At once, she felt a deep sense of relief that loosened her limbs, expanded her ribcage, and cleared her airways; and when she heard a beautiful, unfamiliar, and, for once, not hopelessly sentimental melody coming from Thekla’s room, she started to dance.
Her limbs were stirred into new life, warmth rose in her breast, and she forgot her continual hunger and the accursed cold, which troubled her more than the hunger did. She spun around, leapt into the air, turned and stretched, growing soft and supple, and laughing out loud.
Thekla, who was just coming out of the kitchen, started applauding for all for she was worth. Stasia broke off her dance and sank down on the landing in a daze. Thekla may not have taken much interest in this life, but she knew beauty when she saw it.
‘Forget that man: the only thing in his head is his sick politics. Leaving you sitting here, it’s an outrage — you — look at you, what a sight! Beautiful things seldom come from waiting — you should dance, my darling!’
And she floated theatrically up the stairs in her lilac coat.
The goal is nothing to me, the movement is everything.
EDUARD BERNSTEIN
Three days later, Stasia received a visit from Peter Vasilyev, a master of the old school and former soloist with the Royal Ballet. He gave Stasia his hand and said, ‘Only Thekla would think of engaging a dancing teacher in times like these, but she thought it might provide me with a little distraction, too.’
The house’s large, empty rooms provided ideal practice space, and Peter Vasilyev brought new records with him for the gramophone.
Vasilyev had grey hair. He was tall, artificial, worldly, and authoritarian. Stasia worshipped him from the moment they met, and counted the hours until he arrived.
She had received basic training in classical ballet, but Vasilyev was quite different: imperious, demanding. He knew only the best exponents of his art, and had danced in a number of magnificent halls. If the revolution hadn’t intervened, Peter Vasilyev would probably be the director of the best ballet school in the city, Stasia thought.
With his tireless discipline, his talent, his awe-inspiring manner, and Stasia’s great determination to spend hours practising despite the bestial cold, her hopes for Paris had returned. Everything seemed possible again. With Simon, or without him.
Thus Stasia danced through the winter; through the snowstorms, the icy wind, the frosty days and nights; through the demonstrations and skirmishes, the uprisings, strikes, and — again and again — through the hunger. Simon did not come.
*
In March of the year 1919, workers began to strike in almost all the notable factories of Petrograd. And Masha finally left them. She had inducted Stasia into everything: she had twice taken her to buy bread, introduced her to a Siberian girl who knew people from the black market and would help her in emergencies, and explained the principles of shoving, shouting, and getting oneself noticed, which were needed in those times in order to survive. Then, with a small bag on her back, and showing hardly any emotion, she bade a cool farewell to the weeping Thekla and walked out of the door, which Stasia fastened behind her with numerous bolts.
In April, Simon’s next letter to Stasia informed her that his visit to Petrograd would be delayed further. They still couldn’t grant him leave, as they were currently anticipating an assault on Moscow, and he was being sent there. He put her off until the summer.
By this time, the chocolate-maker had somehow managed to send his daughter a large crate of groceries. God alone knew who he had had to bribe to get it to her. These groceries, together with the spring weather, which was finally starting to beat back the merciless winter cold, granted the two women a few weeks’ peace, and released them from their daily worries about how they would survive the following day.
Dance always helped. The taxing, monotonous exercises and the small successes. After every practice, Stasia felt a little happier, freer, more light-hearted. There had been many times when, had it not been for Thekla, who refused to admit defeat despite her loneliness, and the hard-working Peter Vasilyev, who doggedly made his way to the house by the Fontanka three times a week, Stasia would have thrown in the towel and either taken the next train south or simply gone to bed and never got up again.
Standing in the endless queues for bread, Stasia eavesdropped on people angrily discussing the country’s future. The front at the Don, the front at Kharkov, the front at Novgorod, the front near Minsk, the front near Irkutsk — the very word ‘front’ made her feel sick. The peasants just wanted to be left in peace. The Cossacks wanted to defend their independence and their worldly possessions; the monarchists didn’t want to cooperate with the Mensheviks because they were collaborating with the Reds; the Mensheviks were drawing ever closer to the Bolsheviks, to escape the chaos of the monarchists and the liberals; while people with no affiliations, anarchists, and criminals were taking advantage of the situation: they were seeing to their own prosperity and earning money on the black market.
‘Maybe we should go to Georgia together, Thekla. Unrest or no, we’d be safer there and we’d have no shortage of food,’ Stasia said to Thekla one morning in the kitchen, over insipid tea. (Unlike Masha, she was never able to get hold of the good, strong tea; she always got ripped off.)
‘Oh, my darling, I’m far too old to make a new start like that,’ Thekla replied.
‘Oh, come on. You’re not that old, Thekla. And anyway, nobody’s talking about a new start; this is more a case of getting through the winter, as you call it. Until all this is over.’
‘Will it ever be over?’ Thekla asked, with a harrowing sadness in her voice. And Stasia knew that Thekla would never leave this city and this house, and she also knew that it would be impossible for her to leave Thekla there alone.
And so Stasia and Thekla stayed together over the following months, in the shadowy, damp isolation of the big house, brought to life three times a week by Peter Vasilyev’s visits and his dance lessons. But the constant fear, and continually having to fend off the people who hammered on their front door looking for somewhere to stay, or simply wanting to loot the place, sapped Stasia’s strength. At these moments she would have liked to have boxed Thekla’s ears for leaving her to defend the house alone, as if it weren’t Thekla’s own beloved home.
*
In the summer of 1920, Stasia reached the second anniversary of her Petrograd imprisonment. A few days had become two full years since she had left her home and her family to be with a man whose wife she had been for only a matter of days. Sometimes Stasia seemed already to have forgotten why she had come to this city.
On one hot July evening, swarming with mosquitos, Peter Vasilyev appeared at the front door unannounced. He had a bottle wrapped in newspaper under his shirt, and was beaming from ear to ear.
‘Come, ladies. I would like to drink a toast with you and bid you farewell!’ he cried, walking triumphantly into the kitchen. There he filled three glasses with Crimean sparkling wine, and informed Stasia and Thekla that in two days’ time he would be leaving the country, and the lessons were therefore at an end.
‘I have a cousin in Baden-Baden. She has a shrewd banker for a husband; she’s offered to help me, and my two sisters are already there. I can’t stand all this any longer. They’ve sent money for my passage and arranged the necessary papers for me. For once, I’m glad that I never quite escaped my Jewish relations.’
Years later, when Stasia heard about Auschwitz and Birkenau, she often thought of Peter Vasilyev, whose fine-sounding Russian name was a pseudonym, and she hoped fervently that Isaac Eibinder, as Peter Vasilyev was called, was not numbered among those millions.
After Peter Vasilyev’s departure, everything suddenly seemed stale and futile. Thekla hardly left her bedroom, and Stasia wandered aimlessly about the house. To begin with, she practised and danced even without Peter Vasilyev’s strict instructions, as he had told her to do, but
she found it increasingly difficult; her dream seemed to be fading again, as if she were constantly in need of allies to keep it alive. She started buying strong sailors’ tobacco on the black market, which she rolled into thin cigarettes and smoked (a vice that would stay with her all her life; even when she could have afforded to smoke better cigarettes, she never swore off the cheap, strong tobacco).
One morning, a few weeks after Peter Vasilyev’s departure, after a sleepless night, Stasia went into Thekla’s room and sat on the edge of her bed in the dawn light. Thekla lay with her back to her, asleep, or pretending to be. Stasia woke her.
‘It can’t go on like this. One way or another, they’ll take the house from you, or people will just break in and stay here. Only yesterday I had to threaten two of them with the carving knife again, when they tried to climb in through the cellar. If only I had a gun — they’re more afraid of those than of my knife … I don’t have the strength any more to stand in these queues for hours, to always be afraid that somebody’s going to break in and cut our throats. A silver ring and a chain are all that’s left in your casket. The bonds you still own are worth nothing any more, and the tsar is dead. I know you don’t want to believe it, but it’s true. You’ve always said, Nicholas will come back, he won’t hand over his country to these wretched drinkers, but that’s not going to happen. They shot the tsar almost two years ago. In Ekaterinburg. His children, his wife — they’re all dead. We’re at war. Everywhere is at war. It will never again be like it was before. Never. I’m sorry. But we have to do something, Thekla. I’m going home.’
Civil war has its laws, as is well known, and
they have never been the laws of humanity.
LEON TROTSKY
At the start of September 1920, Stasia began her travel preparations. She wrote to her husband at the Moscow headquarters of the Red Army, informing him in a cool tone of her plan to return home. She no longer ended her letters with the phrase ‘with love’. The last piece of jewellery was sold, as was Thekla’s lambskin coat. With money for bribes, and after weeks of waiting, she finally managed to buy tickets for a train to Odessa, leaving at the end of October. From there, they would take a boat to Georgia. After she had got hold of a heavy suitcase — Thekla’s expensive, hand-made suitcases had been sold off long before — Stasia returned to the powdery-yellow house on the Fontanka, soaked and frozen from the rain, but pleased with her success.
‘It’s worked: we have the tickets, we can go next Monday!’ she called out, and then suddenly fell silent, confronted with an unaccustomed icy stillness. Cautiously, she went into the kitchen. A seductive scent emanated from it. There was nothing there, but she was familiar, very familiar, with the smell.
Quietly, she went upstairs. The scent led her to Thekla’s bedroom door. She knocked: there was no reply, so she turned the handle and peered into the room. Thekla, her back to the door, seemed to be asleep. A tin cup stood on the floor beside the bed, with the sticky remains of chocolate inside. How many weeks had it been? It seemed an eternity since the last time Stasia had made hot chocolate for Thekla. She recognised the cup she had brought her the chocolate in last time. Thekla must have saved the remains and reheated them. Stasia lifted the cup and smelled it; the scent was delicious, magical, intoxicating, but there was something else mixed with the sweetness, something metallic.
Stasia slowly put the cup back on the floor, her knees trembling. Thekla lay motionless on the bed. Something had been mixed into the chocolate; something final. A cold shudder ran down her back, and she saw her father’s reverent face in the chocolate factory, the night before her wedding. She heard him speaking of calamity, something she had dismissed as a figment of her anxious, troubled father’s imagination. This word — calamity — the meaning of which she had not been able to imagine now resounded inside her head. Was he talking about this horror, this pain, this fear that she now felt, looking at Thekla’s back? Had she brought on this calamity, believing she was bringing Thekla a little joy, and had Thekla known the price this black happiness would exact from her? Or was it she who had used the chocolate for something as calamitous as her own end?
An eternity passed before Stasia dared to go round to the other side of the bed and look at Thekla’s face. She had expected something terrible, but Thekla lay there as if sleeping peacefully. Beside her was a sheet of white paper:
Darling, I will be with you always. Your coming into my life at such an unspeakable time was a gift from God. This life, the life that awaits us, is not made for me — I no longer have a place there. I knew the tsar was dead. I knew from the start, but I thank you for keeping it secret from me for so long. I am so very tired. Don’t be angry with me. I have left you a little money, in the sugar tin in the kitchen. That should suffice for the burial, and hopefully also for your journey back. Look after yourself, and remember: if there should be anything beyond this eternal sleep, I will be there watching over you. Forgive me, and accept this last gift from me.
Underneath the note was a watch. An incredibly beautiful, gold wristwatch. It was only after several minutes that Stasia realised the letter was written in their shared mother tongue, in the ornate script that looked to outsiders like a kind of secret code, the script that Stasia had almost forgotten, the script that had made her tear her hair out at her girls’ school when she hadn’t been able to write beautifully, in a manner befitting a lady. She and Thekla had almost always conversed in Russian, and this last letter was a painful reminder that she would never again be able to speak to Thekla in the language that went with the script.
Stasia herself didn’t know how many hours she spent nestled against Thekla’s dead body. At some point, she said, she shouted for help, and people came charging into the house. Strangers.
Three days later, Thekla was buried, without a funeral service, without a priest. The churches had shut their doors for fear of pogroms. Stasia remained standing by the grave for a long time, crying uncontrollably. She had not been able to cry before. Even lying beside Thekla’s dead body. But now, standing at her graveside, with Thekla’s farewell letter and the gold watch in her pocket, the tears came.
*
By the time Stasia came downstairs with her suitcase the next day, people had already forced their way into the house and were running around in a frenzy, stuffing whatever was left to steal into their pockets and arguing about the rooms.
At the station, she was told that she required an exit visa for Odessa. Stasia, at her wits’ end, trembling, showed them all the papers she had, including a copy of Simon’s RKKA certificate, which he had sent her a few months earlier for safety’s sake. She begged with tears in her eyes, but it was no good. Eventually, the lady in the ticket office took pity on her. She couldn’t go to Odessa, but, as the wife of a Red lieutenant, she could follow him to where he was posted; this she was permitted to do. Where was he stationed, she asked.
‘In Moscow,’ an exhausted Stasia replied, sitting down, dejected, on her suitcase.
‘There’s a train leaving for Moscow at six o’clock in the morning; I’ll exchange your ticket, and your husband can get you an exit visa in Moscow. Give me your ticket.’
Stasia absentmindedly handed her both tickets.
‘There are two here. Who’s supposed to be travelling with you?’ the uniformed lady asked.
‘She’s not coming now.’
On the train she sat in silence, listening to the monotonous sound of the wheels. She told me she kept thinking about Thekla’s rigid body, and the simple shirt that was the last thing she wore, a simple white cotton nightshirt, a plain nightshirt, as if she had put it on to set out on a journey into a dream of before.
*
There were propaganda posters all over Moscow depicting a soldier in a white uniform, pointing his finger at you. Underneath, they said: ‘Why aren’t you in the army?’ On the others, the Reds’ posters, there was a soldier in a red uniform, pointing
at the viewer. Underneath, they said: ‘Have you joined the volunteers yet?’
Stasia was in luck. At the address she had been given, everyone knew Simon Jashi. It was a barracks, somewhere on the edge of town. Stasia, exhausted, frozen (her boots were stuffed with newspaper, as they were full of holes), sat in the corridor of this barracks, having finally arrived there in a hired droshky. Two young soldiers brought her a mug of tea and a little schnapps — that would do her good, they said. She drank the schnapps, holding her nose, and it did bring her some relief. Simon, they said, was at a union meeting in some factory or other, and would be back that evening. In the meantime, they showed her to his room, which he shared with two other soldiers, and covered her with all the bedcovers they could find.
She slept, long and deep.
A man woke her. He was sitting at her feet, his arms wrapped around her hips and his head on her stomach. He was sobbing. As exhausted and empty as she was, Stasia was unable to express any kind of emotion. She ran her hand absentmindedly through his hair. It was a strange state of affairs. All that time she had been waiting for this, playing out the details of the scene hundreds of times over, conducting daily conversations with Simon Jashi in her mind. She had such a long, cruel, cold, hungry journey behind her, and now she was able to feel so little. As if all her feelings and her words had been used up. As if the Petrograd years, Peter Vasilyev, and Thekla, above all, had taken from her everything that Stasia had been hoping to save for her husband. They held each other, without talking much. He warmed her feet and brought her hot borscht and a whole loaf of bread, a thing that Stasia had not held in her hands for two years. She ate greedily, and later fell into a deep sleep.
When she woke in the morning, they were alone in the room. He was lying beside her, fully clothed and sleeping. She sat up and looked at him for a long time. There was so much she wanted to tell him, so much she wanted to ask, to explain, but she didn’t know where or how to start. He was sleeping peacefully, his grey wool coat with the red star sewn onto it hung neatly on a hook on the wall. His boots, which were old and worn, but clean, stood on the floor.
The Eighth Life Page 9