THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: THE THINGS WE CANNOT CHANGE

The things we cannot change, change us.

This is what my father taught me, though I had reason  to doubt it. He said, we smash the world, or we are smashed to bits across it, like an icicle thrown upon the pavement. My father is gone now. Smashed. I knew it was coming, and likewise knew there was nothing to be done about it. Such is life.

I was his Anna. His world. And when the world was good to us, we did not change, much. Despite the turmoil (at first) and then the bother and the pomp and the science, we were papa and Anna, and we lived at the Scientific Research Sanitary Institute 7 in Novosibirsk. Papa was a Nazi, but one who was too valuable to “remove”. I was a little girl and necessary to make him work. Such is the way of things.

We hung there in the air for several years, like frozen droplets as the world slowly closed in on us.

The soldiers, the guns, the test subjects, they were the cost for what we tried our best to believe was our unchanging world. Even at 13 when we first came to the mountain, I understood this. Each thing in this life is paid for. It is paid for now, or it is paid for later. But it is always paid. The bill is always closed.

For most.

Comrade Stalin visited four times between 1950 and 1952. Once, my father took his blood under the baleful stares of those small men with the countenance of weasels. None there wished for my father’s work to conclude in success, of course, but all made a show of congratulating him, cautiously, nonetheless. They had seen the animal test subjects and films, of course. But, surely it could not be. Surely there could be no eternal life. Surely there could be no escape from this world of boxes. Surely…

There could be no eternal Stalin.

But if there could be. Then why not eternal Beria? Or Krushchev? Best to hedge one’s bets.

But my father was a very, very clever man. They believed his research had not concluded before Berlin was dead. Before mama and Emil died in the rubble. Before the wire and zones and the continent cut in half. But he could stall no longer. Stalin had grown too weak and ill. The call came down. It would be now, or the world would break him.

He wept, at the end. He could not allow this to come to pass, and he told me that I must leave. I knew what this would mean, of course. He gave me all the money he had, and the flat, gold Swiss watch, and some documents from his time in the group.

The last time I saw him, he was wiping his eyes and the room stank of something like turpentine. He forced a smile, and kissed his hand and waved at me, there through the glass, falling towards his end. When the phone rang, I left. A 16 year old girl, perhaps 40 kilos, with braids and a checked winter coat. I asked the Senior Sergeant to take me to the Novosibirsk Zoo, where I could see the tigers. We had done such things before.

He drove me in the state car, and made eyes at me in the mirror. He opened the door for me, and smiled, and was cordial despite my father’s reputation. I spoke with him. He laughed and marvelled at my Russian. He spoke some German, too.

I accepted his advances, of course. He led me back into the trees, a mittened hand outstretched... A dimpled, farm boy smile on his simpering face, with gold peg teeth that lit the shadows. He kissed me there, and smelled of cigarettes and fish.

When I seized him, I stepped clear so the freshet of blood would not hit me as I tore out his throat. It was not difficult. 

I wiped my hand upon his coat. It was only then I noticed he had stabbed me. The knife hung from my midsection like the rung in a ladder. I pulled it out slowly, and fretted at my ruined coat. Sometime later, in the winter moonlight in the trees on the edge of town, I held his head as one might hold a melon and his blank, black stare lolled up at a spray of stars.  I looked up too, as if it might show me something.

I buried the pieces of him there in the trees.

It was nothing for me to escape, of course. I had not done so, because papa could not.

I walked north across the winter fields in -20 c, bored. I was not cold. I did not feel heartsick. I thought of my father and how he would break and how I could not stop it. He had taught me well, though he had well known the rules did not apply to me. Had not applied since 1944. And I had only grown bigger and stronger since then.

Later, on a train for Mongolia, I slept for a time and dreamt of a world without disorder. A world without rules or repercussions. A world which hung, suspended in time, free of pain or decay or death like a humming dream.

I dreamt of my future.