by Marek Halter
They didn’t speak for a good minute. The explosions suddenly seemed closer. Kapler started talking again.
“Marina Andreyeva, just in case those vermin of the skies crap on us, I want you to know something. I totally agree with Kozintsev. You shouldn’t waste your talent on the cinema. Ever again. Your place is in theatre. I was watching you closely while we were shooting. You don’t like the camera. You hate its glass eye. It frightens you. You don’t know where to put yourself when the lens is pointing at you. Please forgive me if it sounds harsh, but, when the cameraman zooms in on you, anyone would think you had the secret police on your tail! You can get away with it because you’re beautiful. A director would risk hellfire for a woman’s beauty, everyone knows that, but it’s not your beauty we’re interested in, Marina Andreyeva. It’s what’s behind it. It’s what’s going on inside. And that’s got nothing to do with beauty. Do you understand what I’m saying? You know how to move, walk, and sit down. You know how to adapt your walk depending on whether you’re supposed to be walking down a street or through a field. People can understand what it is you’re not saying from a single movement of your arm or a slight inclination of your head. Not to mention the fact that you know how to control your voice and are capable of forgetting yourself. God, yes, that’s the most important thing! So few actors are capable of seeing beyond their own shallow feelings and limited intellects! You started out in the theatre, didn’t you? I made some inquiries. I hope you’ll forgive me for my curiosity. Anyway, I made some inquiries and I was told, ‘Ah, Marina Andreyeva, of course we remember her! She was one of our best hopes, but one day, whoosh! She was gone, just like that! Why? We’re still asking ourselves the same question.’ What happened, Marina Andreyeva, to make you waste your talent on the cinema all these years? Why are you throwing yourself away on productions by the Donskoys, Alexandrovs, and Lukovs of this world? Guys who … . Oh never mind! I’d better keep my mouth shut. It’s madness! I’ve said it before, but I’m going to say it again. You have a duty to go back to the theatre. Yes, you heard, a duty. Especially now. The theatre is like music. It’s been around for as long as we have. It’s been part of the fabric of human existence for thousands of years. It’s about more than whether plays are good or bad. The theatre is a human being putting on a show for a human being. And without theatre, Marina Andreyeva, we’ll stay exactly as we are now until the end of time, miserable animals lost in the dark, blind and trembling for fear of a death that we can’t see coming. … ”
Kapler talked and talked and talked. He was drunk with words, like a mother calming her nerves by telling her children stories to make the night seem less terrifying. Marina listened gratefully, not because he was talking about her, but because with every sentence he was driving back the wings of the bombers and banishing the seemingly never-ending chaos outside.
How she wished that her hands weren’t in such a state so that she could squeeze his. She smiled through her tears, not doubting for a moment that he would guess she was crying.
“Destiny is a strange thing, Marina Andreyeva,” continued Kapler. “I’ve been meaning to come in here for weeks to pick up something that’s very dear to me, a copy of Mayakovsky’s The Bedbug. It’s always a good idea to lose something that’s very dear to you. It’s over there in those old files that Kozintsev wisely forgot to take with him. I wanted to show the play at the Art Theatre last winter, but it couldn’t be done. Mayakovsky’s verse is officially held to be remarkable, but his irony is also officially held to display a nihilism that is incompatible with Bolshevik reality. … You never knew Vladimir Vladimirovich, did you? You weren’t even twenty years old when he finished his play, but if you’d seen it, you would have loved it. ‘My play The Bedbug is a drama of circus and fireworks. It’s a play with animated tendencies. The challenge and purpose of theatre today is to bring conflict, propaganda, and political sympathies to life. Theatre people have gotten into the habit of taking on specific roles, such as the comic character, L’Ingénu, and goodness knows what else. … Roles of pernickety bureaucrats devoid of imagination! That’s why the theatre is an outdated shambles today. The theatre has forgotten that it’s supposed to be a spectacle, that it’s supposed to be the fireworks of the soul and a platform for protest. Actors have a duty to be the life that grabs us by the throat and pins us to our seats … ’” Kapler’s voice went hoarse mimicking Mayakovsky’s. Marina started to feel drowsy listening to him. At last the rumble of the Heinkels petered out. The antiaircraft defense rounds died away. The wail of the sirens signaled that the raid was over.
Silence was restored. They were both exhausted.
“It’s over,” murmured Marina. “It’s over for tonight.”
Aleksei Yakovlevich made no reply. He got off the couch with a groan and felt his way over to the sink. Marina heard him drinking from the tap. He offered her a cup of water, his voice echoing. While she was drinking he said, “I think it’ll be safer if we stay here for tonight. We’ll steal away at dawn. Make yourself comfortable on the couch, Marina Andreyeva. There’s bound to be something around here I can use to make myself a nest.”
In the dark, Marina replied with a smile in her voice, “If I’m going to have to call you Lioussia, you can’t go on calling me Marina Andreyeva.”
He gave a dry little laugh and said he was going to scout around the building for a first-aid kit, if there still was one. He switched on his flashlight for a moment to find his way out of the alcove. His steps echoed in the empty office before reaching the corridor. Marina rolled onto her side and curled into a ball, laying her head on a cushion to make herself more comfortable. Again, she tried to hear Aleksei Yakovlevich’s footsteps but soon gave up.
She had had enough of listening for noises for one night. Before she knew it, she was fast asleep.
When she woke up, a golden light was streaming in through the curtains. The air in the alcove was stifling. Kapler was in a deep sleep, his torso against the wall, his head resting on his arm, and his legs hanging off the couch. He had left as much space between them as possible. His face was smooth and peaceful, but his breathing was heavy. A fine glaze of perspiration was glistening on his temples. His arm was hidden under his thick black curls. He was wearing an elegant blue cotton shirt. Most of the buttons were undone. A vein was pulsing steadily under the delicate skin of his neck. Marina’s eyes lingered on him. Not a single bad memory came back to blur her vision with tears.
Outside, in the grounds around the building, the birds were chirping away cheerfully, as if it were a day like any other.
She carefully rose from the couch and opened the window a crack without drawing back the curtains. The fresh early morning air wafted into the alcove. The chatter of the birds swelled imperially. She undressed in front of the sink. Holding the towel in the crook of her arm, she washed herself as well as could be expected, trying not to make any noise. She would have liked to wash her hair, but Kapler woke up.
Naked though she was, she turned to face him. He propped himself up on his elbow and stared at her body silhouetted in the morning light. Without saying a word, he smiled. She held out her raw hands.
“Aleksei Yakovlevich … Lioussia … I’d like to smother you with caresses, but my hands aren’t up to it. Fortunately, I do still have a mouth to kiss you with. If you’d like me to, that is.”
That was how they came to make love for the first time.
Marina moved into Kapler’s apartment on Lesnaya Street. Until war had broken out, he had shared it with a couple of Mosfilm stage designers. They had left Moscow for Alma-Ata along with the others. In every room, sketches of sets, photos, and bookcases lined the walls. The ill-assorted eccentric furniture had been left over from the various productions.
Aleksei Yakovlevich managed to get ahold of some antiseptics and ointments to treat Marina’s hands. The wounds took a long time to heal. He also tracked down some clothes—dresses; pants; sweaters; blouses; undergarments, and even some stockings; two winter coats;
and a pair of fur boots. Nothing was new, of course, but it was all good quality. Kapler explained that his wondrous finds were courtesy of the black market. He knew lots of women who were more than willing to part with their old clothes in exchange for a few rubles before leaving Moscow or enlisting with women’s air defense battalions.
In a few days, enlisted women were taught how to use rifles, machine guns, and air-defense posts just as well as the new male recruits. They were given dead soldiers’ jackets and helmets, if available. Many of them got ahold of heavy cloaks and sewed on the red Soviet Union badge encircled with ears of wheat. They often wore simple headscarves tied under their chins instead of helmets.
That year, autumn crept up on the country. The west wind, heavy with rain, brought with it the rumble of cannons and tanks. People had stopped believing the official radio broadcasts. The most terrifying rumors were flying around in the endless lines for food, where women would read their letters from the front. Stupefying figures were bandied about by word of mouth. The Krauts were now only thirty miles away from the suburbs. They had taken Tula, surrounded six hundred thousand Red Army soldiers at Vyazma, and were now forcing their way north. They were going to spring a trap on Moscow, just as they had on Leningrad. Already, the Heinkels and Messerschmitts weren’t venturing as far into the city, concentrating instead on pounding its defenses.
Panic left the streets deserted. People were fleeing. They were piling onto trains and climbing onto the roofs of buses headed out of the capitol. Sometimes, they were even sighted in trucks carrying the wounded from the front.
A clammy chill and the unbroken gray of the sky heightened the morbid atmosphere of defeat that prevailed. Rain fell incessantly. The rasputitza, the mud season, began. Tracks and roads turned into torrents of mud. People were up to their knees in it. The treads of the tanks disappeared up to their hubs. Trucks and cars got stuck. The war slowed down a little, like a maniac getting his breath back.
The theaters closed. Some of them, such as the old Vakhtangov Theatre on the Arbat, had been partly destroyed. Once or twice, Aleksei Yakovlevich dragged Marina along to the Art Theatre. A wall of sandbags had been mounted at its entrance. In the lobby, a few actors were loudly airing their opinions. All any of them could talk about was the war and the imminent arrival of the Germans.
Kapler was annoyed. Why were they talking as if they had already lost the war?
As soon as they got back to the apartment on Lesnaya Street, he cleared out one of the spare rooms and transformed it into a basic set for The Bedbug. Not without ceremony, he placed the text in Marina’s hands.
“There’s no need to stop working just because there’s a war on. No war has ever killed the theatre since Aristophanes. You must work. Talent isn’t everything. You’ve got some catching up to do. … ”
Marina was to learn all the parts in The Bedbug.
“You should be able to act any part, whether it’s a man or a woman, a silly old fool or a pimply adolescent.”
The weather turned even colder. Huge flakes of snow started to fall. The city slowed down even more. Barricades were set up on the avenues and boulevards, blocking what little traffic there was left. The echoes of the approaching battle boomed in the icy air night and day. People couldn’t help listening and comparing. Wasn’t that blast closer than the one before, and that last one even louder? Rumor had it that those German bastards had monstrous cannons that could fire shells over fifty miles.
Toward the end of one nerve-wracking afternoon, Marina performed Mayakovsky’s entire play for Aleksei Yakovlevich Kapler for the first time.
She performed it just as he had asked, playing the old and the young, the men and the women, without a costume. Dressed in a simple pair of pants and a black sweater, she relied only on her movements, her hands, her face, and her voice to bring out the comedy and create the illusion of truth.
When she reached the end, she bowed as earnestly as she would have if she had been onstage. Tears glittered in Aleksei Kapler’s eyes. He was trembling when he took her in his arms and kissed her.
“Don’t die. Don’t ever die!”
That night their lovemaking was more tender and intense than ever, as they endeavored to use their pleasure to forget the ever-present thunder of the.
Later, after the din of the bombers had faded away, Marina told him how she had danced with Stalin on that night in November 1932. She told him what had happened in the little movie theater and what she knew about Nadezhda Alliluyeva’s death.
When she had finished speaking, Aleksei Yakovlevich didn’t ask any questions. He made no comment, but kept her pressed close to him. Eventually she fell asleep. At daybreak, when she woke up, his eyes were still open and he was still holding her in his arms.
As November 1941 drew to a close, the dirt tracks started to freeze over. The roads became passable again. The tanks came within thirty miles of Moscow. Then, in the course of a few days, the temperature dropped to minus thirteen. The snow crusts became sharp. The Wehrmacht soldiers were frozen in their tracks. Their thin coats couldn’t protect them against such low temperatures. The cold ate away the last of their strength. As they attempted a counterattack, the Red Army soldiers started finding them by the roadside. The German invaders had collapsed into ditches, as stiff as statues, their faces grimacing under a thin layer of ice.
At Christmas, it was minus twenty-two. Another three feet of snow fell. After the New Year, in the first week of 1942, the temperature dropped a few more degrees. The Wehrmacht tanks and planes refused to start. The truck drivers’ hands froze to their steering wheels. The harshest winter in decades was commandeering the war. It saved Moscow and perhaps even the whole of the USSR.
Stalin had brought hundreds of thousands of soldiers back from the Manchurian front. The Red Army took the exhausted invaders by storm. Now it was the home side’s turn to advance at lightning speed. For the first time, thousands of defeated and ragged Germans were seen staggering up to Moscow’s gates.
The pride and fury of victory set Russian hearts ablaze. So it was possible to drive back Hitler’s heinous horde after all. Their days of laboring for the sole purpose of perpetuating Stalin’s gruesome glory were over. The Russian people could no longer think of anything but liberating their beloved homeland.
At the beginning of March 1942, Marina returned to Lesnaya Street, just before nightfall, laden with grocery bags. After spending hours hunting down a couple of pounds of cabbages and potatoes, she came back to find the apartment ringing with voices and Aleksei Yakovlevich surrounded by a dozen men and women.
She recognized some of their faces through the cigarette smoke. They were writers, actors, painters, stage designers, people she had come across in her work. She couldn’t have said what their names were, but she knew that they were all Jews and friends of Lioussia.
When she entered with her bags, they got up to greet her, their smiles frozen with embarrassment. Marina wouldn’t have minded if it hadn’t been for the glint of irony in Kapler’s eyes.
She took her bags into the kitchen, stopping in the hall to listen to their conversation on her way back. They were all talking at once. Their Russian was peppered with Yiddish words and phrases. Kapler wasn’t the calmest. Not surprisingly, their discussion centred on the war, the defense of Moscow, the Russian people, and the Jews.
“We can’t stand idly by on the pretext that we’re Jewish!” one woman raged. “I didn’t realize I was Jewish until last year when I had one of those horrid petitions thrust in my face. I’ve always been Russian.”
“The Krauts would agree with you there, Ileana. It’s all the same to them whether you’re a Slav or a Jew,” a man’s voice cut in. “Untermenschen! Subhuman, that’s what we are.”
“So that gives me two reasons to join the Committee!”
“The question is not whether we are against fascism, Ileana,” someone else protested. “Nowadays, everyone is antifascist. Even your average Soviet baby is an antifascist militant.
The question is whether we want to shout it from the rooftops on the pretext that we’re Jewish. Why should we draw attention to ourselves yet again? As you say, those vile petitions didn’t start by chance. Stalin and his party have left us alone for twenty years. Now it’s starting all over again. … ”
“I couldn’t care less about the petitions, Semyon. The Nazis aren’t creating petitions, they’re killing people. And they’ll exterminate every last one of us. They’ve made no secret of that. Do you know what the Nazis are doing in Poland at this very moment? The whole point of Hitler’s great global Reich and anti-Jewish laws right across Europe is to turn us into corpses, nothing more and nothing less. … ”
“What’s to say that our esteemed Joseph doesn’t have the same fate in mind for us, Ileana?”
“Don’t be stupid! That’s an insult to the men who are dying in Stalingrad while you just sit there!”
“I agree with Ileana, I trust Mikhoels. We have to support him. The more of us are on the Committee, the better. … ”
“It’s not about whether we trust Mikhoels, Natasha. We all like him and we’ll follow him all the way to Siberia if we have to, but I don’t want to die a fool’s death, and I haven’t forgotten about Erlich and Alter.”
“Lioussia … ”
“Let me say my piece, Ileana. I refuse to be hoodwinked, I’m too old for that. Just in case any of you have forgotten, let me remind you that the Jewish Antifascist Committee wasn’t Mikhoels’s or Ehrenburg’s idea. It was the brainchild of Comrade Lavrenty Beria and the NKVD.”
“No, you can’t say that! We owe it to the two Poles, Erlich and Alter, and they’re no mercenaries.”
“Of course not, and I have the greatest respect for them … if they’re still alive! The first we heard of the Committee was last summer. Erlich and Alter had just come out of Lubyanka jail, the NKVD’s headquarters. Erlich arranged a meeting with Mikhoels. Ask Ileana, she was there, and so was I. Erlich assured us that he had Beria’s and Stalin’s support. The Jewish Antifascist Committee was all set to become the biggest Jewish resistance movement against Nazism. He couldn’t have been happier, and yet two months later, the NKVD arrested him, along with Alter, and where are they now? You don’t know and neither do I, but I do know that Stalin isn’t on a mission to save the Jews. He needs the Jews. Well actually, no, what Stalin needs is the proceeds of what is known as ‘international Jewry,’ to defend his cause, not ours. … ”