For almost a week, Natasha didn’t hear of or from Dima. There was obviously no mention of what had happened in the local edition of Pravda—that would be preposterous—but Natasha had expected to hear whispers from among her own and her parents’ Jewish friends. Surely, somebody had to have heard something. Where were those braggarts who wanted to impress her with their illicit shortwave radios souped up with coat hangers now? Dima’s story must have made it to Voice of America. But there was nothing. Natasha did overhear one of Papa’s drinking buddies blathering on about “hooligans making it tougher for the rest of us.” She chose to think he was referencing Dima and took preemptive offense.
Natasha wondered whether she should risk showing up at the group’s meeting spot on the usual time and day. What if one of them had broken during interrogation and told the authorities about it? Natasha wouldn’t put it past Ludmilla, to pretend to have slipped due to sleep deprivation and torture but, in reality, to have done it on purpose, to incriminate Natasha. Even when she knew such an act would go directly against Dima’s wishes. Though, to be fair, Natasha doubted she herself would last more than one sleepless night under inquisition. Or, God forbid, a beating.
Natasha told herself she wouldn’t let Ludmilla cow her like that. Dima would want Natasha to do her duty, no matter the danger. If Dima were still being detained, he had every right to expect Natasha to pick up the baton he’d been forced to drop and unite whatever ragged survivors were left to continue fighting in his name. He was counting on Natasha. She wouldn’t let him down.
So Natasha went to Moldavanka. Well, technically, she crept there, scurrying from shadow to shadow, staying out of sight the way Dima would want her to. She lurked outside the abandoned house where they met until she saw a flicker of curtains. Someone was there. That someone could be a KGB officer lying in wait. Natasha told herself she wasn’t afraid and went in.
She almost wept with relief when her gamble paid off. No KGB officer. (Well, none she knew of; as Dima and Papa pointed out, in any group, one is inevitably an informer.) Only Dima, Ludmilla, Miriam, and the rest. They were all accounted for!
The right side of Dima’s face was a swollen sickly yellow crisscrossed with broken blood vessels, while the left side was a more freshly bruised purple. Ludmilla’s left eye was swollen shut. A slash ran from the side of her mouth up her cheek. Miriam’s flowing auburn hair showed signs of having been ripped out in clumps, as if grabbed to pull back her head. The other men were equally marked, knuckles scraped raw where they’d tried to fight back.
And yet, none of them were acting as if anything was different. The meeting proceeded as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Their demeanor reminded Natasha of friends who’d had abortions. They’d been through a terrible, excruciating, brutal experience. But it needed to be done. They just never wanted to talk about or reference it again. Natasha obeyed their wishes. She didn’t gasp or fuss over Dima’s injuries. She didn’t tell Ludmilla or Miriam how genuinely awed she’d been by their stoic bravery (and how much she was presently regretting some of her previous, less-than-charitable thoughts about them). She didn’t gush over how inspirational she found them all. For months, it had been all talk and no action. Now that Natasha had seen action up close, she realized how inadequate talk would be.
So Natasha simply took her seat and joined them in pretending everything was normal. All the while knowing that, finally, everything had truly changed.
“Did you give one minute of thought regarding what you were doing to your parents?” Boris, who’d gone about for weeks pretending he had no idea about the latest developments in Natasha’s life, took advantage of an afternoon when the two of them were home alone to pull her into his room and, despite the closed door and lack of windows, still only allow himself to whisper.
“They’re going to be fine.” Mama and Papa had yet to sign her permission papers. Having seen what Dima and the rest were put through, Natasha had ceased pushing them. Yet, for Boris, Natasha answered the way she knew Dima would expect her to. “I had to do it. I have no future here. Neither do you. They made that clear the day we took our math exams.”
Natasha had never understood why, while she couldn’t help thinking about it every day, Boris appeared to have put the travesty behind him. He never mused about what might have been, never lamented the life he’d lost. It forced Natasha to wonder if she wasn’t making too big a fuss. Boris acted like he wasn’t the first person ever forced to let go of a dream, and he wouldn’t be the last, so he moved on and found something new to occupy his time, something he was confident would make him equally happy. It was most infuriating.
Boris crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. When they were kids, he’d given in to Natasha’s arguments without a fight. The most he’d put up in token protest was, “I don’t care what you say, as long as I know I’m right.” Since Natasha met Dima, however, it seemed as if Boris were intentionally overriding his innate tranquility for Natasha’s sake. It wasn’t that he cared about being right, it was that he felt terrified of what would happen if Natasha were wrong.
She rolled her eyes as he gravely intoned, “October 1941, the Romanian headquarters of the occupying army in Odessa was blown up. In retaliation, hundreds of Jews were hanged.”
“Every schoolkid knows that story.” Except the official version had it that hundreds of loyal Soviet martyrs were hanged. The fact that they were Jews was information passed around surreptitiously.
“The same thing happened in Kiev. After the Nazi headquarters was blown up, how many tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered at Babi Yar?” The monument over the mass graves there read citizens of kiev and prisoners of war. Natasha refused to listen to what Boris was saying, even as she heard his message loud and clear. “You selfishly run away, and the people you leave behind pay the price. Like our first kolkhoz.”
“Quit complaining. You didn’t suffer any consequences.”
She watched the debate in his head flare up briefly before Boris confessed, “I didn’t report you for leaving. So I got reported.”
“I-I didn’t know that,” Natasha stammered, shocked not just that it happened, but that he was only telling her now.
“I was up for a promotion at work a few months ago. Manager said he’d been planning to give it to me. Showed me the already filled-out papers. There’d have been a raise. Then he said he reviewed my disciplinary file and found out about my offense. He ripped up the papers in front of my face. ‘Better luck next time, Rozengurt.’”
Guilt sucker-punched Natasha’s chest and stomach. She pushed back against it, the way you fought the urge to vomit by swallowing hard and thinking of something else.
How dare Boris do this to her? Attempt to make Natasha question the righteousness of Dima’s cause by bringing up his trifling setbacks? Didn’t he realize the fate of millions was at stake? What was Boris’s piddling promotion compared to the bruises on Dima’s face? Compared to the elderly couple who, unlike their group, hadn’t been perfunctorily tortured and released? They never returned to the apartment where they staged their protest. Nobody knew where these Heroes of the Soviet Union currently were.
“You’re only worried about how what I’ve done might affect you,” Natasha accused.
Boris let it pass with a look that suggested her blow wasn’t low so much as it was beneath her. “You should have warned your parents. They were blindsided. If you’d warned them and your principal, they’d have warned their higher-ups, and the higher-ups wouldn’t have reacted so aggressively. If you give people what they need, they’re more likely to give you what you want. When are you going to understand that?”
“Spoken like a true collaborator,” Dima sniffed. They were getting dressed after another hurried assignation, Natasha ignoring the marks on Dima’s body the way she’d pretended not to notice the ones on his face. Yet while they were making love, she’d brushed her fingers along the worst of them, hoping Dima wouldn’t notice. She needed, in this small way, to feel a part of what had happened. She hoped some of the bravery manifested in those marks might rub off on her.
Dima stuck his head through the top of his sweater, smoothed his hair with both hands, and announced, “It’s people like that who make life difficult for people like us.”
They were finally an us. Natasha liked the sound of that.
“The ones who fight us, I can handle,” Dima went on. “It’s the namby-pamby appeasers I can’t stand. They keep accommodating and accommodating, no matter how bad things get. They never want to rock the boat.”
“I think he’s concerned about me and my family.” Natasha hated contradicting Dima, but remnants of childhood loyalty didn’t want Dima thinking Boris was looking out only for himself. Or expressing any concerns Natasha hadn’t at least entertained. “Is he right? Am I being selfish? What will happen to my parents if—when—I leave?”
“Nothing. As long as they stop being a part of the system and actively resist it.”
Natasha thought of the missing floor matron and her husband. “If Mama and Papa are fired from their jobs, could they end up like Brodsky? Imprisoned for being parasites?”
“Brodsky’s biographer wrote that, after the suffering of the trial and the mental hospital, the months Brodsky spent in exile in the Arctic were the best times of his life.”
Natasha noted that the biographer had said that, not Brodsky. Probably because the biographer hadn’t spent months in exile in the Arctic. Natasha imagined Mama banished to a frozen wasteland for the third time, not because of her mother, now, but because of her daughter. All Mama’s efforts to keep them safe, and she’d end up even worse than she started.
“And then Brodsky got deported to Vienna!” Dima playfully waved his fist at the window. “I hope they punish me like that!”
“Brodsky had Jean-Paul Sartre lobbying for him. I don’t think Sartre is acquainted with my parents.” Papa had already lost his medals, been called names, censured. To be banished as an enemy of the state after everything he’d given to the USSR would destroy him along with Mama.
“In the Warsaw Ghetto, there were politicians who thought if they went along with what the Nazis wanted, they’d spare the Jews.”
Oh, good, another World War II metaphor.
“Imbeciles like your Boris go way back in our history. Tell me, when was the only time the world ever respected Jewish might?”
Was this a trick question?
“Nineteen sixty-seven,” Dima enlightened. “The Six-Day War. You’d be walking down the street and Russian thugs who’d sooner spit at you than give you the right of way would get in your face and they’d say, “Damn, you people! Look at what you pulled off!”
In 1967, Natasha was more concerned with earning her gold medal than with foreign affairs, especially of a nation that, she’d been taught, had rejected the USSR’s magnanimous offer of friendship to ally itself with the capitalist West and join them in oppressing native people from the Congo to Vietnam. She’d had no time or compulsion to think of anything outside of herself. She thought she’d changed since then. What if she hadn’t? Is that what Dima was trying to tell her? That Natasha was still the self-centered girl she’d been then? The one she’d been trying so hard to leave in the past?
Dima reminded for the umpteenth time, “The only way we’ll ever get out of this prison country is by decisive action. Let cowards like your Boris—”
“He’s not my—”
“Let cowards like them play nice. It’s your choice which side you prefer.”
The grim look on Mama’s face when Natasha came home triggered her to fear the worst. She imagined both parents losing their jobs. She imagined exile to the Arctic—without a troupe of international poets clamoring for their release. She thought of Papa, not only forced to give up his hard-won medals but forbidden from marching in the Victory Parade every May 9. Papa pretended it was just another duty to fulfill, but Natasha saw how his eye filled with tears as the children ran up to him, handing him bouquets of flowers and thanking him for his service.
Natasha was prepared for anything. Except Mama offering Natasha her papers, signed by Mama, Papa, and even by Baba Daria.
“What changed your mind?” Natasha managed to choke out, a maelstrom of conflicting feelings clogging her throat.
Mama held up a crumpled envelope, the address on the front inscribed in an elegant, if shaky, hand, its flap sealed and resealed several times by censors. “Baba wrote that what you need should take precedence over what we want.”