Ch 42

Time never ceased its hasting pace. It retracted youth from the older generation and handed to the younger ones. In the autumn of 1961, Lyuba Orlova got married. The elder folks rejoiced for the celebration as it was the first wedding in the next generation.

The next generation. Eleven-year-old twins Masha and Katya Lorinaitis were studying their cousin's wedding dress, with little girls' typical yearning of the bride. Fourteen-year-old Feliks Lorinaitis wasn't interested as he was discussing the soccer game on yesterday's television with cousin Andrei Orlov. The little Andrei who came to this world in that dreadful day was now nineteen-year-old architecture student, so handsome and cheerful, just like the pilot Andrei back then…

Tonya was at the most honourable seat of the table, wiping her tears from time to time. During the wedding, she whispered to her brother sitting next to her, "Get married, Vanya…How terrible it would be with no one by your side when you get old…"

"How about you, Tonya?" He knew that his reply was cruel.

"I have my children." His sister said in a low but firm voice, "But what do you have…"

Until the fifties, Tonya could still be called pretty. If she wanted to remarry, there would be someone who wanted to marry her. But to her, the only man of this entire world flew the burning jet into the Fascist's and died with the enemies in 1942.

Marriage. It's a word many people had mentioned to Ivan over the years—from his colleagues, neighbors, friends and families…Even fourteen-year-old Feliks asked him when he came to visit, "Uncle Vanya, why haven't you got married yet?"

Feliks had just reached the age of passing love notes and watching movies with girls—there were many things he didn't understand. Feliks' parents got married in 1946. The newlywed couple traveled to Poland and in Warsaw they saw many deserted houses in the Jewish residential areas with doors and windows tightly shut. They heard from the locals that many Jewish people were taken away from their homes during Nazi occupation and never returned. Their houses were left behind with the doorplates remained by the door, like the tombstones outside of empty graves.

There was a house with "Lukasiewcz" carved on the outside. Toris stood in front of that house for a long time. One year later, he became a father. Natasha agreed with his request and named the blonde little boy "Feliks".

Now, the Moscow Planetarium researcher Toris Lorinaitis was sitting with his son in Ivan's home, "Vanya, get married." Toris' eyes were full of sympathy as he lowered his hand to gently stroked the prosthetic, "Two people living is easier than one. If it wasn't Natasha, it would be very difficult for me…"

"Your injury is on the leg, but mine is in the nerves. In the heart." Ivan tap his chest, "From the outside I have all four limbs, but my inside is already screwed up. Do you understand, Toris?"

"That's why you need someone to take care of you. For us veterans, the most fearful thing is to get old with no one except your own injuries. There are still good women out there…"

"How I envy you, Toris…You married the one you loved…"

In the spring of 1962, Professor Ivan Braginsky got married.

Her name was Anya. She was an ordinary middle school teacher in Moscow. A good girl, although passing the age of forty, she was indeed a "girl"—one of the thousands of old girls the war left behind. The day they went to register, Anya cried, "Vanya, forgive me!" She wiped her face, "I can't forget Volodya…"

"I understand you very much, Anya. You and I are the same generation…"

Under Anya's attentive care, Ivan's fits occurred less often. Like Toris said, two people living was easier than one. Especially when people got older, they often married not out of love, but in need of accompaniement. He and Anya respected each other, looked after each other, and undertood each other. He let Anya hang her hidden photos on the wall and came to know the second lieutenant Volodya Kolosov who died in rural Kursk of 1943. It was human nature after all, as he also kept that diary…

He had stopped reading the diary. Perhaps it was because that Chinese characters were too hard to learn that reading them always gave him a headache. There was no Ivan in that diary, just like there was no Wang Yao in his pre-war era diary. What remained in those diaries were the student years free of trouble, worry and care that would never return; the collective memory of his generation of that distant and pure time that stopped abruptly in the summer of 1941. He pushed the diary into the bookshelf's very end, and the teenage-year memory was no longer recalled.

What he often recalled was his adolescent years. The memory started from the first day of the war and easily tested each individual's nature. This memory was the grimmest and the cruellest. The emotions it held were also the purest and most beautiful. This memory had its own witnesses—not only a diary, but also a stack of letters in the forms of environment observation notes, a small piece of bark with the first letter of their names carved on it, a portrait painting that he had been working on for years but hadn't the courage to finish off with the eyes, an all-knowing, all-powerful juju in the form of a little white horse pendant…

He had always worn that pendant in front of his chest. When he was forty-five years old, as he carried his half-year-old son, the infant's little hand accidentally broke off the string. So, he tied the pendant with another string that he had been worn on his wrist for over twenty year—it was the hair band that he snatched off from Wang Yao's hair and clenched in his sweaty palm into sleep in that unforgettable night. Now, it adhered onto his chest, just like what Wang Yao did that night.

Sometimes, he would raise the pendant in front of his eyes and have a good look at the little white horse's dark round eyes, and hold the hair band against his face. Then, he would breathe the fragrance burried under the soft dark hair—those were the aromas of leaves and grass, the smell of the land.

Historians would write down that the Great Patriotic War lasted 1418 days and nights, with 27 million lives lost, that of all the men in the Soviet born between the years of 1921 and 1925, only 3 percent lived till the end of the war.

Historians would conclude the significance of the war and determine the milestones on historical timeline, but they would never know the kind of conversations taken place inside the trenches, the songs sung around the campfire, how the snub-nosed sniper wrote his home letters on cigarette papers which he saved up from everyday, and how the blue-eyed pilot turned into a ball of flame with his hawk while his comrades could only watch.

The generation that encountered the war as they reached adulthood, that were now getting old and perished with their old injuries—they would preserve these details in their memories forever, even if not a single history book would mention them. Let alone the first and only love in Ivan Braginsky's life bloomed in the most arduous winter of 1941.

Love. Only in the youthful years could a person give the entirety of his heart without reserve or expecting anything in return, without regards of nationalities, genders or even their own futures.

…Many years later, one would only wish to be able to meet such a person and say to him, "Do you remember? Do you remember? We were once so young…" even if merciless time had left weariness on their hearts by then; even if they had dedicated most of their lives to someone who could not reminisce with them.

On May 9, 1967, the young architect Andrei Orlov got married. That day, the newlywed couple and their families went to the Red Square to put flowers on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldiers which was just completed. In fact, every year on May 9, the war generations would walk on the Red Square. Many veterans would hold wooden signs to search for their old-time comrades; however, not all were veterans. For instance, there was an old lady looking terribly old who would carry a wooden sign that had aged with her, and what written on it, "Looking for my son: Oleg Petrovich Feodorov, missing from December 1941 in Battle of Moscow". People all knew her because she was there since 1945…

This time, Tonya didn't cry. At night when everyone went to her home for the wedding dinner, Lyuba's four-year-old son stared at the photo of the air captain Andrei in curiosity and asked in his childish voice,

"Grandma, why does grandpa look like that? He's so young…"

"Dear, grandpa has always been a young man." answered Tonya, who was now over fifty.

"But why isn't grandma always young?"

"Because people can only be young once…"