“Yes. But first I have to buy the tickets.”
“I want to see Tateh,” Sura said, suddenly excited.
“When are we going?” asked Samuil.
“As soon as possible.”
“Can’t we stay for the fighting?”
“No, it’s too dangerous.”
“Even if we watch from the rooftop like we did when they had fireworks?”
“No.”
Samuil looked disappointed, until he had another thought. “Are we going on a big ship?”
“Yes.”
“Will I be sick?” asked Sura.
“Maybe at first. But you’ll get used to it.”
“And we can have our own cabin?” asked Samuil.
Berta nodded.
“Will Masha be sick?” Sura asked.
“Masha will stay here with Vera.”
“We can’t take Masha?” Sura said, her eyes filling with tears.
“No. Cats don’t like the ocean.”
She started to cry. “I don’t want to leave Masha.”
“Sura, please, just walk with me. I have to get to the steamship office.”
“Masha is going to be very sad.”
“Masha will get over it. And so will you. When we get to America, I’ll get you two cats.”
Sura looked up at her mother and wiped her eyes. “Can they be kittens?”
By the time Berta came back down the hill the crowd had swelled to thousands and was overflowing into the surrounding streets. The steamship office was located in Davidkovo Square directly across from the little patch of grass where the Merchant’s band had set up their instruments to play patriotic songs. The recruitment center was also on the square and crowded with young men, their eyes shining, their heads erect because they were following God’s will and pledging their lives to Mother Russia. Berta watched these able-bodied boys with their broad shoulders, strong backs, and blond hair. These were the heroes of the black earth. Their mothers clung to them and begged them not to go. But how could they not? It was the adventure of a lifetime. They would go fight and come back heroes. They would do their part for the Little Father. As she watched them from across the square, their eyes glazed with the fervor of the newly converted, she thought how easy it was to convince them to give up their young lives . . . and for what? For a flag and an indifferent czar who, if he considered them at all, thought of them only as a burden of an office he never wanted nor was qualified to occupy.
SHE COULDN’T book passage until late October on a ship departing from Odessa, bound for Liverpool and then on to New York. She was not happy about the delay, but at least it gave her time to wrap up her affairs. Over the intervening months she let go of the staff, closed up the house, and said good-bye to her friends. On her last day in the city, she stood on the bluff overlooking the river, shrinking into her coat, shivering and stiffening against the wind. She had come down to the shops to pick up a few things for the trip and was grateful when she found that they still carried sewing kits, lambskin caps with earflaps, and yarn. As she stood there watching the barges pull into the docks she brought her muff up to cover her mouth and nose and smelled the perfume on the fur mixed with the clean, cold smell of the river. Below her on the little beach by the docks were lines of brightly colored rowboats that had been hauled out of the water and turned upside down, proof that winter had come. She remembered hiring the blue one on a bright, hot Sunday afternoon with Hershel and the children. There were a dozen boats for hire on the river that day, bobbing in the water, looking like pieces of colored licorice in a glass bowl.
Now that she was about to leave for Odessa, there was nothing to distract her from her worries. She still hadn’t received word from Hershel and didn’t know where he was or how to find him. She had his sister’s address and would start there, but she worried that his sister had moved or didn’t know where he was or, worse, that it was the unthinkable. The thought that something had happened to him rarely left her mind. It gnawed at her during the day, and at night it robbed her of sleep. Now, on the eve of her departure, she steeled herself against these thoughts. She had to keep going. She had to find him.
She walked in the park along the bluffs for the last time. She passed the merry-go-round that was shuttered and dark and the Merchant’s Club where the brass band used to play in the flower garden before they were sent off to the front. The park was deserted of course. The ice cream girls in their white aprons and blond hair were gone, as was the man with the monkey who begged for coins. The kvass sellers were gone and so was the old lady who sold hats and Russian flags: They were all gone. Soon she would be too.
She crossed the street, her feet creaking on the snow, and walked down to Svetlanskaya. There she passed the Niklolaev Iron Works factory, a brooding hulk with grimy windows and smokestacks jutting up into the sky. On the other side of the street were the neglected apartment buildings that housed the workers, cold water flats without heat or gas, surrounded by empty lots full of trash and horse manure.
She jumped when the whistle blew and a minute later two guards in company uniforms pushed opened the great iron gates. Soon a crowd of women poured out of the factory floor dressed in heavy coats, woolen hats, stockings, and boots. Berta wasn’t surprised to see that all the workers were women. She knew that the men had all gone to the front and many were now in their graves. In the past three months these women had taken their places, making cannons instead of farm machinery. They stared at her as they passed. They looked her up and down with envy etched in every line of their work-worn faces. They took in her furs, her gloves, and her expensive boots, whispering and giggling to each other, even once or twice jostling her on purpose. They were menacing enough to make her want to turn up the first side street.
Back on Davidkovo Street, she passed shops she used to frequent that were now shuttered for lack of goods. Here and there were burned-out buildings, blackened timbers littered with broken glass and twisted iron. These were once German shops. The war was going badly and Russia had suffered terrifying defeats. A whole army was lost at Tannenberg; army corps turned into divisions, brigades into regiments. There were hundreds of thousands if not a million Russians dead on the battlefields only three months into the war. Hatred of the Germans was running high. Everyone with a German name was suspected of being a spy; even the empress, who was German, was suspected of treachery.
The war had changed so much in Cherkast. Supply trucks parked in the streets were waiting to go to the front. Curtains were drawn over many of the windows, garbage left to rot on the stoops, a sure sign that a son or husband had just been lost. The air was acrid with the smell of smoke—not the smoke of factories, but of burning fields. Berta told herself that it was only the muzhiki burning what was left of the summer wheat, but it made her nervous all the same. She thought she could smell burning villages. She imagined the war was coming closer, even though she knew it was still hundreds of versts away.
It was growing dark and because the motor had been sold she had to walk home. There weren’t many cabs left because most of the motorcars had been requisitioned and the horses too, so the trolleys weren’t running either. Before trekking up the hill she decided to warm up with a cup of coffee. Fortunately the English Room was still open, so she stopped in there. The lunch trade was over and since no one had the time or money for a formal tea, the place was empty. The waiters in starched white aprons sat in the back eating their lunch at a long table and smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. They looked over at her when she came in, but no one made an effort to greet her. Eventually a heavyset waiter with a round, oily face sighed deeply and got to his feet. He sauntered over with a look of indifference.
“Good afternoon, Madame,” he said patiently, taking her coat and hat.
“Just coffee, please,” she said, following him over to a table by the window. It was covered in a white tablecloth and decorated with a red carnation. Overhead was a clumsy painting of Red Square and another of the czar and his family. She sa
t down and put her things on the empty seat beside her and looked out the window at the street traffic. There was a group of soldiers, deserters most likely, standing on the corner in front of the restaurant, selling cigarettes and sunflower seeds.
“So I say to him, it is not my war, it ’s his war. Let him fight it,” grumbled a waiter from the back table.
“That is what I say,” echoed his colleague.
“Why should I go?” said another. “I do not even know this kaiser. Why do I have to go and die in a trench because the czar does not like his cousin?” These were all the older men who hadn’t been called in the first wave but would certainly be called now that Russia had suffered such heavy losses.
“Did I tell you about old lady Demianova?” said the first. “The one who lost three sons? She went crazy after that and now she wanders around the village looking for them. I nearly jumped out of my skin one night when I looked out the window and found her looking back at me with those crazy eyes. My mother says they ought to take her away and lock her up, but I think she’s suffered enough. ‘Let the old lady be,’ I told my mother. Anyway, she will freeze to death by winter’s end. You can be sure of that.”
Her waiter brought over a silver pot of coffee, poured a cup, and set it down in front of her. She was about to thank him when the door opened and a frigid blast of cold air came in along with two officers dressed in greatcoats and lambskin hats. One of them had a paper under his arm, the other a small bundle. Both of them noticed Berta right off but were too polite to stare at a pretty woman sitting alone.
“We’ll have a table,” said the first one, smoothing his carefully trimmed beard. Like so many others he looked like the czar. He gave his coat and hat to the waiter.
“And two brandies,” said the other, adding his things to the pile. The waiter handed their things to the girl at the hat check counter and showed them to a nearby table.
“They’re not all like that, you know,” said the shorter of the two, taking his seat. “I had a lieutenant in my unit once and he was downright decent. A good man and I trusted him. We all did.” He crossed one leg over the other and Berta noticed that his boots had been outfitted with heels to make him appear taller.
“That’s just like you. You’re such a child. You’d trust anyone,” said the other.
“I’m telling you he was honorable.”
“How would you know?”
“I know, that’s all.”
“And suppose you’re right. That makes one. One good Jew out of how many, five million?”
“I don’t know about the others and neither do you. You accuse me of being gullible and yet you seriously believe they cut the phone lines and reconnect them to the Austrians.”
“Why not?”
“Impossible, for one thing. Do you know anything about telephone lines? Baba’s yarn. Old crones making up stories to stir up trouble.”
“So maybe it isn’t true, but everybody knows that 90 percent of them are traitors and the rest are spies. If they didn’t do that, then they did something else. I’d bet my life on it.”
Berta pretended not to hear their conversation. She stared blankly into her coffee cup and then looked up out the window at a passing convoy of army trucks that belched out clouds of blue smoke from their exhaust pipes. She had heard the rumors of Jews hiding gold in corpses and sending them to the Germans, of floating messages in bottles and signaling the German artillery with lanterns and flags in the trees. Everyone was convinced that Jews were collaborators. Nobody thought to question otherwise.
Whenever she was confronted with something like this she pretended not to hear. Over the years she had perfected a look of disinterest, as if it had nothing to do with her, as if she had no thoughts on the subject. In truth it had everything to do with her. It filled her with humiliation for being a Jew and for not defending them. She was angry at the anti-Semites but also angry at the Jews for holding themselves apart and making themselves so conspicuous. It made her miss her parents. Sometimes she thought she ought to do something, say something, but she never did. Instead she kept quiet and justified her cowardice by reasoning that it was important to get along and not make a fuss.
“And I suppose they had something to do with Odessa?”
At that Berta looked over at them.
“Could be, hadn’t thought about it.”
“Absurd. Now you’re really stepping over the line. I wash my hands of you.”
“Blaming me for the truth?”
“What happened in Odessa?” she asked, not bothering to make an excuse for interrupting.
The two men looked over at her, obviously pleased by her question. “It was in the papers tonight, Miss. The Turks shelled the city and sank a gunboat and blocked us in.”
“A blockade?”
“So it seems. There were two German battle cruisers.”
“And there’s no way out?”
The officers exchanged a look. “Well, no, that’s the idea of a blockade, you see.”
“So we’re trapped here?”
“I suppose you could put it that way.”
The officers wanted her to stay and tried to entice her with details of the event, even though she had no interest in any of it. When the waiter came by, she gave him a ruble without glancing at the check, gathered up her things, and left. Out on the street she went first in one direction and then another, knowing that something had to be done but not knowing quite what.
IT WAS after midnight when Berta arrived at the Cat Gut Club, located in the cellar of a warehouse on Podkolokony Street in the heart of the Lugovaya Market. It was a popular gathering place for artists and poets and scions of wealthy families out for an exotic evening of poetry readings and music. On special nights the dancer Marianna Golitsyn dressed as a gypsy and performed on a mirror sometimes wearing underthings, sometimes not, depending on her mood. Mostly it was a place for all the classes to come together and drink “pineapple juice” from teacups. It’s what they were calling vodka since the czar outlawed it at the beginning of the war. It was also the place for paying bribes, selling information, and buying cocaine.
When Berta came down the steps the first thing she noticed was the smell, which only grew steadily worse as she descended into the club. Despite the vases of flowers that lined the wall, the whole place stank of faulty plumbing. It was worse in the lobby, so bad she had to keep her gloved palm over her mouth and nose until she managed to weave through the crowd and enter the main room.
The club proper was a cavernous space built beneath the street. The ceiling and walls had been covered with rough patches of gray plaster to give it the appearance of a cave. Berta stood on the bottom step and scanned the crowded room looking for Yuvelir. It was packed with a rowdy crowd of officers and enlisted men, their women drinking alongside them, smoking cigarettes right out in public. Everyone was singing and clapping while in the center of the room enlisted men were dancing the kazatska, their arms folded across their chests, their legs shooting out from under their torsos as they jumped up and down.
Berta was surprised by the gaiety in the room. How could they be in such high spirits with a war going on? Didn’t they realize that hundreds of thousands of their compatriots were dying at the front? She looked at their drunken faces—at the young officer grabbing a woman and pulling her down on his lap, another falling backward into the crowd, a girl with smeared lip rouge squinting through a haze of cigarette smoke—and realized it wasn’t gaiety that filled the room that night, but a desperate attempt to deny the inevitable. These were officers about to lead thousands of untrained peasants to their death. These were enlisted men about to meet the enemy without guns or bullets. Since there weren’t enough arms to go around, they would be expected to earn their rifles by prying them out of the hands of their dead comrades. Looking around at the singing and dancing and drunken lovemaking, she understood that it wasn’t a party she was witnessing, but a last supper.
Berta spotted Yuvelir seated in the back w
ith five young officers and walked over to join them. He jumped to his feet and reached out for her hand. “Madame Alshonsky,” he said with mock formality. “What is the world coming to when Berta Alshonsky graces us with her presence in a hole like this?”
“I’m sorry to interrupt your party. I really can’t stay.”
“Nonsense. Come sit with us.” He kissed her on both cheeks and pulled over a chair. “Gogochka, get Madame Alshonsky a pineapple juice.”
The talk was all about war: stories of horror and heroism, who was gone and who wasn’t coming back, of the government’s mismanagement, the crumbling supply lines, and the faltering munitions factories that were struggling to keep up with demand. The usual spy rumors came up, but thankfully no one mentioned the Jews. They all knew she was Jewish. No doubt they were raised to be anti-Semites, but civilized ones, who kept a check on their views when in the company of Jews of Berta’s class.
She waited for as long as she could and then she leaned in. “I have to speak to you,” she said to Yuvelir. The waiter had just come and put down a platter of zakuski in the center of the table.
“What now? Can’t it wait?”
“No, it can’t.”
He’d been turned down for service when he tried to sign up during the initial flush of wartime patriotism. The army said his politics were too radical and they didn’t want him. With all his friends gone he had nothing to do but help in the various wartime charities and write his memoir, which he thought was interesting enough to be published. But tonight a few of his closest friends were back and the last thing he wanted was to be pulled away from them.
She rose and the gentlemen got up in deference. She said her goodbyes and then turned to Yuvelir. “Come along, Misha, you’re going to walk me home.”
It was late and Podkolokony Street was shrouded in thick fog. It had snowed while she was in the club and now the wind swirled the snow into drifts around the lampposts and up against the buildings. Every now and then a candle appeared in a window, but mostly the street was dark and deserted. Occasionally, a figure materialized out of nowhere, a leering face in the gloom. There was a distant screech of laughter, then a man’s drunken cry. Someone was calling for help. They passed an old woman sitting on a curb with a baby in her arms. She held out her hand for a coin. Berta ignored her and walked on. Everyone knew where these beggars got their babies—they rented them by the hour off the nursing mothers, hoping for a little pity and a few kopecks to buy lodging for the night.
The Little Russian Page 19