Chapter Text
Before the mice were sound asleep,
There came the dreaded cat.
“I’ve not come here to harm you:
Let’s have a friendly chat.
In this sweet Christmas season
I would not touch a mouse.
Let Love and Peace prevail:
We’ve Christmas in our house!”
— Musevisa (“The Mouse Song”)
—Moscow: Friday morning, 20 November, 1970—
Mama said they were going to buy presents for her grandparents today. And for her aunts and uncles, and all the cousins. And something special for Miss Tanya, the woman who walks her to the school every morning so that Mama can go to work writing down what other people say.
They aren’t going to buy a present for the Soldier. Maria had asked, but Papa had frowned, and Mama had crossed herself, and that was the end of that.
They were still going to spend the day buying presents for the rest of the family, though, or they were until Uncle Pasha had talked to Papa about what it would look like to buy things so soon. Then Papa had agreed that it was too early and it would look bad, and put his foot down when Mama tried to say no one would have to know. Papa has a reputation to uphold in the government, and Uncle Pasha knows all about that because he has a government job, too.
And that’s why Maria is walking to the school instead of buying things in the Beriozka shops. She holds onto Miss Tanya’s gloved hand with her own mittened hand and jumps over the patches of ice that are still frozen because the sun hasn’t turned them into slush yet. She doesn’t miss a single landing.
Most mornings, Miss Tanya laughs when she jumps and even dares her to make bigger jumps over puddles when it’s warmer out. Today, though, Miss Tanya is not laughing. Maria wonders if she knows about the presents and the way Papa said they were not buying any of them yet. It had made Maria not laugh, learning that they wouldn’t go to the shops after all. It had even made her shout, and stomp her feet, and be sent to bed without dessert.
They get to the corner where they always turn right to get to the school, and Maria can’t wait to get there, because it’s very cold outside and her scarf is slipping from all the jumping over ice patches, letting in cold air that Mama says will make her sick. But they go left, instead.
Maria tugs at Miss Tanya’s hand and says that they’re going the wrong way, but Miss Tanya frowns at her and says that they are going somewhere new today, somewhere fun that’s an exciting secret. She doesn’t look excited about it, though. She looks like something has scared her, like her toes are bare and the cat is under the sofa waiting to bite them, but she doesn’t know when the cat will jump out.
Grown-ups aren’t supposed to be afraid, but Maria knows that they can be. She knows because her mama is afraid of the Soldier, like there’s a tiger under the sofa, not a little housecat, and the tiger wants to bite off more than her toes, wants to eat her right up and not leave anything behind.
Whenever they visit her grandparents in Perm and the Soldier is there at Grandfather’s shoulder, still and silent, Mama stays behind Papa until she finds a room with a door, and tries not to look at the Soldier, like looking at him will make him look at her, like it will make him angry. She tries to make Maria hide with her, but Maria slips out of the room as soon as she can, every time. And when they get home, Mama argues with Papa, yelling about dangerous wild beasts and frayed leashes and how the Soldier will snap and kill them all.
It doesn’t make sense to her for Mama to be afraid of the Soldier, though, because the Soldier is really nice. He’s not a tiger at all. He only looks like one. He got her down from an apple tree once, when she climbed up a ladder and then up into the tree, and then the wind blew the ladder over. He knows where the best snacks are hidden no matter what house they’re visiting, and how to give her the snacks without her parents seeing. He calls her myshka, little mouse, and he lets her pull herself up to sit on his shoulders and hang onto his hair while he walks endless patrol around the dacha, even though she’s supposed to act like a lady and keep her hands and her feet to herself.
And he taught her how to bite people, really, really hard. “Like you mean it, myshka,” he said. “Bite down until you taste salt and metal,” he said, “and then don’t let go. Make them hurt,” he said. “If they want to hurt you, hurt them first. Make them sorry.”
She’s not supposed to bite people, though. She’s seven years old now, and that’s too big to bite people. Back when she was just four, before the Soldier had taught her, she bit one of the other kids at the nursery when he hugged her and wouldn’t let go. Mama had been angry, and Papa had been stern, and they had both told her that she should never, ever bite anyone again. For any reason.
But after that, when Papa had dropped her off for a summer-long visit with her grandparents at the dacha with the apple trees, the Soldier had overheard Papa complain about how it was bad for his reputation if his daughter went around biting kids for hugging her. And later, while he was stacking apples in a crate for Papa to take back with him to Moscow, the Soldier had told her that if someone grabs her, she should bite them. Hard. Like she means it.
And then he had taught her how to do it.
She hasn’t bitten anyone else, though. Not since the Soldier rolled up his sleeve and held out his right arm in the apple orchard and taught her how to do it right, showed her how to bite as many times as it took for her to get it perfect, and then helped her rinse her mouth out so she wouldn’t get blood on her dress. It’s their secret, that she knows how to bite people who grab her.
Miss Tanya isn’t grabbing her, not really. She’s just afraid and is holding her hand really tight as they cross the street and go the wrong way, away from the school. Mama is afraid of the Soldier, so maybe Miss Tanya is, too. Maria looks around for him, and doesn’t see him. She hadn’t thought she would. She only sees him when Grandfather is around, and even then, not always. Last spring when they visited, the Soldier wasn’t there, and when she asked about him, Grandfather had said he was busy sleeping for the whole week.
Since the Soldier isn’t here, Maria wonders what Miss Tanya is afraid of.
At the end of the street, where there’s another chance to turn a different way, Miss Tanya stops, and they stand there at the corner for a long time, watching cars and buses go by. Miss Tanya doesn’t let her hand go. She keeps on squeezing, harder and harder the longer they stand there.
The wind picks up a little, and it’s a lot colder when they just stand there than when they were walking and Maria was jumping over icy patches. Maria says that she’s cold, but Miss Tanya just shivers and holds her hand even tighter. Maria’s hand hurts inside her mitten.
The lights keep changing colors, and the cars keep driving past, and Miss Tanya snaps at her to be still and stop wiggling around like a fish on a line. Maria just wants to go inside where it’s warm, and she wants Miss Tanya to let go of her hand so that her fingers will stop hurting.
Then one of the cars doesn’t drive past them. It slows down as it comes closer and then stops right in front of them. The door opens, and Miss Tanya brings Maria around in front of her and pushes her into the car before she can see more than a little bit.
There’s a man with yellow hair in the back of the car, behind the driver. Maria doesn’t want to get in the car with him, but Miss Tanya shoves her further in and climbs in after her, and then she’s stuck in between them while the door closes and the car starts to drive away. She tries to get as far away from the man as she can, and ends up in Miss Tanya’s lap.
Miss Tanya is saying things to the two men in the car, telling them that she’s done what they wanted, telling them that Maria is just a little girl, asking them to promise they won’t hurt her. Miss Tanya says that they’ll give Maria back once they have their money, and then it will all be over. But she says it like she’s asking, like she isn’t sure that will happen, but she hopes it will.
The driver doesn’t say anything, but he looks at Maria in the mirror and grins wide under his oily black mustache, and she doesn’t like his face at all. His eyes are hungry, and he’s a tiger under the sofa. He’ll eat her up. The man with the yellow hair is laughing and saying “Sure, sure, bro, just until we have the money.” Maria doesn’t like his face, either, or his laugh, but he’s not a tiger. He’s just a really mean housecat, the kind that will puff up real big and growl, but can’t eat you.
Maria starts to ask who they are, where they’re going, why they aren’t going to school, but Miss Tanya hisses at her to stay quiet, and Miss Tanya is so, so afraid. She pulls Maria closer to her, wraps her arms around Maria’s waist, and whispers into her hair that everything will be just fine if she’s a good girl, a little lady, quiet and obedient and not making a fuss. They only want her Papa to send them money, and then she will go home. But she must not make too much noise.
There’s something about Miss Tanya’s fear that spreads like spilled kompot, thick and gushing out onto everything and making Maria feel as cold inside her ribs as she did while standing outside in the wind. She wants to be very small, smaller than she already is. She wants to be so small that she falls into the crack between the seat cushions and none of the grown-ups in the car can reach her—not even Miss Tanya.
She is trying to be very small when the car stops moving and the man driving it honks the horn three times, short-short-long. Maria pulls away from Miss Tanya enough to press her face to the window. There is a building, a big one with a wide open door that could fit two whole cars in it. The door is all dark inside, even though it’s morning and there’s lots of light outside. The windows are all dark, too, lined up and small at the top of the building. Some of them are covered up with wood.
For a while, there are no people around anywhere, just the two men in the car with her, and Miss Tanya. Maria cranes her neck to look out the back of the car, and there is another building there, just as open and empty and dark as the one in front of them. There are also rusty cars with parts of them missing. The winter slush over everything makes it look sad and cold, but Maria thinks it would still look sad, even in the summer. Sad, and scary.
There’s a movement in the doorway of the building in front of them, and two more men come out from the darkness, wearing big, gray coats, with their knit hats pulled low over their foreheads. They don’t look any friendlier than the driver does. One of them has a really crooked nose and his face looks like a lumpy potato. The other one’s face is already red, even though he just came outside and hasn’t been in the cold very long. They look like the kind of people her parents warn her not to look at in the eyes, because they will do bad things to her if she does. Tigers, she thinks.
Maria looks down, just in case, and then closes her eyes to be sure. This must be what Mama feels when she’s in the same room as the Soldier. Don’t look at them, she thinks. Don’t let them see you, don’t make them angry. Be small, be quiet, be a mouse. Tigers don’t bother with mice…
“But if they try to hurt you,” the Soldier’s voice drifts through her thoughts, soft and low, tender but strong, with absolute certainty in every solid word. “If they hurt you, hurt them back. Like you mean it. Make them regret touching you.”
Maria swallows, and lifts her head, opens her eyes. Even a mouse has teeth. And mice are quick. They can get out of tight places and run away and hide where no tigers can find them. She can get out of the car. Maybe go inside one of the dark buildings, find a little place to be still and quiet in until they give up. She’s good at that game.
The driver gets out, and opens the door for the man with the yellow hair. Maria scrambles over, but they close the door before she can get through it, and she can’t find a handle with her mittened hands. Then Miss Tanya disappears from the other side, and now Maria is stuck in the car alone, with no way out. She tries to find a handle, or the crank for rolling down the window, but there is nothing for her to grab or pull on.
Outside in the yard, Miss Tanya is surrounded by tigers and looks very afraid. But she is also glaring, with her eyes narrow and her lips flat, and there is a lot of talking that Maria can’t hear. She wishes that she was at school right now, surrounded by her friends and the teacher, and drinking tea with jam in a warm room. She wonders, as she crawls into the front of the car to check those doors, whether anyone even knows that she isn’t where she’s supposed to be. Did the school call Papa when she didn’t get there on time? Did they call Mama? Or did Miss Tanya already tell the school that Maria was going somewhere else today? Maybe everyone thinks that she is in the right place already.
Miss Tanya is gone when Maria looks out the driver’s window, her mitten in her mouth as she tries to work her fingers under the handle to get the door open. It’s locked, but it was locked when the driver got out earlier. It must just be heavy. She pulls and pulls, watching as the men in the yard—now just three of them—have an argument with lots of gestures.
Maria gives up on the handle and looks at the door. It has to open. It opened for the driver. She looks at the crank and thinks about rolling the window down, but they would see her doing that before she could get out that way. She runs her fingers along the door, feeling for something else she can pull on, and there’s a knob on the top. It takes both hands, and she has to pull off her second mitten to get a good grip, but the knob finally pops up with a click that sounds loud in the silence inside the car, and then she goes back to the door handle.
It pulls out this time, and she flings her body against the door to open it, letting in cold, cold air, and sending her sprawling on the grit of the yard, landing hard on her knee and shoulder. She scrambles to her feet, but the lumpy potato-faced man has her arm in his hand before she gets more than a few steps away. She tries to wiggle her arm out of her coat and maybe get away like that, but his grip is much harder than Miss Tanya’s was.
He grabs her so hard she is afraid he’ll squeeze her arm into two pieces, and yanks her up off the ground and into the air so that her feet dangle and she can’t do more than kick lightly at his knees. It irritates him, but doesn’t seem to hurt him at all. She twists and hollers and tries to kick harder, but he’s holding her out at arm’s length now, and she can’t even reach him, and her shoulder hurts so bad.
Then her feet are on the ground again, but her arm is behind her, and she can’t move without her shoulder catching fire. The men and the yard and the mean buildings and the cold, gray sky all blur together through her tears, and she can’t even understand what they are saying because her shoulder hurts too bad to listen. She can hear what they mean, though, just from the tone of their voices. She knows they are saying bad things, that they are angry at her.
The man twisting her arm lets go, and the man with the red face reaches out and grabs her chin in his hand, and breathes smoky breath at her face, tells her they will hurt her if she tries to run again. He says that they are going to take her out to the country, where no one will find her, and they will keep her there until her papa sends them money. And if she tries to run away, they will break her legs.
He asks her if she understands, and she tries to nod. She doesn’t want her legs to be broken.
Then the man with the mustache, who drove her and Miss Tanya there, says that she’d be good for something even if her papa doesn’t pay. Says that she’s pretty and they shouldn’t even bother with the ransom money. Says they can start her young and break her in before selling her on the market for a lot more. Says that if she’s good to them, maybe they’ll be good to her and make it hurt less. Says they can skip the waiting and the hiding and start now, since she’s learned her lesson.
Maria doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but she knows that she should be a good girl. That she should be a little lady. That she should be a mouse, small and quiet, still and unseen. That if she is good, a lady, a mouse, then maybe they will not grab her arm again, or twist her shoulder again, or break her legs. Or break her in. Or sell her on the market. But even if she doesn’t know what he is talking about, something in his voice says tiger, says danger, says he wants to hurt her, says that she does not want to start now. And even a mouse has teeth.
“Like you mean it, myshka.”
The man holding her jaw is not wearing gloves, and so when her teeth close around the soft V of flesh between his thumb and his first finger, she doesn’t taste cotton or wool or leather. She tastes skin, and then salt, and then metal rushing hot and liquid across her tongue as the man shouts and tries to yank his hand back. But she knows how to bite people who grab her. How to bite them hard, like she means it. Her teeth pull and pull as the man swears at her, and the meat of his hand rips apart like a ribbon of gristle in a chunk of beef, tough and catching deep between her teeth.
Then everything is suddenly bright and painful in her head, and there’s a sound like when Grandmother hits the Soldier’s face for letting Maria get leaves in her hair at the dacha, but it’s Maria’s face that lights up hot before everything is dark and quiet and still.
—Route M8 toward Pereslavl-Zalessky: Friday afternoon, 20 November, 1970—
Maria isn’t sure where she is when she opens her eyes. She’s not even sure she really does open her eyes, because it’s darker than it’s ever been before, even in her little bedroom with the door shut all the way. There’s not even a line of light under the door, or at the edges of a window. And there is a lot of bumping and movement, almost like riding in the tractor at the dacha. And it smells. Smells like oil and plastic and pee.
She tries to sit up, and there’s a crinkly plastic sound like a tarp as she squirms, but everything hurts, and her arms and legs don’t move because they are tied together at her wrists and ankles. Her mouth tastes gross, like she was licking a spoon that didn’t have any food on it except salt, and there’s a hard knot of something scratchy between her teeth, pressing her tongue down. When she tries to reach up to touch her lips and get the knot out, her arms hurt even more than before. Her shoulder throbs and aches, and each bump is fire shooting through it, even when she doesn’t try to move it. And her upper arm feels like a huge bruise, thump-thumping in time with her heart.
For a long time, she isn’t sure where she is, or how she got there, or why her arms and legs are tied up, or why her face hurts, or what is in her mouth that tastes so terrible. She tries to count, because Mama says that counting will help her think. She gets all the way up to 100 and has to start over when there’s a bigger bump than before and her shoulder gets knocked and she loses count.
She doesn’t know how many times she’s counted to 100 before she remembers that Miss Tanya took her to a new place instead of school, and that there were bad men and a car, and that they hurt her arm and told her that they were going to break her legs, and she bit one of them.
Now they are taking her to the country, and if she tries to run again, they will break her legs, just like they said. Maria tries to make her face do what Miss Tanya’s face had done in the yard between the cold, dark buildings with the empty windows, pinching her eyes nearly shut and making her lips into a tight, angry line. But all her face does is crumple up until she’s sobbing wetly into the coiled cables and grimy, tarp-covered carpet in the pitch black darkness of the car trunk.