We were in the final stages of our journey to Moscow and I had long reconciled myself to the fact that I was going to die and, in a perverse sort of a way, I welcomed the fact that the Tsar’s secret police would make my death a long and painful one.
I did not believe I had a right to live. Too many people had died because of me. Eugene, all the circus folk, and hundreds of prisoners of war who might otherwise have been saved if I had not loved Eugene so much.
I believed I wasn’t worthy of the gift of life. That the life in me must be ripped from my abused and worthless body to expiate my sins, my terrible crimes against my countrymen.
We were perhaps a day’s journey from Moscow and it was late at night when we came to a halt at an obscure railroad station with the name of Astapovo. It was so small and remote that my guards allowed me to alight and fetch fresh water and to wash out the samovar in which I brewed their tea.
The train was to stop at the larger town of Tula further down the track, but we were getting close enough to Moscow for my guards to want to take the precaution of replacing my shackles. Not that they thought I would escape, but because they might be seen to be careless in their duties. Tula was much too large a centre to let me fetch water.
It was cold, late autumn, November cold, when the wind starts to come in from the north. I wore only a threadbare kapok coat over a coarse linen dress and on my feet peasant sandals made of hemp. I entered the small shack on the platform which was no more than a hovel and from which came a dim light. If it was occupied I thought I might enquire about water, ask where the well was situated, since most railway stations have a well close by. In the corner, lit by a tiny oil lamp of the kind a traveller might use, lay an old man. He was gasping and wheezing and seemed to be in terrible distress. But I hardly noticed. Beside him was a small suitcase and a large vacuum flask, which I hoped might contain something warm to drink. If the old man was too frail or sick to answer my request for the whereabouts of the well, I was beyond caring that he seemed to be dying. I had seen so much death that, had I thought about it, I would have resented the old man’s tenure on life. His time was up and he had no further right to the flask beside him.
I slowly approached him and stretched my hand out to take the flask when he looked at me. I was close enough to touch him. My hand paused, leaving the flask where it stood. The old man was Leo Tolstoy, the great writer.
I knew this with absolute certainty. The misshapen nose, high brow, bald head, his piercing blue eyes now somewhat dimmed, and, of course, the great white beard. What made me certain though was the sable coat he wore. It was the coat my father had given him. Old peasant men do not die in sable coats. I knew it was Tolstoy as sure as I know the nose on my face.
I lifted him into my arms, he was surprisingly frail and even through the lustrous fur coat I could feel his sharp old bones.
‘Count Tolstoy, I would consider it a great honour if you will let me help you,’ I heard myself saying in the accent of my former well-bred self.
‘Child, I am dying, there is nothing you can do for me but report it to the authorities.’ He seemed to smile and then continued. ‘Who, I feel sure, will report it to the Tsar and to the Church, both will be pleasantly pleased to hear the news of my demise and will perhaps call for some positive verification, a lock from my beard perhaps, or a finger for future reliquiae of the devil himself?’
‘I met you at my tenth birthday party, master. You came to our house to…’I stopped. ‘Well, I’m not sure I know why you came, sir?’
For a moment a gleam came into his eyes. ‘Ah, the birthday girl who wanted to be an acrobat. How did it go?’
‘It went well, sir,’ I said smiling. ‘Very well.’
‘That’s right, my child, never let them get the better of you. Not until your final breath. Never give up! Damn the Tsar, damn his eyes and his soul, may he rest in an unmarked grave!’ With these words he slumped back in my arms.
I let him down gently and rushed out of the small hut. ‘It’s Tolstoy, Count Leo Tolstoy, he is dying in there!’ I cried and pointed to the railway hut.
Of course, at first, the people on the train thought I had gone crazy. But I kept running up and down and yelling until a reluctant train inspector alighted and then another official followed him and, when they entered the hut and didn’t immediately return, more people crowded around, until the entire train spilled out onto the tiny platform and beyond. Someone with more credibility than I positively identified Tolstoy, no doubt having seen his picture or perhaps the contents of his small suitcase. As I remember, there were almost as many pictures of him in Russia as there were of Tsar Nicholas.
‘It is Tolstoy, he is dying!’ people were shouting and running around. They were shocked but also secretly consumed by excitement and pride though trying not to show it. They knew they were eye witnesses to history, to a national tragedy, news that would shake Russia to the core and spread like a whirlwind around the world.
It was then that I quietly slipped into the night. I had just taken advice from the greatest intellect Russia has ever produced, a man acknowledged by Russians to be the greatest writer in literature. If he said I was not yet ready to surrender, who was I to argue?
Tamara smiles and spreads her hands and looks over at me.
‘And then one day I found you, Mrs Moses, who will lead us through the wilderness to the promised land.’
News of Tolstoy’s collapse in the obscure railroad station of Astapovo, one hundred and sixty kilometres to the southeast of Moscow, was spread along the telegraph wires throughout Russia and the world. After he was discovered, Tolstoy lay dying for several days in the little railway station, finally passing away on the 26th of September, 1910, with the world’s newsreel photographers recording his death. He refused absolution from the Church or visits from representatives of the Tsar and would not even see his wife, with whom he had quarrelled incessantly to the very end.
CLEOPATRA’S CAT AND THE LETTERS FROM EGYPT
What can I tell you about Mrs Shebaldin? She is a newcomer, a recent addition to our little half-starved journey into freedom. There is not much required to join us, we ask few questions and are not concerned with religion.
Jew, Christian, Muslim, it is all the same, because when you are hungry and frightened the God you choose is important only to yourself. The only prerequisite for travelling with us is that you must be able to walk. So when Mrs Shebaldin told us that she was a foot doctor we ceased immediately to be curious, never mind the fancy questions, a foot doctor is a gift from a loving God.
Like the professor who never quite made the entire journey to Siberia, and Tamara who sent herself there, Mrs Shebaldin also has a story to tell of the desolate wasteland with the name that comes cold and dead to the lips.
Siberia, if you say it slowly, is a malicious word, like a blunt knife pushed slowly into the stomach. It is a landscape filled with dread, a howling gale in the Russian imagination. It is the foul breath of the universe, an endless stench of dark landscape and permafrost where there is no joy, no warm blood, nor kind earth nor sun for the spawning of happiness.
Siberia is where the air itself is the prison guard. It has long been the place the Tsars have sent Russia’s so-called enemies, the land where the secret police bury their victims alive in the remorseless tundra and so turn good, strong men into the walking dead.
When a judge condemns a man to be sent to Siberia it is not unusual that he allows the prisoner to return first to his village to attend his own funeral and get drunk at his wake. The judge knows that the Gulag is a one-way trip and every man is entitled to say farewell to his family and kiss his own life a fond goodbye.
These men sent to the slave camps and the salt mines form the legions of the forgotten, their families mourn them and then they fade from memory. A wife, if she is still young and strong, will marry again and children will talk of a father on whose knee they once sat but who is now long departed.
In Siberia the gates of t
he slave camps stay open. Only a minimum of guards are required and fewer still in the salt mines. These are dull men who will beat you senseless if you don’t work but will invite you to leave any time you may care to do so. ‘Be my guest, my friend. Tonight? But of course! You’ve had enough? Well done! Freedom? Certainly, sir, let me show you to the front gate.’ They will turn to the slave next to you. ‘This is your lucky day, tonight you shall have his tin of hot water which bears the grand name of soup.’
To escape in Siberia is to die alone and there is nothing a person fears more than that his exit from life will take place unremarked and unmarked. It is unbearable for a man to think of his spirit rising into the screeching wind sucked up into the midnight maw of uncaring space without acknowledging the benediction with the last of his breath.
A man has every right to fear that his soul will lose its way in the vast loneliness, that the howling of the dybbuk, his ghost, will be added to the fury of the winter gales. Who will wait with you so that he might cover your silent mouth and close your eyes while, at the same time, steal the gold ring from your finger as a keepsake, to mark your passing?
The professor tells us a story. He is on his way to Siberia, thirty men in a cattle truck, a hundred trucks, transporting three thousand prisoners. The only sounds day after day are the clickity-clack of the wheels and the puff and huff and labour of the hot black engine half a kilometre ahead.
After a week, the men who huddle together against the bitter cold seldom talk. The conversation between them is long exhausted, lives have been explained, laid bare, similarities explored, experiences shared, coincidences examined, connections made, alliances considered. All this and more, until the bones of past relationships have been picked white and discarded. It is now every man for himself as compassion and hope die in the breasts of each of them.
Now there is only the rock and sway of the cattle trucks and the click and clack of steel wheels beneath their feet. They yearn for a little comfort and put great store in the added warmth to be gained from huddling together against the biting cold.
Occasionally a fight breaks out, a pathetic squabble, like two stray dogs over an old bone as one prisoner tries to snatch a warmer place from a weaker man who may be fortunate enough to lie his cheek against someone who wears a fur coat or a collar of silver fox.
The train stops for twenty minutes every two days to take on water and coal. It is usually snowing and the temperature is below freezing, minus thirty, maybe even more. The engine grinds to a halt, a screaming and whining of metal on frozen rails and a fuss of escaping piston steam. The doors to the trucks are opened and prisoners are let out to defecate.
The professor continues his story and he apologises for the coarse language he feels he must use, explaining that to use words other than ‘piss’ and ‘shit’would alter the sense of what happened.
We nod for him to continue. He is not a man with a dirty mouth and is easily the most educated amongst us, besides, these not-so-nice words we all know exist and so we nod the go-ahead, accepting a suspension of good manners for the necessity of an honest telling of the story.
But, of course, Olga Zorbatov brings her finger and thumb to clasp her nose, the usual exception to our accord.
‘The men learn quickly that when you piss you do not remove your trousers. You simply micturate where you stand, the warm urine running down the inside of your trouser legs. Remove your trousers and the piss freezes in the air, an arc of golden ice that drills back and stabs into the urethra, the penis, the pain of which is said to be indescribable.
‘To defecate is not so bad, the trousers may be lowered if the hands are cupped tightly over the genitals to keep them warm. The buttocks may start to freeze but they contain sufficient fat to protect them and the faecal matter within will still drop and the trousers restored in time.’
I now see why the professor has to use common words, after all, the ones he uses to replace them, ‘micturate’ and ‘faecal material’, are most complicated and don’t sound a bit like what people do, you know, when they have to go.
‘By the time the cattle trucks have been opened, the men have about ten minutes to do their business. Both sides of the railway lines are beaded with hundreds of men squatting with their trousers around their ankles. A few have walked away from the side of the trucks, mostly city folk of the better class who are too modest to do their business in public.
‘The whistle blows and the train immediately starts to move away, there are only moments left to scramble back into the trucks. Most of the men make it, but those who strayed from the line are seen frantically running to reach their own truck, calling out desperately. They are urged on by the calls of their comrades, who have their hands stretched out to help them aboard, for if they miss boarding the truck to which they belong no other will take them on board.
‘But now comes the cruel joke. Those who were too modest to squat beside the rail are generally the ones too shy to clasp their genitals in public. The genitals are the warmest place on the body and when your hands are enclosed around the scrotum your fingers are prevented from freezing. Now as the train pulls away they rise, only to discover that their hands are frozen and they cannot pull their trousers up. So they struggle to hold them up with the sides of their arms while they run, but when they stretch their hands out to be helped aboard, the trousers drop to their ankles and they trip, ploughing into the dirty snow beside the track. There is only hapless laughter from those safely aboard. A man running after a departing train with his trousers falling slowly down around his ankles is very funny even if it is also terribly sad. Tragedy and laughter are twin brothers in Siberia.
‘With the mirth of his comrades ringing in his ears a man will pick himself up, but by now the engine is gaining speed and so he stands bare-arsed in the snow helplessly watching his own life disappearing from sight.
‘At each coaling stop half a dozen men are left to die in the wind and the blinding snow. A black smudge of engine smoke against the pewter-coloured sky is their last tenuous connection with the living. Good friends, the milch cows coming into the village at sundown, the sharp cries of mothers scolding their children, hot soup, the sound of laughter coming from a lighted tavern, the memory of a first, late-summer mating with a blue-eyed, flaxen-haired maiden in a rustling cornfield, the mewling of a newborn infant – all this is lost forever in the smoke that slowly spreads and fades against the eyeless horizon.’
The professor looks up and opens his hands wide and sighs, ‘What more can I say? That is the train to Siberia.’
Mrs Shebaldin looks up and also sighs, then she says, ‘I have spent the last five years of my life in Siberia but I too have never been there. I have been living in Egypt.’
For riddles we haven’t got time, I think to myself. Whatever does she mean? Ten years in Siberia but she hasn’t been there but also she’s been in Egypt, all apparently at the same time? Some people should maybe learn a little more commonsense!
‘My husband was a doctor, a famous surgeon,’ Mrs Shebaldin explains. ‘We lived in a fine house in St Petersburg, near the Academy of Medicine in the Nevsky Prospekt. Uri was a modernist, a Deep Knife, which is what they call the young surgeons at the academy, the older ones have no interest in what lies deeper under the skin but only in what they could chop off.
‘“Why leave in what is harmful and will do further harm when it may be neatly cut out and stitched?” my husband would say. “An ulcer will not cure itself nor, for the most part, an abscess on the bowel drain away.” He was also a confirmed follower of Charles Darwin. “Nature doesn’t always take care of the redundant pieces, we evolve and change but so slowly that there are parts of the human physiology which became unnecessary. When these give trouble they must be removed.”’
‘Which parts are those, Madam Shebaldin?’ the professor challenges.
‘Professor, I am not a scientist like you, but my husband talked mostly of internal parts of which I know little, though he did once men
tion that a man does not need a beard or a foreskin.’
‘Bah! Ridiculous! In Siberia he will need a beard and wish also he could grow hair on his nose!’
‘And a foreskin, Professor?’ I ask, ‘We Jews have found it unnecessary to have such a thing for more than a thousand years.’
The professor bows his head towards me. ‘With the greatest respect, a small religious ritual, no more, Mrs Moses. I dare say we could smell as well without the tip of our nose but this does not suppose we should cut it off!’
I have never thought of it in quite this manner and I am somewhat shocked that such an essential ritual in the Jewish faith should be dealt with so logically. The professor has a point and certainly I am not prepared to argue with such a learned man. ‘Hygiene. It is for hygiene,’ I say, not really certain that this is correct.
‘In the Arabian desert maybe, in the wilderness where there are sandstorms and sand grit may get under the foreskin to irritate, start maybe an infection. In Russia? I think not, madam.’
‘Internal parts, Professor. My husband spoke of internal parts that would benefit from removal with the knife,’Sophia Shebaldin comes to my rescue.
The professor turns to face her. ‘I should like to know these parts, Madam Shebaldin. In my experience the removal of any piece of the human anatomy is not without some cost, even if it is deemed necessary.’
‘My husband spoke in particular of the tonsils and the appendix,’ Mrs Shebaldin says and then to our surprise she suddenly bursts into tears.
‘Whatever have I said to upset you, Madam?’ the professor cries in alarm.
‘Not you, Professor,’ Sophia Shebaldin sniffs. ‘It is the thought of an appendicectomy.’
The Family Frying Pan Page 14