“My mother,” Adam said.
“The one you turned in?” Daria told herself the words had slipped out before she’d had time to think about what she was saying. But she knew that wasn’t the case. Adam’s taciturnity, coming as it did on the heels of Edward’s, had driven her into such an agitated state that Daria could think of nothing more satisfying than breaking through his infuriating reserve, making Adam suffer a bit of the agitation, not to mention the fury, he put her through daily. She couldn’t allow herself to be angry with Edward. And even if it were allowed, Daria had no right to express it, not after what she’d done. Daria had no such reservations regarding Adam. And this was the best way she could think of to do it. Her question was no accident. Though, whether it was a mistake was yet to be determined.
“Most people have only one mother,” Adam noted.
“Most people don’t turn them in to the NKVD.” Daria didn’t know if that was true. She certainly hoped so.
“My father left when I was a boy. Distilling vodka was how she supported us.”
Daria thought of Mama’s quest to position Daria for the best. And how her dreams had disintegrated. Mama deserved better than a daughter reduced to prostituting herself. Even if Daria’s prostituting wasn’t proving successful. That, too, seemed an insult to Mama. She’d given Daria everything she needed. Daria was the one who’d failed them both, in addition to Edward and the girls. Having nowhere else to vent her impotent fury, Daria burst out, “How could you do that to your mother?”
“She wanted me to.”
Daria snorted.
“My mother mopped floors at the old Jewish hospital. The doctors, they talked around her like she wasn’t a human being with ears. She heard things. She learned things. When doctors told her she was suffering from anemia, she realized they were lying. It was leukemia. She was dying. She had nothing to leave me. No money, no position. So she told me to turn her in. To say that she had been stealing medicine, selling it. She knew I’d be rewarded. It was my mother’s legacy to me.”
He was telling the truth.
Daria could have gone on asking questions, trying to poke holes in his story, denying it because it was too terrible. But Daria knew Adam was telling the truth. And that she was the only one he had ever told.
What she didn’t know was how to react to his confession. Condolences were hardly appropriate under the circumstances. Neither was pretending that what he’d said had no effect on her.
Adam didn’t appear to be waiting on any reaction from her. Yet Daria felt it was imperative that she offer him one. For both their sakes. She thought she was reaching out to take his hand, to squeeze it in a gesture of pure mutual humanity. But when she got close enough, to her surprise, she found herself rising up on her toes, which she wouldn’t need to do if she were still reaching for his hand.
Daria kissed him.
Adam didn’t appear surprised. Then again, Adam rarely appeared surprised by anything. He kissed her back as if his action, and hers, were the most natural in the world, despite their earlier five-minute conversation being, quite possibly, the lengthiest they’d ever exchanged. On the other hand, Daria couldn’t help thinking, how long had Edward glimpsed her before he decided she was worth pursuing? Maybe she was more tolerable in small doses?
Except Adam’s kiss proved anything but brief. He didn’t lay a hand on her. Yet Daria felt herself being pulled toward him, as if he were inhaling her. His lips were warm. After being surrounded by a piercing cold inside and out, this was as much of a jolt as anything else. He didn’t push; he pulled. And ultimately, he was the one who stopped.
And then Adam did one more surprising thing. He smiled.
Not menacingly, not condescendingly, not wearily. He simply smiled.
And, after that, everything changed.
Not all at once, of course.
Adam didn’t suddenly become a loquacious conversationalist. But he did start bidding Daria good morning as she wrapped her fingers around a tin mug and hurried to sip her tea before it froze like the rest of their surroundings. On their walk to the administrative offices, he began introducing Daria to citizens they bumped into on the street, residents who’d predated the internment camp and exiles who’d managed to build new lives there. She presumed they were customers of Adam’s and so went out of their way to be pleasant. Adam even made Daria laugh, spilling secrets about their former Odessa neighbors, like the couple who were cheating on each other, sometimes at the exact same time and literally next door, while proclaiming themselves the epitome of fidelity and urging the other couple, whom they suspected of carrying on with someone else, to heed their example. The deception got so convoluted that, listening to Adam tell it, Daria laughed until she cried. She hadn’t realized she still remembered how to do either.
Daria talked to Adam, too. She apologized for the way she’d treated him in Odessa. He pointed out she’d hardly been the only one. She apologized for the way she’d treated him here. He pointed out they had greater concerns than maintaining good manners. She apologized for what she’d thought about him opportunistically turning in his mother.
Adam said, “She would be happy to know her plan worked.”
Daria asked Adam to tell her about his mother. She started by telling him about hers. They agreed the pair wouldn’t have gotten along. Daria’s mother would have found Adam’s common; Adam’s mother would have deemed Daria’s pretentious.
They talked about her daughters, too. Adam, Daria realized, was one of the few people who was familiar with her girls, the way they’d once been. Adam filled Daria in on instances she hadn’t known about, like the time Alyssa, with Anya obediently tagging along, sneaked into the rubbish bins. They’d begged Adam for scraps they could use to play buried treasure. He’d given them an old herring tin and a wedge of a broken plate, which they buried in a shallow hole in the courtyard and swore Adam to secrecy. With memories all she had now, this new one proved as precious to Daria as the booty her daughters once hoarded.
Daria never tired of talking about them. She even invited Adam to Anya’s grave. So many of the exiles had buried their loved ones there that it had turned into a de facto formal cemetery. A few of the German speakers had attempted to erect makeshift markers, using two sticks tied with twine to form a cross. Daria certainly hadn’t wanted that, yet she was at a loss for what might prove appropriate. It was Adam who’d dredged up a stone wedged into the foundation of his home—he swore he could replace it. Using a sharpened nail, he scratched in Anya’s name alongside the years of her truncated life. After a guard, without warning, mowed down the illegal crosses, the rest of the survivors followed suit, etching their own stones, this time with Communist-approved symbols.
“My Anya,” Daria had chuckled. “A trendsetter.”
The one subject that she and Adam never broached, however, was Edward.
Edward had become, like so many others in the USSR, an unperson. Talking about Alyssa and even Anya brought the girls to some version of life as happy, thriving children whom Daria could pretend were in the next room, giggling and plotting mischief, waiting for their mother. Edward lived in Daria’s head. She didn’t try to guess his life in Odessa or imagine his growing older, as she did with her girls. The Edward Daria had fallen in love with existed in the past and the present, superseding any other, including the version she’d last spied guiding Alyssa up the departing train’s steps. Edward was a chimera. Adam was real.