Daria and Edward’s first child, a daughter named Alyssa, was born the next year, followed by a second, Anya, two years later, in 1934. Both girls had their mother’s luxurious waves of ebony hair, their father’s glittering green eyes and his slender build, down to those aristocratic fingers. Neither showed signs of having inherited the hooked, incriminating nose Daria’s mother had taken great care to breed out of their bloodline. Mama pronounced the offspring acceptable. Though she did wish Daria had waited longer and spaced them out in more upper-class fashion. Mama accused Daria of dropping litters like a peasant. Genteel women, she insisted, gave birth once.
“You are not a broodmare,” Mama lectured. “You are a queen, a lioness.”
Daria bit her tongue to keep from pointing out that lions were cats. Who delivered litters.
Daria also didn’t feel the need to explain to Mama that it was difficult to space out children when your husband spent every moment he wasn’t at his piano looking at you as if you were the most alluring thing he’d ever seen. When he could barely wait for the door to the room his father had graciously conceded to the newlyweds to close before he was reaching for Daria, stripping off her clothes along with his own, and, from their first night together, taking care to ensure her pleasure matched his own, instructing her in what he liked as well as encouraging her to explore and direct him. Under circumstances like that, having two children in three years was not that prolific.
Edward did travel a great deal. Daria went with him at first, but it became difficult once Alyssa was born and impossible by the time Anya came along. Comrade Stalin unveiling his battle against enemies wishing to destroy the socialist state via infiltration of foreign elements, and curtailing international travel as a result, proved a relief to Daria, though she expected Edward to be incensed. His father certainly was. As soon as he’d ensured no one could overhear, Isaak defiantly whispered about stupid decisions made by stupid members of stupid committees. Edward declined to throw a tantrum like his father and many of his colleagues. Unable to perform abroad, he displayed an unexpected pragmatism, making no fuss about limiting his appearances to traveling among the Soviet republics.
“It’s like music, Papa. You have to let it flow where it wants. You can’t force it. All you can do is adjust the key and find your rightful rhythm within it.”
Edward insisted on seeing the silver lining. He said the limits on traveling left him more time to practice, which he did for hours each day, his delicate, precise fingers caressing the keys in a manner not dissimilar from the one that made Daria sing her own high notes. Rather than tiring, Edward drew energy from his playing. While other musicians might battle their pieces, frequently ending up defeated in the process, Edward followed Bach or Rachmaninoff’s lead to inevitable triumph. Daria watched the familiar electricity charging up his hands into his brain, the resultant light radiating from his eyes like an addiction.
“He was like this as a youngster,” her father-in-law boasted. “Never had to force him to practice. My burden was to make him stop! If I didn’t, he would forget to eat, to sleep. The foolish boy told me once he thought he could live on music alone!”
Daria’s mother approved of no third child appearing after Anya turned two and then three. Mama assumed Daria had heeded her sensible advice. But, in fact, it was because both girls were now sharing a bedroom with their parents. While neither Daria’s nor Edward’s ardor or enthusiasm had dimmed, timing became increasingly complicated.
They forced themselves to wait until the children were asleep, gambling that neither would wake unexpectedly. One night, after pleasuring Edward in the “French” manner he’d introduced her to, the pair struggled to stifle their laughter, imagining a bleary-eyed Alyssa or Anya catching them in the act and turning her parents in for the crime of engaging in cosmopolitan and foreign anti-Soviet activities.
They were joking, of course; anything else was ridiculous to contemplate. Except that, a few years earlier, a thirteen-year-old boy named Pavlik Morozov had reported his father, chairman of the village soviet, as a criminal who forged documents and sold them to enemies of the state. Pavlik’s father was tried, sent to a labor camp, and later executed. In return, Pavlik’s uncle, grandparents, and cousin killed the heroic child—and his younger brother, too. Now Pavlik was a martyr and a role model for good Soviet children everywhere. In their nursery school, Alyssa and Anya sang “The Song of the Hero Pioneer,” chirping, “Our comrade is a hero / He did not allow his father / To steal the property of the people . . . To all youngsters, Morozov is our example / We are a squad of heroes / Morozov is dear to us / The Pioneers will not forget him.”
Daria had lost track of how many times she’d heard the children perform it for parents at holiday concerts on May Day, Red Army Day, even New Year’s Day. It sounded most peculiar when they belted it out, including the gory details of Pavlik’s murder, next to a white-bearded, red-suited, jolly Grandfather Frost, beneath a yolka decorated with ornaments and tinsel. Edward cringed every time he heard it. Daria hoped people would assume it was due to the dreadfully tuned piano on which the nursery-school teacher hammered out her accompaniment, and not something that could be branded political. Because anything could be.
Just last month, there’d been a disturbance in their own courtyard. In the building across the way, on the fifth floor, two families who shared a communal apartment had gotten into a row. From what Daria could glean via the screaming that screeched out their window and ricocheted against anything within hearing range, one of the wives had stretched her clothesline across their shared kitchen, leaving soiled socks and underpants to drip water into the soup the second wife was preparing for her husband’s midday dinner on the stove. The second wife responded by yanking down the laundry, which she called filthy and disgusting, and flinging it out the window onto the frozen mud. In retaliation, the first wife grabbed the cooking pot and dumped its contents out the window—onto her own laundry. That’s when at least one husband got involved. Arriving home to find either his dinner or his unmentionables in a sodden heap on the steps, and hearing the screaming from above, he chose to join in.
Throwing his head back, he howled, “Fuck your Comrade Stalin, and your Comrade Lenin, too. Gypsy thieves! Stealing my home, squatting in my kitchen. I worked for it, I earned it, and you just come from your stinking Romania and take it! Moldovan, my ass. Gypsies, that’s what you are!”
“Close the window!” Edward’s father, catching Daria peeking, pulled her back and reached for the shutters. “You don’t want them to know we heard and didn’t say anything.”
The final round of name-calling brought Adam out from his underground room beside the gate. Looking bored, he shoved the cursing husband toward the street, ignoring how “Fuck Stalin” and “Fuck you, gypsies,” turned into “Fuck you, you motherfucking informer.”
At this point, one wife came flying down the stairs, tripping over the coat she’d had time only to throw on, not to button.
“No, please, Adam Semyonovitch, let him stay. He didn’t mean it. Everything is fine now.”
“Everything’s not fine!” her husband roared. “How much are you going to let these Red bastards keep taking from us? First our home, then our food, now our honor!”
“Shut your drunken mouth about your goddamn honor!” She screamed at her husband while turning to plead with Adam, latching onto his forearm, which did about as much good as if she’d been trying to stop a chopped tree from falling. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He’s been ill. His fever must have returned. Please, Adam Semyonovitch, let me take him upstairs. We’ll settle it ourselves. We won’t be any trouble ever again; you have my word, please, Comrade.”
The appeal proved unappealing. Adam kept moving, shaking the hysterical woman off like melting snow on his sleeve and dragging her husband through the tunnel and out the gate, locking it. He ignored the man’s now contrite pleas from the other side, his promises to behave, his assurance that he hadn’t meant what he said—it was a joke between dear friends; all Soviet peoples were dear friends now, even the thieving Gypsies . . .
The Chaika limousine came three days later. In the morning, like always. Four a.m. They whispered it was because that’s when the accused were in their deepest state of sleep and would have the most difficult time launching a defense. Not that anyone was listening to what they were saying. The family was caught by surprise. It had been over seventy-two hours since the inciting incident; maybe they believed that they were safe. That the outburst, like Daria’s father-in-law wanted, hadn’t been observed by anyone. No one reported them. They’d gotten away with it.
They hadn’t.
They took the husband and the wife. Herding them out to the car wearing the nightclothes they’d found them in. No coats, no hats, not even a shared shawl. They would be fine for a while. It was less freezing in the car. And later, there weren’t enough wraps to keep you warm in the isolator on Marazly Street, where political prisoners were kept separate from common criminals. Unless, of course, these were important enough to be processed straight through to Kiev. Or worse, Moscow.
They took the children, too. No one was sure where they’d end up. After all, could ten-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, be enemies of the state? Then again, they’d heard what their parents said and, unlike Pavlik Morozov, hadn’t informed. That would be counted against them.
The rest of the tenants were spared this time. Daria suspected her father-in-law had been holding his breath throughout the entire operation, looking around their rooms, speculating about what he’d be allowed to keep with him in exile.
Once the crisis had passed, within ten minutes of the Chaika pulling out of the courtyard, the primary communal neighbors took over the abandoned space, rifling through the departed’s things, keeping what they liked, tossing the refuse into the street for the rest of them to fight over. Through the window, Daria spied a clothesline now snaking along the length of the kitchen.
After that, even the bravest inhabitants stopped looking Adam in the eye. Those, like Daria’s father-in-law, who, in the past, had attempted to make jokes, thinking they could josh the sullen giant into good humor through their own example, or, at least, a polite “Good morning, Adam Semyonovitch,” “Good evening, Adam Semyonovitch,” “How pleasant that the rain has stopped, Adam Semyonovitch,” now scurried by him, heads down, shoulders hunched, practically groveling along the ground in a dual attempt to court his favor and escape his notice.
It made Daria furious. Because it reminded her of her mother. Her brave, clever mother, who’d disobeyed Daria’s father to send her to school, who’d ignored their neighbors preaching about the dangers of the city, who’d set out to make her own luck where her daughter’s marriage prospects were concerned, and who’d stuck to her guns even when it looked like all her planning might prove for naught, turning to God only as a very last resort. And then Daria was forced to recall how Mama had acted in front of Edward and his father. Like she was afraid of them, like she wasn’t good enough for them, like she owed them an apology for not having had their advantages, like she wasn’t deserving of being treated like a person.
Daria had convinced herself to forgive Edward and Isaak for making Mama feel that way. She’d rationalized that it wasn’t their fault, that the inferiority was in Mama’s mind, that they’d been as polite as could be expected under the circumstances. But Daria would be damned before she’d give Adam the satisfaction of making her feel that way.
So while everyone else crawled, Daria stood up straighter. While everyone else feigned a fantastic interest in their watches or making certain they didn’t slip on a patch of treacherous ice by keeping their eyes peeled to the ground at all times, Daria made sure to look Adam square in the face. She bade the girls to wish him good morning and good evening in Russian and, once, when her mother was visiting, in Yiddish. With a patronymic like Semyonovitch, Adam was no better than they were, in that respect. He was also a Jew. He couldn’t claim his ancestry was any more patriotic. Daria wanted him to know she was aware of that fact. Her mother cringed and later read Daria the riot act. How dare Daria shame her new family in such a brazen manner? Did she want them to send her packing? Did she want to end up no better than before? And after all the labor Mama did to make certain no one could accuse her Daria of being provincial trash! Speaking Yiddish, no less! Daria would be the death of them all!
Daria apologized profusely. Then, when Mama returned home, continued right on doing what she’d been doing. After Adam came to tell Daria Alyssa was playing in front of the building with a dead rat, wrapping it in old newspapers like a baby doll in a blanket, chastising Daria for risking all of them catching the plague, she made sure to thank him and pull a protesting Alyssa away, even as she made it clear the disgust in her voice was targeted not at her daughter’s unconventional idea of a plaything, but at him.
She knew it terrified her father-in-law, but Edward took it in stride. “She’s merely saying good morning to the dvornik, Papa. She’s not doing anything wrong. None of us is doing anything wrong, so there is nothing to be afraid of.”
Edward believed what he was saying.
Even on the morning when the authorities turned up for them.