It is her coat. My Anya’s coat. Or what is left of it. I cannot see the bright red anymore, but there is her name, written in my own hand, on a scrap of paper pinned to the lapel. The paper is wet and the ink blurred, but it is there. Half of the coat is missing—I do not want to imagine how that happened—one side is simply torn away.
I can see black bloodstains on the pale lining, too.
I hold it to my nose, breathing deeply. I can smell her in the fabric.
Inside the pocket, I find the photograph of her and Leo that I’d sewn into the lining. See?I’d said to her on the day we’d hidden it—that was back when they were first evacuating the children, it feels like decades ago—Now your brother will always be with you.
I take the tiny scrap of paper with her name on it and hold it in my hand. How long do I sit there in the snow, stroking my baby’s coat, remembering her smile?
Forever.
No one will give me a gun. Every man I ask tells me to calm down, that I will feel better tomorrow.
I should have asked a woman, another mother who had killed one child by moving him and another by letting her go.
Or maybe I am the only one who . . .
Anyway, the pain is unendurable. And I do not want to get better. I deserve to be as unhappy as I am. So I return to my bed, get my boots and coat, and I start walking.
I move like a ghost through the snowy countryside. There are so many other walking dead on the road that no one tries to stop me. When I hear gunfire or bombing, I turn toward it. If my feet hurt less, I would have run.
I find what I am looking for on the eighth day.
It is the front line.
I walk past the Russians, my countrymen, who call out for me and try to stop me.
I pull away, wrenching if I need to, hitting, kicking, and I keep going.
I walk up to the Germans and stand in front of their guns.
“Shoot me,” I say, and I close my eyes. I know what they see, what I look like: a crazy, half-dead old woman holding a banged-up valise and a dirty gray stuffed rabbit.
Twenty-six
But I am not a lucky woman,” Mom said with a sigh.
Silence followed that last, quietly spoken sentence.
Nina wiped the tears from her eyes and stared at her mother in awe.
How could that pain have been in her all along? How could a person survive all that?
Mom stood up quickly. She took a step to the left and stopped; then she turned to the right and stopped. It was as if she’d suddenly awakened from a dream only to find herself in a strange room from which there was no escape. At last, with her shoulders rounded slightly downward, she went to the window and stared outside.
Nina looked at Meredith, who looked as ruined as Nina felt.
“My God,” Maksim finally said, turning off the tape recorder. The click sounded harsh in the quiet room, reminded Nina that the story they’d just heard was important not only to their family.
Mom remained where she was, her splayed hand pressed to her chest, as if maybe she thought her heart would stop beating, or tumble right out of her body.
What was she seeing right then? Her once-sparkling Leningrad turned into a frozen, bombed-out wasteland where people died in the street and birds fell from the sky?
Or maybe it was Sasha’s face? Or Anya’s giggle? Or Leo’s last heartbreaking smile?
Nina stared at the woman who had raised her and saw the truth at last.
Her mother was a lioness. A warrior. A woman who’d chosen a life of hell for herself because she wanted to give up and didn’t know how.