The Blackbird Girls

by Anne Blankman

  At once the firemen’s wives silenced. Valentina’s mother placed a hand on her shoulder, showing she wanted to stay and listen to the doctor, too.

  “Your husbands are being flown to a special hospital in Moscow,” the doctor said. “They will receive the best possible care. The clothes they were wearing when they were at the power station have been burned. If you would like to help your husbands, then I suggest you return to your homes and gather spare clothing for them.”

  Some women burst into tears. Others gasped, while a few said, “Yes, we’ll pack their things,” as though they were pleased to have something to do. Relief washed over Valentina. The doctors in Moscow must have special medicine or medical machines that would heal her father and the others.

  “Come.” Her mother walked toward the elevator. “We must go home and collect Papa’s belongings. The hospital in Moscow might be cold. He’ll want his warmest sweater.”

  When they got outside, they found the trolleys weren’t running, so they had to hurry on foot to their apartment. In the distance, blue-black smoke churned above the broken reactor. In spots, the streets were white with foam; it looked like thick, soapy water. Valentina wondered where the foam had come from. Was it part of the radiation? She knew she couldn’t ask out here in the street.

  Policemen stood on every corner. Children rode bicycles, skipped rope, and played marbles or dolls on front stoops. Some laughed and slipped in the foam. Valentina’s friend Larisa was dancing in it with a group of girls. She caught sight of Valentina and waved. “Isn’t it splendid? Papa says they’ll evacuate us and we’ll camp in the forest!”

  Valentina waved back at Larisa. “My papa’s going to a hospital in Moscow, and they’ll make him better.”

  “Hurrah!” Larisa shouted.

  “Come,” Valentina’s mother said, and they kept hurrying through the white foam that ran in rivulets down the road.

  At home, they threw some of Valentina’s father’s possessions into a suitcase: two wool sweaters, a pair of trousers, underpants and socks, and a couple of his favorite books so he wouldn’t get bored.

  Then it was back outside, where red light fell softly everywhere and the foam glistened white and the smell of smoke and metal weighted the air. The stink was so strong that Valentina’s eyes stung. The back of her throat tickled, no matter how many times she coughed. She’d look at her father’s textbooks tonight. Maybe she could learn more about radiation. And she and her mother ought to eat lots of cucumbers, despite what the doctor in the corridor had said.

  By the time they reached the hospital, the sun was sinking below the horizon. A crowd had gathered in front of the building. Against the lighted windows of the hospital, the people looked like a black mass writhing up the steps. Several soldiers had formed a line at the doors. People screamed at them, demanding to be let in.

  Her mother clutched Valentina’s shoulder. “My God, what now?” she murmured to herself. She pushed her way through the crowd, clamping one hand on Valentina’s wrist. Valentina had to jog to keep up.

  As they reached the steps, the same doctor from before came out the door. The soldiers fell back to let him through, then took up their positions again, barring the way inside. The doctor raised his hands for silence.

  Slowly, the crowd quieted. From the lights shining through the hospital windows, Valentina could see most of the people gathered at the door were women. Tears shone in their eyes.

  “Thank you for bringing your husbands’ belongings,” the doctor said loudly. “Unfortunately, the airplane for Moscow has already departed. Your cooperation is appreciated.”

  A huge gasp rose from the crowd. All Valentina could think was: Papa.

  The doctor scuttled into the hospital. The door hadn’t even closed behind him when the women started shouting.

  “How dare they take my Andrei without me!”

  “They tricked us! They sent us to get our husbands’ clothes so we wouldn’t make a scene when they took our men away!”

  “Monsters! Give me my husband! Let me see what has been done to him!”

  There were so many wails of grief and rage that the air seemed to echo with them. Valentina’s mother stood still with her hand over her mouth. She hadn’t said a word.

  Valentina moved closer to her. “Why is everyone so upset? Because we didn’t get to say goodbye?”

  Her mother’s hand fell to her side. “Yes. And they’re afraid the doctors are trying to hide the truth from us.”

  “What do you mean?” Valentina asked. “The doctor already told us they’re going to a special hospital in Moscow. They’ll be healed there.”

  “Yes,” her mother said again, wrapping Valentina in an embrace. “They’ll be fine. We all will be.”

  But her voice shook, which was how Valentina knew she should be frightened.

  6

  KIEV, UKRAINE, SOVIET UNION

  AUGUST 1941

  Rifka

  “HIDE IT AWAY, Rifka,” her mother said.

  Rifka Friedman looked at the flute in her hand. It was the most wonderful gift she had ever received: smooth and silver and made of three pieces that fitted together perfectly. Mama and Papa had gotten it for her twelfth birthday in March. For years, she’d had to make do with borrowing her neighbor Reuben’s, and he’d insisted she do his mathematics homework in exchange for thirty minutes every day with his flute. Then at last, she’d had her own.

  Every single night since her birthday, she’d played. The music took her outside of her mind, away from bombs and bread lines. When she played, all she felt were the notes. Someday she wanted to be a professional flutist in an orchestra, and maybe even compose her own music. Her flute was the only thing that always made her happy, no matter how much she missed her father, who was away fighting in the war, or how badly her empty stomach ached.

  And now she had to give it up.

  “Please, Mama,” she said. “Let me keep it. I’ll be careful with it, I promise!”

  Her mother’s eyes filled with tears. “I’m sorry, my love,” she said in a choked voice. “But we must hide all of our treasures so the Germans won’t find them.”

  The Germans. How Rifka had grown to hate them! When war had broken out two years ago, Germany had been allies with her country. Then, this past June, the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union. Rifka’s teacher had explained why to her and her classmates: Germany, and its Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, wanted to take over the world.

  “Maybe the German soldiers won’t come,” Rifka said to her mother.

  Sighing, her mother took the Shabbat candlesticks off their special space on a shelf. They were silver and covered in intricate carvings. The two candles symbolized the warmth and light of Shabbat, the Jewish holy day. Mama lit them every Friday night. But she did it with the curtains drawn, and Rifka’s family whispered the prayers instead of saying them aloud. The government disapproved of religion.

  “The Germans are coming, Rifka,” her mother said. “You know they’ll be here soon.”

  Rifka did know: the German army had been racing across the Russian countryside, crushing anything in its path. The soldiers drove their tanks across wheat fields, destroying the crops. They stole from people’s homes. They burned villages. And all summer they had come closer and closer to Kiev. Soon—no one knew when—they would encircle her city.

  Rifka looked around the room, which served as their parlor and kitchen. It appeared as it always did: the big wooden table dressed in Mama’s best lace tablecloth, the old stove in the corner, the sink where her brothers’ cloth diapers hung over the lip, drying, and the best place of all, the shelf where they kept the Shabbat candlesticks and a stack of books.

  Someday soon it would be overrun with German soldiers. They could take whatever they wanted. They could burn the apartment building to the ground. They could leave the Friedmans without a home, without food, witho
ut any possessions at all. And that was if Rifka and her family were lucky. She had heard the rumors in the streets: the German soldiers also shot children and women and old folk.

  She shuddered. What would happen to her and Mama and her two little brothers when the Germans reached Kiev?

  “Hurry,” her mother said. “Your brothers should be waking from their nap any moment, and I’ll need your help making supper.”

  Biting her lip so she wouldn’t cry, Rifka slid the flute’s pieces apart. Then she laid them in a wooden box. Gently, she pulled up the loose floorboard. Unlike the others, it wasn’t nailed down. She had seen her mother remove the nails last night, her face red from the effort, her pregnant belly getting in the way. She had offered to help, but her mother had said no, children shouldn’t have to do grown-ups’ work.

  Silently, Rifka placed the box beneath the floorboard. She took the candlesticks her mother handed her and put them beside the box. Then she eased the floorboard into place.

  “Here.” Her mother gave her four nails. “You’ll have to do it. I—I need to rest.”

  Rifka’s head snapped up. Her mother sank onto a chair. She rubbed her stomach, her face contorted in pain.

  “Are you hurt?” Rifka asked.

  “It’s the baby,” her mother gasped. “I think it’s coming.”

  “Now?” Rifka cried. Her mother had told her the baby probably wouldn’t be born for another two weeks.

  “Babies arrive on their own schedule.” Her mother heaved herself out of the chair. “Help me to the bed. Then fetch the midwife.”

  Rifka guided her mother into her parents’ bedroom. Only her mother slept here now, for her father had been drafted into the Soviet army soon after the war began. Last winter, he had come home on leave—and thanks to that visit, now there would be another Friedman. Another mouth to feed. Another body to clothe. Another child to care for, when they already hadn’t enough food or clothes for themselves. Rifka didn’t know how they would manage. Her mother said with love, they could always find a way, but Rifka wasn’t so sure. Love didn’t bake bread or sew clothes.

  Once her mother was settled on the bed, Rifka glanced into the other bedroom, which she shared with her little brothers, Isaac and Saul. She twitched aside the curtain she had hung between their beds to give herself privacy, and saw the boys were still asleep. Good.

  She hurried into the kitchen, put the kettle on to boil, and found a stack of clean towels and sheets in a cupboard. Then she rushed out of her apartment, down the winding stairs, and into Dorohozhytska Street.

  A few months ago, the street had been busy, full of babushkas and mothers walking into shops or standing about their apartment building’s front steps, gossiping and laughing. Children used to play in the street, throwing jacks or playing tag. Horse-drawn carts, filled high with wares for market days, would clip-clop past.

  The whole neighborhood was Jewish, although as far as Rifka could tell, she and her neighbors didn’t seem much different from the Ukrainians who lived elsewhere in Kiev. She went to a nearby school, where all of her classmates were Jewish, and she rarely ventured into other parts of the city, so she didn’t know anyone who didn’t share her religion. But the Ukrainians she saw in the streets looked like her and her neighbors: the women and girls in dresses, the men in suits or tradesmen clothes, and the boys in short pants, much mended, with patches to hold together pieces of threadbare fabric. The Ukrainians had fair hair, of course, but other than that, Rifka didn’t see any differences.

  Now the street was quiet. Most of the men were gone, conscripted into the army. So many of the children and wives they had left behind had fled to escape from the coming Germans. Those who remained holed up in their apartments, fearing that at any moment the German soldiers would appear.

  The ones who had left were smart, Rifka’s teacher had said. They knew how much the Germans hated Jews. Rifka and her classmates hadn’t asked the teacher why the Germans hated them—so many Ukrainians hated them, too, after all. Nor had Rifka asked her mother why they hadn’t left Kiev. Mama’s pregnant belly was answer enough.

  Rifka hurried along Dorohozhytska. The midwife lived down the street, near the Viis’kove cemetery. Rifka could get there and back home in minutes. Mama and the boys wouldn’t be alone for long.

  But she couldn’t help pausing to look at the sky. It stretched above the cramped apartment buildings, a canvas of even blue. It looked so peaceful. No warplanes. No bombs. No smoke.

  When would that change? And how would they survive once the Germans came?

  The questions made Rifka’s heart race. She mustn’t think of the future. Somehow, they would be all right. Mama had said they would be fine because they were a family, and families took care of one another no matter what.

  But the whole time she ran to the midwife’s apartment, she thought of that perfect sky and how different it would look soon.

  7

  PRIPYAT, UKRAINE, SOVIET UNION

  APRIL 1986

  Oksana

  OKSANA SAT ON the parlor sofa. She should have made up her bed for the night long ago—it was nearly ten, past her bedtime—but her mother hadn’t told her to.

  In fact, her mother hadn’t said much of anything since the nurse at the hospital had taken her into an office and shut the door, leaving Oksana alone in the corridor. When her mother had finally come out, her eyes were red, but she hadn’t told Oksana what had happened. She’d only said they had to go home, straightaway, without talking to another soul.

  When they’d reached their apartment, her mother had locked the door. Then she had gone into the bedroom, closing the door behind her. Alone, Oksana had sat on the sofa, not knowing what to do.

  She tried to read, but the words jumped around the page. She got one of her old school notebooks that she kept hidden in the trunk, under a pile of blankets. Her father didn’t know about the notebooks. No one did. At the end of every school year, she held on to the notebooks that weren’t filled. Those clean pages were precious.

  She fetched a pencil from her satchel and curled up on the sofa to draw. The picture had been building in her mind all day, until her fingers ached. She had to let it out.

  Quickly, she began to sketch. The line of Papa’s jaw. Short, light hair. Pride in his eyes.

  She had never forgotten how he’d looked when she had placed first in her school’s spelling contest last year. He’d laughed and kissed her on both cheeks. “Such a clever girl,” he had praised, and she hadn’t been able to speak around the lump in her throat. The moment had been perfect. She had wanted to preserve it forever, like an insect in amber.

  Her pencil felt clumsy in her fingers. She couldn’t capture the delight in Papa’s eyes. It was impossible. How could she show an emotion without color, or paints, or lessons? And her parents would never pay for her to learn how to draw. She’d asked them once, when she was younger.

  “A daughter of mine, prancing about with a paintbrush?” Her father had smacked her, so hard she lost her breath. “Too fancy to take after me, is that it?”

  “No, Papa,” she had said quickly.

  “You’ll learn a useful profession,” he had told her. “Become an engineer, like I am. You’re good at it.”

  She was good at it. She always earned fours and fives in science and mathematics.

  And she hated the subjects.

  She ran her fingers lightly over the drawing. It wasn’t too bad. She’d drawn the proper lines of Papa’s face; it actually looked like him.

  The eyes, though, were flat. Papa might have been feeling anything.

  Oksana crumpled up the paper and threw it in the bin in the kitchen. It didn’t matter. She’d never be an artist.

  The bedroom door opened. Hastily, Oksana moved away from the bin. She didn’t want her mother to ask what she’d been doing and find the drawing. Her mother came in, her hair disheveled, her
eyes still red. She had changed into her dressing gown.

  In her slippers, she shuffled into the kitchen. She took a glass out of the cupboard and turned on the faucet. The sound of the water splashing into the sink was loud.

  She turned off the faucet. “What if the water’s contaminated? Without Ilya, I don’t know what to do!”

  Ilya was Oksana’s father. She opened her mouth to ask her mother how badly he was hurt, then thought better of it. Mama said polite children didn’t ask questions.

  “There’s no one to help me anymore,” her mother said in a choked voice. For a moment, she stared at the glass in her hand. Then she heaved it at the wall. It shattered. Then she slid to the floor, where she sat sobbing, her head in her hands.

  “Please don’t cry, Mama,” Oksana said.

  Her mother pulled her down onto the floor beside her. She flung her arms around Oksana, holding her close. Oksana could scarcely believe what was happening: her mother was hugging her. She hugged her mother back, as tightly as she could.

  “We’re alone now,” her mother cried. “Ilya is gone.”

  Oksana froze. Surely she couldn’t mean—

  “That’s what the nurse at the hospital told me,” her mother went on. “When she came to fetch us in the dormitory and took me into the doctor’s office and you waited in the corridor. Last night during the safety drill, your father was in the southern main pumps circulating room. The force of the explosion brought debris tumbling down on him. They think he must be buried under the wreckage of the steam separator drums. They can’t get him out. They can’t see him. But they have no doubt. He’s gone.”

  For a long moment, Oksana sat still. The inside of her mind felt blank, like a fresh sheet of paper without any drawings on it. She couldn’t think or move. All she could do was sit, still and small in her mother’s arms.

  Dead. Her father was dead. Buried inside the ruined reactor. It must be so dark and hot there, with the fire still burning and the smoke filling the air. She could see it in her mind’s eye, the flames flickering red and reflecting off the piles of melted metal and broken stone. And Papa beneath it all, trapped.