by Peter Golden
That July, Emma flew off to Paris, and one day, as I served Eddie O a vanilla Coke, he said, “Kid, you act like you’re a hundred years old. You’re ready to blow this burg.”
“Where am I gonna go?”
“You done good at WSOV. Get yourself a radio operator’s license. I’ll help you. I got ins at some of the big stations in New York.”
I figured Emma was the impetus for this latest career push and felt rotten about worrying my grandmother. Yet I sensed that hiding behind her humor and stoicism was a mournfulness that she shared with no one, and I was reluctant to leave her alone.
“Ain’t no law against being happy, boyo. You think about it.”
I was still thinking about it on September 9, 1964, the day my family’s history caught up with me.
* * *
I had slept at the studio, and early that morning, after I crossed the avenue and went through the alley to the parking lot behind Village Drugs, the Fury wouldn’t start. I got under the hood, wiped off the battery connectors and checked the gaps on the spark plugs, but I couldn’t get the engine to turn over. I didn’t want Emma to deal with the newspapers by herself, and it was only half a mile to Sweets. I walked through the village, with the spiky green burrs falling from the chestnut trees and rolling on the sidewalk. The twine-wrapped bundles of papers were still stacked in the doorway. Emma must have overslept, which had been happening more frequently, another reason I was reluctant to move to New York. I took out my key, but when I tried the door it was unlocked, and the lights were on over the soda fountain.
“Emma?”
No answer. Figuring she’d forgotten to switch off the lights last evening, I brought in the papers. The scissors to cut the twine were in a drawer under the cash register. Pushing through the low swinging gate that led behind the counter, I saw Emma sprawled on the floor by the soda fountain. She was on her back, with three penny-sized holes in her chest and blackish-red blood splashed across her white blouse. I’d seen gunshot wounds in the movies, and I felt as though I was looking at a screen through the popcorn-scented dark. It didn’t occur to me that Emma could be dead as I dashed to the wall phone, dialed the operator, and shouted, “My grandmother’s been shot! Send the rescue squad! Three-ten Irvington Avenue.”
“Did you shoot her?” she asked.
“Fuck you!” I screamed, and slammed down the receiver.
Kneeling over Emma, I took her hand, telling her that she’d be fine. Her eyes, a dull jade, stared up at me. I recalled her singing a melancholy tune: Shlof, mayn kind . . . shlofzhe, zunenyu. It was my first memory of her voice, and I’d thought it was Russian until fourth grade when I was at the soda fountain and Emma was mixing me an egg cream, and Paul Robeson was singing it on the radio and I learned that it was a Yiddish lullaby. Mishka, Emma had said, staring out toward something only she could see. I used to sing that to you: Sleep, my child . . . sleep, my darling one. I was humming the lullaby now and leaning over my grandmother, crying while the phrase “Nothing is forgotten” repeated itself in my head in Russian until a man said, “Michael? Michael, it’s Officer Nelligan.”
I looked up. A moonfaced South Orange cop was holding a revolver.
“My grandmother’s dead.”
Part II
6
Otvali, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics
September 10, 1964
That evening, as Yulianna Kosoy drove through town, loneliness seemed to be everywhere. In the doorways of the dark shops along Adaskina Boulevard, and the deserted stalls of the market square. In the glimmer of the bell-shaped streetlights, each lamppost crowned by a wrought-iron Communist star framed with a laurel wreath. Even in the chimney smoke, redolent with cabbage soup and roasted chicken, that rose from the tin-roofed bungalows on the side streets, an announcement that families were at supper.
Yuli had no family, just the man who had found a scrawny, terrified child hiding in the woods on an August morning twenty years ago, the husky, dark-eyed man with a salt-and-pepper beard, the man the locals referred to as Der Schmuggler—Yiddish, she’d discover, for his vocation: smuggling. All Yuli owned on that day was her tattered coat and dress and a book of fairy tales swathed in a piece of sheepskin, with her name written on the front flyleaf. Picking her up, Der Schmuggler carried her to his home. He had no wife or children and treated Yuli as a daughter. She began calling him Papka, and after completing high school, she went to work for him.
Yuli was working for Der Schmuggler now and stopped to fill up his car at the petrol station. The town of Otvali was in Southern Russia, wedged between the port cities of Rostov-on-Don and Taganrog, a handy location for the buying and selling of kontrabanda, and Yuli did business in both places. Tomorrow, though, she had to be in Dnipropetrovsk, a seven-or-eight-hour ride west into the Ukraine, and Yuli wanted to make a stop before going there.
A couple of hours later, she was asleep in a rooming house owned by an associate of Der Schmuggler in Donetsk, and by morning, Yuli was staring up at the great stone edifice of a theater with a heaviness in her chest that made her gasp for breath. The inside of the theater was one of her rare childhood memories. The city had been called Stalino then, and Yuli had a dim memory of watching her mother float across the stage to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Yuli could picture herself sitting on the edge of her seat in the front row and the orchestra below the stage, but most of the seats were empty, and Yuli surmised that her mother had been rehearsing for a performance. Her other memories were of panic-stricken grown-ups talking about the Nazis and of leaving Stalino crammed into the back of the truck, her face pressed against the legs of a woman in a musty wool dress. Yuli recalled a sudden crack-crack-crack, and someone crying out that the Germans were shooting and mothers and fathers shouting for their children to run. An older boy had taken her hand and dragged her with him as he ran. Yuli had come to Donetsk before in an effort to fill in the blank spaces of her past, hoping to reclaim another sacred detail of her mother or to conjure up a misty image of her father. She never did.
Yuli breathed easier once she was back in the car, driving past grainfields and Cossack huts with hipped roofs and churches with gilded onion domes glinting in the sun. Half the trip was on rutted dirt roads, and she arrived in the city of Dnipropetrovsk in the late afternoon and met Pyotr Ananko on the embankment of the Dnieper River. Pyotr had attended the Mark Twain English-language school with her in Otvali, gone off to Dnipropetrovsk State University, and now wrote for Dneprovskaya Pravda, the regional mouthpiece of the Soviet Communist Party. He was still the same shy, baby-faced boy with lank whitish-blond hair who proclaimed his esteem for American beatniks by dressing in black—from his turtleneck to his brogues. Yuli had grown close to him when they’d translated Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” into Russian, then enlisted the other rebellious bitniki at school to create copies of the poem by typing it up with carbon paper, and sold the officially forbidden literature—known as samizdat—to teenagers in Rostov-on-Don for two rubles a copy. His job at the newspaper demanded that Pyotr become a less overt rebel, but he had some leeway. His skill at translating news from the United States astounded his superiors, and he reviewed the films—The Defiant Ones, West Side Story, To Kill a Mockingbird, Some Like It Hot—beloved by the younger generation of Soviets, who otherwise would have ignored the political dribble in Dneprovskaya Pravda.
“You brought everything?” he asked as they joined the couples walking along the Dnieper, the river glassy in the cool autumn light.
“Da.” Concealed in a compartment under the rear seat, Yuli had a suitcase packed with ten copies of the record album Meet the Beatles! and three new Blaupunkt Sultans, a splendid German shortwave radio. Pyotr would sell them to the hipsters on Karl Marx Avenue and keep the money as payment for providing Yuli with information.
“You had no trouble?”
“Nyet, Petya. I used Papka’s Volga.”
The black sedan was favored by the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti, particularly the KGB
officers who were visiting from their headquarters in Moscow, and the local police were too intimidated by state security agents to stop such a car and try to extract a bribe from the driver.
At a stand, Pyotr bought them eskimos—vanilla ice cream with a chocolate coating on a stick. When they had been in school, Pyotr, like most of the boys in their class, had had a crush on Yuli. She possessed an unsettling beauty—strange, discordant. She was small and delicate boned. Her ash-brown hair was cut in an unruly pageboy, and she had an angelic face, impossibly high cheekbones, a snub nose, and full, bowed lips, but her dark blue eyes appeared even darker against her cream-white complexion, and it was the darkness of those eyes that seemed out of place in such an ethereal young woman.
They finished their eskimos, retrieved the suitcase from the car, and walked to a cluster of Khrushchyovkas, the five-story concrete apartment buildings that the Soviet leader had ordered built to alleviate the housing shortage.
“Excuse us,” Pyotr said to a short, squat man in a telnyashka—the light-green-striped shirt worn by border guards—who was blocking the entrance, facing away from them and weaving drunkenly. Yuli heard the splash of his piss against the door, and when he turned, his eyes were blurry.
“Where the hell you going?” he said, leering at Yuli.
As she dipped her right hand into the leather document bag on her shoulder—acquired from a Red Army lieutenant on leave in Taganrog for a pair of Levi’s—Yuli replied with the tone of a cheerful schoolgirl: “To fuck your mother.”
Anger sparking in his eyes, the drunk stepped toward Yuli, who pressed the button on the horn handle of a switchblade and held up the four-inch stiletto, a gift from Der Schmuggler, who had brought it back from a trip to Italy.
“You syphilitic bitch, you have plans for that knife?”
“Stay and we will both find out.”
Watching her, the drunk backed up into the courtyard, then spun around and staggered off between the buildings.
Pyotr, his pride nicked, said, “I could have scared him off.”
“I know, Petya, but you have the suitcase,” and to smooth his ruffled male feathers, added, “And I was in a hurry to go upstairs with you.”
Pyotr occupied a one-room apartment that seemed hardly bigger than a coffin. It had two windows, exposed pipes on the water-stained walls, and a concrete floor painted the vivid red of the Soviet flag. Before Yuli could remove her boots, Pyotr kissed her. She broke off the kiss and undressed, Pyotr watching her as if she might fly away. Their first time together had been after completing the translation of “Howl.” Yuli hadn’t been physically attracted to Pyotr, but she had admired his mastery of American slang. Had she not been a practical girl eager to be rid of her virginity, Yuli would have been disappointed that Pyotr proved more adept as a translator than as a lover. Still, Yuli slept with him on occasion, and with other boys too, while Pyotr was in Otvali and after he had left for the university, though she saw no need to share this news with him. Pyotr was kind, easily hurt, and a generous source of information.
In the morning, they strolled across the bridge to Monastyrsky Island, Yuli removing an old FED camera from her bag and taking pictures of the wide blue river. It appeared innocent enough, but they had to be careful. True, Nikita Khrushchev had denounced his predecessor, Joseph Stalin, for his egotism, ineptitude, and brutality, and had enacted the Ottepel—the Thaw—which thinned out the population of political prisoners in the Gulag, reduced the government’s hostility toward free expression, and encouraged engagement with the outside world. So it wasn’t unusual to spot foreign-camera-toting tourists in Moscow or Leningrad or Odessa. But never in Dnipropetrovsk, a city closed to outsiders because it was home to the Yuzhmash plant, where the Kremlin designed and built its intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Yuli put away her FED and sat on a bench with Pyotr.
“You sure?” she asked impatiently, tapping her foot on the ground.
Pyotr glanced at his watch. “Soon.”
When Pyotr had called her in Otvali, all he’d said was that she should visit him and bring her camera, a cautious choice of words because even though he was using a public telephone booth, you never knew which lines the KGB were monitoring. Last night, Pyotr had explained why he’d phoned, and Yuli was pleased that she’d come. The information would be valuable in some way. Exactly how valuable would be determined by Der Schmuggler.
When no one appeared on the shaded path that Yuli was observing, she began to think that Pyotr had simply wanted her company, and she grew irritated at him.
“Petya, did you invite me here to see something that doesn’t exist?”
He smiled. Yuli was referring to a remark that she’d made when they were at school. The students were assigned to read Sputnik Ateista—The Atheist’s Companion, a standard Soviet text—and Yuli commented that it was a ridiculous exercise, because it was impossible to study nonexistence. The class had been amused; the teacher less so.
Pyotr jabbed his head in the direction of three men striding down the path, saying, “There,” and Yuli was ashamed for doubting his motives.
Yuli recognized the two older men; she had photographed them months ago. On the left was the general director of the Yuzhmash plant; on the right was the chief of engineering. It was the one in the middle that had brought her here—a chubby, freckle-faced young man with bushy red hair, terrible posture, and a purple houndstooth suit that fit like a sausage casing.
His name, according to Pyotr, was Kazimir Zolnerowich. He was nineteen and had already earned a PhD from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, a school that Khrushchev liked to brag in interviews was more rigorous than the great U.S. technological colleges in California and Massachusetts.
Yuli said, “You heard Zolnerowich designs missiles?”
“What else would a Soviet physicist design? Nothing to help the people.”
Yuli watched the trio disappear down the path.
“They will be back soon,” Pyotr said.
“You better go.”
“I could wait for you by the bridge.”
“No, Petya.” If the KGB caught her, she would be interrogated by their sadists in the Lubyanka prison, and there was no reason he should suffer the same fate. And Yuli was trying to discourage Pyotr, who wanted more from her than she could give him.
His hurt expression didn’t go away after she kissed him, and he said, “Paka, Yuli. Be careful.”
She waited until he was gone, then crossed to the other side of the path, glancing around to make certain no one was watching her. Kneeling behind a row of poplars thick with leaves, Yuli attached a Jupiter lens to her camera, and when the trio returned, she zoomed in so closely on the young physicist’s face that she could’ve counted his freckles.
7
That evening, in Otvali, her legs cramped after the long drive from Dnipropetrovsk, Yuli parked the Volga behind the high concrete walls of the compound where she lived and walked down the graveled road to town. The first whispers of winter were in the breeze, and Yuli stopped on Adaskina Boulevard and undid the cardigan tied around her waist. Slipping into the sweater, she glanced up at the bronze statue of the girl in a plain frock who had given the boulevard its name. Maria Adaskina was eighteen in 1941 when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. The Fascist scum thought Russian girls were theirs for the taking, and when a captain tried to force himself on Maria, she grabbed his Walther and shot him dead. Maria was hung from a telegraph pole and left to rot.
Velikaya Otechestvennaya Voyna—the Great Patriotic War. No escaping it, Yuli thought, cutting through an alley to the rear of the wood-frame synagogue and entering the bathhouse. Beyond the vestibule was a washroom lit by a bulb in the ceiling, then an archway that led to the banya—a sauna—and finally the stone stairs down to the mikvah, the ritual pool observant Jewish wives used to purify themselves when their periods ended. The bathhouse was closed now, the attendants gone, the only person in the steamy washroom a naked, wide-hipped
woman with closely cropped grayish-brown hair.
“Y’all late,” she said to Yuli in English, dunking a besom of green birch leaves into a wooden bucket of water.
“Next time I go to Dnipropetrovsk, I’ll bring my wings and fly home.”
Every other month for the last year, Yuli had come to the bathhouse to meet this woman. She knew her as Bashe, though Yuli was unsure whether that was her real name. Her voice was full of Eastern Europe yet possessed an odd drawl, like the characters she’d seen in Gone with the Wind. At different times, Yuli had greeted Bashe in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Yiddish, but Bashe, in all likelihood to obscure her identity, had replied in English. Yuli guessed that she was a Hasid living in the southern United States. Her long-sleeved dress and sheitel—the wig devout Jewish women donned out of modesty—were hanging on a peg; her hair had been clipped down to fuzz; and Yuli was aware that Der Schmuggler, either at the request of the CIA or Mossad or both, had recruited operatives from the Lubavitcher sect because the insular Hasidim were impenetrable by the KGB.
“There is something y’all have for me?” Bashe asked, her plump breasts bobbing up and down as she massaged her back with the wet leaves.