The Big Green Tent

PROLOGUE

Tamara sat before a runny omelet on a plate, the vestiges of sleep still clinging to her.

Trying not to yank at the living pelt, Raisa Ilinichna, her mother, nudged a wide-tooth comb through Tamara’s hair as gently as she could.

The radio disgorged strains of triumphal music, but it wasn’t terribly loud: Grandmother was asleep behind the partition wall. Then the music died out. The pause that followed was too long, and seemed to portend something. The familiar, solemn radio voice resounded: “Attention! This is Moscow speaking. Transmitting an official announcement to all radio stations of the Soviet Union.”

The comb froze in Tamara’s hair. She snapped out of her half-sleep, swallowed down the last of the omelet, and in a hoarse, morning voice said, “It’s probably just some dumb cold, and they have to go broadcasting it to the entire—”

She didn’t get to finish her thought. Raisa Ilinichna jerked Tamara’s head back with a violent tug of the comb, so that her jaw snapped shut.

“Shush!” Raisa Ilinichna’s voice was tight.

Grandmother, wearing a robe as ancient as the Great Wall of China, appeared in the doorway. She listened to the announcement, and at the end, her face and eyes shining, said, “Raisa, dear, run down to the store and get us something sweet. Today is, after all, Purim. Besides, the Big Samekh seems to have kicked the bucket.”

Tamara didn’t yet know what Purim was, or why it required something sweet; nor did she know who this Big Samekh was who had most likely kicked the bucket. She was still too young to know that in her family they had always referred to Stalin and Lenin in code, calling them conspiratorially by the first letters of their names, in an ancient secret language—Hebrew. The letters were samekh and lamed.

Meanwhile, the beloved official voice of the nation, familiar to every household in the land, was announcing an illness far worse than a cold.

* * *

Galya had already thrown on her school dress and was now looking for the pinafore. Where could it be? She fished around under the trestle bed—maybe it had fallen behind it.

Suddenly her mother burst in, with a kitchen knife in one hand and a potato in the other. She wailed in a voice so strange that Galya thought she might have cut her hand open. But there was no blood.

Her father, grouchy in the mornings, pulled his head from the pillow. “What are you yelling about, Ninka? Isn’t it too early for that?”

But her mother wailed even louder, a jumble of incoherent words streaming out.

“He’s dead! Wake up, you idiot! Get out of bed! Stalin’s dead!”

“Did they make an announcement, or what?” Her father raised his big head; a lock of hair stuck to his forehead.

“They say he’s ill. But he’s dead, I swear to God! I feel it in my bones.”

Then the incoherent wailing resumed, punctuated by a plaintive, melodramatic lament: “Lord in heaven! What will become of us?”

Wincing, her father barked, “Quit moaning, woman! How much worse can things get?”

Just then Galya’s fingers grasped the pinafore, which had indeed fallen behind the bed.

So what if it’s wrinkled. I’m not ironing it, she decided.

* * *

By morning her fever had subsided, and Olga fell into a sound sleep, undisturbed by sweating or coughing. She slept all the way through till dinnertime, when her mother came in and announced, in a stern, resonant voice, “Olga, get up! Misfortune has befallen us.”

Without opening her eyes, clutching the pillow in the hope that it was all a dream, but already feeling terror pulsing in her throat, Olga thought, War! The Fascists are attacking! War has started!

“Olga, get up!”

What a catastrophe! The Fascist hordes are trampling our holy Motherland, and everyone will get to go to the front to fight, but me …

“Stalin’s dead!”

Her heart was caught in her throat, but she still didn’t open her eyes: thank goodness it wasn’t war after all. When the war started, she would be bigger and they would take her, too. And she buried her head under the blanket, muttering, “And then they’ll take me, too,” and fell asleep to this comforting thought.

Her mother let her sleep.