Chapter 7 - 2
When Soviets were squashed down by life, by luck, by the system, they got resigned—the shoulders drooped.
Hit an American with an equal dose of the same oppression and they went stiff—either with anger or with fear, but their shoulders and chin went up, not down.
Grace even saw it in Mr.
Morrow, who went to work every day with a complete lack of surprise for the fact that he was expected to work in a windowless sardine can, that everyone watched him narrowly whenever he addressed a single word to a white woman, that men half his age and half his rank snapped Boy, get my coat when he went out on his lunch break.
He might not be surprised at such treatment, but his shoulders still went rigid over it.
One month newly arrived in America, graduated from that bullshit city-slick movie-set town to the real thing in California, and Grace had started trying to carry her shoulders differently. Wondering if it would ever come naturally to her.
Pulling her shoulders back, finishing her cheeseburger and fries down to the very last smear of ketchup with a thoroughness only people who had been starved long and recently could muster, Grace thought that she damned well intended to find out.
The whole house came to Grace’s room on Thursday nights, but nearly every other evening she’d hear a knock from some member of the Briar Club hoping for a more private heart-to-heart. Tonight it was Pete and Lina, the darlings. “Can you help us fill out Lina’s entry form for the Pillsbury Bake-Off?”
Pete asked anxiously, Lina chewing her lip at his side.
“If you don’t mind sharing my attention with CBS.”
Grace opened the door, waving them in. “You know I love you, Hammerin’ Pete, but Edward R. Murrow has my heart.”
“Who’s he?”
“Good lord, do you not watch the news? Only the man taking down Senator McCarthy, and about time, too.”
Grace had been absolutely glued to his program throughout this entire month of March. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason. And remember, we are not descended from fearful men. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent... Hear, hear , thought Grace, switching on the television set now and smiling to see Murrow’s lean grave face and long widow’s peak in black and white. Someone please take McCarthy out so Americans would stop looking for Soviet moles under every rock, and this Soviet mole could settle down and live in peace.
“Sun tea?”
Grace called, already filling glasses for Lina and Pete as they flopped on the floor. The recipe hadn’t come from any mother-in-law in Iowa, but from a Betty Crocker cookbook all the female deep-cover recruits had been required to memorize during cultural indoctrination. Pete and Lina sipped, already arguing about the application. “We need to include a seal from a Pillsbury flour bag, Lina-kins; if we do, the prize has the potential to be doubled...”
Edward R. Murrow had already kicked off about McCarthy, looking grave. His proposition is very simple: anyone who criticizes or opposes McCarthy’s methods must be a Communist, and if that be true, there are an awful lot of Communists in this country.
A few more than you think , Grace reflected, wondering what Kirill was up to these days. She very much doubted he’d reported her disappearance to the higher-ups—too much risk of being tainted by association, recalled by his handlers, and briskly shot. If he knew what was good for him, he’d have reported her as dead from a car accident and carried his mission on alone, not that Grace gave him much of a chance of mining information gold from the Edwards flight program without her. Kirill had been one hell of an aviation engineer, but he’d never figured out how to be charming, how to loosen people’s lips. He’d never quite mastered how Americans talked in contractions rather than in careful complete sentences like robots. That had been the reason Grace was paired with him: she’d always had the easier way about her, the ability to make people open up.
You charm the information out of those air force folks, he’ll determine what’s useful , her instructions had been when they began their false marriage. Grace had taken that to mean a partnership: that they each had something valuable to bring to this business of nosing out information and sending it back to Moscow, and that the marriage part was about as real as the fake wedding portraits they’d posed for in a studio while making a mocked-up photo album. Kirill had taken it to mean something much more like an actual marriage: he would give the orders, Grace would follow them, he would receive the credit with their higher-ups, and otherwise Grace would keep her mouth shut, open her knees whenever he felt like it, and make rassolnik exactly the way his mother from Udmurtia had made it or else get the back of his hand. Not so dissimilar from an American marriage, if you substituted green bean casserole for rassolnik ...
Pete, sounding anxious: “You sure you want to enter the competition this year, Lina? Twelve’s the cutoff age and you’re only eleven.”
“I’ll be twelve by the time the competition’s held in New York—”
Murrow’s beautiful voice was still rolling out from the television set: —mature Americans can engage in conversation and controversy, the clash of ideas, with Communists anywhere in the world without becoming contaminated and converted. I believe that our faith, our conviction, our determination are stronger than theirs, and that we can compete, and successfully, not only in the area of bombs but in the area of ideas ...
Grace supposed he was right: her own faith in the Communist ideal had been distinctly tarnished long before she’d been recruited for this work. Faith in the system, in the collective, in Marxism: those things might have been the water she swam in growing up, but a constant undertow in that water had been her Ukrainian mother’s bitterness. If I’d married a man back home and birthed you there, we’d all be dead , Grace remembered her whispering in the Ukrainian she still spoke to her children when her husband wasn’t there to hear. Whole towns dead of starvation, every cousin I grew up with... Purges aren’t just done with bullets and denunciations and black vans in the night, Galina Pavlovna. And she’d seal her mouth tight before anyone could hear, before anyone could report that the pretty wife Comrade Stepanov had picked up near Kharkiv wasn’t as grateful for Comrade Stalin’s bounty and wisdom as she should be.
Comrade Stalin... Grace shook her head to remember how drunk she’d gotten when she heard Stalin had died, so utterly smashed Bea and Claire had had to haul her up three flights of stairs. How she hated that man. Hated him and hated the fact that he was dead and she’d never have a chance to tell him the world he built had been the world that killed her mother’s family, the world that killed her sister. Rot in hell, Uncle Joe , Grace thought, and leaned over Lina’s shoulder to look at the contest form. “Breads, cakes, pies, cookies, entrees, and desserts—which category are you entering in, Lina?”
“Cakes.”
Lina looked suddenly nervous, chewing on a strand of her hair. “I need to submit an original recipe, and—and Mrs.Grace, I was wondering...”
Pete gave his sister an encouraging go on gesture.
“Could I submit that cake you taught me to make last month?”
Lina asked in a rush. “The eight-layer honey cake? I’ve never seen anything like that in all my cookbooks—”
Because it was invented in Russia a hundred and thirty years ago , Grace thought. A treat for the holidays, when she’d been growing up—Papa always frowned at Mama’s Ukrainian desserts like yabluchnyk , preferring good old Russian classics instead. Kitty had been the baker of the family; with Grace working at the ammunition factory and Mama putting in long hours as an interpreter, Kitty would be the one rushing into their shared kitchen, not even taking off her red Pioneers kerchief before she started rolling out the biscuitlike layers, drizzling in the honey, sandwiching them together with sour cream frosting. What on earth would Kitty think—her russet-haired, bright-eyed younger sister—to know that an American girl of the same age wanted to take the family recipe to the Pillsbury Bake-Off?
Grace could almost hear Kitty’s bossy little voice: Make sure she mixes the filling with condensed milk instead of cream for extra sweetness. And pulverizes the cake trimmings into crumbs to decorate the top! And—
“Of course you can submit it,”
Grace told Lina, feeling the thickness in her voice.
Lina beamed. “Tell me the steps again, for the form?”
Grace turned down the volume on the television so she wouldn’t have to compete with Murrow’s sonorous baritone as she began dictating the recipe, but she listened to him with one ear anyway: ... I cannot contend that I have always been right or wise. But I have attempted to pursue the truth with some diligence . . . Pete looked thoughtful, listening. “He really can talk, can’t he?”
Smoothing his hair as if wishing he had the newscaster’s long widow’s peak. Grace wondered if Hammerin’ Pete was about to get a new idol. The William Holden/ Stalag 17 phase had given way to the Dragnet phase, and the Briar Club ladies had endured a certain amount of Pete intoning, “Just the facts, ma’am,”
but that might have just about run its course...
“What’s this cake called?”
Lina wanted to know. “The winning recipes always have good names.”
Medovik , Grace almost said in Russian. “Let’s call it Eight-Layer Honey Cloud Cake,”
she suggested instead. “That sounds like a prizewinner, doesn’t it? Is your mother going to let you compete if you get in?”
The girl’s face fell, and Pete answered somewhat grimly, “We’ll fight that battle when we come to it.”
Later when the television was switched off and Lina bounced down the stairs to find a stamp for her entry form, Pete told Grace, “If she gets into the Bake-Off, she’ll compete if I have to drive her to New York over Mom’s dead body . Lina needs this.”
“She does,”
Grace agreed. Over the last four years she’d seen Lina Nilsson grow from a singularly charmless, graceless eight-year-old with the personality of Elmer’s Glue to a gangly spotty adolescent who still chewed her hair and talked in fits and starts... But she could bake by now, a thousand burned cookies and flat cakes later, and all the lavish encouragement from the Briar Club over the years meant that despite her mother’s carping, Lina knew she could bake. If life wasn’t kind enough to give a little girl dimples, beauty, charm, wit, or any of the other things that made for smooth sailing into adulthood, then she had to find something else to put a swing in her step. Grace reckoned that an acceptance letter to the Pillsbury Bake-Off at age twelve would give Lina bragging rights clear into high school. “She’s going to get in, Pete. I can feel it.”
“Until then”—Pete smoothed his hair back like Edward R. Murrow’s, aiming for a sonorous baritone instead of a teenage tenor, and finished up with the words Murrow used at the end of tonight’s (and every) broadcast—“good night and good luck!”
He thumped off down the stairs, and Grace smiled, wandering back inside and folding herself back up at her window seat. The lean ginger cat she’d semiadopted years ago came winding along the window ledge and through the sill, and Grace lifted him inside. “Hi there, Red.”
The name, her own private joke—Kitty’d had an ancient cat called Trotsky when they were growing up, but you couldn’t exactly name a cat Trotsky in McCarthy’s America. Not that it would be McCarthy’s America for much longer, the way Murrow was taking an axe to his reputation on CBS...
Poor old Trotsky, he’d died of advanced age and decrepitude just before the war started, the meanest, most bad-tempered cat in Leningrad, and the luckiest too.
If he’d lived into the first winter of the siege, he’d have ended up in a soup kettle.
Grace felt a residual clutch of panic in her chest and shifted Red against one shoulder so she could rise and head back into the kitchenette.
There she stared at her pyramid of canned food, the joking toll she collected from every member of the Briar Club for every Thursday night meal, only it wasn’t a joke at all.
She needed the cans for her bad nights, when she woke up with that aching ghost of starvation raking her bones with phantom claws.
It didn’t help to run her hands over her body and feel soft, healthy flesh there instead of jutting bone; it didn’t help to run her tongue over her teeth and feel that none of them were loose; it didn’t help to eat something and remind her stomach it was full.
The only thing that helped was counting the cans.
Canned corn, canned peaches, canned spam, pork and beans, fruit cocktail, tomato soup...
She stood reading the labels, doing the math in her head: seventy-six cans in a colorful pyramid against her kitchenette wall, every one dusted and turned label out with fanatical precision; seventy-six cans meant how many days of survival when divided between eight people, between seven, six, five? Math Grace could do effortlessly, even raked and clawed by ghostly hunger.
Survival arithmetic, the only thing you had the energy to do on 125 grams of bread from the state per day, and whatever else you could put in the soup pot once the weeds had been stripped from every crack in every street, every leather chair and spare boot had been boiled, and every stray cat in the city eaten.
“You’d have ended up in a stew,”
she told Red softly, stroking his back. “I could have, too.”
The nine-hundred-day siege, some called it—Hitler’s forces circling Leningrad like a lethal necklace, choking off everything. Nine hundred days, three winters, but Grace’s whole family went in the first winter. Papa was long dead by the time the siege began, leaving eight of them huddled together for survival in a two-room apartment, curled together for warmth, pooling ration cards, drinking water scavenged from shell-holes in the Nevsky Prospect after the German bombers came through. Eight people: Mamochka, Papa’s father, Papa’s two younger brothers and their wives, Grace and Yekaterina. Kitty had kept a diary, right to the end, even though by the end the entries were just a list.
Aunt Zhenya died on December12 at noon, 1941. Grandfather died January14 at three o’clock, 1942. Uncle Leonid, February3 at six in the morning, 1942. Uncle Josef, February10 at nine at night, 1942. Aunt Sofka... Mama...
And finally Grace’s own handwriting: Yekaterina Stepanova, March1, twilight, 1942. After which she’d shoveled the diary into the stove and warmed her frostbitten fingers on the blaze. A nine-hundred-day siege, but it took less than ninety days to claim her entire family.
Ironic, that. Mama had married a Russian so she could escape the tiny farming village of her birth, then wept bitter tears as her husband’s Party starved her left-behind family and neighbors to death among millions of others whittled down to skin and bone—but she’d consoled herself by hugging Grace and Kitty close: “At least being born here as good Party girls, you will never die in such a hell.”
It was only blind chance she’d learned her family’s fate at all—worrying, as Grace grew, about how the letters from home tapered away and then stopped coming altogether. She’d only discovered the truth when a gaunt former neighbor made his way to Leningrad just before the borders locked down, looking for work and mumbling horrors from a toothless mouth. “All of them starved,”
he had whispered, “while food piled up in depots and they weren’t allowed near it—”
but never where anyone could hear, because it was ten years in the gulags for even hinting aloud at what was happening on the other side of that border. That, Grace remembered, was when Mama’s hair began to whiten... but she hadn’t lost her fierceness, holding Grace and Kitty close. “At least you girls won’t meet such a fate. None of us will.”
But they had. All except Grace.
So now Grace stood in her kitchenette, in this apartment that she would have been forced to share in Leningrad with at least two other people, and she cuddled the lean cat to her breast the way she’d once slept with her bones folded around Kitty’s smaller bones for warmth, and she counted cans of food. She counted green beans and sour cherries and black-eyed peas, counted how many days of survival they guaranteed her, until the ghosts of yesterday slipped away for now and she could remember that she lived in a land of plenty. A land she had made her own, a land she’d entered as an enemy and stayed on in as a friend, a land she was never going to harm and never, ever going to leave.
“Good night and good luck, Kitty,”
Galina Stepanova said. “I wish you were here.”