Work Text:
In the final days of her pregnancy, Lara asked whether Pasha wanted a daughter or son. As if she could somehow control the outcome.
That evening, she had hummed out the question—idle smalltalk—while stirring the supper pot atop the stovetop. No doubt she hoped to draw him into conversation, hear some excitement in his voice.
By then her belly was big enough to make their humble cottage in Gradov feel even smaller than the twenty worn paces of its single room. Everywhere she moved—from rustic kitchen to scuffed table to warped window—she waddled with a hand always draped affectionately over the visible reminder of their soon-to-expand family.
“A boy or a girl, Pasha?” she repeated without any impatience, just a soft raise of voice. It was something she often had to do when he was lost in his own thoughts. “What would you prefer?”
Looking up from where he graded papers at the table, he stiffened a bit.
She followed him from Moscow to Gradov. She, who had once talked of scholarships and ambitions and whatever futures she could earn from the unfair system well-stacked against her, she followed him.
But, where she once had her dreams, now she tended fires, mended clothing, and stared out the window at the emptiness of the mountains in the distance. Even if she never so much as hinted at the fact, Pasha felt that he’d taken something from her. All his life, he’d derived a fierce dignity from the quotidian of survival and its accompanying mundanities. Only after marriage had he considered that the same might not be true for Lara.
He looked back down to his papers, the ink of his correcting pen scratching once more on the pages. The issue, he had decided some months ago, was the tone with which she spoke to him. It was kindly, gentle. The voice of a patient sister or beloved aunt. It was love but not passion.
Too late, Pasha had understood the difference between the two.
“The sexes can serve the party equally,” he finally replied, neutral “Marx said that—"
She laughed—sweet, not mocking— and looked back to where he sat. “Oh nevermind what Marx said. What does Pasha Antipov say?”
He cleared his throat. He pictured a little revolutionary, sitting at his feet and listening to stories of injustice and social wrong. “Perhaps a boy,” he finally said with a shrug. “Not that I really care.”
Though he had meant his words as a show of tolerance towards any sex of offspring, she quickly turned her face back to the stovetop. He’d offended her, made it seem like he was flippant about her earnest question, flippant about her pregnancy.
Once more the needling sense of inadequacy. A good husband would know what to say to her. At very least, he’d go to her and reassure her that he cared tremendously about their upcoming child.
Not sure what to say, Pasha stayed in place. In their silence, the only sound was his pen scratching out.
“Dinner,” she announced after another minute, ladling the contents of the pot into a bowl. Any second of her melancholy was now replaced by a tone of faux chipperness.
They ate in silence that night, as they did most nights.
A few days later, Katya was born plump and screaming.
After the delivery, the midwife met Pasha outside. A tender old woman who had seen a thousand births and deaths, she said her usual script, honed from years. With a smile, she praised his daughter’s healthy lungs and his wife’s fortitude. Both were healthy and recovering. Pasha nodded at the news, relieved but unemotive.
Smiling up at Pasha when he entered the room, Lara passed him the swaddled baby. To see his daughter for the first time, he fought back the needling (and, admittedly, biologically impossible) moment of panic that the little girl had the barest resemblance to Victor Ippolitovich. Once he overcame that weak-minded moment, though, Pasha was pleased. At least inasmuch as pleasure of any sort could still stir him. He felt more of himself slipping away with every passing self-doubt.
But maybe that was where it ended. He was a distant husband and father. The more he understood his distance, the more he felt powerless over it. He could not laugh with Lara over dinner or share anecdotes about his day. Instead, he ate silently without tasting his food and slept without feeling rested.
Pasha graded papers. Pasha taught his students. Pasha embodied the quiet humility of provincial life, that which he had always sought to emulate from his political idols. But there was nothing more. Not happiness or glee. What contentment he felt was fleeting and wispy, too quick to escape even as he tried to clench it.
Within him existed jealousies and malcontent over old wounds which had scabbed but never fully scarred.
Some days he would see his wife looking curiously out the window, and he would wonder if she now saw the milkman or the mailman or the street-beggar. He would wonder if she studied others with the quiet stirrings found only in a woman who existed in a passionless world.
“You’re happy?” he would ask in a probing tone.
Rocking or nursing their child, she would just look at him in a quiet surprise. “Why, of course I am!”
She meant it. That was perhaps the worst part. She was happy. Even as she looked out the window, looked at the rest of the world taken from her by men who tugged her from place to place, she now saw peace in the stability of marriage.
So long as she had him at evening supper, at morning breakfast, at the Sunday market, and all the familial moments in between—she was happy. He could be aloof and untender. He could read her Marx instead of poetry, bring her political pamphlets instead of jewelry. She didn’t seem to mind. He never struck her, never forced himself upon her, never degraded or insulted her.
He never did anything much really. For her, that was enough. She looked at their daughter with the pure love of a mother. She looked at him with the dear love of a relation. She looked at the window with the unmet passions of a woman who had been sold off too young.
And Pasha, visited by the mental monsters of his own inadequacies, drowned himself in ideals of attainable manhood. Marital happiness was too distant a concept, but the revolution seemed tangible, solvable.
The recruiter came to Gradov.
Young men went, mostly.
Some were students of Pasha’s, those boys too boorish or undisciplined for any chance at university. For the sake of wartime adventure, they lied about their ages, embellished fourteen or sixteen to seem older. Wanting his quotas met, the recruiter pretended not to notice their high-pitched voices or hairless cheeks.
Few married men went. Why should they? They had jobs to work, children to raise, wives to love, private lives to live.
Private lives to live.
“You’re happy?” Pasha asked Lara that morning.
By the heat of the stove, warming the interior chill which had persisted into late springtime, the family sat. It was Sunday, early.
The baby was asleep in her cradle. With his foot, Pasha had rocked her while he sat with an unopened book atop his knee.
At his question, Lara had glanced up from the hoop of her sewing. She smiled. A kindly, gentle smile which held all the love in the world but none of its ardor.
“Of course I am happy, Pasha,” she assured.
“I’m not,” he said it flatly, without any sort of accusation.
Perhaps sensing the sudden tension of the room, Katya stirred and started to cry out. Pasha reached down to pick her up.
Lara was just staring at him.
“It’s not your fault,” he added, gentler. In his own way, he did love her. There was no need for harshness in his tone, no need to spoil any of their last moments together.
He went to enlist before the afternoon sun was up. She didn’t stop him.