Yulia Ivanova
The Blue Embankment
She didn't remember how the war had began; in her memory there were left only a dug yard and a deep ditch where one had to go down a staircase - maybe it was an entrance to a bomb shelter. Older kids played their own games there; they took Yana with them only once because she had her father's pocket flashlight. Of course, boys took away the flashlight at once and ran away somewhere, and Yana was left alone in the underground.
The water is squelching under her feet. Her sandals have completely got wet and sink in disgustingly champing clay. Shivering with cold and fear she is pondering, isn't it better to begin to cry? But suddenly she can see an underground tree. It grows right in the earthen wall. Its thick trunk that is thicker than an arm and its bare trees are clearly seen. Some of them were stuck out the wall lifelessly hanging down the water, other are chopped off like round white seals. It's a tree without leaves... the higher it is, the thicker its trunk is. The tree grows head first!
Little Yana is stunned - how can one grow head first? Intelligent Joanna doesn't care about a birch root; she is waiting for her father. It's he who should go down to her and take her out to God's light - she well remembers it. Maybe, she will manage to discern him at last.
There he appears in the hole of the entrance, peers into the darkness; the staircase is creaking under his feet... The damned darkness! Little Yana purposely steps back and hides herself but couldn't help giggling.
"Joan, is it you? Well, I'll teach you!
"Joan" - he insisted to naming her so in honour of his favourite Maid of Orleans. But her mum couldn't tolerate foreign words, and in her birth certificate they have written a Russian version - a seldom name "Joanna".
How many people there are! End everybody is hastening and running to somewhere... with suitcases, bags, trunks, shopping trolleys. A platform and carriages are seen. These are those carriages from childhood with steps, with window glasses, shutting with a grinding sound. People travelled by them on their tops, hung on their steps, waived from their windows. Yana is still at her father's hands as if he carried her out of the hole of the bomb shelter to the platform, from which they left for an evacuation zone. Her memory united these moments in one but maybe several days or a week separate them from each other.
Father is in his military uniform already. Today he is seeing them off, tomorrow he will go to the war front, and in several days a "killed in battle" notice will come to their empty flat. It will be show up white in the post box, get by mistake to the Snezhins instead of the Sinegins, and then one envelope inside another will catch them up in a small Ural settlement. "Forgive me but my husband is not Sinegin Arkady Ivanovich but Snezhin Arkady Ionovich. I brought documents to the post office, and they asked to apologize to you," was written in the letter. "They asked to apologize"...
Mum is still counting the trunks. She is dressed in a grey gabardine dust coat and a hat with small brims. And it is in July's heat. Maybe, they didn't get into the suitcase. Now Yana can clearly see her face redden and roundish in a childish manner with ringlets in permanent wave stuck to her forehead and droplets of sweat on her upper lip.
Mum is 27 and father is 26.
"Why have you taken so many things with you? Oh, these women! The war will come to an end in two month but you... Why have you taken so much soap; is it for to bathing an elephant"?
The soap will end in a year and a half. Mum will divide every peace in four parts, grate it and pour it up with water. Several pieces will be exchanged for sugar.
They are chatting about some trifles. About boots, receipts and keys... Mum is even laughing. In many years her stepfather when they visit somebody will offer lemonade to her because after one or two small glasses of alcohol she will begins to cry and tell one of guests about the great inimitable love of the Jewish girl Sonya and the Russian boy Arkady. And how grandma and grandpa who were also killed during the war locked you at the second floor and you, a Komsomol member and a sportsman, went down from the balcony being barefoot, and father drove you away by his motorcycle as a barefooted and dowerless girl.
"He is in Australia," you will say, "He was taken captive, and now works at a closed laboratory. He simply isn't released because he is so talented"!
A usual railway station's bustle is all around, and no tears are seen. Everybody really believes that the war isn't for long. Won't she really be able to discern her father?
Yana feels bored and begins to whimper. Father seats her down the trunk and says good-bye to mother. Yana is bored and doesn't look at them.
"I have got something..."
Next to her a girl with her panama is sitting. Yana at once understands that she really has got something unusual - such an appearance a girl has. From this moment on a girl's something turning out to be a tortoise transforms little Yana into one continuous "Give!" having nothing to do with her father and evacuation.
"Oh, how pretty it is! Let me hold it... May I stroke it? Oh, it's moving! Mammy, it a tortoise! It's alive! Daddy, it's a tortoise! I want it! Please buy it!
Yana who is deafened by her own howl and blinded by her tears is seized and dragged into the carriage. Persuasions of her mother, her angry clip on the back of her head, parting kisses of her father, reasons of people around "You will be taken by a militiaman" - all of that is nothing in comparison with a desired live box on feet, without which her further life is senseless. And nobody wants to help her. Nobody cares about her inconsolable sorrow.
***
What flowers they were! I won't see them again ever end anywhere. Of course, there will be something similar, approximate and reminding but there will never be no such blue ones and in such plenty. The railway embankment was blue. It seems you can stretch out your hand and touch them that are wet from rain, warm from the sun, fresh from the wind blowing from some fields.
Yana knows if a field is endless it is called steppe, if a pool is endless it is called sea.
The train has stopped for a long time already but everyone is afraid that it is about to set out, and therefore nobody goes out of the chock-full and stuffy carriages to pick blue flowers. Mum has explained so.
Yana is lying with her elbows and breast on the window frame; her arms are in steam engine's soot up to her elbows. Yana talks to the blue flowers. She says that they are going to an evacuation zone - it's a town where there is no war - and they left daddy because daddy is needed in the war but she and mammy are not needed there. She and mammy can't shoot but in the war you must shoot and shouldn't afraid of bombs. And there you should give your life for the Homeland. And when daddy gives his life for the Homeland he will come to an evacuation zone and take her and her mum home.
"Mammy, mammy"!
"Leave me alone, can't you see you mammy has no time. I'll teach you to dirty yourself. I'll teach you to sit in a draught..."
"Such flowers don't exist - why don't you look at them?" Or maybe I, Yana, can see them in a different way? Not so as all adults can? However, do you have time for flowers? And you have no time for me. If I'm alive and healthy that's well and good. It came to pass so - the war began. We will soon hardly see each other - our landlady will take me from a kindergarten and feed myself, her son and granny Xenia with suppers. Lentil kasha, herring heads soup or potato chips - a wonder of wonders.
After suppers granny Xenia will tell me about her God and teach me obscure and mysterious words, with which one must talk to God. I will blurt them out before going to bed as a password and then speak in my own words of what has happened during a day - to God of granny Xenia, not to you - consult with Him and beg Him of something.
You will be coming back from the factory when I'm already in bed and go out when I'm still in bed. Only at nights in my sleep I will be feeling the warmth your body beside me. Even on Sundays you work either in a field of a sponsored collective farm, or at home at saucepans, washing tubs and landlady's sewing machine.
"Let's leave it until later, Yana. You can see how busy your mum is. You are a big girl already and must understand. Go, Yana..."
I become estranged from you. "Wait until the war ends..." We live off the future. When the war ends I'll see daddy again, and an ice-cream will be bought for me, and our train on the way back will stop at the blue embankment with blue flowers. It will stop for a very long time, and we will pick very big flowers...
Before falling asleep I ask granny Xenia's God that the war should finish tomorrow, and then everything will come true.
We will return in autumn of 1943 - what flowers can be in autumn? At Kazansky railway station you will buy an ice-cream for me. Father won't be alive then. And you...
After work you will study at night branch of your institute. You will make up and make up for these lost years. In your mind a bold idea will appear - to finish father's dissertation. And again I will hardly be seeing you.
For what's sake is it? Though you will graduate from your institute but a postgraduate course will be lost by itself because it will become clear that somebody will have successfully elaborated and finished daddy's subject already.
And you will give in. You will be sitting at home in the evenings, not knowing what to do with yourself. You will become estranged from your own home, and I will become estranged from you, and we will only disturb each other.
Then you will remember that you are over thirsty already, and if nothing came out of the postgraduate course and science, you must assert yourself in other way, and you will rush to search for a husband as fervently as everything you have ever done. Some boxes, bottles, dress lengths will appear in our room and the names of different women from a hairdresser's will be heard, our neighbours will begin to say that you have grown much prettier, and it was really as if a demon got into you. You weren't so thin even in your youth. Your pencilled eyes seem to be dark and huge like a Gipsy fortune-teller's, you beautiful exposed forehead, slight shadows on the hollows of your cheeks, a bright cherry red dab on your lips, and you are all bright, lithe and slender in your tight cherry dress with embroidery, in which it's hardly possible to make a single step (anyway, I couldn't do that when I tried it on), but you flew and slid in it, crossed your legs as if you were born in this incredibly tight clothes and as if it were your other skin.
And I will remember you so, girls will say, "How beautiful you mum is," and you will finally find a husband for yourself in that post-war lack of men, quite a decent husband, a kind and attentive widower, an outwardly pleasant one who even work as a boss. He and I will do arithmetical sums about fishers and pedestrians, and I was on excellent terms with him, and when you begin to run away from both of us to some female friends or become an inveterate theatregoer or a voluntary group activist or delay at the office with or without reason in order not to go home, I will judge you and feel sorry for my stepfather. And only many years later will I understand that you need neither postgraduate course, nor tireless activity, not the best husband, that you need only Arkady Sinegin, that being his wife or his "half" on the earth was your own predestination and calling in the best sense of this word because great scientists (the father was expected to have bright future) should have this kind of wives. And who knows how many great people humanity got only thanks to these "halves". Only many years later will I understand that his death wasn't a loss of your husband and beloved man for you but a loss of your vocation and the meaning or purpose of your life, and that's the reason of your blind disorderly rush from one work to another, from one man to another and from one role to another like a ship without a compass...
You will play dozens of unsuccessful roles, not of your own, and when you at last recall the role of mother and decide that it's your own sole role I will be almost in other dimension; several thousand days will divide me from the blue embankment. Those days will be without you.
I will be shocked by this sadden hailstorm of parental emotions, by your kisses and other endearments. You will seem funny and odd to me like an old maid with ruffles and grimace of a schoolgirl, to me, Joanna Sinegina, who will publish her inspired opuses on the mental and ethical themes in a town paper, to an expert in human souls and your daughter.
And later, in several more thousand days, in my hard and belated yearning your 'my little girl' and 'put on your jacket' and feeling ashamed of my hard-heartedness I will cowardly postpone a meeting with you, which should unite us, mother and daughter. And in the meantime I will be sending holiday postcards to you to the town of Kerch.
"Dear mum, I congratulate you..."
I never liked and could write letters.
You will move to Kerch after your marriage. There Arkady Sinegin was born and grew up. There you met him on a beach. He came up and said, "Miss, it seems you've got sunburn." Something symbolic seemed to you in this phrase.
The telegram from Kerch won't find me - I will be in a tourist journey in Italy. Taking counsel with each other they will decide not to inform me of it and not to upset me because nothing can be changed in any case. I will be late for you again. For the last time will I come late to you, mum!
"I have a tortoise," Yana brags to blue flowers. It wears houses. It has a lot of houses: a coat-house, a dress-house... The flowers are surprisingly swinging on their unusually long stems.
"Oh, mammy, mammy, we have started off already...
In a moment mum will rise to shut the window; she fears for Jana's ears. From her knees scissors will fall with a jingle, and when mum bends down to pick them up, for five second only, Yana will be still seeing the blueness rushing behind the window.
Translated in English by Vladimir Glushchenko