Мария Кузнецова - Something Unbelievable

“Shut up, idiotic girl,” I said. “He was just trying to help.”

“Are you kidding? Misha is so in love with you. Now more than ever,” she said.

“Who can think of love at a time like this?” I said, smacking her scrawny arm harder than I intended. “Silly girl, we could die any minute, and here you have your head in the clouds.”

Her bottom lip trembled and I braced myself for the floodgates to open, but they did not. “I have to keep busy somehow, don’t I?”

“Read a book,” I told her, and then I reached into my bag and pulled out The Idiot, perhaps to justify hefting such a heavy tome to the mountains.

But she did not ask to borrow a book. She just crossed her arms and pouted for an impressively long time. She let me see her hurting, just to punish me. Eventually, she joined our grandmother, who was fanning her face and muttering, “This will not do, this will not do….”

Polya put her arm around her and said, “We’ll be fine, Baba, you’ll see.” It was strange to see my sister in the caretaking position, but perhaps that was why she liked being with my grandmother instead of me, feeling like the stronger one under these circumstances.

While those two carried on, Bogdan monkeyed around with little Yaroslava, for whom he always had a certain fondness.

“Of course dogs can marry cats,” he told her. “Where do you think rabbits come from? They’re as soft and fluffy as cats and as fast as dogs, naturally. It’s science, silly girl.”

“But who do rabbits marry? Do they marry each other?” the clever girl asked.

“Almost never,” Bogdan replied solemnly.

Aunt Yulia was amused by his antics but pretended not to be. “Don’t let him fill your head with nonsense,” she told her daughter, who only giggled in response and turned back to her dubious mentor.

When the fathers were done conferencing, Misha patrolled the aisles, attempting to look helpful. When he could not find a function for himself, he stood at the window and watched the landscape for what seemed like eternity without even a twitch in his jaw, impressing me once more with his stillness. Mama and Papa returned eventually and crawled straight into bed though the sun had hardly had a chance to sink below the horizon.

The train traversed the distant land, which was far more remote than the fields surrounding the Orlovs’ immense dacha on the outskirts of the city. I watched the wan grass, the occasional cracked huts, the thin-looking cows wandering here and there munching at the grass, the horses swinging their wild ancient tails.

Baba Tonya had fallen asleep and Polya returned to my side. She seemed to have forgotten our earlier fight and was only tired and frightened. Her stomach growled as she moved closer to me, tugging on my sleeve.

“I’m scared, Lara,” she said, chewing on a strand of fiery hair.

“Well,” I snapped. “Don’t be!”

But this did not ward her off. She studied the dark fields as if they contained the answers she wanted. “What do you think will happen to us—out there?”

A tear fell down her pink, round cheek. I almost felt sorry for the girl. There were no suitors to ogle her here, and our parents were too busy to lavish upon her the praise and love she expected. Her other joy was hearing our grandmother’s stories of soirees, and the old woman was too distraught to offer those. And her formerly gorgeous red hair was greasy and wilted. I considered noting that we were less likely to get blasted to pieces if we got the hell out of Kiev, but I didn’t want to make her cry over her friends again.

“We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?” I said, patting her hand.

“I don’t like the sound of that.”

“This isn’t about what you like and don’t like.”

I noticed something strange on the landscape, which I mistook for planks of wood and then understood were suitcases, strewn about without reason. Was it a sign people had been carted away and forced to leave their things behind—or had they decided to drop them because they were too heavy to carry?

My sister was sniffling beside me, and it was a sad sight to behold. I wiped the snot under her nose with the back of my hand. Across from us, the Orlov brothers rested facing the wall. The backs of their dark heads were identical from that particular angle, there was no telling who was who.

“Fine, fine, Misha might have a crush on me, are you happy now?”

She smiled the smile of a flatulent baby. “I knew it.”

I shook my head at this ridiculous notion, but I allowed her this small victory.

“Come on, now, let’s go to sleep,” I said, and she rested beside me.

I wondered: was it true? Did Misha have any feelings for me, or was he just trying to help in a time of crisis? As I observed Misha’s sleeping form rising and falling across from me, I tried to tell myself that our destination would not be completely bleak, because he would be there. Being near him during our evacuation and resettlement tinged the uncertain future with an aura of romance. It would be a thrilling adventure, not a descent into chaos. There would be an entire steppe just for me and Misha, whispering sweet nothings across a snowy divide.

When Bogdan sat beside me in the middle of the night, I was surprised but not annoyed. Hunger had gnawed away at all of us just a few days into our trip—our extra bread and honey and Aunt Mila and Uncle Igor’s marmalades were long gone—and I would take any distraction that I could get. Everyone else was sound asleep except for us. I was wide-awake, sitting on my bed and staring out the window, fogging up the glass with my breath. I was hungry and hot, already feeling filthy, and there was no chance my body would relax. I was a poor sleeper in general, finding one thing or another to worry about long before the war began. Would I pass the chemistry test? Why was Anna so harshly punished for her love of Vronsky? Would I ever find such a love? Would Papa keel over from helping all those strangers? There was no relief from the onslaught.

“Too scared to sleep?” Bogdan said, his lips twisting into a mean smile.

“Of course not,” I snapped. “Stalin will protect us from Hitler,” I added, pointlessly echoing something Papa said to calm us down. “There’s no reason to be scared.”

He snorted. “You think Hitler is worse than Stalin?” he said, lowering his voice. He scooted closer to me, so our knees were touching. “Stalin knew Hitler was coming for us months before he did, but he was too proud to prepare his army to fight him. He couldn’t believe his so-called ally would defy him. He felt so humiliated by this that he called any of his cronies who warned him traitors and had them shot. If it wasn’t for him, Kiev, Leningrad—we’d all be safe. And now if any soldier doesn’t want to walk into a German death trap, Stalin will have him shot and his family arrested. It’s ridiculous.”

“Be quiet with that kind of talk,” I said, lowering my voice even more. He could go to prison for the things he was saying. And even if everyone around us appeared to be sleeping, you never knew who was listening. “What would your father think?” I added.

He shrugged at his sleeping father. “He can’t hear me now, can he? Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin—all murderers and hypocrites. We just happened to be born under Stalin.”

“Exactly,” I said. “And that being the case, we must root for Stalin.”

He patted my hand as if I had missed the point completely. “And that’s just what we’re doing, darling.”

“As we should be,” I said, but my head was spinning. I considered myself a patriot, and knew it was idiotic to voice any doubts about our government. From my parents’ late-night whispers, I had the idea that they had found our leader less than perfect, but who wasn’t? My parents would never critique Stalin at a regular volume because you could not trust the phones, the wires, your neighbors, your colleagues, or anyone who wasn’t family. But what was this he was saying about Stalin, and where did it come from? He was taking it too far, much further than my parents ever had.