The Orchard: A Novel

PART ONE

1

Milka Putova and I had been friends since the first grade, which was pretty much for as long as I could remember. She was short and thin like a sprat, and every boy in our class called her exactly that—Sprat. She had small acorn-brown eyes, set too far apart and slanted—a result of one hundred and fifty years of the Tatar-Mongol yoke, as she often joked. Her face was broad and pale, her pulpy lips raspberry red, especially in winter, after we’d been sledding or building forts all afternoon, snow crusted on our knees and elbows, our bangs and eyelashes bleached with frost. We lived on the outskirts of Moscow and tramped to school together, across a vast virgin field sprawled around us like white satin. She’d walk first through knee-deep snow, wearing wool tights and felt boots, threading her legs in and out, and I’d trudge after her, stepping in her footprints. She’d halt and scribble our names in the snow with her gloved finger—Milka + Anya—and on the way back we’d rush to check whether the letters were still there.

Milka’s hair was dark gold, straight and silky, cut in a neat bob around her jaw. She shampooed her hair every day, and I could smell it when we sat next to each other during classes, the delicate scent of apple blossoms resurrecting our summer months at my parents’ dacha. How we’d sauntered through a corn maze, the stalks three times taller than we were, fingering green husks, separating soft, luscious silk to check on the size and ripeness of ears. Or how we roamed birch and aspen groves and gathered mushrooms for soup, their fragile trunks buried in grass, their red and orange caps burning under the trees like gems. Or how we swam in the river, racing to the other side and back and then climbing a muddy bank and drying off on towels, motionless like sunbaked frogs—bellies up.

At ten, we hadn’t yet begun wearing bikini tops or shying behind bushes while changing swimsuits. We touched each other’s faces, and shoulders, and nonexistent breasts, compared hands and feet, the length of our toes and fingers, noses, eyelashes, the color and shape of our nipples. We counted moles and freckles, mosquito bites and scratches, searching for hidden birthmarks, gray hairs, some sign of indisputable distinction. We lazed in a hammock, suspended between the porch railing and a single pine tree, or threaded wild strawberries on long straws and sucked them off in one ravaging movement, our tongues, our mouths magenta foam. We carved our names into birch trunks so fat, so mighty, our arms wouldn’t close when we hugged them. We trapped crickets in glass jars or matchboxes, which we placed under pillows for good luck, setting the bugs free in the morning; we made wishes while watching the full moon like an amber brooch pinned low in the sky. We longed for prettier dresses and Zolushka’s crystal shoes and a fairy godmother to turn our dingy flats into splendid castles. At the dacha, we opened the bedroom window and stared into the darkness coalescing around us. The apple trees were bearing their first tiny sour fruit. The trees swayed their branches and threw trembling shadows on the ground, and we would sprawl halfway out of the window to touch their young tender leaves.

—

At eleven, we still played with dolls. Some were missing limbs; others had lost lashes and hair; all had patches of skin scraped and dulled by the years of dressing and undressing, incessant bathing. We owned no male dolls but a set of tin soldiers I begged my mother to buy. The soldiers were disproportionally small, which made perfect sense to us because most of the boys in our class were shorter than the girls. We protected the soldiers fiercely, and not because they were fewer in number and cost more, but because they seemed so delicate to us and somehow helpless, in need of nurturing and reassurance. We handled the soldiers with care and stowed them in their box every evening.

Sometimes we pretended that the soldiers had just returned from the war to their wives and girlfriends. Then we would strip them naked and lay their stiff cold bodies on top of the pink plastic ones and rub the figures together as hard as we could.

Do you think she’s pregnant by now? Milka would ask.

Maybe. How long does it usually take?

Don’t know. Let’s rub some more, she’d say, and slide her doll back and forth under my soldier.

Oddly, I was always in charge of the males, and Milka the females. My soldier would lean in to kiss Milka’s girl doll, his lips so small, so hard against her curvy painted ones. Neither tin nor plastic participant had genitals, of course, but we pretended that they did, and Milka would even take a soldier’s hand and touch it to the doll’s belly and legs, the thick impenetrable place in between. Or she would press the soldier’s face there. At that age, I still had no idea that oral sex existed, but Milka seemed sure in her gestures.

That year, Milka and I began studying our bodies in the mirror, anticipating all the womanly changes my mother cautioned us about when my dad wasn’t in the room. Milka’s father had died in a car wreck when she was a baby, and her mother remarried soon after. Milka rarely talked about her family, except that both her mother and her stepfather worked in a fish-canning factory, and so their clothes and their hair smelled like dead seaweed. Even their skin smells like it, she would say. Rotten.

Why do they never come to school? I asked once.

Because then the whole building would have to be sanitized, she said, and snuck her bony tickling fingers under my shirt. I yelped and smacked her hands and whirled on my toes. She laughed, that grainy, openmouthed laugh of hers, her teeth so straight and white as though brushed with snow.

—

Two years passed, and we had our first periods, grew breasts and pubic hair, started wearing bras and locking bathrooms when showering. I sprouted up and gained some weight and resembled my mother more and more—an ample soft-bosomed woman, who seemed stronger than my dad and all the other men in the world. But Milka remained a sprat—short and puny, with long, awkward limbs and a caved-in stomach. When she stretched on her bed after school, I could count her ribs, outlined by her T-shirt. Her hair was still the same length, still redolent of summers and those apples my parents grew at our dacha.

Back then we paid no mind to scrapes or bruises or even pimples, which we often squeezed on each other’s backs, and those summers seemed as endless as the lives ahead of us. We thought our parents to be old and hopelessly outdated, wasting hours in lines for sugar or toilet paper. Generation Buckwheat, we called them. And my mother would turn and say, Let’s wait and see what they’ll call you. By they she meant our future children, and we’d guffaw and chime in unison, We won’t have children. We’ll elope to Paris or Rome and live happily ever after.

Like most Russians, we’d never been outside the Soviet Union, so any foreign city to us was just as far and impossible as the moon. We couldn’t know that the Iron Curtain was about to fall, or that the rest of the world was any different and not bound by the same brutal rules or years of stone-fisted dictatorship. We didn’t even regard our present government as a dictatorship, but accepted the order of things as we did the ineluctable succession of seasons: poplar fluff and apple blossoms in the spring and a frigid ossifying blindness of snow in the winter. One had to live through it because one was powerless and, perhaps, resistant to change. And even if one wasn’t, the change might not be for the best, for the good of the people. This country is too old and too stubborn, my grandmother always said, and Milka and I would nod and shove her sauerkraut behind our cheeks. She really did make the most delicious, juicy kraut, and we couldn’t imagine our winter meals without it, just as we couldn’t imagine not sharing a table or a school desk or our dreams, the future, as far away as it seemed. We knew we would marry one day, grow old, and resemble our mothers and then grandmothers, with saggy breasts and wrinkled faces and gray hair most Russian women bleached or hennaed. But we also knew that we’d always be friends and nothing could change that.

—

There were not enough boys in our class, just as there weren’t enough men in our country, which was what my grandmother often pointed out to us: The war and Stalin wiped this land clean. So, at school discotheques, Milka and I danced together, like other girls. At thirteen, I was much taller and decidedly plump, but she was more agile, swift and pushy, guiding me on the dance floor. The school gymnasium was decorated with strings of flashing colored lights, and Milka’s skin glowed pink, then blue, then green. Her hair swayed from cheek to cheek as she turned her head left and right, with a twist of her bony hip or her tiny stomping foot. The music was a medley of songs, fast-paced or lugubrious, by the popular Soviet singers: Valery Leontiev, Sofia Rotaru, and Alla Pugacheva, as well as by two famous rock bands, Mashina Vremeni and Akvarium. Also, the Beatles and ABBA, and the incomparable Italians, Al Bano and Romina Power, Adriano Celentano, and Toto Cutugno, who’d made every girl in our class aware of her burgeoning womanhood. He had such a seductive tremor in his voice, it seemed almost palpable. We could feel it touch our bodies somewhere deep inside. We cut his photos out of magazines and pasted them to the walls of our bedrooms and the backs of our textbooks, rubbing his image with our fingers.

For the school dances, we always wore our best clothes, sweaters or shirts we’d borrowed from our mothers’ closets and put on in corridors or bathrooms right before entering the gymnasium. We’d roll up the sleeves and pad our bras with wads of cotton, open one too many buttons to reveal a hint of cleavage. Occasionally, we dressed in outdated blouses, pants, or skirts discovered in family trunks or hunted down in komissionkas, those shabby secondhand stores. We would take the duds to my grandmother, who pedaled her stationary Singer sewing machine to alter our newly found treasures. Oh, how we were proud of those outfits our imaginations had designed and her crooked, arthritic hands had cut and stitched together. We would spot an actress in a Soviet magazine or in a movie, the few harmless foreign films, Italian or French comedies we rushed to see in theaters the first chance we had, and our minds would grow restless, cataloguing our existing wardrobes of dresses and skirts, altering their lengths to accommodate the rising fashion. Our shoes remained hopeless, however—thick leather in ugly brown or unpolished black, with square heels and blunt rounded toes, impossible for flirting. It was on the cusp of adolescence that Milka and I first began to realize the paucity of our choices, in clothes and in men.

One evening, after yet another discotheque, in an emptied school’s bathroom, we decided to have our first practice kiss, which we hated utterly and irreversibly. Too much flesh, too much wetness, and too much taste. Outside the window, the snow was turning into a fuzzy blanket. All was dark, and the only working lamppost in the schoolyard blinked and blinked, as though caught unaware by our touching lips.

If we don’t find boys, Raneva, I don’t know what we’ll do. I sure as hell don’t want to be kissing you for the rest of my life, Milka said, wiping her mouth.

Same here, I said. Horrible. Your tongue is too long or something.

No longer than yours.

I stuck mine out, and she did the same, and we turned to face the mirror. It was chipped and dull and not big enough for two people. We stepped back. Our tongues, pink and pale, had little white bumps and drops of saliva on the curling tips. They appeared unremarkably the same, slimy and disgusting. The rest of our faces didn’t look alike, but from a distance, in our ridiculous strained grimaces we resembled twin dwarfs, all wrinkles and folds, dimpled chins and wide front teeth.

We both got strep that day and couldn’t see each other for a week, which was the longest, quietest time in the history of humankind. It was also the time when Milka discovered science fiction books, and I discovered masturbation, but I wouldn’t share that with her for many, many months.

2

We turned fourteen when Brezhnev died. Pert and insensitive like most teenagers, we had very little understanding of grief, of the weight it carried for the living. Back then we really thought Brezhnev to be eternal, like the earth itself or the sky. It was a gloomy November morning with a dusting of new snow on the ground and the wind sweeping the streets, knocking on windows, all alight, people gathered around their TVs, dumbfounded by the sight of Brezhnev’s body in a nest of red carnations and white gladioli next to the blind hollow of the grave. It began to snow harder, and on the screen, we could see the flurries landing on the dead General Secretary’s face, his tight lips and massive black eyebrows like twisted skeins of wool.

In our living room, which was also our dining room, as well as my grandmother’s bedroom, we sat at the table, drinking hot tea. Milka came over to watch the funeral because we had a new color TV, while her family still had a prehistoric black-and-white box with a jerking picture and no decent sound. Not that there’s anything important to hear, she said, scooping my grandmother’s apple jam onto her plate. A bunch of old, sad dudes putting another one away. It had to happen sometime. He was sick. They recorded his speeches beforehand and then dubbed him. So all he had to do was open his mouth. That’s why the words sometimes missed.

They say he had a double. In the last few years he couldn’t leave his room, he couldn’t walk, but they hid it from us. I topped a piece of bread with cheese and began chewing.

Don’t repeat someone’s stupid words, Anya. It won’t do you any good, my father said, and dragged his chair closer to the TV while my mother poured tea into fragile porcelain cups and placed them back on the saucers. They made a gentle ringing sound, similar to the wall clock chimes. It was an old tea set, brought from Germany by my grandfather after the war. Even though my grandmother was opposed to drinking out of the enemy’s china, my granddad insisted on keeping it. When he died, my grandmother passed the tea set to my mother. Not much was left of the original twelve-piece setting, which also included a sugar bowl, a tiny cream pitcher, and a brewing kettle, all broken or cracked. The teacups had sculptured edges like pleats of a skirt, the same as the edges of the saucers; the pattern of large yellow and pink roses over white porcelain had faded considerably, but still displayed the beauty I found almost too delicate to touch with fingers, only lips.

They just dropped him, my father said, jumping from his chair. Oh—that’s terrible.

Dropped who? my grandmother asked while pouring tea into a saucer. She still drank her tea the old-fashioned way, slurping it bit by bit from the edges. She was a short buxom woman with long gray hair she hadn’t cut since the end of the war.

Brezhnev. My father spoke loudly, as though trying to compensate for my grandmother’s deteriorating eyesight.

That’s bad. Very bad. It’s a bad omen. All will go. It’s the end. My grandmother pulled the shawl over her shoulders, which she never took off, even in the summer months, and refastened her amber brooch. From where Milka and I sat, it looked like a giant bumblebee crawling up her breast.

Maybe it’s the beginning, my mother said. Besides, he’s dead. He can’t feel a thing.

But it’s on national TV. They’re probably showing it in America too. My father rubbed his balding head, the tufts of his light brown hair thicker on the sides. He sat back in his chair, and it moaned under his weight.

Ah, they’ll cut it out for Americans and the rest of the world, my mother said. They always do. They’ll also send the pallbearers to Siberia.

I hate how you repeat every shitty thing every shitty person says.

And I hate how you defend every Communist in this country, dead or alive.

I do not.

My mother dipped a slice of lemon in sugar and sucked on it. They’ve screwed up this country beyond salvation, and you’re defending their greedy asses. They’re like this cat. She pointed at Rasputin on the couch. Fat, complacent, neutered animals who still piss everywhere. Assholes.

My father slammed his fist on the table; the cups slid toward the edge of the saucers, and some of the tea spilled on the tablecloth. A large vein on the side of his neck became engorged, and I could almost see the blood pumping up and down. Those assholes, he said, won the war. They saved the world from evil, from fascist hell. If it hadn’t been for them, the world would’ve ceased to exist. All of it, all that is beautiful and righteous and worth living for—gone, extinguished. We would’ve either been fed to the ovens or become slaves polishing German boots and plowing the land they stole from us. It’s my land, and I’ll die before I give it to any Nazi pig. What happened after the war? Well—it’s a damned shame, but we survived. We raised this country from ruins, we made it proud once again, of its heritage and patriotism and fearlessness. We built an empire. Now that Brezhnev is dead, who’s going to rule it? Who’ll protect this place from the West?

Why do we need to be protected? my mother asked, dropping the lemon in her empty cup.

Because.

Because what? It seems that we know so little, that everything is leaden with heavy, irrevocable truths.

Light truth is no truth at all. Such is our history.

We made that history, not vice versa.

We made what we made, and neither you nor I, not even Anya or Milka, can change that. You dig a well, it fills with water, you drink from it.

Wells dry out, my mother said.

Then you dig them deeper. But you don’t replace the well. It’s crucial that you don’t replace what your ancestors built.

We do it all the time—in science and architecture. We replace old models with new ones. We improve, redesign, restructure. We want a better life.

I don’t. I have a great life. My country gave me everything. I have a well-paying job, free medical care and education, a city flat and a country house. I even have an apple orchard. How many Americans can boast about all that?

I don’t know. I’ve never met any. But they own their lives. Unlike you. You can’t even travel outside the Soviet Union. All of your possessions belong to the State. If the government wants to, it can take it all, including me or Anya.

Don’t be an idiot. Why would they want to? he asked.

Why not? Why do they do anything? Why did Stalin kill all those millions of innocent people? He didn’t spare women or children either. Girls disappeared from the streets.

Says who?

Everybody knows it. Khrushchev exposed him. Him and Beria.

Khrushchev did many things he shouldn’t have done. He paused to add more tea to his cup, plopping in three cubes of sugar and stirring vigorously. Stability, Liuba, not change, is what every country desires. Changes are governed by impulses, no matter how noble but immanently crazy. Every time this country went through a change of government, our land was bathed in blood. Nobody wants that. This country is on its third empire, starting from the Romanoffs. Three is a magical number, let’s hope it stays.

If history teaches us anything, every empire is doomed to fall.

Don’t croak. He spat three times over his right shoulder.

The wrong shoulder, comrade. You jinxed it now. My mother produced a tight smile and began gathering cups from the table. My father inched forward and turned up the volume.

Tempted as we might have been to ask questions, Milka and I remained silent; we knew better than to interfere in my parents’ arguments, to disrupt the fight that had started years ago and seemed to have continued with a steady beat. At times, it seemed that my parents would divorce before I graduated from high school; other times I was certain they would stay together always and age on the same pillow. Later, when I got older and the fights almost ceased, I found their absence disturbing and would seek any excuse to goad my parents into a war of opinions. There was heat in the room back then, and there was freedom, intimacy, and desire, and all of it mattered.

—

Do your parents fight when they have sex too? Milka asked when we went for a walk that afternoon. She wore a long gray coat and a matching hat in the shape of a dome, so from the side she resembled one of those Egyptian women—long neck, wide cheekbones, haughty nose.

I don’t think they have sex, I said, laughing.

Lucky. That’s all mine do—screw like rabbits.

How do you know?

I can hear. My mom screams because my stepdad has a huge dick. It hurts.

I tripped, and Milka reached to grab my coat sleeve. She was biting her lips red like cherries against her pale face.

Are you serious? I asked.

About what?

His, his…thing. I couldn’t bring myself to say dick; somehow it sounded so unpleasant, like raw meat.

Yeah. He likes to walk around naked afterward.

What about your mom? Doesn’t she say anything? I tried to imagine Milka’s stepdad, that bear of a man, tall and hairy, with tattooed fingers, parading naked through her flat.

She walks around naked too, Milka said, grinning. She ran to the swings and plopped her scrawny behind on a narrow metal seat.

The playground was empty, the sandbox piled with snow. I wedged onto the other seat, clutching the thick rusty chains. We swung in silence for a while; the chains groaned and creaked. The sky was gray, suppressed with clouds. Shreds of muslin-white air drifted through trees so stark, so solemn, against the bleak concrete buildings of flats. When the wind swept through the branches, they rattled like old bones. They made me think of the war, the Blockade, dead frozen bodies piled on the streets. Nearly forty years had passed, but my grandmother and my parents still talked about the war as though it’d just ended: there were all those demolished buildings to be restored, and all those deaths the country continued to mourn.

I wish my parents fought more. Milka sucked in the cold air through her teeth.

Why? What do you mean?

Nothing. It’s just that yours will cuss and scream and don’t think twice, and they both have university diplomas. Mine don’t say a rude word, and they work in a cannery.

All mine do is look for flaws in rocket drawings, when engineers are done designing them.

What if there aren’t any?

Then it’s a pass. But if another person spots a mistake, my parents can lose their jobs.

What if a flaw isn’t in the drawing but in the design itself? Milka pushed off hard, with her feet dressed in scuffed leather boots; she rose above me, and the wind muffled her words.

What design? I shouted.

But she didn’t answer, swinging higher and higher until I became scared that she would flip over. I yelled, Too high, too high. Stop.

She nodded and then jumped from her seat, flying like a goddamned bird, arms akimbo, the two sides of her unbuttoned coat stretched like wings. The sight of her body—so terrifying yet so graceful and free—made me leap from the swing too and drop straight down. I landed a few steps from my friend, who sat up, brushing snow from her face and her hands. There was blood on her palms as she reached in her coat pocket for a cigarette.

You’re crazy, I said. You could’ve…could’ve hurt yourself. Died or something.

Wouldn’t that be cool to die on the same day as our Communist Leader? She blew a stream of smoke in my face, and I waved it away.

It’s nuts, I said. Death is nothingness. I pulled the cigarette from her hands and took a short drag, and another. Shit, you scared me. Shit. Shit.

She stared at me, her face pale and fearless, a sweep of dark golden hair across her forehead. Her hat fell off, and she grabbed it and shook the snow from it before foisting it back on. She seemed perturbed, if only a little. "To die or not to die? Hmm, it’s a damn good question. The high school is staging Hamlet. They do it every year. It’ll be our turn soon. She snatched the cigarette back from me. It’s the last one. I have to steal more from my parents. While they have sex, I smoke."

You smoke at home?

Yeah. They do too, so they can’t tell.

Mine don’t smoke, but I think my dad hides it from my mom, because I can smell it on him when he comes back from work.

Ugh, why marry if you can’t even smoke in your own flat? She offered me the last few drags from her cigarette. I declined just as she said, I’ll let you smoke all you want, and you can have your own bed and half of my kingdom. She threw the smoldering butt in the snow, and it fizzled out.

Why half? I asked.

You want it all? You can have it—as much as you can carry, but don’t you complain, Anya Raneva, and don’t you stop, don’t you ever fucking stop, not even after I die.

Or what?

Or I’ll come back and haunt you.

You would, wouldn’t you?

I laughed, and Milka did too; we toppled into the snow and scooped palmsful and mashed it into each other’s faces, blinking so hard, the snow crunchy and soft at the same time. It stuck to our lashes and our skin and then started to melt, droplets of water on our cold flushed cheeks.

3

My grandmother always believed God had a design and that it took a lifetime to be able to appreciate it. My parents never openly disagreed with her, although my father used to ask my mother, How could she say such a thing? After everything she’s been through. The war? The Blockade? What kind of a design was that?

My mother would shrug and say, One has to believe in something. Life is unbearable without hope. Don’t you think that’s why she survived? Because she believed she was destined to?

No matter what design, people are the ones to implement it. We’re responsible, not God. There’s no divine prophecy in our actions.

If there is no design, no prophecy, how come she and I survived? my mother would say. When the city lost close to a million in less than nine hundred days? How come we didn’t freeze or starve to death? Weren’t eaten by the neighbors?

Dumb luck, my father would say and kiss her. Sheer, dumb, wonderful luck.

When Yuri Andropov took office in the fall of 1982, there was much hope but perhaps less luck. Little was known about him except that he’d led a group of partisans during the war and that he’d been the Soviet ambassador to Hungary during the crisis in 1956 and then the head of the KGB. There were rumors that to eliminate rivals for the job, he ordered the KGB to stage automobile accidents, heart attacks, and apparent suicides. Some also said he’d masterminded the construction of the Berlin Wall. Others insisted that Andropov was involved in the attempted assassination of the Pope in 1981, as well as the death of Brezhnev. But there were also those who said that he wasn’t such an abominable monster at all, that in his heart he admired Western culture and loved jazz, and that he was just as ill and exhausted as the system.

During his short rule, however, Andropov made attempts to reinvigorate our stagnant economy and improve work discipline and ethic. My parents left for their