The Nesting Dolls Read online

  Each operation went off without a hitch, swelling Natasha’s confidence about her usefulness to the group, and to Dima. Confidence that lasted up until the evening she and Boris were alone in the kitchen, cleaning up their respective families’ plates after supper, and he, again using water to keep from being overheard—in this case, it was the trickling sink—asked Natasha, “What were you doing in my room earlier today?”

  Natasha managed to catch the glass she’d been holding before it hit the ground. “Why—Why would you think—”

  “I could smell you,” Boris said, which shocked Natasha by its intimacy, before she realized they’d gone through puberty together in a cluster of rooms that rarely got a breeze. Of course he knew what she smelled like. Natasha bet she could pick Boris out in a crowd, too, even on a bus stuffed to the rafters with commuters returning from work on a summer day, arms raised, pits at nose level, no soap or perfume to speak of.

  Nonetheless, she went with denial. “I wasn’t in your room.”

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” Clearly her repudiation had been less than convincing.

  “Yes!” Natasha leaped on the out he’d given her, then lowered her voice to sound guiltier. “Don’t tell Mama and Papa.” She lowered it even further. “He’s not Jewish.” There was nothing more sinful than that. Except . . . “He’s Romanian! Black. A Gypsy.”

  “Doesn’t he have his own home?”

  She went with what easily could have been the truth. “He shares a room with his parents.” And since locals were forbidden to check into hotels, which were for out-of-town visitors, “We have nowhere we can go to be alone.”

  “So you chose my room?”

  “I’m sorry. I wish I could have thought of something else.”

  “Was it worth it?” From anyone else, the question would have sounded prurient. But there was an innocence to Boris that made Natasha opt to be honest with him. Up to a point.

  “You and I,” Natasha began, “were raised to do what we were told, follow the rules, be good. Sure, it was the way to survive, but it also came with the promise of reward. Except we were lied to. Our parents said it was to protect us, but they were still lies. I’m a teacher, you’re a . . . what do they call it? Computer programmer. You rearrange ones and zeros. That’s not what we wanted. That’s not what we earned. That’s not what we deserved. Doesn’t it make you angry? Doesn’t it make you want to do something? Break a rule? Fight back?”

  Boris looked unconvinced. Which Natasha found disappointing. She’d had no intention of telling him about her recent activities. Yet a part of her had been craving his tacit agreement. She’d wanted Boris to validate her choices even if he didn’t know the truth about them. What else was a childhood friend who’d been in love with you for years for? It bothered Natasha that Boris’s good opinion of her still mattered.

  Realizing she wasn’t going to get what she wanted, Natasha flipped from aching sincerity to joke mode. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs. I needed your room more than you did. You can’t deny me; it would be anti-Marxist! I’d report you!”

  “Would you?” There went that innocent curiosity of his again. Natasha found it completely disarming.

  She’d made a similar joke multiple times when they were kids and Boris wouldn’t share the floppy, azure flexible disc he’d cut out from a magazine and spun on his child-sized record player. But was he honestly asking her now whether she meant her threat? Did that mean he considered it a genuine possibility?

  Horrified, she rested her fingers on Boris’s arm and reassured, “I’m kidding. I would never do that. You know me.”

  “I know you,” Boris agreed, even as he continued looking unconvinced.

  Which unexpectedly disappointed Natasha even more.

  Chapter 24

  “You were there, weren’t you, Papa?” Natasha waited until her father was drunk enough to be gregarious, but not so drunk that his testimony couldn’t be trusted. “At the Twentieth Party Congress? When Khrushchev exposed Stalin?”

  Papa was in their room, smelling of acetone, weaving as he pawed through the chifforobe looking for his coat. “No, kitten. Your papa wasn’t important enough to be at the congress. That’s for higher-ups. I was at work. They called us Party members together. This was before the congress. Weeks before. They told us what Comrade Khrushchev was going to say. So we’d be prepared. So we would support him. I was one of the trusted. I was among the first to know!”

  “You knew Khrushchev was going to denounce Stalin? Expose the Gulags?”

  “Expose Stalin’s cult of personality, yes.” Her father straightened up, saluted, and began to warble, “Long live beloved Stalin, long live dear Stalin.” Then he switched to a different song, somehow still managing to retain the melody, “The people sing a beautiful song of Stalin, wise and dear . . .”

  “Sha!” Natasha’s mother materialized abruptly, slamming shut the door.

  Papa explained, “Natashenka was asking me about our great Comrade Stalin.”

  “She should read a book, the official story.”

  “Which one?” Natasha demanded. “There’s a new one every few years!”

  “Whichever one it is now—that’s the one you should read.”

  “It’s all lies. Even Khrushchev’s speech, he blamed everything—mass arrests, torture, forced confessions, deportations, Gulags—on Stalin, when it was Lenin, Lenin who started it; they were his decrees. It’s what the USSR was based on!”

  “Zatkniz! Shut up,” Mama growled, shoving her daughter’s shoulder hard enough so Natasha stumbled backward, plopping onto her bed, Mama towering above her. “You don’t know anything.”

  “But you do.” With Mama this uncharacteristically angry, Natasha saw an opening to pry out some truths—and lay some truths on her, in return. “This happened in your time. How could you not have known? The Great Purge, the Doctors’ Plot, the millions deported to camps. You had to be aware of what was happening. People were disappearing right and left! And you still pinned that Lenin red star on my school uniform, and you made me stand on a chair and recite those ludicrous poems. Even the one by that idiot American, Langston Hughes. I didn’t know what I was saying!” Natasha assumed a little girl voice to chant in English, “Lenin walks around the world / Frontiers cannot bar him / Neither barracks nor barricades impede / Nor does barbed wire scar him.” She resumed a normal tone. “Lenin was to blame for how many barracks? How much barbed wire? You were there, you saw them, you tell me! He imprisoned his own people for disagreeing with him. I dare you to tell me I’m wrong!”

  “You’re more than wrong. You’re foolish. Ignorant. Naive.” If Natasha thought fury would make Mama lose control, she’d miscalculated. Instead of flaming, Mama’s anger froze. “Do you not recognize how fortunate you are, with a name like Natalia Nahumovna Crystal, to be allowed to live in civilized Odessa instead of banished to die of pneumonia in some frozen shithole, no proper burial even?”

  Natasha startled. She’d never heard Mama use such language before. Maybe she had gotten to her, after all.

  “You talk about barracks and barbed wire as if you know anything. You know nothing. Yes, I pinned on the Lenin star. Yes, I taught you the poem. And I sat in the auditorium, listening to you recite, proud that the star and the poem and Papa’s war record were keeping you safe. I made certain my family was beyond reproach. No one was going to accuse us of impropriety. I made sure we said the right things to the right people. No one would have anything to use against us, ever.”

  “So you selfishly kept silent, and your silence underpinned a genocidal regime. I know all about it. Baba Daria told me.”

  “What,” Mama’s voice grew even icier, “did my mother tell you?”

  “How none of you did anything wrong, but you were still arrested. How your neighbors watched you get taken away, but nobody objected. How she had to make a choice, and she chose to sacrifice herself.”

  “Is that how she characterized it?�
� Mama’s tone hinted that she and Baba Daria held divergent interpretations of the same event.

  “Well, no.” Natasha didn’t want to get her grandmother in trouble and, truth was, this was Natasha’s take, not Baba Daria’s. “But she didn’t give in. She fought.”

  “And did she tell you how that worked out? Her noble, selfless choice. For all of us?”

  “It saved you from the war.”

  “That,” Mama corrected, “was not her sacrifice.”

  “At least Baba was honest with me.” Natasha understood when she’d gone too far and changed the subject. “You and Papa told me lie after lie, and now you want me to keep lying!”

  “What difference does it make?” Unlike her mother, Natasha’s father insisted on remaining jolly. “When we marched off to fight in the Great Patriotic War, you know what we said? We said: If I die, consider me a Communist, and if not, then not! Wrong, right, Communist, capitalist, fascist, even—who cares? A bullet doesn’t care. Frostbite doesn’t care. Only difference is, survivors of Communist Party members got better widows’ and orphans’ pensions.”

  “You’re no wiser than she is.” Mama couldn’t decide which of them to gag first. “Maybe the pair of you could deign to care about who might be overhearing this nonsense of yours?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Mama. The only ones who could overhear us are the Rozengurts. I don’t think Boris and his parents are salivating to turn us in so they can colonize our room.”

  “How can you be so certain?” Natasha’s mother inquired matter-of-factly, her tone strangely reminiscent of Boris’s when he’d asked Natasha more or less the same question.

  “Are you serious?” Natasha felt like she was answering them both. “You’ve known the Rozengurts for how long? Twenty years? They’re your best friends.”

  “And what makes you think that, to save themselves, they wouldn’t turn us in for the things we’ve said? If they don’t, and someone else does, they’ll share our fate. Did Baba Daria not tell you that?”

  “I can’t believe you’d say that about them.”

  “Why not? It’s what I would do.”

  Natasha stood there, dumbfounded and shaking. Her father chuckled, having located the coat for which he’d been searching. As he pulled it on and headed for the door, he observed, “You know what they say, in every group of two, one is an informer. If it’s not you, then it must be me!”

  Natasha needed to speak to Dima, to share with him her horror over what had happened, how her mother had all but confessed to being an agent of the state, an informer—or had that been Papa’s virtual confession? Except there was no way to do it. Neither the Crystals nor the Rozengurts had a phone. Papa said it was too expensive, and what was the point when you could achieve the same result by going to someone’s home and tossing pebbles at their window until they answered or you realized they weren’t in? And Dima had warned Natasha against using a public booth, for security reasons.

  If she couldn’t be with him, Natasha could cling to something that reminded her of him. Even though it was risky, she ducked under the bed and crawled toward her hiding place, behind the nylon-stored, decomposing onions and potatoes, for her contraband book.

  Only to find it missing.

  When would they come for her? Natasha wondered. They came for Baba Daria during the predawn hour of four a.m. Natasha lay awake all night, stomach contracting each time she heard the wheels of a car or the shuffle of footsteps. Maybe they would come for her at school. Make an example of her in front of the children. She could barely get through the day’s lessons for worrying, stammering at the chalkboard, losing her place in the algorithmic sequence, making silly arithmetic mistakes that prompted the know-it-all girls to roll their eyes and twirl their fingers next to their foreheads. Natasha considered not going home, running away. But where could she go? Unless she planned to live in the forest like the partisans, she lacked the paperwork to switch apartments, much less cities or republics. Suicide was her only option. She’d go out a martyr for the cause of freedom. But would it count as martyrdom if no one knew of her sacrifice?

  Unable to think of anything better, Natasha returned home. The minute she entered, Boris grabbed her arm, pulling her into his room, closing the door, and whispering urgently, “I burned it.”

  Fury overwhelmed any urge to defend—or deny. “How dare you go into my things?”

  “You think the KGB would have made the distinction between your things and ours? They’d have arrested us all!”

  Not if Boris had reported her first. And yet he hadn’t. After their earlier conversation, that made Natasha even angrier. Was Boris trying to prove he was better than her? Wasn’t that what he was always trying to prove, going back to his unsolicited kolkhoz rescue? Natasha wasn’t about to let him get away with it. “So now you’re helping the KGB keep the truth from our people?”

  “I’m helping you not end up in front of a firing squad.”

  “I’m not afraid,” said the woman who’d spent the past twenty-four hours nearly vomiting whenever a man in uniform entered her field of vision. Natasha wished Dima could hear how brave she was being. “Don’t you understand that by not resisting, you’re helping perpetuate a murderous regime?”

  “So the solution is to get murdered yourself? How will that help anything?”

  “At least I’m doing something! If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem!”

  “We had a problem,” Boris agreed. “I found a solution.”

  Natasha shook from anger at Boris, but mostly from fear at having to tell Dima that his precious copy of The Gulag Archipelago had gone up in smoke. He’d trusted her with the most critical task. If Natasha didn’t copy out the book’s text, others wouldn’t be able to distribute it. She was the rate-determining step, the linchpin of the entire operation. And she’d let him down.

  Yet, to Natasha’s surprise, the next time their group met under cover of darkness and she gathered her courage to confess, Dima barely allowed her to finish before dismissing it as of no consequence.

  “We’ve been talking,” he said, indicating the others. Without her? Had Dima found out about her failure? Could this be her expulsion? Was it a done deal?

  Natasha bet this was Ludmilla’s doing. Ludmilla had long been looking for a slip that wasn’t even Natasha’s fault that she could use against her. Ludmilla saw how Dima ignored her whenever Natasha was around. She’d decided to eliminate the competition.

  “We’ve decided there’s something more important you could be doing for us,” Dima said.

  “I’d do anything for you,” Natasha swore.

  “We need to get word of our activities west. Mail is out of the question. The KGB intercepts our letters. Getting a telephone connection is impossible. What we need is someone to speak for us in the United States. Natasha, we need you to apply to emigrate.”

  Chapter 25

  “You want me . . . gone?”

  “No one knows you’re with us; you’re more likely to get permission to leave.”

  Leave? Leave her family, her home? Leave finally finding something to believe in again after years of feeling adrift and directionless and cruelly let down, even if all that came with risks Natasha allowed herself to dwell on only late at night, confident the fears would have dissipated by morning? Leave Dima?

  “But I want to stay here. With you.” Fearing not getting her desired response, Natasha pivoted from the specific to the general. “I can’t go and leave you, my comrades, behind.”

  “You’d be our flag bearer in the West. It’s a critical position, Natashenka. You’re the only one who can do this for us.” Fearing not getting his desired response, Dima pivoted from the general to the specific. “For me.”

  The first thing Natasha needed was a visov from a relative abroad. Because nobody could want to leave the USSR for economic, religious, ethnic, or civic reasons, sole grounds for receiving permission to emigrate were for family reunification. Natasha lamented she
didn’t have anyone outside the country to invite her. Dima showed her a document from a woman living in Israel for whom they’d forged papers to prove she was Natasha’s second cousin, and who would sponsor her exit.

  Natasha struggled to wrap her head around the setup. “I’m asking for permission to leave my parents in order to reunite with a second cousin? Someone I never met? That’s crazy!”

  “That’s the rule.” Ludmilla shrugged, looking much too pleased about their plan.

  “Take this to OVIR,” the Otdel Viz I Registracii, the Interior Ministry’s Office of Visas and Registration, Dima said. “They’ll give you the rest of your paperwork. The most important thing is that no one knows you’re connected to us. That’s why you’re so valuable.” He curled his palm over the back of Natasha’s hand.

  “I won’t let you down,” she swore, fortifying herself with the conviction that “flag bearer to the West” meant she’d be blazing the trail. The sooner Natasha left the Soviet Union, the sooner Dima would be free to join her.

  Natasha used to wonder why Mama hardly ever spoke of her family’s banishment, or denounced the forces that sent them there. Now that Natasha was about to take a massive risk, she understood. Mama was desperate to protect her privilege. If Mama had her way, Natasha would be following in her traitorous footsteps. Mama had Natasha’s life planned out, and Natasha had gone along, expecting to attend university, get a job, marry an apolitical Jewish boy, produce a single child—so family resources could be focused exclusively on him/her—and, most important, never rock the boat. Even when Natasha’s dreams of studying math imploded, Mama acted as if nothing had changed. Everything had changed. Natasha didn’t want the leftover crumbs of the life that had been promised her. If she couldn’t have all of it, then she wanted none. Natasha wanted something different now. She wanted the kind of life only Dima could provide. She wanted to be by Dima’s side when he made his speeches, while he was storming the barricades or launching sneak attacks from underground catacombs, his blood-spattered hand wrenched out of hers as he was dragged off by the police. She wanted to stand vigil outside his prison and demand his release and be talked about in hushed, awed whispers as Dimitri Bruen’s muse, the woman who inspired him to keep going when all seemed lost, as the one without whom none of their great achievements would have been possible. Natasha understood the danger. Not just to herself but to her family. They would see, Mama and the rest. She was doing this for them. They would be grateful, in the end.