Nothing Is Forgotten_A Novel

by Peter Golden

  Yuli was gazing at the dachas, and I was thinking that when I was a child, we considered it an adventure to ride a bus by ourselves to South Orange Village.

  “Children ran everywhere. We had no idea where to go. So many died in the Ukraine before we got to Lake Bereza. Thirst. Starvation. Typhus. And the Ukrainian Auxiliary Police—evil as Nazis—caught some crossing the steppes and shot them.”

  Behind us, tree branches cracked and fell, and Yuli flinched.

  “The oldest one of us at the lake was fourteen. His name was Dovid. I could never forget his hair—it shines like a copper kettle. And his freckles—I had not seen that many freckles. His sister Faiga, she had them, too. I was very young, but Faiga was younger and follows me like my shadow. So Dovid, he cares for us both. He has a German machine pistol and a Soviet submachine gun. Picked up in a field we had gone through where there were dead Russian and German soldiers. And we think we are safe here. Dovid told us that peasants believed birch trees could protect Russians from misfortune. And we never went hungry. Dovid hunts deer and rabbit, and the girls fish in the lake. And those dachas, some of them, have root cellars with potatoes. Then Faiga is sick. I do everything, Michael, everything. I sing to her and bathe her in cold water because Faiga is burning, and I hold her in my lap. I was holding her in my lap when she died.”

  Her voice broke, and she leaned against me, saying, “Two mornings after Faiga dies, we hear tanks and trucks far away. Dovid goes to see and comes back and says a German patrol is walking up the hill. The children hide in the root cellars. Not Dovid. He hides in the woods behind the dachas, because he is the—the looker?”

  “Lookout.”

  “Lookout. Dovid is the lookout. And I go with him. We see the Germans circle the lake and go into the dachas. Dovid and I can hear the shooting. And the screaming. The children scream. I thought their screaming would never stop. I prayed for it to stop. Then it was silent and we wait until the Germans go and leave our hiding place. But not every German is gone. And one shoots Dovid.”

  I moved my hand up to her elbow, turned her toward me, feeling as if I wanted to cry. Yuli was composed and dry-eyed, so what right did I have to my tears?

  “How did you ever survive that?”

  “I disagreed with the Nazis. I didn’t believe the world would be improved if I wasn’t in it.”

  “I meant Dovid was right there, the soldier shot him. How—”

  “I hid.”

  It occurred to me that there was more to the story, but I looked at her, thinking what I often thought—no face could be so perfectly heart-shaped, no skin that milky, no eyes the exact shimmering blue of twilight—and I put my right hand on her back and kissed her. I was prepared for Yuli to retreat. Instead her lips, cold and pliant, moved sweetly against mine, her arms going up, her fingers massaging the back of my neck while I lost my hands in her hair, which, incredibly, was even silkier to the touch than to the eye. The snow fell like a curtain of silvery-white lace, and the flakes melted on our faces as our lips grew more insistent, her mouth opened, and our tongues played, and I wished that we weren’t bundled up in our quilted jackets so I could feel her body against mine. She was holding me tighter now, her arms surprisingly strong, and pulling me down toward her and whispering, “I had enough of missing people. I can’t miss any more people.”

  We stepped back then, looking at each other as if to appraise the changes brought on by what we had just done.

  Yuli said, “We should go. I have a trip to prepare for. A month, Papka says.”

  “A month? Why a month?” Yuli had often taken day trips, and sometimes she was away overnight. I was curious about what she did, but when I asked Der for permission to accompany her, he replied that Taft Mifflin would not want me to get arrested, a distinct possibility if I bumped into an official who hated capitalists or who hoped to be paid to release me.

  “I don’t know yet. Why do you sound angry?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You do,” she said.

  I wasn’t angry, I was hurt, because if Taft gave Der the all clear while she was away, then I wouldn’t be in Otvali when she returned, and while that didn’t appear to bother Yuli, it certainly bothered me.

  “Say something, Michael.”

  “What do you expect me to say?”

  Yuli laughed. “You say, ‘Later, gator’?”

  “I do?”

  “On the radio you did.”

  Yuli took my hand, and as we walked the compound, I realized that deejaying felt as if it had become a piece of my distant past, a souvenir you toss in a drawer and don’t see again until you’re packing to leave home.

  21

  By mid-January, sunlight poured through the high windows in the kitchen, and I heard ice breaking up on the roof. Der wasn’t in the house. He’d said that Yuli would be back the evening before, and I’d stayed up waiting for her. When she didn’t show by midnight, I went to sleep, and the disappointment was still with me in the morning as I filled a glass of tea from the samovar and headed to the parlor to choose a new book, a British paperback of stories by Gogol.

  Reading “Diary of a Madman,” I felt a kinship with the narrator. His tedious government job and hopeless crush on his boss’s daughter led him to conclude that he was the king of Spain, and by the last page I was frantic to get on with my life before I reached an equally insane conclusion. I’d ushered in 1965 alone with a bottle of Sovetskoye Shampanskoye. The wine merchant in Otvali had told me that Stalin had declared the champagne crucial to la belle vie, but all it did was give me a hangover. Yuli had been away for weeks and I was miserable without her, even though now, despite our kissing by the lake, a romance between us seemed about as realistic as the one I momentarily imagined with Ann-Margret after seeing Bye Bye Birdie. I felt as if I were under house arrest and wanted to go home. The shooting in Munich and Emma’s murder were scary, yet I didn’t buy Taft Mifflin’s assurance that I was safer in the Soviet Union than South Orange. The only logical theory that I’d come up with was that I’d pissed off somebody by lampooning Khrushchev. And if Oswald could assassinate JFK, in spite of his Secret Service protection, then it shouldn’t be all that challenging to shoot me, and I preferred getting shot in the comfort of my own neighborhood.

  At noon, after finishing the stories, I felt glum and threw my clothes into my suitcases, thinking that once I returned to New Jersey, I’d never see Yuli again. Unable to shake the hollow feeling, I walked to Otvali, the sun so bright I put on my Ray-Bans. The townspeople, spotting a chance to cure their cabin fever, had come out in droves. Women were shopping; a group of children too young for school were standing in a circle on the steps of St. Sergius holding hands and looking upward to feel the sun on their faces; and men, who had left their heavy overcoats at home, were drinking and talking on the terrace of Café Victory.

  My mood noticeably improved when I spotted Yuli sitting on a bench underneath the statue in the park. She was talking to Der Schmuggler, and they were facing each other, so they didn’t see me as I approached. Yuli was wearing a white fisherman’s sweater with corduroy slacks tucked into high leather boots. Nothing strange about that, but her face was tanned, and her long hair had been streaked a lighter gold by the sun. Where, I wondered, did she get a winter suntan in the Soviet Union? The USSR did cover eight and a half million square miles across eleven time zones—15 percent of the planet—so there had to be some area ruled by the Kremlin where Yuli could go sunbathing. Yet as I got closer to the bench, Yuli glanced toward me, and I realized, with a pang of jealousy, that I was less interested in geography than whether she’d gone off with another of her boyfriends.

  Standing and smiling, Yuli asked, “How’s life?”

  “Normalno.” Things didn’t feel normal, but I planned to let her know about my decision to leave in private—hoping, I suppose, that she’d try to talk me out of it.

  Placing her hands on my shoulders and going up on her tiptoes, we exchanged the triple kiss, and I thought
about how much I loved her fingers, not because they were long and slender and graceful and moved to a music all their own, but because sometimes she used them to touch me.

  Looking at Der, Yuli said, “You should tell Michael.”

  “Tell me what?”

  Der was staring up at the bronze statue. I’d noticed the statue before without really seeing it, nor could I read the Russian on the granite base—MAPИЯ AДACKИHA. Now, I looked up at the fine-featured young woman in a plain frock, the intensity of her expression almost unbearable, as though she was witnessing every horror the world could conjure. Her long skirt and hair were blown back by the wind, and one leg was striding in front of the other, her woven shoes planted in the earth, and her hands raised, the left holding a hammer and the right a sickle, which led me to conclude that she was a tribute to the proletariat laboring in the factories and fields of Mother Russia.

  Getting off the bench, Der pointed to the statue and said to me, “Her name was Maria Adaskina,” and just as I recalled the afternoon at Eddie’s house when Taft Mifflin had told me that Adaskina was Emma’s maiden name, Der added, “She was your grandmother’s sister.”

  I was astounded and wondered why he’d put off telling me. “You knew my grandmother?”

  “I didn’t know her well, nor do I know why anyone would harm her. Her father had been a grain dealer in Rostov-on-Don. So was my father, and they were friendly competitors.”

  “Wasn’t Emma from a shtetl in the Ukraine?”

  “Born there, moved to Rostov with her father after her mother died. Emma was eight or nine years older than Maria and raised her.”

  “Do you know the name of the shtetl?”

  Der laughed, but it wasn’t a happy sound. “From back then? No. Today? Dust or Ashes. You choose.”

  “And Emma’s father?”

  Der had a weary sadness in his eyes. “Like Maria, like my parents and brothers and sisters, like my aunts and uncles and cousins—the Nazis killed them.”

  I remembered finding Emma on the floor, and I thought about how it must have felt losing so many loved ones at once—the incalculable heartbreak, the helplessness, the outrage.

  Der kissed his fingertips and pressed them to the hem of the statue’s skirt. “ ‘My little Communist,’ I called her. In Rostov-on-Don, she was a leader of the Komsomol. She could quote Lenin and Marx the way a child sings songs, and I used to tease her, ‘Masha, we will have none of that on our wedding night.’ That made her laugh. But the young Communists did not love Masha for her quotes—it was because she was so kind. And everyone in Otvali loves the statue I commissioned for her. Am I right, Yuli?”

  She rubbed a hand across his back. “Da.”

  Der turned toward me. His beard needed trimming, and his face was contorted as if it hurt him to move. “Of course, almost everyone loves dead Jews. Jesus was a Jew, no? It is the live Jews who seem to bother people.”

  I thought he was going to cry, but the tears didn’t come. All of them shed already, I guessed. “Where did Emma live? In Rostov.”

  His mood shifting abruptly, Der chuckled. “Ulitsa Yevreyev.”

  “The Street of Jews?”

  “The street had another name, but no one used it.”

  I asked Yuli, “Can you take me there?”

  She looked at Der. He nodded. “Your first right off Portovaya Street. The street looks like it did after the Nazis got done with it. Ask anyone you see for the Adaskin house. They will know it.”

  Before leaving, I glanced at my great-aunt, Maria Adaskina. She had the same round face and intriguing slant to her eyes as Emma, and I was surprised to discover that it was possible to miss someone you had never met.

  22

  Yuli was driving the Volga, and we rode uphill past snowy fields toward Rostov-on-Don.

  “You’re quiet, Michael.”

  Not wanting my jealousy to show, I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t ask Yuli where she’d gone. But a minute later, as if reading my mind, she volunteered the information.

  “I was skiing at Mount Elbrus.”

  That news didn’t make me feel any better. “How nice for you.”

  “Not nice. It was a three-day drive each way. And I went for work.”

  “Are you ever going to tell me exactly what you do?”

  Her sparkle of laughter was equal parts amusement and evasion. “Never.”

  When the Don River, wide and flat and the color of slate, came into view, I said, “I’m leaving.”

  “What—you’re?”

  I turned to study her face, the lovely angles, the dusk-blue eyes, the mouth perpetually on the verge of a smile. “Leaving. Going home.”

  Yuli didn’t change my mind when she said, “I wish you would not,” but it was flattering to hear.

  * * *

  Portovaya Street was snowed in, so we had to leave the Volga by the Don. It was a slippery hike up from the riverbank. Ruts of wagon wheels and hoofprints of horses marked the snow, and lamps shone in the windows of the three-story brick houses. The Street of Jews was a cul-de-sac on the top of a hill from where you could see white steamboats moored along the Don embankment and the barges in the harbor and the bridge being built across the river and the city with the gold onion domes of churches. Most of the houses on the circle were fire-blackened shells courtesy of the Luftwaffe and German artillery. It felt odd knowing that my grandparents and my father had once resided here, because it was so distant from the Shangri-la where I’d grown up, as if this ravaged street occupied another galaxy where suffering arrived as reliably as the Good Humor man ringing his bell on summer evenings as he drove down Montague Place.

  Yuli and I walked to the far end of the cul-de-sac, where an old woman, wearing a black babushka and wrapped in a mousy-brown blanket, sat on an upturned crate outside a house drinking from a bottle of red wine.

  “Dobriy den’,” I said—good afternoon.

  Her eyes, dark slits in her withered face, gazed up at us as if we’d come to deliver bad news. “Chto ty khochesh’?” she asked—what do you want?

  Yuli said, “Excuse us, but do you know where the Adaskin family lived?”

  The woman gave her a toothless smile and cackled. “Are you stupid, girl? The Fritzes took the Jews out to the Ravine of Snakes and shot them in two days. That’s where the Jews live now.”

  “Not all,” I said. “Not Emma Adaskina.”

  She took a pull from the bottle. “The pretty one. Her husband, Dainov, was as crazy as a drunk cockroach. Always babbling about his big dreams. He stole his father-in-law’s money, left Emma, and ran off to America with their son.”

  “He divorced her?”

  “Who bothers with divorce when they run away? And what did Emma Adaskina care? That man, Gak, he came for her.”

  “Gak?”

  The old woman rose unsteadily to her feet. “The great Alexander Alexandrovich Gak. The artist. A Jew so rich no one treated him like a Jew. They say Gak came to paint pictures of the ships in the harbor, met Emma, and whisked her off to see the world.”

  I could understand why my parents had told me that my grandparents were divorced, a more socially acceptable explanation for their living apart. But I’d never heard of this other man, and that puzzled me. “Where did Gak and Emma go?” I asked.

  Setting her bottle on the crate, the woman peered suspiciously at me. “Why do you question me? I have done no wrong. Not even Stalin would accuse me of doing wrong. I am too old and poor and alone to disobey the party.”

  “Emma was my grandmother.”

  She stood there, her eyes welling up. At last she said, “Come,” and went into the house.

  Inside, it was drafty and smelled of fish and fried onions. The old woman led us into a dining room with peeling wallpaper, a table and chairs caked with dust, and a china cabinet with glass doors. The woman pointed at the shelves. On the top shelf were four dinner plates painted with images of roosters. On the shelf below the china was a row of picture postcards of P
aris—the Eiffel Tower, Cleopatra’s Needle, Notre-Dame, and a bridge over the Seine.

  “That is all that was left of the Adaskins,” she said. “I did not steal them. I would not steal. Not even from Jews.”

  “May I look at them?” I asked.

  She replied with a half-dozen quick nods. I removed the postcards, which were brittle and singed along the edges, and when I turned them over and saw the Russian words in washed-out black ink, I caught my breath. At the candy store, Emma used to scribble notes to herself in Russian, and I was sure that this was her handwriting. I handed the cards to Yuli.

  Flipping them over, she said, “They are from Emma to Maria.”

  “Read one to me.”

  “ ‘My Dear Masha: Paris is gorgeous. We are living in the Marais section. There are many Jews here, so I speak Yiddish while I try to learn French. The apartment is across from a park with chestnut and lime trees and fountains. Everything is wonderful except my heart aches to see Lev.’ ”

  “Lev?” Yuli asked.

  “My father. He was eleven when his father took him to the States.”

  Yuli looked back at the postcard. “ ‘I love and miss you, dearest sister, and please write me at the address I gave you, 22 Place des Vosges.’ ”

  The old woman, who had crossed herself as Yuli was reading, touched my arm. “This is from your grandmother?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am sorry what happened to the Adaskins. I am sorry what happened to my whole country. Take the postcards. This is as God wants. You see now I did not steal them. I was keeping them safe because God knew you would come for them.”

  I took a hundred-ruble note from my pocket and held it toward her. She shook her head as if she were trying to get water out of her ears, but I pressed the money into her hand.