She hears Anya’s voice spike above the rattling wheeze of the train. Vera claws her way forward to the small seat where her children sit huddled together, their heads too low to allow them to peer out the window.
She slides into the seat, pulling them both onto her lap and smothering them with kisses.
Leo’s round face, wet with sweat and tears, is already dirty, although she cannot imagine how he made that happen. His eyes are damp with tears, but he doesn’t cry this time, and Vera wonders if her good-bye did something to him, if now he is less innocent or not quite so young. “You said we had to go. ”
Vera’s throat feels so tight it is all she can do to nod.
“I held his hand, Mama,” Anya says solemnly. “Every minute. ”
Like all good Soviets, Vera does not allow herself to question the government. If Comrade Stalin wants to protect the children by taking them south, she puts them on the train. Her great act of defiance, going with them, seems like a small thing, and the farther she gets from Leningrad, the smaller it seems. She will see that they are safe at their destination and when she knows that all is well, she will return to her job at the library. If she is lucky it won’t take more than a day or two. She will explain to her boss, Comrade Plotkin, that it was her patriotic duty to accompany the children on this state-mandated evacuation.
Words matter here in the Soviet Union. Words like patriotic, efficient, essential. No one wants to question the wrong thing. If Vera can act certain and fearless, perhaps she will be okay.
If only Mama will not worry too much. Or Olga.
“Mama, I’m hungry,” Leo says grumpily. He is curled into her lap like a tiny fiddlehead fern; his stuffed gray bunny clutched in his arms. He is sucking his thumb and stroking the soft pink satin inside the rabbit’s floppy ear.
They have been on the train only a few hours and no one has said a thing about meals or stopping or when they will arrive at their destination.
“Soon, my little lion,” Vera says, patting his padded shoulder. She can see the way the children on the train are coming out of their numbness, growing restless. A few whine; someone starts to cry. Vera is about to reach down for the small bag of raisins she has brought with her when the train’s whistle shrieks. It doesn’t stop this time, doesn’t blast once as if at a crossing and then go still. Instead, the sound goes on and on, like a woman’s scream. The brakes lock, make a grinding noise, and the train shudders in response, starts to slow.
Gunfire erupts all around them. There is the whine of an airplane engine and the explosions start.
Vera looks outside, sees fire everywhere. Panic breaks out in the train. Everyone is screaming and running to the windows.
A woman in a Party shirt and wrinkled blue wool pants makes her way through the car, saying, “Everyone off of the train. Go. To the barn behind us. Now!”
Vera grabs her children and runs. It occurs to her later, when she is at the front of the line, that she is an adult, that she should have helped the unaccompanied children, but she is not thinking straight. The airplanes keep flying overhead; the bombs drop and fires start.
Outside, all is smoke and screaming. She can hardly see anything but destruction—burning buildings, black and smoldering holes in the ground, ruined houses.
The Germans are here, pushing forward with their tanks and their guns and their bombs.
Vera sees a man coming toward her; he is wearing an army uniform. “Where are we?”
“About forty kilometers south of the Luga River,” he yells as he runs past her.
She pulls her children in closer. They are crying now, their faces streaked with black. They run with the crowd to a giant barn and cram together inside.
It is hot in here, and it smells of fear and fire and sweat. They can hear the airplanes overhead and feel the bombs that shake the ground.
“They took us right to the Germans,” some woman says bitterly.
“Shhh,” comes at once from dozens of others, but it cannot be unsaid. The truth of it sticks in Vera’s mind like a shred of metal and cannot be dislodged.
All of these people—children, mostly—waiting for a night that won’t fall, for protection that may not come at all. How can you trust a leader who sends his country’s children directly into the enemy?
Thank God she is with them. What if they had been alone?
She knows she will think this later, and for a long time; she will probably weep with relief. But later. Now she must act.
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“We need to leave this barn,” she says, quietly at first, but when another bomb hits close enough to rattle the rafters and send dust raining down on them, she says it again, louder: “We need to leave this barn. If a bomb hits us—”
“Citizen,” someone says, “the Party wants us here. ”
“Yes, but . . . our children. ” She does not say what is on her mind; she cannot. But many know anyway. She can see it in their eyes. “I am taking my children out of here. I will take anyone who wants to go. ”