She smiled.
“What did Leib tell you about our meeting?”
“Just that he ran into you.”
“That’s all?” I asked, disappointed.
“Enough with Leib,” she scolded. “Tell me your new name.”
“What’s wrong with my old one?”
“Miriam’s fine but you need to change your last name. It’s for your own security.”
I thought about it for a while.
“So?” she prodded. “What will it be?”
“Entelman,” I said, and she looked up sharply. “No,” she said. “I don’t think that’s a good name for you.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“I don’t think you should bring honor to that name.”
“If I’m going to join the movement I’m going to do it in the name of Entelman.”
“Join the movement. Listen to you. You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re a few hours out of prison and can barely keep your eyes open.”
“Miriam Entelman,” I repeated, and though Bayla shook her head, she wrote it down then as I had directed. From another drawer she pulled out a stamp, which she used with a bureaucrat’s flourish. “There,” she said, handing me my passport. “Welcome to Kiev.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE COLD CAME EARLY THAT YEAR. BY NOVEMBER we were in the full frost of winter. Mornings were bitter when we rose in darkness to light the stove.
Our apartment consisted of one room in the basement of a house. There were four beds in it, a stove, and a table around which we gathered to eat and hold discussions. The room was cramped but tidy—each of us made our bed neatly every morning and swept around and beneath it—and although we lived below ground, there were two high windows at street level through which natural light streamed in during the first hour of the day. We shared one armoire for our clothes and kept the rest of our belongings in trunks under our beds. Nina and Esther had lamps that lent some light to the room, and Zelda had erected a long shelf on the wall between the windows on which we kept our books and a photograph of Zelda’s departed parents.
We cooked and cleaned as a group, in that way keeping down our expenses. We shared bread and tea in the morning before leaving for work, and bread and soup and more tea in the evenings after returning home. After our evening meal we gathered with other young people, men as well as women, to discuss the coming revolution.
I was working at a ribbon factory in the Podol that autumn—a workshop, really, located in the back room of the owner’s house. My flatmate Nina also worked there and it was she who had found me the job. The wages were lower than what I had earned wrapping sugar, and I found the work punishing in its stillness. For eleven hours I had to sit on a stool, only the small muscles of my fingers and eyes allowed their full range of movement. At lunchtime I stamped my feet and swung my arms around me, hoping, in this way, to encourage the movement of my blood. All day I longed to feel my blood rushing its warmth to my furthest reaches, but this never happened until the end of the workday, when Nina and I hurried arm in arm through the dark, icy streets.
I tried those first weeks after my release from prison not to let my thoughts drift backward, but memories rose out of me with a power of their own: images of Tsila’s hands, the slope of Aaron Lev’s shoulders, Sara’s face. A tapping sound at work would startle me, swing me around to its source: just a girl at the table behind me adjusting the dowel on which she wound her ribbons. Moments of terror or bitter sadness floated free of any other content, like clouds of darkness settling heavily upon me. It was only as I rushed through the streets with Nina after work that I began to feel a lightening of my mood, a relief that persisted as I gathered with others to discuss problems and issues not exclusively my own.
We gathered at different locations every night to avoid raids by the police. We would come singly or in pairs, staggered in our arrivals so as not to attract unwanted attention. The doorways we knocked on never looked any different from all the ones we had passed on our way, and I always had a moment of fear that a door would open one night only to reveal the Colonel Gendarme who had questioned me in prison, and nothing behind him but a cold, bare room. This never happened, of course. The rooms I stepped into each evening were warm with all the young people gathered there, and filled with smoke and laughter and voices raised in argument and discussion.
There was hope in the air that autumn. The public’s response to Von Plehve’s assassination had exposed the weakness of the autocracy, and not just to youth like us. It seemed like there was nowhere in the empire that Von Plehve’s passing had been mourned. Instead, people had celebrated openly, taking their joy to the streets in some cities and praising the Socialist Revolutionary Party, whose Combat Battalion had carried out the assassination. The money that now poured into the coffers of the various revolutionary parties was said to be coming from all segments of society, and it was widely believed that the longer the Tsar held firm against meaningful reform, the greater would be the blow that felled him. As we met each evening to discuss the relative merits of strikes and demonstrations versus terrorist attacks, of incremental reform versus revolution, we didn’t imagine—none of us did—that the despotism could last much longer. The pressure that was building seemed unstoppable.
The dam of autocracy will crumble under the force of a cleansing tide. That was a phrase we used often, a phrase that inspired me at the time.
BAYLA STAYED IN KIEV, AS PROMISED, BUT HAD TO MOVE from her apartment.
“So Leib was mad,” I said, to which she laughed and tousled my hair.
“You seem to think Leib and I are just another bourgeois couple. Do you think I made him mad, so now he’s sending me home to Mother?”
Not to mother, perhaps, but packing, definitely. As I sat at her table she was piling her belongings into baskets.
“I don’t take my orders from Leib,” she said. “We’re comrades. Equals. We were meeting—I can’t tell you where—to work together on an operation. When my plans changed he found someone equally competent to replace me. And Leib wasn’t mad, as you keep expecting. His only interest is in the outcome of the operation, not who participates in it.”
“Then why are you moving?”
“For my own work,” she said.
“You can’t do it from here?”
“No, actually, I can’t.”
I watched her pack for a few more minutes. “Are you ever going to speak honestly with me again?” I asked her.
She looked up, surprised, then colored a little. “I am speaking honestly with you.”
“No, you’re not. You’re talking in code about your various unnamed operations and mysterious work. Do you think I’m a child?” I asked. “A fool?”
She looked at me for a few minutes, then came and sat with me at the table.
“What do you want to know?”
“What you’re doing. Why.”
She nodded. “There’s a lot I can’t tell you, you understand.” I waited.
“I started with speeches,” she said. “Agitation. Education. I was with the Bund. I joined them soon after taking my job in Mozyr. And it wasn’t Leib who drew me in, contrary to popular opinion.”
“Tsila’s opinion. And I’d hardly call her popular.”
“True enough,” Bayla conceded, and smiled. “In any case, I was drawn to the Bund by my own conscience, my own values. It was the Bund who helped people who were being exploited at work, whose pay had been withheld, who were fired for no reason. I didn’t face these problems personally, and if I had I could have stood up for myself. I’m educated and have a sense of my own worth. My mother saw to that, despite the wretchedness of her own life.”
Rosa’s life, wretched? This I hadn’t heard. Rosa with her enlightened attitudes, which she always found the opportunity to express? Rosa with her good china and silver that she’d brought with her from Minsk?
“I felt I had something to offer, a way to be useful, after a life that could only be describe
d as utterly useless. When I think of the time I wasted sitting around waiting to be married, running to Tsila’s with gossip …”
A longing filled me as I imagined Bayla and Tsila sitting at our table as they used to, laughing about Chippa’s latest proposal, but Bayla shook her head as if to clear it of those memories.
“Suddenly, after a lifetime of drifting, I had a purpose. I could read Russian—most of the workers, if they could read at all, only read Hebrew and Yiddish. And more than that, I had an inner conviction that life could be different. Finer. From my mother again, though her vision of what constitutes fineness is very different from my own.”
I remembered Tsila talking to me about fineness, the wistfulness in her voice, my own sadness that whatever it was she longed for was not to be found in the life that I knew.
“I began by educating workers.”
“You ran a study circle?”
“I attended one first, and then I started one. I taught reading, history, economics. I led discussions about justice, respect for all humanity … but I felt restless. Because of the slowness of the work, the snail’s pace at which workers were learning, while injustice, meanwhile, proceeded at a full gallop. The members of my study circle painstakingly grasped the difference between A and B while their children died of preventable diseases and their cousins were massacred in Kishenev.
“I started agitating beyond my study circle, but my restlessness continued. I felt I wasn’t being effective, wasn’t making the best use of my own strengths and skills.” She paused now before proceeding. “I have talented hands, you know.”
“You do?”
“Why the surprise? Aren’t my father and Tsila similarly endowed?”
“Your father and Tsila, yes.”
“But the talent skipped me, right? That’s what you think. That’s what everyone has always thought. Kind, simple Bayla …”
“It did always seem …”
“The talent didn’t skip me,” she said sharply. “It was just buried in the circumstances of my life. Yes, buried,” she repeated, as if I had contradicted her. “For it certainly isn’t with a needle that my hands come to life. Or in the kitchen, God knows—my cooking’s barely palatable. But with chemicals. I have an affinity with chemicals. I discovered this at the pharmacy in Mozyr.”
“An affinity?”
“They speak to me, whispering their secrets, and my hands can decipher their murmurings.”
“You hear chemicals whispering to you?”
Her color rose. “It’s an unusual talent, I know. And it might easily have remained unrevealed throughout my lifetime, creating nothing but that unexplained sense of waste within myself that I had until I left for Mozyr, that vague sense of unease that buried talents often produce. But I was fated to be born in this country, at this time in history …”
I continued to stare at her.
“I make bombs,” she told me. “Of the highest possible caliber.” Her face filled with pride. “I can transform the impurest of Russian materials into bombs of Macedonian quality. And if you don’t mind me bragging a little, my temperament is such that I remain calm under the most trying of circumstances, loading and unloading explosives as if measuring flour into a bowl.” She smiled at me.
A thrill ran through me at that moment, the same fear-tinged excitement as when I had accepted the dynamite from Wolf.
“Does Tsila know?” I asked her.
“Tsila? Are you crazy? Why on earth …?” Bayla looked at me closely. “I shouldn’t have told you,” she said. “You act so mature sometimes that it’s easy for me to forget what a child you still are, your mind running always to what Tsila might think.”
I regretted the question, of course. I didn’t know what had possessed me to ask it. Bayla’s smile as she spoke, perhaps, the pride in her face. It had reminded me of Tsila’s face when she stepped back from a dress she’d been making to admire the beauty of her work. Except that what Bayla was now creating … I feel I should be sewing a shroud out of this brocade, I remembered Tsila saying that afternoon that she and Bayla had argued, and the thrill that had fluttered through me just a moment earlier turned heavily to dread.
“What if you get caught?” I asked.
“I knew I shouldn’t have told you.” Bayla was quiet for a few minutes, her expression distant. I tried to think of something to say, but the dread I felt was so heavy in my chest that I knew it would creep into my voice if I spoke. We sat in silence for some time, then, “Tsila does know. I told her when she came to Kiev.”
“You told her?”
“God knows I shouldn’t have, but she made me so angry, ordering me to come to Argentina after your release, telling me I’d find a life there. A husband, she meant. As if I have no life. As if I have no will or ideals. As if I have nothing except my supposed shame about my supposed abandonment by Leib.
“It wasn’t my proudest moment.” She smiled ruefully. “When I think that I betrayed my comrades’ code of behavior and self-discipline to try to prove to Tsila that there’s more to me than she thought.” Bayla shrugged and shook her head.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“Nothing worth repeating, believe me. She only sees the danger of my work, not the possibilities.”
I told Bayla about Tsila’s reaction to the dynamite I’d brought home, her conviction that there was only death awaiting us in Russia.
“She called me an agent of death,” Bayla said, blushing deeply. “She couldn’t even bring herself to imagine the new life I’m trying to bring forth.”
THAT NOVEMBER TYPHUS BROKE OUT IN THE CITY.
That’s how it seemed to go in Kiev: cholera in the warmer months, typhus in the cold. In the summer it was the water that caused illness; in the winter, the crowded conditions: too many unwashed bodies exchanging lice in airless rooms.
“Have you heard the latest?” Nina asked at one of our evening gatherings. “Councilman Zalevsky has decided a plague barracks should be set up outside city limits for the teeming migratory masses. Can you believe it? This is how they mean to deal with the housing shortage and the outbreak of disease. A plague barracks!”
“Who are the teeming migratory masses?” Esther asked, which brought a round of laughter.
“Us, my dear,” someone answered.
“Most of the working population of Kiev.”
“They want us to work for them by day—make their clothes, produce their sugar, create their profits, serve their food—and then clear out of the city by night so that their so-called better class of citizen won’t have to breathe air sullied by our presence,” Nina said. “That’s their thinking now, but they have another thought coming, don’t they?”
There was agreement all around, and plans were made for pamphlets to be printed and distributed at everyone’s place of work.
“YOU HAVE TALENT,” ESTHER SAID TO ME THAT NIGHT. Nina and Zelda were already asleep, and Esther and I were at the table by the stove, Esther with a glass of tea and I with the pen Tsila had brought to me in prison and a sheet of paper. I had seen a coat in a store window on my way to work that morning. It was a warm-looking coat, and lovely in its lines, but it was the color that had drawn my eye, a blue entirely out of place in the gray of that autumn, a vivid blue full of light, like that of the quilt with which Tsila had welcomed me into her home.
As I sketched the coat in black ink, Esther watched admiringly.
“What color is it?” she asked.
“Blue,” I said, though that didn’t begin to describe what shimmered in my mind.
“I’ve been thinking of having a dress made,” Esther confided. “Can I show you?”
She took the pen from me, and on a new sheet of paper she drew a dress she had seen in a magazine.
“What do you think?” she asked when she had finished. “It’s also blue. Like your coat.”
“It’s very smart,” I said.
“The collar’s lace. The cuffs as well.”
“And the dress?
”
“Cashmere wool.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“I know I can’t afford it, but I just can’t help daydreaming about how nice it would be. I look pretty in blue—my mother always told me. Because of my eyes.”
“There’s too much skirt,” I said, looking at the sketch. Esther was a big girl and at risk of looking like a lake in that dress if something wasn’t done to break up the expanse of blue skirt. I took the pen back and drew in a trim of ribbon. Then I lowered the waistline a bit. “Satin ribbon for the trim,” I said. “I cut some just this week.”
Esther took the drawing, studied it, then smiled broadly. “You have definite talent.”
“I know a thing or two about dressmaking,” I admitted.
“You won’t tell the others about this, will you?”
“There’s no crime in wanting a dress.”
“They already think I’m shallow.”
“No, they don’t,” I assured her.
“I almost died of embarrassment when I asked that stupid question tonight about the teeming migratory masses.”
“It’s not stupid to ask questions. And everyone knows how committed you are,” I said, to which she burst into tears.
“I’m not interested in pamphlets.”
“That’s all right,” I said, not certain why a disinterest in pamphlets would cause her to weep.
“What good are pamphlets when most of those affected can’t even read them?”
“Those who can read them explain them to those who can’t.”
She continued crying, her shoulders heaving with each new sob.
“I didn’t join the movement to distribute pamphlets,” she said. “If I’m going to be arrested and bring shame onto my family I want it to be for something valuable. Not pamphlets, for God’s sake.”
“It’s really all right, Esther,” I said. “No one’s going to think the worse of you if you decide not to distribute pamphlets.”
She continued sobbing, and as I looked on helplessly I wondered if she was unbalanced.
“You really don’t have to have anything to do with pamphlets,” I said as gently as I could.
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