by Talia Carner
Vera’s mother pulled a hand-knit blanket over her daughter’s knees to create a tent. Vera’s dark eyes, burning with fever, were intelligent, and although her chopped hair stood out in clumps, Brooke could see that this long-limbed woman was beautiful.
Less than three feet separated the bed pushed against the left wall and the built-in cabinet and bookcase on the right wall. A jutting shelf served as a table, wide enough for one chair. Vera’s mother gestured to Brooke to sit, then shuffled out of the tiny room. Brooke remained standing, but found no spot to rest her eyes lest it be perceived as a critical stare.
“They put up the wall to divide the room when Vera’s brother got married,” Olga said by way of explanation. “Then he got a job elsewhere and sold his space rather than give it back to his mother.”
At the orientation before leaving New York, Amanda had talked about the abhorrent living conditions of most Russians, but Brooke had anticipated a modest dwelling like her family’s first apartment in Brooklyn—three tiny yet functional rooms, not this wretched crowding. Vera was a factory director, and, judging by the number of books on the shelves, an educated woman.
Vera moaned. Olga crouched next to her and uncovered the plate. With her fingers, she fed Vera a small dumpling. “She speaks a little English,” she told Brooke. “She’ll understand what you say.”
Vera nodded, swallowed, and moaned again.
Brooke couldn’t dislodge a sound. “I’m so sorry about what happened,” she finally managed to say, her voice tinged with tears. Then the dam broke. She was stunned by her own burst of crying. “So sorry,” she murmured and turned her head away, embarrassed. She wasn’t the victim here.
“Honor to meet you,” Vera croaked.
Brooke buried her face in her hands, crying.
Olga patted her back.
“Sorry.” Brooke stepped away. She must compose herself. What would these valiant women think of the spoiled New Yorker?
“You never imagined that teaching our women business skills would mean literally watching them fight for their lives,” Olga said, handing Brooke her handkerchief.
“I truly apologize.” Brooke sniffed, but unable to control herself, she went on crying. “Just let me get some fresh air. I’ll be right back,” she managed to say. With such a display, surely Olga would think her emotionally unstable. Brooke had never before had a public meltdown. When at age four she had tried a temper tantrum, her mother said that having endured the Nazis, she could stand up to a child’s fit. After that, Bertha cried only when she was alone.
Brooke made her way out to the broken sidewalk, where her bottled-up grief surged, heaved, and finally subsided into hiccups. She wiped her eyes and looked around at the darkened buildings. Had the Russians, and then the Ukrainians, followed by the Nazis, not destroyed her mother’s family, her mother would still be here, living like this. Her mother’s siblings probably would still be alive. Her mother would have been a whole person, not the mourning shell she had become. She would have married a Jewish man whom she loved, and Brooke would have been born in the Soviet Union. She could have been Vera or Svetlana or Irina. Or, if more fortunate, Olga. Instead, by several twists of fate and a parade of unbearable miseries, Brooke had become the recipient of the rarest of commodity—luck. She had been lucky to be born in the United States of America.
This was her debt. She had always known that she had been put on earth to rectify the world’s atrocities; she had been born with the responsibility of redressing all the injustices her parents—and by extension, all humanity—suffered. This was how one repaid luck.
Back in Vera’s apartment, Brooke rinsed her face in the communal kitchen sink. “I will explain later,” she told Olga as she handed her back the damp handkerchief, wondering whether she had ruined the fine embroidery, but not knowing what to do about it.
She stood next to Vera’s bed and took the woman’s hand. “Again, I apologize.”
Vera attempted a weak smile. “Olga say you know everything business. That you earn million dollars.”
Brooke smiled, her eyes misting again. “Not even close.”
Olga chuckled. “Americans don’t talk about income. Russians always do.”
“Maybe Russians are right,” Brooke said. Her New York friends discussed their sex lives but never their money.
“Maybe you explain things,” Vera said. Her voice turned weaker, like a week radio signal, and she switched to Russian.
Olga translated. “I—meaning Vera—I am the director of a factory for pots and pans. Not good stuff, everyday quality, Russian level.” Both women let out chortles. “I can’t make sense of what the new owners want. They order us to cast nickel into the bottom of our cheapest pans. What for? Or make copper bowls without finish. Their edges are so sharp you could cut your fingers, but they don’t let us polish them to make them safe. For export, they say. Western cooks don’t mind cutting their fingers?”
Nickel? Copper? The picture became instantly clear. “They know exactly what they’re doing,” Brooke said. She sat down in the chair Vera’s mother had vacated. “The cost of raw metals in Russia is way below the European cartel price, but the European Common Market can’t allow Russia to create unbeatable competition. Metals from Russia must be sold at the higher Common Market prices.” She bent toward the injured woman. “Therefore the nickel and copper are cast into anything, in whichever shape, because Russia is allowed to export to Europe finished products at any price it chooses.”
“So what do they do with our pots?”
Brooke hesitated. All of Vera’s employees’ hard work was purposeless. Yet the woman had suffered too much to be denied the truth. “Since Russian raw material is worth a lot more in Europe’s open market than the finished product, once your pots and bowls reach their destination, they are probably melted down. The nickel and copper are then sold at a huge profit. The money, in foreign denominations, is probably tucked away in an offshore bank account.”
“Offshorsky. We’ve already adopted the word.” Olga shook her head.
Brooke sat back. A new apprehension filled her head. “These smugglers are not fools. They know what they’re doing,” she told Olga. “Vera’s up against an international crime cartel whose business practices must be as sophisticated as Coca-Cola and IBM put together.”
AS THEY TRAMPED their way back, Brooke’s mouth tasted metallic. Frogs burped somewhere in the darkness. When the women rounded the corner, wind whipped down at them from the open fields to the north. Brooke removed her cashmere shawl and placed it over Olga’s coat. “Keep it.”
Olga fingered the fine wool. “It’s too elegant. You’ve given me an expensive gift already. I can’t take this—”
Brooke tucked her hands in her coat pockets for warmth. “You’ve given me a far more precious gift.”
“What’s that?”
Emotions rippled through Brooke, too complex to define. How could she begin to explain that seeing the misfortune and courage with which Russian women faced life finally made her grasp the magnitude of her parents’ survival?
As though she’d read her mind, Olga’s cold fingers laced into Brooke’s. “Only our stories are different. Not what they represent to us.”
“My story is still different from most Americans’.” Brooke bit her lower lip. “My mother was born in Russia. She is Jewish. Her sister was murdered in a pogrom. Afterward, the family escaped to Riga, but later ended up in a concentration camp. She survived, but her entire family was murdered before and during the war.” She continued to speak as they reached the shelter of Olga’s stairwell, where they stood in darkness. “In my childhood, the Holocaust was always present by the void of what was gone. I grew up without grandparents, aunts, uncles, or cousins. My parents were too old and too beaten to produce more than one child, so I had no living siblings, only the ghosts of three murdered ones. I was given an impossible legacy of responsibility, one I tried to escape my entire life.”
“What sort of responsibility
?”
“To never forget.”
“I am so sorry to hear about your family tragedies.” Olga lit a cigarette, and Brooke tried to read her face in the flicker of the lighter. Olga’s brows were squeezed together. “We were horrible to our Jews. For centuries we stored up deadly hatred against them. Our priests gave us permission to rob them, to ridicule them, to beat them, to kill them—all under the premise of vindicating their killing our Jesus. Where was the goodness and compassion and Christian charity the priests were also telling us about? Shamelessly, we were the oppressors and the persecutors of the Jews in our midst.”
Brooke felt the hair rising on her arms. She had never imagined she’d be facing one of “them,” and certainly not one who confessed. “You say ‘we,’ yet you distance yourself from it—”
Olga cut her off. “It’s our collective guilt—and it should be our collective shame—except that it is not.” She sucked on her cigarette. “Even under communism we let minorities thrive and maintain their cultural identity, but we continued to persecute your people. We closed their synagogues and shut down their newspapers. Yet, when the Jews wanted to leave, we forbade it. We only tightened the noose on their necks.”
Was Olga asking for Brooke’s forgiveness? It wasn’t hers to give. “How much of it have you witnessed yourself?” Brooke asked.
“I grew up with it. I am guilty both collectively and personally. My family was friends with our Jewish neighbors. I had liked Mrs. Horvitz’s cooking. She was kind to me. I was only three or four years old when, one night, I heard a lot of shouting outside and noise of banging and breaking glass. Then my mother brought in down-feather quilts, and I saw from the window my older brothers lead the Horvitzes’ cow and horse to our barn. I asked where the Horvitzes went without their horse, and was told they ran away by foot. In the morning, I received the wool coat of their daughter, who was a few years older than me. All winter I worried about her being cold somewhere, but then I too, forgot.” Olga pressed the light switch, as if wanting Brooke to take a full measure of her culpability. “With alterations, the coat served me for years.” She tapped her cigarette, and the feathered ashes fell to the floor. “When the war ended, Mr. Horvitz came back to town—alone. A neighbor who had worked for him had taken over his home and business. He stabbed Mr. Horvitz with a pitch fork in front of my eyes.”
Brooke couldn’t find words and anyway wouldn’t have been able to get them through the contracted passage of her throat.
Olga went on, “I was older then and was both ashamed and horrified. My parents told me that the Horvitzes weren’t worth getting upset about, but I couldn’t get them out of my mind. I knew that my parents were wrong, and this knowledge was my first awakening into adulthood and independent thinking. I understood that it wasn’t just hate. It was greed, even envy. I never saw a Jew again until I went to university, and even there, we were jealous of them because they were so smart that if our academic institutions hadn’t limited their enrollment, there would have been too many Jewish students and then Jewish professors churning out Jewish graduates that would qualify for the best jobs. Universities that were supposed to be the temple of knowledge, open thinking, and academic achievement were scared of the Jews’ intellectual powers.”
When Brooke said nothing, Olga sighed. “So you see, I was complicit, if not active, in horrific acts against your people. Maybe today a more clever Jewish woman would have been director of the Institute of Social Research. Perhaps I’ve benefited from the vengeance we unleashed upon our Jews with more than just a coat.”
“Your honesty alone must redeem you,” Brooke managed to say. But who was she to forgive transgressions committed against others?
“Redeemed in whose eyes? The Lord? Our priests told us that He punished His Chosen People for killing His son, Jesus.” Olga drew in a rough breath. “Just so you know, I don’t believe the priests—most of them are greedy and corrupt—but I believe in the Lord, and I still don’t understand why He let down your people.”
“You sound like my mother. She won’t talk to Him until He asks the Jews for forgiveness.” Brooke swallowed. “Thank you for admitting all that. It takes courage.”
“It takes courage to flaunt your being a Jewess. No one in Russia would wear that.” Olga pointed to the Star of David.
“It’s because of my mother that I must go home.” Olga’s confession, the honesty of it, had both chipped at Brooke’s resolve and reinforced it. She admired Olga even more than before, but also there was no doubt that she was in the wrong place.
Olga let out a plume of smoke from the side of her mouth. “I admire filial loyalty—our Soviet regime glorified children that turned in their parents; it broke the crucial bond of a core family in any healthy society. But I am deeply disappointed to see you leave. Look how easily you’ve just figured out the scheme with the nickel and copper. You have so much to teach us.”
Brooke felt the pull. “I apologize for leaving you in the lurch.” She bent a little to hug Olga. “Thank you.”
Olga pulled back and punched the timed light switch. “We’ve said everything we can say. Viktor will drive you back to the hotel. Wait here. He’ll come right down.”
After Olga walked up, the light went out. Brooke did not punch the button again.
DAY FOUR
Sunday, October 3, 1993
Chapter Twenty-eight
BROOKE WOKE UP on her last day in Moscow to spokes of sun spraying through the window. In the morning light, her initial urge to help Olga investigate the mafia seemed like sheer lunacy. Vera had shown her their methods. Establishing a fund for women would be a much more reasonable way to help—if she could bring herself to defile the memory of her relatives.
She held the matryoshka and admired the delicate brush strokes. The symbolism of motherhood moving back through history, one the product of another, would forever remain with her. She wrapped her silk nightgown around it, then placed the one remaining piece of Irina’s broken ashtray between two sweaters.
“Are you all packed?” Amanda asked, walking in from the bathroom. Her glance took in the suitcase still open on the bed. The collection of plastic bags and gifts of lipstick, aspirin, condoms, and music cassettes Brooke had brought was piled on the desk.
“I’m going down for breakfast,” Brooke said. “The chef will probably have bagels and lox for us, and Aleksandr will have bought the Sunday New York Times, right?”
Amanda put her arms around Brooke. “I’m sorry to see you leave.”
Brooke returned the hug, glad that their friendship would survive her departure. “I have till the afternoon to join your trip to the arts and crafts market.”
In the dining room, Aleksandr was nursing a cup of coffee. Brooke stopped by his table. “What’s the news today?”
“About what?”
“The parliament. Have you heard of the almost-war that’s been going on there for over two weeks?”
Aleksandr shrugged. “Nothing’s new, yes?”
“No news is good news.” Jenny chirped from the next table, where she sat with two strange men.
“Are the roads to the airport clear?” Brooke asked Aleksandr.
“You shouldn’t worry.”
“Aleksandr.” She forced her tone to remain pleasant this last time she must deal with him. “It’s not for you to decide what I should or shouldn’t worry about. It’s your job to keep us informed.”
Aleksandr blushed and pulled a newspaper clipping from the pocket of his leather jacket. As he did so, a wad of papers fell on the floor. Quickly, he bent to retrieve them, but Brooke stomped her foot on them.
“Hold it.” She picked up the papers and stared at the top one. “My faxes are here. You were supposed to drop them off at EuroTours on Friday.”
Aleksandr stared at his shoes. “I didn’t get to the office.”
“Any reason you didn’t tell us that in the forty-eight hours since then?” Brooke’s father hadn’t known before their phone conversation tha
t she was here—nor was Hoffenbach made aware of her whereabouts. She studied the papers. Among them was a list of the group members’ names in English and their respective room phone numbers. She was astonished to also recognize the numbers for her office phone in New York along with her unlisted home phone. On the margin next to her name was a note in Cyrillic. “What does it say?” she asked Aleksandr, pointing at the scribbles.
She hadn’t noticed that Judd was standing behind her, looking over her shoulder, until she smelled his cinnamon-and-wood aftershave. “May I?” he asked. Gently, he extracted the list from her hand, folded it, and placed it in his pocket.
“It’s mine!” Aleksandr protested. “This paper is mine.”
“Not any more,” Judd replied. He handed Brooke her faxes. “You want them?”
Unnerved by Aleksandr, baffled by Judd, Brooke took her faxes. Thankfully, she was about to go home. She stepped away and settled at a small table behind a paneled column. On her plate, the now-familiar measured quantities of sliced hard-boiled egg, cucumber, yellow cheese, beet, salami, pickled red cabbage, herring, and radish must have been set out last night and had since dried up. She poured herself kefir, preferring it to the alternatives, borscht or a “coffee-flavored drink” that looked and tasted like brown dishwater.
Judd took the chair across from her. Light streamed down through the tall windows. A ray of sunlight illuminated the gray of his eyes. His long fingers played with a piece of bread. His nails were filthy; even the creases of his skin seemed to have caked-in dirt.