November, 1941
The Caspian Sea
Defying its name, the Caspian Sea was like a placid lake. They relaxed in the sun on the deck during the day and slept inside on couches at night. Most of the people on board were connected in some way to the arts; there was even an entire symphony orchestra from Leningrad. As a result the ferry was a floating rehearsal hall, with the sound of strings and horns constantly tumbling out over the water.
“I never thought of waiting to see what happened to Maslow,” Lily observed. Her comment came out of nowhere, but Rachel was relieved that she had brought up the subject. “Did you?”
They lay on the deck, staring up at the sky.
“No.” Rachel pictured Maslow climbing the rope ladder to the barge. “Once he was on their ship there wasn’t anything we could have done for him. Nor would he have expected us to try.”
“We’re lucky he didn’t invite them to come onto the Avatar. We all would have been killed.”
“Without question.” Rachel sensed that Lily needed reassurance; this was surprising in view of what she had already been through. “I felt nothing for the man. To me he was a cynic who had given up on life.”
“He was the loneliest human being I’ve ever known,” Lily remarked. “Stalin ruined his life.” The sharpness in her voice carried a warning. “He lost his sense of direction.”
“What are you trying to tell me, Lily?”
“Don’t contact Avilov. Or anyone else who’s high up in the artistic establishment.”
“Why worry about that now? I have no identification papers, and we have to locate Mitya before we run out of money.” A touch of hostility clung to her words like dust on glass. Just now, Rachel didn’t want to be tortured about Avilov. “It’s going to be a long war. Let’s not rush things.”
Lily put her arms around Rachel. “You’re right. The first order of business is money. As soon as we reach Tashkent I’ll try and cable my father again.”
“Good. I’ll start looking for someplace to live and put out some feelers for Mitya . . .” Rachel listened to herself talking about the future with confidence; but her thoughts were less sanguine than her words. Money would be a problem, but far more threatening was the prospect of renewed contact with the authorities. Thanks to Mitya, she had avoided registration entirely in Moscow; but Tashkent was like Talsi by comparison. She would have no place to hide. It wasn’t by chance that so many creative artists were being evacuated to one city; there, Stalin could better keep an eye on them. The moment they arrived in Tashkent, if not sooner, she would be required to register. It might then be only a matter of time before the N.K.V.D. found her name on a list and arrested her as one of Michael’s accomplices.
The boat took on the trappings of a prison to her. Seeking an escape from that oppressive sensation, she got out her sketch pad. No more memories, she thought.
“What are you doing?”
“Portraits.”
For the rest of the voyage she lost herself in portraiture, to the evident delight of the many children on board. She wandered about like a minstrel, amusing everyone with her quick sketches.
All too soon, they docked at Krasnovodsk. It was night, so they saw nothing of the city as they were herded directly to the railroad station and onto boxcars. Those with “personal business” to attend to were directed to a wooden latrine that had been erected near the tracks. This provoked a hale of crude jokes that served to ease the gloom that had fallen over all of them.
Waiting her turn with Lily in the endless women’s line, Rachel got her first look at the desert. She was struck by the absence of any dunes. Under a canopy of moonlight, the vast flat expanse was disturbed only by a few rock formations and small scatterings of bushes. Above it were galaxies of stars, seemingly dropped so close to the earth that she felt she could touch them. She felt an instant kinship with the desert.
She reached the entrance to the latrine. She followed Lily inside and was assaulted by a stench of raw sewage so strong she came close to fainting. They had to stoop beside one another.
“Hey artist,” one of the women still waiting for an opening called, “why don’t you draw a picture of these wonderful marvels of socialist progress?” Along with the others Rachel couldn’t help but laugh. “Perhaps they’ll provide us with a cat to lick our asses clean,” someone else jested, eliciting more laughter.
Upon returning to the train, they were given plates loaded with corn meal and put into a boxcar populated only by women. “How wonderful,” Lily observed, “another nunnery.” The separation was meant to protect their privacy—buckets for waste had been placed in each car. “Oh to be a man,” Lily mused, “just stick it out over the edge and let fly into the sand.”
“Unless the wind shifts,” a voice replied, to a smattering of applause.
Once on their way, Rachel found that she didn’t mind the overcrowding as long as she could look out the open door and feel the cool night air blowing across her face. Before long, she was the only one still awake, and she glanced about at the sleeping women, studying their bodies in repose. How many of them would become pregnant before the end of the war, she wondered, producing a generation to whom the horrors still to come would be as distant as the Trojan war. Thank God she hadn’t become pregnant with Michael’s baby. It was difficult to understand why more women didn’t go mad during wartime; how could one take seriously the present, when she carried the future in her own body?
The sunrise brought a quick end to her comfort. The sun came up from the desert floor and seemed to aim its fiery blast directly at them. Within minutes the boxcar was a hot oven; there was no corner where she could escape. Lily and some of the others stripped naked and lay on their clothes; but it brought them no relief. By noon, many had simply passed out from heat stroke or lay moaning in a stupor.
When the train stopped for water, delegates from each car were sent to fill up buckets at the watertower and carry them back along the length of the train to their cars. Lily and Rachel volunteered so as to escape the confines of the oven.
“What do you think of the desert now?” Lily asked sarcastically at the first water stop.
“It’s not the desert’s fault that people are so stupid as to ride through it in metal crates.”
“Whose side are you on—ours or nature’s?”
“I’ll tell you if I survive after drinking this so-called water.”
They used their hands to scoop the water out of troughs used by sheep and any wild animals that wandered in from the desert. Dark green, a layer of scum floated on its surface. They knew it should have been boiled, but there was no time to build a fire, even assuming they could have found something to burn. When they got back to their car with the brimming buckets, their fellow passengers were already formed into rows, waiting to gulp down their share, one cupful at a time. Having no other choice, Rachel and Lily each took their turns, going first out of deference to their having carried the buckets.
While they were stopped at the water-tower, dark-skinned men approached the train carrying trays of dates and nuts. This was to be the only source of food made available to them until they reached their destination, so everyone stuffed themselves in spite of what they knew would be the dire consequences.
By evening their European stomachs reacted to the food, and the slop buckets were overwhelmed by their needs.
“One has to wonder what effect all this fertilizer will have on the desert,” Lily commented.
Remarkably, Rachel wasn’t effected.
“If you think I’m going to have to go without sleep while you escape into your dreams,” Lily groused, “I’ll stuff dates down your throat until that cast-iron gut of yours softens up.”
“I’ll eat for both of us, “Rachel quipped. “You’ll be better off imagining you’ve eaten.”
Most of the evacuees were plagued by diarrhea, yet at each water stop they drank the scummy water and devoured the dates and nuts. To those caught in the vicious circle of dehydration and cramps, the sun appeared white, and its scorching rays were unbearable. Their skin took on a bleached pallor, and they shrunk from the light as though it were poisonous.
Lily soon complained that she lacked the strength to help Rachel fetch their car’s water.
“Sleep it off,” Rachel suggested.
But when she awoke, Lily looked like a drowning woman who welcomed the sea into her lungs.
“What is it?”
“I can barely move and I’m burning up.”
Rachel knelt beside her in the shadowless cave on wheels, cradling her head. She was burning, her skin hotter than the sides of the boxcar.
There wasn’t anything Rachel could do. The train was without medicine; people began to die all around them, and their bodies were tossed into the sand within moments of their final breath. The fever took its victims so quickly that they departed in feeble silence, unable to make a sound in resistance.
Panic drove hundreds to leap from the train, taking to the desert on foot without food or water. Rachel was glad they didn’t attempt to throw the still-living victims to their death instead.
From all appearances, Lily didn’t share her concern. Her eyes had sunk deep into their sockets and glazed over. She breathed in painfully short bursts that jerked her body. She was delirious, rolling her head from side to side as sweat drenched her frame. Rachel held her and wiped her face with her shirt after soaking it in the very water that had given her the disease.
They didn’t reach Samarkand for two more days. Rachel’s joy at seeing the green oasis was short-lived: the train was quarantined outside of the city, and no one was permitted to leave it. Even the gravely ill had to remain on board as the military hospital wouldn’t receive civilian patients.
Rachel suppressed her outrage and her sense of helplessness; neither would help Lily hold onto life for the short distance that still separated them from Tashkent. The train didn’t move again until morning, and during those terrible hours hundreds died. Rachel sang to Lily, pleaded with her to fight harder, and in the loneliest moments of their night of death she prayed for her. Still locked in her delirium, alternating between teeth chattering chills and feverish sweats it appeared that Lily heard nothing.
When morning came, Rachel thought at first that Lily had died. Her eyes had rolled halfway up into her head and her lips were a bluish grey that matched the rest of her face. As Rachel felt for her pulse, Lily’s body was wracked by a convulsion that caused her to whimper. “Oh Lily!” Rachel cried. “Thank God. Just a little while longer. I promise.”
They were moving. The train rolled through green fields spliced by irrigation ditches filled with blue green water. Rachel held Lily tight the rest of the way, jamming her fingers into her mouth during her convulsions. They wound their way through a snow capped mountain range and down juniper-forested foothills to a long river valley that held in its grasp Tashkent.
From the foothills the city at first sight appeared to be an arboretum interspersed with monuments of stone and marble. Rachel wondered if Tashkent meant city of trees, as she marveled at the vast canopy of greenery that spread across the valley. “Trees, Lily!” she exclaimed to her unconscious companion. “Thousands of them. Even more beautiful than back home.”
The valley itself, crisscrossed with irrigation canals, was a latticework of cotton and melon fields. Hundreds of thousands of acres of white puff balls shared the fertile ground with round green melons. “What can they be, Lily? Melons the size of boulders. Wait until you see them!”
They approached the city’s outskirts at a maddeningly slow pace. Now had come the time that Rachel dreaded most: for at the railway station waited the hand of Stalin. She had considered and rejected as implausible the strategy of using her mother’s name. The inescapable conclusion she had reached was that she couldn’t allow any contact to occur between herself and the authorities until she had located Mitya, and once again had hidden herself in the protective embrace of the poster unit.
Leaving Lily, if only for an hour, would be the most difficult choice she had faced so far; yet it had to be done if she was to survive. So she set about trying to explain what was going to happen, believing that even in her unconscious state, Lily would hear and comprehend.
Bending low to her waxen face, Rachel kissed her pale forehead and whispered to her. “I’ve got to go now, my sleeping beauty. But I’m going to be back with you in just a few hours. They’ll have an ambulance waiting to take you to the hospital. I’ll meet you there and take care of you.”
She looked into Lily’s blank eyes and choked off the anguish that she knew would paralyze her if she submitted to it. “I won’t be able to help you if I’m arrested.”
She lowered Lily’s head to the floor. The others in the car watched her as she moved to the edge of the open doors. She couldn’t wait any longer, for the closer they got to the city, the more likely they’d be looking for fugitives seeking to avoid identification. She looked back at Lily, and then, as the train made one of its sporadic stops and starts, slipped over the edge onto the soft damp earth of a melon field.
For a few hundred yards she followed the tracks. Aiming for a heavily wooded area in the southern part of the city, she set out on a diagonal through the fields; though she walked rapidly, squinting against the glare, she made little progress. To her annoyance, she tired quickly and was forced to stop and rest. She sat on one of the huge melons and tapped its cool green skin. If only she could break it open. But there were no sticks or other sharp objects to be found.
A man came upon her there. He was about her height, round-faced with black hair and Asian features. He wore a skull-cap and his shoes and cotton pants were covered with dirt. His hands were calloused and his thick wrists and muscular forearms reminded her of her father. She knew that it was obvious why she was in the field, so she said nothing.
The laborer glanced about to assure himself that no one else accompanied her.
“You shouldn’t be out in the sun bareheaded.” He took a blue silk bandana from his pocket and gave it to her. She unfolded it, admiring its weave, and covered her head. Immediately she felt cooler.
“Thank you.”
“My wife sewed it by hand.”
“It’s very beautiful.”
“Are you thirsty?”
“Very.”
He took a long skinny knife from a sheath attached to his belt, and with a single stroke slit one of the melons sideways. He cut a piece from its center and handed it to her. She bit into the red fruit, and the juice soothed her parched lips and throat, dribbling down her chin.
“What is it?”
The man laughed. “Watermelon. Haven’t you ever seen one before?”
“No. It’s too cold where I come from.” She spit out the flat black seeds and ate more of the fruit.
The man took a piece for himself. He seemed to enjoy the unique spectacle of someone tasting watermelon for the first time. When she finished her piece, he cut her a second. She ate this one slowly, relishing every bite.
“Good,” the man said, nodding his approval. “Eat too fast and you’ll get a belly ache.”
For some reason his remark struck her as funny, and she laughed. He laughed with her.
“You must not have eaten for a long time.”
“Only dates and nuts for days.”
“The trains come in by the hundreds. Full of Russians. Like you.”
“I’m not Russian. I’m Latvian.”
He didn’t understand. “Latvian? What is that?”
“A tiny country west of Russia.”
“But you speak Russian.”
“Only because they conquered us. Listen.” She told him in Latvian how delicious the watermelon tasted. “That’s my native tongue,” she explained in Russian.
He spoke to her in a language she didn’t understand. “That is my tongue,” he said in Russian. “I am Uzbek.”
“What did you say to me?”
He studied her for a time before answering. “That we too were conquered. In 1865, by the Russian Czar.”
“So were we. But we gained our independence after the First World War.”
“What war was that?”
It was her turn to regard him curiously. Had it not been for the deadly seriousness of his manner, she would have laughed at him; but she felt instinctively that her fate depended on her answer.
“At the time of the revolution. When the Bolsheviks came to power they relinquished our country. A year ago Stalin took it back.”
“You are bitter.”
“Yes.”
“And that is why they will arrest you.”
“Exactly.”
“Many have been arrested.”
She knew from his expression that he had found others in this very field, and because they were Russians he hadn’t cared whether they were caught. She had to make him believe that she wasn’t Russian.
“Here. Let me show you.” She smoothed the earth where the melon had sat and drew a map that showed the Baltic Sea and Latvia in relation to Moscow and Leningrad. “This is my home.” She pointed to Riga. “Latvia. Not Russia.” He nodded. “They took away my land and my house.” He looked up from the map and spat. I’m saved, she thought.
“Where are you going now?”
“To the hospital. My sister is there. She is very ill.”
“Tonight I will take you there. Eat some more and then we’ll get out of the sun.”
She couldn’t resist a third piece of melon. When she had finished, he buried what was left and covered her drawing. “Follow me.” He led her on a zig-zag course across the field. Her heart was thumping, but it wasn’t from fear; she was certain he wouldn’t harm her. She felt the thrill of discovery, of being introduced to a culture and world so different from her own.
At the edge of the field was a road and across it was a wooden hut shaded by a row of poplars. They crossed the road and entered the shade. He opened the padlocked door and motioned for her to enter. Inside, the hut was remarkably clean, without a spec of dirt on the board floor. Instead of chairs there were thick pillows placed on cotton mats. Covering the pillows was brilliantly colored silk. The man sat and motioned for Rachel to sit opposite him. She did so, resting against the pillows.
“I am called Alisher,” he said. “After Navoi.” Her face was blank. “He was one of the great poets of all time, yet it doesn’t surprise me that you have never heard of him. Centuries before Pushkin we had many poets and artists of genius. But Navoi was the greatest. He was our Leonardo DiVinci.”
“When did he live?”
“In the 15th Century. We Uzbeks have been a people since the time of Tamerlane. Even then we were known for our weaving and our jewelry.”
“I am an artist.”
“Of course. Do you think I’m blind?” Rachel smiled. “Does this artist have a name?” She told him. “A Biblical name. My daughter is named Safur. But she is much younger than you.”
Alisher asked where her family was, and she told him of her parents’ deaths and Stephen’s dilemma.
“I am sorry. Many of our sons have also been taken. Was your father also an artist?
“Yes. He was famous in Europe.”
“Regrettably, his work has never been shown here,” Alisher observed.
“If you give me something to draw with, I’ll show you what it looks like.”
On a table in the corner were ledgers. Alisher tore out a blank page and gave it to her with a pencil. She sketched several of her father’s works; tears came to her eyes. “You must understand,” she explained, “they were all monumental.”
“He would like our mosaics. But you will see them for him.”
Rachel wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “Yes, I will do that.”
Alisher had to leave to tend to the fields. “You will be safe here,” he promised. “Once it is dark I will guide you to the hospital.”
He opened the door and stepped out into the bright light. When the door closed, she waited for a few minutes and then tried it; it opened and she peeked out. She saw no one. Now was the time to run, unless she decided to put her life in Alisher’s hands. She had no doubt that he had stood by while others had tried unsuccessfully to elude the authorities; but she didn’t sense in him the sort of cruelty that would have led him to lure her to the hut just so she could be arrested. If that was his aim he could have held her out in the fields. No, she concluded, he wasn’t going to betray her.
She went back to the pillows and sat down. The silk was cool against her face, and light from outside outlined the door and came under it, darting across the floor. She was pushed toward sleep but clung to the edge of consciousness, her memory keeping her awake.
She thought of Michael, replaying in her mind the night she had first had sex with him. And all the nights that followed.
What difference would it make? She and Michael had made love many times; but now she feared they would lose that sense of who each of them was and become strangers. Years could pass, she thought, before they found each other, and by then they would be different people.
She got up and opened the door. The sun was a red disc sinking into the mountains, tinting the snow-capped peaks rose and sending long purple ribbons across the sky. The air became cooler and a breeze came over the fields. I wish you could see this, Michael, she thought, imagining his arms around her. Someday I’ll paint it for you, all of it, to fill in the gap. She waited until the sun went down to go back inside, leaving the door open to the night air.
It wasn’t long before Alisher returned. Upon seeing the door open, he groaned in dismay.
“I’m in here,” Rachel called out.
The Uzbek peered into the dark hut. “I almost ran off looking for you.”
Rachel was touched by his concern. “I thought of leaving but my instincts told me to trust you.”
He looked pleased. “Trust is a rarity in these treacherous times. I’ll savor it. But I must warn you—do not dispense it too freely. Particularly to Russians.”
“I won’t.”
“We’ll go now. But you must cover your head and keep your eyes on my heels so that no one will look at your face.”
“What about when we get to the hospital?”
“Once you are in sight of it I’ll disappear.”
“Will I ever see you again?”
Alisher smiled wanly. “To most Europeans we are invisible. But if you look you will see us.”
“I understand.” She was captivated by his subtle manner. “Thank you for saving my life.”
“Someday you can put us into your pictures.”
“I will.”
They walked side by side until they came to the end of the fields.
“Here I will say goodbye.” He spoke some words in Uzbek; she didn’t need to ask what he had said, for their sound conveyed their meaning.
“I hope we meet again,” she replied. Then, in Latvian, she wished him good luck and a long life.
She covered her head with the bandana and followed him, keeping her head down. They entered a section of the city made up of mud huts that lined narrow twisted streets; she knew that this was where the Uzbeks lived. Others passed them in the streets, but they were only shapes in the darkness hurrying to their destinations. Lingering in the air was the spicy aroma of meat roasted over an open brazier; she resisted the overwhelming temptation to stop Alisher and ask him to get her something to eat. She maintained what she assumed was the pose of a dutiful daughter. If only Father could see me now, she observed.
They left the old part of the city and crossed a bridge over a wide canal. Here the streets became wide boulevards, beautifully landscaped with trees and modern buildings. No mystery who lives in this section, Rachel thought. She also noticed out of the corner of her eye several monumental pieces of sculpture.
Alisher stopped at a wide, but deserted, intersection. She looked up and saw what could only be the hospital a few blocks away. She nodded and walked on, taking off the bandana. When she reached the hospital, she glanced back, but he was gone.
Now you must look like you belong, she told herself. Just another evacuee looking for her sister. She realized that the bandana would be an oddity; yet she felt that she ought to hold onto it, if only to remind herself of Alisher. She stepped into the shadows and folded the bandana into her underwear. Not the most comfortable arrangement, she thought, but it won’t show.
She went directly into the hospital through the ground floor doors. Any fears she had of being stopped were allayed by the madhouse environment she encountered. It was a hospital under siege, with patients jammed into every open corner and nurses and doctors rushing about ignoring constant pleas for their attention.
She went through each ward on the ground floor without finding Lily and then walked upstairs to the second floor; it too was in a chaotic state. No Lily. The third floor the same. On the fourth floor she located the typhus ward, its door covered with signs warning everyone but medical personnel to keep out. She ignored the warnings and went inside.
The stench hit her first. An odor of decay, of slow death, rose up from the floor; hundreds of victims lay on mats, most unconscious, unaware of their primitive circumstances. Lily, what have they done to you? Rachel thought, moving slowly past the prone figures, fear rising in her throat. A deathly silence overhung the warehouse-like ward, punctured only by an occasional whisper or feeble moan.
Lily was one of them. Rachel found her a quarter of the way down the narrow aisle that ran between the blocks of patients. She was still dressed as she had been on the train, and it was evident that she hadn’t bathed. She was barely conscious, her face drenched with perspiration, her mouth hanging open.
“I’m here, Lily. I’m back, just as I promised. Now I’m going to get you some help.”
The money Pug had given her amounted to nearly two thousand rubles. She took it from inside her bra and kept it in hand as she went in search of a doctor.
She saw a lone duty nurse at the opposite end of the floor and approached her. “If you are looking for the doctor he won’t be back until tomorrow morning.” The nurse was thin with blond wavy hair, and Rachel knew as soon as she spoke that she was Latvian.
“Are you from Riga?” Rachel asked in Latvian.
The nurse didn’t appear surprised. “Yes,” she replied in Russian. “I arrived just last week.”
“So am I.” Rachel switched back to Russian. “My sister is a patient in this ward—she’s lying back there.”
“Not much hope for them.” The nurse looked directly at Rachel. “We have no drugs, and the doctors are busy with the ones who can be saved. Here they die like flies.”
“I have to get my sister out of here.”
The nurse looked about and then rubbed her fingers against her thumb.
“I have money.”
“That makes a difference. The black market operates here too.”
Within an hour Lily had been moved up to the tenth floor, the top of the hospital. She was bathed and gowned, then put to bed in a room by herself. The doctor, who had been evacuated from Leningrad, held out slight hope. “It’s a miracle she hasn’t died yet,” he declared.
Rachel sat with her until she could no longer keep her eyes open. She slept on the floor beside her bed. The next morning brought a slight change: Lily opened her eyes and moved her head from side to side, but she didn’t recognize Rachel. Through the day, Rachel remained at her side, monitoring the intravenous flow of drugs into her veins and talking to her, urging her to fight for her life.
That night, she fell asleep in her chair holding Lily’s hand. She was awakened by hunger pangs, and she realized she had forgotten about eating. There was no food to be had in the hospital at that hour and she didn’t want to go out alone at night. Her hunger drove her out into the corridor. The door to the next room was open, and she walked over and looked in. A skeletal woman who was near death lay on the bed, staring out the window. In a chair near the bed dozed a man Rachel judged to be thirty five. He was very thin, with thick black curly hair. She was about to walk away when his eyes opened and he stared at her. Looking into his blue eyes Rachel felt something; more than mere desire, a gentle rip that made her heart thirst for him. No! She chided herself. Michael’s still alive. She didn’t want to disturb the patient so she said nothing. Sleep passed from his eyes and he got up and came to her.
As he stepped outside, she started to apologize for disturbing him, but he interrupted her. “You’re my neighbor. I’ve walked past your friend’s room a dozen times, but you never looked my way.”
“My sister. She is gravely ill. Typhus. You may not want to even get near me.”
“I’ll take my chances. That’s my mother. Cancer. She’ll be gone in the next few days.” As though to explain his matter-of-fact tone he added, “We’ve been ready now for a week. She’d like to go.”
“The reason I disturbed you is that I’m hungry.” She realized how absurd she sounded.
“Do I look like a cook?”
“No.” They were both smiling now.
“Good, because I fancy myself a literary man, and it would be dismal if I had the face of a chef.”
“I haven’t eaten for two days, and I just got here, so I don’t know where to even look for food.”
“At this time of night it would be difficult but not impossible. Can you wait a half hour?”
“Of course.”
“Look in on Mother for me and I’ll be back.” He ambled away from her, a youthful buoyance to his step. She forced herself to look away.
She returned to Lily’s bedside. “I’ve met someone who can help us.” She spoke as if Lily were coherent. “He’s a writer of some sort. Arrogant, but very warm.” She went on, describing him like they were schoolgirls and there was a new boy in her class. Every few minutes she went and looked in on his mother; she hadn’t moved, and she stared silently out the window, a shrunken frame with large unyielding eyes that were dying embers in her ashen face. Rachel respected her need for silence and didn’t disturb her.
Her son returned forty-five minutes later, carrying two large circular cakes from which came the familiar delicious aroma of spicy meat. Rachel went out to him. “Uzbek food,” he said. “Shashlik.” He opened up the two cakes and showed her the chunks of still sizzling mutton. “They roast it out in the streets. I’m the only Russian I know who eats it and I plan on living on it for the rest of the war.”
Imitating him, she folded the cake in half around the meat and took a bite. The mutton, heavily seasoned with pepper and vinegar, tasted wonderful. They quickly devoured their sandwiches, leaning against the wall in the corridor.
“Oh, I’m Igor Bachterev,” he said. “From Leningrad.”
“Rachel Hummel. From Latvia.”
He extended his hand and she took it. Desire surged through her. She welcomed it, a burst of life in this house of death.
“You came in by train?”
She couldn’t resist teasing him. “No, by boat.”
“Ouch.” He laughed, and she realized that she was still holding his hand. She let go, but a part of her wanted to pull him closer.
She glanced into Lily’s room. “Thanks for the food.”
“I’m glad we have something in common, even if it’s only mutton.” The same buoyancy that she had observed in his walk now animated his face. “Mind if I look in on you and your sister tomorrow?”
“Not at all.”
Fortified by her meal Rachel remained awake well into the night. Lily was more agitated than she had been up to that point, tossing and speaking incoherently in her delirium, as if she were trying to break through it. Rachel urged her on, coaxing her back to reality. To no avail; she sunk back into a fitful slumber.
“That’s enough for now,” Rachel advised. “We’ll try again later. We’re close now, Lily. Very close.”
She dampened a towel at the sink and wiped Lily’s brow. Her eyes were closed now and her lips were relaxed. She was at peace, her breathing regular. What did she see, Rachel wondered, when she looked at her? The face of a stranger or of someone she knew but couldn’t recognize?
“Soon, Lily, soon.” She drifted off to sleep for a few hours, awakening in that hour when the deepest silence held sway. Insignificant sounds were enlarged as if under a microscope: rubber heels hitting the corridor floor with a muffled thump, the murmur of indistinct voices, a sudden moan that seemed to encompass all the pain and agony in the world.
From next door she heard Igor’s mother’s pleading voice. “Why won’t it let me go? Why am I being tortured?”
Igor’s voice, no longer dispassionate, followed. “If I believed in God I would pray for your release.”
“Do it anyway. God doesn’t care what you believe.”
“I will Mother. I’ll do whatever you ask of me.”
Rachel heard a slight movement and glanced at Lily. She sat up and stared at her. “I don’t understand.”
Rachel couldn’t speak. She embraced Lily’s emaciated frame and held her.
“You know who I am?” Lily nodded. “Say my name.”
“Rachel.” She pronounced it slowly as though she were spelling it in her mind.
“Yes. Yes!” Rachel couldn’t constrain herself. “You’re back, Lily. You’re here!”
A look of animal fright overtook her. “What happened to me?”
“You’ve been ill. Desperately ill. You got sick on the train.”
“Train?” She glanced about, taking in her surroundings. Rachel could see her struggling to comprehend. Her face appeared to be caught in a vise as the strain built up within. “The train.” Lily looked at her hands and then at Rachel and burst into tears.
“It’s over, Lily.” Rachel held her. “You’re back with us. There’s nothing more to fear.”