Winter Garden (25 page)

“Get on board,” a comrade yells out. “Now. The train is leaving.”

Vera hugs her daughter, and then her son, and then she straightens slowly, feeling as if her bones are breaking as she does it.

Other people are handling her babies now, grabbing them, handing them to other people.

They are crying and waving. Anya is holding Leo’s hand; she shows her mama how tightly she is holding on, how strong she is being.

And then they are gone.

At first Vera cannot make herself move. People push her out of the way, muttering desperate, feral curses. Do they not see that she is paralyzed, that she cannot move? Finally someone pushes hard enough that she falls to her knees. She can feel children being handed off over her head, passed from one to another of the adults.

Vera climbs slowly to her feet, noticing dully that her stockings have ripped at the knees. She moves aside, searching the train’s windows, starting to run from car to car until she realizes that her children are too little to be seen.

So little.

Has she told them everything?

Keep your coat; winter comes on fast, even though they say you’ll be back in a week.

Never be apart from each other.

Brush your teeth.

Eat your food. All of it. And get to the front of the line at every meal.

Watch out for each other.

I love you.

At that, Vera stumbles, almost falls. She didn’t tell them she loved them. She’d been afraid it would make them all cry harder, so she’d withheld the precious words, the only ones that really mattered.

She makes a sound. The pain of it comes from someplace deep, deep inside and it just erupts. Screaming, she shoves her way back into the crowd of people, elbows her way past women who stare at her with blank, desperate eyes. She fights her way to the train.

“I am a nonessential worker,” she says to the woman at the head of the line, who looks too tired to care.

“Paperwork?”

“I have dropped it in that mess,” she says, indicating the crowd. The lie tastes bitter on her tongue and makes her sick to her stomach. It is the kind of thing that draws attention, and nothing—not even war—is as frightening as the attention of the secret police. She draws herself upright. “The workers are not controlling the evacuation. It’s not efficient. Perhaps I should report this to someone.”

The criticism works. The tired woman straightens, nods briskly. “Yes, comrade. You are right. I will be more careful.”

“Good.” Vera’s heart is pounding in her chest as she walks past her into the train. At every step she is certain that someone will come for her, yell, Fraud! and haul her away.

But no one comes and finally she slows down, seeing the sea of children’s faces around her. They are packed like sardines in the gray seats, bundled in coats and hats on this sunny summer’s day—proof that no one believes they’ll be home in two weeks, although no one would dare say it. Their faces are round and sheened with tears or sweat. They are quiet. So quiet. No talking or laughing or playing. They just sit there, looking broken and numb. There are a few women around. Evacuation workers, nursery school teachers, and probably some like Vera, who could neither let their children go nor defy an order of the state.

She does not want to think about what she has done or what it will mean to her family. They desperately need the money she earns at the library. . . .

The train seems to waken beneath her. The whistle blows and she can feel it start to move. Barely touching the seats, unable to make eye contact with the children around her, she keeps going, from one car to another.

“Mama!”

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.

“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.”

There is grumbling around her. She is hardly surprised. Her country is a place of great fear these days, and no one knows which is more likely to kill you—the Germans or the secret police.

She tightens her hold on her children’s hands and begins to move slowly through the crowd. Even the children ease sideways to let her pass. The eyes that meet hers are distrustful and afraid.

“I will come with you,” one woman says. She is old and wrinkled, her gray hair hidden beneath a dirty kerchief. Four children stand clustered around her, dressed for winter, their pale faces streaked with ash.

They are the only ones.

Vera and the woman and their six children make their way out of the barn, past all the silent children. Outside, the countryside is gray with smoke.

“We might as well start walking,” the woman says.

“How far are we from Leningrad?” Vera asks, wondering if she has done the right thing. She feels exposed now, vulnerable to the airplanes flying overhead. To her left, a bomb falls and a building explodes.

“About ninety kilometers,” the woman says. “It will do us no good to talk.”

Vera hefts Leo into her arms and holds on to Anya. She knows that she will not be able to carry her son for long, but she wants to start out that way. Just in case. She can feel his strong, steady heartbeat against her own.

In the years to come, she will forget the hardships of that journey, how her children’s feet blistered until they bled, how their food ran out, how they slept in hay barns like criminals, listening all night for air raids and falling bombs, how they woke in a panic, thinking they’d been shot, feeling blindly for wounds that were not there. Instead, she will remember the lorry drivers who picked them up, and the people who stopped to give them bread and ask them what they’d seen down south. She will remember how she told them what she hadn’t known before: that war is about fire and fear and bodies lying in ditches by the side of the road.

By the time she gets home and stumbles into her mother’s welcoming arms, she is battered and tired and bloody; her shoes have worn through in places and the pain in her feet will not ease, even in a pail of hot water. But none of this matters. Not now.

What matters is Leningrad, her wonderful white city. The Germans are moving toward her home. Hitler has vowed to wipe this city off the map.

Vera knows what she must do.

Tomorrow, very early in the morning, she will get out of her narrow bed and dress in layers. She will pack all the sausage and dried fruit she can carry, and like thousands of other women her age, she will go south again to protect all that she loves. It is every citizen’s job.

“We have to stop them at Luga,” she says to her mother, whose face crumples in understanding. “They need workers there.”

Mama does not ask why or how or why you? All of those answers are clear. It is only the first full week of war, and already Leningrad is becoming a city of women. Every man between fourteen and sixty has gone to fight. Now the girls are going off to war, too. “I will take care of the children,” is all her mother says, but Vera can hear You come back to us as clearly as if it had been spoken aloud.

“I won’t be gone long,” Vera promises. “The library will call me patriotic. All will be fine.”

Mama only nods. They both know it is a fiction, this promise of Vera’s, but they say nothing. Both of them want to believe.

I think that is enough for tonight,” Mom said.

Meredith was the first to stand. Moving almost cautiously, she crossed the small, carpeted space and stood beside Mom. “You don’t look as tired tonight.”

“Acceptance,” Mom said, staring down at her own hands.

The unexpected answer brought Nina to her feet. She moved in beside her sister. “What do you mean by that?”

“You were right, Nina. Your father made me promise to tell you this story. I did not want to. And fighting a thing tires you out.”

“Is that why you went so . . . crazy after Dad died?” Meredith asked. “Because you were ignoring his wishes?”

“That is perhaps one of the reasons,” her mother said, giving a little shrug, as if to say that reasons didn’t matter much.

Nina and Meredith stood there a moment longer, but whatever slim strand of intimacy had been created tonight was gone now. Again, Mom would barely make eye contact with them.

“Okay,” Meredith finally said. “We’ll come get you in the morning for breakfast.”

“I do not want—”

“We do,” Nina said in a voice that silenced her mother’s protest. “Tomorrow the three of us are going to be together. You can discuss it or argue or yell at me, but you know that I won’t change my mind and in the end I’ll get my way.”

“She’s right,” Meredith said, smiling. “She’s a bitch when she doesn’t get her way.”

“How would we know?” Mom said.

“Was that a joke?” Nina said, grinning.

It was like seeing the sun for the first time or riding your first two-wheeler. The whole world suddenly brightened.

“Go away,” Mom said, but Nina could tell that she was trying not to smile with them, and just that little change gave Nina wings.

“Come on, big sis,” she said, slinging an arm around Meredith.

They left Mom’s stateroom for their own room.

Their long, narrow room was surprisingly spacious. There was a small sitting area—a love seat that could be made into a bed—a coffee table, a television, and two twin beds. A pair of sliding doors led to their private veranda. Nina turned on the television, which showed the ship’s progress on a nautical map. There was no cell phone or Internet service out here in the waters off British Columbia, and no television programming. If they wanted to watch a movie, they needed to borrow one from the ship’s library.

“Dibs on the bathroom,” Meredith said as soon as they closed the door behind them, and Nina couldn’t help laughing. It was a sentence straight from their youth.

Meredith is on my side, Dad, tell her to scoot over.

Nina broke my rock ’em sock ’em robot on purpose.

Don’t make me stop this car, you two.

Nina couldn’t help smiling at that last one. When Meredith came out of the bathroom, looking squeaky clean and ready for bed in her pink flannel pajamas, Nina took her turn and got ready for bed. For the first time in years, she and her sister ended up in side-by-side twin beds.

“You’re smiling,” Meredith said.

“I was just thinking about our camping trips.”

“ ‘ Don’t make me stop this car.’ ” Meredith said, and they both laughed. For a magical moment, the years fell away and they were kids again, fighting over an inch of space in the backseat of a bright red Cadillac convertible, with John Denver singing about being high in the mountains.

“Mom never joined in,” Meredith said, her smile fading.

“How did she stay so quiet?”

“I always thought it was because she didn’t give a shit, but now I wonder. Dad was right: the fairy tale is changing everything.”

Nina nodded and leaned back. “The picture,” she said after a moment. “It’s Anya and Leo, right?”

“Probably.”

Nina turned to look at her sister. The question that had been beside them all night, gathering weight and mass, was close now, impossible to ignore. “If Mom really is Vera,” she said slowly, “what happened to her children?”

Nina had been all over the world, but rarely had she seen scenery to rival the magnificence of the Inside Passage. The water was a deep, mysterious blue, and there were islands everywhere—rough, forested hillocks of land that looked exactly as they had two hundred years ago. Behind it all were rugged, snow-draped mountains.

She had come out early this morning and been rewarded with breathtaking shots of dawn breaking across the water. She caught an orca breaching off the bow of the ship, its giant black and white body a stark contrast to the bronzed early morning sky.

She finally stopped shooting at about seven-thirty. By then her hands were frozen and her teeth were chattering so hard it was difficult to keep the camera steady.

“Would you like some hot chocolate, ma’am?”

Nina turned away from the railing and the exquisite view, and found a fresh-faced young deck steward holding a tray of cups and a thermos of hot chocolate. It sounded so good she didn’t even mind that the girl had called her ma’am. “That would be great. Thanks.”

The steward smiled. “There are blankets on the deck chairs, too.” “Does it ever get warm up here?” Nina asked, wrapping her cold fingers around the warm cup.

“Maybe in August.” The girl smiled. “It’s beautiful in Alaska, but the climate isn’t too friendly.”

Nina thanked the steward and went over to one of the wooden deck chairs. She scooped up a heavy, plaid woolen blanket, swung it around her shoulders, and went back to the railing. There, she stared out at the sparkling blue water. A trio of dolphins swam alongside the ship, jumping and diving in perfect synchronicity.

“That’s a sign of good luck,” Meredith said, coming up beside her.

Nina opened one arm, let Meredith snuggle under the blanket beside her. “It’s cold as hell out here.”

“But beautiful.”

Up ahead, a lone lighthouse stood at the rugged green end of an island.

“You were restless last night,” Meredith said, reaching for Nina’s hot chocolate.

“How do you know?”

“I’m an insomniac lately. It’s one of the many prizes you find in the Cracker Jack box of a crumbling marriage. I’m always exhausted and I never sleep. So why were you tossing and turning?”

“We’re three days away from Juneau.”

“And?”

“I found him.”

Meredith turned to her. The blanket slipped out of Nina’s fingers and slid downward. “What do you mean, you found him?”

“The professor of Russian studies. Dr. Adamovich. He’s in a nursing home on Franklin Street in Juneau. I had my editor track him down.”

“So that’s why we’re on this cruise. I should have guessed. Did you speak to him? ”

“No.”

Meredith bit down on her lip and looked out at the water. “What are we supposed to do? Can we just show up at his door?”

“I didn’t really think it through. I know. I know. Big surprise. I just got so amped when I found him. I know he’ll have answers for us.”

“He wrote to her. Not us. I don’t think we can tell her. She’s . . . fragile, Neens. Dad was right about that.”

“I know. That’s why I wasn’t sleeping. We can’t tell her we’ve been researching her life, and we can’t just show up at the professor’s nursing home, and we can’t sneak away for a day after all the fuss I made about us being together. And if we did sneak away, he might not talk to us anyway. It’s her he wanted to see.”

“I can see how all that would keep you up. Especially with the rest of it.”

“The rest of it?”

“Your nature, Neens. You can’t not see him.”

“I know. So what do we do?”

“We will go see the professor.”

Nina gasped at the sound of her mother’s voice and turned around. In her surprise, she caught the side of her cup on the railing and hot chocolate splashed everywhere.

“Mom,” Meredith stammered.

“You heard it all?” Nina said, licking chocolate from her fingers. She knew she looked calm—it was one of the many things photojournalism had taught her: how to look calm even if your insides were shaking—but her voice was uneven. Things were going so well with Mom lately; she hated to think she’d ruined that.

“I heard enough,” Mom said. “It is the professor from Alaska, yes? The one who wrote to me years ago?”

Nina nodded. She pulled the blanket off of her and Meredith and carried it over to Mom, wrapping it around her thin shoulders. “It was me, Mom. Not Meredith.”

Mom held the blanket closed at her breast, her fingers pale against the red plaid. She glanced at the deck chair beside her and sat down, covering herself carefully with the blanket.

Nina and Meredith took chairs on either side of her, flipping the blankets out, too. A steward came by and offered them each a hot chocolate.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Nina said. “I should have told you at the beginning.”

“You thought I would not agree to the trip.”

“Yes,” Nina said. “It’s just that I want to get to know you. And not only because I promised Dad.”

“You want answers.”

“How can I—how can we,” she said, including Meredith in this, “not want answers? You are part of who we are, and we don’t know you. Maybe it’s why we don’t know ourselves. Meredith can’t figure out if she loves her husband or what her own dream is. And I’ve got a man waiting for me in Atlanta and all I can think about is Vera.”

Mom leaned back onto the teak chair. “It is time, I suppose,” she said quietly. “Your father spoke to Professor Adamovich, I believe, although I never did. He thought we should talk—I should talk. It’s probably why he kept the letter all these years.”

“What does the professor want to talk about?” It was Meredith who asked this, and although her voice was quiet, the look in her eyes was intent.

“Leningrad,” Mom said. “For years the government hid what happened. We Soviets are good at hiding things, and I was afraid to talk about it. But there is no reason for fear now. I am eighty-one years old tomorrow. Why be afraid?”

“Tomorrow is your birthday?” they said at once.

Mom almost smiled. “It was easier to hide everything. Yes, tomorrow is my birthday.” She sipped her hot chocolate. “I will go see this professor with you, but you two should know now: you will be sorry you began all of this.”

“Why do you say that?” Meredith asked. “How could we be sorry to learn who you are?”

It was a long moment before Mom answered. Slowly, she turned to Meredith and said, “You will.”

Ketchikan was a town built on salmon: catching it, salting it, processing it. The rain gauge—called a liquid-sunshine-o-meter—attested to the dampness of the climate.

“Look at that,” Meredith said, pointing to a grassy area across the street where a man with long black hair was carving a totem pole. A crowd was gathered around him, watching.

Nina dared to reach for her mother’s arm. “Let’s go check it out.” She was surprised when Mom nodded and let Nina guide her across the street to the small park.

Rain started to fall as they stood there. Most of the crowd dispersed, running for cover, but Mom just stood there, watching the man work. In his capable hands, the metal instrument cut and gouged and changed the wood from rough to smooth. They saw a paw begin to appear.

“It is a bear,” Mom said, and the man looked up.

“You have a good eye,” he said.

Nina could see now how old he was. His dark skin was lined and leathery, and the hair at his temples was gray.

“This is for my son,” the man said, pointing to the beaked bird at the base of the totem pole. “This is our clan. The raven. And this thunderbird brought the storm that washed the road away. And this bear is my son. . . .”

“So it’s a family history,” Meredith said.

“A burial totem. To remember him.”

“It’s beautiful,” Mom said, and just then, in the falling rain, Nina heard the voice of the fairy tale, and for the first time it made sense. She understood why her mother only told the story in the dark and why her voice was so different: it was about loss. The voice was how her mother sounded when she let her guard down.

They stood there long enough to see the bear’s claw take shape. Then they finally walked toward Creek Street. Here, the old red-light district had been transformed into a boardwalk of shops and restaurants positioned above a river. They found a cozy little diner with a view and sat down at a knotty pine table by the window.

The street outside was full of tourists with shopping bags, moving like wildebeests in the migration season from one store to the next, even in the rain. The bells above the store doors were chiming a random tune.

“Welcome to Captain Hook’s,” said a cute young waitress dressed in bright yellow overalls and a red checked blouse. A yellow fisherman’s hat sat firmly on her brown curls. A name tag identified her as Brandi. She handed them each a large laminated menu in the shape of a fishhook.

In no time at all the waitress returned to take their orders, which were three fish-and-chips baskets and iced teas. When she left, Meredith said, “I wonder what our family totem would look like.”

There was a moment’s pause after that. In it, they all looked up, made eye contact.

“Dad would be the bottom,” Nina said. “He was the start of us.”

“A bear,” Meredith said. “Nina would be an eagle.”

An eagle. A loner. Ready to fly away. She frowned a little, wishing she could disagree. Her life had left markers all over the world, but very few at home. No one’s totem would include her except this family’s, and while that was what she’d always wanted—to be totally free and independent—it felt lonely just now. “Meredith would be a lioness who cares for everyone and keeps the pride together.”

“What would you be, Mom?” Meredith asked.

Mom shrugged. “I would not be there, I think.”

“You think you left no mark on us?” Nina asked.

“Not one that begs to be remembered.”

“Dad loved you for more than fifty years,” Meredith said. “That’s not nothing.”

Mom took a sip of her iced tea and stared out the window at the rain.

The waitress returned with their food. Nina got up quickly and whispered a request, and then sat down again. As they ate the delicious halibut and fries, they talked about the day in Ketchikan—the gold nugget jewelry in the windows of the shops, the ornate First Nations tribal art, the Cowichan sweaters the locals wore, and the bald eagle they’d seen perched on a totem pole in town. It was a conversation that could have been had by any family on vacation in town, but to Nina it felt almost magical. As her mother spoke about things that interested her, she seemed to soften. It was as if every ordinary word loosened something in her until by the end of the meal she was smiling.