by Dara Horn
“It’s perfect,” Ben whispered. “Thank you.”
He stepped toward her, his arms open, waiting for her. Sara let him wrap his arms around her and kiss her cheeks along with Leonid, again and again. But then she wrenched herself free. She turned around without a word and hurried back to the bathroom, closing the door tight behind her.
ON THE TRAIN home, she sat on a three-person bench seat between her brother and her husband, with her head leaning on Leonid’s shoulder and Ben’s hand resting on her painted palm and the future person inside her tugging at her gut. The train moved slowly, and the three of them had fallen into silence. Sara stared at the blank brown back of the seat in front of her and tried to picture how the painting had looked in her parents’ house. To her horror she saw that her memories had changed colors, that her former life with her mother and father had paled into faded browns and blues. It was as if it had never really been. Everything left that she loved in the world was contained on this train, on this single seat. Leonid stroked her hair as she watched Ben gaze out the window, his nostrils stiff and his eyebrows tight as he wrestled with something she couldn’t see.
In the lull of the train’s rattle along the tracks, wedged between the only loves left, Sara slipped into sleep. In her dream, she was walking through a landscape filled not with objects but with colors, pure colors—not red and green and yellow and blue, but colors she had never seen before. When Leonid woke her up, she barely remembered the dream. Later, she struggled to fall asleep again in their bed, her body encircling the future and Leonid’s body encircling hers, and she tried to recall what those colors had looked like. But she found that she couldn’t even describe those colors to herself, because colors like those don’t exist outside of paradise.
17
IT ASTOUNDED Boris Kulbak, thirty years after he had met Chagall and Der Nister and had guessed which one would survive and which one would disappear, when he turned out to be right. The Hidden One had vanished.
As Boris grew older, leaving Malakhovka for Moscow to live his adult life, he eventually read all of Der Nister’s stories—stories so weird that he always needed to read them three times before he even could follow what was going on, but which haunted him for a long time afterward. Later, after he was married—after he was married the second time, that is, since he had woken up one morning less than a year after his first wedding to discover that his first bride had disappeared—he came across a very different work by the Hidden One. It was a trilogy, two volumes thus far, called The Family Crisis. The second volume was dedicated to the memory of “my child, my tragically perished daughter, Hodele. Born July 1913, in Zhitomir, died spring 1942, in Leningrad. May your father’s broken heart be the tombstone on your lost grave.” It was a weird book, weird because it seemed so utterly normal. Unlike most of the stories the Hidden One had written, which were full of angels and demons and objects that came to life, The Family Crisis was completely realistic. It was as if Chagall had suddenly started painting like Vermeer. Still, he read Volume One and Volume Two, and was eager to find out what would happen in Volume Three. But in recent years the Hidden One had become more hidden, and Volume Three never surfaced. The story remained unfinished. Now it was already 1951, and no one had heard from the Hidden One since 1949.
He wasn’t the only one to vanish into the abyss. Shloyme Mikhoels, the director of the State Jewish Theater that Chagall had so lavishly decorated, had been run down and killed in a traffic accident a few years before—which wouldn’t have been odd if the actor who succeeded him hadn’t also vanished the following year in an unexplained arrest. The same was true of Dovid Hofshteyn and Itsik Fefer, the latter of whom had briefly taught literature at the Boys’ Colony, and both of whom, Boris remembered when he began to hear the rumors, had had books of patriotic poetry illustrated by Chagall. Boris recognized their names when he heard the rumors, not only from the orphanage, but also from a strange Yiddish letter he had received eight years earlier, in 1943.
“My dear comrade,” the letter had begun,
Please excuse the impersonal nature of this letter. I obtained your address from the records of the Soviet Jewish Boys’ Colony of Malakhovka, of which you are one of many proud graduates, in the hopes that your noble patriotic background might encourage you to lend your strength to a crucial aspect of the war effort. Although you have exceeded the age for service in the Red Army, I am certain that you understand the importance of contributing anything and everything you can to the defeat of the Fascist menace.
As one of the many young men rescued from the civil war pogroms by the patriotic efforts of the Soviet Jewish Boys’ Colony of Malakhovka, you surely appreciate the dire circumstances to which our people have been reduced in those areas now subject to Fascist domination. Though reports have been suppressed, you have doubtless heard rumors of the humiliations and torments our Jewish comrades have suffered. Those of us who have relatives in the occupied regions know that these are not rumors. In fact they are grossly understated. Entire communities have been slaughtered.
It is under this dark sky that I ask you to join the efforts of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, a group operating under the supervision of the Soviet Information Bureau and dedicated to building support among Jews overseas for Soviet efforts to destroy the Fascist beast. Along with the noted Yiddish poet Itsik Fefer, I have recently completed a tour of the United States, where we were welcomed by over 50,000 people at a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee rally in New York. Our efforts have been productive, but more must be done. The need is urgent.
As one of those children who courageously survived another assault upon our people, you know that brutality against the Jews will not stop unless we take measures to save ourselves. We are too old to fight with our hands. I implore you to join us in fighting with our hearts.
Sincerely,
Comrade Shloyme Mikhoels
Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee
A list of names followed, including those of several Yiddish writers and other public figures he had heard of. Boris had taken the letter seriously, though his talent for expressing himself had not developed much since Malakhovka. In the end he hadn’t become an artist, but rather what the state had needed, an engineer. But he felt guilty for being too old to fight. Following further instructions from Mikhoels and the others, he had written several letters—mostly to Yiddish journals and newspapers in the United States, though some to politicians in Washington as well—based largely on the form letters that the committee provided. He had even organized meetings in support of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee within the engineers’ union, and raised money in every way he could think of during lean times. He could never tell if it had done any good. But when the names on the bottom of that letter began to disappear, along with others, after the war, Boris tried not to be disturbed. They were mostly artists and politicians, after all, which was always a tricky business. He told himself that they had probably followed Chagall to France, though some small buried part of him knew better. Meanwhile, he was just an engineer and a patriot, building roads and bridges to which no one could object.
CHILDREN ARE OFTEN envied for their supposed imaginations, but the truth is that adults imagine things far more often than children do. Most adults, Boris knew, wander the world deliberately blind, living only inside their heads, in their fantasies, in their memories and worries, oblivious to the present, only aware of the past or future.
Boris had been astounded to be married—the first time, that is—to find himself suddenly in a world of families, of people who actually had parents, whose parents had parents even, whose lives did not start at the age of eleven, but centuries before their own births. But that astonishment had been too shocking to be love, too shocking even to be real, and when it proved false, Tatiana, an old friend from his university days—pretty, Jewish, fresh from her own divorce—had rescued him. She was a biologist, and when she became pregnant, she refused to allow him to consider the pregnancy anything more than wha
t it was, cells multiplying, differentiating, turning into some sort of life, yes, but not in any way that someone like Boris could readily think of as real. Everything, even her own pregnancy, was simply a process to her, a cliché. In a dark way Boris found it comforting.
The actual child, however, had proven to be quite real, and frightening. At five years old, Raisya was tiny for her age, with smooth black hair and enormous dark eyes, and she saw things that no one else could see. Sitting with her on a train or a park bench made him realize the thickness of the veil that age and willful ignorance had lowered in front of his eyes, the percentage of each moment obscured by menial memories or predictable worries, the thick scrim of pointless thoughts that hung between him and the world. To Boris, the city park was cold and gray, its grass nothing more than blocks of hardened mud and its trees bare sticks for nine months of the year. But to Raisya, the mud itself was alive, full of ants and beetles for whom she constructed roads and bridges out of twigs, making way for a blind worm searching for a path, taking off her shoes and sinking her feet into the mud. To Boris, the communal kitchen of their apartment was a hassle that added hours to his days as he and Tatiana waited their turn for the oven and stove and wondered which of their neighbors was the official informant—every apartment had one (theirs, they had decided, was Semyon, the old man with the dyed black hair), though neither Boris nor Tatiana had ever talked enough about politics to worry. But to Raisya, it was a world of intrigue, where the ten people who occupied it ran a free market of paybacks and betrayals, of unwashed plates left intentionally in the sink that Raisya never failed to see, charred food left defiantly stuck to shared pots that Raisya never failed to smell, muttered curses that Raisya never failed to hear. To Boris, a train was a place to pretend to sleep, to brood, to be reminded of unpleasant train rides past and to dread the imminent future, when he would have to smile at his insane mother-in-law as she yelled obscenities at his wife. But to Raisya it was a wonderland where every stranger’s beard was a new and unpredictable color, where discarded ticket stubs could be assembled into a complete map of the USSR, where words in Polish and Ukrainian and Uzbek floated through the air and landed on her lips. She was like the blood beneath his skin, flowing and raging blue and beautiful while his own bloodless skin paled and shriveled, unworthy of being in her presence. For the first time in his life, Boris had fallen in love.
Irina and Sergei Popov lived directly below the Kulbaks, and Raisya noticed their chubby, red-haired, five-year-old son Tolya wandering the hallways and became his friend almost instantaneously. The boy’s parents had asked Raisya to bring her parents with her the next time she visited, but Tatiana was so busy in her lab, regularly returning home well after midnight in recent weeks, that it was impossible for her to come along. So it was Boris who arrived at the Popovs’ door with Raisya one cold spring evening.
When the door opened, he found himself welcomed by the young couple with lavish kisses and embraces, as if he were an old friend. Irina, the mother, was tiny and red-haired, with a meek grin that made Boris grateful that Tatiana couldn’t come; she could have eaten this woman alive. Sergei, the father, a thick-chested man with an easy laugh, led Boris into a corner of the room almost immediately, sitting him down as Irina busied herself with the children, distributing toys.
“When we heard you lived right upstairs, we had to have you over,” he told Boris, almost gushing. He was a man who seemed to speak with his chest as much as with his mouth, leaning forward with every word. “There are so few children in this building. It’s wonderful that Tolya has someone to play with.”
“We’re delighted, too,” Boris said honestly, wishing that Tatiana were with him. “When did you move here?”
“Oh, we’ve lived here for years,” Sergei said with a deep, disarming sigh. “I’ve been in this place since right after the war. Nice to be first, huh?” He smiled, waving his hand.
Boris looked around. Unlike the Kulbaks, who shared their apartment with three other couples and one elderly man, the Popovs had the whole place to themselves, and the walls were covered almost completely with framed pictures and framed medals. Obviously Sergei was a man whom the government liked. Such people often made others nervous, but Boris was a patriot who prided himself on not being afraid. “It’s amazing that we’ve never seen each other before,” Boris said.
“Not so amazing,” Sergei said with a grin. “It’s a big building. And I’m sure you’re so busy that you never notice who’s coming and going.” In fact, Boris was nowhere near as busy as his wife, but he liked Sergei’s assumption about his productivity. There was nothing better, Boris had absorbed since his days at Malakhovka, than being perceived as useful. “What’s your field?” Sergei asked.
“I’m a civil engineer,” Boris said.
“Designing sewers?” Sergei said, still grinning.
Boris tried not to squirm. He had done some templates for rerouting and repair of sewer lines about five or six years ago, a redesign of an outdated system that had been damaged during the war. He had enjoyed it. He had just started seeing Tatiana then, and each morning seemed full of possibilities, and each evening he came home with a sense of happiness he had never had before, knowing that he was doing his share of washing away the filth of the past, of creating a brand-new world. “No, mostly roads and bridges for the new highway system,” he said.
“The city really is changing so quickly,” Sergei said. “Did you grow up here in Moscow?”
“No, outside the city—in Malakhovka.”
Sergei drew his eyebrows together. “Were your parents farmworkers?”
Boris cleared his throat. He often lied about this, particularly to strangers, but seeing this man’s child playing with Raisya had softened him. Raisya and Tolya were coloring with chalk on a slate easel in the corner of the room; Irina seemed to have wandered away. “I was in an orphanage there,” he said, too low for the children to hear.
Sergei reached over, putting his hand down on top of Boris’s. He was a somewhat ugly man, with heavy dark hair, a thick torso, and a wide mouth, and his ugliness made Boris feel confident. Sergei’s palm was warm on Boris’s hand. “My father died in the Polish campaign,” Sergei said, looking Boris in the eye. “Just before I was born.”
The two men sat for the next seven seconds in heavy silence. There was nothing to do in this life, Boris thought, except to pick up the pieces of a shattered world. Suddenly, as he stared awkwardly at Sergei’s hand, he heard Raisya burst into laughter, a ridiculous cackle that never failed to make strangers smile. He looked up and saw Sergei smiling, and knew he had found a friend.
“So what do you do that you have this gorgeous art collection?” Boris asked, glancing at the pictures that crowded the walls. He had only asked to find out more about Sergei, but now that he looked more carefully, he saw that the paintings really were impressive, or at least impressive-looking. From a distance he had assumed they were prints, but now he saw that they were all real oil paintings, some of them cracked through with age.
“Oh, they’re all reproductions,” Sergei said with a wave of his hand. “My wife and I are administrators for the state museum.”
Senior administrators, Boris thought, judging by the apartment. Near the end of the evening, Sergei offered him some vodka. He accepted, and together they toasted the Party and their children. With a few more drinks, Boris found himself talking freely—about Raisya, about Tatiana, about the new supervisor in his office. Sergei’s laughter encouraged him. They traded story after story, until Sergei started spouting battle tales about the war and Boris fell silent. When Sergei asked him about where he had been during the war, he blushed, embarrassed to be too old, embarrassed about all his private failures over the last ten years, ashamed, suddenly, of his too-young daughter and his too-young wife. Afraid to say nothing, he told Sergei embellished stories about the Anti-Fascist Committee, though he neglected to mention the Jewish aspect of it. It didn’t seem important.
“DID YOU AND Tol
ya have fun?” he asked Raisya later, as they climbed up the stairs on their way home. The staircase was poorly lit, with iron railings and dank gray tiles that smelled of disinfectant, a deep throaty stench that reminded Boris of the clinic at Malakhovka, of shivering and screaming as a pregnant woman who was not his mother tried to take off his clothes and shave his head. He looked down at Raisya as she skipped up the steps beside him, and felt a tremendous ache in his chest. He wished he could hold her entire body in his hands. Instead he put his hand down on his daughter’s head, cupping her skull in his palm.
Raisya nodded eagerly, her head wriggling underneath his hand. Already she was trying to escape. “I told Tolya lots of stories,” she said. “I made him laugh so hard he almost died.”
As Raisya began babbling, Boris’s mind began to wander, and he found himself thinking of Tatiana. They had been friends, years ago, but now their friendship seemed long past. Lately he had started becoming furious with Tatiana each time she came home late, which only made things worse. When Tatiana came home the previous night, it had been close to two in the morning, and he had growled at her. He would have shouted, but he was afraid to wake Raisya. Then Tatiana had cried, weeping into Boris’s chest and sputtering that she missed him, that she felt like a prisoner at work, that Raisya was growing up without her. Her face crumpled, and her hot tears seemed real. But it could all be a ruse, she could have been out with a lover night after night like his first wife had been, and Boris would never know. He had held her head to his chest with his eyes on the ceiling, seeing, in his mind’s eye, the starry sky beyond the room that had hovered over him during all the previous hours while he was frustrated and alone, unreachable from where he lay in the abyss. He trusted no one in this world anymore, except for Raisya.