The Girl in the Water by Joseph Howse

Author:Joseph Howse [Howse, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / Literary, FICTION / Coming of Age, FICTION / World Literature / Canada / 21st Century, Modern and contemporary fiction (post c. 1945), Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary, Narrative theme: Coming of age, Narrative theme: Sense of place, Narrative theme: Journeys and voyages, Soviet Union, Ukraine, Estonia, c 1980 to c 1989
ISBN: 9780995287846
Publisher: Nummist Media
Published: 2022-09-17T00:00:00+00:00

7: Witnesses

If her father’s testament and promises stayed on Nadia’s mind, then so did her mother’s, which followed. Is it fairness, Nadia would wonder, or simply paralysis, which makes me hear one and the other, over and over again?

She surprised herself, though, by pressing a question on her mother, so soon after asking her father why he played the matchmaker for Nastya.

The moment Nadia chose was at the end of the day on Monday. Katya had gone to work that day and left Misha and Nadia to each other’s company—two quiet walks and several quiet games of chess, no new revelations, a nap, and hours of silent reading. (Misha was reviewing his book on Naval Aviation, as well as the deck of cards from Giorgi with technical details of various planes and helicopters, in preparation for the upcoming carrier tour on Air Fleet Day.) When Katya got home in the evening, she ranted about the criminality at the factory: the theft of her thermos of chicken soup, her suspicion of a group of plotters led by the forewoman, the reappearance of the thermos but filled with dishwater instead of soup, hidden laughter.

“These Ukrainians,” Katya fumed, “every last one of them would steal the flesh off her own child. That’s what I told them.”

Katya took over the dinner preparations that Nadia had begun. They had a soupy chicken stew in a bed of mashed potatoes. Misha took more painkillers with the meal and, when he had finished, he pleaded exhaustion and went to bed. Soon, he was snoring. Nadia persuaded her mother to go lie down in Nastya’s bed. At last, after clearing the table and leaving the dishes to soak, Nadia went to sit in her own bed with a copy of And Quiet Flows the Don. She closed the door behind her and read to Katya for awhile—of cossacks and village gossip and a woman beaten to death for alleged witchcraft. She left a premature baby, who grew to become a hot-tempered old man who liked to fish and smoke, with a disobedient young son who liked to fish and flirt.

At the end of a chapter, Nadia put down the book and asked, “What do you and Lieutenant Colonel Sokolov do together?”

“What do we do?” Katya echoed.

“I imagined you might do lunch or museums,” Nadia said. I’d better be careful. She licked her lips and flicked her fingers through her hair. “Do you meet up with him here in Odessa?”

“No.” Katya sat up and, with a listless gaze, faced her daughter. “No, we haven’t met at all since we got back. Some of the time he’s away in Sevastopol or at the flight school in Stavropol.”

“Or even at sea,” Nadia supposed.

“Yes, he would be, sooner or later,” Katya concurred.

To hell with this, I’ll push it. “I just knew his friendship meant a lot to you when you were lonely at the sanatorium.”

“Perhaps.” Katya’s hands seemed to freeze to each other in her lap and likewise she squeezed her eyes shut.

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