Yasha reluctantly bit his fry. A familiar twitch at the corner of his mouth told me this was no slip. He’d meant to say it. But his voice carried a note of regret, even sympathy. “Look, I wasn’t there. My mother, she lost her mind a little by the end. I don’t know who was right, who was wrong—and I don’t care. But to put it on paper like that! That’s what got me.”
“Come on, now, Yasha, I didn’t pull you by the tongue. You started, please finish. What did she say?”
“Who, Mama?”
I was silent.
He palmed back his untidy gray hair. “Flora used to talk to her…when all the chaos started in that apartment with the arrests. Flora told her, ‘Rosa, if you’re taken away, they can send your boy to live with relatives. If it happens to me, where is Yulik going to go? Lord knows they won’t send him to my relatives in America. What will happen to him?’ Mama said Flora was ready for anything. Ready to go to any length.”
“Well, that’s certainly more deductive.” I felt something cold and stern taking hold of me. “A conversation over a kerosene burner.”
Yasha was avoiding my eyes, wolfing down his brisket like a sword swallower, though the effort of it seemed to be causing him some difficulty now. “She said some things. What does it matter now? I’m sure you could get all the facts, if you wanted.” I could see satisfaction wearing through his apologetic grin. “They’ve opened up the archives again. Didn’t you tell me you always wanted to get your mother’s classified files?”
I stared at him. He certainly never forgot a thing. It was true: I’d once lamented to him about missing my chance to obtain my parents’ dossiers. That had been some time after ’92, when Yeltsin had decreed that the KGB’s old archives could be opened for anyone who’d had a relative arrested, killed, or sent away under Stalin. But a few years after the announcement, access to the files was again restricted, without warning or explanation, as is our Russian way.
Yasha mopped up the sauce on his plate. “You must have read about it. It was in all the papers.”
“I haven’t had much time for reading,” I said.
“Of course.” He gazed around at last, taking in the view with a look that said, I can see you’ve kept yourself busy. “Well, if you’re still interested, you ought to do it soon. You never know, they could start reclassifying everything tomorrow. That’s how it is—a few years of so-called freedom and they turn the screws tight again.”
I smiled. “I’ll give it some thought.” I raised two fingers to signal for the check.
“Better to light one candle than to curse the darkness, right?” Yasha said, giving me a shrug and a half. “Especially if you’re already traveling there for business.”
“My trips are scheduled pretty tightly,” I said.
He took another bite of beef. “Oh, I’m sure you’ll find the time.”
—
That night, I couldn’t sleep, thinking about all the counterarguments I’d failed to make to Yasha’s face. My mother, going “to any length” to save her child? Was he kidding? The defining tragedy of my mother’s life was that she’d never had an instinct for family preservation. I recalled a conversation around our small kitchen table in Moscow. We’d been reminiscing about my old babysitter, Avdotya Grigorievna, the old woman who’d lived down the hall and was fond of me. Mama and I were laughing at old Auntie Dunya’s queer way of rolling her “o”s when Florence suddenly said, “Her family was from one of those Volga villages, outside Gorky somewhere. She offered to help us get there, stay with her relatives for a while, keep low after Papa was arrested.”
“So why didn’t we go?” I said.
But she’d laughed at my dismay. “What was I going to do in a village? Pick turnips? Grow potatoes?”
“And what were you doing that was so special in Moscow? Writing letters to Comrade Stalin? Dragging me out before dawn so you could get a better spot on the prison lines?”
“I wasn’t going to abandon your father. I had to find out what happened to him.”
“You knew what happened to him. You were just drawing attention to yourself.”
At this, her face acquired that gloss of incomprehension she liked to retreat behind when challenged. “I couldn’t have just left him,” she said irritably.
“And what about me, Mama? Did you ever think about what would happen to me when they came for you?”
She chewed her food for a while before answering. Then she said, “Yes, I did think about it. Your father and I talked about it.” This was a surprise to me. “We knew that, no matter what happened to either of us, they would never let anything bad happen to the children here. The children were always going to be taken care of.”
Then it was my turn to laugh. Taken care of, indeed! It was a miracle my arm hadn’t been emancipated from its socket when I was six years old by my state-appointed caretakers.
“No matter what happened to you, Mama?”
“Yes, no matter what happened to us, the country would always look after the children,” she repeated like a robot.
“But, Mama,” I said, “it didn’t have to happen to you at all! Don’t you get it? None of it had to happen to you, or to anybody.”
Again the fact-proof screen was raised. Once more her eyes acquired the perplexed look that indicated all communication had ceased.
The list of subjects to which my mother could apply her famous silence was bounded by neither taste nor logic. I could understand her not wanting to elucidate on her years in the labor camp. But later, in the seventies, I almost never heard her speak about our family in America, though we were regularly in receipt of packages filled with sweaters, denim Levi’s, instant coffee, and sneakers. And still later, in Brooklyn, she refused to let me change the name tag on the intercom in the vestibule of her Section 8. For the next eight years, I would buzz myself up to the flat of one deceased “Marquita Muñiz.” If I asked Florence for whom all this subterfuge was intended, she simply answered, “Whoever needs to find me knows where I am.”
Her tight-lipped-ness I’d long made my peace with. Why, then, after my lunch with Yasha Gendler, did it set my teeth on edge that there might be things about my mother—humiliating, atrocious things—that others knew, or believed they knew, and that I did not? Over and over I’d weighed every word I’d spoken to Yasha and felt ugly about the indifference I’d affected. “Touch shit and you’re the one who smells”—that had always been my motto in dealing with unsavory innuendo. Not for a moment did I believe Yasha’s suggestion that Florence had betrayed her friends and neighbors to the Soviet secret police. And yet I was pained by the unfair impression my mask of amused silence must have made on him.
And so, at midnight, with a glass of Rémy in my hand and wearing only my pajama bottoms, I found myself climbing the eight steps up to my attic office and booting up my Dell. I cracked open the skylight above my head and let in, through the liquid reaches of the night, the restless summer screeches of the cats and raccoons.
I called up a browser and in the search window, in Russian, typed “repressions,” “stalin,” “FSB,” and “archives.” In .45 seconds, the search engine returned 48,535 entries. Most of the links were to articles or academic texts, though those gave way to personal accounts: unpublished stories, poems, and screeds pertaining to brothers, fathers, uncles swallowed up by Stalin’s terror. The Internet was undeniably demonstrating that the affliction of graphomania, to which Dostoyevsky claimed every Russian was predisposed, had blossomed into a disease as contagious as it was incurable. I shivered at the thought of adding my number to that roll of countrymen sucked back endlessly into the past.
When I limited my search to recent news stories I found what I was looking for—articles in several prominent newspapers covering the announcement that the Russian government had made just months earlier: The FSB had declassified millions of documents on victims of repressions. Relatives could now request information about those who’d been executed in prison or deported to camps.
I’d missed that window in ’92. Traveling back there had been the furthest thing from my mind. I had work to do, and my mother’s growing list of ailments to manage. And she, I was sure, had no desire to reopen chapters of her life she’d so carefully forgotten. Now I wondered if my failure to raise the topic with Mama had been inspired by a fear of trespass. Our relationship was fraught enough without adding this to the mix. That summer was still entangled for me with the memory of our last fight, which it anguished me now to recall. My mother had suffered a stroke. For days, her right side was paralyzed. Gradually, she began to recover her speech and movement. But there was no longer any question of her living alone. With unsettled feelings, Lucya and I relocated her to a nearby group home. She’d been at the facility for almost a year when doctors operated on her leg. A few days after she was released from the hospital, I visited Mama in the nursing home and discovered that the undersides of her legs and her backside were covered with bedsores. The so-called caretakers were clearly neglecting to sponge-bathe her in a timely manner and properly apply ointment to her sores. Enraged, I started berating the nursing assistant on duty—an imperious imbecile who continued to insist, even as I pointed to the subclean sheets, that everything had been done properly and “according to procedure.” I informed the woman that only a mental incompetent could fail to see my mother was in serious discomfort. I demanded to speak with the doctor in charge. That was when the nurse stormed out, maybe to find her superior, more likely to complain about me while she sucked a cigarette or whatever it was she normally did instead of tending to her patients.
But all of this is only the backdrop to the crucial part of the story: While I had been chewing out the nurse, Florence, reclining in her metal bed, would not stop interjecting that everything was “just fine.” Why was I making a fuss, she demanded, when she was feeling “absolutely all right” (though she had confessed quite the opposite to me minutes earlier)? There was “no need to make trouble,” she kept insisting to me, smiling wanly at her idiotic caretaker.
I could understand her impulse to appease when the nurse was within hearing range, but she continued defending her own abuse even after the woman had stormed out. “These people know how to do their job.”
“If these people were doing their jobs,” I said, “your backside wouldn’t be covered in sores.”
As if not hearing me, she said, “They take care of it their own way. They know best.”
They know what they’re doing. They know best. It was the refrain I’d been hearing from her all my life. For heaven’s sake, I thought, you are eighty-two years old. You’ve been living in a free country for thirteen years now. Why must you compulsively parade your loyalty to whatever cruel and indifferent master happens at this moment to be pressing his boot on your neck?
What I did in fact say was “Enough, Mama. I’m doing the talking now.”
We remained locked in disagreement until the day she died, less than a year later. Now, with my mother buried along with her silences, I googled the names of activists quoted in the news articles, and came upon the object of my search: a website called MEMORIAL. Apparently, it was a Russian society dedicated to the rehabilitation of victims of Stalin’s repressions. The website was forlorn-looking, a Gulag of defunct links, many of which, like the victims the site represented, were themselves “under rehabilitation.” But toward the bottom was the name of the webhost, listed simply as [email protected]. For a full minute, I let my cursor hover uneasily over the address. I pictured Yasha’s gloating face. His invitation had been a challenge. What was I afraid of?
I double-clicked on the link and composed a short email asking how and to whom I was supposed to address my request for my parents’ documents. Judging by the site, I didn’t expect an answer. I pressed send and closed the window. Now Yasha could be satisfied.
Only I wasn’t. If there were any secrets to be found, there was one person I knew who might reveal them. And I was overdue to pay him a visit.
—
The Avalon was unlike any place to which one might attach the words “retirement” or “home.” The reception area, with ferns and planted palms, large armchairs, carved wooden side tables with exotic ironware artifacts, and a grand Steinway in the corner, resembled a waiting room in some far-flung U.S. embassy. The residents looked like vacationers shuffling about in their loafers and Bermuda shorts. On my way out to the patio I consulted the calendar, on which the weekly activities were mixed in among such notable events as:
AMELIA EARHART IS LOST OVER THE PACIFIC, 1937 * Sundaes on Sundays 2:00. THE BIKINI DEBUT IN PARIS, 1946 * MARC CHAGALL BORN, 1887 * Morning Stretch BR 10:30 * Mind Boosters BR * MILTON BERLE BORN, 1908 * Caribbean Party w/Gary Lovett * JOHN DILLINGER KILLED BY THE FBI IN CHICAGO, 1934 * Spanish for Beginners BR 4:00 * Poker Pals GR 2:00 * JFK JR. CRASHES OFF MARTHA’S VINEYARD, 1999 * Shabbos Service * 10:30 Schmooze & News BR
Out on the brick terrace, I sat down on one of the striped-cushioned chairs and tilted my head back to drink in the sun. It wasn’t long before my uncle Sidney emerged, sockless in espadrilles, with an issue of The Wall Street Journal tucked under his arm. He was moving more stiffly than I remembered. “Julian, my boy, good to see you! Sit back down.”
“How’s the colon, Uncle Sid?” I said.
“Very good. Doctor says I have the longest colon he’s ever seen in a man my size. A spool of kishkes a mile long. Apparently, I’ve got plenty more to snip if the day comes again.”
He was letting me off the hook. I felt terrible for not coming to see him sooner. Despite the easygoing way he managed to speak about it, the physical signs of his recent surgery and chemo were difficult to disguise. His lightweight khakis hid the sticks of his legs well enough, but his polo shirt couldn’t do the same for his thin arms and wrists, his sharply protruding shoulders. My mother’s brother Harry had passed away before we’d arrived in America; his children now lived in California. Sidney was the only one who remained who still remembered Mama.
“So you’re feeling good?” I said.
“That’s a different question.”
“Looks like they keep you busy as a cruise line here. Spanish lessons. Board games.”
“I skip all that kindergarten stuff.”
“Poker your game?”
“Gin. I’ll play a hand with anyone. What do you want for lunch?” he said when a member of the staff appeared. “Get him a cup of coffee, Deborah,” Sidney instructed. “With cream, and some herring. You like herring? Good. An egg-white omelet for me, and a coffee, black.”
The scrub-attired Deborah smiled and left with our unopened menus.
“How’s Judy?” I said.
“My daughter and her husband are in Myanmar. Last spring it was Turkey. Each year a more exotic destination. I don’t think middle New Jersey is far enough away for them to visit. But you know what they got here now?” he said, almost perking up. “Computer tutors! Twice a week, they teach us how to email our grandchildren, like nobody can pick up a telephone anymore. But me—I’ve started doing my stock trading on the computer now—just a bissele.”
“I didn’t know you still played the market.”
“I don’t play. I read the papers, I look at the numbers, and I only listen to myself.” Talking about stocks always got Sidney animated. “Last week,” he rushed to add, “my broker called, said he had a tip for me. I told him, ‘Jeff, you’ve known me for twenty years. You know my name and you know where I live. The day you start giving me advice on trading is the day you’re no longer my broker.’ ”
I’d loved Sid’s disarmingly gruff manner since the first time I’d met my uncle, back in Moscow in 1959. I was fifteen; he, thirty-nine, a dapper vision in a gray flannel suit, brimmed hat, shiny black wingtips, striding to greet my mother and me in Sokolniki Park. As an executive at Dow, he’d managed to score himself a visa that year as a delegate to the Moscow World Exhibition, an enormous trade show intended as a technological pissing contest between Nixon and Khrushchev. My first m
emory of him is still engraved in the Kodak colors of that day, along with all the panoramas of American houses and automobiles, the “model kitchens” and washer-dryers of tomorrow and the other marvels of domestic technology meant to teach us Soviets about the humanity of our rivals. I saw him again twenty years later, at JFK Airport, upon our arrival in America. It was Sidney who, along with his now departed wife, Stella, had welcomed my family that first cold evening in New York, with his reassuring warning that the United States was just a labor colony with better food. And Sidney who, while giving Lucya and me our first nighttime car tour of luxury Manhattan, told me, “You’ll do all right here, Julian, as long as you don’t let envy clog up all your senses.” We’d found a mutual language right away; all the things I’d never had in common with my mother, I finally had with Sidney. Like me, he was no justice crusader. After he’d gotten out of the army, he’d taken his GI money and picked up a master’s in chemical engineering at Northwestern, then spent the next forty years pragmatically embracing the American Dream his sister had turned her back on.
“It’s good to trust only yourself. I guess that’s why you haven’t lost money,” I said to him now.
“Oh sure, I’ve lost. Never enough to break the bank. I’m not a gambler. I grew up during the Depression, when folks was tossing themselves off buildings.”
“So did Florence,” I said. “I guess it taught her a different lesson.”
Sidney took a moment to think and finally shrugged. “I was a kid. Florie, she was older. Folks who lived through that time, they were like survivors of a war. And your mother was always very sensitive to all the injustices. She’d get into fights at the dinner table with our father every night. At the Sabbath dinner, we all had to agree not to talk about politics.”
“What would you talk about?”
“Well, I remember they once argued about the Harlan County miners who were getting beat up by the police for striking. Dad said, ‘Nobody got jobs nowadays, and those ones are striking!’ Well, Florie, she was quick, she said, ‘They starve while they work, they might as well strike while they starve!’ Every night it was something like that.”
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