Jasha is another character who reminds us of the unspeakable horrors the women of Eastern Europe endured at the hands of two dictators. Her husband and son were murdered by Stalin. She was enslaved by Hitler, and then raped by Soviet soldiers. Yet she is not broken and has found a rare soulmate in an aging British Lt. Colonel of Engineers.
Jasha looked at
herself in the mirror critically. She did not look like a bride. She wore a
sleek, three-quarter length gown with matching jacket and hat that while elegant
and sophisticated was not bridal. For her first wedding, she’d worn a
traditional gown with puffy, white sleeves, and elaborate embroidery on the
skirt and bodice that suited her plump and rosy body. But she was not sixteen any
more and years as a slave labourer had left her gaunt. Nor was she marrying in a
peasant village in White Russia with aunts, uncles and cousins galore. She wasn’t
wearing white in the English tradition, either. How could she? She was neither
pure nor innocent. She’d chosen instead a dress in a dusty rose colour, ashes-of-roses
they called it. That seemed appropriate for a forty-five-year-old widow attempting
to start over on the rubble of the past.
The only problem with the dress was that she owned no shoes to go with it; she had borrowed a pair of low, grey heels from Emily. Together they had stuffed handkerchiefs into the toes so she could walk in them without falling out. Hopefully, she reflected, she wasn’t trying to step into shoes too large for her on an abstract as well as a physical level. A quarter of a century ago, the villagers had whispered and fretted because she was marrying the young schoolteacher Jurek. He was a “stranger” and had gone to university, whereas her parents could hardly read or write. The consensus among her neighbours had been that she was getting “above herself” and no good would come of it.
They had been right, Jasha reflected, but not for the reasons they had imagined. Besides, there had been almost twenty good years before calamity struck. Jurek had taken her away from the hidebound village. He’d found jobs in larger towns and bigger schools until he got his wish of living and working in Minsk. Long before they reached Minsk, she had accepted that she would have no additional children after Alojzy was born. She had started working as a cook outside the home to make extra money. With Alojzy to dote on and worry about, it was easy to ignore that she and Jurek spent little time together anymore. The passion between them had definitely cooled, she admitted, and yet, there was nothing fundamentally wrong between them. If — She slammed a door on her thoughts.
Today she was marrying Graham and starting a new life. She was not going to let the ghosts interfere. She was not going to think about what she had lost. She was not going to ask herself whether Jurek or Alojzy would have approved. Nor did she want to think about what happened to her after Stalin murdered her husband and son. She had survived what she called ‘the years of terror’ but at a terrible cost. Yet, as she slipped her rosary into her handbag, she could not forget that a neighbour in Minsk had been sentenced to ten years in the Gulag just for owning one. The scars were there. They always would be. She was simply determined not to let them cripple her.
Emily Priestman called up the stairs, “Are you ready, Jasha? The car is out the front.”
“Yes, I’m coming.” Jasha picked up the little wicker suitcase with her change of clothes and toiletries. Graham had booked them a room at the Hotel Olympia. She found she was both nervous and excited by the thought of sleeping with him. It was odd how the act of telling Graham about the rapes had freed her of their spell. They had been pushed into that place in in her brain alongside Jurek and Alojzy’s murders and her years as a slave, behind that mental door that she kept locked and barred.
She took the stairs slowly, afraid of falling out of her loose shoes, and found Emily waiting impatiently in the front hall. Yet when Jasha reached the last step, Emily broke into a smile and exclaimed, “You look lovely!”
“Yes?” Jasha asked back uncertainly. “I do not want to shame Graham. He is British officer. I do not want to look like peasant or servant.”
“You look like neither, Jasha,” Emily assured her, meeting her eyes. Then turning around, she pulled a large bouquet of pink roses from the table behind her. “Graham sent you these,” Emily told her as she handed them over, adding with a wink, “I did tell him the colour of your dress.”
They were so big and full that Jasha gasped in wonder. Where had he found roses like these in blockaded Berlin? They could only have come from some royal greenhouse in the West, she thought. Jasha felt tears in her eyes as she buried her nose in the blooms, breathing in their rich scent. Gardening was what had brought them together. Surprising her with a bouquet like this was the perfect gesture.
Find out more about the Bridge to Tomorrow series, the awards it has won, and read reviews at: https://helenapschrader.net/bridge-to-tomorrow/
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