leaving them constantly wanting. She finally understood what that meant. And why it proved so effective. Daria felt like Adam was torturing her daily. Every time he ignored the purportedly accidental brush of Daria’s hand along his arm, every time he failed to notice that she was standing as close to him as she had when they’d kissed, every time he climbed into their bed and turned his back on her, Daria boiled with a sensation she refused to call desire, yet one that stirred a hunger even stronger than the endless craving for food or warmth or safety. Perhaps it was because Adam was the nexus of all three. Or perhaps it was something else.
She couldn’t wait for him any longer. She couldn’t spend another night watching the rise and fall of Adam’s back, listening to his breathing, feeling the heat radiating from his body, and continue keeping her distance.
She whispered his name. She’d never done that before. Adam startled fiercely enough for the bed to jolt along with him. But that was the extent of his response. He didn’t answer. He didn’t budge. She wondered if he’d heard or if his reaction was just a coincidence. There was no way he could not have heard. She wondered if he intended to act as if he hadn’t, nonetheless.
Adam slowly rolled over, shifting his weight along the mattress so Daria almost slid into him. They were lying face-to-face in the darkness, Adam’s features coming gradually into focus. The shaggy beard first, then the jut of his nose, the ridge of his brows, and, finally, the query in his eyes.
Daria raised her arm and gently stroked Adam’s beard with the backs of her fingers. As her hand brushed past Adam’s mouth, he fleetingly kissed it, sending a shiver through Daria she couldn’t have denied even if she’d wanted to. She didn’t want to.
He kissed every one of her fingers, then up Daria’s palm, inside her wrist, past the crook of her elbow, and to her neck. She whimpered, and he abruptly halted, terrified he’d hurt her.
Daria rested her free hand on the back of his head, caressing his hair, urging him to go on.