September-October, 1941
The Volga River
Rostow had told them the truth; from the moment Pug threw off the lines that tethered the Avatar to the dock they were all hard at work. Lily and Pug handled the nets while Rostow piloted the boat. Rachel was assigned a myriad of chores that had to be repeated each day as their journey progressed.
At first Rachel was too busy to pay attention to the river. She might as well have been working in a factory, washing floors, shining fixtures, even tying knots, a skill that she quickly mastered from Pug’s demonstrations. At the end of each day she collapsed onto a pallet that Pug had made for her on deck and slept until daybreak, unconscious of the great river that carried them south.
Rostow never spoke to her except to give her more chores, and Lily was too involved with the fishing to talk. So it was the human silence that finally made her aware of the river’s sound, its ceaseless murmuring that became song once she listened more closely to it. Remarkably, Pug’s humming was the river’s music and he moved to its rhythms. Rachel soon found herself possessed by the same sounds.
She discovered to her amazement that Pug stayed awake most of the night, piloting the boat after Rostow went to sleep. She joined him in the wheelhouse one night, and his eyes shined with delight as he sang her songs about the river ripe with the legends of many heroes, ancient and modern. She, in turn, made sketches from his tales and put them into storybooks for him to look at. He wept over these simple drawings, pressing them to his heart and babbling nonsensically.
She returned the next night, and the next, suddenly no longer tired at the end of the workday. It was during those nights beneath the stars that she came to love the river. She was entranced by its vast, brooding presence, too immense to be captured by any artist. Mother Volga. She stared at it while Pug sang his simple poems of suffering and endurance that aroused her memory and delivered it into the river’s tender grasp.
Elizabeth. Her story, her sacrifice, now haunted Rachel more than her father’s, for in the end, Elizabeth had proven herself to be the greater of the two, though she had never created a single work of art and had died unknown, one of millions whose lives passed as uneventfully, as far as the world was concerned, as that of an insect. Yet, Rachel decided, it was Elizabeth’s story that Pug would have sung, had he known it, not her father’s, for all his fame. To the river he would have been a minor character, brought to life merely as a foil for the heroine, for Elizabeth.
Her father may have been famous, but he was a minor character compared to her mother.
And you, Rachel?
You had your chance that morning—after you and Stephen destroyed all the maquettes. You could have walked away from Father and the statue. You could have ended it right then and there. But you didn’t. You went right back to work on the statue, didn’t you?
Night after night on the river with Pug, she remained fixated in an agony of self-reproach. She wept shamelessly in front of Pug, who never asked what was troubling her. One idea pierced her heart like a dagger—she might have saved Elizabeth’s life had she stopped working on the statue that day.
Pug and the river sang on, absorbing her anguish in their timeless grasp.