The Last Siberian Tigress
by Tony Judge.
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The cherry tree is blooming in the street outside. The bones in her neck creak as she cranes towards the window from her armchair, trying to catch a glimpse of the ethereal pink. On her right side is the small gas fire, on her left the low table, where she keeps the samovar. Sometimes she forgets to put the samovar on, so she drinks yesterday’s cold tea with her breakfast jam and bread. The fire is a rare luxury, reserved for special occasions, such as visits from grandson Misha.
He doesn’t visit so often now. Not since he moved to Leningrad. She still calls it Leningrad, cannot bring herself to utter the hated old-new name, St Petersburg. Misha had to leave. It’s such a good job he has there, something to do with computers. He’s explained it to her, but the words are just words. She has nothing to hang them on. If he said he was a doctor, or a farmer, or a train driver, or a soldier, she could understand that. She knows all about soldiers, she married a soldier, was a soldier herself once.
When the call came from Comrade Stalin, as a good communist, she had known her duty. There was no need for anyone to dragoon her, she presented herself at the local party headquarters on the shores of Lake Baikal, begging, no, demanding to join the army. The training was over in a few weeks and before she’d had a chance to say goodbye to her parents, she was hauling her kit bag onto the station platform with all the others from her unit. Two weeks she spent on that lice-infested troop train, fending off the advances of her male comrades, watching the unknowable vastness of the motherland unfolding on the other side of the window.
Those were different times, heroism was in the air. She wonders often if certain generations are inherently more heroic than others, or if it is just the demands of history that make them so. It is one of those unanswerable questions, like, “Why do men love to drink so?” You can sit and turn your brain upside down and inside out and never come up with an answer that will stand up in a gentle breeze. So why waste your time pondering these mysteries?
There is a photograph on her mantle piece. A young man, in Red Army uniform circa 1943, is sitting at a table, holding up a glass of vodka and winking at the camera. He looks tanned and strong, ready to take on the world. It is this memory of Sergei that she prefers; the more recent photos are packed away in a trunk. They never see daylight anymore.
She looks across at the cheap, plastic-topped dining table, all they could afford on their pensions. If she squints, it’s still possible to imagine him sitting there, watching TV with his vodka in front of him, polluting the flat with his roll-ups. It was always vodka and cigarettes with Sergei. She would put a plate in front of him with some slices of sausage, pickles and good rye bread on it. When she returned from the market, the bread was usually untouched and the meat and pickle barely so. Pleading with him was useless. “Sergei, eat the bread, if you eat nothing else, please, eat the bread!” She had learned this on operations, out in the woods, fighting the fascists. The others would waste space carrying sweets and vodka, when they could get them. She would take as much bread as she could stuff into her pack. It always pulled you through. But Sergei would just smile and pour himself more vodka and then raise his glass to her, the way they did in the army. It infuriated her and he knew it. He did not want the bread in his stomach. It would act as a sponge and slow down the hit from the drink. That was the last thing he wanted.
Misha doesn’t drink spirits, only a little beer or wine. Misha has sense; he wants to keep his wits sharp for his job. You need to be crystal clear, when it comes to computers, that’s what he tells her.
A young man came calling yesterday, the third time this week. He claims to have a special deal on the insurance for her flat. This time he pushed some documents under her nose. “Sign, Baba…sign! It’s for your own benefit.” She had refused and he had become agitated, a little threatening. She wished that Misha was with her, to deal with him. She had just written a note for her neighbour, the one who helped with the shopping. It was just her usual list with her little flourish of a signature at the bottom. Before he left, the man had taken a small object from his pocket. It was sleek, pleasing to look at, like the silver make up compact that she keeps in her jewellery box. He pointed it at the note on the table and pressed a button. When the flash went off, she realised that he was taking a picture. She protested, but he was already sweeping up his documents and striding towards the door.
She wishes again that Misha would come, but then thinks better of it. There is something in the man’s expression that reminds her of Dmitry Karpov, her old unit commander; a deadness in the eyes that makes you wonder what might happen if you cross him, if he knows any limits. With Karpov, there had been no limits. The fascist prisoners in their care had discovered that on more than one occasion. She had been sickened at first, revolted at seeing the defenceless killed like that, but she had told herself, “The motherland needs men like Karpov. We should celebrate him as a hero.” She had learned then to keep such ‘hard secrets’, as she called them. Hard secrets were the kind that meant the difference between someone living and dying, and that someone was usually you.
These are different times, she thinks. Something has perverted the heroic, patriotic impulses of our grandchildren and turned so many of them into gangsters. Her fear of the young man is tinged with pity. He will never have the opportunity to know true heroism and the comradeship of sacrifice.
When she met Sergei, they were both on active service, fighting with the partisans along the shifting front line west of Moscow. She was carrying a long-barrelled sniper’s rifle. It was heavy, but she managed. He had laughed at her, “How can you shoot that thing? You can hardly carry it!” She had bridled with anger, but kept quiet. When he saw that she could shoot a Fritz in the head from a kilometre away, he soon learned to respect her. At first, the recoil from the rifle bruised her shoulder badly, but she had stuffed kapok into her tunic to absorb the impact. This is the shoulder that aches now, from morning to night. It is arthritis, the same arthritis that has ruined her hips and knees, keeping her in bed most days until mid-morning.
It was not long after they met that she had slept with Sergei for the first time. You had to take love when it was available then, you might be dead tomorrow. She had wrapped her legs around him and clawed his back raw. “My little Siberian Tigress,” he had called her. The nickname had stuck, even with the other members of the unit, although they thought it referred solely to her fighting spirit. Sergei would grin like a wolf and wink at her, whenever he heard one of them using it.
She thinks, if she could just lose twenty years she would be able to stand up to the man who came calling. She knows that she will never tell Misha about him. Misha does not have that Karpov look. He is one of the gentle ones. If she tells him, he might try to do something heroic and end up getting himself shot in some alley. It will have to be another of her hard secrets.
There is a wind blowing along the street now. The blossom is streaming past her window, reminding her of when, as a small girl, she would eat cherries straight from the trees in Uncle Max’s garden. It was high above the shore, with a view over the profound blue depths of Baikal.
After the war, they settled in Moscow, Sergei’s home town. She missed the country, so they found a plot at the end of a bus route and built a tiny dacha. In the years of their strength, it yielded so many crops of potatoes, cabbages, beans and onions. And fruit! Oh the strawberries and the plums! They gave it up when Sergei couldn’t work the ground anymore. She no longer craves the lake shore of her childhood. She remembers the bitter winters, even worse than Moscow’s. She has not been to their little dacha in the woods for years, but still dreams of plunging her fingers one final time into the deep black earth and pulling up a handful of sweet new potatoes.
Someone is banging on the door, loud, impatient knocks.
“Misha? Is that you…Misha?”
But she knows that Misha is not coming.
©2006 Tony Judge