“I can’t even read them,” she whispered.
“You can’t?” I whispered back.
She shook her head without meeting my eyes. And so we began, that night, with the first letter of the Russian alphabet.
IT WAS THE FOLLOWING SUNDAY THAT WE WENT TO THE ravine. Esther had asked around at work for a seamstress who might be able to make her the dress she wanted for a price she could afford. It was the material, of course, the widths of blue cashmere that would prove the most costly, but apparently there was a woman named Magda living in one of the ravines who could obtain any material in any color, and for half the price that one would pay elsewhere. Esther was going to find this Magda and she wanted me to accompany her.
“Don’t be crazy,” I told her. “How do you expect to find this one woman named Magda among the masses of people who live in the ravines?”
“I have specific directions,” Esther answered.
It was recklessness to venture into the ravine—at the height of a typhus outbreak, no less—to pursue a rumor of a woman selling fabrics. Fabrics that were obviously stolen. It was pure recklessness, not to mention a waste of time and energy that might otherwise be spent in a productive manner. And yet … no, I told myself. The very idea of devoting half a day to the sole purpose of procuring blue cashmere for a dress … worse than reckless, it was decadent. How, then, to explain the appeal of the proposition, the lifting of my spirits when I woke up Sunday morning and remembered that this was the morning for our ill-conceived outing, the giddiness I felt as we walked hand in hand toward the ravine with no objective other than finding the exact shade of blue cashmere that would most complement Esther’s sparkling eyes?
It was a dreary morning. The sky was leaden, the trees sheathed in ice, their uppermost branches disappearing into the mist. As we approached the ravine I began to feel nervous. “You know the ravines are dangerous,” I said to Esther.
“No kidding.” she said.
Our flatmate Zelda had been entering the ravines for weeks now to attend the ill and dying. I suddenly felt ashamed that I had never offered to accompany Zelda to help with her work, while the mere mention of a search for blue cashmere was enough to lure me. I said this to Esther and she nodded. “I’ll die of embarrassment, for certain, if Zelda finds out. Nina, I don’t mind so much. But Zelda … she’s so serious.”
“Ardent,” I said.
“Stern.”
“Totally committed.”
“Boring,” Esther pronounced, with a slight smile.
“You think so?”
“She never laughs.”
“Maybe she doesn’t see anything funny in people’s suffering.”
“Do you think she’ll laugh more after the revolution?”
“Hard to say,” I had to admit.
The fog thickened as we descended into the ravine and was acrid now with smoke. Shacks like packing crates crowded the hillside, their arrangement haphazard. Some were built of wood and scraps of metal, others of bales of straw with sacking hung for a door. Their sources of heat were outside—squat clay ovens from which smoke billowed from broken pipe, and fires, open fires around which people huddled to keep warm.
“I think it’s just a bit farther on,” Esther said, turning sharply between two hovels.
At one fire I saw the organ grinder who had played “Bitter Parting” the previous spring. He was roasting a small piece of meat, and with him were three boys. His sons, perhaps. Or not—the shaping hand of hunger was stronger on their skull-like faces than any family influence might once have been. They stared at the fire, riveted by the roasting meat. A river rat, I thought, from the shape of it, though it could have been a squirrel.
“Do you think a parrot could survive a winter here?” I asked Esther.
“A parrot?” she released a peal of high, clear laughter, then she smacked me playfully. “What do you care about parrots?”
I told her then about the prediction that the parrot had picked out for me just weeks before my arrest. He was a beautiful parrot, I told her. Red and green, with stripes of blue across his wings. Dark eyes will bring you good luck, he had promised, filling me with hope for my future.
“I had the same prediction,” Esther told me, squeezing my hand, “but from a different parrot.”
THE DWELLING WE STOPPED AT WAS BETTER THAN MOST, with walls made of boards and a roof of tin, but the doorway was covered only with sacking. “Hello,” Esther called, but there was no answer. “Hello,” she called again. “I’m looking for Magda.”
An old woman pulled aside the sacking. “Are you Magda?” Esther asked. The woman didn’t answer but stared at Esther through eyes so cloudy that I wondered if she was blind. “We’re looking for fabric,” Esther said.
“What kind?”
“Blue cashmere wool.”
The woman turned back into her dwelling without a word but didn’t pull the sacking closed. I could see a young child sitting on the dirt floor near the entrance. He had a pot between his legs and a small hill of stones beside him that he was piling systematically into the pot. The back section of the dwelling was covered with what looked like rags, layers of rags, upon which lay a figure that I couldn’t make out clearly in the dimness. From her moans I knew she was a woman. The moans increased as the other woman rooted through the rags until finally she pulled something out and returned to us.
“This,” she said, showing Esther a sample square of cashmere wool in a rich shade of blue.
It was a beautiful fabric and the price she named was so low that it surprised me when Esther started haggling. The price came down a bit, but not much. “How much do you need?” she asked. Esther told her and the woman narrowed her eyes, patted Esther all over, then increased the quantity by a yard. “I’ll have it for you next week,” she promised. “And you?” she asked, turning to me.
“Tell her about the blue of your coat,” Esther prodded, so I did, and once again the woman disappeared into her dwelling. But when she returned she did not have what I was seeking.
“It’s lighter,” I told her, looking at the sample she had brought. “Darker,” I said, as she pulled out another sample. “More luminous,” I said, shaking my head to the third. “Richer.”
“What you’re looking for doesn’t exist,” she told me finally.
“But it does,” I insisted.
“In here, maybe,” she said, pointing to my head, “but not in this world.”
I described the location of the store where I had seen it.
“If there was such a color, do you think I wouldn’t have it?”
“It’s there,” I insisted, and she promised that if it was really in the window, as I claimed, she would obtain the fabric for me, and for a price I would not believe was of this world.
“Come back next week,” she told me, as she had told Esther.
THE NEXT SUNDAY ESTHER WAS ILL. ZELDA ASSURED HER that the fever and headache she had wasn’t serious, but she could not raise herself from her bed.
“Please go get my fabric,” she begged me, pressing her rubles into my hand.
“We’ll go together next week,” I promised her. A meeting was going to be held that day in our apartment and I wanted to attend it. Councilman Zalefsky’s plan for a plague barracks had ignited such anger throughout the city that a demonstration was being planned for the very next week. It was going to be huge, Nina said. Fierce. “Like nothing we’ve seen yet,” she promised, her eyes shining as she imagined it. I wanted to help plan it.
“I can’t wait for next week,” Esther said, her eyes filling with tears. “By next week, who knows? I could well be dead.”
“God forbid,” I said quickly. “Why would you say that? Zelda already told you it’s nothing serious.”
“What does Zelda know? Has she been inside my head to see why it pounds so?”
“I want to be here for the meeting.”
“You can still make the meeting. How long will it take you to go to the ravine? An hour. Two hour
s. You go, you buy the material, you come back. The meeting doesn’t start till noon.”
“I’m not even sure I can remember how to find the right place.”
“Please,” Esther said. “If I’m going to die, at least let me have obtained one thing I wanted in life. Just one thing. It’s not so much to ask for. One thing, in my entire life. A few widths of blue cashmere wool. I’m begging you now.”
She looked at me then, her blue eyes shimmering with tears.
THERE WAS NO ANSWER TO MY CALL WHEN I ARRIVED AT Magda’s dwelling, nor was there smoke billowing out of her oven. I called again, without expecting an answer, but this time a voice called back, “Go away.”
I identified myself and, again, there was no answer. I reminded her that she had told me to come on that day, but she still refused to answer, so I turned to leave, and as I did I saw Wolf. He was sitting by a fire in front of a wooden shack no more than twenty strides from where I stood. Had he been there the previous week as well? I couldn’t know, but as I approached him his face was so serene I felt he had been awaiting my arrival for some time.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
“Having my breakfast. Would you like some?”
He had a samovar boiling, a tarnished silver samovar as elegant as any I had ever seen. He poured me a glass of tea and handed me a piece of bread.
“Where did you get that samovar?” I asked.
“From my mother, may she rest in peace.”
“You shouldn’t have it sitting out like that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s dangerous,” I said, sweeping my hand to encompass the tumbles of hovels around us. “Everyone can see it.”
“And why shouldn’t they? It’s beautiful, is it not?”
“People have been killed for less.”
“People are being killed as we speak. Meanwhile your tea is getting cold. Why don’t you drink it?”
I drank the tea as he suggested. It was strong and warming.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him again.
“The same could be asked of you. Bothering a woman whose daughter died this week.”
“Magda’s daughter died?”
“In childbirth. The baby was in the wrong position.”
“The poor woman,” I said, remembering the moaning I had heard from atop Magda’s pile of rags.
We sat in silence for a few moments.
“Her suffering was terrible,” Wolf said at length. “Her screams went on for two days, with no one but her mother attending. Not that anyone could have helped. He was very badly stuck, impossible to dislodge.”
“Did no one offer to help?”
“They’re not well liked. Magda’s a thief and doesn’t restrict herself to the belongings of strangers.”
“Still …”
Wolf shrugged. “I kept the boy here with me through it all. He would have been better somewhere else, though, somewhere where he couldn’t hear her screams.”
I looked at Wolf closely as we sat across from each other drinking tea. He was terribly thin—his face formed more of hollows than of flesh—and his skin was the color of bone. His teeth, though, continued to blacken in his mouth—a sign of life, Tsila had once told me, for it’s the teeth of the dead that are always strong. And his dark eyes were glimmers of light in his face.
“Why are you here?” I asked again. “I thought you’d left Russia.” For had he not been on his way to the border, under threat of arrest, that night I had met him in the forest and accepted his dynamite into my possession?
“I did leave. And then I returned.”
“But why?”
“It’s a long story,” he said. “And not one I particularly feel like telling right now.”
We finished our tea in silence. I thought maybe I should leave; he obviously didn’t want to talk. But then, he didn’t seem to mind my presence. And I felt oddly comfortable sitting there with him. I remembered our first meeting in the swamp, a comfort the same as I was feeling now.
“Are you from Mozyr?” I asked him.
“Kalinkovich.”
“And are your parents still there?”
“My mother’s dead. And I never had a father.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Not nearly as sorry as my aunt who had to raise me,” he smiled. “I shouldn’t blame her, I suppose—she took me in, after all—but she couldn’t bear the sight of me.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“She looked at me and saw only her own shame, the shame her sister had brought to the family by bearing me. She despised me, and her children did too. There was no one in that house who looked at me and saw anything other than their own shame and hatred. You can understand, perhaps, why I spent a lot of time alone in the swamp.” He met my eyes. “It was the only place I felt at home.”
“I also felt at home there,” I told him.
“You were gathering reeds that first time we met. I surprised you, frightened you—I could see it in your face. But you didn’t look away.”
I remembered that one note he had played on the reed he took from me, that sound of pure sorrow.
He poured some more tea and we sat again in silence. It was a comfortable silence; there was a spaciousness to it, and after a little while I began to have the sensation of myself expanding within that spaciousness.
The sensation was physical, my muscles relaxing, tension draining. And as we continued to sit like that I felt my mind expanding too, opening to images and colors I hadn’t seen for months: green meadows of early spring rolling to a blue horizon, flashes of orange fish in the river, the honey of Tsila’s hair as she released it down her back each evening. I closed my eyes, at ease despite the squalor that surrounded us, and felt myself floating on the colors that unreeled in my mind.
When I opened my eyes again the gray of the ravine assaulted me. Wolf was looking at me and I was embarrassed to have sat there as I had, eyes closed, imagining myself floating, expanding … “I’m sorry,” I said.
“For what?” he asked. “You’re tired.”
“I am,” I agreed. “Ever since my time in prison.”
“You were in prison? What happened? Not the dynamite …”
“No, no,” I said.
“If I could tell you how much I regret—”
“It wasn’t the dynamite,” I repeated. Though wasn’t my acceptance of the dynamite the first step I had taken away from Tsila and Aaron Lev, my first step along the path that led to my eventual imprisonment? I remembered the weight of it in my arms, the life I thought might be contained in its unexploded power. “It’s a long story, and not one I particularly feel like telling right now.”
He smiled.
I had been longer than expected already, and the meeting at our apartment would soon begin.
“I need to go now,” I told him.
“Good-bye, then,” he said, holding my eyes as I rose to leave.
THE BELLS OF ST. ANDREW’S CHURCH WERE PEALING AS I rushed down Andreev slope toward the Podol. It was later than I had thought. Two o’clock already. Was it possible I had sat that long with Wolf?
By the time I reached Alexander Street I was running. I cut into an alley that formed a shortcut to our street, and there a man blocked my way. “Don’t go home,” he said to me in a low and urgent whisper. I recognized him as a resident of one of the neighboring apartments. “There’s been a raid,” he said.
I didn’t want to believe him, yet as I proceeded past him I felt the first weight of fear in my chest. My pace slowed and my limbs grew heavier. I turned onto my street and walked toward my house. There were no police on the street, and the entrance to our apartment looked the same as always, the door shut, offering no hint of what lay within. I descended the stairs to our door and tried it. It was unlocked. I opened it and understood why Mrs. Plotkin had referred to the police who had come to her place as a pack of dogs.
The table and four beds had been turned upside down, the contents of the armoire strewn on the floor. Our books were also on the floor, some of them torn at the bindings. The frame that had held the photo of Zelda’s parents was shattered, the photo itself ripped to shreds. Our trunks had been opened and emptied, the contents piled on the floor. Our crockery was all smashed to pieces, as was every glass in the house. I saw the pen that Tsila had left for me when I was in prison. It was lying among shards of broken glass. I picked it up and slipped it into the pocket of my coat, then I left the apartment, shutting the door behind me.
I WENT DIRECTLY TO BAYLA’S NEW APARTMENT, BUT SHE wasn’t home, and suddenly I became fearful that she too had been taken, and that the Okhrana were still there, behind the door, waiting, just waiting, knowing I would turn up. It was panic, nothing more, but I so terrified myself with the thought that I ran into the street and kept running. I was aware I was drawing glances but was unable to stop. I turned into a side street, the sort of back lane every female resident of the city knew to avoid, and forced myself to stop running, though to do so went against all my instincts. I walked then with no sense of where I was going, aware only of the waning light of day. It was not until I saw Wolf looking up at me with confusion that I realized where I had come.
I became aware of myself, the shaking of my body.
“There’s been a raid,” I managed to tell him.
“You’ll stay with me,” he said immediately, and took me into his dwelling. I stood in the doorway until he lit a lamp. He had made a home for himself out of that shack in the ravine. A red-and-black carpet was thrown over the dirt floor. He had set up a chair in one corner; a crate beside it was filled with books. Beside the chair was a cot, which he led me to. He pulled back the blankets and told me to lie down. Then he covered me.
He pulled the chair closer to the cot and sat down beside me.
“They won’t be held long,” he told me. The new Minister of the Interior had instituted a series of reforms since Von Plehve’s assassination, an easing of the restrictions on free speech and association, a strengthening of the rule of law. “They’ll be released within a few weeks. A month at most.”
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