The Summer Garden (35 page)

Oh how Pasha laughed. Indignantly red, Dasha pushed Tatiana off the table. “What do you know about anything? Stay out of adults’ business. I like it better when you’re buried in your silly books.”

“I bet you do, Dasha,” said Tatiana, hitting a laughing Pasha with the flat of her hand as she went to fetch
Queen Margot
. “I just bet you do.”

Who is Saika?

Saika was an arresting girl with dramatic overemphasized features,
as if her creating artist drew her too fast with a charcoal pencil and then slapped on some undiluted paint. Her hair and eyes were the color of char and coal tar, her lips were ruby red and her teeth polar white. The cheekbones were high, the chin pointed, the forehead broad, the nose sharp. It all was sort of right, well-shaped, slick, but all of it together had the effect of too much on too small a canvas that you were standing too close to. You couldn’t look away, but for some reason you wanted to.

The next morning, Saika was by Tatiana’s window. “Hello,” she said, sticking her head in with a smile. “I’m unpacked. Want to come out and play?”

Was she serious? Tatiana never got out of bed in the morning.

“Can I climb in?” Saika asked. “I’ll help you get dressed.”

Tatiana, who slept cool and comfortable in just her underwear was ready to tell Saika to come on in, but something in the girl’s glance stopped her. What was it? Saika’s eyes were too black to discern a dilation of the pupil, and her skin was too dark to blush, but there was something in the unblinking of the almond eye and the parting of the large mouth that puzzled Tatiana. “Uh…I’ll be out in five minutes.” Tatiana drew the shabby window curtain. She slept by herself in a tiny alcove near an old unused stove. Her family hung a curtain across the opening so she could pretend it was a bedroom and not a boarded-up kitchen. She didn’t care. It was the only time in her life she slept by herself.

When she was dressed and brushed, Tatiana ambled with Saika down the morning village road in the fragrant air. She took Saika to Berta’s house. Berta had a cow that needed to be milked. Saika immediately asked why Berta couldn’t milk the cow herself.

“Because she is ancient. She is like
fifty
! Also she has arthritis. She can’t grasp the udders.”

“So why does she have a cow if she can’t take care of it? She can sell that cow for fifteen hundred rubles.”

Tatiana turned her head to Saika. “Because then she’ll have fifteen hundred rubles and no milk. What would the point be?”

“She can buy the milk.”

“The money will be gone in three months. The cow will produce milk for another seven years.”

“I’m just saying. Why have a cow if you can’t take care of it?”

Berta was very surprised to see Tatiana so early in the morning, throwing up her arthritic hands and exclaiming, “
Bozhe moi
! Who died? Even my mother is still sleeping.” She was a small, round, dark-haired woman, with sharp button eyes, “Not fifty, you impossible child,” she said, “but sixty-six.” Her hands may have been crippled, but she still made Tatiana and Saika tea and eggs, and while the girls ate, her gravel hands sifted through the grains of Tatiana’s soft hair. Saika watched it all.

They brought the fresh milk back to Dasha and then went out into the fields, on the outskirts of Luga, across the long grasses. Tatiana said to Saika that she imagined that’s what the prairies in America must look like—long grasses on rolling fields out to the horizons.

“Are you dreaming of America, Tania?” Saika said, and Tatiana, flustered, said no, no, not dreaming, just imagining prairies.

Saika told Tatiana she didn’t know where she was born (how could she not?) but she spent her last few years in a small town called Saki in northern Azerbaijan in the Caucasus Mountains. Azerbaijan was a tiny republic nestled under Georgia and above Iran. Iran! It might as well have been a prehistoric universe full of ferns and mastodons, that’s how remote it was from Tatiana’s understanding. “And from there, we came by train to here. After the summer my father’s new post will be north in Kolpino.”

“New post? What does he do?”

Saika shrugged. “What
do
adults do? He leaves in the morning. He comes home in the evening. My mother asks how his day was. He says it was fine. The next day it starts again. Sometimes he travels.” She paused. “Does your father travel?”

“Yes,” Tatiana said proudly, as if her father’s traveling was a reflection of her personal glory, as if she was just
fantastic
for raising a father who traveled. “He has gone to Poland for a month. He is going to bring me back a dress!”

“Oh, a dress,” said Saika, as if she couldn’t care less. “We haven’t been to Poland, but we’ve been to a few other places. Georgia. Armenia. Kazakhstan. To Baku on the Caspian Sea.”

“My, you’ve been all over,” Tatiana said with a touch of white envy. She didn’t want Saika
not
to have traveled. She just wished she had traveled a bit herself. All she’d ever seen was Leningrad and Luga.

They sat on a rock in the field, and Tatiana showed Saika how to eat the sweet meat out of a clover flower. Saika said she had never eaten it before.

“They don’t have clover in the Caucasus Mountains?” asked Tatiana, surprised that Saika could have lived without once touching the ubiquitous three-lobed weed.

“We lived on a farm in the mountains, herded sheep. I don’t know, maybe there was clover.”

“You were shepherds?”

“Of sorts.”

There was that vague qualification again. “What does
that
mean?”

Saika smiled. “I don’t think we were very good shepherds. We kept herding the sheep into the wolf’s mouth.” Tatiana turned to get a better look at Saika, who was smiling as she said it. “Just joking. It wasn’t sheep, Tania. We actually herded goats.” She made a derisive sound. “I don’t want to talk about it. I hate goats. Disgusting filthy animals.”

Tatiana didn’t reply. She never thought much about goats—but she smelled something suddenly that made her slide away from Saika. Embarrassed at her reaction—but there was that odor again!—Tatiana forced herself to sit still as she looked down at Saika’s hands, which were oddly unwashed for so early in the morning. Tatiana wanted to ask about the dirt under the nails, and the darkened tint to some of the pores of the skin, the rough brown texture of the ridges and grooves of Saika’s fingers, but then glanced further down and noticed too the unwashed feet in the sandals and wondered what Saika could have been doing at seven in the morning to have gotten herself into such a filthy state. Then Saika spoke, and the breath left Saika’s mouth and traveled across the summer meadow air to Tatiana’s nose and Tatiana realized that the smell that made her move away was Saika’s sour breath.

Tatiana got up. Saika walked in front of Tatiana, and as she did so, the whiff of her body got into Tatiana’s nose. Saika smelled of mold and ammonia. A baffled Tatiana looked at Saika, whose hands were raised above her head as she stretched. Yet Saika’s hair was shiny as if it had just been washed, and her face was not dirty. She wasn’t actually unwashed, she just smelled and looked unwashed.

The two girls stood in front of each other. The dark-haired girl wore an indigo dress. The blonde-haired girl wore a pale print dress. Saika was a head taller and her feet were one and a half times larger, and as Tatiana looked closer she noticed that the second and third toes on Saika’s feet grew out in a V. She stared inappropriately long and finally pointed. “Huh. I never saw that before. What is that?”

Saika glanced down. “Oh, that. Yeah. I have a fused joint.” She shrugged. “My father jokes that I have cloven feet.”

“Cloven feet?” Tatiana said faintly. “What does he mean by that?”

“I don’t know. You sure do ask a
lot
of questions, girl. Let me ask
you
a question. Can we go play with Pasha?”

Slowly they started walking back to Luga. “Tell me about him. What do you all do for
fun
around here?”

“What do kids do in the summer? Nothing,” Tatiana replied. When Saika laughed, Tatiana said, “No, really.
Nothing
. Last week, for example, we spent two days seeing how long a blueberry string we could make. Turned out about ten meters. Other times we fish. We swim, we argue.”

“Argue about what?”

“Europe, mainly. Hitler. Germany. I don’t know.”

“Come on,” Saika said. “You must do something else around these parts other than argue about Hitler and swim.” She raised her eye brows.

Like what? Tatiana wanted to ask. And what did the raising of the eye brows mean? “No, not really,” she said slowly.

“Well, we’re going to have to change that, won’t we?” said Saika.

Tatiana coughed slightly as they walked to the river to the other kids, attempting to steer the conversation back to how the children fished or berry-picked or idly spent their hazy summers.

How Idle Children Spend their Hazy Summers

Anton Iglenko was Tatiana’s best friend
and he played great football and constantly begged for Tatiana’s small Leningrad-bought supplies of chocolate. Anton had three older brothers, Volodya, Kirill, and Alexei, all of them Pasha’s friends and all under direct nonnegotiable orders from Pasha to stay away from Tatiana, all except for Volodya’s friend Misha, who didn’t leave Tatiana’s side and
hated
Anton. There was also Oleg, who never played anything.

The only other girl in their group was Natasha with long brown hair, a bookworm even worse than Tatiana, always trying to engage Tatiana in one conversation or another about who was a better writer, Dumas or Dickens, Gogol or Gorky. Cousin Marina, who was not a reader, was coming in two weeks and would inflate the girl numbers and equalize the games.

Tatiana stood politely to the side while the new raven-haired girl held court among the eager-for-a-new-face throng, who had all known each other since birth.

“Who is the boy sitting under the tree?” Saika whispered, pointing. “He hasn’t come over to say hello to me.”

Tatiana glanced over. “That’s Oleg,” she said. “I told you about him. He is not in a playing mood.”

“When will he be in a playing mood?”

“When Hitler is dead,” Tatiana replied lightly. “He is a bit overwrought about—well, you want to see? I’ll show you. Oleg!” She called to the skinny brown boy nestled under the birches.

Reluctantly, as if it were a great effort, Oleg stood up and walked over. He nodded to Saika, he did not shake hands, and when Tatiana, poking him in the ribs, asked if he wanted to play hide and seek, he said, “Oh, great, yes, go ahead, play your little games. Czechoslovakia is about to fall, but you go ahead and play,” and went back under the trees.

Tatiana stared at Saika with a
you see?
“Oleg,” she explained, as they followed him to his hiding spot, “is distraught not only at the crisis in international relations, but—”

“I’m distraught only at your lack of interest in the outside world,” Oleg exclaimed.

“We’re very interested,” Tatiana said. “We’re interested in the fish in the river, and in the blueberries in the woods, and in the potatoes in the fields and in the amount of milk the cow brings us because that will determine whether we can have sour cream next week.”

“Go ahead. Make fun. Foreign Minister Masaryk and I only hope that sacrificing his fledgling country will be the
only
price the world pays for peace.”

Saika said she found him delightful. Tatiana replied that yes, they all took frequent delight in Oleg, who put up with them for only so long and then spat and ran the other way.

“Not too far, though,” Saika said. “Just under the tree.”

“He wants to save our immortal souls.” Tatiana smiled. “He can’t be doing that all the way from his
dacha
.”

“Oh, the immortal soul is such a bourgeois concept,” said Saika dismissively. “Oleg,” she said, “what are you afraid of? There will be no war. No one will go to war for little Czechoslovakia.”

“So how big does a country have to be before someone will go to war to defend it from Hitler?” asked Oleg.

Saika laughed. “Bigger than Czechoslovakia.”

“No one will go to war for Austria either.”

“Why would anyone want to?” Saika said. “The Austrians
wanted
the Germans in. Didn’t you see the results of the referendum they had two months ago? Ninety-nine percent of all Austrians welcomed Hitler.”

“The referendum was rigged,” said Oleg.

A shrugging Saika continued, “And now in the Sudetenland elections, the Germans won many votes. Did you hear what Herr Hitler said when he argued for the annexation of Sudetenland? ‘It is intolerable,’ he said, ‘to think of a large portion of our people exposed to the democratic hordes who threaten us.’ Herr Hitler also has no patience for democracy, like our Comrade Lenin.”

“Czechoslovakia is
not
his people,” said Oleg, frowning. “And Herr Hitler, as you reverentially call him, is amassing his troops along the Maginot line. Tell me, after Austria and Czechoslovakia, what’s next?”

“France!” Saika happily exclaimed. “Belgium, Holland. Spain will go to Franco soon—he’s winning that silly civil war against the factioned communists.”

“Now there’s a house divided against itself,” said Tatiana.

Saika shrugged. “Never heard of that expression,” she said, “but sounds right. Spain is Franco’s. Italy is already in Germany’s pocket. France will be next.”

“Do you think England will go to war for
France
?” Oleg asked caustically.

Saika laughed. “Certainly not for France,” she said.

“Exactly. France will fall. And then?”

“And then what?” Saika asked with a benign smile.

“Is Hitler going to be facing
west
during his entire expansion?” asked Oleg. “You don’t think he’ll turn east? To the Soviet Union?”

“Oh, he might turn east,” Saika said, crouching near Oleg who moved away from her warily. “But so what?”

“When he mobilizes his troops along the Ukraine and Byelorussia, will you still say, so what?”