Savage Feast

by Boris Fishman

  “A boil on your tongue.” He shook his head.

  “Sorry.”

  We returned to the kitchen and cooked silently. I fried potatoes while he messed around with his salmon.

  “How’s everything with Alana?” he said. His idea of a conciliatory topic.

  “The same,” I said.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t understand what your problem is.”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Is she barren?”

  “What? No.”

  I wondered if there was a follow-up on his tongue—“Are you?”—but he would never risk inviting it to be true by mentioning it out loud. I had tried to explain truthfully many times why Alana and I struggled—this seemed more loving and respectful than a deflecting deception; besides, I wanted the understanding—but it made so little sense to someone of his mind that he assumed it was an elaborate lie. She was barren. Or I was gay. Or God only knew what he came up with but refrained from voicing out loud due to superstition. Sometimes it made me want to try to explain harder, smarter, better—the power was mine; I could do it. And sometimes it just made me want to be left alone.

  “Five years together,” he said. “Life isn’t forever.”

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “I met your grandmother—”

  “I’ve got it!” I snapped.

  “How irritable you are,” he tsked.

  “No entrée?” I said through my teeth, trying to steer him away.

  “You make what you know,” he said. He looked over: “You know entrées?”

  They didn’t have the ingredients for the simple, hands-off things that I knew: roast sausages, roast pork chops. “What about a cabbage salad?” I said. “The way Oksana makes it—vinegar and a little sugar.” He shrugged, and I went to the fridge.

  When it was all ready, I offered to take it in, but he told me to go in the living room—as far from the bedroom’s germs as I could. He was pretty germophobic himself, but he wanted to be the knight who brought in the food. The bedroom door opened, and Oksana called out a dull hello. “Queen for a day!” she yelled hoarsely, and we all laughed.

  When he returned, he plopped down on the couch pillows, a shit-eating smile on his face. We all thought he took his privileges for granted (who got a twenty-four-hour live-in home aide?), but he was proud to have done that for her. “What do you want to know?” he said.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “You keep asking questions. Navy tattoos, money on the side. Ask. Ask what you want to know.” He winked and gave me a slanted smile. “I don’t want you to think I’m a murderer. Just close the window.”

  “It’s a hundred degrees in here,” I said. Starting in October, the central heat went berserk. He had to keep the windows open all winter.

  “They can hear upstairs if the window’s open,” he said.

  “You think they’ll report you for stealing from a Minsk garden seventy-five years ago?”

  Finally, he was willing to talk—why was I ruining it? At some point, I must’ve come to draw more pleasure from the anger I felt at being denied information than from the prospect of finally getting it—from getting to know the him who wasn’t a bullshitter complimenting himself on his magnificence as a grandparent. The only generosity I actually needed from him—his understanding—he couldn’t provide, and so I thought maybe we could cut a different groove in the frozen soil beneath us. Certainly the alternative—leaving each other’s lives for good—felt impossible. The five months we spent not speaking after Paris and Israel had been almost as hard for me as they’d been for him. But I was weary of being publicly adored and privately deflected by him, like a child. I was thirty.

  It tormented me that I couldn’t get him to crack, when I had cracked so many who should have been harder (the Ivy League; the Fulbright people; Carly K. next door in New Jersey). I wanted to play him the way he played others. But I couldn’t. Even though I knew he was dying to brag. Either I wasn’t good enough or he was too good. (Or my grandmother too clearly visible shaking her head no from heaven.) But then Oksana had gotten sick; he had made soup for the woman who usually made soup for him; and something I hadn’t been able to dislodge got dislodged. Defeated, I got up and closed the window.

  We spoke for several hours, the daylight turning to night outside. At some point, he reheated the ukha—good—and we slurped, chasing with fried potatoes. A barracks meal. Our brains did not work the same way. I asked him about navy tattoos and ended up with a story about sixty-five mink stoles two decades later. Were there, at that moment in New York City, two more different people sitting across from each other in more intimate conversation?

  Maybe it wasn’t only feeding Oksana that had opened him up. I’d been coming around more for a while now, and not even because I got to go home with one of Oksana’s food bundles. Maybe I’d crossed into some inside circle. Hell, we’d been at the stove together. A day earlier, that would have seemed as likely as seeing him press a hundred on a panhandler.

  Once he started, there seemed no use in stopping. For the next year, I came down once a week, often more, and this was what we did. Finally we had something to do other than try to relate. I gained ten pounds—“You’ve rounded a little, haven’t you”—and I wrote down a lot.

  The concrete stadium seats from which he and I had cheered for Dinamo Minsk on weekends—he had poured the concrete. As an inmate of the old prison on Volodarskaya Street. He headed there after he “turned off the lights” for a drunk who was taunting him and his friends, on their way home from a dance club and turned out in their finest—“Living well, kikes!” They had made it through the war—out of three million Soviet Jews, only a few hundred thousand survived, and a western city like Minsk, which saw German paratroopers on the first day of the war, got the worst of it—and felt light-headed with it. They went dancing every night—at the Belarus movie theater, at the Officers’ Club, in Gorky Park. Some finery—that night, Arkady had, under his jacket, a fake collar from a more expensive material.

  He didn’t stay at the prison long—his father bribed the judge on his case. But it was long enough to see the justice system for what it was—an old man who had taken home a bowl of oats from a government stable because his own horses had nothing to eat was sentenced to five years. The widow of a war veteran, a mother of seven, had pilfered, for trade, a pouch of tobacco from work. She got ten years.

  Arkady went back in, however, when he broke a bottle of champagne over the head of another drunk slurring away from his table about the kikes having sat out the war in Uzbekistan. Unfortunately, the drunk was a colonel, this time Arkady got three years, and the envelope for the judge had to be fatter.

  His younger brother kept up. One night, at a dance club called Ray of the Sun, two men started in with the usual. His brother took out his straight razor and took an eyeball clean out of one of them. Arkady hid him in the attic, but the police found him. Arkady gave the precinct commander two thousand rubles—a fairy-tale amount of money—and his brother went free. But the commander lied and had his brother picked up a second time.

  Arkady had a friend named Lenny the Trombone. No one went by their real names—maybe because that made them less easy to find. (“Nicknames made the NKVD unhappy,” as Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote about the KGB’s precursor in the 1930s.) Arkady got Lenny to put on his marching-band epaulets, and himself found somewhere a moth-eaten war uniform. They rang the doorbell of Eyeball’s family. Arkady stuck out and quickly withdrew a small laminated set of credentials—it was an old address book.

  “Drop the case,” Arkady, the “policeman,” said. “Otherwise he goes before the judge, then prison, and two meals a day. Whereas you drop it and we’ll teach him a lesson the hard way. An injury of his own, to remember.”

  The man and his wife were simple people, but not simple enough—they called the bluff and said, “Ten thousand.” Arkady didn’t have ten thousand—he had five. So that was what the judg
e got. And his brother got three years instead of ten.

  During visiting hours at the jail, Arkady found a “warm” body among the guards and plied him with soccer tickets, high-end cognac, bags loaded with deficit food. The guard knew the steps to this dance; one night a month, he let Arkady’s brother out for a family meal. But someone got wind of it, and brother and guard both were transferred to a penal colony in Siberia. They loaded bricks onto a barge in a river, ten thousand a shift. The penal settlement was full of Chechens, who used their work axes to chop the heads off anyone who spoke to them incorrectly. Dutifully, they delivered each head to the guards. So Arkady’s brother kept quiet.

  Because things became so bad for Jews after the war, many took advantage of how many records had been destroyed by reclassifying themselves as Belarusian in their passports. But then a decree went around saying that these had to be rooted out and turned back in. Arkady went around to what relatives and friends were left and collected their passports, then went to the precinct commander who had taken his money but then picked up his brother again. (No point holding grudges—it was a shifting alliance.) This time Arkady brought vodka—three bottles. Ostensibly, he had come with all the family passports like a tribal chief to make the reclassification easier. But first let’s drink. And drink. By the end of the third bottle, the precinct commander didn’t care who was a Jew and who Martian. (And maybe he felt a little guilty.) The price for these feats was Arkady staggering home blind with drink, night after night.

  Arkady’s difficulties with authority did not begin after the war. He had been expelled from the first grade. He didn’t like going. Just didn’t. Altogether, he managed six grades by the time the war ended his schooling forever. The angel brother was Aaron, the oldest. He was the handsomest; he lifted weights; he had a girlfriend. He’d finished high school and worked as an electrical engineer. His hands were always dirty with smudge, but he loved the work, and it had prestige—electricity was new. When the war started and Aaron was called up, Arkady “accidentally” dumped a vat of boiling water on Aaron’s feet at the steam baths. But that delayed Aaron’s conscription by only three weeks. Then Arkady got the idea to chop off one of Aaron’s pinkies. In 1941—when you still had to be able-bodied to serve—this would have been enough to keep Aaron in the rear. Arkady got close several times, a butcher knife in his hand, but he never managed it, and Aaron, none the wiser, went off to fight.

  They’d all gotten out of Minsk on the first day of the war. The radio had said to remain, but they knew enough not to listen. Arkady’s father saddled his horses, they piled all they could into his cart, and they clopped off, nearly two hundred miles, to a settlement from which they managed to get on a train to a dispersal point deeper inside Russia. From there they were sent 1,200 miles to a village in an autonomous republic of Turkic people just north of Kazakhstan. These had never seen Jews before. “Where are your horns?” one of the villagers asked Arkady, without ill will. But the Jews were good workers, and the village needed bodies after an entire clan had vanished into the army. Even the women were good workers—an aunt of Arkady’s had hauled twenty-kilo bags of potatoes from the Minsk market on her own shoulder. One time, a vendor had been rude to her and she smashed him so hard he “sat down on his ass.”

  By 1943, Arkady was up for the draft. A girl at the village council had been going around with a friend of his, so he went to her and came out with a new identity card that said he’d been born in 1927, not 1926, which saved him from the draft for a year. He would abide by that falsehood until his late eighties, nearly thirty years into his life in Brooklyn—he didn’t like talking about it even when the window was closed—when it melted away in service of his desire to see himself make it to ninety. So he wasn’t eleven days younger than my grandmother. He was 354 days older.

  Even with the new document, he wasn’t going to take chances. Aaron was gone, and his father had been recruited for a munitions factory in the Urals—half the family men was enough. Every week during harvest season, two boys delivered the village’s grain to a regional center sixty miles away—all grain was requisitioned by the government. Arkady used one of their horses; in the town, he boarded a train for Uzbekistan, to which a great deal of the European part of the Soviet Union had been evacuated. He didn’t board it—he didn’t have a ruble to his name. He slipped into a compartment just above the wheels.

  Once the train got going, he clambered out and switched to the roof. When the train stopped and passengers stepped out to stretch their legs, he swung down into their compartments to pilfer the poor food they carried: usually carrots or beets. This went on for eleven days, and with each one the weather got warmer.

  Those days, when all the railroad stations and piers in the country were besieged by sullen, grimy mobs who had to wait for weeks on end to buy a ticket. . . . All over the riverbank, charcoal fires were glowing in pits dug in the sand where they were making a stew for their children. The grown-ups chewed crusts of bread which they carried with them in bags—bread was still rationed at that time and they had stored up these iron reserves for the journey.

  Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote that about her voyage east into internal exile with her husband in 1934. The scene was similar in Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, when Arkady arrived there. The Soviet wartime evacuation effort had only one logistical model, that of all the forced deportations that had become a regular part of Soviet life in the 1930s.

  Few evacuees had ever seen a place like Tashkent. Upon arrival, a more poetic observer than Arkady felt “as if the ground was covered with white snow and pieces of ice burned against the gleaming hot sun. In fact it was salt.” The women were covered by flowing black garments. Donkeys pulled carts with wheels the size of a person. On every corner, Arkady saw teahouses and peddlers pulling flatbreads out of outdoor ovens. He was inside a fairy tale.

  It was also unbearably hot. The endless dust turned to mud after a rain. There was nowhere to live. And some things were quite familiar: The same hierarchy that kept elites well supplied in Moscow and Leningrad had reestablished itself here; for the rest, there was nothing. The city was a black market. Fortunately, how that worked was familiar to Arkady, too.

  He went to the bazaar, picked a corner, and watched. Soon he saw what he wanted. They pretended to be lame or deficient so no one would pay them attention, including the military personnel sweeping the city for draft-worthy bodies. Then the razor would come out and he’d see them slice through the bottom of a purse or a pants pocket. It took no more than a second. The one Arkady decided to approach was banging a stick at the pavement in front of him.

  “You’re a pincher,” Arkady said. “I want to join in.”

  “I’m a blind man, little son,” the man said.

  “You’re as blind as I am,” Arkady said. He walked away and came back ten minutes later with two wallets. That changed the “blind” man’s mind.

  There was a safe house overseen by a boss mother. What you stole you brought there, where it was divided equally, an authority system that, perhaps for the first and last time in his life, Arkady abided—when he came across a nice pair of velvet pants, he kept them for himself only after checking with the boss mother. His adopted disability was incontinence. He stumbled around with soaked pants, then found something worth taking and took it.

  Though they had left much behind, evacuees often brought with them what was most dear. Thanks to people like my grandfather, they soon parted with it. Nadezhda Mandelstam—who also fled there during the war—lost her ration of fish, and I sometimes wonder if my grandfather took it. Probably not—he had his eyes on bigger things. Also, he was a gentleman—he didn’t take food from women.

  Arkady was less concerned about the police than about the draft, which by now was conscripting without discernment. It was time to give in. Arkady said a rueful goodbye to his unexpected fairy tale—in regular Soviet life, one usually discovered a place so far away only against one’s will—and found a train home. This time, he
paid for a sleeping berth. Now he had enough money to buy every seat on the train.

  He came home to joy and despair. Joy from his mother on seeing him, and the bundles of bills hidden around his body; despair exactly one day later, when Arkady did not recognize the emaciated man knocking on the door as his father. The wide-shouldered man who had hauled safes on his back had turned into a skeleton, the skin on his bones like ill-fitting clothes. The munitions workers had had to work all-day shifts, but there was almost no food; he had been discharged as a hopeless case. At the door, his father wept. Finally recognizing him, Arkady wept, too.

  Soon, worse news arrived: Aaron, Arkady’s older brother, was dead. A reconnaissance man on the 3rd Baltic Front, he had gone after a “tongue,” a German soldier who’d (be made to) talk. On the way back, they came under artillery fire, which sheared off Aaron’s leg; he died from the blood loss. He had served alongside the men from the clan whose conscription in 1941 had emptied out the village where Arkady’s family had settled. “We . . . gave each other our word that we would write to the other’s parents if something unlucky befell us,” one of them wrote in a letter to Aaron’s parents.

  The 3rd Baltic Front existed for less than six months in 1944, long enough to kill 43,000 Soviet soldiers and injure 150,000 more. In 1941, a Soviet soldier survived, on average, twenty-four hours. By 1944 that number was higher, maybe several weeks. (Arkady had almost certainly saved his own life by delaying his draft by a year.) Aaron had been drafted at the very start of the war and had survived more than three years. He was killed two months after Minsk had been liberated; one month shy of victory on the 3rd Baltic; less than a year before the Soviet flag rose over the Reichstag; and on the same day that, forty-four years later, we left Minsk for good.