Sashenka

Bedbug was raging. “Haven’t we loved you all your life? Haven’t we been good parents? And this is how you thank us—by claiming we’re nothing to you!” He turned on Katinka. “Why toss these lies in our faces? Shame on you, Katinka! Is this some trick, some joke of those rich Jews in Moscow?”

Katinka was racked with pain and doubt. She looked at her father. She had never seen his face so tormented.

Then Katinka’s mother intervened. “Dear parents,” she said, “you’ve been like parents to me and I know Valentin loves you more than you can know.” She turned to her husband. “Darling, tell them how you feel. Tell them now.”

“Papa, Mama,” he said, kneeling at the feet of the old peasant woman and taking her hands. “You’re my parents. You’ll always be my beloved Mamochka and Papochka. If I was adopted, it’ll change nothing for me. You’ve loved me all my life. I know nothing but your loving kindness. I know who I am, and I will always be the little boy you’ve loved as long as I can remember. If you chose not to tell me before, I understand. In those days, people didn’t talk about such things. But if there is anything you’d like to tell me now, we’ll all listen and love you just the same afterward.”

His speech touched Katinka deeply, and she looked into Baba’s face and saw it soften by degrees. The old peasants exchanged glances, then her grandmother shrugged. “I want to tell the story,” she said to her husband.

“All lies,” said Bedbug but he was quieter now.

Some secrets are denied for so long, thought Katinka, that they no longer seem real.

Then Bedbug waved his gnarled fingers at his wife. “Tell it if you must.” He sat on the sofa and lit a cigarette.

“Go on, Mama,” said Dr. Vinsky, lighting up too. He got up and poured some cha-cha into a tiny glass and gave it to her. “I want to hear your story—whatever it is.”

Baba took a deep breath, downed the cha-cha and, looking round the room, opened her hands. “Me and Bedbug had been married for eight years—and no children. Nothing. It was a curse to be childless. Even though I was a true Communist, I visited the priests for a blessing; I saw the quack in the next village. Still nothing. Bedbug wouldn’t discuss it…Then one day, I heard in the collective-farm office that a bigshot official from Moscow was coming on a tour to inspect our new tractor stations. He was talking to everyone informally and he wanted to talk to us. It was Comrade Satinov.”

“Did you already know him?” asked Katinka.

“Yes,” said Baba. “In 1931, the campaign to collectivize the villages and destroy the richer peasants, the kulaks, came to our region. All the kulaks were being deported; many were shot here in the villages; there were grain searches and famine. It was a time of dread. Bedbug was denounced as a kulak. We were on the list to be arrested. All the others on that list were shot. Comrade Satinov was in charge, and I don’t know why but for some reason he intervened and had our names taken off the list. We owed him our lives. Eight years later, in 1939, he again blessed us. He asked us to take in a three-year-old boy. ‘Love him as a treasured gift,’ he said. ‘Take this secret to your grave. Bring him up as if he were your own.’ One day we got the call from the Beria Orphanage and we went into Tbilisi and collected…a little boy with brown eyes and a dimple in his chin. The most beautiful little boy in the world.”

“You were our son, our own,” said Bedbug.

“We loved you from the moment we saw you,” added Baba.

“Did you ever contact Satinov?” asked Katinka.

“Only once.” Bedbug turned to address his son. “You wanted to be a doctor. It was hard to get into the best medical schools and none of my family had ever been past grade school. So I called Comrade Satinov—and he got you into Leningrad University.”

“When you were little,” continued Baba, “you remembered something. You cried about your mother, and your father, and your nanny, a dacha and a journey. You had a toy rabbit that you loved so much that we raised our own rabbits in the hutch in the garden and you fed them, gave them names, loved them like we loved you. I held you at night and gradually you forgot the past and loved us. And we adored you so much in return, we could never tell you…And that’s God’s truth. If we’ve done wrong, tell us.”

When her father kissed his parents, Katinka could not watch. She stepped outside onto the veranda to admire the budding plenty of spring, the lush honeysuckle, the trilling, diving swallows, the rushing of frothy streams and far away the snow-peaked mountains. But she could see and hear nothing—just her father’s loving face and the howling of her grandmother, who cried in the uninhibited way that peasants have always cried.

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