by Gates, Moses
“Fuck. This is fucking very fucking bad. Let’s fucking go right fucking now. Fuck.”
Running through a storm drain against the flow is very tiring, very slippery, and very nerve-racking. Imagine trying to run upriver on a bed of glass while being chased by Godzilla. Finally, after what seemed like hours but is probably closer to ten minutes, we come to the last manhole we passed.
Max stops us. “OK, guys. This is a fucking bad way to go out. We are up and out very quickly and hope we don’t be seen by fucking cops. If we do, do not be speaking English. Do not be speaking fucking English.”
We pop the manhole and scurry out. Nobody is around. The plan seems to have gone off without a hitch.
We head over to a nearby park. The Russians have kept a few odd statues of Communist heroes around for nostalgic purposes, one of which is a statue of Marx that we plop down by. I try to snap a few shots of us changing as we’re laughing and generally being pretty happy with ourselves. The moment is survived, the adrenaline fades, the tension released and replaced with that happy stomach-full-of-sunshine feeling.
“Guys, guys, shhh, shhh,” I hear Max say, and my stomach-full-of-sunshine drops straight to the ground. Thoughts of incurable tuberculosis strains I have read about existing in Russian prisons fill my head as I turn to see four guys in uniforms armed with machine guns come marching over to us. I remember the warning my mother never spoke.
My worst realization is that I cannot remember if I have my passport with me. On a separate trip into the metro system, Max had dropped his passport and not noticed he’d done so until we were off the tracks and heading back up through the vent shaft we’d used to infiltrate the system. Now, losing your passport certainly sucks, but if you’re in your own country and you don’t plan on traveling anytime soon, it’s not that big a deal. It’s certainly not something you’d consider going poking around for in between the cross ties of active subway tracks you illegally infiltrated ten minutes earlier. Yet Max freaked out in a way usually reserved for people who’ve lost a finger, not a passport.
“Oh, no, guys. You fucking don’t understand. If we are seen by police coming out, I fucking need my passport. In Russia, if you have no paper, no passport, you are nothing. You are no person. If the police stop you with no paper, they do not know fucking what to do with you. No passport, and no money for bribe, you maybe just disappear.”
Now, sitting beneath the gaze of Karl Marx, I’m focusing on “money for bribe,” desperately hoping that the legendary corruption of the Russian police will trump any terrorism suspicions. Getting out of this with light pockets seems to be a great solution right now. As they jabber at me in Russian, I remember Max’s admonition and stare blankly. The police motion for my camera. I give it to Max. Max shows the cop a few blurry photos of us changing. Luckily, they lose interest before they get to the pictures of the tunnel. The bad news is that the reason they lose interest in my small handheld digital is that everyone else is outfitted like they’ve been hired by National Geographic: backpacks full of photography gear, fancy cameras, huge tripods, the works.
SCENE OF THE CRIME, DAYTIME.
© Elizabeth Demitriou
There are four other cameras to go. Luckily, while they were busy with me and Max, the other Russians have figured out what was going on. They pass inspection one by one. Steve is the last one. He takes Max’s advice about not speaking English to mean he should talk in French to the police. I’m sweating bullets as he pulls out the camera while mumbling something about “Vous voulez voir cet appareil?” But somehow Steve has managed to palm the memory card and insert a new one. The police are rewarded with pictures of a bar mitzvah in Short Hills, New Jersey. When they walk away, not even trying to shake us down for a quick payoff, the astonishment soon gives way to relief. I am, by nature, insatiably curious for almost any of life’s experiences. “Almost any,” however, does not include getting beaten up by convicts in a Russian gulag.
Max explains later: “When we got stopped, the cops asked us questions about what we are doing here, why we have waders, why is the place around us wet. When I showed them Moses’s camera, the cop said, ‘This is only one small amateur camera, but you’ve got tripods. Did you take pictures on that shitty cam using a tripod? Show me all cameras!’ So one Russian guy told him that he’s got a film camera, not a digital, ha-ha, another one that his batteries died, and blah-blah-blah. After a few questions they fucked off. Steve trying to speak French was fucking funny!”
When I was a child, one of the things my mother would regularly tell me—along with “Look both ways before you cross the street” and “Don’t drink and drive”—was not to eat wild mushrooms. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned that this was not part of the standard litany of parental life lessons—that this constant refrain came instead from one afternoon during the Summer of Love when my nineteen-year-old mother had to get her stomach pumped after trying to impress her hippie friends by eating some mushrooms growing in her backyard. I wonder how long it will be until my children realize their dad is the only dad who regularly sits them down and tells them, “Kids. Remember. Don’t go to prison in Russia.”
Steve says: We were getting better at this by now. We had been to a few different cities, had experienced that terror of “What are we getting ourselves into?” a few different times. The crew in Moscow was fantastic, a mixture of younger kids who thought we were cool for the entirely too simple reason that we had come all the way across the ocean from New York and a few older guys. Moe, by this time, had started what turned into a constant refrain: “This is going to be my last adventure.” Every time we’d climb up anything, even a flight of stairs, I’d hear, “Steve, Steve, after this I’m retiring. No more climbing.” But he hadn’t gotten any more civilized. A moment I remember from that trip more clearly than any other: About a week into the trip, after having been in three main-line sewers, some filthy utility tunnels, the Moscow Metro, and I can’t remember what else, I happened to see his stuff spread out on the bed of the hostel—including the bar of soap he had so carefully brought. It was still in its original packaging, untouched.
Moses’ mother says: We were all sitting around in my parents’ backyard playing music. Somebody claimed that mushrooms are always poisonous, which I scoffed at. So to prove it, I ate about one-quarter of a small mushroom. Then we went over to Ray Bradbury’s house because Mark or Brucey or someone knew his daughter Susan, and I started barfing in Ray Bradbury’s toilet. Then I went to the hospital.
TWENTY-SIX
Szczecin, Poland, January 2007
I belong to a strange generation. We have no direct experience with the Holocaust, like my grandparents’ generation. We don’t even have the experience of living with people who have, like my parents’ generation. But it has not yet faded into history, known only in academic and philosophical ways, like it inevitably will for our children’s generation. We still know what it is like to see a person you love turn back into a terrified nine-year-old girl in front of your eyes when she apologizes for not picking you up at the airport.
“I’m sorry, Mose,” my grandmother’s cousin Maria says to me after I arrive at her flat in Poland “You know I don’t so much like to go to Germany.”
My great-great-grandparents had twelve children. Six died in childhood. Five more immigrated to the United States between the wars. One stayed in Poland, in the small town she had grown up in, called Krasnystaw. She and her husband had three children. The only daughter, Maria, was sent to hide with a Catholic family during the war. Her father, mother, and two brothers were shot on the streets of Krasnystaw in 1942.
• • •
Some time after the war, with no way to find any family outside of Poland, Maria married Janek, one of the children of the Catholic family, and had a child named Stanislaus, Stashek for short. Shortly after his birth they moved across the country to the port city of Szczecin, where
Janek worked in the shipyards. In the late 1950s my great-grandfather finally learned she had survived.
MARIA AND HER FAMILY BEFORE THE WAR.
Szczecin is within spitting distance of the German border. In fact, until the Potsdam Conference at the end of World War II, it was a German town named Stettin, and Berlin’s main seaport. Today, you can take a direct flight from the United States into Berlin-Schönefeld Airport and catch a van that will have you in downtown Szczecin in two hours. But my older relatives have never gone that way. To this day, my grandmother, bad hip and all, will fly to London, change planes for Warsaw, and then take a train six hours back to Szczecin to visit Maria. She has been to every country in Europe except Albania—and Germany.
I had taken a couple of days to visit Maria as part of an earlier trip Steve and I were on, the one where he ended up in the Lord Wigram Ward of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. Between Italy and England we took a week to travel through Central Europe, making our way from Naples to Venice, Prague, Vienna, and Berlin. It was my first time in Central Europe, and my first time in a place where I have roots, that I could call “the old country.”
Talk to most ethnic groups in New York and you’ll find at least a little nostalgia for the lands of their forebears, even if it’s more manufactured than genuine. Caribbean immigrants dream of their lost island paradise, Italians talk about taking a vacation to visit the little town in Sicily or Calabria or Campania where their grandparents used to live, you can see flags from a dozen Latin American countries flying from houses or storefronts during a ten-minute walk through the streets of Jackson Heights or Sunset Park. The one stark exception to this nostalgia is that you will never hear a Jew pining away for the memory of Central or Eastern Europe. With good reason.
I had been to Italy and France, countries that had been occupied by the Nazis, but not to the extent that the entire Jewish population was destroyed. I had left Rome the previous week, a city that has the oldest continuously active Jewish community in Europe, one that is still fairly active today despite its not being allowed to live outside the confines of the four-block-square ghetto until 1870.
I had also been to the Iberian countries, former centers of a Jewish culture that had been eradicated, and which are virtually devoid of any Jewish community today. Portugal, a country that was once about 20 percent Jewish, today has a few thousand Jews. But half a millennium of time has insulated that period of history to a large degree. Not so with Central Europe.
Being Jewish in Central Europe, even today, even as a young person, is eerie and extremely unnerving. What you know to be alive is said to you to be dead. A culture you are used to experiencing in sounds, smells, and feelings is relegated to museums, memorials, and tourist shops. And, of course, a heavy dose of security cameras and police officers, as a reminder that despite a near-complete extermination, there are still plenty of people willing to come back to try to destroy what pathetic little there is left.
You feel like a living ghost—that who you are shouldn’t exist. That you have been told in the most brutal way possible that this is no longer your home, that you are no longer welcome here. Despite the changes in Central Europe over the last sixty years, the fact remains that these changes occurred only after the vision of the old ideology had been fulfilled to a horrific extent—an extent almost beyond capacity for imagining in a world populated by people you actually know, rather than one of history books or science fiction shows set in alternate universes. Politically, the Central Europe of today might not resemble Hitler’s dreams of the future, but in terms of the “Jewish question,” the undisputed fact is that it does—a fact that I could feel in my bones from Austria to Poland.
Ironically, of the Central European cities I visited, by far I felt the most comfortable in Berlin. One has to remember, during the Weimar era, Berlin was the most anti-Nazi city in the German-speaking world, and one of the most liberal and cosmopolitan in all of Europe. And today, Berlin is well along the road of returning to these noble roots. Immigrants from all over the world walk its streets, multitudes of languages are heard in its cafés, gays and lesbians live openly and freely. There is even a small but growing Jewish community. It makes me smile. I can think of no better historical repudiation of the Nazis’ ideals than for their imagined racially pure capital of a totalitarian Third Reich to, in fact, become a multinational, liberal, cosmopolitan city—complete with a Jewish presence and culture—embracing the very values that the Nazis abhorred. I use this argument to try to get my grandmother to visit Maria the easy way, but it falls on deaf ears. I don’t agree, but I understand: how much more difficult it is to ask people to forgive their prejudices when they are acquired firsthand, not passed down through the generations.
It was my first time in Berlin. Although I spent only about a day and a half there, it was enough to get a certain feel for the city. It reminded me a lot of New York, as much as any other city I’ve been to except perhaps Paulo. The kicker was the subway: it’s one of the largest systems in the world and, while not quite 24/7 like the New York City subway, comes closer than pretty much any other system. And the train pulled something straight out of New York City Transit’s book: changing lines due to construction in the middle of the trip.
When Berlin was divided, the subway would run through several ghost stations in the eastern section before returning to the West. These came complete with armed guards, and the general “Shoot on sight” directive for potential defectors. When the wall came down in 1989 they were time capsules, unaltered since they had last been used, almost three decades previous.
Within a few years the subway system had returned almost completely to its prewar state. And today you can hardly notice that Berlin was ever divided at all. This isn’t very surprising. The idea of completely cutting a city in half—and not even along a natural boundary, such as a river—is unrealistic. Something as complicated as a world city, with subways, sewers, electric grids, and water pipes—not to mention the natural economic and social flows of its citizens—can be cut in half and stitched up on either side only with crippling results. While I never got to see Berlin heal itself after the wall came down in 1989, I imagine it was quick, painless, and completely natural. Even after twenty-eight years of separation, a city will fall into its natural state seamlessly, the way the body heals itself after a wound.
• • •
Maria lives alone, without a blood relative sharing the same continent. Janek had died a few years ago, and their son Stashek had died as a young man in an auto accident. I talked with Maria well into the night, and the next day she showed me some of the sights of the city, including the docks where Janek had worked until shortly before the fall of communism. That night we went to visit Janek’s family and I got to meet some of Maria’s in-laws, the family that had hidden her during the war.
Family is a strange thing. This was my grandmother’s cousin’s husband’s sister’s husband’s house. I wasn’t related genetically to anyone I met in the room. I didn’t share a nationality, religion, or even a language with these people. I had never met any of them before in my life; in fact, I wasn’t even aware that most of them existed. Still, from the moment I stepped in the door, I immediately felt at home. Part of it might have been because of Polish hospitality, part of it definitely was because of all the whiskey they were plying me with (apparently in the Polish cultural consciousness, Americans are supposed to drink whiskey). But most of it was because I knew we were family, and so did they.
FAMILY IN POLAND.
• • •
Traveling, and especially traveling alone, is one of my favorite things to do: the freedom, the complete responsibility for yourself and complete lack of it for anyone else, the ability to see and do and learn things you thought you would only ever read about. But there’s a downside to everything, and for as many interesting people as I meet and converse with on the road, there’s still a sort of melancholy
loneliness that lingers with me. It’s not a totally unpleasant feeling, and there are even times when I quite enjoy it. But the breaks from that feeling are always appreciated while on the road, and there is no better break than being around family. Maria had once told me that the best day of her life was when her family in the United States found her. In some very, very small way, that night I think I may have caught a fleeting sideways glimpse of how she must have felt.
• • •
I think of all of this—of family, Berlin, the war, the Prague Jewish Museum with its security cameras and ancient cemetery, the Great Synagogue of Vienna with its gates and armed guards, the stories from Maria about hiding from soldiers and how she still hates hearing German—all of this as I’m in an abandoned limestone quarry under Odessa, staring at a swastika carved into the wall.