“It’s like music, Papa. You have to let it flow where it wants. You can’t force it. All you can do is adjust the key and find your rightful rhythm within it.”
Edward insisted on seeing the silver lining. He said the limits on traveling left him more time to practice, which he did for hours each day, his delicate, precise fingers caressing the keys in a manner not dissimilar from the one that made Daria sing her own high notes. Rather than tiring, Edward drew energy from his playing. While other musicians might battle their pieces, frequently ending up defeated in the process, Edward followed Bach or Rachmaninoff’s lead to inevitable triumph. Daria watched the familiar electricity charging up his hands into his brain, the resultant light radiating from his eyes like an addiction.
“He was like this as a youngster,” her father-in-law boasted. “Never had to force him to practice. My burden was to make him stop! If I didn’t, he would forget to eat, to sleep. The foolish boy told me once he thought he could live on music alone!”
Daria’s mother approved of no third child appearing after Anya turned two and then three. Mama assumed Daria had heeded her sensible advice. But, in fact, it was because both girls were now sharing a bedroom with their parents. While neither Daria’s nor Edward’s ardor or enthusiasm had dimmed, timing became increasingly complicated.
They forced themselves to wait until the children were asleep, gambling that neither would wake unexpectedly. One night, after pleasuring Edward in the “French” manner he’d introduced her to, the pair struggled to stifle their laughter, imagining a bleary-eyed Alyssa or Anya catching them in the act and turning her parents in for the crime of engaging in cosmopolitan and foreign anti-Soviet activities.
They were joking, of course; anything else was ridiculous to contemplate. Except that, a few years earlier, a thirteen-year-old boy named Pavlik Morozov had reported his father, chairman of the village soviet, as a criminal who forged documents and sold them to enemies of the state. Pavlik’s father was tried, sent to a labor camp, and later executed. In return, Pavlik’s uncle, grandparents, and cousin killed the heroic child—and his younger brother, too. Now Pavlik was a martyr and a role model for good Soviet children everywhere. In their nursery school, Alyssa and Anya sang “The Song of the Hero Pioneer,” chirping, “Our comrade is a hero / He did not allow his father / To steal the property of the people . . . To all youngsters, Morozov is our example / We are a squad of heroes / Morozov is dear to us / The Pioneers will not forget him.”
Daria had lost track of how many times she’d heard the children perform it for parents at holiday concerts on May Day, Red Army Day, even New Year’s Day. It sounded most peculiar when they belted it out, including the gory details of Pavlik’s murder, next to a white-bearded, red-suited, jolly Grandfather Frost, beneath a yolka decorated with ornaments and tinsel. Edward cringed every time he heard it. Daria hoped people would assume it was due to the dreadfully tuned piano on which the nursery-school teacher hammered out her accompaniment, and not something that could be branded political. Because anything could be.
Just last month, there’d been a disturbance in their own courtyard. In the building across the way, on the fifth floor, two families who shared a communal apartment had gotten into a row. From what Daria could glean via the screaming that screeched out their window and ricocheted against anything within hearing range, one of the wives had stretched her clothesline across their shared kitchen, leaving soiled socks and underpants to drip water into the soup the second wife was preparing for her husband’s midday dinner on the stove. The second wife responded by yanking down the laundry, which she called filthy and disgusting, and flinging it out the window onto the frozen mud. In retaliation, the first wife grabbed the cooking pot and dumped its contents out the window—onto her own laundry. That’s when at least one husband got involved. Arriving home to find either his dinner or his unmentionables in a sodden heap on the steps, and hearing the screaming from above, he chose to join in.
Throwing his head back, he howled, “Fuck your Comrade Stalin, and your Comrade Lenin, too. Gypsy thieves! Stealing my home, squatting in my kitchen. I worked for it, I earned it, and you just come from your stinking Romania and take it! Moldovan, my ass. Gypsies, that’s what you are!”
“Close the window!” Edward’s father, catching Daria peeking, pulled her back and reached for the shutters. “You don’t want them to know we heard and didn’t say anything.”
The final round of name-calling brought Adam out from his underground room beside the gate. Looking bored, he shoved the cursing husband toward the street, ignoring how “Fuck Stalin” and “Fuck you, gypsies,” turned into “Fuck you, you motherfucking informer.”
At this point, one wife came flying down the stairs, tripping over the coat she’d had time only to throw on, not to button.
“No, please, Adam Semyonovitch, let him stay. He didn’t mean it. Everything is fine now.”
“Everything’s not fine!” her husband roared. “How much are you going to let these Red bastards keep taking from us? First our home, then our food, now our honor!”
“Shut your drunken mouth about your goddamn honor!” She screamed at her husband while turning to plead with Adam, latching onto his forearm, which did about as much good as if she’d been trying to stop a chopped tree from falling. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He’s been ill. His fever must have returned. Please, Adam Semyonovitch, let me take him upstairs. We’ll settle it ourselves. We won’t be any trouble ever again; you have my word, please, Comrade.”
The appeal proved unappealing. Adam kept moving, shaking the hysterical woman off like melting snow on his sleeve and dragging her husband through the tunnel and out the gate, locking it. He ignored the man’s now contrite pleas from the other side, his promises to behave, his assurance that he hadn’t meant what he said—it was a joke between dear friends; all Soviet peoples were dear friends now, even the thieving Gypsies . . .
The Chaika limousine came three days later. In the morning, like always. Four a.m. They whispered it was because that’s when the accused were in their deepest state of sleep and would have the most difficult time launching a defense. Not that anyone was listening to what they were saying. The family was caught by surprise. It had been over seventy-two hours since the inciting incident; maybe they believed that they were safe. That the outburst, like Daria’s father-in-law wanted, hadn’t been observed by anyone. No one reported them. They’d gotten away with it.
They hadn’t.
They took the husband and the wife. Herding them out to the car wearing the nightclothes they’d found them in. No coats, no hats, not even a shared shawl. They would be fine for a while. It was less freezing in the car. And later, there weren’t enough wraps to keep you warm in the isolator on Marazly Street, where political prisoners were kept separate from common criminals. Unless, of course, these were important enough to be processed straight through to Kiev. Or worse, Moscow.
They took the children, too. No one was sure where they’d end up. After all, could ten-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, be enemies of the state? Then again, they’d heard what their parents said and, unlike Pavlik Morozov, hadn’t informed. That would be counted against them.