Legends

Pocketing the postcard, Martin retraced his steps. In the kitchen the old woman, using a torn apron as a potholder, was filling two cups with an infusion that turned out to have been brewed from carrot peelings because, for her, tea had become too expensive. She settled onto a three-legged milking stool, leaving the only chair in the room for her visitor. Martin pulled it up to the table covered with formica and sat across from her. The woman kept both of her hands clasped around the cracked mug as she summoned memories and gently rocked her head from side to side at the thought of them. Her lidded eyes flitted from one object to another, like a butterfly looking for a leaf on which to settle. “I recall the day Samat brought you back from Moscow, Jozef. It was a Tuesday. Ah, you are surprised. The reason I remember it was a Tuesday is because that was the day the woman from the village came to do laundry—she was too terrified to use the electric washing machine Samat brought from GUM and scrubbed everything in a shallow reach of the river. You and Samat had been roommates in a school somewhere, so he said when he introduced you to his uncle’s entourage. Later, Tzvetan took you aside and asked you question after question about things I did not comprehend—what in the world is an exfiltration? You do remember the Oligarkh, Jozef? He was a very angry man.”

Martin thought he could hear the angry voice of an older man raging against the regime as he lurched back and forth on aluminum crutches before people too cowed to interrupt. My grandfather was executed during the 1929 collectivization, my father was shot to death in a field gone to weed in 1933, both were found guilty by itinerant tribunals of being kulaks. Do you know who kulaks were, Jozef? For the Soviet scum, they were the so-called rich peasants who wanted to sabotage Stalin’s program to collectivize agriculture and drive the peasants onto state farms. Rich my ass. Kulaks were farmers who owned a single pair of leather shoes, which would last a lifetime because they were only worn inside church. My grandfather, my father would walk to and from church wearing peasant shoes made of woven reeds, what we called lapti, and put on their leather shoes when they crossed the threshold. Because they owned a pair of leather shoes, my grandfather and my father were branded enemies of the people and shot. Perhaps now you understand why I wage one-man war against Mother Russia. I will never forgive the Soviets or their heirs …

Martin looked across the table at the old woman sipping her infusion. “I remember him saying something about leather shoes,” he said.

The woman brightened. “He told the story to every newcomer to the dacha—how his grandfather and father had been executed by the Soviets because they owned leather shoes. It could have been true, mind you. Then, again, it could have been imagined. Those who lived through the Stalinist era can never get out of it. Those who were born afterward can never get in. You are too young to know the Soviet state’s greatest secret—why everyone spent their waking hours applauding Stalin. I shall educate you: It is because the walls in the new apartment buildings were insulated with felt, which left the rooms well heated but infested with clothes moths. Our indoor sport was to clap our hands and kill them in mid flight. We kept score—on any given evening the one with the most cadavers was declared to be the winner. Ah,” the woman added with a drawn out sigh, “all that is spilt milk. Samat and Tzvetan, they are both of them gone from here now.”

“And where have they gone to?” Martin asked softly.

The old woman smiled sadly. “They have gone to earth—they have hibernated into holes in the frozen ground.”

“And in what country are these holes in the ground?”