From Siberia With Love

by Ilana Cohen

  Six months later, during the celebrations of the New Year, he appeared again. An impressive man dressed in a fancy military uniform of a pilot officer was standing at the door of her boarding house room at the Moscow University. Vera, who was already on her last year of science and engineering degree, was about to join the young engineers and move with them the wheels of the vast soviet machine that had entered a construction boom period, following the war.

  He brought her a bouquet of flowers, a box of chocolates and a marriage proposal. She accepted everything from him with youthful love, and they were married and transferred to an air force base in Georgia. Stalin presented Yakov with three options:

  The first one was to move to a base in East Germany without the family. The offer was surprising, but not impossible, because Yakov had already lost his entire family in the holocaust.

  The second option was to join the great leaders of the Jewish nation, such as Ezer Weizman, and fly to the newly established Israel to build its future magnificent air force. But Vera wouldn’t hear of going there.

  “We are realistic people, what’s the state of Israel anyway? It’s not a country, just a collection of camps filled with immigrants possessing wild dreams of building the Jewish country. We’ve been through enough in our lives and today, you Yakov, are a distinguished Soviet pilot, an aviation officer, we have no time to spare for games.” Vera vetoed her family’s Zionist future. Following the horrors she had undergone with the persecution of the Nazis, she wasn’t willing to undergo another adventure.

  They decided to go for the third option: Relocate as far as possible, all the way to an air force base on the Kuril Islands, to stand tall in the eastern front against America.

  For eight straight days, they travelled on the longest railroad from Moscow to Vladivostok. One could lose his mind in the railroad car they had travelled in. Yakov and Vera weren’t able to keep their son Alex next to them, and he would go for his daily round throughout the train. He knew all the passengers and they all knew him, a child running between their feet and asking for candy. He was only four years old, a little boy with a head filled with white curls.

  “Alexei, nice people are giving you all sorts of candy, spoiling you, you’re the only child in the train. Listen to me, and listen well! You mustn’t eat any of these candies! You might get sick and throw up, that’s the last thing we need here,” his mother ordered him.

  “On the other hand, it is also impolite not to take it from them, they give them to you with love, so do what I tell you, take what you’re given, put it in your pockets, fill them up and then bring everything to mommy, I’ll keep it all for you.”

  And so it was. The fear in her words had disarmed little Alex and left him exposed and unprotected. He’d do anything with his eyes closed in order to please her.

  At the Vladivostok headquarters, they were suddenly informed that the military base they wanted to reach no longer existed, as it was washed into the ocean by a Tsunami, with all its soldiers and their families. It was an earthquake stricken area and these earthquakes occurred frequently. In those times, the media wasn’t present in the area, and since they had missed their opportunity for a patriotic honorable death for their country, they were sent to the islands of Sakhalin. They reached a place called Prunayesk, a small fishing village attached to the air force base the family had been sent to. From Vladivostok, they sailed the Pacific Ocean to Korsakov, a port in the islands of Sakhalin.

  The name of the ship was Yakutia, after the far eastern Russian district. During their ocean sail, an especially powerful storm raged. Tall waves lifted the ship to great heights then tossed it back down into the deep oceans. No one on the ship was able to eat, other than Yakov and little Alex, everyone else was seasick and vomited into the sea.

  “You, my son, are going to be a pilot just like me, our vestibular system is stable and all our bodily systems function properly. When you grow up, you’re going to be a pilot or a ship captain, you have plenty of time to decide which one you want to be,” Yakov took pride in his courageous son.

  The island of Sakhalin is located in the Pacific Ocean and its barren shores overlook the coasts of Japan and the continent of America, “the enemy territory”. Any area outside of Stalin’s control had been marked as enemy territory. Along with many others, they were there to protect the soviet kingdom of the great paranoid. They found themselves living on a piece of land at the end of the world. In the mornings, Yakov would head out to perform military operations in the sky, and little Alex stayed home with his mother. A snowstorm normally raged outside while they sat together in the heated cabin. A little boy and his mother, just like in the fairy tales, but with a single small difference: Alex’s childhood had been a very sad fairy tale. Inside the heart of the young woman, the heavy weight of the holocaust she had just survived still burdened her. And besides, in that remote place, Vera didn’t have the opportunity to fulfill herself by working in the profession she had studied. The higher education she had acquired at the university was rare for a Russian woman during the fifties.

  They both suffered in their Sakhalin Islands hell. Vera needed to understand something important she had been unable to understand till then: Her little child still had no idea what was expected of him. She should have realized she was the adult and he was the child. All his life, ever since he could remember, Alex lived under the shadow of a five-year old monster his mother had put into his head by beating the living daylight out of him. He suffered from it and everyone who surrounded him suffered with him. It complicated his life and he was unable to free himself from its grip. Even when he would calm down, she remained hanging on his neck, and continued to accompany him to adulthood. Every woman who had ever loved him felt firsthand the moments in which his face would toughen up and become expressionless, and his eyes that would wear a frozen layer of ice, wordlessly spoke to her. Often, he would also raise his voice and scream, “Enough already! You’re choking me, don’t you understand?! Lay off me! I’m not a five-year old child anymore, you can’t tell me what to do and how to act!”

  The planes would take off during the nights from the airport attached to the camp. After midnight, they rattled all the houses in the base with a tremendous noise. No one would sleep during the drills and false alarms. Ordered formations of three MiGs each, took off together MiG 19 and MiG 21, and flew towards America’s east coast. Beneath the wing, next to the fuel tank, bombs were hidden. The Russians regularly patrolled the enemy’s skies to demonstrate their military presence.

  Yakov had taken an active part in the cold war the Soviet Union had conducted against the American enemy during the fifties, and at the same time, Vera had conducted a heated and desperate war of her own over the head of little Alex. In all honesty, she had many reasons to be worried, and she worried all the time. For instance, she could never know if her husband would return home at the end of the day from all those patrol missions sneaking into American airspace. There were heroes who had not returned and no one knew what had become of them. The enemy shot down the airplane and the pilots were taken prisoner or crashed in an aviation or naval accident. The pilots had been equipped with two-way radios, but their orders had been unequivocal, they were not allowed to operate them in enemy skies nor call for help. Being captured by the Americans was strictly forbidden. The radios the Red Army pilots possessed had a single purpose, the ability to receive an order: “Russian pilot, this is comrade Josephovich Stalin. I order you to drop bombs on America!” but such an order had never been given.

  At a time of emergency, the pilot would crash land at the heart of the ocean. In his life boat, he would have a two-pound chocolate ball and an energy bomb for emergencies. Yakov used to bring them home for his little son from “the battlefield”, as they used to call father’s workplace at home.

  Vera was always filled with panic and concern, constantly angry and often erupting. They had nowhere to go out to, powerful winds and typhoons raged in the islands of Sakhalin throughout th
e year. During the winters, snow would completely cover the houses, and the entire house became buried under the snow piled during the storm. On such mornings, there was no way of leaving the house through the front door because it was blocked, and so were the windows. There was only one option to go out of the house – through the attic window.

  In the second part of the small family house lived an additional couple, a pilot and his wife, who were barren of children. Vera couldn’t stand the pilot’s wife who would sing in order to relieve her loneliness during the cold-filled days of winter, when everyone remained locked up at home.

  “Stupid whore!” Vera would curse her in her son’s ears every opportunity she had, without him understanding why and for what.

  “Alexei!” Vera shouted the moment the neighbor’s pleasant singing voice was heard through the walls. “Alexei, dress up warm, put your fur coat on and go up to play on the roof! Quickly! Quickly!”

  The child would immediately understand his mother’s real intention and why she was sending him to play up there. He would go up the ladder to the attic and roll tin cans made in the People's Republic of China, of course, that had been stored there. He rolled them to the center and spread them to all corners of the attic. He lifted a huge can of preserved meat above his head, and when he could no longer hold onto it, dropped it on the floor, creating such a terrible noise that he himself was alarmed by the commotion he had created there because he almost broke the roof floor and killed the two women below. The moment the cans had been dropped, the singing ceased and Vera called for him to come down.

  “Get down! You’ve made enough noise for one day.”

  “Just a little more, mother,” he would ask, in the middle of a tempestuous game.

  “Didn’t you understand what I’ve just said? Get down from there right away!”

  He understood perfectly, he had finished his part, silenced the whore of a neighbor and thus, ended his own game as well.

  ** ** ** **

  It had once happened that Vera noticed Alex was missing, that he was too quiet, that he had not capered about her for a few good hours. He must be quietly hiding somewhere occupied in his own affairs. She looked for him everywhere, and finally found him in the attic, sitting on the pantry floor, open tin cans of ground food in front of him, supplies from Moscow, made in the People's Republic of China, of course, that could last a few months. He sat quietly and mixed them all up. Passed with a spoon from can to can semolina, ground peas, ground rice, oatmeal, ground corn, even starch powder. In short, everything; he had mixed together everything he could find there.

  Little Alex had simply wanted to imitate his mother, wanted to cook and mix a meal for the family, that was why he couldn’t understand why his mother began to beat him hysterically, as she had always done, when he would do something that wasn’t to her liking.

  “Oy vey, oy vey, Alexei, you naughty child! What am I going to do with all the mixtures you’ve mixed for us here?! Oy vey, we can no longer cook nutritious porridges that are important for our health! Oy vey!” she cried and hit him, hit him and cried.

  “Mrs. Vera, comrade Yakobovichna, take heart, you could still make good use of your porridge mixture,” the local farmers, the fishermen, comforted Vera.

  “Buy a chicken from the village woman and feed her with this mixture. The chicken will run around in your yard and lay eggs for you, everything is good.”

  And so it was. In the market of the nearby fishing village, they bought a chicken for five kopeks. A week later they bought another chicken, then another and another. The entire base would come to them to take a look at the wonder. The chickens devoured the mixture little Alex had prepared. They clucked in the yard and lay beautiful eggs, large and brown. At his young age, he had already become an anonymous agronomist, inventing his own feeding mixture for the chickens. Later on, he and his mother built a coop in the yard, so that the chickens would have a place in which to sleep and lay eggs.

  Each morning, Alex would go up on a small ladder to the coop, to collect the eggs the hens had laid over the night. Vera, a “Moscow farmer”, was too disgusted to get inside the stench and chicken dropping-filled coop. Of course, Alex was disgusted by it as well, but he had no choice. After all, he was the only man in the house for days on end. He would go up the ladder, close his eyes and with outstretched hands chase all the chickens crouching on their eggs. In the grass, he groped for each and every egg, warm and moist, smeared with excrement. The chickens clucked, jumped with fright, and wildly beat him with their wings until he would go down the ladder as a hero with filthy hands and a dirt-caked face, with white feathers wrapped in the curls of his head. Filled with a child’s pride, he would hand his mother a few homemade eggs.

  In the chicken department, he had an additional important role: Cleaning the coop and slaughtering a chicken for soup. “First of all, you need to tie up her legs, so she won’t run around headless in the yard,” his mother instructed him, after he had decapitated a chicken with an ax, and released her in panic, after it had gone wild in his little hands. It was a traumatic experience for a five-year old, seeing his own chicken, running round and round in front of him during its last moments, beheaded by his own hands.

  When the weather allowed them to go outside, the children would roam along the shores of the ocean the whole day. In this case as well, Vera used to make her son’s life difficult. She overdressed him against his will with a red fur coat and the children mocked him and called him “little red riding hood”. “Don’t mind them, they don’t understand that when you’ll get lost, your mother will be able to find you as quickly as possible in the white snow.”

  Vera acted according to the strict instructions, given by the authorities, that anything moving on the snow should be painted red so it could be located from the air, if the need arose. The roofs of all trucks and airplanes were painted red, a warning color, and little Alex went out just as marked to the frozen field.

  The mothers wrapped their children well and equipped them with tin cans filled with preserved milk. The children created two holes in the cover and sipped from the milky, thick and incredibly sweet liquid. The cans of preserved milk in their hands, served as unequivocal proof of their privileged and aristocratic stature as the children of pilots, superior to the children of the local fishermen.

  The fishermen and vagabonds lived next to their base which served as a sort of refuge for them. The fishermen children hungrily stared at the tin cans they would lick in front of their faces. On the shores, and next to the brooks, they met fishermen casting their nets to capture ocean fish for producing red caviar. In the spring, large and swollen salmon fish came from the ocean into the shores and entered the river to lay their eggs between the pebbles. The fish swam against the current of the streams to lay their eggs at the same place they themselves had hatched from two years earlier. Once they had laid their eggs, their color faded from bright red to murky brown and they expired.

  The children were mainly drawn to the military airport which was the heart of the entire area. Of course, the soldiers and guards did not allow them to enter the airport area, but the children had located a junkyard filled with aircraft parts taken out of service. They turned the junkyard into an exciting playground, and pilfered from their homes work tools, screwdrivers, pliers and hammers. They disassembled anything that could be taken apart. Broken measuring instruments, operating devices and various other wrecks which they had no idea about their usage, they only knew that they possessed a valuable treasure. Alex brought the disassembled treasures home and buried them in the large storage shed in the yard, next to the chicken coop. Yakov knew about his son’s forbidden games and treated the interesting toys he collected with respect. He only implored him not to reveal this to anyone and to maintain utter secrecy.

  “Alexei, what you have in the shed is important information that might serve the enemy. Enemies roam everywhere, looking to find out military secrets. Remember, my son, each of such instrument is a secret
invention of the Russian nation.”

  Yakov, like all good Russian, was a sworn follower of the great leader Stalin and his psychotic ideas.

  Little Alex had already realized the secrets of the nation and its weapon inventions were of the utmost importance and must be safeguarded. Just like his father had said, the enemy was roaming everywhere and might sniff something other than the pungent odors of chicken droppings coming from the coop.

  Additionally, Yakov had brought the child many locks so he would lock the important games in his possession. Alex was extremely proud of them and was happy to receive his father’s professional attention.

  “Father, you have nothing to worry about, I’ll be a pilot just like you, you’ll see.” He cherished the camaraderie that had developed between himself and his father with great pride. The problem was, as soon as Vera stepped into the picture, the great father couldn’t recall any of his brave son’s words, and their alliance was instantly forgotten.

  “Disaster, disaster, you bring us nothing but disasters, you terrible child!” Little Alex heard the horrifying shouts of his mother after she had discovered all of her son’s most closely guarded secrets while he was playing.

  “You’re a felon! We’ll find ourselves in prison one day because of you. Is that what you want? To grow up as an orphan while your parents are sitting behind bars?” she screamed angrily and hysterically while beating the life out of him.

  “Villain, you’re a villain, you are, you are… what could ever come out of something like you?!” Vera continued to beat her son who never cried in spite of the pain.

  Little Alex could never understand how his mother had managed to break the locks his father had brought him. He didn’t know his mother possessed a master key with which she was able to open all of her son’s most precious secrets.

  And while Vera was busy beating Alex up, Yakov would quietly slip into the yard to completely destroy his son’s precious toys and get away from the painful occurrences in the house.