Leaving the Broken Palace

The apartment still had a hole in the corner of the living room, a hole covered with cloth stolen from a munitions truck. An artillery shell had broken the roof but most of the damage was superficial. Ms. Schroder (now widowed) kept her husband’s velvet couch against the wall and still watered their three plants on the cast-iron balcony. Her two daughters played with a radio missing its dials and two headless dolls scraped up from a trash bin. Ivan Chertov sat at the kitchen table drinking his obligatory tea as Ms. Schroder puttered about. A mushroom rain was dancing its way onto the street and she stepped inside.

            “Would you like something to eat?” The war wrinkles showed around her face. Twenty-eight and age had come galloping alongside the horsemen of the apocalypse.

            “No, not now,” Ivan stumbled with his words. “Do your daughters need anything?”

            “Just new dresses.” She sat down.

            “I’ll talk to Ovechkin, he’ll handle the quartermaster.”

            This was the fifth time the two had met. Ivan, an impressive seventeen, had arrived at facial hair the first time they shoved him through her apartment door. It bore no resemblance to their first meeting.

            “Your first time!” the sergeant screamed. “Do it!”

            They had busily been going door to door and platz to platz pulling everyone they could fuck from their chairs and tables and bathrooms and beds. This was to be Ivan’s first conquest, they shouted, he had killed for their motherland of sorts and now he’d fuck this woman for her too. He shut the door behind him as they catcalled.

            She stood in the hallway, shooing her children into their bedroom with its splintered window, and stared.

            “What do you want?” She had picked up the tiniest bits of Russian she could from the surviving embassymen before the ring closed around them. They had swallowed their bitter pills and she had declined their invitation.

            “You,” he spoke quietly. The ruckus outside continued, blood forever up after blood forever spilt. He gripped his Mosin-Nagant tight and looked at his pocket, counted his shells.

            “Fine.” Better it be him than ten angry ones.

            He stepped forward, floor creaking. A picture of her dead Colonel smiled from a recently dusted frame. “Your husband?” he asked and she nodded. She scanned the floor for something. He stared at her husband’s photograph: slick hair, clean teeth, proper uniform unlike the rags Ivan wore—he winced. He turned about and lowered his rifle. She stood two feet away, a piece of broken glass in her hand.

            “I not anything do,” he said in whatever German he had heard (his knack for languages a useless skill in a world of bullets and rubble).

            “Promise?” she said in literal terms.

            He nodded and leaned his gun against the wall.

            “Just tea,” he muttered, “just tea.”

            The water wasn’t working but she had a little vase leftover for some roses and a couple pieces of wood from a dresser. He helped her start a fire on the stove and they sat in plenitude: shouts, gunshots, hoots, the Earth dying screaming. An exposed brick fell from the kitchen wall. They didn’t flinch.

            “Apartment building hit badly?” he asked.

            “Yes.”

            The embers had caught on the wood and water would soon be boiling.

            More yelling more from the stairwell interrupted by the blusterings of an old Lieutenant with no time for hooligans and others mal-adapted to the mannered world. He demanded they scatter else invisible men up the food chain would hear of it (though they would not have done a thing). They did, protesting down the bannisters like angry schoolchildren.

            Ivan had no plans that stirred men’s loins. He had no desire to fuck a perfectly innocent woman thrust between too many rocks and her homely hard place. And so, he did not. He simply told her he would stay awhile, for appearances of course, but that he had girl back home and nothing in this God-Forsaken world would break that liminal, adolescent bond. Her name was Masha, living in Tomsk at that time until her family finished making arrangements to reclaim their trokhkomnatny kommunikalka with the help of the proper authorities (and papers, always papers). Ms. Schroder merely looked at the boy like a stick figure filling out a ragged uniform. There was nothing there but anger and hate and love, which meant there was nothing there for her. But hearing her daughters scream, she bolted into the bedroom.

            “Don’t look,” she told them. They scrambled beneath the iron frame of their bed.

            Three soldiers had grabbed a ragged woman outside, yanking her clothes and cursing though she couldn’t understand. Before any other words unidly spoken passed, they pulled her inside a café and all was confusion for the two little lambs holding their ears.

            “It won’t happen to you,” Ms. Schroder said. “I promise.”

            She turned to see Ivan in the doorway fidgeting with a clip of ammunition. “They won’t,” he said and grabbed a stool and faced the front door, rifle at the ready.

            It was a curious affair. The first three times he crossed their creaking threshold with gifts and ever improving German, he had simply sat in silence and watched children playing. He had lied his way into the army at fifteen—noble in a world of annihilation and no steps back—somehow thinking that this would shut a door on what he had been: a precocious sycophant prancing about and insulting teachers hither and thither. Once, when he was ten, he had learned a little electrical engineering from a janitor who liked to pass out candy to the children fleeing classes for the day. When a teacher wouldn’t look, Ivan would take a rag (he had wetted it during a bathroom break), and slowly unscrew a lightbulb with it. It would short, the school would go dark, and while the teachers ran about trying to solve a simple problem, he and the others could wander free, learning about lighters and cigarettes and how to charm one’s way into warm peach soda.

            The fourth, he spoke at last. A friend whose name is not known—I have checked and another Ivan (for they are legion in this world) assured me that whatever filing cabinet summarizing this man’s Soviet existence had gone missing—worked as a translator and gave him lessons. Fortunately for the boy, he had a knack for different tongues with times and picked up enough to get by quickly.

            “I’m sorry for my silence, Ms. Schroder,” he said, “there is just little to say.” The pictures of her husband had gone missing—she claimed a thief looking for souvenirs had grabbed them, “stoned as a heretic, he was,” she muttered.  “You could smell the liquor from a thousand yards. He cared only for the photos and nothing more.”

            She sat beside Ivan at the table and watched her daughters with him. They played with a small fire truck he had taken—nalevo mind you—from a store being looted.

            “Thank you,” she said softly. He was no longer a stick figure with a gun. He brought gifts, heft of a sort.

            “I wish to have daughters,” he said, “but my mother tells me they’re too much trouble and I’m too young.” He smiled and saw a pigeon nest itself amidst a pile of bricks out the window.

            “Mistakes only exist once you’ve made them,” Ms. Schroder said. “And please, call me Maria.”

            That fifth time, after offering tea and sympathy and other scarcely tangible things in a scorched world, Ivan turned to Maria when her daughters weren’t looking and asked ever so carefully, “can I give you anything else?”

            Now, having established that this figure of anger and hate and love had more gray to him, and more importantly smiles in the form of toys and chocolate, she considered his words quite carefully and poured herself more tea.

            “Yes,” she said. “But not now.”

            With that, she explained her story. Her husband had been an aviator, a friend of some important brown-shirted person who went on to wear two S’s on his lapel. Ivan understood just enough with his German, though he would interrupt and ask for simpler words. Her husband had died somewhere over Ukraine which, in her eyes, was “a quiet tragedy.” Quiet because she had been sleeping with an officer in the Foreign Intelligence Division for several months before his death but tragic because, as with so many terrible things, it was invisibly visible to her children.

            “They hid under that bed for a week,” she said. “A week where I fed them shoving plates underneath, screaming, stomping, nothing worked.” It was only a visit from an old maid who played violin and sang drinking songs unfit for print that helped spur them up, if only to shut her up.

            Ivan responded that his father had disappeared before his birth and so his last name had come about from some poor schoolteacher’s hobby in genealogy. His mother, the type to barrel into conversations waving a bright flag of an opinion and then suddenly retreat into passive guilt and contemplation, waited for his return in Moscow. She did not approve of Masha who—if reports are to be believed—was utterly uneducated in the ways of those of means who had survived in the cold, Kulak-killing world. He recalled their first date.

            “We went to Gorkiy Park,” he said. “She loved fresh air and the smell of the city and the occasional statue laid about.” He had asked her with a small bouquet to join him after a terrible math class taught by a manic preacher of a man whose fly was always mysteriously open (though no one dare commented). “May I?” he asked polite as a butler waiting upon a master and she nodded. They kissed beneath a statue of Derzhinsky, the proper Chekist lover. They were so befouled by hormone and nekulturnizm that she pushed him to the ground and lay atop him until a policeman dressed in his finest Summer Lenin held a truncheon up and barked that they move along. They were successful. Three Rubicons had been crossed: they had held hands, they had kissed, and they had bothered a policeman.

            The next time he stopped by, he brought flowers and three children’s books concerning a predatory bear and a boy and girl’s fight for survival. The daughters, Sophie and Anna, accepted them with wide lips and coiffed hair. Appearances amidst the ruins were everything for when there is nothing behind the curtain, at least the curtain must be maintained. There’s always someone looking in through rose or clear spectacles or even the occasional bug. They had given up the illusion of infinite life and so accepted the books as tokens of the time they had left since Time was infinite death. But that now meant pleasure and jokes for anything worth crying can be smiled, particularly amongst those who learn early and often that pain is simply humor leaving the body. They did not know this yet but felt it and there is more knowing in feeling than even Emeriti might care to admit.

            “You spoil them,” Maria joked, “more than I do.”

            “I wasn’t spoiled,” he answered, “and I wish I was.”

            They had more tea and joked more about how bad things can get. The rations, the searches, the lies, the two a.m. door-knocking and air raids. Safety was found in one’s grave, at least in those four years they had somehow lived together in some fanciful way. But nothing is worth its salt if it is not dangerous, or at least the fullest of what it can be. So said Thomas Wolfe and so say I—his translator, poor boy, was shot for his work. Truth be told, the prose was worthy of murder and since the poor boy had not fulfilled his great promise in life, he had failed. For those on the verge of death, failure is a resort best crossed off one’s bucket list. Those helpless, herded creatures on the verge of life, though, are not so hard-pressed.

            Ivan mentioned bayonetting a man to death and the sound of tanks breaking apart like metal toys crushed by a sound too loud for the wardrums of the ear. She mentioned the old man downstairs who kept notes on everyone so that the right people would know and give him good cognac. Ivan joked about vodka in the winter and the friends who shot their hands or feet. She mentioned the smell of thinning soup and bomb shelters. Needless to say, there was no line between home and war. All were soldiers, all were mothers, all were broken like bicycles tossed into the street, no longer needed by some grandiose boy. She kissed him on the cheek as he ambled out the doorway, asking only that he come again and like a broken record, he repeated that he would.

            A week later, he returned to find Maria’s face colorless as the moon. Anna had fallen ill and the doctor, blessed be his materialist heart, had utterly failed in apprehending the medical culprit. The girl was feverish and frail and squeaking when she could from her cot so tidily arranged underneath a watercolor painted by her mother.

            “How bad is the fever?” Ivan asked as his eyes darted about.

            “Bad,” Maria whispered, “very bad.”

            “I have some American aspirin, it will help with the fever. As for the doctor, I will ask Smerdyakov. He knows someone who works for General Koniev. She’ll be fine.”

            Maria hugged him, her body still thin and wonderfully wasted by starvation. It was desperate, without abandon, and Ivan—who had promised his heart like a fool rushing in and who therefore did not know where the exit was—stock-still allowed it to pass. He had nothing in his vocabulary of life to say or add or do. It was utterly beyond the Pale. Within minutes, she was huddled against the hallway wall on the floor and laughing uncontrolled. Ivan left the bouquet he had brought on the table and said only “I’ll handle it.” She calmed down when she saw that the bulbs were wilting and dusted. Luxury had already expired and, with a final haw, she stood up and saw him out. He hit the last step of the stairs, saw the old man who’d kept notes, and wished him well. The man spat at him and slammed his door behind him.

Anna’s health improved after the doctor, a paltry fellow with name close to Chekov, visited. He unpacked his kit, checked her pulse and forehead, and pronounced her not terminal. Within a week, Anna felt no pain.

Ivan had busily scoured checkpoints and notary publics as per the orders of shuttered-eyed men with malintentions. Maria sent Ivan a note through a boy courier who worked the partition lines in the city. It was terse. Paper was expensive. But her prose was spare and true. It read a time and place. Wrapped amidst mystery and its strange delights, Ivan knew that the note had to be honored, whatever its intentions might have been. He hadn’t received anything like it for over a year.

The final time the two met was not at her apartment. For whatever reason, her children were engaged there—perhaps with piano lessons for she had restored a small upright with the help of a neighbor carpenter and musician. It was in a battered cemetery late beneath the ruin of a church whose bell would never again toll for thee.

“We’re moving,” Maria said. “The West. I have family there.”

“Of course.” Ivan grumbled, looked at his shoes, and knew that she had found a lifeboat.

“Thank you so much.” She held his hand and smiled. Strange as it was, the graves did not bother them for love—the conquering of fear—belonged amidst the ruins of forgotten soldiers. “Tell me, I know it is awkward, but do you love me?”

Ivan had not given it any thought. Love was something one merely awoke in, like pajamas. He offered her another bouquet he’d arranged from a neighbor’s garden.

“Perhaps,” he answered.

She laughed and leaned in for a cigarette. He passed one on and lit it for her.

“Good.” She took the bouquet and smelled its quaint scent of sodden decay. “I wish you the best.”

Before they hugged once more, Maria whispered into Ivan’s ear, “I love you.”

The embrace was short as the rain began coming down slowly, like the drip from a sink, and she walked off towards the cemetery gate with her flowers. Ivan wiped the water from his glasses. Before Maria left, he saw a man in blue-collar, blue-tabbed glory step up to her. He smacked her, demanded to know what the flowers were for, and brusquely tossed them aside into a bush as he dragged her off to some dark place to conclude his business. She did not turn around or say a word in protest. There was nothing left to fight but fighting itself. At least her dress was still intact.

Ivan crept towards the flowers as they nestled underneath the bush, soaking in the raindrops ever thickening. He leaned down and saw the bulbs barely crushed when a rabbit emerged from the rubble of a nearby pharmacy. Gray and smelling of thrown away food, it nibbled away. Ivan left it to its work. There was enough hunger in Berlin as it was. He reported back for duty at his post that night. It was an officer’s friend who had fucked Maria, calling her a “sweet woman.” That was all that was left of her: “Sweet Maria” and “I love you” and then, with the flick of a quartermaster’s hand, a letter was produced. Masha (The other Maria of Ivan’s dreams) had written him wasting no words—she despised the pain of things unsaid.

“Ivan, my parents have agreed. We may marry when you return.”

It was not pleasing for some reason. Ivan looked upon his unit’s strasse, the shattered windows and picture frames lying about, the Opel left burning after a drunken party, the glasses clinking and life thrown upon the roulette wheel. “Marriage will finish you,” his sergeant told him, “but every end is a new beginning.” He folded the letter, crammed it into his jacket pocket, and saluted a passing lieutenant. It was another year before they let him come home. Nineteen-hundred-and-forty-six, the year of our Lenin. The broken palace was now behind him.