Shards Picked from the Floorboards
by Malina Douglas
(this is part III. Read
Shards Picked from the Floorboards
from the beginning.)
Frozen Moments
Nadiya returned home with a thick Manila envelope. Standing before a blank, cream wall, she opened it and took out photos.
There was Anton, eyes slightly wide because she’d caught him unguarded, lips curling upwards, blond hair ruffled because he’d just sat up from bed.
Then he was beside her on their honeymoon, at the seaside at Yalta. He wore a forced grin because taking the picture had interrupted his sunbathing, his chest bare and ruddy. Nadiya looked at her own face and saw the way she squinted into the camera, the white lines on her shoulders, the rest of her skin an angry pink, the loose strands of blonde hair that had stuck to her lip. The long thin legs beneath her minidress, upper thighs paler.
She stuck it to the wall.
A photo of her mother from Nadiya’s last visit, looking over her shoulder from the batter she was stirring. Then she was standing before the oven, smile tired and palms pressed to her skirt, smoothing out wrinkles even when they were invisible.
Then both of her parents, her father’s arm slung around her mother’s, standing in the garden of their dacha. She saw her father’s steady blue eyes, his sparse grey hair and the smile lines etched into his cheeks. Her mother’s eyes filled with love and pride, with the same button nose that Nadiya had inherited.
There was Anton in deep discussion with Yulia’s husband Sergei, taken from the entrance of the kitchen when they were not looking. The way they sat, hunched forward, elbows on the table, empty cups scattered around them, Anton detailing architectural schemes as Sergei listened, head tilted and lips poised with his response. Captured before her was Anton’s earnest enthusiasm, a remnant of how she imagined him as a boy, and Sergei’s amusement, wry smile lines etched in the sides of his mouth.
There were moments to treasure like insects in amber. Sergei’s mouth, wide open in laughter, the way Yulia snagged his arm and pulled him towards her, the eyes that said you’re mine.
Before both couples were parted at the border. Before Anton and Sergei were sent to war. She and Yulia had been forced to go on without them. And then there was Kseniya, like a long-legged colt and just as unpredictable. A photography student who had joined them in flight from Kyiv.
In a photo she stood outside her apartment, dark-haired and lanky, her arm around Yulia, half a head shorter and gold hair in curls. The pink tones of Yulia’s skin contrasted with Kseniya’s milky features, lavender silk beside wine red, a pair of flowers plucked from different gardens. The innocence of their expressions that could no longer be reclaimed. The home they could not return to.
Nadiya missed her apartment with its flower-painted kitchen and views of a leafy park. The gold domes of St Sofia Church and the wide Dnieper, sipping cocktails from a lounge chair from the river’s pebbled bank while a salsa band played.
She yearned to go back but bombs were falling, erasing landmarks and leaving rubble like dark splotches on a map.
Her suitcase stood at the foot of the bed. A sentinel, a gargoyle. The embodiment of her refusal to accept. This was not home. She disliked how Dresden was changing them, Yulia’s retreats and Kseniya’s growing recklessness. Kseniya was growing into the daughter’s she’d never had, and the more protective Nadiya grew of her, the more Kseniya resisted.
Nadiya could not go back but refused to go forward so she remained in an in-between state, frozen. The photographs returned her to the sweet, simple times that were lost.
There were moments Nadiya had wanted to capture but couldn’t—Anton’s eyes, wide and luminous, just after he kissed her and before he turned away.
A roadtrip in earlier, carefree days, Anton’s arm on the ledge of the window, the wind sweeping his hair back, the quirk in his mouth as he told a joke she had long since forgotten.
Driving to the top of a high, rocky cliff, that she photographed but failed to capture Anton’s light, bouncing stride, the look he gave her when she tossed a handful of flower petals onto his head. The feeling as he chased after her, laughing, as he caught her and tickled her, how she curled her arms inward, squirming away from him till she squeezed her eyes shut and opened her mouth in a burst of surrendering laughter.
Nadiya’s shoulders sank and she sat on the edge of the bed. She squeezed her eyes shut and thought of her parents, shoulders bowed and eyes sunken, confined to their village because it was too unsafe to leave.
There were moments she did not want to capture, the moments her camera had missed. Anton during a rare storm, eyes fire-bright and mouth twisted into a snarl. Her own pitiful look as she stood before him, pleading.
The resolve that hardened in Anton’s eyes, as he turned away and she could not reach him.
When she got into the car and saw Yulia wide-eyed with fear. Kseniya hugging her knees to her chest. Yulia’s face puffy with tears. Sergei’s jaw clenched as he bashed his fist into the seat.
Yulia’s expression on the first days without her husband, a mirror of Nadiya’s own pain. Her own distant look that Nadiya could not see, as she walked through strange streets submerged in memories, of loved ones severed from her, too far to reach, as the sun shone on and flowers cascaded from hanging baskets with a beauty she did not see. They were moments frozen inside her that no amount of sunshine could melt.
She turned back to the photographs. Her wall was now covered with a mosaic of joyful memories. As her eyes scanned the smiles of the people she loved, she saw in them surety, optimism, and love, and she kept gazing, until there was nothing else.
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