The Nesting Dolls Page 12

  “The Germans,” Edward hissed, “will make the Communists appear like benign occupiers. Adam, you must get them out of here. Daria and Gosha, Alyssa, too. Take them east. The Germans will never advance that far. The cold will stop them, like it did Napoleon. Daria and the children will be safe. Please.” His voice broke and, for a moment, Daria thought Edward would sink to his knees. “Please.”

  “No.” Daria piped up before Adam had a chance to answer. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  “You must.” Daria would have said she was seeing glimpses of the old Edward, except he had never been this forceful, this decisive before. “You’ll die if you stay here. We’ll all die.”

  “Then we’ll leave together.” The decision seemed simple to Daria.

  “We can’t just ask for permission to leave. No one will grant us that. We don’t have the political capital. Besides, you need someone who can take care of you and the children, someone who can protect you no matter which side is in power.”

  Edward knew that person could never be him.

  And thanks to her afternoon spent lurking at the ballet academy’s door, Daria knew who had made him feel that way. Just because it was true didn’t mean she wasn’t to blame.

  “You’re my husband,” Daria said, although that didn’t address Edward’s argument. She could never leave him. Precisely because what he’d said was true.

  “I’ll take them,” Adam cut in brusquely. The strength holding Edward upright left him as he all but collapsed in gratitude. Except then Adam said, “If Daria wants me to.”

  If Daria wants me to . . . The words swam in her brain. What the hell did Daria’s wants have to do with anything? Daria’s wants and actions were what had brought about this situation. Daria’s wants were of no relevance. As Comrade Stalin loved to distort Tolstoy and remind his citizens, “You have no rights, only obligations.”

  “Thank you,” Daria told Adam, letting a fraction of the emotion that she felt for him come spilling out, even as she was already pulling herself back together. “You were kind to come. But this is where I belong.”

  “At least take the boy.” Edward swung Gosha up off the floor and thrust him into Adam’s arms. “He’s your son; you can take him—you have the right. Then Daria will have to come, too.” He looked at her desperately. “She’d never choose me over him.”

  Gosha looked questioningly at Edward before turning his attentions to Adam. Or rather, to the sole gold button of Adam’s coat. He twisted it curiously in both directions, paying no attention to the man staring longingly at him. Daria waited for Adam to contradict Edward, to reveal that Daria had already chosen her husband over her son once before. That should be enough to convince Edward. It should be enough to send Adam on his way. Before Daria’s resolve began to waver.

  “No.” Adam peered over Gosha’s head at Daria. “I’m afraid I cannot do that.”

  “Let me talk to her,” Edward pleaded. “Reason with her. Give me until tomorrow morning.”

  “I won’t change my mind,” Daria said, as much to herself as to either of the men. “I won’t leave you.”

  “I’ll come back in the morning,” Adam said.

  Edward begged, Edward cajoled, Edward wept. The latter disgusted his father, terrified Alyssa, and prompted Gosha to toddle over and pat Edward on the head, the way Edward did when Gosha hurt himself. It was that last move that solidified the resolve Daria earlier feared shattering. After everything she’d put Edward through, after the way he’d taken her back and accepted Gosha, treating the boy like his own no matter how cruel the derision from Isaak, Daria couldn’t abandon Edward—not for anything, not for anyone, and that included her children. She’d done it once before. Staying with Edward now would be her penance for that betrayal.

  Daria tried to convince him they would be fine. Their families had weathered the previous German occupation and, as his father kept insisting, even thrived! They would manage whatever came next. Daria possessed skills now. She couldn’t imagine a future she couldn’t handle, one that would prove more cataclysmic than her recent past.

  But Edward kept talking. He talked through most of the evening and, after everyone else had gone to bed, he whispered. He embraced Daria; he shook her. She kept expecting him to grow weary, but the more she resisted, the more fervent he became. Daria found it impossible to keep wrangling, especially when she was determined to keep her true argument hidden from him at all costs. Finally, Daria collapsed into an exhausted sleep, Edward’s words still buzzing in her ears.

  She thought she woke because he’d at long last stopped, and it was the silence that roused her. Edward had, at some point, collapsed on the bed beside her, twitching and mumbling with his eyes closed. Yet what she’d actually heard were Adam’s footsteps outside their room. She could still pick them out, even while asleep. Daria slipped out of bed and hurried to the door, opening it and darting outside before Adam could knock. It was dark, barely dawn. Daria hadn’t realized that when Adam said he’d be back in the morning, he’d meant at first light.

  “I wanted to get you alone.” Had he anticipated her hearing him and dashing out before anyone else? Did he know her that well?

  “I haven’t changed my mind,” she said.

  Adam sighed. “We can take him with us. Your husband. His father, too. I can try to arrange the papers. It may take a while.”

  “And what would happen to me?” Daria demanded.

  “Whatever you want.”

  “I want to stay with my husband,” she declared, then wavered. “I need to stay with my husband.”

  “And he needs to know you and your children are safe.”

  “Gosha,” Daria prompted, as if Adam needed reminding. “He’s been so good to him.” Her next thought may not have made sense coming directly after to Adam, but it did to Daria. “I can’t leave Edward.”

  “He wants you to.”

  “He doesn’t know what he wants. He needs me to look after him.”

  “And you need to play martyr. Again.”

  She knew what he meant. That didn’t mean she had to like it. “Go to hell.”

  “I plan to. It’s still frozen over.”

  Despite herself, Daria smiled.

  “I missed you,” she confessed, locking her hands behind her back again, to keep herself from rushing to him. This conversation couldn’t be happening. How could this conversation be happening? How could Adam be standing in front of her, close enough to touch? Close enough that he shouldn’t, under any circumstances, be touched?

  Adam followed her lead, keeping his distance, though Daria had no way of knowing if it was for the same reason. Was he feeling it, too, this irresistible pull? This unacceptable pull? She understood no more about what Adam was thinking or feeling now than she ever had.

  Voice devoid of judgment, he observed, “When you’re with him, you miss me. When you were with me, you missed him.”

  What was there to say to that but . . . “Yes.”

  “And I’m the one who should go to hell?” Was that amusement or fury Daria was seeing? “You’ve reserved yourself the main room!”

  She sighed. “Good thing we’re so used to living in crowded quarters.”

  To hell with distance, to hell with following her lead. Adam grabbed Daria and kissed her. It felt so much like the first time, the urgency, the unrestrained passion, the need, and the release. But Daria also knew it was the last time for them both. So she didn’t rush. Yes, they could be seen; yes, they could be caught; yes, they could be reported. But once again, Daria couldn’t find it within herself to be scared of anything that might happen in preference over what currently was. She raised her arms to wrap around his neck, then slid her palms until they were cradling his cheeks. Adam’s hands went around her waist as he lifted her off the ground. He broke his mouth away from hers and buried his lips in her neck, moving around to the crest of her throat, then up to her chin, her jaw, and back to her lips, her tongue, anything and everything, greedy and demanding and
giving, remembering and memorizing her at the same time.

  They couldn’t have stood as they were that long, because it was still barely day outside when they heard Alyssa’s frantic screaming from the other side of the door.

  Adam and Daria broke apart. She tore back into their room, where Daria encountered a hysterical Alyssa, Isaak Israelevitch beside her, Gosha right behind, tugging frantically at what it took Daria a stupefied moment to comprehend were Edward’s legs, hanging limply from the ceiling.

  Chapter 18

  Daria’s first thought was how quiet Edward had to have been, making sure no one woke up while he was methodically stringing his belt over the water pipe, tightening it around his neck, and, especially, during the last of his death throes. What self-control it must have taken, how determined he must have been.

  Adam sprang into action, cutting Edward down with a single swipe of his knife. Edward’s body collapsed to the floor. Adam stretched Edward out on his back, sending the chairs in his way crashing in all directions and dropping to his knees. He slapped Edward across the cheeks, he pounded his chest, he opened his mouth and breathed into it. But Daria realized it was too late. Edward’s face was a Kandinsky of blue and red blotches, his tongue swollen and slack. She’d seen too much death not to recognize when it was irrevocable.

  Gosha ran crying, terrified, into Daria’s arms. Alyssa hovered over Edward and Adam, gazing at them with a hope Daria also knew too well. She’d seen it on Alyssa’s face even as she’d hurried to bury Anya. Isaak Israelevitch was pummeling Adam’s shoulders, trying to pull him off Edward, screaming that Adam was murdering him, calling him names in Russian, in Ukrainian, in Yiddish, cursing him, accusing him, entreating him. It was only when Adam sat back on his haunches, spent, hands by his sides, surrendering to the inevitable, that Daria’s father-in-law turned his curses toward her. He called Daria a whore, a wretch, a homewrecker, a killer. She let his words hit her like waves, like arrows, welcoming them, embracing them as the very least she deserved.

  With Daria’s help, Adam moved Edward’s body off the floor and onto the bed. He volunteered to see if he could round up an undertaker. Daria nodded. She couldn’t take her eyes off Edward, couldn’t stop smoothing the matted hair across his forehead or stroking his still warm cheek, the way she remembered his doing to Anya. She linked her fingers through his; she massaged his palm with her thumb, the way he’d once playfully done to hers. Behind her, Daria could hear Alyssa’s hysterics settling into breathless, ragged sobs, while Gosha sniffled alongside her. Isaak Israelevitch had gone silent, sagging onto a chair, head in his hands. She knew she should turn around and address them, comfort them, at least remove the children from the room so their last memory of Edward wouldn’t be this horror. But Daria had no strength left for any of it.

  Instead, she remained as she was until Adam returned with word that the undertaker said it would be a few days—a week, at most. They should wrap the body in a shroud—bedsheets would do; as if they had a set to spare—and wait for notification regarding when they’d be allowed to bury him.

  “No!” She was shocked by her own scream. Alyssa and Gosha jumped in terror, though Isaak Israelevitch didn’t so much as budge. “I can’t leave him.”

  “You will.” The words came, muffled, from behind Isaak’s palms. So faint, Daria at first thought she’d misheard. But then he raised his head and repeated, “You will get out of my house, and take your goddamn bastard with you.”

  Daria looked toward Gosha, but, as he had no idea what the expression meant, or that it was directed at him, her son remained unaffected. Adam also declined to respond to the old man’s taunt. Then again, Adam never minded when she’d used it against him. It was a factual term, he said.

  A moment earlier, Daria had been determined to stay as she was, where she was, to stay by Edward’s side forever, like she’d promised that breathless day back at the ZAGS. She knew her father-in-law’s threat was empty. Daria’s propiska had her assigned to this space. Even with Edward dead, Isaak Israelevitch couldn’t evict Daria or Gosha. Relocation was up to the regional leadership, not personal preference. The old man couldn’t do anything to Daria. And yet, this was what Daria deserved. She deserved punishment; she deserved disgrace, abuse, banishment; she deserved it all.

  “All right,” Daria said. “I’ll go.”

  Her father-in-law looked triumphant, but also aware that it was a hollow, pointless victory.

  “What about Alyssa?” Daria wondered if she’d be losing another child in another well-earned penance.

  “She stays with us.” Isaak, sensing Daria’s surrender and the chance to hold on to at least some part of his beloved Edward, moved in for the kill. He cajoled, “You would like to stay here with me, wouldn’t you, Allysochka?”

  The child hesitated, looking from Edward’s body to her mother. “Are you going back to Anya?”

  “Yes.”

  Her daughter thought it over, the push-pull of dual loyalties written across her face even as she apologetically told her grandfather, “I’ll go with her.”

  “You can come, too, Isaak Israelevitch.” Adam’s generosity stunned Daria. “I can arrange travel papers. It may take a few days—”

  “Damn your days! Damn all of you for what you’ve done! Get out of my house! Leave us alone!”

  “Edward . . .” Daria began.

  “I’ll bury my son on my own. Just like you buried my granddaughter.”

  “Please,” Daria entreated, sounding as desperate as Edward had when he was begging her to go, begging Adam to make her go. “Please, he’s my husband. Please, let me—”

  “You killed him.” Isaak Israelevich indicated Adam. “Listen to this savage of yours, and at least do the last thing my son asked of you. Go!”

  Daria hurriedly packed up her and the children’s few things, leaving Alyssa to say goodbye to her grandfather while Daria, Adam, and Gosha waited in the courtyard, ignoring the curious and mercenary looks of their neighbors, not to mention the dvornik, who eyed Adam warily, as if afraid of being picked up by his collar and tossed into the street, a pretender to the throne.

  “I can’t do this,” Daria whispered. “I have no right.”

  “He’s dead.” Adam’s voice was matter-of-fact. Daria knew better than most that energy was to be expended on the living. “He wanted me to take you away from Odessa.”

  “I wanted that, too,” Daria confessed, horrified to hear words that previously had only echoed inside her head bursting like icicles into the otherwise moderate June day. “I had dreams, over and over, once, sometimes twice a week, of you coming for me. Not Gosha, me.”

  “Edward was grateful you came back to him. He wrote me.”

  Stunned to hear that, Daria faltered. “What—What else did he say?”

  “That Gosha was a good boy.” That part visibly touched Adam most. “And that none of you were safe in Odessa.”

  “It’s my fault he didn’t trust himself to take care of us. I made him feel that way,”

  Adam pointed to the room where Edward’s body still lay. “He did take care of you.”

  “I loved Edward,” Daria said. “And I loved you, too.”

  The word had never passed between them. They’d pretended not to notice, but its absence was perennially there. They’d felt it, more even than the lack of food or heat. For two years, Daria and Adam had lived alongside a sensation they didn’t dare name, because, like in Brothers Grimm, where saying a creature’s name robbed it of its power, so would giving voice to their feeling risk instantly shattering it.

  Adam nodded slowly, thoughtfully. For a minute, Daria thought they’d been transported back to their early days, when she could go weeks without hearing him speak.

  But then Adam said, “Edward understood that.”

  “Do you love me?” Daria challenged, realizing that, so far, the sentiment had been hers alone.

  “From the first moment I saw you.” He turned toward the courtyard’s tunnel. “Over there.�
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  “That silly girl is long gone.”

  “Good,” Adam said, tentatively reaching for Daria’s hand, as if his mouth hadn’t been crushing hers only a few hours earlier. As if their son weren’t standing between them, indifferent to their conversation. “Because I love this one more.”

  At the train station, Daria sat on a wooden bench pressed against the wall, Gosha on her lap, Alyssa with her head on Daria’s shoulder, watching Adam negotiate four tickets east for them. She couldn’t quite believe what was happening, that she was returning to Kyril. At Edward’s request. That Edward was dead. That he had died because of her. And for her. She’d loved him, but she hadn’t known him. She’d thought him weak, but he’d proven stronger than she was.

  “It’s like music, Papa,” Edward had tried to explain when this all began, and the first edict came, banning him from traveling outside the country. He’d gone along, uncomplaining. “You can’t force it. All you can do is adjust the key and find your rightful rhythm within it.”

  It’s what he’d done in Kyril. Daria had judged his passivity as surrender, but in reality it had been the opposite. Edward gave up everything without so much as a token protest—except that which was actually important to him. While the rest of them wasted energy battering their heads against walls that were never going to break, Edward had conserved his for what really mattered.

  “The music inside, they cannot take that away from you,” he’d told Alyssa, “not unless you let them.”

  So he’d hummed. With his last exhausted breath, he never let them take his music. He’d fought in his own way, in a way Daria wasn’t used to, in a way she didn’t recognize. He couldn’t force Daria to do as he begged, so he’d adjusted the key and altered the circumstances until she had no other options. It’s like music, Papa . . .