Marina Cramer - Roads

“Please, eat,” Ksenia invited, moving the plate closer to Maria Kirilovna. The doctor took a piece. Everyone followed suit. Ksenia watched them eat, her face aglow with intense satisfaction. After a moment, she also took a piece, crossed herself, and ate. It is like a sacrament, this food , she thought. How little we need.

Filip, standing near the door to the courtyard, wanted desperately to take a second piece, but did not dare. “What do you recommend, then, Doctor?” he said, trying to distract his attention from the pie and conclude the discussion. “What can he do?”

“Perhaps he can teach, or lead a youth group, give health and first aid instruction with someone else demonstrating the techniques. He has enough knowledge and experience to be useful at the sanatorium in some capacity. Or he could learn to use a typewriter and write for a journal or a newspaper.”

“He could play chess,” Filip suggested. “That only takes one hand.” Maksim glared at him. Filip shrugged, watching with profound regret as Ksenia arranged the remaining pie pieces on a clean kitchen towel, folding the edges in to make a neat package.

“Thank you, Doctor,” she said. “We can give you only a little money for your visit, and for your advice. But please also take this pie.”

Maria Kirilovna stood up. “I will accept whatever you can manage. Your pie is delicious and I thank you for sharing it with me. But I live alone, and cannot take this bounty away from your family. Maksim, you are a fine young man. I wish you the best possible recovery, but you must take your life into your own hands.” Realizing what she had said, she colored deeply and went quickly through the apartment and out into the night.

IN THE WEEKS FOLLOWING the doctor’s visit, Maksim began to die. There was no sign of illness, no inexplicable cough, no sudden weakness or fever, just a profound crushing despair.

“Only a cup of tea, Mama,” he said quietly, pushing away the food she had fortified with every nutritious ingredient she could find. “Thank you,” he added with an anemic smile.

“Listen, we’re doing a comedy tonight. Come with us,” Galina encouraged. “Not much of a play, but you can see how Filip made a set out of practically nothing.”

“I had help,” Filip protested. “And people let us borrow things. Luyba’s lamp steals the show, with its decadent fringed shade.”

Maksim sighed. “No. Theater does not interest me. It never did, with or without lamps.” He left the table, going out to the inner yard to smoke.

No one spoke. They finished the meal quickly; Galina jumped up from her seat. “I will wash the dishes, Mama, when I return.”

She and Filip walked, stepping around freshly formed puddles with inordinate concentration, as if navigating a minefield. Finally, Galina said, “What will happen to my brother? He is so unhappy.”

Filip said nothing, steering them clear of two German soldiers preoccupied with lighting their cigarettes in the evening breeze. But Galina wanted an answer. “Filip. How can we help him?”

“How do I know?” He spread his hands, palms up, and shrugged his shoulders. “He does nothing all day, sleeps and smokes, will not even try to help your mother in any way. Just smokes and stares into space.”

“Do you talk to him? I know how you feel about idle conversation, but can you not talk as one man to another?”

“There is no common ground. What do I know of his experience? And he doesn’t care about my life or interests.”

“Common ground? Common ground?” Galina’s voice held a rising note of sarcasm. “How much more common ground do we need? Are we not all in this, this… dreadful time together? Together,” she repeated.

Filip had no answer. He had heard Ksenia say more than once how important it was for a family to stay together, mind its own business. Keep your head down and your mouth shut. All around them, people were disappearing, taken off the streets by patrolling troops, vanishing without a word. Their own little household was as if charmed, held together by the force of his mother-in-law’s indomitable will. Unless there’s something we don’t know about Ilya’s frequent absences, and all those Germans who come to the door to pick up their purchases. He shook his head, but the thought had struck him unawares and would not be banished.

Outside the theater entrance, Galina stopped and laid a hand on his arm. “Please. Please try.”

A few days later, on a warm, clear afternoon when everyone was out of the house—Ilya to make and sell his crafts in the park, Galina to the toy shop, Ksenia to stand in line for whatever was available—Filip set his chess set up on a little folding table in the courtyard. At his elbow he had a book and a few sheets of paper he had cut and folded into a pocket-sized notebook. He studied the board intently, shifting the occasional piece, taking a pencil from behind his ear to record the move.

He was so absorbed in the game he did not notice his brother-in-law standing in the kitchen doorway until Maksim limped over to the bench by the wall and lit a cigarette. “Oh, hello,” he said, glancing up. “I didn’t know you were up.”

“Mother does not like me to smoke in the house,” Maksim replied, as if to justify his presence in the yard. He blew a fine plume of smoke, watching it dissipate in the sunlit air.

“But you do it anyway,” Filip observed. “When it suits you. You have another? Mine are inside.”

Maksim tucked the cigarette into the corner of his mouth, thumbed his case open, and passed it to Filip. The case was Ilya’s work, two halves of scrap plastic joined with a wire hinge and latched with a diminutive hook. “Mother is a saint. We should not provoke her.”

Filip said nothing. Why bother? he thought. His mother-in-law was frugal to a fault, and no one in the house went too hungry for long, yet he suspected there was always a little more, something extra held in reserve for the beloved invalid son and the husband returning from his travels. Well, I have a saintly mother, too , he thought, remembering the extra sugar cubes, the occasional tin of caviar Zoya saved for him—treats he devoured avidly, alone, with no shred of guilt.

They smoked in a silence if not exactly companionable, at least tolerant of the other’s presence, each understanding the other’s pleasure in the habit. “There’s one advantage of your father’s doing business with the Germans,” Filip observed, stubbing out his cigarette and tossing the butt into a clay flowerpot kept for that purpose. “We never lack for smokes.”

“ Pravda . True enough.” Maksim did the same.

“I mean, these European brands are far superior to our homegrown ones, right? Especially that stuff the peasants smoke. Mahorka . Have you tried it?” Filip warmed to his subject. He felt compelled to keep talking, egged on by his brother-in-law’s monosyllabic reticence.

“I have. It is vile.”

“When? With the army?”

“With the Partisans.”

“Oh.” It was the end of conversation. Not that Filip wasn’t curious, but he feared belying his neutrality by knowing too much.

And Maksim would not talk about it. How to describe people whose patriotism suffered no compromise, who would fight to the death against self-serving invaders masquerading as liberators? People who were determined to protect the only country they had, however flawed and unjust? He could not talk about their fierce resolve, the acts of suicidal sabotage, the missions propelled by hard, hot fury. He could not. Not least because he knew that even if he had been whole, with two arms, and capable of rapid movement, he lacked the cold blind courage to do the necessary acts of violence. Mining roads, blowing up trains, burning villages—these actions caused people to die. He could not be a part of that; his mission was to save life, to heal.