Lenin Falling

by Peter Rondinone

Nora Beletsky sat at her kitchen table, the Florida Sentinel on her lap, tears going down her fat cheeks, dumb, dumb tears; crying first thing in the morning. It was so dumb. She clutched a mug of iced tea, but the sun through the pink curtains was already hot on her hands

The TV was on, like every morning, even before she brushed her teeth. She had a new VCR, but it was too confusing -- a present from the big shot in New York City. Of six children, he was the only one who still spoke to her.

The crying started with the 6 O'clock news. She saw Lenin's statue toppled in Moscow's Red Square, a crowd wrapped in Russian furs and wool, steam rising from open mouths. The Sentinel captured the moment on the front page: Lenin wrecked on the cobblestone, his chin and arms cracked off like a Greek ruin. Nora would've taped the news. She would've used freeze frame to re-live the moment, the great thud, over and over again. But she couldn't get the damn VCR to work, thanks to the big shot, the professor.

When Zed saw the statue on CNN, he was struck by the eight story crane and the cable around Lenin's neck, ripping his monolithic feet from a marble base, toppling him with a great wheeze and a crash. He wanted to call his mother immediately, to know what she thought of Lenin falling. But he had piles of papers to grade and he fell asleep on the couch.

He had no idea his mother was crying. And if anyone told him, he would've never reconciled it with the woman who raised him.

When he was thirteen, someone broke into his apartment. His sisters shrieked when they discovered their underwear and training bras scattered all over the house. "We were robbed." Everyone felt violated. The crook left his cigarette ashes and butts in everyone's bed. Zed's younger brothers wept out loud and thrashed their pillows to the floor. Zed cried harder than his brothers when he saw that his bronze chess medals were gone. He pinned them above his bed on a buckskin pelt. (That was gone too.)

But his mother, who had gold, a ring and a bracelet, didn't even sniffle. "It's not the end of the world," she said.

Zed's Dad was not amused. He was outraged. Why hadn't they seen? Why didn't they hear? When the family went into the building, the neighbors sat on stoops. They laughed. And one kid in a tee-shirt called out: "Hey-ho! You people own a green radio?" That sounded like Dad's. How did he know?

The detectives knew. Someone saw something but no one was talking. The cigarette butts found on Zed's stoop matched those in the apartment.

"It's because we're white," said Dad. Because the others moved out, Zed's was the last white family in the South Bronx. Zed's father was always too sick (with Graves disease) to work.

Not that every black person in the neighborhood hated them. It just felt like that. It was the era of Malcolm X ("white people are devils"), and Black Power. It was the 1960's and the riots, the Black rage and fire storms burned in the Bronx too. Every friday at Zed's school was Kill Whitey Day. And every night, gangs like "The Turbans" roamed the streets, ducking tear gas and the national guard. They pulled the whites -- the bus drivers and shop keepers -- into the gutter for a good beating, just like the beatings they saw on their news, the beatings of the Freedom Riders in places like Birmingham, Alabama.

Maybe, just maybe, that brought tears to their eyes, the black people who tormented Zed's Dad. But Dad only wept for himself. And the one person who never wept was his mother.

"When I was in Russia," she said,"the Germans came and took everything. They put us on a train, in the winter; and we ate snow and went to prison. So don't cry. We still have a roof above and food to cook."

But to Zed, this fat woman with the sagging belly under a flowered house dress, this woman with a triple chin, and a fat ass could not be the same woman (the starving one, the cold one) he'd heard about. A woman in the middle of a war...behind barbed wire. To Zed, this was the woman who gorged herself on Russian meatballs and red cabbage borscht, swimming with gobs of sour cream. At that time, he didn't give a shit about Russians or Germans.

Pavel and his comrades lay in a ditch in a field, their rifles caked with mud and horse manure from the plows that had furrowed the corn into tight rows, tight enough to give them cover from the German snipers.

Every time a gun crackled, Pavel wondered if maybe the Panther Line was collapsing, maybe General Von Kleist and his 7th Panzer Division halted the invasion into the Ukraine.

All day long, Pavel lay in the mud while insects teemed over the dead bodies the German's left scattered at the edge of the field. Women and children were blown to bits by machine guns, their carcasses dumped into mass graves, huge pits. They were Jews, rounded up in town squares. But they came to the Ukraine for Stalin. He promised a Zionist homeland if they cultivated the swamps on the Sea of Azov.

But now, the Jews lay slaughtered and their skulls blown from the pits not far from Pavel. But he lay absolutely still, like his comrades, aware that the slightest movement might draw fire from a sharp eyed sniper.

Pavel stared at an ear of corn, the fat kernels oozing yellow juice. He hadn't eaten in 2 days. His lips were parched, his head half-buried in the mud as he tried to think of something else. Something else: but only the screams of children tossed into the flames returned to him. The next day, the bodies were arranged in the pattern of a swastika.

He knew they were surrounded. If he crawled, where were the Russians? He stared at the corn. And it was the corn that got him to his feet, the insects dropping from under his belt buckle. His comrades looked up and swore they saw a dead man. They were frightened for themselves too. It was common, in battle, to see a bullet pierce a man's face, come out the other side, and kill someone else. Now the snipers knew their position. They cursed Pavel. They spit.

Then they listened to his footsteps rustling in the corn stalks, thrashing louder instead of fainter as if the whole world were thrown off balance, as if Pavel himself were expanding. He just walked off, clutching a corn cob like a mad man, his rifle fallen to the ground. And the only thing Pavel heard, faintly, was his comrades singing an old Russian song. Then, shells exploded and the singing stopped.

The sun was definitely hotter. Nora raised her bulk, straining from her seat for the cord to draw the kitchen curtains more tightly. Sweat drenched her arms, and the simplest effort left her wheezing, and choking. No diet pills, no diet, nothing did anything for her; so she resigned herself to fat, to eating boxes of Dunkin Donuts with a quart of milk and a pizza before bed.

At the kitchen window, she put cold water on her neck, and onto the thumb prints around her eyes from all the dumb crying. Her face burned from the sun. She gripped two chairs, like a walker, to brace herself at the sink, to keep her mass from dragging her to the floor. She took baby steps, the chairs beside her, certain she'd make it to the TV in time to change the channel to CNN Headline News.

She wanted to see Lenin falling, crash to the ground again and again. She wanted to hear the new Russian democrats declare their goal, again and again, to carry out a Nuremberg II in the Communist Party, "a leagl accounting in the press of the atrocities of the Stalin era."

She was reminded of the day her father walked through the door. She and her mother cowered behind the living room couch, their hands over their ears while the Germans bombed the town. They'd heard the stories: Germans raped Russian girls.

But it was her Dad who walked in. It was her dad who said the Germans had a truck in the town square waiting for them. It was her Dad who put his heavy hands over her ears and carried her through the smoke filled streets, the buildings gutted by fire, everything blown to bits.

She was fourteen. Still, when the train left Russia, she was sure she was big enough and strong enough to take care of her mother and father (if she had to). And it was the corn that got her father to his feet and the corn he yelled about as he hurried his family toward the German train, faster and faster as the German tanks swarmed all around. It was the corn that got him to strip off his Russian uniform, to stand naked before the German guards as they sealed the cattle car while Nora crouched in a corner. That was when she saw her father's penis. He had to use the one pail, like everyone else. When he noticed Nora looking, he smacked her so hard, a front tooth fell out.

And now Nora remembered the corn too, the piles in open fields, left to rot by Stalin's Red Guard. He'd ordered peasants onto collective farms. Its was part of his plan to raise money to turn Russia from an agricultural backwater into an industrial empire. But the peasants burned their crops instead; so Stalin's men confiscated all grain not grown on the collectives. He withheld farm equipment and seeds. Anyone caught stealing food from the military stockpile was shot. By 1931, there wasn't a single hen left in the Ukrainian villages. And so the poor begged from the poor. The starving begged from the starved. And Nora saw how this starvation wiped every trace of childhood from the faces of the Ukrainian children, their limbs dangling from balloon-like bellies. Even newborns looked old, their skin erupting into festering sores.

But Nora's family was lucky. Originally from Moscow, they were Russian settlers -- and not Ukrainians. Nora's father was already part of Satlin's dream. He worked in a Russian factory and so his family was entitled to a daily diet of salt fish and a kilogram of black bread. But when Nora went to town, she watched women and children crawling around on all fours; some only stopping to prick their blisters before they dragged themselves to beg some more.

Then by the second winter, even Nora's family began to eat anything at all. The government ration left them hungry and weak. So they caught mice and rats. They ground their bones into flour. Sometimes they ate earthworms and sliced fur into a noodle of some kind.

When it was over, 5 million Ukrainians had starved to death in five years. Nora didn't need to ask why her father dragged his family into the German train, begging the Germans to take him to a prison outside Russia. She understood what corn meant.

And when she arrived in Germany, 25 miles outside of Munich, she was glad to hear Mr. Otto, the factory owner, tell them that for the rest of the war they would stay in thisworker's camp, making railroad ties for the Third Reich. They were volunteers, behind barb wire and machine guns. They'd be fed.

Then they were given cardboard signs with numbers to hang around their necks, and they were photographed before they went to their barracks. Men, women and children -- sixty people-- slept in one room with a single pot belly stove to keep them warm in the harsh Bavarian winter. They were given cotton clothes and wooden clogs for shoes.

But then to Nora's shock a brooding German soldier with a truncheon ordered everyone to strip naked and crowd into a shower. White powder was tossed over her shivering body, a strong lice killing chemical that burned Nora for over a week, raising red welts over her back so that her mattress stuffed with nettles felt even more uncomfortable. At night, she also missed her front tooth.

Zed turned off CNN, Lenin falling again and again, and watched his building worker climb a ladder to change the bulb in his halogen lamp. Zed knew his brothers would be disgusted if they saw this. They'd call him a wimp and poke his pot belly. Before he became a hot shot professor, before he married a woman with money (before she died of breast cancer), his brothers kicked his ass, and considered him a punk, a nerd who did his homework while they-- the brothers -- excelled in using their fists in gang fights.

In fact, as Zed watched the worker, he was reminded that one of his brothers was also a janitor in a posh high-rise; so Zed tipped the worker generously, aware that somewhere in the city his own brother had his hand out. One of his brothers was even a cab driver and Zed feared that one day he might hail a cab with his brother behind the wheel. Would he have to pay the fare?

Zed's sisters were much like his brothers. Except, they cursed more. They had dirty mouths, using shit and fuck. And they were more like the women who worked for Zed's wife, the women who cooked and did their laundry. To Zed's wife, these women were disasters. They showed up late for work. They had to be fired.

But Zed made sure his wife would never confuse him with his family. At Duke, where they met, he took tennis lessons and speech classes to get rid of his Bronx accent. On a Fullbright, together, they lived in Rome and studied Italian literature. They dined with Italo Calvino and Alberto Moravia at the Accademia di Roma. And when these famous writers praised Zed's knowledge of Italian culture, Zed's wife went warm inside.

But Zed never forgot that in this setting he was living a life far removed from those closest to him--his family. He even tried his best, at family gatherings, to play down his intellectual success (even though he called them mushrooms behind their backs, or "fungi" as they say in Italian).

So he didn't call his brothers and sisters to ask them what they thought of Lenin falling in Red Square. They didn't read newspapers, vote or discuss anything -- especially if it had the slightest connection to their mother, the hated woman from Russia.

But his sisters knew that if anyone understood, it was Zed. He was the oldest and so he was the protector. He knew more than anyone else. He never forgot.

One night in the Bronx he was startled by the sounds of shattered glass, police sirens fading in the distance. His brothers and sisters slept three girls on one side of a room and three boys on the other-- barracks style. In the morning they changed their clothes with their backs to one another, promising not to look, squealing loudly about vaginas and winkles.

That night Zed heard a mattress squeak. He saw his grandfather peeking under covers. Pavel was in his underwear and when Zed looked, he looked back, coldly. So Zed closed his eyes and buried his face in his pillow, pretending to sleep, waiting for the torment to begin. Pavel fondled a breast, the youngest first. Zed buried his face again and held his breath.

When he looked up, Pavel was next to him, breathing; and Zed felt a tug at the waistband of his boxer shorts.

Zed sat up, his heart pounding and Pavel didn't say a word. He went back to his cot in the hall. He lay down and made like he was snoring. Zed made like it was a dream, just a dream. His brothers refused to discuss it -- ever. They used their hands, not their heads. But he knew Pavel was dirty.

Now from the front, Pavel was nothing but eyes. The cloth was wrapped tightly around his face-- frosted over where his breath came steaming from his mouth during the long march. His fingers were already frozen. His mittens were too thin. But that wasn't as bad as his foot. His hands would warm during work, but his toes were too numb where he'd burned this hole in the felt boot (trying to get as close as possible to the wood stove).

He didn't need a thermometer to know how cold it was. He'd been in the Siberian Gulag long enough to know that the morning fog meant it was probably 40 degrees below zero. When it was 50, he inhaled with a slight rasp. At 60, it was just too hard to breathe, and spit froze. For a month, spit was freezing. So he and the others spent nights squeezed in their bunks, spoon style, rubbing their genitals into one another's backside.

But now, he just wanted to return to the barracks to put on a foot rag. He didn't want to perish in Stalin's prison, under the guard's club or in the jaws of the barking dogs and the guns that kept the work line moving, the men with their hands behind their backs, trudging a path through freshly fallen snow--each man trying to walk behind the other to break the cold wind. So every morning Pavel gulped an extra cup of hot water, and he kept pieces of morning bread, crumbs in his mittens to keep from weakening beyond hope. But on this day, nothing seemed to help.

He knew that soon he'd have to wave a pick axe and jump and down until dinner to keep from freezing. And dinner was nothing but a potato peel broth and a spoonful of kasha, which warmed him for but a brief moment.

So he was barely dragging himself to work that morning when a guard put a rifle to his head. Pavel had fallen and was lying in the snow, too tired to get up.

"Listen, old man," said the guard. "You are a fake and a fascist. Our country fights for its life, and you stick traps under our feet."

"You're a fascist," said Pavel. "Look at what you do."

It was his temper which got him into the Gulag to begin with. He was an article 58, a political criminal. He was judged polluted and stripped of all rights as a citizen. His crime? He asked an official at the government store why, four years after the famine, he still couldn't buy a loaf of bread.

After that, the KGB burst into his house and found some letters from America, from Pavel's czarist cousin who fled Russia during the Revolution. Pavel was declared a spy, a threat to national security, even though the letters talked about the price of watermelons and other nonsense in the new world.

Now Pavel curled in the snow, protecting his face. He wasn't afraid of the blows to the stomach. It was empty and hard. So the guard kicked him in the back instead. And when it was over, Pavel spit blood and knew that the cold would now get to him even more quickly. The warm feeling from the beating had faded.

Meanwhile, his work gang prayed for a blizzard. Only then did the work stop. The guards feared getting lost in the snow drifts. The cold weather itself didn't bother them. They paraded up and down the work line in their deer skin boots, hats and white Siberian furs.

"Now pick up your picks or I'll crack your heads," the guards yelled. "Get to work."

They were digging the holes for telegraph posts that would make it easier for Stalin to keep a check on his slaves mining the minerals, diamonds and gold he hoped would pay for his new empire.

Sometimes when the blizzards raged, the guards would come into the barracks to make drunken speeches, praising the prisoners, calling them comrades, trying to convince them that they were the unsung heroes of the New Russia.

But digging holes was torture. The tundra was like solid stone even in summer. And when the frost covered it, the pick axes would glaze off the hard ground, sending sparks shooting into the air, barely scraping off a crumb of frozen earth. Still if Pavel's team didn't meet the quota, their rations would be reduced. Sometimes the potato broth was cut entirely. (There was a bonus for the team that did the most--a slice of slat fish that made everyone's mouth so painfully dry, they lost sleep eating snow all night.)

That morning, Pavel dug alongside a Ukrainian. He tossed snow over his shoulder. Then Pavel saw frozen blueberries. They flew from the Ukrainian's shovel. They glistened on a snow drift that turned orange in the approaching dusk. They'd landed just at the edge of the forest where desperate men did flee -- never out running the dogs. The Ukrainian stopped hacking at the frozen ground. He and Pavel stared at the berries (a rare source of vitamin C to keep a man's gums from rotting). The berries could help Pavel save a tooth-- maybe two- - for his wife if he were ever released. But the signs on the trees were constant reminders. NO CROSS ZONE.

The Ukrainian, who was older and weaker than Pavel, crawled slowly on his stomach toward the berries -- his pick axe raised slightly to the horizon. Then Pavel heard the dry crack. The Ukrainian's head exploded in a red gush.

"You bastard," the guard said to Pavel, lowering his rifle. "I was aiming for you. I was hoping you'd cross the line, you fascist. Now leave him and join the others."

That night Pavel pulled his foot from his boot. He knew the worst happened. His toes were black and there were no doctors, no medicine -- not for the prisoners. His fate was clear. There was always someone who knew what to do--for a few crumbs of bread. The others gathered some hot water and foot rags. Then a scissor appeared, and two toes were cut like old meat. They snapped off but he didn't feel it since his entire foot was frozen. In time, he'd lose that too.

Still if he was lucky, his gang reassured him, maybe the next day the guard would let him bury the Ukrainian. Then he could steal the poor bastard's boots. But if there were a blizzard that night, the corpse (his boots) would disappear until the Spring thaw.

Thus Pavel learned that there was no sense in planning ahead. He already lost the habit of imagining how he'd find his family if he ever got out. Still his wife kept sending letters filled with hope and his daughter wrote too, wondering when he'd save them.

Then, one day, there was a chance. The guards said that with Germany invading, Stalin might declare an amnesty for political prisoners. They could put on Russian uniforms, carry guns and die for the fatherland. They could volunteer for the front, which is what Pavel did, begging for a chance to prove himself to the Communist party.

That's how he ended up in the corn field.

The cool water soothed Nora's eyes. She stopped crying now and ignored the knocking at the back door. Old woman Hennesey, the neighbor who owned the grapefruit trees behind Nora's house, always worried that left alone Nora would get into trouble. Hennesey knocked everyday. But on this day, Nora chose to ignore the door. She pressed mute on the TV and held her breath until Hennesey left.

Today Nora wanted to sit in the big chair in front of the TV. She wanted to be cool. But as she strained to maintain her balance, dragging her two chairs, she couldn't get the air conditioner to work right -- another present from the big shot. Like the VCR, it was so damn programmable she couldn't figure out which button made the air cool. Which made it hot?

The gift was supposed to make Nora breathe easier on the humid days. Still, her chest burned, and sweat dripped between her breasts. She pulled her house dress off and it sank around her belly like a tire. Then she put her breasts as close to the air conditioning as possible, the nipples hardening. Lenin was on TV, his nose broken from his face. But that brief pleasure was quickly replaced by a searing pain in the small of her back and up and down her rib cage. Her bulk was too much for her spine and doctors warned that after the spine went, the back would go, and then the ankles. Basically, her body was imploding from fat.

Once she was too thin and she forgot how it felt. But she always remembered the hunger in the prison. She remembered how at the end of the war Mr. Otto begged for forgiveness. When everything went to the German army, his workers didn't eat. So Mr. Otto went out of his way to find some kind of food. A farmer agreed to let these people rake over his fields after the harvesters finished their work. Nora and her girlfriends could keep all the potatoes they found, which amounted to those too rotten or too small to basket.

Nora had already turned seventeen in the prison and she grew up on turnip roots, turnip squash, turnip soup and boiled cabbage. But now, with less food, her face was gaunt and yellow, her legs scabbed and burned from the chemicals they used to cure the railroad ties. Still on the day that Nora hobbled into the prison yard carrying the biggest basket of drop potatoes, even the polish prisoners who normally kept to themselves let out a celebratory cry. And one officer, Kazimir Wjocik, rushed to Nora's side. He took a piece of cloth from his pocket and wiped the blood from Nora's fingers. Like all the prisoners, she had to dig deeply into the ground without a shovel to get at the fat potatoes the mechanical harvesters missed.

She followed a tractor all over the field, while a guard watched with his rifle. She stooped in the sun all day while the farmer smoked a pipe and laughed happily at the sight of this thin girl finding such wonderful treats. He was just too generous to take them away despite the official word to send as much nourishment as possible to the crumbling German front.

Even Nora's Dad was impressed. And he was "The Great Beletsky" to the other prisoners because he'd already lived through Stalin's hell. He cheered them with his stories. No matter how bad they thought it was, unlike the Gulag, in Hitler's factory, they didn't have to go out into the snow in 60 below. They didn't lose their toes. They had a roof over their heads and wood burning in their pots throughout the Bavarian winters, which were like heat waves to Pavel who knew what Siberian cold was all about. So cheer up!

Everyone admired Pavel. He could prepare an earthworm meal better than anyone else; and now, everyone saw how his daughter was following in his footsteps, proving that she too was a first class survivor. But she didn't get a swollen head from his praises and open kisses. She knew what he endured.

When he died in a Bronx hospital from stomach cancer, his guts rotten, he held Nora's hand. The surgery went as well as it could.

"Boom, boom," he whispered, thumping his chest, his eyes rheumy. "All night."

"Who, what are you talking about?" Nora asked.

"Shhh.," he said, looking at the nurses. "They're listening."

"Who, who's listening?" Nora asked.

"Boom, boom," he said, and blubbered like a baby pointing a finger to his chest.

"Who? What is it?"

"Boom, boom," he said and those were the last words he spoke.

Now she herself could hardly breathe. Her chest ached from the heat that seemed to blow from the air conditioner.

Even with auto-dial, Zed couldn't get through to Orlando. Finally, an operator checked the line -- his mother left the phone off the hook. But all day? This was a woman without friends. If she left the house, she barely walked to a snack shop for a box of doughnuts. And in the heat, carrying the fat she did, she'd never make it. She rarely went into the sun.

As hard as he tried, he couldn't recall the last name of his mother's neighbor. He called the operator again and asked if she could read all the names on Shine Street -- his mother's street. The operator sarcastically said, "Sir, we can't do that. We need a name."

Zed asked for a supervisor and was disconnected. He called his brothers and sisters. Something was odd. They seemed concerned -- as long as Zed assured them that no matter what-- if she was still alive -- he would not give her their phone numbers. They hated the woman that much. Zed just hoped that if she were ever really sick they would let the grandchildren speak to her at least once. But they all took a wait and see attitude.

Their father left their mother without a pot to piss in.

That's how his brothers and sisters understood the situation. That's why they got stuck in the South Bronx. Zed's father sold hot dogs (when he did work). But with six children, it was never enough. And he was always tired and angry. Zed never liked his father, whom he called Joe (unlike the others, who said "Dad"). And it was odd that Zed never called him "Dad," but somehow, something made it seem wrong.

His sister Debbie, the youngest (the one he felt the closest to) was the one who always begged Zed to listen to his father.

"Why don't you be like us?" she said. "If you only listened to Dad, he wouldn't have to hit you all the time."

But Zed couldn't help himself. Unlike everyone else, he read books and learned things. He knew things his father didn't.Joe dropped out of the 7th grade. In his Italian family of fourteen the oldest had to work. That's when he met Nora at the factory where he was the line manager. She put springs into ball point pens.

Pavel swore his daughter married a gangster, a Mafia man. Pavel hated Joe as much as Zed. He knew how hard this man hit his children and how often. And he knew his daughter Nora did nothing, absolutely nothing, to protect anyone.

In fact, it was Pavel who confronted Joe when he was being particularly brutal. Having worked on the tundra, Pavel's forearms were thick as plywood. On a few occasions, he stopped Joe from using his belt too hard, especially on the girls, on backsides whipped bloody. It was Pavel who moved into their house after his wife died, too poor to live on his own. He slept in the hall outside the children's room. Nora posted him there, leaving him in in charge of her children, whom she ignored, putting her every energy into making American money, helping Joe at the hot dog stand.

Yet, Zed couldn't stop it. When his father explained something like why plants grew, using a primitive spill of words ("cause of the sun") Zed explained photosynthesis, and cycles within plant cycles. And this gave him a sense of power. So he ran his mouth off with people who didn't know anything, like his father.

That's when Joe would lean over the dinner table and smack him in the face. And Nora would say, "Don't call your father stupid."

She stuck by his side. She survived too much, she said, to give up her American dream.

The mortars pounded the railroad yard. Wooden ties were blown into the grey sky. Mr. Otto fled during the night. While bombs dropped, the prisoners huddled between the train tracks, under box cars painted with big red crosses.

"Where is my daughter?" Pavel kept asking anyone who would uncover his ears long enough to listen. People shivered, praying the bombs would not land too close. Everyone feared, as they heard, the Nazi's would massacre them as they retreated. It almost happened to someone who'd wandered into their camp. He saw his fellow workers locked into a barn that was set afire.

Pavel volunteered to climb the watch tower to raise a flag which had three letters of the alphabet which would forever bring tears to his eyes -- U.S.A.

From his perch, he yelled to the families below.

"Where are the girls?"

Not only did his daughter disappear, but all the girls were gone. Taken in the night? Everyone assumed they were raped, or murdered.

Then the shelling stopped. Pavel heard something, the sound of tanks. The factory itself was a smoldering rubble and from beyond the smoke, Pavel suddenly saw his daughter and the girls, arm-in-arm, coming over the crest of a hill, holding a banner between them like a parade, an American flag. Following behind were the canons of the U.S. Tank Command.

Pavel had to know why they fled in the night. How could they be so stupid? But first everyone cheered the Americans who tossed them packages of food and candy. People danced like little monkeys, hopping up and down. Their faces were drenched with tears and Russian men actually kissed the hands of American men.

Meanwhile, Nora spun from a circle of dancing girls and fell to her knees, her face in her palms. She sobbed so hard she heaved as if she were going into shock. All that Pavel could learn was that the Polish officer, Kazimir, had fled in the dark now that Nora was pregnant. The girls wanted him back.

But Pavel didn't get it. They weren't going to Stalin. How lucky they were! He yanked open a red cross pouch and shoved a fistful of chocolate bars into Nora's trembling arms.

"Now stop that," he yelled. "Stop crying and eat!"

When she didn't stop, Pavel got a bucket of cold water and dumped it over her head. "Now eat!"

"Mrs. Hennesey!"

Zed finally remembered the name and he phoned her. She was frantic herself, trying all day to find at least one phone number, one address or something she could use to contact the family. Nora Beletsky died in the hospital in Orlando, Florida.

But neither Hennesey nor Zed could understand why the air conditioner was blowing hot instead of cool. And no one could make the funeral...but Zed, who never did get to ask his mother what she thought of a legal accounting of Stalin's atrocities-- of a Nuremberg II, of Lenin falling.