“Oh, relax, Anna, will you?” Tonya said. “No one’s going to arrest you before you get home to your Grishka tonight. I promise you. But tell us,” she said, leaning over to run her hand over Anna’s stomach. “Has he given you a present yet?”
Everyone laughed then, except Anna, whose cheeks filled with color.
IT WAS THE FOLLOWING DAY THAT TONYA INVITED ME TO join her for a night of theater, an invitation I accepted. I’d enjoyed my exchange with her in the canteen, and she obviously felt the same. I looked forward to the evening ahead.
She was waiting for me outside the factory gate after work and threaded her arm through mine as we walked toward the center of town.
“It was such a relief when you spoke up yesterday,” she told me. “I feel sometimes that I’m the only one around who sees things as they are.”
“It’s lonely,” I agreed, remembering the pleasure I’d taken in the sharpness of her arguments, enjoying the warmth of her arm on mine after so many weeks on my own.
“Infuriating,” Tonya corrected. “It’s not their stupidity. I don’t mind stupidity. It’s cowardice I can’t abide.”
She talked for some time about the cowardice of girls like Anna, and I noted the education in her speech. I had noticed it before and asked now how she came to be working at the sugar factory.
“I’m an agitator,” she admitted without a moment’s hesitation. “A failed agitator,” she added with the quick laugh that made her so popular at work. “What needs changing in Russia is so obvious that it doesn’t even bear saying—or so I think—and yet I say it, and say it again, and still I receive only dull stares in response.”
“You’re too impatient,” I replied, remembering the kindness of Malka’s responses to everyone in our study circle and the gentleness of her corrections. Tonya was quiet for a few minutes, and, concerned that I had offended her, I started to apologize.
“Do you think I don’t already know that I’m not cut out for agitation?” she interrupted sharply. She was quiet for a few minutes more, kicking at loose paving stones as we walked. “Do you think you’re the first to tell me I’m impatient?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to …”
“If you’re going to speak your mind, then don’t undo it by apologizing. I can’t abide people who don’t stand behind what they say,” she told me, and I held my tongue to avoid angering her further.
“And what’s so great about patience, anyway?” she asked. “Has it done our long-suffering countrymen any good?”
The peasants, she meant. Not the Jews. And yet she referred to them as “our” countrymen. It occurred to me she might not even know I was Jewish.
“Has patience ever brought land and food to those who need it?” she asked me. “Of course not. How could waiting like a dumb ox ever bring about change?”
I worried I had ruined the atmosphere of the evening, but in the very next breath her expression and tone changed. Her face relaxed, her brow unfurrowed. “But enough about that. What about you? How did you come to work at the factory? You’re not from around Kiev. I can tell from your accent.”
“I’m a runaway,” I said.
“Really?”
“No. Not really,” I told her, but in the instant that I formed that word—runaway—I saw my luck dashing around the station in Gomel in those first moments after it realized I’d escaped. The idea of it made me smile.
“What’s so funny?” Tonya asked.
“Nothing,” I said, and told her how I had hurried away from the Frumkins in Gomel, traveled to Kiev on my own, and stayed here all these weeks without permission.
This is how you thank those who love you, I heard Tsila rage as I told Tonya what I had done, Tsila’s hurt and anger not diminished in the least by the distance it had traveled to reach me. This is how you love them in return. In that you’re no different from your mother. I fell silent as the truth of my actions confronted me.
“We need more people like you,” Tonya said. “People who create their own permission instead of waiting endlessly for it to be granted. Patience and compliance are overrated virtues, don’t you think?”
There was such charm to the smile Tonya turned on me at that moment that I didn’t mention the return ticket home I had already bought, on Tsila’s orders.
“What do you come from?” Tonya asked.
“The Polyseh. I just told you.”
“I mean your background.” She focused her sharp gold eyes on my face, and I felt dark and oily under their scrutiny.
“I’m Jewish,” I said quickly, well aware that her interest in me might end with those words.
“I don’t mean that,” she said crossly. “Such distinctions are irrelevant among comrades. I mean your class background. What does your father do?”
“He’s a shoemaker,” I said.
“Ah,” she responded, her face softening. “A shoemaker.” She laid her hand on top of my arm. “Then there’s probably much you can teach me.”
Siberia, February 1912
I dreamed of you again last night. I felt the weight of you, your life. I heard your cry and rose to it, but as I reached the surface of my consciousness I knew it wasn’t you. Maria, perhaps. She’s been crying out more often in her sleep. Or maybe it was Vera, though her moans no longer carry any hint of the lusty life I’d heard. I was still asleep but knew that I had lost you once again.
I hovered at the edge of wakefulness, trying to regain you, trying to sink back deep within myself, back to deepest sleep, the only place where you and I can meet, but dread had taken hold of me by then. It filled me with a weight so unlike your own. It dragged me from sleep as surely as the guards who held me back when they first tore you from my arms.
When I opened my eyes our cell was bathed in light, the cold pale wash of the Siberian moon. I thought I wouldn’t sleep, so heavy was the dread I felt, yet when I closed my eyes you came to me again, a girl of six now, slight and dark with long black hair to the middle of your back. You turned toward me. The contours of your face were your father’s but shadowed with experiences all your own. Your eyes were dark like mine and bright with the life I’ve lost you to.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
1904
I DID NOT EXPECT THE SOLOVITSKY THEATER IN KIEV TO be anything like the hall at the new shul where we held our Purim entertainments, of course, but neither was I prepared for the opulence that greeted me, the heavy floral scent in the entry hall, the corridors lined with mirrors framed in gold, the rows of seats upholstered in sky-blue velvet.
We sat in the very highest balcony, from where you could hardly see the stage. The play that night was called Madame Sans-Gêne, and long before the end of the first act I wondered why Tonya had chosen it. It was not that I didn’t enjoy myself. Just to watch the ladies in the boxes below me with their bared white shoulders and mother-of-pearl opera glasses was entertainment enough, and the dresses were so exquisite that I regretted Tsila not having the opportunity to see them.
But the play was dull, the only excitement coming at the close of the first act, when Tonya whispered, “Get ready,” and handed me a stack of leaflets: “Citizens! Demand Your Right to Clean Water!” As soon as the curtain fell, she dropped a handful of the leaflets over the railing. They drifted like flakes of snow toward the bejeweled heads below us. “Quick,” she commanded me as she dropped some more. I followed her lead and let mine go as well. I watched a hundred sheets of paper fluttering down, but I didn’t see them land. Tonya had already grabbed my hand and pulled me down the many stairs and out the side door to the street.
“Act normal,” she whispered, bending her head to mine and giggling, as if she had just confided the name of the man that she loved. Thus we walked, like two giggling schoolgirls, but we were not far from the theater when we heard calls of “Halt,” and we started to run.
I felt a tight grip close around one arm, then the other, a wrenching backward of both my arms, an imposed immobility. My mind froze, racing
neither forward to fear nor backward to regret, merely recording, without thought or emotion, the unfolding assaults on my senses. I saw the blue serge of the gendarme who restrained me, the glances and stares of passersby. I heard a voice, familiar and yet not, pleading on my behalf. “Let her go,” I heard as if from a great distance. “Let her go, I beg you. She is entirely innocent.”
I looked down as my feet started moving beneath me. They were my own feet, familiar in the boots that Aaron Lev had made for me, yet moving as if by the will of another. They were my own brown leather boots, new this year and stitched with Aaron Lev’s fine, careful hand, but scuffed now and dusty compared to the shiny boots they walked between. Such a gloss those other boots had. Such a high black shine. Like the beetles I used to watch in our garden at home: huge, black, and glistening. And my own feet, two dull brown grubs trapped between them.
The cobblestones were uneven and I stumbled. My arms wrenched backward, upward, sending a jolt of pain through my back. I tried to walk carefully but couldn’t. I could no longer feel the feet that stepped beneath me. I could no longer feel the arms by which I was propelled relentlessly forward. There was only pain, hot and radiant, spreading throughout my upper back.
The cobblestones gave way, at length, to flatness, the flat gray stone of stairs leading upward, the rougher stone of a corridor. More stairs, down this time. The light was dim, the air musty and damp. A clanging of metal against metal, a door opening, and I was flung into darkness.
“Pigs,” I heard muttered beside me. It was Tonya. “Are you all right?” Her voice rose, disembodied, out of utter darkness. I closed my eyes to more quickly acclimatize, but when I opened them again I could see no more than before. We’d been thrown into the bowels of the earth, foul and dark. There was no light, no escape. Panic rose in me. “Are you all right?” I heard again, more urgently than before. “I can’t see,” I said, panic cracking my voice.
There was laughter then, not Tonya’s. I bolted upright to a sitting position. “Who’s there?” I demanded, my heart beating wildly. I felt a warmth on my arm, a living warmth. I shrieked.
“It’s only me,” Tonya said, her voice quiet, gentle.
“Who laughed?” I asked, to more laughter.
“Better settle your friend down, little auntie, or she’ll scare herself to death,” someone said. A woman’s voice.
“Close your eyes,” Tonya whispered.
“I did already.”
“Never mind her eyes. Get yourselves off the floor,” someone said, and as she did, I became aware of the damp beneath me, the sliminess of it. I bolted to my feet, producing another round of laughter. “Relax, little auntie. It’s only shit.”
I sniffed my hands and arms, but the smell of excrement was so strong all around me that I couldn’t determine its source.
“There’s a cot here,” someone said. I was beginning to make out shapes now. A hand took mine and led me a few steps. I felt the edge of the cot against me and lowered myself onto it. Tonya joined me.
“You’re shivering,” she said as she lay down beside me.
The surface beneath us was hard and lumpy, but dry. Tonya put her arms around me. Her body was warm against mine. Within minutes there were snores all around us. “They won’t keep you long,” Tonya whispered. “You just have to get through tonight.”
“How do you know?”
“I know them,” she said.
“I don’t have papers.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she assured me. “They’ll evict you from the city. That’s all they’ll do.”
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“Absolutely.”
“And you?”
“They can’t harm me,” she said. “Not really.”
I SLEPT—I DON’T KNOW HOW—AND WHEN I WOKE I WAS on a narrow straw cot in a cell. Light, still dim, leaked through a narrow window high above us, illuminating the faces of the eight other women who shared the cell, women who looked no different from any of the vendors or shopgirls I often saw on my nightly walks along the Krestchatik. Tonya was already up, sitting on the edge of our cot.
“Caught working without your ticket?” one of the older women asked.
“What ticket?” I asked, producing the heartiest round of laughter yet.
“We’re politicals,” Tonya said sternly, to which one of the younger women took a few prancing steps, curtsied, and said, “Well, excuse us. We’re just here for trying to earn a living.”
The floor, I was relieved to see, was only dirt, turned to muck in places from the moisture of the ground. There were two buckets, both filled with excrement, but we would all be taken to the latrine later in the morning, one of the women informed us. “Once a day, whether you need to or not.”
“What if I have to go again?” I asked.
“This isn’t the Rossiya Hotel.”
“I couldn’t tell,” I responded, and for the first time the laughter wasn’t mocking in tone.
WHEN THE GUARD CAME TO BRING US OUR TEA AND bread Tonya asked when we would be charged. The guard ignored her. She asked again when he came to take us, handcuffed and in pairs, to the latrine, and again he ignored her.
Some of the other women were released that morning, and late in the afternoon, two guards came for me.
“You see?” Tonya said, embracing me. “I told you.”
The guards positioned themselves on either side of me to march me up the staircase, down a long corridor, through a courtyard, up more stairs into another section of the building, and down another corridor. We had left the holding jail now and entered the prison itself. As we walked, I heard a rhythmic banging against the wooden doors that we passed and voices raised in song.
“What’s that?” I asked, but the guards stared ahead as if they heard nothing.
The song was for me, I soon realized. The other prisoners were watching my progress through the keyholes of their cells, banging against their doors, shouting greetings as I passed and raising their voices in song. And while my fear didn’t leave me, not at all, the attention was momentarily warming.
We climbed another set of stairs, entering a corridor where the silence was broken only by the sound of our own footsteps proceeding down its stony length, and stopped finally at a room where an official was seated at a desk, reading a document. He didn’t look up at our arrival but continued reading, twirling his mustache as he did. For some time I stood in the doorway flanked by my two guards, who did nothing to draw his attention. At length he glanced up as if he had just noticed our presence.
Not fat, but full. Oozing fullness and satiation. Those were the words that filled my mind when I first met the eyes of the Colonel Gendarme who would question me. Out of a recess in my mind rose Bayla’s description of a prospective bridegroom Chippa had once brought to her, for such was the man who faced me that day. Such was the man in whose hands my future now lay.
“Sit, please,” he invited me. His tone was polite. “You may leave us,” he said to the guards.
There was no air in the room—the one window was covered by a dark, heavy drape—and when the door first shut behind the guards, a momentary terror rose in me that I was to be entombed, now and forever, with that oozing Colonel.
He returned his attention to the document for a few moments, then looked back at me.
“May I see your residence permit?” he asked. A reasonable request in a reasonable tone. I froze in dread to hear it.
“Did you hear me?” he asked.
“I did.”
“And?”
“It’s at my house,” I said.
“Don’t lie. You really don’t want to be lying to me, I can promise you that.” He smiled. “You see, we’ve been to your house. Your dear Mrs. Plotkin’s.”
Fear gripped me at a deeper level now. How did he know where I lived?
“You’re surprised, I can see.”
I said nothing.
“Do you think I don’t know who you are? Who your friend is?”
/> “Tonya?” I asked.
“Tonya,” he spat, as if the name had a particularly unpleasant feel on his tongue. “Do you think we’re unaware of the vermin that scuttle before our eyes?”
There had to be an informer at work. Anna, perhaps. A security guard.
“I know you’re illegal here in Kiev. I know also that this is your first offense.” He smiled again. “I don’t want to keep you any more than you want to stay here, I assure you.” Then he pushed a document over to my side of the desk, the document he had been studying so carefully when I first entered the room. “Can you read?” he asked, as my eyes slid over the text.
“I don’t know anything about this,” I said. I understood I was meant to confirm the document that attested to my having witnessed Tonya participating in all manner of activities designed to bring down the government.
“I don’t understand,” he responded. “First you ask for release, then when I show you how to achieve it, you refuse.” He rose from his chair behind the desk and walked over to the window, where he pulled back a corner of the drape to survey the darkening day outside. He stood for a long while in that meditative pose, so long that it seemed he had forgotten my presence.
“Tonya and I have only started to become friends. That was our first outing together. You must know that,” I said, but when he turned to me I could see a change had come over him. He walked over to me, half stood, half sat against the edge of his desk, and surveyed me coldly. He leaned forward, his face so close now that I could see the pores on his cheeks, feel his breath on my face as he spoke.
“If you’re such an innocent as you claim, then why did all your cohorts sing to you as you walked by on your way here?” he asked. “And such a song! Such an uproar! I could hear it from here.”
“I don’t know,” I said, and he slapped me across my face, first with the front of his hand, then with the back.
A terrible rage rose in me then. Terrible because it obliterated everything else within me. Pain, fear, confusion—all was incinerated in the flash of that rage. I remember little of what followed. Certainly I don’t remember spitting in his face, but there was my spit, streaked with the blood of my split lip, sliding down his white, full face.
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