The Nesting Dolls Read online

  It was nearly midnight when they boarded the train, Adam carrying a dozing Gosha, Daria propping up an exhausted Alyssa. Adam had secured them a private cabin with four berths. He lifted the children onto the upper bunks, while he and Daria sat across from each other on the bottom two, talking into the night, filling each other in on the months they’d been apart, making tentative plans for the days ahead.

  Plans that grew a great deal more critical as, in the distance, they heard the first muffled explosions from the bombs incoming planes boasting swastikas on their tails were starting to drop with great precision straight into the heart of Odessa.

  Book II

  Natasha

  1970–1991

  Chapter 19

  Odessa, USSR

  In the spring of 1970, Natasha Crystal received two lessons regarding the infamous Jewish problems. Those that were about math, and those that were about men.

  Natasha stood with her back to the wall of an Odessa University hallway, Boris sitting on the floor by her side. Twelve years from now, Natasha’s daughter would introduce her to what Americans thought when they heard the names Boris and Natasha. They thought of secret agents out to capture Moose and Squirrel! Her daughter would observe that neither Natasha nor Boris fit the stereotype. She would be half right.

  For now, Natasha and Boris were waiting to take the oral part of their university entrance exams. Natasha had already taken her written test a few days earlier, as had Boris. They’d walked into the auditorium together, hoping to be placed in the same row so they might write their essays on the same theme. But the proctor had separated them. Natasha was assigned to expound about the USSR’s right to mass along the Sino-Soviet border, and why the proper name for the contested area was Damansky Island, not Zhenbao. Boris wrote about why dual-use civilian and military space stations such as those developed in the USSR were a greater contribution to science and mankind than America’s recent moon landing.

  Their scores had been posted that morning. Boris received a 4, while Natasha got a 5, the highest possible score. She wasn’t surprised. Until last month, she’d been expecting to graduate with a gold medal, indicating she’d earned 5s in all her classes and, as such, could skip her exams and head straight for an interview with the university admissions committee. Except, at the final marking period, her history of the Communist Party teacher shocked Natasha by asking her to stand up in front of the class and explain why sexual contact between Young Communist League members was a crime against socialism. All a blushing Natasha could get out was the official line, “Good Komsomolniki don’t engage in such activities.”

  Afterward, Boris attempted to comfort Natasha, telling her that it wasn’t her fault, the teacher had been trying to trip her up. Natasha refused to let him conjure up excuses or to appeal the grade. She didn’t want to worsen the situation and make other teachers think she was a troublemaker. So Natasha was issued a silver medal, testifying to her 5s—and one glaring 4. Which meant she had to write the composition and take an exam in her chosen field of study, math. Boris was also applying for the mathematics department.

  Remembering his attempt to buck her up after the sex and socialism fiasco, Natasha now tried to do the same for Boris, disheartened by his 4 in composition.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Natasha faked a confidence she couldn’t back up with facts. “As long as you ace the math exam, nobody will care about your writing. It’s not as if you’re applying to study Russian literature or humanities.”

  Boris smiled wanly. A Jewish boy applying to study Russian literature, that really would be something laughable.

  Every forty minutes, a handful of students were escorted inside a classroom. As they exited, they already knew how they’d done, and whether they’d accumulated enough points to be granted access to the major and university of their choice.

  “Natalia Crystal!” A voice echoed down the hall. The proctor jerked her head to indicate Natasha should follow her into the classroom, where a panel of three teachers—two men and one woman—sat behind a table. In front of them were five rows of seven white cards, facedown.

  Natasha stepped forward, ostentatiously confident in a way her mother insisted would get them all arrested one day. Was it Natasha’s fault math had always come easily, numbers lining up, one after another, so all she had to do was follow their logical procession to the answer? Natasha’s eyes swept over the cards. She reached forward and snatched the one at the left edge. Mental statistics in the hallway had convinced her it was the card least likely to be selected. As soon as she touched the paper, though, with its still damp fingerprints of previous geniuses who thought they had the system figured out, she realized her miscalculation. Natasha had assumed the cards in the middle and toward the right would be the most-frequently selected. She gambled the testers would place their difficult equations there, with the easier ones hovering along the top and edges.

  Natasha glanced at which equations she’d drawn. There were three of them. One was on the sums of the lengths of pairs in a tetrahedron, one was finding a point within an ABC triangle, and the last asked her to construct a quadrilateral using a ruler and a compass.

  The panel gave Natasha thirty minutes at the rear of the classroom to work on her answers, while they dealt with other students. Natasha only needed twenty-nine, and that included checking her work. She stood before the trio and went through her solutions. Each of the teachers took an opportunity to stop her and ask follow-up questions. She had answers for all of them.

  She watched the head tester pick up his pen in order to record her result. It was going to be a 5. It had to be. She hadn’t missed so much as a parenthesis.

  “One moment,” the man sitting behind where her card had been, spoke up. “Miss Crystal?” The emphasis he put on Natasha’s name made it clear what he was asking. The only Crystals in Odessa were inevitably Jewish. In America, Natasha would claim the comic Billy Crystal, whose grandparents came from Odessa, had to be a relative.

  So Natasha gave the expected answer. “Yes, Crystal. Natalia Nahumovna.” Now that they had Papa’s ethnically identifiable first name, too, that should settle any doubts. But just in case there remained a question regarding her loyalty to the USSR, Natasha added, “My father is a decorated veteran of the Great Patriotic War. He gave his eye for the cause.” The grandparents who’d been deported to Siberia as enemies of the state, Natasha opted to keep to herself. That information was likely in her file, already.

  “Natalia Nahumovna,” he repeated, grateful for her help identifying Natasha as another Jew who thought she was so much smarter than everyone else. “We have one more problem for you.”

  Natasha flipped over her card. “No. I finished them all.”

  “One more,” he insisted.

  The other teachers shifted in their seats. The woman stared past Natasha, out the window. The man put down his pen and waited obediently. He may have been the head of the examination panel, but his colleague was the Party member.

  Natasha was handed a second card. One that had never been on the table. It came out of the tester’s pocket.

  Natasha told herself she had nothing to worry about. She’d already faced the worst they could do, and she’d beaten them. No reason she couldn’t do it again.

  Her final problem read: Find all real functions of real variable F(x) such that for any x and y the following inequality holds: F(x) − F(y) ≤ (x − y)2. It looked like something she’d solved a thousand times in preparation. It looked like something she should be able to solve. But it was different. She’d already used up twenty-nine minutes. Did they expect her to tackle this in sixty seconds?

  They weren’t even willing to offer that much.

  “Your answer, Natalia Nahumovna?”

  “I—I’m not sure.”

  The tester leaned over the chairman, picked up his pen, and wrote down her final grade.

  “Three,” Boris said. Natasha wondered how he could already know her result. Then she realized he was
talking about his own score. Boris had been called into a different classroom right after her. In his case, they didn’t even bother with the charade of letting Boris pick a card. They handed him three problems, none of them, as far as Boris could see, solvable.

  “Me, too,” Natasha admitted. They stood there, looking helplessly at each other—Natasha trying not to cry and draw attention to herself, Boris trying not to reach out and hug her because that would do the same.

  “Jewish problems,” a voice behind them said.

  Natasha, sniffling, turned around to tell whoever was offering his unsolicited two kopeiki to get lost; she wasn’t in the mood for anti-Semitic gloating. She found herself nearly nose to nose with a stocky young man, maybe a year or two older than she was, barely taller, but much broader. Natasha was used to boys her height being thin and sickly, with bronchial coughs from endless colds and allergies. But this one’s shoulders and arms were so muscular that his shirt looked a size too small. A pair of glasses sat on his nose, giving him the appearance of a scholarly boxer. She’d never seen anyone quite like him before. The dichotomy intrigued Natasha in spite of herself.

  He stretched out his hand. “Bruen, Dimitri. Dima.”

  If he was an anti-Semite, he was a Jewish one. Not that there weren’t plenty of those, too.

  Looking from Dima to Boris, Natasha had a fleeting image of the pair sculpted from identical pieces of plastiline, Boris stretched to skinny capacity, while Dima was pounded into a hard, tough block.

  “Jewish problems are a myth,” Boris dismissed, attempting to turn his back on Dima and usher Natasha away.

  But the stranger had gotten her attention, in more ways than one. “What Jewish problems?”

  “Ones they came up with, special,” Dima explained, amused she didn’t know. “They can’t be solved; to keep Jews out of universities.”

  “Why would they need to do that? They already have quotas.”

  “Some people think they’re too high. This makes it easier. We failed, so no university placement for us.”

  “You didn’t get in, either?” Natasha couldn’t imagine this confident, charismatic young man, with his fine, light brown hair and pure azure eyes, failing at anything.

  “My name wasn’t on the list of students to accept no matter what answers they gave.”

  That list wasn’t a myth. Those on it felt no shame about boasting. But, like Dima, Natasha wasn’t in competition with those privileged souls. Her rivals were other Jewish girls who wanted to study math. Quotas dictated a set number of spaces for applicants who fit that description. They were competing against each other, not against unrelated nationalities, or the children of Party members and other politically connected candidates.

  Dima said, “This is my third year applying. I graduated with a gold medal.”

  Natasha was about to say she had as well, then remembered that wasn’t the case.

  “I felt confident the first time. Applied to Moscow University, wanted to be a doctor.”

  “That’s just foolish,” Boris snorted. “Everyone knows Jews can’t—”

  “They told me I couldn’t go to medical school because I wore glasses. The doctor on the panel, the one who told me? He wore glasses. What a joke! But my parents didn’t have the going 20,000 rubles for a bribe.”

  Natasha gasped. Her own parents barely earned 1,200 rubles a year. Is that what it would cost to get her a university place now that her exams had gone so badly?

  “I thought I’d try again, get a different group of testers, someone my family could ask a favor of. I thought I could scrape out a good enough score to at least get into the night school. That didn’t work, either. So I decided to come to Odessa. More Jews here than anywhere in the USSR, right? I gambled they’d be friendlier to us. Plus, I’ve finished my two years as a worker. They’re supposed to give preference if you’ve worked for two years. But I miscalculated. More Jews in Odessa doesn’t mean they’re more generous here, it means there are more Jews fighting for the same quota spots. So that’s it, no university education for me. I’m done. And my propiska is for while I take the exams only.”

  “You’re not staying in town?” Natasha’s heart sank.

  “If I had my way, I wouldn’t even stay in the USSR.”

  As quickly as her heart had sunk a moment earlier, now it did a complete one-eighty in Natasha’s chest, Dima’s words hitting her as forcefully as seeing that 3 on her results sheet had earlier. Did Dima just say it was possible to leave the USSR?

  Years later, Natasha would look back on that moment and marvel at how anyone could have been that naive. Had it honestly never crossed her mind that there was a world outside her homeland? One that she might someday see? One that she might someday opt for? She knew how Baba Daria had left Odessa with Mama. The first time they’d been forced to; the second time they’d had to. But the family had stayed inside the Soviet Union’s borders. The possibility of not being so constrained had never been so much as broached at their house.

  “Quiet!” Boris, who shared Natasha’s house and appeared equally discombobulated by Dima’s pronouncement, hushed him. Even when they were children, playing Fascists versus Red Army soldiers in the courtyard—Natasha made Boris be the Fascist so she was guaranteed victory, and so Mama wouldn’t catch Natasha pretending to speak German—he only dared whisper his threats of Nazi world domination, lest anyone overhear and accuse Boris of genuinely holding such views.

  “There’s three of us congregating,” Dima mocked, “so we must be plotting political mischief. Is that what you’re afraid of being charged with?”

  “Not three. There’s us two”—Boris reached for Natasha’s hand as she continued staring at Dima, trying to process what he’d said, the world he’d opened up for her—“and there’s you. We don’t even know you,” Boris pronounced loudly, and not for Dima’s benefit.

  “Is your boyfriend always such a coward?” Dima asked Natasha.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” she quickly corrected. “We live in the same kommunalka, that’s all.”

  “Just because you have no future, Bruen,” Boris spat, “is no excuse to ruin it for us.”

  And there it was. The inferred reason why Natasha had never so much as daydreamed about the possibility of leaving the Soviet Union and going somewhere else. Because, up until this afternoon, all of Natasha’s daydreams had centered on the life she strove to achieve here, the one that everyone had assured her was possible, just as long as Natasha did as she was told, followed the rules, did not make any waves, accepted the price of everything—and expressed gratitude for what she’d already been given.

  “What future?” Dima pulled down his lips with two index fingers in, Natasha had to admit, an uncanny impression of Boris’s disappointed face—and Natasha’s equally crushed spirit. “Weren’t you just crying over your three?”

  Boris refused to take the bait. Mustering as much dignity as possible while being teased, he defended, “They told me, at the examination, there is room this year at the technical institute.”

  “Nursing? Cooking?” Dima sang in imitation of a little girl.

  “Economics?” Natasha leaped on the possibility, wondering if a fragment of her daydream might yet be salvaged. Some years, those with an interest in mathematics who didn’t do well on their university examinations could talk their way into a night course at the economics technical institute. And by talk, Natasha meant a bribe to the right person, hopefully for less than 20,000 rubles. If there was room for Boris, maybe she could apply, as well.

  “The Polytechnic,” Boris said. “To study computers.”

  “Computers?” As far as Natasha could glean from dribs and drabs heard around the math department, computers were machines designed to do calculations in more time and with less precision than an adept human. They were dull instruments for even duller people.

  “I know there’s little future in it”—Boris straightened to full height, still refusing to be cowed into embarrassment, even with t
he latest revelation—“but they said they might be able to find me a spot, maybe even to attend during the day.”

  “Will you apply?” Natasha asked.

  “As soon as I get my papers back from here.” It was illegal to make copies of documents, which slowed down the admissions process for those who failed to get into their first choice.

  Dima challenged, “Are you going to let them keep treating us like this?”

  He’d mentioned three distinct groups. You, them, and us. Natasha knew she wasn’t Them. She was definitely You. And yet, she would have given anything in that instant to be Us.

  Because You had just realized she’d be permanently deprived of the privileges accorded Them. But that Us might have access You had never previously known existed.

  “No, of course not.” For the first time in her life, it was no honor to be the one with the answers. For the first time, Natasha was the one with the questions.

  Dima patted Natasha on the shoulder. “When you’re ready to put actions behind those words, you come find me.” He raised his eyebrows in Boris’s direction, somehow managing to look down on a man several heads taller. “If your guard dog lets you.”

  Chapter 20

  “How can I do that?” Natasha whined as she and Boris meandered along Primorsky Boulevard, surrounded by mothers pushing baby carriages and old people strolling, arm in arm, beneath the blooming trees. “He didn’t say where he was going!”

  “Siberia, that’s where he’s going.” Boris appeared eager to change the subject.

  “He can say hello to my Baba Daria,” Natasha snapped, tired of Boris whipping out the threat of Siberia whenever he needed to win an argument.

  Boris maneuvered Natasha toward the statue of Alexander Pushkin. The great man’s bust stood surrounded by three small fountains shooting streams from its base. When Natasha and Boris played there as children, they’d splashed and called it Pushkin’s pee-pee. Now, Boris was hoping for the water to muffle the sounds of Natasha’s criminal dissent.