Little God Blues

by Jeffrey M Anderson

  “Guilt? That assumes he killed himself.”

  Tomas pursed his lips, looking down. He was the messenger, my statement beyond his remit.

  “What does Jolanta say about the drug part?”

  “That he would not take them like other people, who do such things to run away.”

  He stopped; I waited. There was a “but” looming.

  “But yes, if it is to prove a theory or test an idea. She talks of doctors who come into contact with bad diseases, on purpose, as part of their experiments to find a cure.”

  We came to another pause. Tomas had fulfilled his job as messenger. He had never met Kirk. His marriage, successful or not, was none of my business. Etiquette called for us to finish our coffees. He was a surgeon who specialized in GI. The gut. We talked about that for something to talk about. Then he said, “Are you staying here for long? You should visit Auschwitz. It is only seventy kilometers from here.”

  I obliquely met his eyes but they were opaque. “Was she Jewish, Jolanta?” I have no idea why I used the past tense. Maybe because she would always be in my past now, the one person on this continent who shared my pain about Kirk.

  “When we suffer, all of us are Jewish.”

  Finally, we stood up. He gave me an envelope. After he’d disappeared down the street I sat back down. It was too early for a beer, but what the hell.

  Dear Jim,

  Often how we start is how we continue. There is no blame in that.

  Fondly, Jolanta

  I got a call from Moira on the Ides of March. She started talking about rehearsal schedules, my availability. We talked at cross-purposes for an exchange or two before our misunderstanding was cleared up: she thought the one condition for my investment was that I played the lead part, the female, man-in-drag, Queen Lear character.

  The winter continued into spring, floating by in a cold, slow dream. Sula and I were getting used to each other. Natalie, hitting it off with Sula, came around at least twice a week after school. Sula did most of the heavy lifting to do with the emotional side of the Mexico revelation. As for me, Natalie had one simple instruction: find her. My days of playing the bumbling rock amateur were over, Mexico being my accomplishment, after all.

  In mid-April Sula and I relocated to a three-story semi-detached brick house in the same neighborhood. I owned it outright: Lamzaki’s gift to me. I tried everything in my power to avoid it, but I was fighting both Sula and her father on that. No doubt it was bought with illegal funds that would incriminate me, or it was a former safe house visited by spooks, or the site of a grisly murder. It was haunted, cursed, condemned. Call me suspicious.

  Sula wanted me to accept it, then sell it and donate the money. “It is his peace offering. Sure he is buying you. He wants us in London, not America.” (There he suffered from the Polanski problem.) “Let him spend his precious money.”

  I had Lucian Gee handle the details, including a strenuous look for any traps, loopholes, or illegalities. Sure we could live there for a few months, then see. Thus we slide into things.

  At the end of April I bought Estelle for fair market value. The folk/blues legend had had a major stroke. His left side was gone; he needed money for medical bills. That seemed to be the final detail, wrapped up. Then a few days later a letter arrived from a London law firm called Jackson, Lattimer and Smythe. Sir Clive Wormsleigh, now out of jail, brought it over.

  Dear Mr. Shalabon,

  We are acting on behalf of the estate of Francine Kinsella McLain. Ms. McLain left an informal list of instructions, one item of which relates to you (copy attached):

  “To Jim Shalabon—False Memory (Russ Vers) Moira? Ref. Maria Kolokova, 99 Malata, Apt. 10, St P.”

  We have determined that the book Ms. McLain refers to is one of Soviet poetry called “False Memory” by Nikolai Shalabanov. We have been unable to find it, either a Russian version or any other, amongst Ms. McLain’s effects. We have no information on Maria Kolokova, nor have we attempted to contact her in (presumably) St. Petersburg.

  Please let us know if there is any way we can be of further assistance.

  Sincerely, etc.

  The attachment was a photocopy of a notebook page, line after line censored in heavy marker strokes. My two lines, near the bottom, were in that typical British vertical looping handwriting.

  What a strange feeling. Francine wanted to send me her book. I already had it. It proved that Kirk had met with her. It was as if Francine had risen from her coffin and tapped me on the shoulder.

  I left for St. Petersburg a week later.

  Part IV

  ST. PETERSBURG INTERLUDE

  CHAPTER 1

  “I met young Kolya in a ditch off the main road to the east from Pskov. I was in a right state. We were fleeing from the advancing Germans; half our town was on the road, the other half gambled that life would be better under Fascists than under Stalin. On the second day a plane came in low down the road. Tak! Tak! Tak! Before I knew what had happened, I was lying down, much weight on top of me. I couldn’t move either leg. Where was the pain? How bad was it? Was this the end? One of the men pulled me up. He allowed me one look at my mother. She had such slow, gentle hands. Now they would never move again. I was only twelve.”

  I am reassembling Maria Kolokova’s story from the nine days I sat at her kitchen table in St. Petersburg, formerly Leningrad. Her English was solid. She was a doctor, and had been allowed to read restricted Western publications, like Lancet and The American Journal of Medicine. As with most Russians she was an unrelenting hostess—eat this, drink that, eat more, please; do you feel okay? Please, more. The kitchen saved her a continual string of short walks back for more goodies. There was pain in her rocking, heaving gait.

  “Yes, Little Kolya. I was in a ditch to urinate, to be by myself for a moment. I wanted to be alone, yet not alone. Just as a few days before I would enjoy some time by myself in my room, but in my house. Then a sound, a rock rolled a meter or so. A boy was sitting there. By himself. Not hidden, but so still you just didn’t notice him. He smiled. He was tall for his age, maybe nine, thin with dark-blond hair, dark eyebrows. His eyes, they looked like those of a man who has come back after many years in Siberia.

  “I left the road and went with him. He had a confidence I hadn’t seen in any of the adults in our weary and disorganized party. Truthfully I was sick of adults and their complicated world of wars and destruction.

  “We fled east. Off the main road it was all dangerous swamps. The rivers went north to south, which forced us north more than east. Often we couldn’t risk being on the roads. The Fascists were everywhere. We were dirty, hungry, wet. Our feet were the worst, always in wet shoes.

  “We followed occasional paths. We encountered partisans forming up in the deep forest swamps to fight the Germans. They helped us when they could. We ate off the land; we went hungry; we stole. We waded through marshes, fell into deep water, never dried off. The rail tracks were where the Germans were. We avoided them; when we had no choice we ran along the rails in the moonlight.”

  Probably about now, if this reassembled monologue had been in sequence, Maria Kolokova would have rocked to her feet, taken a few steps to the samovar, to a few goodies she had baked in my honor. The delicacies I had arrived with that day—I soon had a routine bakery I called at on my way to her—were rarely in play.

  “Oh, I forgot to mention that the boy did not talk. Ever. He must have seen horrors. It was like a bomb went off and all his words were birds that scattered. He was not able to tell me his name. He looked like a Kolya, so that’s what I called him.

  “During our three-week trek, Kolya and I saw many horrors, scenes a child should never see. Or an adult, for that matter. I will describe only one. It made such an impression on me. We had passed through a small village. The bridge across a minor river had been blown up. Many of the houses were black ruins, corpses were laying here and there. You could hear the flies from ten meter
s. We headed north along the river. Soon we came upon a small farm. There was the shell of a tiny house, black from a fire. To the side of it a cart, on it lay a young girl, her face had major contusions. They had not swollen yet, so her beating must have been recent. She had no clothes on. Between her legs was a bloody mess; blood ran down the tilted cart, dripped on the hard ground. Already flies. A man, most probably her father, was dead near her, hands tied behind his back, half-sitting, fallen onto his head.

  “The girl was still alive. Her one good eye, blue-green like sea water, looked past me. I wanted to help her. In ways I would only later understand, she was me. She had lost a lot of blood. I retrieved a few of the rags that had been her blouse and used them to staunch the bleeding. She did not want the water I offered her.

  “I will never forget that eye: more animal than human. No more fighting to stay in a world that had done such things to her. Water would only delay her new journey. She just wanted it all to be over with.

  “Kolya pulled me away from her once he had finished looking for food. He did this in a way that told me the truth, the truth I had just learnt from this girl. You are alone in this world. No one can protect you, not your mother (mine gone), not your father (forced to watch), no, not even Kolya. Therefore you must put yourself before all others, never take unnecessary risks, fight with everything you have to survive. It is all right to help others, but only once you are fully covered in all directions.

  “The rivers, the swamps, the rail line sent us north when we wanted east. Kolya was skilled at finding food, tracking, navigating. We kept moving, trying for east, settling for north, until we were pulled into Leningrad itself.

  “It was chaos in the big city. Thousands had been pushed there by Germans. None had ration cards. Few had money. The state could tell them they didn’t belong here. They couldn’t tell them, or us, where we did belong. We traded; we stole; we had no choice but to ignore desperate mothers trying in any way possible to keep their young children nourished, soon merely alive. We searched carefully through ruins, looking for valuables to trade. We were starving, but our eyes supported each other. We did all this under a terrifying bombardment of German artillery shells and bombs. We did this while trying to avoid the authorities. To us, all adults meant trouble.”

  About here it would be time to offer me more food. Eat! Please! What a wicked contrast to those tales of starvation. I told her that each bite was a betrayal of her story. I got that bony finger shaken at me. Her unspoken gesture said, Maybe you will now appreciate such riches. She nodded at the plate of pirogi (meat pies) before me.

  “By late September it was getting too cold to sleep outside. Kolya was the scout, navigator, and explorer. I was the trader, the charmer, the one who dealt with people. In the city I became as important as Kolya: we were now a team.

  “I charmed our way into a mostly empty communal apartment. Our sponsor was a twenty-seven-year-old physics student, Vsevalod Ignatovich Shalabanov. The poor man had only one arm. He had been a guest at Lubianka, the notorious NKVD prison.

  “We did not have ration cards. One of the tenants, Comrade Plotnikova, had a minor job in the party. She ruled by threatening to report anyone to her bosses. We lived in terror of her discovering us. The other residents shielded us from her. They helped us with a crust when our luck was bad, even though they were all on the dependent ration; the lowest, one thin slice of bread a day. I was always starving, my stomach twitching like a dying bird. It turned cold early. It was survival now.

  “All adults were dangerous except for a few in our apartment. The leader was Valentin Dmitrich Stohl, an intellectual who was about forty-five. His sad eyes still had fire in them. He fought with Plotnikova. She reported us. We had to move away; we came back. We did that several times as the temperature plunged. Still we did not have ration cards. We had to live by our brains. Kolya and I were the same person: what happened to him might as well have happened to me. The other way also. We fought together for everything.

  “Kolya didn’t like the bomb shelters—too many adults. He did not trust any of them. We risked our lives daily, foraging amid the scream of artillery shells. The whistle of bombs. Some were close. One time I was hit in the head by a woman’s shoe. She would not be needing it.

  “At our apartment, Kolya spent many hours on the roof with the fire marshals. He was learning how to read the sound of the artillery shells and bombs. How often my eyes ran into his when I heard a shriek. Always a slow, understanding smile, except for the times he started running.

  “Seva (diminutive of Vsevalod) showed us how to distil perfumes and tinctures into raw alcohol. We traded that for food. We shared with those who had shared with us.

  “Young Kolya was learning to be a city hunter. On the roof he trapped tired birds too weak to fly. They looked to the sky as an old soldier does his medals. In the cellar, really a crawl space under the ground floor, he figured out how to trap rats. As the cold descended—winter came early and severely that year—they came in search of our heat and crumbs. He caught at least eight. In his scavenging he had found a bag with three gold coins and elegant jewelry under the floorboards of an abandoned apartment. He hung on to the last coin even when I begged to trade it a hundred times. Always that slow, shy Kolya smile. He may have saved our lives on the one hundred and first.

  “It is difficult to describe the boy’s power. Confidence was part of it. Luck a large part—the type of luck that had method in it. He spent long hours on that roof watching planes and ordinance; equally long hours with his rat traps. And the floorboard treasure? He was always examining the world around him from every angle. I remember desperately wanting to get out of that apartment—the entire floor shifted when you walked on it. Not our hero. He took slow minutes finding out why one short section of floorboard had come away as it did.

  “By January many in our flat had died, including a fourteen-year-old boy who had been exhausted digging trenches out at Luba with little food or blankets, worse, no cover from air attacks. Back home there was little food to help him recover. I sat with him every day.

  “As I said, the cold was severe that winter. No running water, no gas or electricity. We suffered through minus thirty degrees of frost for months. A small burzhuika, a teakettle-like burner with a vent to the outside, fought against the arctic air seeping through the cardboard that had replaced the broken glass in our window. I can’t remember about the ration cards; as citizens died, we traded for them. Eventually we had one of those precious cards every month. All of us in the apartment were on the dependent ration. One hundred twenty-five grams of bread that was filled with floor sweepings, husks, sawdust and moistened by God’s own tears. The State was only pretending they wanted us to live. Oh, the pangs of hunger, the weakness. It was as if we had moved to a new planet, brutally cold, and with much stronger gravity. Even the birds struggled to stay in the air.”

  Maria never believed that I was fascinated by her history. The younger generations in Russia didn’t want to know about the Siege of Leningrad. They found its survivors, the blokadnitsy, tiresome. Well, in most countries the young aren’t that interested in the past. This must be doubly so when that past is so horrendous. So Maria kept stopping and giving me a look that said, “do you want more?” Or more mischievously, she would take her story to yet another point of abject starvation, such as processing the glue in furniture for its animal protein, how god-awful the taste was, how hard to keep down. She would pause, a glint in her eyes, then offer me more savories, a meat pie, tea. ‘Why are you not eating?’ she would ask. It got so I would starve myself beforehand.

  “Week after week on starvation rations. To climb our stairs was like to go to the top of Everest, one step and rest, another and rest, every day. Just to walk to the long bread lines or to the Neva for fresh water took all our strength. By November neither Kolya nor I could go out without an adult. We lived near the lawless sector that saw children only for their calories.

  “Oh, I
was so hungry, that siren call from my belly. The spasms, as if my stomach had made itself into a fist to shake at me for denying it. Such hunger! I recalled the time the thugs came to our house looking for documents that would incriminate my father. They searched everywhere; they left our house a shambles. My poor body had done this too now; anything found had been taken away; nothing was left. Now it was time for a deeper search, to tear up floorboards and tear down walls.

  “We were fighting for our lives, hanging on by sheer force of will. We learned that the sum of those wills was greater than the individual ones, that to do good for others somehow created a few of what Valentin called ‘moral calories.’

  About now Maria would have paused again, looked at me. Is that enough? Can you possibly want more? Sometimes she would look at me and shake her bony, withered finger in mock lecture mode. You, you must always be grateful for what you have. Take nothing for granted. She liked to call me her ‘playboy musician,’ as if pushing me as far as possible away from her story. I was a privileged, pampered Westerner. The spiritual purity of starvation versus the unthinking decadence of haute cuisine, fine hotels and platinum credit cards. This was all light-hearted, in no way malicious, but the truth was there: how different I was from the characters Maria was describing.

  “By mid-January there were only five left: Kolya and me, the young physicist Vsevalod Ignatovich Shalabanov, Valentin Dmitrich Stohl, and Zinaida Andreevna Luria, a nurse who had lost her husband to the Terror in ’38 and her son, Yuri, whom I visited daily until he died in early December. The five of us slept together in the smallest room under all clothes and all blankets. We told stories; we read from David Copperfield (a huge sacrifice, for books were more important for the heat they could give). We made comments full of dark humor. We were survivors. It was down to sheer will now. Valentin put it best, for his humor was always the blackest. “Survive! Of course we will!” he said in his basso profundo voice. “There are a few calories one gets from hopes and dreams, a few more carried by the arctic blast, then some from your good thoughts to others, more from them to you. Not as many as in our Leader’s moustache, but enough for one more day.”