The Secret History of Moscow (8 page)

* * * *

Yakov finished his drink. David looked at him, as if expecting something.

"She never remarried,” Yakov said. “Grandma, I mean."

David nodded. “Neither did I. Still, I wish I knew… About your mother."

"There isn't much to know,” he said. His mother was ordinary-not a sort of person who lived an exciting life; even her hardships lacked exoticism. She was born three years before the war, and remembered it vaguely-the hunger, the fear, the dull torments of ordinary souls who were never offered a chance for heroics. She was someone one needed to know to appreciate, and David lacked that. “She's a good person,” he finally said. “You would've been proud of her. Like grandma was. Her name's Valentina; she's going to be fifty-three. She works all week, and on weekends she goes to take care of your and grandmother's grave. She made sure to bury her in Moscow, next to you."

David looked perplexed. “I have a grave? Why?"

"I don't know,” Yakov said. “I never asked."

David slumped, his head resting on his folded arms. “I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Only it is strange. To learn that you have a grave and a daughter who's fifty. I heard about men finding out that they had kids they didn't know about-only not fifty years later. I wish I could talk to her, to tell her…"

"Tell her what?"

"That I'm sorry. I'm sorry it happened this way, and I'm sorry I survived. I know I wasn't supposed to. If only I had had my glasses on-I wouldn't have tried to run through that window."

Yakov understood what his grandfather wanted-for-giveness. “You've done nothing wrong,” he said. “You were fucked either way."

David shrugged, unconvinced. “I suppose."

Yakov didn't know what else to say. He'd seen this before, people who survived catastrophes. They could not enjoy life knowing that others had died-survivor's guilt, they called it. He'd seen it in his grandmother-she left Moscow, saving her unborn child. Yet, the guilt of abandoning her husband was never far below the surface. The letter on the government letterhead made it worse.

Perhaps there was a reason for it, he thought. Those who ended in this no-man's land underground: perhaps they were allowed to live for a reason. “You were spared,” he said out loud. “Surely there is a point to that."

"Perhaps. But if there is, I sure don't know what it is. Nobody here does, and some have been around for centuries.” David sat up and shook his head, smiling. “Listen to me babble. Why don't you tell me about yourself?"

"I was born in Serpuhov,” he said. “We stayed there until the eighties, and then moved to Moscow. After grandma died. Now I'm a cop."

David seemed amused. “Indeed. Interesting choice. Are you in the Party?"

Yakov shook his head vehemently. “No way. They told me I'd never get promoted, but so be it."

"Married?"

"I was. Didn't work out.” He tried to think of something to say, but he had trouble baring his soul to strangers, even if the stranger in question was his own grandfather, unaged since 1937. “Look, we just got here, and the whole thing is a bit much."

"I understand,” David said. “You'll get used to it. Anything I can help you with?"

"Yes,” Yakov said. “See that girl?” He indicated Galina with a subtle tilt of his head. “Her sister's missing. And a bunch of other people. That crazy guy led us here, and I was just looking for those who are missing. They turned into birds."

"Ah,” David said. “Birds? That would be one of the old ones messing around. Berendey is your best bet. He's usually in the forest, but you can't go there-he has a strict no-people policy. But stick around-he comes by every now and again to get a drink. Meanwhile, go to your friends, and I'll ask Sovin to answer whatever questions he hasn't covered yet."

Yakov obeyed. He felt a little relieved that his grandfather didn't offer him to stay with him, to talk more; both needed time to absorb the meeting.

"All right,” Sovin said and looked over them, as if surveying troops. “All ready? Come with me, and I'll put you up for the night."

"I'm not tired,” Yakov said.

"You will be soon.” Sovin clapped his shoulder. “Buck up, son. Tomorrow's a new day, and we'll find your bird-people."

* * * *

When the young people left with Sovin, David worked the bar until it was time to close, going through the usual movements of opening the bottles and pouring beer and an occasional glass of mulled wine for the habitually cold rusalki. The denizens of the underworld noticed his subdued state, and knew better than to attempt bantering.

His mood cast a pall over the Pub's ambience, and he wanted to apologize to everyone, but resisted. The guilt was his alone and he had no right to fish for reassurance with his apologies. He waited for the place to clear, and put away the glasses for the domovoi to clean. He spread a thick layer of sawdust on the floor and left a saucerful of milk for the kikimora and whatever other house spirits breathed shyly behind the dark paneling of the walls and the wainscoting. He used to be annoyed at the absence of brownies or other English spirits, but with time he grew to love their Slavic equivalents, as pointless and skewed as they usually were. “Seriously,” he muttered. “What sort of culture invents a spirit whose only purpose is to throw onions and shriek at night? It's just stupid."

A blood-curdling shriek answered him from somewhere behind the pipes.

"Oh shut up,” he said. “Bloody banshee wannabe."

The cries sputtered and stopped in an uncertain whine. David shook his head and unlocked the back door leading to his quarters-a sparely furnished, cavernous room that retained the stone chill despite the brightly burning big-bellied woodstove on bent legs. He sat on the narrow bed with a nickel headboard, his head in his hands, and thought about the death of his wife.

It didn't matter that he hadn't seen her in over fifty years; it didn't matter that she was dead; he had said goodbye to the idea of her years ago. He never stopped loving her, but rather the memory was sequestered away deep in his heart, surrounded by calcified layers of regret and guilt, isolating it from the rest of his mental landscape-like a clam, he surrounded the irritating grain of sand with pearly layers, not to create beauty but to protect the tender mantle from irritation.

Now, the protection was stripped away, and the image of her face tore at his heart like a splinter. He reminded himself that she had grown old, that she raised a daughter and watched her grandson grow big while she aged, something he didn't think much about-everyone underground remained like they were when they first got here, until eventually they faded away, all of them, except the old ones. He tried to imagine how she would look after the years of war and privation, but the image in his mind's eye remained the same-a young woman with serious eyes and a stubborn chin, the woman who tried to keep him alive despite his best efforts, and in the end denied any knowledge of her success. Then it occurred to him that he hadn't seen her in so long that he doubted the accuracy of his recollection. For all he knew, he had constructed the face from his vague dreams and longing. With the doubt, the image in his mind wavered, fell apart, and disappeared.

He lost her again that night, as he lost her every night, ever since he had fled underground. Belatedly he felt regret for never trying to find her or send a word; then again, what good would it do? His mind went over and over the familiar track, each rut honed by fifty years of the same old regrets. And yet, tonight he knew for sure-even though he had a daughter and a grandson, Tanya was dead. Alone in his room, David wept.

6: Sovin

Fyodor couldn't sleep-he thought about his childhood in Zvenigorod, about long and dusty provincial summers he usually spent riding his bicycle down local roads. The smell of heated asphalt

and tar became forever associated with those summers, when the cheap tinny bicycle bell drowned out the singing birds.

The summers when everything but the road and the bicycle disappeared, and he could ride it downhill, the pedals spinning so fast he sometimes had to lift his feet off them, to the sun, orange and huge, that waited for him at the bottom of the slope. In those days, he half believed that if he rode fast enough, gained enough momentum, he would catch up to the sun and sizzle and become one with the angry red semicircle that set faster than he could pedal.

He was pleased to recognize this old belief in his current adventure-apparently, the ability to ignore reality and to take things for what they appeared, not what they were, was the key to entering the underground kingdom. Everyone here, Fyodor learned from Sovin, had been desperate enough or confused and hurt enough to believe that the doors appearing on solid objects would open and admit them inside, that the reflections were the same as their originals. This is why there were so many madmen here, Fyodor decided. He wasn't sure he should count himself among them. But certainly not Sovin-that man, as Fyodor learned, was stone cold sober, and it was really a miracle that he had managed to make it in at all.

Fyodor could not sleep, even though Sovin's house was comfortable in the way of an old-fashioned wooden village house, with its warm dark walls and low ceiling, each beam distinct and blackened with soot. He lay on the bed (a straw mattress covered with a blanket), and thought about their host, the stories he told while Yakov was yammering away with his youthful grandfather.

* * * *

Sovin had fought in two world wars, earned three PhDs, and spoke five languages fluently. He was born in St Petersburg into the family of a fur merchant, studied philosophy in Germany, and returned to Russia in 1914, to fight. The world war quickly graded into the civil one, and Sovin chose the red side, surprising even himself. It wasn't any shrewdness in the face of soberly weighing his circumstances; it wasn't the realization of the inevitable victory of the proletariat. It was a desire for fairness, for equality. He tried to like his comrades.

After the war, he went back to the Petrograd University to get a degree in agricultural science. He traveled with Vavilov, he collected seeds; Fyodor could not even imagine the sights he had seen and asked about Tibet and the Himalayas, but Sovin was determined to stay on the subject of seeds. “You have to understand,” he said. “There's that thing, a grain of rice or wheat, and it's small. But everything, everything every stalk of wheat or rice has ever known is packed inside it. It knows where it lives, it knows whether it's cold or warm; it is perfect in how it suits the place. And every one of them is the same yet different-Asia, East, West, the Andes, any given place. How can you not love such a thing?"

Fyodor recognized that the question was rhetorical, and kept his indifference to grains of anything to himself.

"Anyway,” Sovin continued, “you probably know what happened after."

"Repressions?” Fyodor said.

"Lysenko,” Galina offered.

Sovin seemed amused by their answers. “You're both right,” he said. “But before all that, there was the Genofond and Vavilov's Institute."

Sovin went home to Leningrad, where he worked on cataloguing and classifying the seeds, studying their genetics, crossbreeding strains. His philosophy training not forgotten but rather dormant, he focused all his energy on understanding the seeds and the plants that grew out of them, on defining and describing their traits. The collection of the seeds, the Genofond, embraced all of the variety of cultivated crops and held great promise. Until Vavilov was arrested.

Sovin and others continued their work, apprehensive about the war and Lysenko's crusade against genetics and other sciences with a suspicious foreign whiff about them. Sovin confessed that it was the fear of the labor camps that compelled him to join the army again-he was over the draft age, but they took him. His division was just outside Leningrad when the siege started.

Sovin was tormented by the visions of starving people and the precious grains from all over the world, and their close proximity worried him. He felt deficient when he prayed at night that the Genofond survive. “I didn't want anyone to die, understand,” he said. “It was just-I wanted the grains to survive too. To the people, it was just bread. But it was the entirety of human history in there. Even as we moved East and then back West, I kept thinking about it. Some things are just too important."

"It mostly survived,” Galina said.