The Blackbird Girls

by Anne Blankman

  “Thanks.” Valentina took a few.

  They crunched in companionable silence. At last, Oksana asked, “How did you think to say that to the guard?”

  Valentina shrugged. “It just came out.”

  “It must be marvelous to be able to come up with cutting insults,” Oksana said. “I wish I could do that.”

  “I’m sure you could . . .” Valentina broke off. She glanced at Oksana, then away.

  Oksana knew what she was thinking. There had been many times over the years that she had said cutting insults to Valentina.

  Her papa had been wrong about all Jews being rich. Maybe he had been wrong about Jews in other ways. Oksana thought of how Valentina had summoned her grandmother after she had seen Oksana in the bathroom last night. How Valentina’s mother had given up a seat on the train for her. And how Valentina’s grandmother had given them money for the day, even though she didn’t have much to spare.

  This was too confusing. She didn’t want to think about it anymore. “Let’s explore the gardens,” she said quickly.

  “Fine,” Valentina muttered.

  They started to walk. The pathways were lined with marble statues, which glimmered in the sunlight. Flower-dotted grass spread in all directions. The place was lovely, but Oksana was too miserable to enjoy it. Valentina must despise her—that was why she had stopped talking. And somehow, for reasons she couldn’t quite understand, Oksana didn’t want Valentina to hate her.

  “It’s beautiful here,” Oksana said at last. “I like the statues.”

  “My mother told me about them,” Valentina said in a grudging tone. “In the winter, they’re stored in boxes to protect them from the snow and cold. Every year for May Day, city workers uncover them.”

  “They’re pretty,” Oksana said.

  The statues stood under the protective branches of greening trees. Each was different: some were characters from fairy tales, others from Roman myths, and a few were long-dead kings and queens. There must have been a hundred of them.

  Oksana tried to imagine what it would feel like to have a block of stone or marble in front of her and to form something beautiful from it. She wondered if the art was trapped within the stone, and if it took an artist’s talent to free it.

  “Which statue is your favorite?” she asked, and then, naturally, they had to look at every one before they could pick which they liked best, and before long Valentina was smiling again. Neither of the girls could decide, although Oksana preferred the queens, while Valentina loved the Roman gods and goddesses.

  They were sitting on the edge of a fountain, dragging their fingers through the cool water, when Oksana asked, “Why does your grandmother speak Ukrainian?”

  “She does?” Valentina sent her a surprised look.

  “This morning in the street,” Oksana said. “You didn’t notice?”

  Valentina shook her head no.

  “You’re from Siberia, aren’t you?” Oksana asked. At Valentina’s nod, she said, “Then you probably won’t understand. Most Ukrainians resent having to speak in Russian at work or school. My parents say we ought to speak the language of our ancestors.”

  Russian was the official tongue of the Soviet Union, and its citizens were supposed to speak it at school or at their jobs, regardless of the language that had originally been spoken in their republics. Valentina’s grandmother was from Leningrad, which meant she was Russian and there was no reason for her to know Ukrainian. Yet this morning she had spoken it so fluently, Valentina hadn’t noticed what language she was using. Oksana wondered how Valentina’s grandmother had learned Ukrainian in the first place.

  Valentina didn’t seem interested, though, and suggested they go for a walk. As they ambled alongside the canals, the sun rose higher, gilding the windows in the elegant buildings, turning them into sheets of golden glass. They were like a sort of art, Oksana thought. Even ordinary windows could be beautiful, if she looked at them the right way.

  For lunch, she and Valentina bought meat-and-potato dumplings from a street cart. After they ate, they went to Decembrists’ Square to see the famous statue of Peter the Great called the Bronze Horseman.

  In the sunlight, the bronze looked black. Peter sat astride a horse rearing on its hind legs, his face turned to the right, his sword hanging at his side. His left hand gripped the reins, and his right was flung out, as if he were reaching for or pointing at something in the distance. Oksana imagined he had ridden to the shore and was looking out across the Neva River, picturing the city he would build that would become St. Petersburg—and which would be renamed Leningrad after the Communist revolution.

  When she finally turned away from the statue, she felt as light as the soft spring air all around her. “Are you ready to go home?” she asked Valentina.

  “Okay.”

  Together they reached the embankment. The river flowed alongside them, its surface sparkling with sunlight. It looked as though diamonds had been tossed across the blue water. Oksana thought it was beautiful, and it was hers, hers to see and enjoy.

  She felt something rise up in her chest, as delicate as a plume of smoke. She recognized the feeling. It was the same way she felt when she finished a drawing or saw something lovely and sketched it in her mind.

  Joy.

  20

  Valentina

  THE NEXT MORNING, Babulya walked Valentina and Oksana to the middle school to register them for the fifth grade. With every step, the knots in Valentina’s stomach tightened more. Maybe this school would be different from her old one. Nobody here, except Oksana, knew she was Jewish, and perhaps Oksana wouldn’t say anything. Maybe here she could feel as though she belonged.

  The building looked like the one in Pripyat. In the classroom, about forty children, dressed in black-and-white uniforms, sat in orderly rows of desks. A large portrait of Lenin hung on the wall.

  The teacher, Yekaterina Federovna, was covering the Great Patriotic War. In Pripyat, Svetlana Dmitrievna had been about to teach it, too. Svetlana Dmitrievna had said it was called World War Two in other countries. Everything seemed the same, and the knots in Valentina’s stomach ached.

  But when the teacher introduced her and Oksana to the class, several of the girls smiled at them. Valentina felt herself smiling back. Maybe this school would be all right.

  At recess, though, a boy from her class planted his feet in front of her and said loudly, “Your last name is Kaplan.”

  Valentina looked up. She and Oksana had been drawing squares on the pavement with chalk for a game of big bear’s den. The first square had to be big enough for several children to fit inside. Within the first square, she had been drawing a smaller square, which would be the bear’s den. One child would stand in the den while the others waited in the outer square for the “bear” to try to tag them.

  “Your name is Kaplan,” the boy said again.

  “Yes,” Valentina said. To her ears, her voice sounded calm, but her heart had started beating hard. She knew what the boy would say next. It was starting—the sly looks, the insults, the name-calling. She hadn’t been able to escape after all.

  The boy loomed over her. She thought his name might be Andrei, but she couldn’t remember for sure. “Kaplan’s a Jewish name.”

  Valentina didn’t say anything. Maybe if she ignored him, he would stop. In Pripyat, sometimes that had worked. Her hands shook as she drew the inner square. The lines came out wobbly. Oksana stopped drawing and looked up at the boy.

  “I know all about your kind,” he continued.

  Valentina drew over the wobbly lines, trying to make straight edges for the square. Her face felt hot. Why couldn’t he leave her alone? But even if he did, there would be other children to take his place. It had been the same at every school she had gone to. Nothing ever changed.

  “Why don’t you go back to Jerusalem, where you belong?” the boy said. “
Nobody wants you here.”

  Oksana stood up. “Nobody wants you here. Why don’t you shut your mouth?”

  The boy’s eyes narrowed. “What did you say to me?”

  A hush fell over the schoolyard. Children stopped playing to stare at Oksana.

  “You heard me.” Oksana fisted her hands on her hips. “Leave Valentina alone.”

  Valentina couldn’t believe her ears. She stayed crouched on the ground, unable to move.

  “I know who you are,” the boy said. “You’re one of those Chernobylites. My father says you’re all contaminated and you’ll turn into rabid dogs.”

  Oksana shoved her face into the boy’s. “He’s right. I think I’ll take a bite out of you.” She clicked her jaws, and the boy jumped back. She shouted, “You’d better run away! Next time I might bite your face.”

  “You’re crazy!” The boy dashed across the schoolyard.

  The girls clustered around the chalk squares cheered. “Well done, Oksana! Andrei’s a bully. We’ve all wanted to tell him off forever.”

  Oksana’s face was red. She put her hands to her cheeks. “I can’t believe I did that,” she whispered.

  Valentina couldn’t believe it, either. This couldn’t be the same girl who had mocked her at their old school.

  But it was. She stood there, her face flushed, smiling a little. It was the first time Valentina could remember someone at school other than Larisa or a teacher defending her.

  Oksana looked at Valentina. “Are you all right?”

  Slowly, Valentina took the hand Oksana offered. She stood up. She knew she should let go of Oksana’s hand, but for some reason she didn’t. They stood awkwardly, not looking at each other. Valentina wanted to say thank you, but the words stuck in her throat. Oksana seemed to understand, though, for she didn’t let go, and while they played big bear’s den they held hands the whole time, even though they weren’t supposed to.

  * * *

  - - -

  When Valentina was a small child in Siberia and the autumn evenings turned cold and misty, her parents liked to say, “The moon has put on his furs.”

  Instead of using a refrigerator, she and Mama hung food in bags outside their window. Their drinking water was hauled to their apartment in solid chunks of ice sawn out of the river. She wore reindeer-fur-lined boots and carried her shoes in her satchel to change into when she got to school. On days when the thermometer dipped below minus-sixty degrees, the schools closed, and she stayed home with her mother, snug and cozy behind their three-panes-thick windows.

  May in Leningrad was the opposite of October in Siberia. The moon shed its furs and shone like a silver coin. The last traces of snow melted, and the frozen patches of earth in the courtyard behind Babulya’s apartment turned to mud. Leningraders stopped wearing coats.

  Babulya told the girls that the days would grow longer and longer until the sun would set for only a few hours every night. Those were called White Nights, and they were like magic. Sailboats glided on the Neva River, swans swam the ponds in the Summer Garden, and the scent of linden trees carried on the soft breeze. Valentina could scarcely wait to see it for herself. She hadn’t heard of White Nights before, not even in Siberia, where the sun seemed to shine forever during the summer.

  Her mother still hadn’t been able to get out of Kiev. Tickets were impossible to come by unless you had special connections, and she had none. For now, she was staying with the second university friend.

  She had spoken on the telephone with a doctor at the special hospital in Moscow. He said Valentina’s father and some of the other survivors would receive bone marrow transplants. “They’re taking excellent care of him,” Valentina’s mother had promised, then had to hang up because long-distance telephone calls were expensive.

  Valentina didn’t know what bone marrow transplants were. Babulya and Oksana didn’t, either. The next day at school, instead of going out to recess with the other children, she lingered in the classroom to ask her teacher about them.

  “Marrow is a sort of tissue deep inside your bones,” Yekaterina Federovna explained. “It makes blood cells. People need transfusions to replace dying or damaged bone marrow.”

  “Can a transfusion cure someone who’s sick?” Valentina asked.

  Yekaterina Federovna put her arm around Valentina’s shoulders. “Absolutely. Now go out and play. Put some pink in those cheeks.”

  “Thank you!” Valentina rushed outside. The whole time she played in the schoolyard, she felt as though she were floating instead of running. Papa would be cured! It couldn’t be long now until he was released from the hospital, and somehow he and Mama would get train tickets and make their way to Leningrad. They’d be a family again.

  “What did you talk to Yekaterina Federovna about?” Oksana asked. “You look so happy.”

  “Nothing.” Valentina wiped the smile from her face. She didn’t want to tell Oksana the doctors were healing her father. Not when Oksana’s father had died.

  And Valentina didn’t want to hurt her. Not anymore. Something had changed between them. She wasn’t sure when it had happened—after they had spent the night in the hospital, maybe, or had wandered the city together, or had dealt with that bully Andrei at recess. They weren’t friends exactly, but they weren’t enemies anymore, either. Valentina wasn’t certain what they were. She only knew she didn’t wish for Oksana to feel badly.

  So she said, “Nothing,” once more and grabbed Oksana’s hand, tugging her across the yard so they could line up for a footrace.

  21

  SOMEWHERE IN UKRAINE, SOVIET UNION

  SEPTEMBER 1941

  Rifka

  RIFKA HAD NEVER known hunger before.

  She walked along a dusty road, with Nathan at her side. Night had laid itself across the land, so Nathan had said it was safe to come out of the forest. Rifka knew what would happen next: They would walk down the dirt road, as they had done every night for weeks, every step taking them farther away from Kiev and, they hoped, from the approaching German army. When dawn broke, they would forage in the fields, digging bare-handed into the earth, searching for something they could eat. Potatoes. Carrots. Anything.

  After they had found some food, they would run into the forest, winding around the trees until they felt safe. Then they would sit and eat. Once their bellies were satisfied—never full, only satisfied enough that the terrible, clawing hunger was held at bay—then they would lie down and sleep.

  Now as she walked in the darkness, she couldn’t stop thinking about her mother’s food. Black bread as soft inside as clouds. Soup thick with vegetables. Pastry drizzled with honey. And milk—icy cold and sweet.

  “Nathan,” she said, “can’t we stop and look for food?”

  “No.” He didn’t take his eyes off the ground. “We have to move as fast as we can at night. You know that.”

  “I know,” she mumbled. But her stomach was a hole. The hole had talons, which scraped her insides as they stretched up, up until they reached her throat. It hurt to talk. It hurt to move. She didn’t know how much longer she could walk.

  The road was a gray ribbon, stretching on forever. They would never get to the end of it. Never get far enough away.

  She stumbled and had to swallow a sob. She missed Mama so much! And Isaac and Saul, and baby Avrum, and Papa.

  “Why can’t we go home?” she asked for the thousandth time. “We haven’t seen any soldiers.”

  “Not yet.” Nathan’s tone was grim. “They’re coming, Rifka.” And then he said, as he had said to her so many times before, “We have to escape to one of the Stans. It doesn’t matter which one.”

  She understood. Kazakhstan. Uzbekistan. Turkmenistan. Tajikistan. She knew little of them except for their names. They were all parts of the Soviet Union to the southeast. All thousands of kilometers away. All, hopefully, would not be conquered by the German ar
my.

  “I know,” she said again.

  They continued walking. Each step hurt. Rifka wore her mother’s boots, which were too big. Although she had put on three pairs of woolen socks—all she had brought with her—the boots still rubbed her ankles. The straps of her knapsack bit into her shoulders, but she didn’t dare throw out anything inside it. She knew she would need the woolen undershirts and underwear in the winter.

  “Have courage, Rifka,” Nathan said gently. “We must escape. If not for our sakes, then for our mothers’. They sacrificed so much to send us away.”

  Tears sprang to Rifka’s eyes. She hated thinking of her mother at home, alone except for the boys, who were too little to be any help. “They’ll be fine,” she said in a shaking voice. “The Germans won’t hurt them. They’re only women and children—not soldiers.”

  Nathan hesitated. “Yes. You’re right.”

  In the east, the sky had turned gray. The sun was rising! Rifka felt her heart lifting from her belly up into her rib cage, where it belonged. “It’s time to find food!”

  Nathan pointed at a cottage in the distance. “There’s a farm. Let’s . . .”

  He went still. “Rifka,” he whispered. “Do you hear that?”

  Rifka listened with all of her might. The breeze rustled through the fields of wheat. Nathan’s and her breathing rasped in her ears. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  And then she heard it. A far-off rumble.

  Her eyes met Nathan’s. “It’s a tank,” he said. “I bet it’s the Germans.”

  Rifka gasped. “What should we do?”

  “Hide. If the Germans see us . . .”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. Rifka knew what he would say: the Germans would kill them.

  She looked around frantically. The long road, the farm fields, the cottage, and on the horizon, the forest. If they went into the woods, there was no guarantee the soldiers wouldn’t see them. They had to be tucked out of sight.