The Nesting Dolls Read online

  It may have sounded as if Natasha were being petty. She sounded that way to herself. But the reality was, Natasha yearned to open her soul to Dima, to tell him how much the previous months had meant to her. She ached to explain how she’d grown resigned to relegating her dreams of becoming someone of note to the dustbin of childish fantasy. She’d accepted being ordinary, no different from anyone else, the Soviet ideal. But then Dima had returned, and her ambitions were reawakened, flipped on their heads yet suddenly again within her grasp. Whenever Natasha attempted to turn feelings into concrete words, she ended up sounding greedy or shallow or, yes, petty, when that wasn’t how she saw herself at all.

  So Natasha stumbled on, trying to sound like the woman she believed herself to be, instead of the one she secretly feared she was, cajoling Dima, “I know I’m doing my part by applying to emigrate. I don’t want to sound ungrateful about the huge trust you’ve placed in me. But I feel like I’m just on the fringes of our work. I want to be in the heart of it.”

  Dima had crawled into bed, naked except for his watch, which he’d already checked twice to calculate how much time they had left. Seeing precious seconds ticking away, he decided now was not the time to get into a philosophical argument. If Natasha were honest with herself, she’d admit that was precisely why she’d chosen this moment to bring the subject up. But that would make her sound devious and cynical. And that wasn’t how Natasha saw herself, either. Especially when it came to the man she loved.

  “Tomorrow, we have a planned demonstration,” Dima said. “You can’t stand with us. But if you find a hidden spot far enough away, you can watch.”

  “Just watch?” Natasha struggled to keep the disappointment from her voice.

  Dima consulted his timepiece again, raising the blanket, gesticulating for Natasha to join him. “And you can take notes, keep the record about how we’re treated, so you can report on it once you’re free in the West.”

  It wasn’t what Natasha had been hoping for. But it was more than she’d honestly expected. If it meant playing even the smallest part in their plans, if it meant spending even a few minutes more in Dima’s presence, it, too, would have to do.

  Natasha had passed the majority of her life delaying gratification while focusing on a long-term goal. She stood well versed in how to bide her time and keep her eyes on the prize. Natasha’s only hope—one that she pushed to the back of her mind, for even thinking it was disloyal—was that this bout of sacrifice wouldn’t disappoint her.

  Like the last had.

  When Dima called it a demonstration, Natasha expected something along the lines of what she was used to for May Day or Victory Day or Veterans’ Day; thousands of citizens packing the streets, bouquets of flowers everywhere, placards with pictures of Lenin and Brezhnev, a forest of giant red flags. As a child, Natasha had loved the holidays, putting on her school uniform with the white, special-occasion pinafore and marching with her class. Afterward, she’d beg Papa, his chest overflowing with medals, to let her hold one of the flags he’d been given to heft onto his shoulder.

  Natasha hadn’t been expecting flags and placards of their leaders at this demonstration. But she had been expecting something more than the Odessa University matron and her equally short, albeit wigless, husband standing on their apartment building’s balcony, her holding a sign that read i want to emigrate to israel, his proclaiming let my people go. On the street below, Dima, along with Ludmilla and Miriam and a half dozen men who weren’t Dima, formed a line of similar protesters. And that was it.

  How could that be it? Surely, something that played such a dominant role in every waking moment of Natasha’s life—and in her dreams, as well—was worthy of a larger manifestation in the outside world? How could something so all-encompassing to her be so negligible to everyone else?

  “Remember, keep your distance” was the last thing Dima said as he left Natasha lurking behind a lamppost almost a full block away and jogged to join the others. First, she felt abandoned. Then, she felt bored.

  It was a silent protest. The only noise came from the handful of passersby heckling them, but even that was low-key. Schoolboys threw rocks and pinecones and called them “dirty zhidy,” but most adults scurried by, averting their eyes lest their even acknowledging the event put them at risk of being misconstrued as endorsing or, God forbid, participating in it. Natasha’s favorite critic was the one who shouted, “Go back to where you came from!” As if that weren’t exactly what they were trying to achieve.

  The militsia arrived within ten minutes. Which was faster than when Natasha’s neighbor had called an ambulance for her convulsing husband. That took six hours.

  Natasha should have expected the police, and she had—intellectually. Of course a protest by someone as significant as she believed Dima to be would court censure. But she hadn’t expected it on a visceral level. Nor had she expected what proved to be her response to the sight of Dima being repeatedly punched in the stomach and face, until he finally stumbled and sank to his knees, still clutching his sign, demanding freedom for all!

  Before the attack began, Natasha had expected she’d want to drop her notebook and pencil—red on one side/blue on the other, filched from the children’s art room at school the day she was let go as yet another act of rebellion—and rush to Dima, no matter what he’d told her about staying out of sight. She’d expected to want to throw her body between his and the blizzard of blows, to absorb them herself and spare him, to cradle his bloodied head in her lap, and to dab at the worst of it with a strip of cloth she’d torn from her sleeve, refusing to be dragged away in a feat of passive resistance rivaling the Mahatma himself.

  But while it was happening, what Natasha most wanted to do was drop the notebook and pencil—and run in the other direction. She wanted to close her eyes and plug her ears and pretend that none of this was happening. It was too horrible. It was too real. It was just like that 3 she’d received on her exams, the sense that she’d miscalculated and any attempt to rectify the error would only make matters worse. Then, she’d been helpless and uninformed; she couldn’t be blamed for her inaction because it was before she’d become enlightened. Now that Natasha knew better, she must simply be spineless and unwilling.

  No, Natasha chastised herself, that wasn’t it. The only reason she wasn’t running to Dima was that she was following his orders. Keep your distance, take notes, report it all later, and raise awareness of their cause . . . Once she was safe in the West. That’s what Dima wanted Natasha to do. That’s what he’d ordered her to do. Natasha was a good soldier. Natasha was brave.

  Natasha watched Dima and the rest, including the elderly couple on the balcony, being dragged, barely conscious, into the backs of militsia trucks pulling away in a cloud of exhaust.

  Natasha wrote down what she’d seen. And then she went home.

  Chapter 27

  For almost a week, Natasha didn’t hear of or from Dima. There was obviously no mention of what had happened in the local edition of Pravda—that would be preposterous—but Natasha had expected to hear whispers from among her own and her parents’ Jewish friends. Surely, somebody had to have heard something. Where were those braggarts who wanted to impress her with their illicit shortwave radios souped up with coat hangers now? Dima’s story must have made it to Voice of America. But there was nothing. Natasha did overhear one of Papa’s drinking buddies blathering on about “hooligans making it tougher for the rest of us.” She chose to think he was referencing Dima and took preemptive offense.

  Natasha wondered whether she should risk showing up at the group’s meeting spot on the usual time and day. What if one of them had broken during interrogation and told the authorities about it? Natasha wouldn’t put it past Ludmilla, to pretend to have slipped due to sleep deprivation and torture but, in reality, to have done it on purpose, to incriminate Natasha. Even when she knew such an act would go directly against Dima’s wishes. Though, to be fair, Natasha doubted she herself would last more than one sleeple
ss night under inquisition. Or, God forbid, a beating.

  Natasha told herself she wouldn’t let Ludmilla cow her like that. Dima would want Natasha to do her duty, no matter the danger. If Dima were still being detained, he had every right to expect Natasha to pick up the baton he’d been forced to drop and unite whatever ragged survivors were left to continue fighting in his name. He was counting on Natasha. She wouldn’t let him down.

  So Natasha went to Moldavanka. Well, technically, she crept there, scurrying from shadow to shadow, staying out of sight the way Dima would want her to. She lurked outside the abandoned house where they met until she saw a flicker of curtains. Someone was there. That someone could be a KGB officer lying in wait. Natasha told herself she wasn’t afraid and went in.

  She almost wept with relief when her gamble paid off. No KGB officer. (Well, none she knew of; as Dima and Papa pointed out, in any group, one is inevitably an informer.) Only Dima, Ludmilla, Miriam, and the rest. They were all accounted for!

  The right side of Dima’s face was a swollen sickly yellow crisscrossed with broken blood vessels, while the left side was a more freshly bruised purple. Ludmilla’s left eye was swollen shut. A slash ran from the side of her mouth up her cheek. Miriam’s flowing auburn hair showed signs of having been ripped out in clumps, as if grabbed to pull back her head. The other men were equally marked, knuckles scraped raw where they’d tried to fight back.

  And yet, none of them were acting as if anything was different. The meeting proceeded as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Their demeanor reminded Natasha of friends who’d had abortions. They’d been through a terrible, excruciating, brutal experience. But it needed to be done. They just never wanted to talk about or reference it again. Natasha obeyed their wishes. She didn’t gasp or fuss over Dima’s injuries. She didn’t tell Ludmilla or Miriam how genuinely awed she’d been by their stoic bravery (and how much she was presently regretting some of her previous, less-than-charitable thoughts about them). She didn’t gush over how inspirational she found them all. For months, it had been all talk and no action. Now that Natasha had seen action up close, she realized how inadequate talk would be.

  So Natasha simply took her seat and joined them in pretending everything was normal. All the while knowing that, finally, everything had truly changed.

  “Did you give one minute of thought regarding what you were doing to your parents?” Boris, who’d gone about for weeks pretending he had no idea about the latest developments in Natasha’s life, took advantage of an afternoon when the two of them were home alone to pull her into his room and, despite the closed door and lack of windows, still only allow himself to whisper.

  “They’re going to be fine.” Mama and Papa had yet to sign her permission papers. Having seen what Dima and the rest were put through, Natasha had ceased pushing them. Yet, for Boris, Natasha answered the way she knew Dima would expect her to. “I had to do it. I have no future here. Neither do you. They made that clear the day we took our math exams.”

  Natasha had never understood why, while she couldn’t help thinking about it every day, Boris appeared to have put the travesty behind him. He never mused about what might have been, never lamented the life he’d lost. It forced Natasha to wonder if she wasn’t making too big a fuss. Boris acted like he wasn’t the first person ever forced to let go of a dream, and he wouldn’t be the last, so he moved on and found something new to occupy his time, something he was confident would make him equally happy. It was most infuriating.

  Boris crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. When they were kids, he’d given in to Natasha’s arguments without a fight. The most he’d put up in token protest was, “I don’t care what you say, as long as I know I’m right.” Since Natasha met Dima, however, it seemed as if Boris were intentionally overriding his innate tranquility for Natasha’s sake. It wasn’t that he cared about being right, it was that he felt terrified of what would happen if Natasha were wrong.

  She rolled her eyes as he gravely intoned, “October 1941, the Romanian headquarters of the occupying army in Odessa was blown up. In retaliation, hundreds of Jews were hanged.”

  “Every schoolkid knows that story.” Except the official version had it that hundreds of loyal Soviet martyrs were hanged. The fact that they were Jews was information passed around surreptitiously.

  “The same thing happened in Kiev. After the Nazi headquarters was blown up, how many tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered at Babi Yar?” The monument over the mass graves there read citizens of kiev and prisoners of war. Natasha refused to listen to what Boris was saying, even as she heard his message loud and clear. “You selfishly run away, and the people you leave behind pay the price. Like our first kolkhoz.”

  “Quit complaining. You didn’t suffer any consequences.”

  She watched the debate in his head flare up briefly before Boris confessed, “I didn’t report you for leaving. So I got reported.”

  “I-I didn’t know that,” Natasha stammered, shocked not just that it happened, but that he was only telling her now.

  “I was up for a promotion at work a few months ago. Manager said he’d been planning to give it to me. Showed me the already filled-out papers. There’d have been a raise. Then he said he reviewed my disciplinary file and found out about my offense. He ripped up the papers in front of my face. ‘Better luck next time, Rozengurt.’”

  Guilt sucker-punched Natasha’s chest and stomach. She pushed back against it, the way you fought the urge to vomit by swallowing hard and thinking of something else.

  How dare Boris do this to her? Attempt to make Natasha question the righteousness of Dima’s cause by bringing up his trifling setbacks? Didn’t he realize the fate of millions was at stake? What was Boris’s piddling promotion compared to the bruises on Dima’s face? Compared to the elderly couple who, unlike their group, hadn’t been perfunctorily tortured and released? They never returned to the apartment where they staged their protest. Nobody knew where these Heroes of the Soviet Union currently were.

  “You’re only worried about how what I’ve done might affect you,” Natasha accused.

  Boris let it pass with a look that suggested her blow wasn’t low so much as it was beneath her. “You should have warned your parents. They were blindsided. If you’d warned them and your principal, they’d have warned their higher-ups, and the higher-ups wouldn’t have reacted so aggressively. If you give people what they need, they’re more likely to give you what you want. When are you going to understand that?”

  “Spoken like a true collaborator,” Dima sniffed. They were getting dressed after another hurried assignation, Natasha ignoring the marks on Dima’s body the way she’d pretended not to notice the ones on his face. Yet while they were making love, she’d brushed her fingers along the worst of them, hoping Dima wouldn’t notice. She needed, in this small way, to feel a part of what had happened. She hoped some of the bravery manifested in those marks might rub off on her.

  Dima stuck his head through the top of his sweater, smoothed his hair with both hands, and announced, “It’s people like that who make life difficult for people like us.”

  They were finally an us. Natasha liked the sound of that.

  “The ones who fight us, I can handle,” Dima went on. “It’s the namby-pamby appeasers I can’t stand. They keep accommodating and accommodating, no matter how bad things get. They never want to rock the boat.”

  “I think he’s concerned about me and my family.” Natasha hated contradicting Dima, but remnants of childhood loyalty didn’t want Dima thinking Boris was looking out only for himself. Or expressing any concerns Natasha hadn’t at least entertained. “Is he right? Am I being selfish? What will happen to my parents if—when—I leave?”

  “Nothing. As long as they stop being a part of the system and actively resist it.”

  Natasha thought of the missing floor matron and her husband. “If Mama and Papa are fired from their jobs, could they end up like Brodsky? Imprisoned fo
r being parasites?”

  “Brodsky’s biographer wrote that, after the suffering of the trial and the mental hospital, the months Brodsky spent in exile in the Arctic were the best times of his life.”

  Natasha noted that the biographer had said that, not Brodsky. Probably because the biographer hadn’t spent months in exile in the Arctic. Natasha imagined Mama banished to a frozen wasteland for the third time, not because of her mother, now, but because of her daughter. All Mama’s efforts to keep them safe, and she’d end up even worse than she started.

  “And then Brodsky got deported to Vienna!” Dima playfully waved his fist at the window. “I hope they punish me like that!”

  “Brodsky had Jean-Paul Sartre lobbying for him. I don’t think Sartre is acquainted with my parents.” Papa had already lost his medals, been called names, censured. To be banished as an enemy of the state after everything he’d given to the USSR would destroy him along with Mama.

  “In the Warsaw Ghetto, there were politicians who thought if they went along with what the Nazis wanted, they’d spare the Jews.”

  Oh, good, another World War II metaphor.

  “Imbeciles like your Boris go way back in our history. Tell me, when was the only time the world ever respected Jewish might?”

  Was this a trick question?

  “Nineteen sixty-seven,” Dima enlightened. “The Six-Day War. You’d be walking down the street and Russian thugs who’d sooner spit at you than give you the right of way would get in your face and they’d say, “Damn, you people! Look at what you pulled off!”

  In 1967, Natasha was more concerned with earning her gold medal than with foreign affairs, especially of a nation that, she’d been taught, had rejected the USSR’s magnanimous offer of friendship to ally itself with the capitalist West and join them in oppressing native people from the Congo to Vietnam. She’d had no time or compulsion to think of anything outside of herself. She thought she’d changed since then. What if she hadn’t? Is that what Dima was trying to tell her? That Natasha was still the self-centered girl she’d been then? The one she’d been trying so hard to leave in the past?