A Silver Willow by the Shore

by Kelli Stuart

  She peppered her mother with question after question, but the answers never really satisfied.

  “Your grandparents died in the war.”

  “I was an only child.”

  “We don’t need to retreat to a dacha. We can stay right here in the city.”

  Nina finally quit asking her questions, realizing that she would never get more than skeletal answers. But now, as she continues to read, she feels a shiver run up her spine.

  “A large swath of survivors from Stalin’s reign were a group known as ‘kulaks’. These were wealthy peasants considered enemies of the state. ‘Kulaks’, or ‘kurkuls’ in Ukrainian, were a special threat to the communist state. ‘Kulaks’ were blamed for everything wrong in the USSR, from famines to illnesses, and this justified their treatment by the government.”

  Nina takes in a deep breath, a weight settling on her chest. Tucking a bookmark into the pages of the book, Nina slowly pushes to a stand and walks to the front desk to check it out. She fights the urge to drop the book and run. Something tells her that she’s following a trail that will open doors. Either that, or she has opened up a can of worms she may never be able to close.

  Annie

  Annie leans back, settling uncomfortably in the crook of Toby’s shoulder. She stares at the screen, completely uninterested in the movie. Toby’s hand moves lightly up and down her arm, and she shivers. He leans down and kisses the top of her head. Annie pulls away. Toby sighs and slides his arm out from under her. He grabs the remote and points it at the TV, freezing the frame just as Tom Cruise begins crawling up the outside of a Dubai skyscraper. Annie looks up at him, his eyes extra blue in the glow of the television.

  “What’s up with you?” he asks.

  Annie shifts, swallowing hard. “What do you mean?” she asks.

  “I mean, you’re, like, a million miles away. You ignore half of my texts; you’re apparently repulsed by my touch. I practically had to beg you to come hang out tonight. What’s up?”

  Annie is silent a minute, then shakes her head. “It’s nothing,” she lies. “I’ve just been tired lately.”

  Toby sighs, running his hand through his hair. “Look,” he begins, “I know things...happened a couple of months ago. I’m sorry if you felt pressured, or if you weren’t ready, or whatever. I’m not here to make you do stuff you don’t wanna do, ‘kay? Stop making me feel like such a creep.”

  Annie feels her cheeks grow hot. Her hand unconsciously drifts to her stomach. It’s still early in the pregnancy. She doesn’t have to say anything yet.

  “I just...” Toby leans back with a sigh. “I like you, Annie,” he says. “But if you don’t feel the same then you need to just tell—”

  “I’m pregnant,” Annie blurts out. She immediately regrets the words, and the silence that follows her announcement hovers heavily over them. Annie feels like she’s standing beneath a waterfall trying to breathe through a straw. Toby stares at her, his mouth slightly open, the color slowly draining from his face. He swallows hard and stands up, walking a few steps to the kitchen in his tiny apartment. He pulls a beer out of the mini fridge and pops it open, taking several long gulps. Annie stares at her hands, now crossed over her flat stomach. She shouldn’t have said anything.

  “You’re sure?” Toby asks, leaning against the wall. His broad shoulders slump inside a rumpled white t-shirt that hangs, untucked, over his baggy jeans. His hand grips the can, knuckles white.

  Annie nods. “I’m sure,” she answers. Her voice is timid, laced with shame.

  “When...? Um...how far?”

  Annie shrugs. “I guess I’m about two and a half months,” she says looking up and meeting his eyes. It was only the one time, an afternoon of passion after a particularly stressful morning spent deflecting the judgmental eyes of her grandmother. Annie had called Toby that Saturday and asked him to come pick her up. She told her mom that she was studying with her friend, Natalie. She didn’t even know anyone named Natalie, but that didn’t matter. She’d made her mother so jumpy over the last year that Nina was willing to say yes to almost anything if it meant avoiding confrontation.

  She’d gone to Toby’s and let herself be swept away by what she thought was the perfect rebellion. Sleep with your hidden boyfriend to get back at your overprotective mother and tongue-wagging grandmother - it seemed like the perfect assertion of her free will. But afterward, Annie had been overcome with shame. That wasn’t how she’d wanted her first time to be. She’d always pictured herself waiting until marriage, feeling as though that would be the perfect gift she could give to the man she loved.

  She didn’t love Toby. She’d only realized it that day two and a half months ago.

  “What’re you gonna do?” Toby asks.

  The question floats between them and lingers for a moment, whispered words full of weight and meaning. Annie slowly shakes her head. “I don’t know yet.”

  “Have you told anyone?”

  “No. Just you.” Annie looks up at him, her eyes filling with tears. “I don’t know how I can possibly tell my mother this,” she whispers. And for the first time since she took the test, she cries. The tears rake their way down her smooth, thin cheeks. Toby takes a step toward her, then stops. Both of them stare at one another, fear weaving its way through the dim room.

  “What do I do?” Annie asks.

  Toby doesn’t answer, and in his silence, Annie realizes what she knew all along. She’s alone.

  Elizaveta

  Moscow. My heart longs for Moscow.

  I’ve only ever loved one man. He was a good man, a kind man. I’m certain he would have loved me forever if I hadn’t destroyed it all with my lies. But then, what were my options? If I’d been truthful, he never would have even considered me to begin with. And so perhaps he and I were destined to fail.

  I tried hard to be the perfect citizen, the upstanding communist that my country dictated. I followed every rule, abandoning anything that would stain the name I created for myself. I enrolled in the Russian National Medical University, easily passing the entrance exams thanks to a natural ability to learn that I had somehow always possessed. I kept my head down, distancing myself from others as much as possible, avoiding study groups and quiet off-to-the-side meetings of students who glanced around furtively as they discussed politics. Everyone was afraid to speak then, not just me. It seemed I was simply better at staying quiet than all the rest.

  Pulling myself free from the memories, I shuffle from my room into the kitchen and shake my head at my daughter’s carelessness. She was in a hurry this morning, bustling through the house and out the door without turning off the coffee pot or rinsing her dishes. I reach for a sponge in the sink and my arm cramps, a jolt of pain coursing through my body. I gasp and slump forward onto the countertop, swallowing hard against the nausea that rolls over me whenever this happens. It’s been occurring more frequently lately, though I haven’t told Nina. It would only make her fuss over me as though I am a small child incapable of caring for myself. She forgets that I’ve long been independent, that she left me alone to fend for myself more than twenty years ago. And, of course, she does not know how long I was alone before that.

  The moment passes, and I straighten back up, gulping in deep breaths before lowering myself on the stool in front of the sink. I turn the water on and let it run until steam rises, then plunge my hands into the scalding stream. I wince for only a moment before settling into the pain. My hands occupied, I’m instantly transported back to the day Nina left, so many years ago.

  I didn’t go with her to the airport. It was my final rebellion, one last attempt to control her. Not that it would have mattered. At that point all the arrangements had been made. She had renounced her Soviet citizenship and married an American man. She had signed the papers stating her intention to desert her country and move to the United States. I had protested and yelled and fought her on it every step of the way, until finally I stopped. She needed me to sign papers in the court allowing her to m
arry and leave, and I did so because it became apparent that I would lose her either way. If I refused, she would still leave me, and she might never come back.

  Nina had packed up her suitcase the week before her departure, utilizing all twenty kilograms that she was allotted, folding what she could of her culture and heritage into a small, hollow square. There were no tears from her that final morning. She was stoic, steady in her resolve to leave the life I had so carefully curated. How desperately I wanted to stop it, but the only way to do that would have been to tell her the truth, and that was a risk far greater than sending the girl I’d raised into the mouth of the American beast. So I kissed her cheek goodbye that morning, blinking hard against the tears that threatened to spill on my own cheeks, and she had nodded resolutely at my cold dosvedonya.

  “I will write you as soon as I land,” she said. “It will be okay, Mama. In fact, I think it will even be wonderful.”

  “Yes, well you must at least promise me that you will be very careful,” I had replied, my words clipped. “Wear warm clothing, and don’t forget your tapochki in the house. I don’t want to hear that you caught American pneumonia and died.”

  “Okay, Mama,” she answered with a sigh.

  “And do not sit on the concrete. I hear they have many concrete benches in America, but don’t sit on them. They will make you infertile.”

  She’d smiled at me then, a wry smile laced with impatient amusement, and it took my breath away. Despite my horror at her choice, I felt the smallest prick of pride nip at the base of my brain. She was strong, this girl I raised. She was forging her own path in the world, so different from the way I had done it. She wasn’t acquiescing, as I had. She was striking out on her own, and it hurt so badly.

  I watched her from the window of our small flat, careful not to let her see my face from the street. She stepped into her friend’s car without so much as a glance back at the place she’d called home for twenty years. That was the day that I began washing dishes in scalding hot water, boiling it in the communal kitchen of our flat, then carrying the bowl into my small kitchen and plunging my hands in as I winced in pain. Perhaps it was my own punishment for having so obviously and desperately forsaken the child I had raised.

  That was also the day that I began to feel the cold again. It seeped into my bones through memories I had long worked hard to stifle. The cold was a nagging reminder of the years I had spent a lifetime trying to escape. And so the hot water became like a balm to my frozen soul. It was my hiding place, the place where I tried to keep those icy visions from blowing back, but it never really worked, because there is a single truth that I cannot escape no matter how often I plunge my hands into a basin of steaming hot water: Nina doesn’t know. She doesn’t know her own story, and that is my fault.

  I close my eyes and take in a deep breath. Of course, there is much about her life she has willingly hidden from me as well. There are so many questions I want to ask. I want to know about the decade that Nina lived in America before I arrived. What did she see and experience? What did she do? Why did she split with Andrew, and who was Annie’s father?

  Nina refuses to talk with me about the details of what happened between her and Andrew, though I suppose it doesn’t matter. I knew that morning she left for the airport that the marriage would never last. It was so foolish and impulsive, but Nina had been a stone wall, impervious to reason. I’m not really disappointed that she left Andrew. He was a nice man, but hadn’t been right for her.

  But who was the second man? Who was it that Nina loved so much she was willing to bring a child into the world? Nina will only tell me that his name was Richard, and that he died of cancer before Annie was born. Besides those two details, she never speaks of him—not even to Annie.

  Pulling a towel out of the drawer, I dab the water from my reddened hands, the brown spots of age a contrast to my heated skin. I lean against the counter and mull over the nagging thought that pricks at my conscience.

  The walls that separate me from Nina are my own doing. I built them and hid behind them, and it is too late to climb over now. The life of quiet that I so carefully set up for Nina and I all those years in Moscow was a farce. It is I who taught her to whisper, and no amount of heat can stave off the bitter cold of that truth.

  Nina

  Ah! The foolish bravery of youth.

  I miss it.

  Nina stares at herself in the mirror, turning her chin from left to right. She picks up a tube of lipstick and slowly applies it, hoping that today will bring the miracle of fuller lips that she’s always wanted. She straightens up again and takes in the sight.

  Her thick brown hair has been straightened and sprayed, and now hangs stiff over her shoulders. She’s applied more makeup than usual this morning but was careful not to overdo it. She pulls her shoulders back and holds up her chin, then smiles at herself in the mirror. Her soft, hazel eyes crinkle at the edges when she smiles. They’ve always done that, apparently. But it wasn’t a feature she noticed until Andrew pointed it out to her all those years ago.

  Nina smiles at the memory. The day she arrived in America was one of the most terrifying days of her life. She had so many emotions as she timidly walked off the plane. What if he didn’t show up? What if she got lost, or she found herself alone in the big, bad capitalist land of opportunity? What if her mother was right and she really did end up living alone on the streets...with the cats?

  But Andrew had been there. He stood just outside the door as she exited the customs line, a large bouquet of flowers in his hand, and when she stepped out and blinked at the bustling noise of the new land, he’d grabbed her and kissed her. Right there in public, he had kissed her and she’d pulled away, terrified. What if they were seen? What type of public chastisement could they receive for such a blatant and ridiculous display of emotion?

  No one seemed to notice them, though. People buzzed on by, oblivious to this break of public protocol. Many of them rushed into the arms of their own waiting loved ones. That was the first moment Nina realized she had a lot to learn about this new country.

  “Are you hungry?” Andrew asked, grabbing her hand and walking her away from the crowds of people at the gate. Nina was so taken by all the sights, the brightness of this new land, that she couldn’t translate his question in her head, so she simply stared at him blankly.

  “Ty golodna?” he repeated himself, this time in Russian. Nina nodded her head slowly.

  “I didn’t eat on the plane,” she said. “I couldn’t recognize the food.”

  He threw his head back and laughed. “Come on,” he answered, sweeping his hand over her shoulder and leaning on her a little. “I’m going to introduce you to your first American meal.”

  Nina had been so smitten with him in that moment. He was natural and easy with her, as though they had known each other for years. Really, though, this man was a stranger to her. Even though they were married, she knew so little about him. But in the first few moments of that first day, she felt great hope that perhaps she hadn’t been as foolish as her mother had so boldly claimed. Perhaps she’d even made a good decision.

  Nina followed Andrew out of the airport into the bright American sunshine. The hot summer air swelled around them, thick and stale, reminding Nina of home. She swallowed hard against the pang of fear that kept threatening to choke her, and she stopped in front of a large gold car as Andrew fumbled with the keys. He opened the back door and slid in her suitcase, then gently guided her to the passenger side and opened the door for her. Nina slowly ducked into the seat, reminding herself to not let her mouth hang open in fascination. This was the nicest car she had ever seen.

  In actuality, she had only been on a handful of car rides her entire life, and traveling by car had been one of the things she most looked forward to in this new land of freedom, where everyone drove their own vehicle.

  “Buckle up,” Andrew said. When Nina blinked at him in confusion, he chuckled. He reached over her lap and grabbed the seatbelt han
ging beside her, crossing it over her waist and sliding the buckle into the latch. She felt panic swell for a moment. Why would she need to be strapped into a car like this? How fast was he planning to drive? Her body tensed at all the fears that instantaneously raced through her mind. Andrew still leaned over her, his face close to hers. His lips lightly grazed her cheek then he leaned back into his own seat and strapped himself in.

  “Don’t worry,” he said with a grin. “This is just a safety precaution.” She cocked her head, trying hard to decipher his strange words. “Safety.” “Precaution.” They were words without a translation, and the confusion balled itself into a lump at the base of her throat.

  Ten minutes later, after Nina finally unclenched her hands, which had clamped down around the seatbelt, Andrew pulled into a parking lot in front of a restaurant. Nina blinked up at the giant, yellow ‘M’ on the front of the building. Andrew swung the car around the corner and got into a line behind another car. Nina looked at him quizzically.

  “Uh...” she began, attempting to say her very first English words in America. “We get food? Here?” She pointed at the building outside Andrew’s window. He smiled, white teeth gleaming in the American sunshine. He smiled a lot, a trait that Nina quickly realized was not unique to Andrew, but rather to America.

  “Yes,” he replied. “Only we’re not going inside. We’ll order out here, and they’ll give us the food in the car.”

  Nina worked hard to digest the information he’d just given her. All the words alone made sense, but put together they sounded like nonsense.

  She watched as Andrew stuck his head out the window and spoke to a voice in a box, then blinked curiously as they drove around the corner to a small window where a young man with a pimply face leaned his head out and asked for payment. At the next window, a woman reached her hand out and handed Andrew a bag. Nina watched all of this happen with great interest. None of the people in those windows seemed at all intrigued by this process. They acted as though it were perfectly normal to pass food through windows into the hands of strangers.