The Nesting Dolls Read online

  Mama didn’t blame Papa for drinking. All who returned from the war drank. Considering what they’d seen and—it was implied; no one asked—done, it was the least they deserved to help them forget. Still, Natasha’s mother warned her, not everyone became a drunk like Papa. Some managed to drink heavily only on special occasions, holidays, birthdays, and when someone else was paying. They stayed sober the rest of the time. Papa couldn’t. That meant Natasha had bad genetics. She should stay away from alcohol altogether.

  Mama had been talking about social drinking. Not a home-brewed concoction that might be 80 proof.

  But then again, there was Seryozha. He was looking at Natasha now like he’d looked at Boris bagging the corn. Seryozha was looking at Natasha like the person she was, not the one she’d intended to be on this excursion. So despite her better instincts—remember, she’d made a vow to ignore those—Natasha stuck her hands in and drank. It tasted like rubbing alcohol smelled, with an undercurrent of rusty metal. A few hours into their renegade outing, barely anyone could stand. They lolled, instead, on hay-stuffed sacks, boys and girls in piles of arms, legs, breasts, and lips, several of them committing precisely those criminal acts against socialism forbidden to good young komsomolniki.

  Natasha had no aversion to said criminal acts. Her aversion was to their consequences. Condoms were impossible to get. Sometimes a med student would have access to one they’d stolen from the hospital. But that meant washing and reusing it every time, which risked tears, not to mention abrasions. Granted, abrasions were nothing compared to the pain of an abortion. Sure, they were legal and free. Did Natasha know there were places where abortion was illegal and also where it had to be paid for? Can you imagine paying for medical care? Those people were savages! Wasn’t she lucky to be living in the USSR?

  Not if she needed an abortion, she wasn’t. They might have been legal, and they might have been free, but they were also done without anesthesia. If you wanted anesthesia, you had to bribe the doctor.

  So despite the earlier vow to go along with whatever was suggested, Natasha opted to pick and choose her rebellion. She’d play hooky from work. But she wasn’t going to drink (much), and she wasn’t going to offend socialism.

  At some point, a guitar appeared—it was missing a string, but they could drown out the dissonance by singing louder. A girl Natasha had said barely six words to began strumming tunes by Vladimir Vysotsky. The raspy-voiced bard’s socially critical, politically charged music and general existence had been dubbed “scandalously recognizable.” Singing his underground hit, “Capricious Horses,” with a fatalistic narrator begging his unruly animals not to speed so quickly toward self-destruction, managed to sober up even Seryozha. They warbled along, a small collective act of defiance. That each sincerely hoped nobody else heard.

  Or planned to report.

  Natasha was among the first to wake up the next morning, though she had only her watch to confirm it was daytime. Their basement distillery, now reeking not just of moonshine but also of sweat, vomit, and other bodily fluids, was as dark as ever. Natasha stumbled up the stairs toward the light. She wondered why she’d originally thought this was a good idea. Sure, she’d wanted to create a new persona, one a boy like Seryozha and his followers could respect. But judging by his current state, Seryozha was unlikely even to remember she’d been there the previous night, much less what a grand rebellious figure she’d cut.

  Next, Natasha wondered how she’d find her way back to the kolkhoz when her compatriots were having trouble assuming an upright posture. If she intended to get back in time for her shift, she was on her own. No one was coming to rescue her. Natasha recalled a children’s story about a rosy-cheeked brother and sister who’d gone out in the hot sun looking for a well from which to drink and, by the end, the brother had somehow turned into a goat. Natasha couldn’t conjure up what the moral of that story had been. It might have been Don’t make the bad decision of stumbling lost around the Russian countryside in the sweltering summer. Which was what she was about to do.

  Natasha sighed, blinked, then rubbed her eyes with the palms of both hands to get rid of the crud that had gathered overnight. She bit the bullet and pushed open the front door, heading for the porch. Even squinting, it was as if the sunlight were shoving her back in. Natasha’s eyes were still growing accustomed to the brilliant assault, when she thought she saw Boris standing at the corner, leaning against the remnants of a fence, reading a book.

  It was the rescue Natasha had been hoping for. But it wasn’t the man Natasha had been hoping for. Boris could never be the man Natasha was hoping for.

  He caught sight of her wavering on the porch and stuck the paperback in the front pocket of his shirt. Boris approached Natasha, gazing up the steps at her while shading his eyes with a flat hand to his forehead.

  “Did you have a nice rebellion?” he asked.

  When Natasha merely grunted in lieu of an answer, Boris added, “You know you don’t have to pretend to be someone you’re not to impress these idiots.”

  Natasha knew that. But, as she grudgingly allowed Boris to show her the way back to the kolkhoz, she also knew that, despite the earlier pep talks to herself, these idiots weren’t the ones—one—she’d been trying to impress.

  If Dima were here, he’d understand. If Dima were here, everything would be different.

  If Dima were here, Natasha wouldn’t have to be.

  Chapter 22

  One kolkhoz down, then three more, and finally Natasha found herself graduating from teachers’ college, feeling no more enthusiastic about the profession than she had upon first being forced into it. Natasha requested assignment to a school with advanced tenth-grade math students. She knew there was an opening at the program from which she’d graduated, and when she spoke with the principal there, the woman who’d once been Natasha’s teacher expressed interest in having her.

  Yet when placements were announced, Natasha learned her request had been denied. The official reason was that Natasha had once shirked her kolkhoz duty, going into town to get drunk. She’d been written up by her supervisor. It was the first Natasha had heard of the reprimand.

  Instead, she was assigned to teach sixth and seventh graders algebra and geometry. The school was an average one. Which meant its students were as interested in math as the average child. On her first day, Natasha followed the principal down the hall, counting her steps, calculating when she was one-fourth of the way there, one-half, three-fourths. If this were Zeno’s paradox and every distance was cut in half, she would never get there.

  “Children, this is Natalia Nikolayevna,” the principal intoned. “Give her your complete attention.” He scurried off so quickly that Natasha didn’t have a chance to tell him he’d made a mistake with her name.

  “It’s Nahumovna, not Nikolayevna,” Natasha corrected at the end of the day. Getting her name right felt like the sole bit of control she might exercise over her life.

  “Your students are young,” the principal responded, avoiding calling her anything. “It’s distracting to them.”

  “My name is distracting?”

  “They’re not familiar with cosmopolitan patronymics. It’s best not to confuse their study of mathematics with irrelevance.”

  Natasha was about to point out his non sequitur, then figured that he might not be familiar with cosmopolitan expressions, and that she’d be confusing him with irrelevance.

  So she went back to the classroom and remained Natalia Nikolayevna. It proved the least of her irritations. Behind students who refused to crack a book or do their homework, forcing Natasha to stay after school and redo every problem with them, because she was the teacher, and students’ passing was her responsibility, no matter how much of her own time she had to sacrifice. It made Natasha long for the days right after the Revolution when, according to Baba Daria, USSR universities were so eager to prove that, unlike the czars, they would educate everyone, even peasants, that they formed groups where one proficient studen
t was tethered to a handful of unprepared ones, many of whom were attending school for the first time and could barely read. All worked together, and all received the mandatory passing grade. Not only were they able to graduate five times the number of engineers, doctors, and academics in this manner, the communal learning process was praised as uniquely Soviet.

  But Natasha’s dim, lazy students didn’t irritate her as much as the overeager ones. The ones who sat straight as sentries—as the Young Pioneers motto promised, “Always ready!”—arms folded, fingers touching elbows atop their desks. Natasha would barely finish asking a question before the top arm would spring up, as if jerked by an invisible string reaching to the ceiling. They were always polite, always prepared, always ready with the answer. Their uniforms, the crimson scarves tied around their necks, were spotless and ironed. But Natasha knew they didn’t give a damn about the beauty of math. All they cared about was getting their 5s, their gold medals. It made Natasha sympathize with the instructor Boris once asserted was deliberately gunning for her. She realized now why that teacher felt compelled to ruin Natasha’s perfect record, giving her that solitary 4, in order to wipe the expression of smugness—the one she now saw reflected in her most unbearable students—not from Natasha’s face but from her soul. Never again would Natasha feel as confident that she knew who she was, what she was doing, and where she was headed as she had back when she was the one with her hand perennially in the air.

  Boris was the first to recognize Natasha’s melancholia. He gallantly attempted to buck her up, reminding her there was more to life than work. Boris, for instance, was struggling to learn a programming language called Ratfor so he could coax a computer into not sending him repeated error messages. Did Natasha believe he found that enjoyable? He didn’t! He focused, instead, on the part of his day that he did enjoy. Family, friends, other emotional entanglements . . .

  Boris didn’t need to elaborate. Natasha knew he meant her.

  She’d known for a while, since they were in school and he’d brought her presents, like wildflowers picked from an empty lot, or chestnuts he’d knocked out of trees by hurling a stick at the branches, or a tiny square of pink chewing gum his mother, who worked at the port, got from a visiting sailor. They’d been ten years old and determined to make the gum last. Every day for two solid weeks, they’d each dug a fingernail into the mass known as Bazooka Joe and chewed the tiny sliver they’d plucked out. But now they were past squashed chestnuts and rationed gum. Boris had moved on to writing her long, poetic letters, littered with quotes by Pushkin and Balzac. Natasha kept pointing out it was silly—they lived in the same apartment, and she didn’t even have her own room where he could slip his letters under the door. The first time he’d tried, Papa found it, read it, and passed it to Natasha, saying, “For you. I hope.”

  She told Boris she was flattered. She told Boris he was sweet. She told Boris to think about this logically. What would happen if they did attempt a relationship, it didn’t work out . . . and they were still living in the same apartment? They knew couples who’d married, divorced, and then, because one or the other couldn’t get an alternate propiska, were forced to continue sharing a home, a room, a bed, even. Did he want to risk that?

  Boris said he did.

  Natasha said she didn’t.

  Boris, in an uncharacteristic fit of temper, accused her of comparing every man with whom she came into contact to a guy she’d barely brushed by almost four years ago. How could any flesh-and-blood mortal hope to compete with a fevered fantasy?

  Natasha said she had papers to grade.

  What she didn’t say was anything about the postcards.

  The first one was waiting for Natasha when she returned from her freshman-year kolkhoz. The handwriting was unfamiliar, there was no return address, and no message on the back. All Natasha had to work with, to figure out who’d sent it and why, was the garishly colored image on the front. It was the children’s book character Dr. AiBolit (Ow, It Hurts), a jolly old fellow with a bald head; a gray, Trotsky-like mustache and goatee; and glasses. Someone had circled that last detail with a pen, though you had to look closely; it could have been mistaken for a mere postmark. And then Natasha knew.

  She wondered how he’d gotten her address. She wondered what it meant. She wondered when she’d hear from him again.

  The next card arrived before the New Year. It featured a red-sketch outline of the Kremlin, the hammer and sickle wrapped in a green wreath beneath a red, five-point star hovering over it like a protective satellite, and a generic New Year’s greeting. But it also trumpeted, in big block letters, glory to the union of soviet republics! There was nothing improper or incriminating about it, unless you were clever, like Natasha, and picked up on the irony. Glory, indeed.

  The postcards kept arriving. There was no pattern Natasha could detect, though she spent hours trying. She spent even more time decoding the subversive messages embedded in each one. There was the New Year’s card with Santa sitting atop an airplane . . . heading west: an immigration metaphor. There was the snowman holding an open mailbag: a reminder that their communication was being monitored and must remain cryptic. There was the Hedgehog in the Fog, just another generic cartoon character to those not in the know, to signify how lost they all were, followed by three little pigs (three!), and Crocodile Gena playing the accordion, his famous lament about what a shame it was birthdays came but once a year. This was clearly Dima’s way of telling Natasha what a shame it was they could communicate so rarely, and in such a roundabout fashion. Postmarks indicated he was reaching out from across the country, Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan, Yekaterinburg in Omsk Oblast, Kishinov in Moldova. Natasha wondered how he’d gotten permission to travel. She fantasized he’d done it without permission. Dima was defying the authorities, living as a free spirit . . . and pining for Natasha to join him.

  Why else would Dima be taking the risk of contacting her, if Natasha weren’t on his mind as frequently as he was on hers? She’d made an impression; they’d made a connection. Dima had all but promised Natasha a way out of the life she could no longer have and into one they could both share. Boris was wrong. Natasha wasn’t comparing every man she met to a guy she’d barely brushed by almost four years ago. She was comparing every man she met to someone with whom she’d been having a four-year-and-counting conversation, one in which Dima had bared his soul, his hopes, and his dreams. Even if Natasha had no way of writing back with hers. The fact that Dima kept reaching out to her, in spite of the one-way nature of their communication, proved that he wanted Natasha to continue being privy to his thoughts . . . so that they might be pondering the same great questions of life at the same time, so that when they met again, they would still be as in sync as they’d been that first afternoon in the halls of Odessa University.

  Was it Natasha’s fault the flesh-and-blood men she went out with these days fell into one of two categories? Either obsequious rule followers who were terrified of doing, saying, or thinking anything that might be construed disloyal or original. They were exactly who she’d once been. Or they were of Seryozha’s ilk, louts who proclaimed their defiant independence and lack of fear of retribution . . . while doing nothing beyond drinking, swearing, and stealing as much as they could from their employers. They were what Natasha feared becoming. One candidate boasted about how, at the fruit juice factory where he worked, he’d threaded a separate tube from the main pipeline so he could fill his own bottles, then sell them on the black market. Another, a doctor who’d managed to evade the big-city ethnic quota by traveling so far north for medical school the village he’d stayed in barely knew what a Jew was, much less considered them a threat, sought to impress Natasha with tales of how, working as a health inspector, he forced restaurants to bribe him with choice cuts of meat and fresh fruit in exchange for a good report. Those without profitable graft stories were left to demonstrate their refusal to kowtow to authorities via the playing of illegal records. One told Natasha about painstakingly transcribing l
yrics to Western rock-and-roll songs to learn English; did she happen to know what the word wanna, as in “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” meant? He couldn’t find it in the dictionary. At the very least, they listened to Voice of America on a shortwave radio using coat hangers for better reception. Natasha felt sorry for them. They believed they were striking a blow for freedom, while they were really nothing more than useless blowhards.

  And so Natasha continued accepting invites to movies and cafés, then conjuring up excuses to avoid second dates—in case her lack of enthusiasm failed to get the point across on the first. She wasn’t playing hard to get the way Baba Daria recalled she’d attracted her world-renowned piano-playing husband. In Natasha’s mind, she was already taken.

  Her days blended one into the next, with Monday proving no different than Friday, Tuesday the same as Saturday, since it was also a school day.

  Until Dima returned.

  She recognized him immediately.

  Natasha was crossing Soviet Army Street, not looking where she was going—getting hit by a car would at least break up the monotony—when, in her peripheral vision, she registered a truck idling at a red light. A ZiL model with a green front cabin and a rusty, gray flatbed in the back, covered by a flapping tarp held down by ropes. It had four large wheels that elevated it above the majority of the traffic, save for buses. And Dima sat behind the wheel, sunburned elbow resting on the bottom of the rolled-down driver’s-side window, a cigarette dangling from his fingers and dripping ash onto the sidewalk.

  First, Natasha thought she was imagining him. Her second, more fanciful assumption was that she’d conjured Dima out of her fervent, unceasing desire, but that he was just an illusion, destined to go up in smoke. Her third was that Dima had finally come for her. Now Natasha’s life, which had effectively ended the day they’d met, when she’d received her cursed 3, could finally begin. And, this time, she’d get it right.