The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield

by Anna Fishbeyn

I tried to translate to Eddie in a hurry but Grandmother waited patiently, letting me know that she wants him to learn, to understand us.

  Then she went on, “I don’t remember the exact year, maybe it was 1931, I was just a child when the purges started. Stalin was arresting everyone, informants lived inside your walls, under your bed, in your toilet bowl staring up your asshole. Our house was filled with them—cockroaches crawling out of every corner. Each family assumed that only their case was unjust, only their son or husband or father was mistakenly arrested while everyone else was guilty. They didn’t spare the women either. Eyes burned into each other’s backs, everyone thinking—should I report him?

  “In those days, everyone had special government stamps—you couldn’t get food otherwise at the market. Ti golodal. But my grandmother had sewn gold into the underlining of our mattress for an unforeseen emergency, and against Stalin’s decree, kept sugar and flour in our kitchen cabinets. One of the peasants, a fat drunk who could barely function, saw Grandmother open the cabinet, and the next minute, the NKVD were swarming our place; all our trunks and drawers were turned over, clothes and books strewn on the floor and German shepherds barking at us. It was easy to find the flour and sugar—that drunk, that miserable alkogolik pointed at the cabinet.

  “‘How do you have flour and sugar?’ the NKVD agent asked us, ‘no one has anything—everyone is starving—where are you getting your food, your sneaky Yids—you subversive capitalist swine!’ They arrested everyone—my grandfather, Aaron, and grandmother, Aksaniya, my aunt Brina with her three-week old infant and her husband, Issak, my uncle Arkady, my aunt Irma, their fifteen-year-old daughter, Anya, and my mother, my mother Sonya. I was the only one not arrested—I was only eight. The women started screaming, protesting—you can’t leave a child alone in the house, but the NKVD weren’t human—they were vultures feeding on the flesh of the living. They left me alone in the house, with no food, and they took the flour and the sugar. The peasants living in our bedrooms didn’t care either—no one was fully human then. The neighbors would pass me on the stairs, knowing I was alone, only a child, and not utter a word, not one kind word. Kakaya nespravedlivost!

  “A few days later, they let my mother come home to me. My grandfather and Issak were now sitting in a Moscow jail.

  “Together Mother and I sat in our attic and tried not think about food. Oh, how little I was back then … how time flies, Lenochka moya dorogaya, zachem govorit? I still remember the unbearable pain of hunger, my gut stuck to my back, I was a sheet. And yet I bore it, we all did, like a knife cutting your flesh out but you keep living, you keep thinking, Let me die, Bozhenka, I want to die, but God says live and so you do. Prosti menya.” Grandmother put her palms together and looked up at the ceiling.

  “Then one day Grandmother Aksaniya sent a loaf of black bread from Moscow. Oh, how the bread gladdened my mother’s heart! ‘We will eat again, my dearest dochenka,’ Mother cried, ‘we will survive.’ It was as if the hunger had caused her blindness, as if she couldn’t see it or smell it: the bread was covered in green festering mold. ‘Don’t think about it,’ she said as she cut it up into little pieces; she even saved extra slices for Brina and Grandmother. We split one piece per day and ate crumbs for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Worse than not eating at all, eating like that.

  “My mother’s face turned bluish-gray, her throat swelled, her fever rose. Three days after that she could barely walk or breathe. She only left the bed to go to the bathroom—she was coughing constantly and was in terrible pain. She told me to stay away from her—she was afraid she was contagious. ‘Just give me a little more bread,’ she’d say and I’d feed her more and more crumbs, eating less myself. Turned out she had diphtheria: it was the bread that killed my mother—the same bread I ate. She died a few days later. But I didn’t know what death meant—worse than hunger to lose your mother. I kept talking to her, putting wet towels on her forehead. Thought she was asleep. By the time aunt Brina came home, I had lived on that bread and water for more than a week with my dead mother lying next to me. I was an orphan at eight.”

  Grandmother had been telling me this story since I was a child, but every rendering revealed new details that soaked into my memory, coloring and conflating my past with her own. As I translated for Eddie, I felt myself deposited into her world, reliving her life—in English.

  I wasn’t cohesive and suddenly it didn’t seem to matter if he understood me. I watched him scrape at the walls of my language, groping in solitude for similar-sounding words, for hints in our gestures and expressions, wanting desperately to know but staying put—at our mercy. And at once I was assailed with an image of my grandmother’s muteness. She existed in a vacuum of knowledge, inside the anger that billowed on her face and whipped us like a torrential gale, but was never able to break down the barricade: oh, that wretched English—unpronounceable, inconsistent, unpredictable, obstinate and yet, yet—how this frustrated her—as everyone said and of course she had to agree, easier than Russian! It seemed right that the man who embodied my future should live, however temporarily, in her void.

  “What a difficult life you’ve had!” Eddie said, looking into Grandmother’s moist eyes.

  “Shto govorit—why speak when everything under the sun has been uttered,” Grandmother replied. “In America everyone thinks life gets better with time, but in Russia—you get arrested, starve, freeze in Siberia, die, and then Hitler attacks! Thank God we fled Ukraine in 1941; the whole family could’ve been wiped out—if not in Babi Yar, then in the concentration camps.” Grandmother broke off and sighed loudly, tears fogging her eyes. Her entire being glowed like a giant lantern in the dark, blinding me to everything: the kitchen, my own thoughts, Eddie, even love itself.

  “When Grisha was attacked—well, by that time, America was all I thought about.” It took me a few minutes to realize that Grandmother had jumped half a lifetime forward to my own grandfather, Grisha, and the year was 1981. She mixed decades and people, Brezhnev with Stalin, Gorbachev with Khrushchev; she was perpetually lost in the maze of history, mapping incoherently the traumas of her life.

  “My grandfather was attacked by the KGB,” I tried quickly to translate for Eddie.

  “What does your grandmother think of the new democracy?” Eddie asked timidly.

  “Democracy—Shmukracy,” Grandmother said, picking out the most important word. “What you think is democracy is not what Russians think is democracy. You couldn’t go to the bathroom without having to bribe someone to make sure the sewage system traveled down instead of up your asshole!”

  “American businessmen should be careful when investing in Russia,” I translated for Eddie.

  “That’s true, I know people who’ve lost millions there—” Eddie wanted to say more but Grandmother quickly cut us off.

  “In the hospital, they pretty much finished the job they started. The KGB doesn’t like loose ends.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked her, switching languages in an instant.

  “Your grandfather—they finished him off in the hospital. Didn’t you know?”

  “Everyone said he died of a heart attack—you and Mom always said he died of a heart attack.”

  “Oh, no,” Grandmother muttered ruefully, “that’s what we told you children. We didn’t want to scare you.”

  “But why—what was Grandfather involved with?”

  “Oh Bozhenka, prosti menya, you were always the curious one, Lenochka.”

  With that, Grandmother began to tell a story I had never heard.

  “No one knows the truth, Lenochka, that’s the curse of Russia. What did the KGB have against your grandfather, that old goat, cheating on me left and right? With ugly ones especially, made him feel like a prince. But then one day he picked himself a real beauty, with breasts up to her nose. Except that she was also the wife of a KGB officer. Did that goon find out and try to kill your grandfather with a good beating and a metal knuckle in the jaw in our elevator? Maybe.


  “There’s another theory too, a terrible one, Yakov—that snake—said it once at dinner—no one wanted to believe it: what if he was an informant for the KGB and things got sticky? But then why kill him?

  “Then of course there’s your mother, and she fancied your grandfather a hero. She believed he was involved in strategic anti-Soviet activities—part of the dissident movement in Russia!”

  “Wait—the Hijack Plot Affair—The Leningrad Trials—the sixteen dissidents—my grandfather?”

  “Yes, that’s what your mother believes. Don’t look at me. She knew him better. She told your father some story about a dissident cousin, but your mother believes your grandfather was an operator in his own right. A big shot! He knew all of them—the pilots, Dymshits and Kuznetsov and all the others who plotted Operation Wedding. He studied Hebrew with them in the secret underground, and your mother believes he became a messenger, just like he had been in the War, passing information to Western journalists in Moscow. Bozhe moy, we could have all been arrested! Oh, I knew he missed the war, missed being the hero, my Grisha. He needed to do something with his life other than cheating and drinking with Russia’s eternal sufferers. But to go so far—to take such risk—uzhas—koshmar—hard to imagine! And yet I could see him volunteering, mapping Moscow, passing notes on benches, while the KGB watched. The KGB would have killed him regardless; he was a walking dead man.”

  “But I don’t understand—how would we have gotten out in that case? I mean, they didn’t need us for anything then; we should have ended up refuseniks for years and years on end.”

  Grandmother’s eyes glided over my face in silence as if she were balancing some weighty equation in her head. Then she uttered the following words: “I might as well tell you, this is where your mother’s theory gets real crazy—even Bella herself does not know.”

  “What does Bella have to do with it?”

  “Everything,” Grandmother declared. “Do you remember how she had fallen in love with that urod, Nicholai, and swore that she wouldn’t leave him?”

  “Of course!”

  “Your mother believes—Bozhe moy, Bozhenka—to think that we got out on account of Bella. You see, that Nicholai was a KGB infiltrator. We were certain he was sent to us to watch Grisha and his activities. The goal was to infiltrate Operation Wedding. Our whole house was tapped. Your father was terrified but what to do! None of us lived in those years, just fear—strakh—you can’t imagine the fear! You and Bella were just children.

  “When Nicholai came we knew instantly: he just didn’t look like normal people, smell like them. He smelled nice … Oh, the gifts he brought us, the gifts alone were enough to make a grown man swoon.”

  Grandmother remembered with a smile. “Of course, what he hadn’t counted on was Bella arrayed in all her glory. Oy nasha krasavitsa dancing for Lenny Avenbuch. Lenny didn’t stand a chance. He fell in love and the next morning, bah! He was arrested for speculation, with two years in jail.

  “In the KGB the more arrests you made the more money you got, the higher your status, and that Nicholai was ambitious. What delicacies he brought, and American turtlenecks and Levi’s jeans for everyone. Even me—imagine me in jeans, smeshno! Oh, the way he strutted in his leather jacket and fine slacks the likes of which we had never seen. And Bella, no matter what we said—oh, she was so young and idealistic about love then—became so infatuated with him. Oh, she lost her virginity to him that very first night they met, and my mother theorized that it was this gift of her golden innocence that stumbled Nicholai in his plans for our Grisha, even for the rest of us.

  “You were in Kiev with your father when the two officers dragged my Grisha into our elevator and beat him in the jaws with a metal knuckle. Oy Bozhenka, how horrible he looked, full of blood, the teeth just hanging out of his mouth.” Tears fell out of her eyes, but she soldiered on. “Someone dragged his bloodied unconscious body to our doorstep but no one, no one dared to call the police. Why call the police when it’s the police who commit the crimes! Your mother found him at ten in the evening—seven hours had passed—seven hours he lay unconscious, bleeding, with his broken jaws. It was a favor to grandfather from Nicholai—a warning to stop his activities. But my husband was so stubborn! He believed in the cause, our cause, the Jewish cause—how exactly did they kill him?

  “A few months after Grandfather died, when no one was being let out of Moscow, our permission letter came in the mail. It was 1982 and the doors had already slammed shut. Your mother believes if it wasn’t for Nicholai, we would have become refuseniks for years to come. That’s how much Bella affected him!

  “So many secrets, so many secrets between all of us,” Grandmother cried, throwing her hands up in the air. “Your mother would never admit it, but I believe it was your mother who paid his wife an afternoon visit. I imagine they drank tea and nibbled on fancy chocolates your mother bought especially for her, and laughed for hours. Oh, your mother was very smart and she had such guts, your mother; my Sonichka was a warrior, never afraid of anything, bez strashnaya! When Nicholai came home and saw Bella’s mother in his house, he understood at once what cards lay on the table—he understood the threat. Not simply to his wife, but possibly even to his career in the KGB—getting involved with a Jew v podache—with a traitor—would destroy his reputation, put a cloud of suspicion on his head.”

  “My God,” I sighed, “that seems impossible.”

  “More impossible things have happened in that country,” Grandmother muttered. I saw in her eyes that this wasn’t merely a theory; Grandmother had put the pieces of a puzzle together, she had been putting it together for the last fifteen years.

  “Does Bella know or suspect?”

  “Of course not, ni v koyem sluchaye,” Grandmother said. “And we can never tell her. It’s a terrible thing to bear for a young woman. No doubt about it: whatever she had with Nicholai made her lose faith in love altogether—in men.”

  “Yes.” I nodded.

  “But we’ll never know the real truth … so many things we’ll never know, oy Bozhenka,” Grandmother announced with a dismissive wave of her hand. “And memory is a faulty mechanism, feeding us truths one minute, inventing lies the next. Oy ve iz mir, Lenochka, how my heart hurts from all these memories. There’s no justice in the world, as there’s no justice in one’s life—only suffering—odni stradaniya.”

  The same hand suddenly grabbed mine, her old fierceness crackling in her eyes again, and she said, “In our world there were no good choices, Lenochka, people had to compromise themselves. But it’s different for you now. You’re free to make the right decision! Do you see? Otkroy svoi glaza!”

  I turned away from her, my attention at once on Eddie. “My grandmother just told me that my grandfather was murdered by the KGB.”

  “How terrible—why—what did he do?” Eddie’s voice wobbled, his eyelids kept closing. He appeared drained of the energy necessary to keep up with Grandmother’s inexhaustible Russian tongue.

  “That’s just it—Grandmother isn’t sure but she thinks that maybe he was involved in—”

  “Don’t tell him,” Grandmother interrupted, “it’s not safe.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, we’re in America now,” I said, but I didn’t feel secure. Like Grandmother I battled an irrational fear that the KGB could rise like the undead from the Soviet-era graveyard and yank us back into their black void.

  “Oh, America, we thank America! Tell Eddik we’re very happy to be in America,” Grandma sang and tears sprang to her eyes.

  “Grandma says she’s happy to be in America.”

  “I bet,” Eddie shot back, and somehow the moment ended; the romance between my grandmother and me and our beloved tango with the past snuffed out by that one pithy line. “I bet.”

  “Well,” Grandmother croaked, “I better go upstairs to bed before I tire you two out.” She rose from her chair and smiled kindly at Eddie. And I prayed that he had made his first inroads into her heart, by simply being there
, by listening, by looking into her old anguished face. He beamed his genial smile at her, and managed to belt out, “Ochen priyatno,” and Grandmother murmured, “Spokoynoy nochi.” Then, glancing at me with her clever, inscrutable eyes, she added as an afterthought, “I’ll look terrible tomorrow with so little sleep.”

  Appealing to the Higher Powers, i.e., Mom and Grandma

  The next morning, with my lids half-opened and my heart chirping, I flew down the staircase and into the kitchen, a sprightly kite suspended indefinitely in the sky.

  “So what do you think of him—what do you think of Eddie?” I said to Mom and Grandma upon first entering the breakfast area, certain that he had won them over. The sun was blazing though the transparent cream blinds and their eyes were fixed on the turquoise placemats on the kitchen table. It was only when I stopped speaking that I noticed the tapping fingertips, the dour expressions, the pursed lips, the bunched foreheads on their practically identical faces. “Isn’t he amazing—that story about Alex and the Russian businessman—unbelievable—and last night, last night, Eddie listened to you with such, such intensity—”

  “Eddie’s gone to the grocery store with your father—we needed vegetables,” my mother said ominously.

  “I see—Dad’s kidnapped him?”

  “Listen, Lena, I won’t deny that he’s a very unusual American but on this point, your grandmother and I are firm: you can’t marry him.”

  My heart came to a standstill; the sprightly kite lay battered on the kitchen floor. No comeback, no good old-fashioned “Fuck off” came out of my mouth. I stared at them in silent disbelief. In my head, I could only lament the sorry state of our culture, our distinctly Russian lack of the American happy-go-lucky-parenting technique—of letting one’s children “live out their own lives” and declaring a moratorium on one’s actual feelings. What relief, I thought, it must be to have fake, insincere, cautious, civilized parents, those stately beings who surreptitiously jab but never offer their true opinions! Here, here, at this kitchen table, disagreements were waged like battles with tongues surpassing AK47s. Get ready, set, shoot—action! I was being reprimanded, deprogrammed, morally, courageously improved.