The Blackbird Girls: Chapters 11–20

Oksana pressed a hand to her roiling stomach.

Tall buildings rose like sentinels in the night.

In the light from the street lamps, the puddles gleamed yellow and green, as though someone had poured paint in them. Oksana had never seen water shine with that strange luminescence before.

Blinking blearily at them, she pushed her disheveled blond hair out of her face.

“Quickly,” Masha Petrovna chided, nudging Oksana into the washroom.

“There aren’t any curtains.” Oksana sounded panicked.
“For pity’s sake, this is hardly a time to be modest!”

A red patch of skin marred the back of her left shoulder. A few black dots lay scattered across the damaged flesh.

“I’m afraid your accommodations will be a bit rough tonight,” Masha Petrovna said, coming to the sofa with her arms full of blankets. “You’ll have to sleep on the floor.”

“Clothes,” she said triumphantly, dropping a parcel wrapped in brown paper on the table.

Masha Petrovna’s larder had been nearly empty, so they had made do with canned vegetables and soup.

“We can spend the night outside, if we have to.”
“Like vagrants?” Oksana had never slept outdoors before.

“Come,” Valentina said, and together they followed her mother into the encroaching darkness.

Was her grandmother a criminal? A political agitator? Whatever she did, it must have been terrible for Mama to cut her own mother out of their lives.

Her mother shouted to be heard above the din.

Fields had given way to a city: dilapidated factories, blocks of apartment towers, and trash-strewn streets.

And here were her parents on their wedding day, smiling, standing in front of a taxi whose grille was bedecked with ribbons.

She dipped into a curtsy, which her grandmother acknowledged with a curt nod.

Oksana was glad she didn’t have to address this aloof lady as “grandmother.”

They stepped out of the station, and the city exploded all around them: buses trundled past, belching exhaust; a tram rumbled closer, its cables shooting off blue sparks; and automobiles sped by, sleek lines of gleaming metal.

Children circled an old man and his ice cream cart. A couple of mangy cats slunk between the children’s legs, hoping someone would spill.

The buildings were little more than piles of bricks and mortar that had been thrown together; in several places, bricks had fallen off, exposing the plaster beneath.

She unlocked the door and led them into a dingy entrance hall.

“I’ll incise and drain the skin around the wound,” the doctor said to Babulya.

The hospital was noisy: machines beeped, voices hummed, and gurneys squeaked in the hallways.

After they left the hospital, she saw red pennants hanging down the sides of buildings.

Dozens of tanks, decorated with red bunting, and hundreds of people wearing red ribbons streamed through the streets.

“My mother told me about them,” Valentina said in a grudging tone.

As they ambled alongside the canals, the sun rose higher, gilding the windows in the elegant buildings, turning them into sheets of golden glass.

She felt something rise up in her chest, as delicate as a plume of smoke.

“Marrow is a sort of tissue deep inside your bones,” Yekaterina Federovna explained. “It makes blood cells. People need transfusions to replace dying or damaged bone marrow.”