“Caroline loves you all. It’s the first time I’ve seen her happy since her father died.”
“If you don’t mind me asking how?”
“Pneumonia.” At least I could talk of it without feeling like the world was made of blown glass and about to shatter.
“You still wear black.”
“Can’t seem to give it up. It’s all I have left of him.”
Nancy poured me another glass and I drank it in one gulp. The warmth grew in my belly. “I should have been able to save him. I’m still not quite right.”
“A natural death is a gift.”
“It has caused me nothing but pain.”
“I would have given the world for a natural death for my boy. A pneumonia germ. A death in the night.” Nancy poured us both more samogon and tossed back her third. “You want to hear the story?”
“Of course,” I said, setting my glass on Mother’s kitchen table.
Nancy looked out the window at the surf pounding in the darkness. “Well, at first I thought it was a parade of some sort coming down the road in Kiev, but it was the Reds looking for us, a large rabble from town. My husband had been gone, at the front, for several weeks and our son Dreshnik, a cadet in military school, stood watch, his blue uniform pants a little too long, for I’d forgotten to hem them. At twelve, he was only allowed a child’s rifle, though it shot real bullets. I held under my skirt my mother’s icon of the Virgin Mary, covered in silver, her most prized possession.”
Nancy played with the base of her glass.
“The men came about the house looking for money and watches. They laughed at Dreshnik guarding my ten-year-old daughter Sasha and me, but when a gang of them surrounded his sister and tried to take her off to the next room he shot and grazed one of them in the neck. At first Dreshnik stood astonished his gun had worked, but the mob surrounded him and took him away, as he screamed for me. They held Sasha and me in the house until they’d taken everything of value and we found Dreshnik later. Near the train station.”
I covered Nancy’s hand with mine. “My dear.”
“They’d stripped off his uniform and hung him by the neck from a tree, and written in grease pencil on his chest: Former Person. The sight of him, so young and slim hanging there, his neck broken…Sasha cried for me to take him down. I tried but the rope was too high. We had to leave him there, for we heard the mob returning.”
Nancy took another drink.
“Sasha and I were lucky to secure passage here but halfway on the trip she grew sick and they said it was typhus. I had the choice to return to Russia and have her buried there or continue on and do it here.”
“I don’t know how you went on.”
“Is it fair my husband went to war never to return? That my boy died terrified and without me? That my daughter died in my arms in the belly of a ship? That I miss them every moment? No. But this is my life now. Every woman at the boarding house has stories similar. So I translate letters for them and help others best I can and try and accept things the way they are.”
We were silent for a long moment. How brave she was. And she was right. I was lucky Henry died in his own bed, taken naturally, with me by his side.
“How are you doing today?” I asked.
She smiled. “There was a time when I couldn’t remember my name. But today is good, thank you. You know, in Russia we have a name for a friend you make while drinking vodka.”
“ ‘Very drunk,’ as I am now?”
Nancy laughed, her eyes bright with tears. “No. ‘Sobutylnik’ is the word. You know, I have been trying to work up the courage to give you something.”
“Oh, that’s not necessary—”
She pulled from her lap a rectangular piece of wood the size of a cereal box, depicting the Virgin Mary and child painted there, covered in silver, the metal trimmed to show their faces. “This is my mother’s icon. I would like you to have it.”
“Oh, no, I couldn’t, Nancy.”
“Please. You are our champion and savior and I have nothing else. If my mother were still alive I know she would be happy if you took it.”