The picture he painted of the good life in the workers’ paradise was like watching a Soviet film—fields heavy with grain, plump cattle with udders bursting to the full, laughing faces, everybody happily at work, singing all the while. Behold the millennium!
Dance music was now drifting in from the ballroom, along with clip-clops from the swaying dance floor, rocking gently on an unseen sea, to which no one was giving a second thought. It seemed as if the music and the dancing were accompaniments to the Soviet idyll as described by my Jewish engineer friend.
“You understand?” I said to him. “I honestly don’t know if I can untangle all the strands of my life story in a way that will make sense to you. I come from Lublin, a small city in Poland, and I remember the revolutionary songs which the workers in my town used to sing, what their hopes were, and the look in their eyes when they spoke of the social revolution. In fact, the revolution was watered with their tears. They, the downtrodden, wanted to stand tall, alongside a Rothschild, a Shereshevsky, a Brodsky, a Wissotsky, and our own local millionaire, Sheinbrun. But life is a lousy midwife and child delivery a hazardous business. In the course of being born, someone’s skull can get crushed, someone else’s hands and feet can get mangled, and the devil knows what else can go wrong. In a happier instance, the midwife delivers a perfect infant, patting it on the head and tying a red ribbon around its wrist. One such healthy baby grows up smooth-tongued, another can’t put words together properly and from birth on is destined to become the slave of those who tell him what he can and cannot do, what he wants and doesn’t want. One grows up with clever hands, another bumbles through, a third grows up dull-headed, while a fourth proves a mathematical genius. Such is the despotism of tens of thousands of blackened years, the genetic heritage of great-great-great-grandmothers and -grandfathers, aunts, uncles, and the devil knows who else, going back all the way to our Cro-Magnon or Neanderthal ancestors.”
I was now wound up. “You Bolsheviks,” I continued, “play right into the hands of that miserable midwife. You accept her decrees. You reward talent, while the helpless among you, the damned, the incompetent, are left to fend for themselves. Those with ability get to drink wine from the Caucasus, those without are lucky if they see a piece of bread. All those begrimed tailors and shoemakers, with their tear-stained cheeks, have achieved nothing. Where are the luxury liners for them? When do they get to celebrate? And yet, they are in the tens of millions, and you, the talented ones, members of the Party, are in the minority. Where is their recompense? Their downtrodden lives, their tearful stammer won the revolution for you clever, intelligent types. Believe me when I say, in all sincerity, that you are terrific engineers. Yet here you sit, enjoying the best, while all those unfortunate millions remain sunk in their misery. Their revolution, my friend, has yet to come.
“Take your comrade here. He had to get lucky and win a lottery in order to be equal to you and earn himself a break. He had no other alternative. Neither capitalism nor Communism wants to pay for his lack of ability; he must always be dreaming of winning the sweepstakes. Yet that unfortunate creature is your true millionaire, the salt of the earth. He isn’t cunning, he doesn’t know how to play politics, he can’t make speeches, he’s no brilliant mathematician, but the truth is that he helped build the new society, which isn’t merely for the blessed, talented, lucky few who’ve jumped onto the bandwagon and now hold the reins.”
We all went up and walked round and round on deck. The night was so bright you could make out every feature on every face. An invigorating breeze rose up from the sea to lift our spirits and gladden our hearts.
“You are a sentimental bourgeois and an enemy of the Soviet Union,” said the Jewish engineer, placing a friendly hand on my shoulder, “and I have no idea what you’ve been babbling about.”
A ship outlined in lights came out of nowhere and began to accompany us, like an orbiting moon. For the first time, we had the feeling that we were not alone on the vast sea but one part of a greater whole, of a grand, oceanic scheme. Sonya Yakovlyevna was so moved by the ship’s appearance that she danced for joy, like Robinson Crusoe at the sight of his rescuers. Khazhev and the tall Wisconsin teacher stood leaning against the railing and stared at the lights of the vessel, now moving alongside ours. The Finnish-American nurse sang a Finnish folk song. The lady from Riga kept reciting verses of sea ballads in five or six languages. The middle-aged Englishwoman, walking arm in arm with the blond young Russian, disappeared with him every so often into a dark corner. Each time that she emerged from hiding, she would say to me, in a breathy whisper, “Aren’t these Russians perfectly exquisite!”
Chapter 4
1
Should you want to conjure up the aroma of our British ship, you must begin with the salty breakfasts that permeated the large dining room with disagreeable smells of frying bacon, kippers—grilled, baked, or fried—and herring.
At my table, inhaling the pungent odors, sat a deaf professor, munching on a piece of dry toast. Next to him was a student, of middling height, with broad, athletic shoulders, big hands, and full cheeks. The professor held up an ear trumpet pointed toward the student, listened to what he was asking as if he were on the phone with him, and answered with a mouthful of food and in a high, squeaky voice that was in sharp discord with his commanding head and steel-gray hair. The student was also something of a surprise. His appearance suggested some sort of athlete, but he turned out to be an economics student, indeed, a whiz on the subject, and he bombarded the professor with questions about supply and demand, tariffs, international agreements, farm production, all bolstered by tens of citations that were as dry as the toast the professor was attacking with his false teeth.
The professor, who was on his way to do research at the British Museum, was visibly impatient with the student’s importuning. He would have preferred to engage in lighter conversation with others at the table, but the student was intent on monopolizing his attention and moved on from economics to pestering him with details about student life at American universities as compared with the European, all of this replete with statistics. The student ate quickly, never looking around him or down at his plate. He kept his gaze fixed on the professor, giving the poor man no chance to turn elsewhere. Like some giant, omnivorous whale, looking to scoop up its fill of knowledge, the student must have belonged to the school that holds one mustn’t forgo any opportunity for instruction. Even later on deck, when the professor had finally managed to get out from under his clutches, the young man sat off in a corner, head buried in a book, taking notes. Here, too, he didn’t glance up or return the smiles directed his way. He seemed to have decided exactly how he wanted to live and how to make every moment count, for a career doesn’t just stand there waiting, it must be cultivated, otherwise somebody else will snatch it.
At table, whenever the professor, wanting to be polite, threw some good-natured remarks my way, the student made a face, showing signs of impatience, only waiting for the strategic moment when he might reclaim the professor for himself, reattach himself like a leech, and resume spouting. Only after the two had left did things lighten up. The thirteen-year-old girl at our table didn’t lose a moment and immediately started imitating the professor’s high, squeaky voice and the student’s bass drone. She strung together meaningless sentences with ten-dollar words, mocking the elevated discourse of the learned duo. Her father, a hardworking American, with a red neck and an even redder face marked by an outbreak of eczema that divided his countenance into peaks and valleys, ordered her to stop, but couldn’t help himself and laughed so hard that he spit his tea back into his saucer. He coughed and choked, but his daughter persisted in her comic performance and answered him in the professor’s falsetto voice.
This American workingman, with his calloused hands and scarred face, who seemed lost among all the big-city sophisticates in the dining room, also began to loosen up and became rather animated, as if he had just bidden farewell to two gravediggers. Between sips of tea,
he told me that he was a widower, raising on his own the little girl his late wife had left on his hands. He explained that his daughter, now thirteen, had emerged from childhood with a rare combination of boyish and girlish traits—mischievous as a boy and flirtatious as a girl. Since she was the only female in the household, she felt she could act the coquette with her own father. Her split nature was reflected in the contrast between her sturdy body and her plump, round girlish face, with its laughing, mischievous blue eyes. The girl was dark-complexioned and healthy looking; she looked as if she had been cast out of tasty rye bread. She behaved toward her father like one pal to another, speaking to him as an equal, and also chewed him out like a little wife, as well as watching over him to make sure that he wasn’t eating too fast or too much.
For his part, the father kept his strong sentiments for his daughter under layer upon layer of protective armor, afraid that he might cry at the mere sight of his playful kitten, babbling away at the table, and self-assured enough to interrupt the deaf professor when she felt like it. So to mask his feelings he acted toward her as buddy-buddy as she did toward him. He was on his way to England, he told me, for a yearlong stay with his parents. He wanted to give his child a holiday that would also get her acquainted with her grandparents. He, too, needed a good, long rest. Other than the joy his daughter brought him, he confided that he hadn’t had a single carefree moment in his entire life. He worked like a horse and worried about raising his little girl, which was the toughest job of all, since he was father, mother, and cook, as well as breadwinner.
He was employed in a gold mine. “You don’t get much sympathy from ordinary blokes when you tell them that you work in a gold mine,” he said, in his broad British accent. “They hear ‘gold’ and right away think that you must be rich, because how can it be that some of that stuff doesn’t stick to you, and besides, gold is such a nice, refined metal, mining for it can’t be all that hard. None of that, of course, is true. Gold is as hard to mine as coal. The gold goes to the mine owners, and we get the copper, that is, the few lousy coppers they pay us, for which we work like slaves.”
He had certainly earned his rest, he said, and all he wanted to do on this Atlantic crossing was to lie in the sun, warming himself, like a hound. He complained bitterly about the aloofness of the passengers, so different from those on the ship that had brought him from California to New York. Now there was a lively voyage, because everyone aboard was an American—friendly people, not like the teachers, doctors, and professors of the present company, who began to stink of Europe the moment they came aboard, second-class people the lot of them, trying to pass for first-class. “I’m not an educated man,” he said, “but I know all about people like that, and I don’t like them.”
He was one of the loneliest persons on deck. Even his daughter had made some friends, girls her own age, but he connected with no one. When he was sure that his daughter wasn’t looking, he sneaked into the bar and quickly downed one whiskey after another. And when his daughter next saw him, she smelled right away that her father had let himself go too far and gave him a few good smacks in his red face, as he swore on his life to this plump little girl with the sharp tongue that this was positively his last drink: If she ever saw him take another, she would throw him to the sharks.
On deck there was so much sun that everyone seemed to be encased in a thin layer of sunlight, like cellophane wrapping. There was sun between every exchange of smiles, between exchanged Good Mornings. Sun everywhere, on hands and necks, bare backs, and faces. Everything looked brighter and more transparent—suits, dresses, stockings. The slight hairs on women’s bare legs, stretched out on deck chairs as if on display, quivered in the sunlight like tiny blades of grass. Downy motes flew by, like precious diamonds of sun-dust that sometimes streak on the tail of a comet of sunlight into a sun-drenched room.
The prizefighter who had spent his first days slathered in oil, sunning himself, was now up and about, beaming at everyone. He had become more acclimated to shipboard life and had abandoned his former habits. With a woman on his arm, he now promenaded the deck, just like everybody else, neglecting to swagger or thrust out his chest. He still wore the same sweater knotted around his neck, and a cap at a jaunty angle, but his muscle was no longer intimidating. On the contrary, the companion he had picked up looked more the prizefighter. She stepped down heavily on her sandals, weighed down by her considerable bulk. Her red-painted toenails, rouged cheeks, painted lips, several gold teeth, and her ample bosom sagging under clanking chains were all so well suited to the fighter’s bashed-in nose that no one could have found him a better match. Trailing him, like Sherlock Holmes, was his manager and Man Friday, looking as if his head were in the clouds, but all the while, not once taking his eye off his bread-and-butter. He walked alone, too much the concerned businessman to bother with the ladies—his head filled with plans, calculations, and strategies.
The doctor who had been stalking me for days finally caught up with me. Unceremoniously, he motioned to his wife to go off and leave us alone, and immediately launched into an account, sparing no detail, of how he had discovered a cure for that incurable affliction, Addison’s disease. With his fat little hands and round face, he had the look of a clever pug. His cheeks here and there sported bluish-red blotches. He was a short man, and when he spoke, he bounced up and down, thrusting himself into the listener’s face. His medical practice was divided between America and Europe, half a year on each continent. “Europe used to mean Germany,” he sighed, “but that’s now off limits.” He was therefore on his way to Austria, where he would be attending a medical conference, at which he would disclose his cure for Addison’s disease.
He explained to me, in his grotesque Yiddish-German English, interspersed with some well-worn Hebrew phrases, that, in general, doctors were actually—he finished the sentence with a vulgar word, spoken with the utmost relish. He then struck a questioning pose, to ascertain what impression his shocking word had made on me and whether I had caught his opinion of his colleagues, who, to his mind, were no great exemplars of wisdom. He repeated the offensive word several more times, smacking his lips and shouting it aloud so that all might hear.
“Dat’s vot doctors are. You tink,” he said in his Germanized English, lapsing into a Yiddish intonation, “that a doctor is a clever man, but the truth is”—this he confided to the non-Jewish woman who was walking beside me—“a physician is a —.” Again he concluded with the same Yiddish vulgarity and the same display of Hasidic rapture. It was a word which for him was the ne plus ultra for conveying the unmitigated stupidity of doctors. The woman looked to me for protection from the incomprehensible remark, which the doctor urged me to translate for her. “Tell her what it means. It’s no shame! It’s human.”
Sensing that some indelicacy was being bruited, the woman took fright lest I actually translate, as requested, and very elegantly slipped away from us and disappeared.
“You see,” he said, rubbing his fat, little hands with satisfaction, “I chased her away. I hate it when women mix in when men are talking about serious things.” He then digressed and proceeded to lecture me, now speaking entirely in Yiddish, on how one should behave toward women. One must practice thrift.
“Sure, flirt with them,” he expounded, “make them happy, don’t make a fool of yourself, but above all—preserve your manly energy, your vital fluids. Never dissipate your powers. Learn how to get pleasure out of life, but always practice thrift. Life isn’t that proverbial ‘inexhaustible fountain.’ A great doctor is telling you this, not some little pipsqueak who thinks he’s a doctor, but who’s really … well, you already know what.”
But he couldn’t take the risk that I might have forgotten and told me again. Just then his wife happened by and he decided that she should also have the pleasure of knowing. She smiled tightly and continued on her way.
The Latvian lady passed by and greeted me. I introduced her to the doctor and he immediately took advantage of the opportunity.
Asserting medical privilege, his hands made a quick tour of her figure, as he noted her lovely throat, healthy skin, well-developed bust, and truly proportioned back. His fat, little hands moved up and down, until she realized that this was more than a medical occasion and she excused herself. “Well,” said the doctor, “I’ve just given you an illustrated lecture. I can’t say that I don’t enjoy a pat here and a pat there, but the main thing is to conduct yourself like a man and preserve your source of energy.” He then explained to me that the most fatal mistake doctors make is to speak of specific diseases.
“The truth,” he declared, “is that there are no separate diseases. People are divided into two categories—healthy and sick. This is elementary, but doctors have messed it all up with their complicated theories. A healthy person contains within him all diseases, but he is master over them, he keeps all his body parts in harmony, he sets a rhythm to his life. In a sick person, all the so-called diseases erupt simultaneously and they become the masters. There’s no such thing as cancer alone. When a person falls ill, he becomes susceptible to cancer, to tuberculosis, he can die from pneumonia—in short, he can get any and all the diseases in the book. A doctor—and you know what kind I mean—pokes around, looking for a specific ailment, and lucky him! A diagnosis! Right away he begins to bombard the ailment with all manner of junk medication, overlooking the larger picture, the entire human body. This is how an amateur operates, not how life operates, and it is, in fact, downright inhumane. He pokes around in the dark to cure the ‘illness’ while everything in the patient is going wrong. He doesn’t understand that it’s all a matter of harmony and disharmony. He puts a stethoscope on the chest and listens to the heart—do you know what a heart is? Neither does that doctor. You might as well be whistling into his ear. When you listen carefully to a heart, you hear—what can I tell you?—you hear a Wagnerian opera. Now it’s pumping away as triumphantly as the ride of the Valkyries across the heavens. Then comes the kol demama daka, the ‘still, small voice’ of the High Holiday prayer—Liebestod. Blessed be the true judge!”
The Glatstein Chronicles Page 12