Winter Garden

“Comrade Stalin has eyes everywhere. He is surely watching the Germans, and he knows where our children can go so that they will be safe. And all workers’ children must go. That is all there is. ”

“What if I don’t see them again?”

Mama peels back the cover and gets out of bed, crossing the tiny space between them. She gets into bed, takes Sasha’s side, and pulls Vera into her arms, stroking her black hair as she used to when Vera was young. “We women make choices for others, not for ourselves, and when we are mothers, we . . . bear what we must for our children. You will protect them. It will hurt you; it will hurt them. Your job is to hide that your heart is breaking and do what they need you to do. ”

“Sasha told me I would have to be strong. ”

Mama nods. “I don’t think men understand, though. Even your Sasha. They march off with their guns and their ideas and they think they know courage. ”

“You’re talking about Papa now. ”

“Maybe I am. ”

They lay for a while longer without talking.

For the first time in a long time, she is thinking about her father. As much as it hurts, it is better than dwelling on what is to come. She closes her eyes and in the darkness she is on the street in front of their old apartment, watching her papa leave.

Her fingers are freezing beneath her woolen gloves and her toes tingle with the cold.

“I want to come to the café with you,” she pleads, tilting her face up to him. A light snow is falling around them; flakes land on her bare cheeks.

He smiles down at her, his big black mustache beetling above his lip. “This is no place for a girl, you know this, Veruskha. ”

“But you’ll be reading your poetry. And Anna Akhmatova will be there. She is a woman. ”

“Yes,” he says, trying to look stern. “A woman. You are still a girl. ”

“One day,” he says, pressing a gloved hand to her shoulder, “you will write your beautiful words. By then they will be teaching literature again in our schools instead of this terrible Soviet realism that is Stalin’s idea of progress. Be patient. Wave to me when I’m across the street, and then go inside. ”

She stands there in the snow, watching him go. Tiny kisses of white fire land on her cheeks, almost immediately turning to spots of water that slide downward, slipping like cold fingers beneath her collar.

Soon he is only a blur, a smear of gray wool moving in all that white. She thinks perhaps he has stopped to wave to her, but she cannot be sure. Instead, she sees how night falls on the snow, how it changes the color and textures, and she tries to place this in her memory so that she can describe it in her journal.

“Do you remember when I used to dream of being a writer?” Vera says quietly now.

It is a long time before her mother says, even more softly, “I remember all of it. ”

“Maybe someday—”

“Shhh,” her mother says, stroking her hair. “It will only hurt more. This I know. ”

Vera hears the disappointment in Mama’s voice, and the accep tance. Vera wonders if one day she will sound like that, too, if it will seem easier to give up. Before she can think of what to say, she hears Leo in the kitchen. No doubt he is talking to the stuffed rabbit that is his best friend.

Vera thinks, It has begun. She feels her mother’s kiss, hears words whispered at her ear, but she cannot understand them. The roar in her head is too loud. She eases out from the bed and sits up. Although this morning is warm, as was the night before, she is dressed in a skirt and a sweater. A battered pair of shoes waits at the end of the bed. They are all sleeping in their clothes now. An air raid can come at any time.

The sound of movements overtake the small apartment: Olga whines that she is still sleepy and her arms ache from loading art into boxes; her grandmother blows her nose; Anya informs everyone that she is hungry.

It is all so ordinary.

Vera swallows the lump that has formed in her throat, but it will not go away. In the kitchen, she sees Leo—the spitting image of his father, with angelic golden curls and expressive green eyes. Leo. Her lion. He is laughing now, telling his poor one-eyed, tattered rabbit that maybe they will get to feed the swans in the Summer Garden today.

“It is war,” Anya says, looking impossibly superior for a five-year-old. Her lisp turns the sentence into something softer, but all of Anya’s fire is in her eyes. She is pure steel, this girl; exactly how Vera once imagined herself to be.

“Actually,” Vera says. “We are going on a walk. ” She feels physically ill when she says it, but her mother comes up behind her; with a touch, Vera can go on. She crosses the room and picks up their coats. Last night, Vera stayed up late, sewing money and letters into the lining of her babies’ coats.

Leo is on his feet in an instant, gleefully clapping his hands, saying, “Walk!” over and over. Even Anya is smiling. It has only been five days since the announcement of war, but in those days their old life has disappeared.

Breakfast passes like a funeral procession, in quiet glances and lowered gazes. No one except Mama can look at Vera. At the end of the meal, her grandmother rises. When she looks at Vera, her eyes fill with tears and she turns away.