The Blackbird Girls: Chapters 31–40

At the threshold, Oksana looked back to where Valentina and Babulya stood and gave them a tremulous smile.

Babulya settled down on the floor beside Valentina, tucking her skirt primly under her legs.

“My grandmother always says if you save someone’s life, you are beholden to her forever.”
“I think you said that backward.” Rifka sipped more tea. It still hurt, but the needles in her skin were softening. “Don’t you mean the person you save owes you for the rest of her life?”

Villages had been razed to the ground. Forests had been burned.

Farm fields had been pillaged, leaving them fallow.

Farm fields had been pillaged, leaving them fallow.

In the hole below, flecked with dirt, lay her mother’s Shabbat candlesticks and a wooden box.

He was an old man dressed in black. Something about his wizened face looked familiar.

He was a cobbler who had lived down the street from her family.

She hitched a ride with a group who was heading north and had bundled their meager possessions into a horse-drawn cart.

She wished for the oblivion of sleep, but it would not come.

There was no mention of the dead in the Kaddish. The prayer contained two parts—an affirmation of life and gratitude for God.

She wanted to tell him to leave her alone. There was something so beautiful about his smile, though, that she relented.

She told Valentina how much she missed her and Babulya and how her mother had already found a new—what was he, anyway? A companion? A suitor? She didn’t know what to call him. A new man, she decided on.

They laughed over the antics of Babulya’s little brothers, who had forever been getting into scrapes.

“Targets for what?” Valentina asked.
“Reprisals.” Babulya put away her sewing. “Some customers would have stopped coming to my father’s tailor shop. Other people would have teased us—or worse.”

Probably gave Oksana kitchen scraps to eat and threadbare clothes to wear while she swanned around in furs.

“Please,” she started to scream, but the belt cracked through the air and white-hot pain lanced her back.

The skin had split apart, leaving behind bloodied grooves.

But she’d have to put salve and bandages over the cuts, or they could become infected.

Moving gingerly, she went into the common room to get her satchel.

When she finished, she hid the letter in her chemise and slept with it close to her heart.

She thought about adding a postscript to the letter, explaining what she would do with the money if she couldn’t use it for a train ticket to Leningrad.

As the girls clamored around her, she could finally take a deep breath.

A man in a brown suit stood behind the counter, writing in a big book that looked like the account ledger Babulya used at her shop.

She felt the string grow taut—and then slacken.

The ticket collector spat on the grungy floor.

Valentina’s eyes traveled over the red and blue frocks in the window.

In the glass, Valentina saw a couple of people straggling past. Other than them, the street was empty.

Oksana had never seen a room like this before: the walls were painted white, the floorboards dark and varnished.