A SONG WENT UP ONE MORNING IN JULY, THE SAME SONG I had heard the first morning I was marched through the corridor to questioning. I recognized it now as the “Marseillaise” and assumed, at first, that a new political prisoner was being welcomed. But there was an excitement to the singing, a bright tension, an air of celebration that surpassed anything I had heard so far. I climbed to my window and saw banners of red cloth unfurled from almost every window around the courtyard.
“Rejoice, little sister,” Larissa tapped on my wall. “Von Plehve is killed at last.”
I knew Von Plehve, knew of him at least. As Minister of the Interior he had been hated across Russia for the repressiveness of his order, his utter disregard for human life. And Jews held a special grudge against him, for it was he who was said to have sanctioned the pogrom in Kishenev, he who was said to have declared his support for the struggle of the Christian populace against its enemies.
“Down with the autocracy!” a cry rose up from the other side of the courtyard. “Long live the revolution!” someone on our side answered. “Long live the Socialist Revolutionary Party!”
I waited for the suppression by the guards that would surely follow such a commotion, the heavy footsteps, the shouts, the clanging of locks and doors, but there was no response from the prison authorities—none I could hear. The singing continued undisturbed, the shouting, until late in the morning when it gradually subsided, then faded away. When the guard brought my bread and soup at lunch there was no indication from him or from me that anything but a usual morning had just passed.
I asked Larissa that afternoon about the banners of red cloth that had been hung from the windows around the courtyard during the morning’s celebration. I had seen them before, but not in such profusion. During my daily exercise period, lengths of red cloth were often unfurled, then hastily withdrawn, from various windows around the courtyard.
“They are meant as a signal of solidarity,” Larissa explained. “A signal that you are not alone in these stone walls. We know how alone you often feel,” she tapped. “We watch you through our windows as you walk around the courtyard. We see the sadness in the stoop of your shoulders. I hear it traveling through your fingertips in the messages you send to me. But you are not alone. We want you to know that you are not alone.”
A feeling of warmth spread through me then, not unlike what I had felt during my first march to questioning. I asked Larissa how such cloth was obtained.
“To tell you that might endanger you,” she tapped back, but when new sheets were issued to me the following week, a piece of red cotton was folded within them. I too began unfurling red cloth when Larissa alerted me that a political was exercising in the yard, and in that action felt a weakening of the stone walls that enclosed me.
SUMMER TURNED TO FALL. MY SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY came and went. “I’m to be tried tomorrow,” Larissa tapped to me one afternoon, and a fear welled so large within me that I couldn’t respond.
It was a clear evening, the first chill of autumn in the air. Rosh Hashanah was approaching and the beginning of the Days of Awe. In every Jewish village and town, Jews would soon be streaming to the synagogue. Along every grand boulevard and from every back alley and lane: women in their finest dresses, men in their flowing caftans. “A good Yonteff,” they would be greeting each other. “May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year.”
As I stood on my viewing tower the night before Larissa’s trial, watching the sky out my window, I imagined Tsila and Aaron Lev making their way down the hill into town. They always walked together to the synagogue on the eve of Rosh Hashanah. Tsila’s dress would be severe—as befitting the somberness of the holiday—but well cut. Her hair would be swept under a large, brimmed hat, her head barely turning left or right as she returned the greetings of her neighbors. Her sojourn in that town in the swamp was almost finished. If all had progressed as planned they would be leaving for Argentina immediately after Sukkos. Just a few more weeks and they would be gone from Russia forever. Would I be in their thoughts as they addressed the King of Kings on this year’s day of judgment and remembrance? Would they enter a plea on my behalf? A despairing loneliness filled me.
I awoke before first light as I had on the morning of Larissa’s previous, postponed trial, and as before, there was no response to my tap. I refused breakfast as I had before and spent the morning pacing my cell, waiting for the news that mercy had been granted, that she was to be transported, alive, to Siberia.
The tap came late in the afternoon. “Rejoice for me, my sister,” she said, and my grief was a physical weight that pushed all breath from my lungs.
The hanging would take place at night, Larissa told me. “They do their work in darkness, but our hopes and ideals bring light even to that.” It would be before the next dawn, in the courtyard right outside my window. There would be singing, she said, voices raised from within and without the prison. “You’ll sing too, my little sister. It will be a beautiful death.”
It was not, of course, beautiful. It was her life that had been beautiful, her thoughts and dreams that she tapped out to me in the precious hours of our friendship, her hopes for a better world, her generosity. Her death, when it came, was ugly. I heard its approach as I lay sleepless that night. I heard the hammering in the darkness as the scaffold was built, then a moan, a terrible moan that swept the prison like a wind bringing pain and destruction. Was it her moan? I don’t know. I had never heard her voice to recognize it.
She had planned to make a statement. This she had told me. She had planned to assert her disdain for a regime that murdered its young but could never silence their cause. “Take my life,” she had planned to say. “You can never silence the ideals that fueled it.” As the moan died away, though, and I waited for her voice, there was only silence, a dark deadly silence into which she soon fell.
I listened to her die. Even as a rhythmic beating of hands and feet was taken up throughout the prison, I listened for her life and kept it company in its struggle. I could not possibly have heard her last gasp. This I know. The uproar in the prison was so great by then that it drowned out even the cawing of crows that always heralded dawn. But I heard her death—one lone sigh—through the uproar. I felt her last breath as it traveled upward, a soft breeze on my skin, warm with all she had been, and then nothing.
There was singing, as she’d promised. With the first light of dawn, singing from within and without the prison. “Farewell, my sister,” the voices sang. “Honorably you passed on.” And there were speeches. From prison windows, from the streets beyond. Some were close enough that I could make out their words, some were just a drone of meaningless sounds. I didn’t join the singing or strain to hear the speeches. I stayed curled on my cot, curled around the cold hard knot at my core.
A week later, on a cool autumn morning during the fifth month of my imprisonment, two guards entered my cell after breakfast. I didn’t ask if I was to be charged at last. I no longer cared.
“Gather your belongings,” they told me.
I took my pen and the sheets of paper on which, until Larissa’s death, I had recorded daily the physical fact of my existence. They took me through the courtyard to the prison anteroom, where in exchange for my canvas prison gown I was given the brown linen dress that Tsila had sewn for me and the boots that Aaron Lev had made for my big trip to Kiev.
“Well, go on, then,” the prison master said to me. “You’re free to leave.”
I took my belongings without another word, signed the release that I had received them, and exited from the prison onto the street. I was once again a free subject in the realm of His Imperial Highness, Tsar Nicholas II.
Siberia, February 1912
Tsila’s letters are full of light. I open them and the fullness of her life escapes the envelope, filling my gray mind with color.
“It is summer,” she writes, just as the ice of our winter hardens around us to such a thickness that I fear this will be the year that we are permanently s
ealed from the rest of the world. “The heat in this city is heavy but not oppressive. As I sit at my table writing to you I feel a light breeze drifting in through the open window.”
Here too a window is open. The wind blew it out and they haven’t replaced it yet. Cold howls at the opening but quiets once it finds its way inside. It is not a living cold that shifts and changes but a bitter stillness, a stagnancy that presses upon us hour after hour, day after day, month after month. It is immutable, despite the efforts of our valiant stove, the heat of our twelve bodies. We are nothing against this cold.
“And music. It too wafts through my window.”
There is always music in the city where they now live, a music not unlike ours in its longing, Tsila says, but filled with a dark heat. “Like the thickest of summer nights in the swamp,” she writes.
I close my eyes to remember those nights, the air so saturated it could no longer hold its own moisture, a beating life suspended in its heavy heat. I hear that beat, that heat, its insistence. It wafts through the open windows of a warm apartment.
“Your father is not yet home,” Tsila writes. Home is their apartment above Tsila’s dress shop in Buenos Aires, the city Tsila insisted they move to from the Baron’s colony, a city where the fineness of Tsila’s work is apparently not wasted. “He works late these summer evenings, but is without the weariness that I long thought would sink him into an early grave.”
Aaron Lev has opened a fruit stand in the market there. He spends his days arranging and rearranging pyramids of fruit. The apricots have been particularly sweet this year, Tsila reports, but the grapes are late and, for some reason, lacking in sugar.
She doesn’t inquire how I am. She never does. “I trust you’re well,” is what she says. “You have never lacked for strength.”
“Your father and I are also strong now, stronger with each passing day. It’s the feeling of freedom that we awaken to every morning, the sunlight, the fineness of this city. All this nourishes us and the child that will be born, God willing, before Pesach.”
Heat fills me then. An intense rush of heat. I feel it burst in my sore, cough-racked chest, then radiate to the furthest reaches of my stiffened body. I bask in it as I once basked in the sunlight that pooled on my brightly colored quilt in the early hours of the morning. And as it ebbs from me, I still feel its effects in the loosening of my limbs, a light tingling in my shoulders and chest.
“Meanwhile, we await your arrival with growing impatience,” she writes, as she does in all of her letters. As if it is willfulness that keeps me here, sheer laziness that stops me from escaping and making my way to Argentina. That she expects me to escape is clear. It’s the very least I can do, her impatience implies, given the trouble she took to raise me. I did not raise you to waste yourself in this way, I hear beneath her words. I did not raise you to rot in Siberia.
That my sentence is life does not impress Tsila. We all receive a life sentence at the moment of our birth, she has written me repeatedly. It is a sin to break under the weight of it.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
1904
“SO THEY’VE RELEASED YOU,” MRS. PLOTKIN SAID AS she eyed me through the crack of her front door.
“This morning,” I answered. I had not really expected her to let me in, had hoped only that she would return my clothes and suitcase and the few other belongings that I possessed at the time of my arrest.
“I’ve already rented out your bed,” she informed me.
“Yes, of course. I was only hoping …”
“You’ve had a lot of callers,” she said, opening the door a little wider.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured. “I was just …”
“Well, come in, come in, don’t just stand there giving all the neighbors something to talk about.”
I followed her to the kitchen, where she poured me a glass of tea and broke off a generous chunk of sugar, half of which she kept for herself, gumming it in her toothless mouth. I drank the tea quickly and noisily, sucking it through the sugar. Mrs. Plotkin watched me drink and when I was finished, she poured me a second glass and handed me another chunk of sugar, which I dissolved into the tea until it was a sweet and sticky syrup.
“Did they injure you?” she asked. Her eyes were pinpricks on my face.
“No,” I said.
She nodded then, relaxed her gaze. “They came here the night you disappeared. That’s how I knew where you were. From the way they tore the place apart I thought maybe you had committed a crime, but then I remembered how they are. It’s been many years since they’ve paid me a visit, but some things you remember, no?”
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
“What did you do?”
“I distributed pamphlets.”
“What sorts of pamphlets?”
“About the water, telling citizens to demand their right to clean drinking water.”
Mrs. Plotkin nodded, her lips working between her gums.
“I’m very sorry to have brought such trouble to your house,” I said.
“The police were no more trouble than any pack of dogs tearing through my house and shitting where they please. Your mother’s visit, though—that caused me grief.”
“My mother?”
“She came to fetch you home, only to find out you’d been arrested. Nice, I thought. Very nice to find out in that way that this is the sort of girl I had taken in under my roof. A girl who ran away from home and lied to her parents.”
I felt the heat rising in my face.
“And to think I’ve wasted tears mourning that I never had a daughter.”
“What did you tell her?”
“What could I tell her? That her daughter led me to believe that she had no parents who cared? That her daughter preferred to live with strangers than with her own flesh and blood? Do I look like someone who takes pleasure from being cruel to others? I told her you were always polite and tidy and were obviously well brought up, that you paid your rent on time and were pleasant in your demeanor, and that you were teaching my boys to read. I managed to get a little smile from her with that, but just a little one, because she was clearly sick at heart from worrying over you. Still, a mother’s love doesn’t die just from being cast off in that way, so she went immediately to the prison, where, of course, they told her nothing and denied her a meeting with you. She left some things for you there. A pen, paper, some books, I think, food.”
“I only received the pen and paper.”
“And were lucky in that. She spent two nights here, in your bed.” Mrs. Plotkin leaned closer to examine my face. “You don’t look a thing like her.”
“No. That’s right.”
“No resemblance whatsoever.”
“None,” I agreed.
“Not in feature. Not in coloring.”
“Not in temperament either,” I replied.
Mrs. Plotkin sighed and rose from the table. She went into the alcove where she slept and returned with two envelopes. “She left a letter for you should you turn up here after your release. And a second letter arrived, by post, just this week.”
I took both letters and brought them instinctively to my face, but there was nothing of Tsila in their smell. Both letters were sealed. The first had been hand delivered by Tsila, the second had foreign stamps on it.
“You’ll have missed your chance to sail for Argentina by now.”
“I have?”
“It’s too late in the season, I would think. You’ll have to wait until spring.”
This hadn’t occurred to me before. It might have had I spent any time imagining what I would do once I was released from prison, but I had not. Since Larissa’s death I had lain on my bed, day after day, with no thoughts I could remember, just a sensation of coldness, an awareness of the gray chill of the prison permeating me ever deeper, taking me over, transforming me into one of the stones that surrounded me.
“Maybe you should read your mother’s letters,” Mrs. Plotkin suggested, but I couldn’t
right then. With the realization that Tsila and Aaron Lev had already left for Argentina came a sudden rush of feeling, sickening after weeks of stillness. Nausea rose within me, tears welled in my eyes.
“What will I do?” I asked Mrs. Plotkin. I had no papers, no money, no place to stay for the night. “I have nothing. No one.”
Mrs. Plotkin raised the bald ridges above her eyes where her eyebrows should have been. “What about your comrades?” she asked.
“My comrades? What are you talking about? I have no comrades. I’m alone in the world.”
Mrs. Plotkin looked no more sympathetic. “Enough with the melodrama,” she said. “What about your so-called aunt?”
“My aunt?”
“So she introduced herself.”
Was it possible, I wondered. “Pale with long red hair?”
“Pale, yes. I couldn’t tell you about her hair, since it was covered like a proper housewife. Not that she fooled me with that getup. Not for a minute. She came by just a few weeks ago and gave me an address to give to you, right here in Kiev. I asked if she had just moved here, and she said no, she had been here for a while already. As if I was born yesterday. Do you think I was born yesterday?” she asked me. “Do you think if you had such a proper married aunt living in Kiev you would have been paying rent to a stranger?”
“I suppose not,” I said.
“You suppose not,” Mrs. Plotkin muttered. “She was insistent that I give you her address if and when you should turn up.” Mrs. Plotkin handed me a slip of paper on which an address was written in Bayla’s hand. “She’s lucky I am who I am, this aunt of yours, but her luck won’t hold if she remains careless. Handing out her address like that to strangers. In her line of work.”
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