After Anatevka

by Alexandra Silber

  Perchik saw many shapes of misfortune far worse than his own. Perchik himself had at some point escaped the state he witnessed now in Grigory Boleslav: this very lowest state of spiritual suffering, the final state of shame.

  “At last we stopped in a field. Placing my arm dotingly around his shoulder, I pointed out something in the distance, which made him look away. I kissed and kissed his neck, the softness behind his ear, as if to say goodbye. Then, in an instant, I brandished the pistol in both my hands, pointing it straight into his body. He began to inch backward, arms in front of him pleading. Then, without thought, I pulled the trigger. But my hand was shaking with nerves, and I only wounded him, grazing him across the shoulder.”

  He is still such a young man, thought Perchik as he listened.

  “The female companion ran screaming toward him. Bleeding and stunned, he clutched his seeping shoulder and threw himself upon his knees before me, weeping, ‘Grishushka! My love! Forgive me!’ in a tone of voice so heartrending, it made me tremble. ‘Forgive me, my darling! Forgive me, please! I love her!’ And suddenly, it was all very clear indeed. My love loved her. He betrayed me, and they had to die for it. They had to.”

  It is an indescribable torture to know that a menacing watch is being kept upon one’s every movement—Grisha had lived a lifetime with it, the unrelenting eye. But nothing could be worse than the eyes that are set upon you in the final gazes of those whose lives you have taken. Perchik need not guess at such a torture, for it was all there on Grisha’s face, engraved like a tenebrous watermark.

  Grisha continued, his voice more delicate now, “When you are in pain, how little you contemplate the pain of others. I answered his plea for mercy by plunging the weapon directly into his heart and releasing the gun into it. I watched his eyes go blank before he fell down, stiff and dead.” Perchik could see the eyes of Grisha’s lover were burning into him—forever burning and pointed, like two hot needles.

  “Then I caught the horrified grimace of his lady-friend. She tried to run. I felt my hand rise quite uncontrollably, and I shot her through the stomach when she attempted escape.”

  Perchik could see Grigory Boleslav set his quiet, feverish glare back upon those two persecuting eyes, defiant in the simple act of recounting his story.

  “Then I did a most unthinkable thing,” he said. “I aimed the gun toward my lover’s face and fired into it, obliterating him beyond all description.” Grisha grew very pale, his expression perfectly still. “Hatred. Loathing. Hatred it was, really—how thoroughly it guided me. The pain of his betrayal mutilated me. I had to mutilate him too.” He stopped then, but he was not weeping. His voice was clear and free. “You see, comrade, I thought an act of violence would ease my suffering. Somehow, though I cannot explain it at all, it was not enough to simply kill him. I had to disfigure him as well.”

  “But you murdered the man you loved—”

  “The face . . .” Boleslav recalled, voice barely audible now. “That beautiful face. I liquidated it.” He was staring, catatonic. “It was in his face that the love for her lay. Yes, I suspect that was probably it.”

  After a few moments Perchik cut into the silence.

  “What did you do then, my friend?”

  “Well. I turned on the sight, walked slowly away, went straight to the authorities, and gave myself up. Now here I am for life.”

  “But does your conscience not gnaw at you?”

  “I don’t believe I shall ever forget it. But as for conscience? No. I was quite right in killing them both.”

  Perchik was baffled. “So you feel no crime has been committed?”

  “I blasted them out of the world. Pfft. Like exploded stars gone in an instant, without a trace, without a thought, into the blackness and silence of the universe. Poetic, eh? And how good it feels, really. They are dead while I labor here for life. That is fairness. That is justice. I need not justify a single action. He took away my peace, she took away my love and my dignity, and so I took away their lives. Where is the crime?”

  His question was sincere, as if he was looking to Perchik for a genuine answer. Grigory Boleslav inhaled deeply, the tears from his eyes dried upon his face in sharp white streaks, his nose frosted at the edges. Perchik stared hard into him—false righteousness of deed and thought was not unrepresented among these men he considered to be his friends. All the same, he could not help but feel for him.

  “Oppression. Misunderstanding,” Grisha continued, stubbing out the nubbin of his cigarette. “They do things to you. They fill you with a pressure that boils over. Perhaps that is why I—” He stopped abruptly. “Perhaps that is it.” His throat was tight. “I feel much better, you know!” he declared, sighing, his shoulders loosening. “I feel stronger and better having told it. Thank you.” Grigory Boleslav looked away again and thought another moment. He gazed upon the horizon, the ground, and his hands, and at last his look landed on Perchik as he spoke with candor.

  “When you have won, Reb Perchik, do not forget Grigory Boleslav and the others like him. I shall certainly rot away in here, but the vast numbers of others . . .” His voice trailed away. “Do remember me.”

  Grigory Boleslav looked once more into the distance. At the rising Siberian sun. At the painful piercing of its light as it cut into the wet blackness of his eyes—as black and infinite as the mines they sat before.

  twenty-eight

  THE CELLO SANG FROM THE CORNER. DMITRI’S HANDS HAD BEEN aching to play; he had been waiting several weeks for his fingers to heal after the long winter had ravaged them. Now, in the flushes of Siberian spring, the men sat idly in Hodel and Perchik’s open front room within the Volosnikov house as they were want to do most Sundays. Grigory Boleslav was smoking in one corner while Anatoly and Yevgeny played cards in another. Andrey Tenderov lay prostrate in the center of the room, legs sprawled blithely, thumbing through a pile of both novels and pamphlets, thoughtlessly adding his own hummed melodies to Dmitri’s concert.

  “Oh, Mitya, do play the Bach suites—number three, please,” Yevgeny asked. “It is my very favorite. Oh, say you will.”

  “Yevgeny,” sighed Dmitri Petrov. “I cannot do the sarabande. My thumb is still healing.”

  “The second, then. Even just the prelude. Come! No one does mournful cello better!”

  “Yevgeny, I am almost as weary of the Bach as I am of you,” Dmitri said. “Now be still, stop nagging, and don’t let Anatoly beat you with a pair of fives yet again.”

  Anatoly smiled broadly at this—he loved to win.

  “I wouldn’t know a prelude or an allemande if it jumped up and bit my arse, but I like the sound of Sarabande—is she spoken for?” joked Tenderov, not even looking up from his books, still sprawled upon the ground, his hair gleaming even in the ambient light. The men chuckled approval.

  Yevgeny was unfazed. “Please,” he pleaded, eyes batting, smiling.

  Dmitri sighed again. “Oh, very well,” he said, agreeing only to silence the nagging, though the sincere light in Yevgeny’s face was, admittedly, charming. “But the second—and only the first movement.”

  They all cheered at the predictable squabbles of the mismatched bunkmates. And then, at last, Dmitri began to play.

  There are times when we witness a creature being essentially itself— it happens when we watch beavers build their dams, when birds launch into the heights of the open skies, or as mothers feed their young. In this we witness a kind of glory, not with our senses but with something else entirely: the essential parts in us respond to it, our nerves tremble, and we are ignited with a kind of knowing. So it was when Dmitri Petrov played his cello. There was no visible shift in them. They soaked in long strains and mournful chords as they continued to sit and read and stew and smoke. But the shift was there, real and present, the cellist crying out to the essential with these inessential men.

  Andrey Tenderov took a flask from his coat pocket and drank. He passed the flask around before wiping his mouth and exhaling with pleasure.
>
  “What is this?” Boleslav asked, impressed.

  “Wine!” Andrey exclaimed. “Beautiful wine!”

  “Where in the hell do you get all your liquor?” Grisha asked of Andrey, thoroughly vexed.

  From the very first moment the carriage doors opened, delivering him to this place, Andrey Tenderov was forever sneaking. He snuck into the kitchens at night to gather scraps of food to share with the others. He’d shuffle workers away to lead them in song during working hours. He strolled to and fro on the officers’ grounds (often even walking directly into the residences of The Gentleman and his compatriots), then emerge with swagger, as if he owned the camp! All of this, only to be caught moments later and sentenced to some punitive task or another. Andrey Tenderov was charismatic and likable, with limitless spirit. No one could understand how he could be like that in such a place as this. He also always appeared to have a spare shot of vodka, a slice of bread, or a pinch of tobacco, no matter how downtrodden he became.

  “Yevgeny here showed me a storehouse on the eastern front where they put it all in great crates. Then he taught to me break in, he did. You see, Dmitri? The man is good for something!” And Andrey laughed, shining his golden smile upon the room, then took another swig of wine from the flask. “Now,” he continued, “do you know apparently Tolstoy and his wife, Sophia, had a rather tumultuous marriage? Yes, it says here that the onset of their union possessed extraordinary passion, followed by a steady decline in contentment alongside his growing faith.”

  “Fascinating” droned Grigory Boleslav, ever acerbic.

  “That’s what it says,” said Tenderov, shrugging. “Mysterious.” He looked at the paper a moment longer before asking, “What think you of marriage, Reb Perchik?”

  “I?” asked Perchik, looking up from his writing. “Why do you ask me?”

  Tenderov smiled. “For you are the only one among us here who is in the presence of his wife!” He flashed his broad teeth in delight. “Think of it—Anatoly, alone in Ekaterinburg, was it?”

  “Vladivostok, actually,” said Anatoly, shuffling his cards.

  “There you are. And Yevgeny? Have you ever had a love?”

  Yevgeny thought for a moment, then said uncertainly, “I loved my mother. And we had a dog once we called Malenkey Petya—I loved that dog no question.”

  They all paused, taking that in.

  “And darling Dmitri over there,” interjected Grigory Boleslav, gesturing from the opposite corner. “The confirmed, crotchety young bachelor who, despite this, has all sorts of fancy ideals about love—can’t you tell? Who would want to marry him?” Grigory Boleslav smirked as he sucked his dwindling cigarette.

  “Well, what about you?” hollered Dmitri over the Bach. “Nothing more than a—”

  “A bachelor! A bachelor myself!” he shouted back, punctuating the word with a flick of his cigarette stub.

  “Oh, is that what they are calling it nowadays?”

  “Now, now, men—settle!” said Andrey Tenderov in a pacifying tone. “Regardless. Reb Perchik, Hodel is the only wife . . . well, any of us know, and you are the only one to whom she is truly married. So: What think you of marriage?”

  “The word, comrade?” Perchik asked coyly.

  “The notion, comrade! The thing of it. Come now! Tell us.”

  He thought for a moment, rubbing his thumb into the arm of his chair.

  Veren ferherret—Yiddish for “to get married.” Perchik recalled once asking Tzeitel and Tzeitel’s husband, Motel, for the secret to a good marriage.

  “The most important words in a marriage,” Tzeitel said, “are: you are probably right.”

  At that Perchik had laughed. He then turned to Motel and inquired, “Reb Motel?”

  Motel shrugged and said, “She’s probably right.”

  In the company of men, his thoughts traveled first to marriage’s adversities. He thought of Hodel’s fire, her obstinate will, her temper. But in light of such a connection, these details seemed to serve as merely a backdrop for a wealth of shimmering virtues: her implicit, almost clairvoyant understanding, the calm of their silences, the buzz of their discussions. The way his thumb fit perfectly in the palm of her hand.

  Indeed, all in all, marriage was wonderful—because he was married to her.

  “You know,” he said with a smile, “truly, I do believe there is not a thing about it I detest.”

  The men laughed together, complete with kissing noises and shaking of their heads. “Oh God!” shouted Boleslav from across the room. “Please save us from the presence of the lovesick—my teeth are rotting in their sockets!”

  With that, almost as if she had known, Hodel entered from the cold of the afternoon, sunlight and frost streaming in with her.

  “Hello, men!” she greeted, shivering, then kissed her husband while removing her cloak and shawl.

  “We were just speaking of you, my dear,” Perchik confessed, reaching for her hand and smiling softly.

  “Oh? Did someone get hungry or spill something again?” she said, her eyes laughing, ears simultaneously pricking to Dmitri’s playing. “Dmitri, I thought you were weary of that piece,” she said over her shoulder, making her way to the stove.

  At this, Grisha retorted, “Yes, quite right, Perchik, a very pleasant business this marriage seems. We are inarguably missing out. Just think, indeed, if it weren’t for marriage, men would go through life thinking they had no faults at all.”

  Perchik looked on as even Dmitri surrendered a smile, shaking his head in reluctant delight, and he saw Hodel catch Dmitri’s eye and nod before she walked back across the room to sit atop Perchik’s waiting lap. If he come in by himself, he shall go out by himself, he thought, quoting the Good Book to himself. “If he were married, then his wife shall go out with him." The Good Book is a good book, he thought, and this is my wife. . . .

  He scarcely noticed Dmitri’s cello playing. Perchik gazed upon her: her look was impassioned. She leaned over and kissed him, eyes filled with yearning, mouth full of tenderness—she could not hear the music at all.

  “A flush!” cried Yevgeny suddenly. “A flush of diamonds! I cannot believe it! You see, Mitya, you see how your Bach suite inspires! It has made me clever for the briefest of moments, enough to trample even Anatoly! Thank you, thank you, Mitya; thank you, my worthy opponent Anatoly; thank you, one and all!” With that, the Bach came to its end as the group cheered and applauded, Yevgeny already giving little bows to the many corners of the room, forever basking in the smallest of victories.

  twenty-nine

  AS HE RETURNED FROM THE MINES AND STOOD IN THE ENTRANCE of the Volosnikov house, Perchik caught a glimpse of Hodel washing herself in a basin. Her beautiful hair was unraveled and flecked with the thawed light of the wasteland he knew would always be imprinted upon his mind as their first home. He bathed too—in the autumnal light of this hazy evening—and realized he had asked Hodel to be his wife nearly four years ago. . . .

  Light, he thought, has a funny way of imprinting itself upon our memories. He was suddenly stung with regret. How quickly things had changed.

  From Gershom to Rabbi Syme, from university to squalor. From an evening with a stranger in a faraway bar and back again. Back to university—and paying his own way, on his own terms. Learning more—more than one ever could from any book or school or teacher. Becoming a man. Becoming a leader. Then taking to the road—to reach and teach the people of this vast and glorious land. A road that would eventually lead him to her.

  For all his talk, for all his rhetoric, his dreams and visions for the future of the People were minute in comparison to his dreams and visions of a future for her. He loved her and all that she was—more than he had ever loved anything, and his commitment was more than a promise to honor her throughout his life: it was a commitment to opening his heart. He vowed to give her not all that he had, but all he knew she deserved.

  Her love was palpable in the still of the bitter nights—he would enfold her while they talked, a
nd she would lean deeply into him, resting in the circle of his arms as they made plans and dreamed. After a day in the mines, he would come to her for a few moments of sanity. To listen. To have his life held in her discerning mind. To hold hers. To provide some semblance of helpful commentary, and to bask in a contentment that felt like the hand of the divine upon his chest.

  He gazed at her as she rose from the basin. She gathered her hair up into a knot, and as she wrapped a sheet around herself, a lock of hair fell across her face and along the curve of a naked arm. He entered and saw her body respond to his presence. Glancing toward him, her expression fully open, her frame suggested knowing tranquility—as if her innate attitude were that of sheer luminosity.

  Half dressed, hair unleashing with each deliberate step, she moved toward him. He brushed the hair from her face, hands grazing her carefully, with great attention, as if she were breakable. Then he held her face between his hands—beholding her. She smiled, and his heart leapt so suddenly that all he could do was raise her forehead to his lips, pressing them upon her as if endowing her with all he possessed.

  She placed her cheek against his, and emotion rose within him— swollen, bursting, like waves of an inner ocean. It was this surge of feeling that moved him to kiss her face with a covetous thirst, as if drinking in her very essence. The salt of Nerchinsk may have been slowly preserving him, but it purified him too. He was falling, dissolving into her. He relinquished himself to the ebbing pull of her tide.

  “Hodel,” he whispered into her neck, “Hodel, I love you.” He held her with his crumbling fingers and inhaled deeply the scent of her hair. She did not need to reply. The devotion in her embrace said it for her. She kissed his mouth, tasted the salt, and smiled.