The Blackbird Girls: Chapters 21–30

Then he snatched up Rifka’s hand, and together they ran from the cottage to the ramshackle barn with its thatched roof.

At last, the lady turned away and flounced out of the shop.

Meekly, Oksana took her cheese. She wished she could be stronger like Valentina.

Glare at people who dared to hit her. Laugh and smile cheekily at annoyed customers.

Fortunately, when Valentina asked Babulya that night, Babulya said she couldn’t spare them from the shop this week, so Oksana was granted a reprieve.

Deeper, she had to go deeper, someplace where the trees clustered thickly together and would take the brunt of the bombs.

Across the water, the navy ships glided, swathed in darkness.

Dimly, she heard people screaming, and then she felt underwater reverberations as the bomb burst.

The tips of her fingers brushed the low ship’s gunwale.

It was a barge, she realized. A shipping barge. Back home, she had sometimes seen them floating down the river.

And Babulya kissed and coddled her, and let her do as she wished, while Oksana had to act perfect all the time so Babulya wouldn’t throw her out.

When she woke in the morning and the final dregs of sleep hadn’t yet fled; when she was lost in her schoolwork; or when she, Oksana, and the other girls chased one another during recess, she felt as light as the birds flying overhead.

And her friend said farmers could no longer make cheese, and when milk spoiled it didn’t go sour but instead curdled into white powder.

Someday, when the poison had finally leached from the air, Oksana would be sent away to Minsk and Valentina to Kiev.

From then on, Oksana wanted to walk the bridges every night, but Babulya said it had been a special occasion and they needed their rest more than they needed to traipse around the city.

And wait until she saw the money Oksana had hidden in her winter galoshes at the back of the wardrobe.

“Have you been to the Peter and Paul Fortress yet?” he asked by way of greeting. She shook her head no. She wanted to visit the citadel, but it was far off, in another part of the city, and she didn’t want to spend her pocket money on a Metro ticket.

“A defector,” she whispered.
Oksana had heard the word many times, but she had never spoken it aloud before. To be a defector was to be a traitor, because it meant you were pledging your loyalty to another country.

“I hope they all swam to shore, too,” she said fervently.

He marched her toward the road as she tried to appeal to the others.

Her skin was tawny beige.

They were pencil sketches of people or familiar sights from Leningrad: the massive Palace Bridge; the spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress; the statues in the Summer Garden.

On nights when Oksana sketched or went for a “walk,” Valentina locked herself in the bathroom to work on Oksana’s gift, much to the annoyance of the Kozlov boys, who knocked on the door in vain and finally had to go downstairs to use another toilet.

She’d glued the pieces of the teacup back together, and then she’d soldered screws onto the cup’s surface. An old gentleman from one floor down had lent her his soldering gun.

“It would have to be the most expensive and decadent dessert, wouldn’t it? We’ll have it,” she said quickly when Valentina opened her mouth to beg.

They were tarnished, and she wiped them clean with a rag.

During the summer, when Oksana and Valentina had been free to roam the city, they had climbed onto the parapets of the arched granite bridge over the Fontanka River.

They had crossed the Palace Bridge, from which they could see the green-and-white splendor of the Winter Palace, and they had rubbed the Blue Bridge’s obelisk for luck.

Autumn sunshine shone like burnished gold on the surface of the river, and the sound of the water lapping the sides of the canal was as gentle as a lullaby.

The door gaped wide—she and Valentina must have forgotten to latch it.
Standing on the threshold was her mother.