The Patriots by Sana Krasikov
On a Sunday in August, a boy and a one-armed man appeared on the platform of the Saratov train station. The train they awaited was due to arrive at six. In that early-evening hour the air was beginning to cool. The sunlight shifted, deepened and turned to gold the dust suspended by the shoes of hurrying passengers. Leading the way through milling crowds, the man drew a handrolled cigarette from his jacket and gripped it between his teeth. He worked a match out of a box with his one hand, struck it up with the flesh of his thumb, and leaned down on the flame. Sucking his cigarette, he glanced back to see that the boy had not been swallowed up by the masses.
All summer had found the railway stations mobbed as they hadn’t been since the war. To contain the stench of public toilets, the sanitation workers poured bleach powder in the latrine pits. The man forbade the boy to go alone into one of these facilities, knowing they were full of urki ready to slit your throat for the money you carried in your underwear. A wave of crime had hit the cities two years prior, for the first of the condemned to be let out were the pickpockets and prostitutes, the murderers, thieves, and onanists. Only now, three years after the tyrant had croaked, were the others being released—the fifty-eighters and counterrevolutionaries and enemies-of-the-people whose number was too absurd, too enormous for the bosses, with their abiding fear of chaos, to free all at once.
From Vorkuta they came, from Pechora and Inta, from Kolyma and Kengir and Perm. They arrived that summer moving south with the trains, like logs down a swollen river. Entire forests of people felled, bound and piled and now cast adrift into the rising water. A winter’s cut, carried aloft with frightening rapidity.
A signal blasted from the locomotive up ahead. A click and switch of iron rails brought the final filling of teakettles. When the second wail sounded, the boy wished he hadn’t heard it, then reproached himself for the cowardice of this wish. All week long he’d been failing to conjure her up in his head. Now, as he prepared to recognize his mother among the strangers rapidly streaming from the wagon, he felt swamped by despair. “Car nine,” said the man, and let the boy walk ahead.
His hair, freshly cut, fell across his forehead in a fringe that made him look younger than his twelve years. His clothes, though not new, were ironed and starched.
A woman stepped off the train, her mouth frozen in an imploring smile. Her olive padded jacket reminded the boy of the one worn by the farmer who delivered potatoes to his orphanage. Her thick sweater hung over a coarse-hemmed dress. The suitcase she set down on the platform was cardboard, reinforced with metal corners, and so small he couldn’t imagine it holding anything besides a few papers. The light that entered her face as she recognized him sent a twinge of nausea down his throat.
She was older, of course, her face pale and puffy. Her once-sculpted features were altered by an odd short haircut: parted on the side in two dove-gray streaks. Only her eyes, those heavy-lidded blue eyes that had always been the striking focal point of her face, were troublesomely familiar.
The man gave him a shove.
She squatted and cupped her hands around Julian’s face. “Let me look at you, my precious, sweet boy.” He caught the meaning of her words at the last moment. She had spoken them in English—a language he hadn’t heard or uttered in almost seven years. As if teasing, she said, “You don’t recognize me?”
“Of course I do, Mama!” he answered in Russian.
“That’s all right. I’ve turned into an old crow, haven’t I?”
He wasn’t sure how to answer this, and in a voice full of falseness said, “Let me carry your bag, Mama!”
The train was leaving. Bits of sky flashed between wagons. But where was her hair? The long, thick curls he’d buried his small face in, which he’d pictured for years in his sleep, all he’d been able to preserve of her—their loss felt like betrayal. He held her suitcase as she approached Mark Pavlovich, the children’s home director, and took his one hand in both of hers. She was thanking him for everything he had done for her son all these years. Now that she’d reverted to Russian, Julian was suddenly stunned: her voice, surprisingly loud and clear, was afflicted with the thick lilt of an American accent.
How could he have not remembered this?
“We’ll be sorry to see him go,” said the director. “Yulik has been a real helper.” Briefly he glanced at the departing train. “You’ll see for yourself what a fine boy he is. An outstanding worker.”
“I’m certain I will,” she said, putting a hand on Julian’s shoulder. He felt his body go rigid. He’d have to leave school now, forsake the games behind the cowshed, say goodbye to his friends, to his whole life. The thought that he would have to go live with this woman made him want to crumble in angry tears. But the director, seeming to read his mind, said, “I hope you won’t mind that we’ll keep him a little longer….” It was less a question than a promise to look after him until she could get back on her feet. It had all been arranged beforehand. It was done this way for all the prisoners’ children.
His mother’s eyes filled with bitter gratitude, but still she looked at Julian to make sure he approved. He felt a pang of shame. It was clear she had no means to take him with her. Mark Pavlovich asked whether she wanted to stay that night, but she said she’d wait for the nighttime connection to Moscow. There she would sort out her life—obtain her rehabilitation papers, look for work, find a room for the two of them to live. “But everything should be in order by December,” she said with an effortful, slightly bronchial laugh. “Then we can celebrate the New Year together. Won’t that be something?”
For years he had rehearsed what he might say to her once they were together (Sit down, Mama, rest, I will take care of you). Now he felt like a conscript who’d evaded the draft.
“What’s a few more months after all this time?” she said. And with these words, his mother—the phantom of his exhausted imagination—reentered his life.
Breaking your family’s heart was the price you paid for rescuing your own. Florence had committed herself to this credo, letting it carry her through the cruelty of the past six weeks—so that she was surprised, on the upper deck of the Bremen, to feel her faith recede. From under her narrow palm she gazed down at the people crowding the dock. A May sun accosted the harbor and coated everything with a blinding shine. The air smelled of coal and rotted fish. Small green waves raced from the hull back to the pier, where her parents and her little brother stood squeezed in among strangers. She would have shouted out to them but knew her voice could not carry over the screeches of gulls and the intermittent bassoon of the ship’s tremendous whistle.