Nothing Is Forgotten_A Novel

by Peter Golden

  Except I had never danced with anyone like Yuli. She anticipated every turn, whirling in the right direction before I fully realized which way I was going. It was as though her feet weren’t on the wood floor, but somehow, in defiance of gravity, I was dragging her through the air. Then Little Richard really started hammering the keys and the drummer went along for the ride until the saxophone took over, the brassy wail quickening the beat. Trying to keep up, I danced faster, but my body was out of synch while Yuli kept floating through the music, dipping, spinning, and not letting go of my hand. People had stopped dancing to watch, and if I wouldn’t have looked ridiculous, I would’ve done the same. Under the tiny ceiling bulbs, Yuli had become a cashmere and denim blur, and as the song built to a climax, she stepped to the side, put a hand on my shoulder, hopped up, and in one dreamlike movement, rolled over my back and landed on her feet, still dancing.

  “Bravo!” several couples called out when we were done.

  Yuli was grinning at me. I wasn’t sure why.

  “Thank you,” I said, and started to walk away as another song came on, the slow, romantic “Tears on My Pillow,” and Yuli put her arms around my neck.

  We danced, Yuli pressing herself against me, and I inhaled the clean sweet smell of Canoe, an inexpensive men’s cologne that had become popular with young women. Beryl wore it in high school, and I began thinking about her, and then Yuli held me tighter, and Beryl went away, and it took every ounce of my restraint not to bend Yuli backward and kiss her. Instead, I retreated to safer ground and became a deejay.

  “This is Little Anthony and the Imperials,” I said.

  “Interesting.”

  “Their first hit.”

  “Very interesting.”

  “Nineteen fifty-eight.”

  “Do American men talk this much when they dance?”

  “Usually we sing.”

  I felt her chuckling against me, and after the Little Anthony falsetto faded to silence, we held on to each other. Then: “On the radio I used to like it when you said, ‘Here is my heart, it is full of love.’ ”

  “Vot moyo serdtse, ono polno lyubvi.”

  She put an index finger to her lips. “You are not supposed to speak Russian.”

  “And you’re supposed to use contractions.”

  Yuli smiled, neither happy nor sad, but something else entirely—a woman intrigued by a game that she wasn’t quite sure she wanted to keep playing. “I’ll do that.”

  We stood still, holding each other.

  “We’re not dancing,” Yuli said with that same smile. “What will people think?”

  I grinned. “That you want to paint a mural of me.”

  “I might, but you must let me go.”

  I dropped my arms, and her eyes briefly held mine before she walked off.

  I was standing by the refreshment tables and downing my second stopka of vodka when Pyotr came over, his unbelted trench coat and half-scowl fitting accouterments for a cynical globe-trotting reporter.

  “Michael Daniels, Mikhail Dainov, this makes sense,” he said, taking a cigarette and matchbook from the pocket of his coat. “From what I hear on Four Freedoms, you’re in the hospital.”

  I put the empty ridged glass on the table and wondered if Yuli had told him. No, she wouldn’t say anything, but now I understood why he’d looked at me as if we’d already met.

  The cigarette had a cardboard tube instead of a filter, and Pyotr put the tube in his mouth and lit it. “I recognize your voice. I’ve been a fan since your recorded shows from—from South—”

  “South Orange Village. You want an autograph?”

  He glanced toward the mural, where Yuli was standing. I’d seen partyers stop by to talk to her and noticed that some of the men pulled her toward them and aimed their kisses at her mouth. Pyotr was noticing it now, and you could see the heartache behind his scowl. I was glad not to share his pain. Yuli made me feel happy, but I figured that I wouldn’t be around long enough for us to fall in love.

  Pyotr let the smoke curl out of his mouth. “Yuli has a lot of dance partners.”

  “She likes to dance.”

  He grunted, a sound full of resentment and irony. “Yes, she likes to dance.” Pyotr looked away from the mural. “Your secret is safe with me.”

  “Spasibo.”

  “You are welcome,” he said, and put on his sunglasses and walked through the party and out the door.

  20

  The next three weeks flew by. Yuli and I spent almost every evening together, eating dinner with Der, then adjourning to the book-lined parlor with its black-and-gold-tiled fireplace. Der had collected a vast library on his travels, and he and Yuli were compulsive readers, Der in Russian, Yiddish, German, and English, and Yuli in Russian and English. I tackled The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, thinking that it would explain how hellholes like Dachau could exist. The camps were no secret in 1960 when The Rise was published, yet in over eleven hundred pages they were seldom mentioned, and I asked Der why he thought the author didn’t include more.

  He said, “In the Soviet Union, I have noticed that people resist accepting bitter truths,” and then, with an ironic edge in his voice, asked, “Tell me, is it different in America?”

  Good point, and I chose to explore the darker regions of the soul by switching to a translation of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

  Sometimes I’d put down my book and draw Der and Yuli, and when I was done, Yuli would sit on the arm of my chair and page through the pad, complimenting my sketches. I liked her being so close, her thigh brushing my shoulder, and I hoped to be alone with her after Der had gone to sleep. However, Der was as vigilant as the spinsters who chaperoned our junior high dances. Once I suggested to Yuli that we listen to music in the Malt Shop. Her eyes widened in alarm, and Der replied without glancing up from his book, “It’s too cold in there.” Nor did waiting for him to go to sleep pan out. He didn’t retire to his bedroom off the kitchen until we were in our rooms, and then I frequently heard him, at all hours, come down the hallway to knock on Yuli’s door and ask her a question about work—an excuse, I always suspected, for him to check up on us.

  * * *

  Yuli did finally make it into my bedroom. She had left the compound that morning and wasn’t home when I went to sleep. Then something woke me up. The light in the hall was shining into my room, and I saw Yuli outlined in the doorway.

  “You are awake?” she said softly.

  “I think so.”

  She walked toward the bed.

  “I missed you,” she said.

  “Same here.”

  “I didn’t like it.”

  “Missing me?”

  “Missing you.”

  I held up the blanket, an invitation for her to climb in.

  Yuli saw the gesture, but all she was did was say “I wanted to tell you. Before I forgot.”

  “Forgot to tell me or forgot that you missed me?”

  She giggled. “Both. Good night, Misha.”

  So it wasn’t only Der who was in the way of our romance. Yuli herself was hesitant. That was puzzling. At the party, Pyotr Ananko, plainly one of her ex-boyfriends, had made it clear that she was no prude, and her reluctance left me wondering what was wrong with me. I had no answer, not out of modesty, but because not only did Yuli stay close to me in the evenings, on the days when she had completed her work, she asked me to have lunch with her in Otvali, a short walk down the hill from the compound.

  The hustle and bustle of the town made me homesick for South Orange Village. At the north end of the main thoroughfare was a gas station, a stable, a market square with open stalls that were empty in winter, and a modest circle of a park with a statue. Farther down the street were the shops; a sandstone synagogue attached to a yeshiva and study house; a Russian Orthodox church, St. Sergius, with gold onion domes; and the redbrick Mark Twain English-language school. Food shortages, Yuli explained, were rife across the Soviet Union, but the local collective farms and st
ate farms supplied a thriving black market, and because Der Schmuggler always had goods to trade, he made certain that the shortages were not so severe in Otvali. Women in babushkas went in and out of the shops, their netted string bags bulging with fruit, vegetables, bread, and cheese, and a few shopkeepers stood outside, munching on a pickle and waiting for anybody in the mood to chat. Young men in sheepskin hats rode their horses to the stable, then gathered in the park and drank samogon—Russian moonshine. Father Nikolai, the old white-bearded priest, made the sign of the cross whenever he passed anyone, including the Hasidim in their beaver hats and frock coats. Yuli said the priest, who was nearly blind, didn’t want to miss any of his flock, and he believed that even Jews and Communists could use a blessing.

  The nerve center of Otvali was Café Pobedy: in English, Café Victory. Every town has one—in South Orange it was Gruning’s Ice Cream Parlor—a place to exchange gossip, debate the headlines, go on a date, and celebrate with friends. The café was much noisier than Gruning’s, a rip-roaring opera of Russian, Yiddish, and Ukrainian rising from the plain wood tables and chairs. Of course ice cream parlors don’t serve alcohol, yet there was another difference, too. Ever since meeting Konstantin and Dmitry in Munich, I’d been aware that World War II was a heavier weight to bear for Russians than for Americans. Part of it was the scope of Soviet losses—over twenty million dead and the destruction of so many cities and towns—but it was also a facet of the Russian character, the conviction that history was a chilling, inescapable shadow that fell across the present.

  Café Victory had been named to honor those who fought in the Great Patriotic War, and the white plaster walls were crammed with black-and-white photographs of their triumphs and sacrifices: the Red Army marching past the charred huts of liberated villages; a Soviet medic carrying a skeletal man through the main gate of Auschwitz; children, tears on their faces, kneeling at a hilltop memorial; and a photo, blown up to twice the size of a poster and hung over the doorway, that the regulars frequently gazed at as if paying respects at a shrine—a Russian soldier on the roof of the Reichstag with the ruins of Berlin below him as he raises the Soviet flag with its five-pointed star and crossed hammer and sickle.

  “Yevgeny Anan’evich Khaldei took that picture while he was working for TASS,” Yuli said the first time I saw it. “Like me, he was from the Ukraine. His mother was murdered in a pogrom, and the Nazis killed his father and sisters. That has been the most famous picture in the country since it appeared in the newspaper, and Yevgeny was fired after the war.”

  “Why?”

  “Stalin never liked Ukrainians, and he got mad at the Jews. They would not stop speaking Yiddish and there were rumors that thousands wanted to go live in a Jewish state.”

  While we ate, Yuli encouraged me to talk, never taking her eyes off me as I spoke, and when I recounted my parents’ car accident and Emma’s murder, she put a hand on mine. And she had plenty of questions. Did I see Elvis and the Beatles on Ed Sullivan? (Yes.) Is there really such a thing as a pizza burger? (Absolutely!) Would I rather watch a movie in a theater or at the drive-in? (Depends on the weather.) Did I have a girlfriend?

  “Ex-girlfriend,” I answered, and when she pressed me for details, I told her about Beryl and skipped those summers with the divorcée, who, from my perspective, defied classification.

  For someone so interested in my life, Yuli was reluctant to share much about herself beyond that she was an orphan who had been taken in by Der. In fact, when I asked how old she was, Yuli arched her eyebrows in comic pique. “What? I’m a chicken, and you want to know if I’m too old to cook?”

  I laughed, but her message was clear: Ne sprashivay, as Emma was fond of saying—Don’t ask.

  * * *

  Our usual spot at the café was in the quiet back room where the old men played chess, and on this afternoon, as we were digging into beef stroganoff, a young guy with a patchy beard came staggering drunkenly toward our table. He was only an inch or two over five feet and wore a red-and-yellow plaid jacket and a tall hat, like a woolly version of Abraham Lincoln’s stovepipe without a brim.

  Draping himself around Yuli, he said in Russian, “We never see each other.”

  As adroitly as a wrestler escaping a clinch, she squirmed free. “I am busy, Stenka.”

  He stood up. “With an American, I hear.”

  Stenka glanced at me with disdain and then, reeking of moonshine and self-pity, said, “You and I, Yulianna, we are done?”

  Yuli’s romance with Pyotr Ananko was in the ballpark, a school friend and a journalist. But this jerk? I didn’t get it. And when Yuli looked at me and just as quickly looked away, I figured she was thinking along those lines, and having me there as a witness explained the mortified expression on her face.

  “AshitAmerican,” Stenka said, slurring his words together. “AshitAmericanZhid.”

  While not a direct translation, Zhid was equivalent to kike. That Stenka used it with Yuli, who I assumed was Jewish, and who was brought up by Der, whom everyone in Otvali knew was Jewish, demonstrated that samogon and stupidity were a regrettable combination. Growing up, I’d heard people joke about Jews being cheap crooks, and Rollie had a cousin who wouldn’t stop insisting to Birdman and me that “Dirty Jew bastards killed Christ,” until Rollie punched him, saying, “And an Italian gave you a fat lip.” I didn’t get overheated about the jokes or Rollie’s cousin, who was so dumb he flunked eighth grade. In Munich, I’d been indignant when that waiter had implied Nazi war criminals wouldn’t be on trial if not for the Jews, but hearing Zhid, I had a new reaction. I imagined smashing the wine bottle over Stenka’s head. Visiting Dachau, I concluded, could make a Jew touchy.

  “Do not speak like that,” Yuli said, her eyes shining as if she were about to cry, though I couldn’t say whether it was from anger or sadness.

  Stenka shot me a drunken smirk, which I made disappear by standing. I was a foot taller and towered over him. He backed up, and I offered him my hand. “Michael Daniels. Ochen’ priyatno,” meaning that I was pleased to make his acquaintance.

  We shook, and I twisted his arm, a trick that Rollie had taught me, flipping up his hand and putting him in a wristlock. With a yelp, Stenka went down on a knee.

  “Ischezni,” I said—Get lost.

  Stenka broke into a goofy smile, as if we were kids fooling around after school. “You speak Russian. This is excellent.”

  I shoved his arm forward so his head hit the floor and his hat fell off. “Ischezni.”

  Without a glance at Yuli or me, Stenka grabbed his hat and wobbled away, bumping into two waiters before he made it out the door.

  I sat. Yuli’s eyes were wet. “I don’t know my exact age. In my twenties, that’s all.”

  “I was curious. It’s not important.”

  “Not to you. To me it is. When Papka tried to find my records in Stalino—the city is Donetsk today, because Khrushchev wants to erase Stalin and changes name—there were no records. Germans murder hundreds of thousands in the city. And burn records. Death is not—how do you say—sufficient? For Germans, it had to be they did not ever exist.”

  I wished that I hadn’t asked Yuli her age and characterized the answer as unimportant. When would I smarten up? Not every childhood was centered around a candy store, cartoons, Little League, and double features for seventy-five cents with the soda and popcorn.

  We finished our lunch without talking, nor did we speak on the way to the compound. Snow had started to fall, but at the gate Yuli waved to the two men sitting on barrels with shotguns across their laps and kept walking.

  “Where we going?”

  “Another kilometer.”

  Yuli stopped where the graveled road narrowed to a path that went uphill through a field with yellowish-green wheat beneath the snow. At the top of the hill a birch forest stood out against the dull gray sky.

  Yuli stared at the white trees. “I remember my mother, a ballerina, dancing on a stage. And running with her to the trucks when t
he Germans came. After that . . . Did you ever wake up and know you dreamt but can remember nothing of the dream?”

  “Sure.”

  “This is my life before Papka. Except up there. I remember what happened up there.”

  I watched her breath steaming in the snowy air.

  “Will you walk there with me, Michael?”

  “Da.”

  The snow was deeper and the air colder the higher we climbed, so even with the fur cap, quilted jacket, and felt boots Yuli had given me, I was shivering as we entered the woods. Icicles hung from the spidery branches of the birches, and after a few minutes we came out the other side to a frozen lake. Across the ice were summer dachas, small A-frames painted emerald and sapphire and vermilion. Some stood close to the shoreline, and I could see the pointy-tipped snow-covered roofs of other dachas behind them in the woods.

  “Lake Bereza,” Yuli said. Bereza was Russian for birch tree. “Eleven of us made it here from the Ukraine. After walking and hiding and walking some more.”

  “Us?”

  “Children. In Stalino, right before the Germans came, my mother took me to a synagogue. We never went to pray, but now I see a line of trucks outside. Young men and women, the drivers, were shouting for us to hurry and get in. I believe they were Zionists. Stalino, I’m told, was known for its Zionists. I estimate seventy or eighty children board those trucks with their parents. We drove away, but the Germans followed us, and by that evening they weren’t far behind. The trucks stopped near a village. I could smell smoke from the chimneys. Mothers and fathers told their children to run, and helped us out of the trucks. That is all I remember. I cannot even remember if Mama kissed me good-bye.”