by Peter Golden
It was always the same with Bashe. Yuli didn’t mind her being brusque or naked. What disturbed her was the hunger in Bashe’s eyes while she stared at Yuli. Bashe had a wedding band on her finger and the faded stretch marks of pregnancy on her belly. Wasn’t a Hasidic wife and mother forbidden to lust after women? Maybe it wasn’t lust. Maybe Bashe enjoyed needling her. An amusement to pass the time.
Yuli held out a film canister with adhesive tape wound around it. “A new physicist. I wrote his name on the tape, and I take his pictures.”
Bashe looked at the canister. “And where should I be putting this?”
Yuli, deciding to pay back Bashe for making her uncomfortable, lowered her gaze to the ferny tangle between her legs.
Dropping the besom in the bucket, Bashe scowled. “You wicked girl.”
Yuli answered her with a beatific smile.
“Put it there yourself.”
Yuli kept smiling.
“A girl like you should swim for a week in the mikvah.”
“I have no one to be pure for. Not that this is your business.”
Bashe chuckled, a sound like she was gargling pebbles. “Towns talk and Bashe listens. And let Bashe tell you what she knows. Boys don’t want wicked girls for marriage.”
Yuli knew she was the subject of gossip, which bothered her more than she let on, but her body was her own and she would do with it as she pleased. Still, Yuli suspected that Bashe was correct. Nobody in or around Otvali—not a Jew or a Communist or a Cossack—had ever proposed to her, nor had the witch of a shadchan, who would mate a dog with a cat to earn her fee, tried to arrange a match for her. So what? She already cooked for Der Schmuggler and nursed him when he was sick. That was enough. Why did she need a husband and the inevitable children? Yuli was fine without them.
Bashe gazed at Yuli. “Take off your clothes, we’ll sit a spell in the banya. We can steam ourselves.”
Yuli was lonely enough to be tempted. Would it make a difference, being loved by a woman instead of a man? Yuli didn’t know. And she was curious about so many things. Not tonight, though. Tonight she had other plans.
Yuli put the canister with the film of the physicist on a bench and headed home.
8
The road up from Otvali ran for a kilometer past the compound, tapering to a dirt path as it curved through fields of wheat and sunflowers before disappearing into a birch forest and ending at the shore of Lake Bereza. Yuli had been hiding in those woods when Der Schmuggler discovered her, and as she approached the compound gate, the moon was turning the trees a ghostly white. She had come to the forest with the other children who had been pushed out of the trucks when the Nazis began shooting at the convoy from Stalino, and by the time Der Schmuggler found her, the other children had been killed by the Germans. Yuli preferred not to recall their dying, so over the years the images dissolved like when you woke up from a nightmare and all that remained was the fear.
Now, after locking the gate, Yuli saw a light in the kitchen window of the main house and Der Schmuggler sitting at the table by the white-stone wood-burning Russkaya pech, the same sort of Russian oven that had been warming peasant huts and shtetl houses for centuries. Every evening, when he finished reviewing the inventory lists, Der Schmuggler would put together the jigsaw puzzles that he brought back from his trips to U.S. military bases in Germany, Italy, and Spain. When Yuli was young, she used to help fit the pieces into place until the pictures appeared: an American cowboy lassoing wild horses; Sleeping Beauty lying on a bed about to be kissed by the handsome prince; and her favorites, those paintings by Norman Rockwell—a young woman holding up her white prom dress in front of a mirror, and a boy sitting with his arm around a girl while they gaze at the moon.
Lately, Der Schmuggler worked on puzzles that were so complex Yuli became dizzy looking at them—bizarre splotches of color, as though a drunken artist had sprayed paint onto a canvas with a hose. These puzzles were difficult, and Der Schmuggler worked on them late into the night, pausing only to replenish his tea glass from the brass samovar and eat spoonfuls of the black currant jam that Yuli prepared for him. Most mornings Yuli fired up the samovar by lighting a pinecone and dropping it in the chimney of the urn. An electric samovar would’ve been more convenient, but Der Schmuggler wouldn’t use one, saying that the piney fragrance reminded him of his boyhood in Rostov-on-Don.
He seldom spoke about his past. Yuli knew that his father had been a grain merchant and owned a gristmill, and Der Schmuggler had worked with him before the war. When he had brought Yuli out of the woods, the town of Otvali hadn’t existed. All around, the land was cratered from shelling and bombing. Hundreds of elderly couples and widows with their young sons and daughters, and veterans, many of them missing limbs, had lost their homes and wives and children. There was a young priest whose church had been burned, and a dozen Hasidic families who had hidden in an underground shelter from the Einsatzgruppen—the SS killing squads—were living in lean-tos around a sagging barn and chicken coop.
Because Premier Stalin believed that he and his lackeys could control the economy from the Kremlin, the Soviet Union was bound from head to toe in official red tape. A foolproof method for escaping these restrictions was blat, a Russian term that encompassed the panoply of corruption by which the nation functioned, trading on connections with the Communist Party big shots who ruled the localities, and the nomenklatura—the administrators who oversaw everything from access to telephones to production in the pencil factories. As a child, Yuli learned that Der Schmuggler had mastered the art of blat by accompanying him to Rostov and Taganrog and watching him drink vodka with the dockworkers, who knew him from the grain business. These sticky-fingered men enabled Der Schmuggler to carve out his own substantial niche of the black market, and he used these goods to bribe anyone who could help him.
The director of a concrete plant was the first official he bribed; then someone with access to trucks, excavators, and tractors. Soon loads of copper wire, tin, cast-iron pipes, glass, and gravel were delivered. Within a year, the lean-tos were gone; houses had sprouted on the new streets; wells had been dug, septic tanks buried; and stalls were operating in the market square. People displaced by the war, and POWs returning from their Nazi captors, whom Stalin wanted executed for surrendering instead of dying in battle for the motherland, were still wandering the countryside, and Der Schmuggler welcomed them. Within four years, electric lights had replaced kerosene lamps; a synagogue, church, and school were built; and the walled compound was complete—barns for cows and horses, a garage, outbuildings for the handful of men who resided on the property and for storing kontrabanda, and a concrete fortress of a house painted the rich shade of borscht with a gabled roof and tall factory windows.
Around then, Yuli started to hear gossip. An old man at a fish stall, who was smoking beech leaves rolled in strips of newsprint, told Yuli that he’d heard it was Der Schmuggler who had persuaded Comrade Stalin to grow his mustache when they were young, and Stalin still consulted him on the weightiest matters. Yuli overheard the men who came to Otvali from the countryside to sell their grain, produce, meat, and poultry at the market proudly claim, when they were sober, that Der Schmuggler was the last of the Jewish Cossacks and as skilled a swordsman as had ever ridden a horse across the steppes. Their opinion of him began to change as they drank their samogon—home-brewed alcohol that could pickle a wild boar—and when the bottles were empty, they declared that Der Schmuggler was plotting with other Jewish Elders of Zion to control the world.
“Is any of the gossip true?” Yuli asked Der Schmuggler one day while they were driving to Moscow.
“Why waste time with these crazy tales? Our town has five thousand people and no name, and you are supposed to help me think of one.”
Yuli was perhaps nine years old—she didn’t know her birthday—and even at that age she detected the fear behind his dismissiveness and concluded that the stories contained clues to his past, a history so dreadful that he decide
d it was off-limits to her.
Eleven hundred kilometers later, they reached Moscow without naming the town, and checked into the Hotel Metropol. Yuli was in awe of the arches and crystal chandeliers in the lobby. After unpacking, they walked to Red Square, Der Schmuggler carrying a khaki haversack fastened at the top with a cord. While they waited at the northern gate, Yuli looked at the colorful domes of St. Basil’s and thought the cathedral resembled a fairy-tale castle. A soldier in a wedge cap approached and waved for them to follow him to the street, where a pasty-faced older man in a smoke-gray hat and suit was leaning against a long black four-door ZIL.
“Tovarich,” he said to Der Schmuggler. Comrade.
Der Schmuggler bent forward in a slight bow that Yuli had never seen him perform, and gave the haversack to the man. He undid the cord and peered inside. Yuli stood on her tiptoes to look and saw tin cans of Nesquik, a chocolate powder that she liked to mix into her milk.
“My grandchildren will be pleased,” the man said. “And Comrade Beria sends you greetings. We must come visit your operation, no?”
Der Schmuggler performed that bow again, grasped Yuli’s hand, and began ambling toward the hotel.
“Who was that?” she asked.
“A deputy minister of state security.”
“But Nesquik is from America. From the capitalists.”
“To be successful here, you must become a connoisseur of irony.”
Yuli didn’t understand the words connoisseur or irony, but she had a more pressing question. “When he asked to visit, why did you say nothing?”
“Because he would not like what I wanted to say.”
“Which was?”
“Otvali.”
Yuli giggled. Otvali meant “Go away,” or if spoken in a harsh tone, “Go to hell.”
“Otvali,” Yuli said. “That should be the name of our town.”
Der Schmuggler put his huge hand on her head and smiled down at her. “Yes, yes, it should.”
* * *
Yuli had her own suite in the main house—a bedroom, bath, and an office where she maintained the accounting ledgers for Der Schmuggler. Although she was exhausted from her trip to Dnipropetrovsk, Yuli didn’t go in to sleep. In fact, on her ride home through the Ukraine, she’d kept alert by imagining this part of her evening. The compound was lit by spotlights bolted beneath the roof line of the house, and Yuli went past a barn to a concrete box that was forty square meters, which Der Schmuggler still referred to, with the annoyance common to the parents of teenagers, as Solod Magazin—the Malt Shop.
He’d had it built years ago, when Yuli was in school and complained that she and her friends had nowhere to go on Saturday nights, but Der Schmuggler had been reluctant to do so. The Kremlin was serious about the indoctrination of Soviet youth, and he was careful not to cross a line that officials couldn’t ignore. He did, however, permit Hasidic youngsters to attend an illegal yeshiva: So many Hasids had been slaughtered by the Nazis, Der Schmuggler didn’t have the heart to let their remnants die out, and the presence of four or five hundred of them in Otvali would provide cover for messengers like Bashe. Yet the English-language school was operated by the numbers: Named for Mark Twain, whose loathing of Tsarist Russia endeared him to the party, the students spent half the day immersed in the government-blessed curriculum in Russian and the other half taking courses in English, all while a portrait of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet state, stood guard on a wall of every classroom, glaring at the students as if accusing them of harboring the forbidden desire to own private property. Der Schmuggler also decreed that children participate in the groups the Kremlin believed would indoctrinate them with an allegiance to the state and its leadership akin to religious devotion. Teenagers had to join the Komsomol, the Young Communist League. To refuse could cost them a spot at a university or alienate a member of the party committee in Rostov, who would prevent them from securing a decent job or apartment.
Der Schmuggler had explained this to Yuli when she told him about her dull Saturday nights, and she responded by saying, “Papka, I do everything you want and seek nothing in return.”
He attempted to explain again, but she interrupted him, screaming, “Fascist!” and stalked off, and for the first time in their life together he was tempted to strike her.
Yuli gave him the silent treatment for two weeks, and he relented and ordered his men to build her the Solod Magazin, even adding some modern touches to the design that he had seen in an American architectural journal, a white roof like the raised wings of a swan and steel-rimmed porthole windows.
Yuli apologized for her name-calling and did make a concession in the event one of the party faithful came to inspect the Malt Shop. She and a couple of girlfriends painted a mural on a wall of five Red Army soldiers doing a jumping, heel-clicking dance in front of a scorched Nazi tank. Their one other argument was when Yuli pasted cork over the wall across from the mural and tacked up movie posters of Elvis, James Dean, Paul Newman, and Marilyn Monroe; and postcards of the Hollywood sign glowing at night, and the Empire State Building. Der Schmuggler said the posters could stay; the postcards had to go.
Yuli kissed him on the cheek. “It will be fine. Just tell anyone they bother that I am identifying targets for our missiles.”
Since Yuli had received her diploma, most of her classmates had relocated to the cities, and she no longer socialized in the Malt Shop. It had become a refuge where she could be alone, which, strangely, eased her loneliness, as though with no one to witness her pain, the pain itself didn’t exist. Now Yuli kicked off her boots and switched on the pole lamp next to the white-and-red soda machine that dispensed carbonated water plain or with pear or lemon syrup. On the wall opposite the machine was steel shelving, and from the shelf below the Blaupunkt shortwave radio, Yuli grabbed a Bass Weejuns box. The shoes had been procured for her by Der Schmuggler through an arrangement he had with a sergeant at the American army post exchange in Munich, and as Yuli slid on the burgundy loafers, she wondered if her mother had felt the same pleasure when she’d stepped into her ballet slippers.
Yuli tuned in the radio. The reception was excellent. The Americans must have put up new towers far enough from the Soviet transmitters that the ministry of communications couldn’t jam the frequency. A month back, Yuli had dialed in the program when she was cycling through the stations, and she hated to miss it. Petya was also a fan. Last night, while they listened together, Petya said that the young people left the streets of Dnipropetrovsk whenever the jammers couldn’t drown out the broadcast with noise like a revving truck engine.
“Dobryy vecher,” the disc jockey said. “Good evening. We’re in lovely downtown South Orange, and I’m Mikhail Dainov, the Mad Russian . . . .”
Yuli stood still, her arms folded across her chest, her eyes closed. From the first time she’d heard Mikhail’s voice, Yuli had been enchanted by its texture, a hypnotic blend of honey and sand, an American voice straight from the home of rock ’n’ roll—that wondrous kingdom, the air clear as glass and full of music, with people gliding over the sidewalks, going in and out of the bright stores, their arms loaded with packages while children rode bicycles on freshly tarred streets and waved to each other. Perhaps this America was nothing more than propaganda foisted on the world by the West, but this was the America, new and clean, that Yuli saw in her dreams, where the only party that counted was one with ice cream and cake, and sour, colorless men didn’t jam radio stations. Oh, what a country this America was, a land without memory, so unlike the Soviet Union, the land that forgot nothing.
Yuli started to dance. Mikhail was playing Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti,” and the relentless beat of his piano and the saxophones sent her across the beechwood floor, kicking up her feet, extending her arms, spinning so that her hair whipped against her face and her skirt whirled upward, her movements both controlled and exuberant—the synchronicity of soldiers marching, the grace of the Siberian cats leaping between rafters in the barn. Every
thought was driven from her head, a comforting blackness, infinite, warm, like a summer night on a blanket with one of her boys, after drinking vodka and lemon soda from a canteen, Yuli on her back, brimming with a sweet tension until the boy collapsed, exhausted, at peace, while her tension persisted, weighting her to the blanket like a stone.
Loneliness surged through Yuli as Mikhail whispered, “Vot moyo serdtse, ono polno lyubvi—here is my heart, it is full of love,” and played another record, the Paris Sisters singing “I Love How You Love Me,” a slow song of gratitude and wonder. Yuli imagined she was dancing with Mikhail, raising her arms, his hands cool and strong in hers. She couldn’t see his face because her cheek was on his shoulder, and she pressed against him, fighting off her loneliness the best she could.
Outside, Der Schmuggler stood looking in through the window and watched Yuli dance in the glimmer of the pole lamp. He could hear the faint music on the radio and figured that this was the show she had told him about, with the boy Mikhail Dainov who spoke English and Russian, and talked about his grandmother Emma.
Emma Dainov.
Der Schmuggler could still see Emma that icy day on the outskirts of Rostov. He was searching for his girlfriend, Maria Adaskina, but a Nazi soldier spotted him, and as the soldier raised his rifle, Der Schmuggler heard a gunshot and was surprised to find himself alive. The soldier fell forward and behind him Der Schmuggler saw Emma, whom he’d known since childhood, standing there with her dark gold hair spilling over her shoulders and holding a pistol in her hand, smoke rising from the barrel.
Turning from the window, Der Schmuggler glanced up at the moon, thinking about God and His intermittent desire to author a story with a plot, a final chapter that revealed the fates of all the characters involved.
Der Schmuggler walked to the veranda, sat in a rocking chair, and put his head in his hands, waiting for the present to banish the past.