Roads Read online
Copyright © 2017 by Marina Antropow Cramer
All rights reserved
Published by Academy Chicago Publishers
An imprint of Chicago Review Press Incorporated
814 North Franklin Street
Chicago, Illinois 60610
ISBN 978-1-61373-558-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Is available from the Library of Congress.
Cover design: Joan Sommers Design
Cover image: Photo by Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images
Typesetting: Nord Compo
Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1
This digital document has been produced by Nord Compo.
For Baba Lena
Но вечно жалок мне изгнанник,
Как заключенный, как больной.
Темна твоя дорога, странник,
Полынью пахнет хлеб чужой.
But to me the exile is forever pitiful,
Like a prisoner, like someone ill.
Dark is your road, wanderer,
Like wormwood smells the bread of strangers.
—Anna Akhmatova, “I Am Not with Those Who Abandoned Their Land,” trans. Judith Hemshemeyer
* * *
All those you really loved
Will always be alive for you.
—Anna Akhmatova, “And All Those Whom My Heart Won’t Forget,” trans. Judith Hemshemeyer
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Prologue - Germany, 1945
PART I - Yalta - Friends
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
PART II - Enemies
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
PART III - Maksim
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
PART IV - Germany - A New Life
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
PART V - The Women
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
PART VI - The Men
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
PART VII - Family
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Author’s Note
PROLOGUE
Germany, 1945
IN THE END, getting away was easy.
They set off across the field through ankle-high summer-browned grass, heading for the road, Filip’s shovel swinging by his side. Ilya set the pace, purposeful but not too fast. They walked abreast, heads down.
“Keep walking,” Ilya said softly, glancing sideways at his son-in-law. “Don’t look back. He’ll think we’re going to work on the road.”
With a rucksack and all our belongings? Filip thought, but merely grunted in reply, refusing to look at the older man, expecting at any moment a shout, a bullet in the back. The old man had to be crazy, thinking two Russian men in German uniform, ROA insignia on their sleeves, could expect to survive in this alien land, even if the war was over. Wasn’t the American camp they had just left behind their best hope?
When they reached the shade of the linden trees that lined the road, the men stopped and turned. Across the field they had just crossed, the camp looked small, a forlorn grouping of gray barracks, a dusty yard, a neglected watchtower, a wisp of smoke rising from the kitchen chimney, where even now the next meal they would not eat was being prepared.
And there was Anneliese, carrying a basket of laundry to the officers’ quarters, throwing her brash laugh over her shoulder at a passing remark. His eye caught the glint of sunlight on her cropped auburn hair, hair he knew to be fine and smooth and smelling of almonds. Filip suffered a momentary twinge of regret, a little ache at the back of the throat. Did Anneliese care that he had not said good-bye?
A few men milled around the yard with no apparent purpose. Some stood in small groups or squatted in a circle where, Filip knew, there would be dice or a card game in progress. The lone sentry stood with his back against a fence post, one leg bent back at the knee, the sole of his booted foot resting against the fence. He lit a cigarette, tossed the match into the scrubby grass. That’s what I want, thought Filip. An American cigarette.
PART I
Yalta
Friends
1
SHE HAD WANTED to be a nun. As a young child, Zoya had studied them, marveling at their ageless appearance. Their faces were either smooth as eggshells, as if their very skin had absorbed the translucent glow of the thousands of candles with which they marked their days, or so finely wrinkled, fragile and deeply etched like a fallen leaf, that she could not imagine they had ever looked otherwise.
When she was older, she admired their bearing, the dignified humility, austere gentleness. Mysterious virginal passion. Awestruck, she never dared talk to them, only nodding reverentially if their glances happened to fall in her direction.
She saw them only at church. They would come from the nearby convent on service days—Saturday evening, Sunday Mass, holidays, and, if asked, weddings, christenings, and funerals—to sing the hymns and responses and read the Psalter selections while the priest carried out his secret duties inside the curtained altar. “To help you forget about everyday things, and think about being a good person,” Father Yefim had explained when she once asked about the reason for these interludes of monotonous recitation when nothing seemed to be happening.
She wanted to ask, Isn’t it just the opposite? The cool, semidark interior, the hypnotic, melodious drone of archaic Slavonic words whose full meaning was only revealed after years of arduous study, did these really make you think about your soul? But she did not dare contradict the priest; perhaps when she was older, she would understand.
Zoya loved the nuns’ thin voices, the way they seemed to reach only half volume, chanting almost to themselves, conversing with their God. She wanted to be like them, to wear the severe robes that hid their bodies, not only from the eyes of the world but even from themselves. At seven, after making her first Communion, she was permitted to tend the candles, gathering the burnt-down stubs into small buckets placed discreetly along the walls, delivering them, when nearly full, to the sacristan, who passed them on to the nuns to melt down into new candles. Father Yefim warned her against taking pride in her small task, but she knew it was important, a vital part of the cycle that placed her, however indirectly, in touch with the holy women.
By the time she turned twelve, Zoya had taken to wearing a scarf, draped to cover every strand of her glossy black hair, and tied modestly at the nape of her neck. While she grew through adolescence and into young womanhood, it made her even lovelier, setting off her perfect Grecian features, the fine straight nose, deep black eyes, perfectly proportioned mouth.
“Why hide yourself away?” her mother had pro
tested. “How will you ever be a bride if you never go dancing?”
“I will be a bride of Jesus. Dancing does not interest me.”
The day she fell in love with opera it was raining. It had always been there, the music, in her home, on the records her father played evenings or Sunday afternoons while her mother napped or gossiped with neighbors. Zoya paid little attention at first, absorbing the music as naturally as breathing, humming along with favorite passages while dressing her doll, leafing through a picture book, daydreaming. Then, with the rain beading down the parlor window, the air serenely gray, she was suddenly listening. She was entranced with the sound, the harmonies that pleased her ear, the purity that pierced her heart.
When he noticed her interest, her father told her the stories. It all began to make sense. She did not need to understand the words; as with church, she could absorb the sonorities and follow the narrative, gleaning more and more meaning with repeated listening. It was secular, yes, but it carried the clearest of moral messages: evildoers were punished, the selfish or guilty suffered the consequences of their transgressions, the clean of heart received their reward. More often than not, they had to die for it, transported by sacrifice to ecstatic salvation. She wept, filled with desire to suffer, to be Gilda, Marguerite, Mimì, Tatiana.
And the spectacle! She would never forget traveling with her father to Kiev to visit relatives, going with them to the opera house to see Carmen. She was thirteen.
It was glorious. She tried reminding herself it was entertainment, the devil’s way of distracting her from pure thoughts, as Father Yefim would say. But from the overture’s opening chords, she was bewitched by the blazing lights and splendid, colorful costumes, her resistance defeated by the powerful emotions playing out onstage.
Thinking about it later, she told herself, Carmen dies with no hope of redemption because she is wicked and self-indulgent, unlike the virtuous Micaela, who is faithful and good. And dull. Secretly, Zoya cherished the high drama of Carmen’s story, her valiant death at the hands of the jealous Don José a fitting testament to the honesty of her private outlaw creed. Would she, Zoya, be capable of such intense integrity? It was a dangerous, troubling question, implying layers of interpretation behind the superficial concepts of right and wrong she had so far accepted on faith. She pushed it out of her mind.
And what was the Orthodox church service if not spectacle? The ornate vestments, gold vessels encrusted with precious stones, candlelight and incense; the chanting in strictly ordained cadences; the beautiful singing, the call-and-response between priest and choir—all in observance of rituals hundreds of years old that engaged all the senses while requiring little active participation. You just had to be there and pay attention. Take heed. Absorb what you had witnessed in your own way.
Back home in Yalta, she finished the tenth grade at eighteen and received her teaching certificate. She taught first grade and loved it. She lived with her parents, went to church, observed days of Lent and fasting and, with a few colleagues from school, attended every opera and play that opened in the city. She gave most of her modest salary to her parents, and, except for inexpensive balcony seats, spent almost none on things for herself.
It was this, embracing theater and recognizing the vital part that music and the performing arts had come to play in her life, that finally turned her away from dreams of the cloistered life. At sixteen, she had stopped wearing the head scarf, except in church. She would be good. She would not drink or gamble or use profane language. She would not know a man before marriage. But she would live in the world, and she would go to the opera whenever possible.
* * *
Vadim, a postal clerk six years older than Zoya, had recently arrived in Yalta to serve as assistant to the postmaster. A distant cousin of one of her theater friends, he joined their circle, and soon focused his attention on her.
They made an incongruous couple. She was diminutive, fine-boned, with straight black hair she wore braided and unadorned. Her wardrobe consisted of simple dresses in plain colors: blue, gray, brown, with lace collars she crocheted herself, and a single cameo brooch she saved for special occasions. Vadim was tall, sandy-haired, blue-eyed. At twenty-five he was still gangly but was beginning to show the first signs of future corpulence: a little slackening of the chin, some softening around the middle.
They met at a concert performance of Tchaikovsky opera arias and songs. At intermission, both stood aside until the crush of people at the buffet had eased, rather than fight their way to the front of the hungry throng.
To her own surprise, Zoya spoke first, sensing the young man’s discomfort as a stranger in their midst. “Are you enjoying the performance, Vadim . . .” She hesitated, not knowing his father’s name.
“Nikitich,” he supplied. “But please just call me Vadim. Patronymics are for old folks and college professors.” Smiling, he steered her toward an opening in the crowd around the table. “Come, or we will get no pirozhki.”
“I suppose we are old-fashioned here in the south. Now that I am finally old enough to be called Stepanovna, the customs seem to be changing. What is the filling?” she addressed the kerchiefed woman behind the table, pointing to the last few buns in the basket. “Mushroom and onion? Yes, please.”
“Why so particular?” Vadim paid, over her protest, and they took their punch and pastries toward the mezzanine railing.
“It’s still Lent,” she explained. “I should not even be here, at the theater. But at least I can refrain from eating meat.”
“Surely Tchaikovsky is good for the soul. And yes, I am enjoying the performance, but I find these disembodied arias a frustration. In my head, the music continues to the next scene, while on the stage, they are already singing something completely different. ‘From another opera,’ as my father used to say whenever I tried to change the subject in one of our discussions.”
She smiled at the familiar expression. “But the concert songs are lovely, so lyrical—” Zoya broke off, turning to greet some friends, just as the light flashed for the beginning of the program’s second half, and they returned to their seats.
I like this young man, she thought. He seemed different from the other men she knew, with none of the austerity of her distant father, or the benign severity of Father Yefim, whose stern words, softened by the kindness in his eyes, had been falling into her child’s heart all her life. Vadim had a self-confidence that was new to her, an air of developing authority that seemed to take its strength from some inner source, some intellectual center quite unlike her own emotional compass.
When she got to know him better, she learned that he did not sing or play the guitar, like some of her other friends, he did not joke and he did not drink. She came to admire the way his face lit up when the conversation turned to serious matters—questions of philosophy or history, or the bewildering recent events that frightened her into silence because she did not understand them.
“Change is coming,” Vadim said, his voice firm and self-assured. “We are that change.” He is the sturdy oak to my bending willow, she thought, echoing the words of a folk song. She did not know where he was going, but feared getting left behind.
“What do you see in me?” she asked when his courteous attentions crossed the line into undeniable courtship. “I am such a mouse next to your lively friends. I have nothing to say that would interest them.”
“Even a mouse has a worldview. Yours may encompass only this apartment, but within it there is certainty and peace. I love your quiet charm, and the glimpses of passion you reveal at the opera, like sunlight glinting through cool summer foliage.” He stopped, blushed deeply. “I don’t know what came over me. I don’t usually wax poetic. But that’s exactly what I mean.”
“My charm?” Zoya colored slightly, genuinely perplexed.
“Yes. You are so serene. My friends may shout their opinions, convinced they see the truth at last, the solution to our country’s difficult problems. You bring calm into the room. Into my lif
e.” As if mindful of her modesty, he did not say, And you are beautiful. I love looking at you.
When the revolution came, in 1917, it left her convictions relatively untouched. She had never delved into political matters; the Tsarist system had given her enough food and education, respectable work, access to refined entertainment and to sustaining religious practice. She did not understand, when she read about workers’ demands for bread, or peasants clamoring for land, who were these workers, these peasants? Russia was a vast country, rich in land and resources, as she had learned at school, and taught her pupils. Wasn’t there enough for everyone?
Not so, Vadim, now her husband, explained. “We can only be happy if the least fortunate among us bear their burden in silence, to paraphrase Anton Chekhov,” he said solemnly over their morning tea. “This can’t go on. Soldiers who suffer brutal punishment and starvation rations instead of pay are banding with oppressed factory workers, joining our infamously ignorant peasants. Their demand for reform can no longer be ignored. It’s time for change, my dear.” He kissed the top of her head and patted her shoulder.
“He treats me like a child,” Zoya said aloud when Vadim had left for work, her resentment just short of anger. “Well, when it comes to politics and change, I suppose I am.”
Curious, she reread Chekhov, and found herself of two minds about her country’s greatest storyteller. She admired his vivid characters and the easy flow of his words across the page, capturing moments in nineteenth-century Russian life with a vibrant quality that would, she was sure, continue to delight readers for years to come. But why did he dwell so much on the sordid side of life? His stories lulled you with their eloquence while showing you the very worst in human nature: lies, deceptions, cruelties, and bitter twists of fate. Even love, so prominent a theme in almost every piece, was tainted. Those few characters who loved truly, wholeheartedly, invariably came to a bad end, never understanding how their own naive view of grand emotions led to their downfall.