by Marek Halter
There was a brief icy silence after Kapler’s words, and then a man’s voice said, “We all know that Lioussia is right. Mikhoels may have been delegated Committee chairman, but they’ve already appointed Lozovsky and Feffer to keep tabs on him. They might be Jewish, but they’ll still be skulking back to report to the NKVD every morning.”
“So what! Nothing happens under the skies of the ‘Little Father of the Peoples’ without his blessing. Big deal! I couldn’t care less about Beria’s snitches. Mikhoels knows all that and more, Lioussia. Yet, he’s agreed to chair the Committee, and Ehrenburg goes along too. He has the guts to come out and say in public, ‘I’m Russian and, like all Russians, I’ll fight for my country, but the Nazis have reminded me of something else too, that my mother’s name was Hannah, that I’m Jewish and proud of it.’ That’s a big slap in the face for the people who circulated those horrid petitions last year … and that’s something, at least.”
Marina was rooted to the spot. She finally understood the glint of irony in Kapler’s eyes and the others’ embarrassment.
She had signed those “horrid petitions”—angry calls to “rid the cinema, the theatre, and Soviet culture in general of the pervasive and corrupting influence of cosmopolitan Jewry on the arts and Soviet values. … ”
Twice, her name had appeared under those incitements to hatred, albeit drowned in a sea of others, but everyone there that evening must have known. There was no chance of them having forgotten.
Lioussia must know too. How could it be otherwise? Had he known all along, ever since their first encounter?
Going back into the kitchen, she tried to distract herself with menial tasks, but her hands were shaking. She moved slowly, as if she had lead running through her veins.
Finally, she could bear it no longer. She left the kitchen and even toyed with the idea of joining Kapler and company for a second, but she didn’t dare. Instead, she slipped soundlessly into the room that Kapler had converted into an acting studio. Shivering with cold, she stayed in semidarkness. She wrapped herself in one of the coats she had considered using as a costume, then curled up in the only armchair on the mock set.
Of course she had known that Kapler was Jewish. She had always known. But what did it matter? By the time they had met on set for Kozintsev’s film, she had long since put the petitions out of her mind. People signed because they had to sign, because they hated the Jews from force of habit, but the Jews were nobody in particular. The rest of the population was just furious to see men and women successful where they had been less successful, to see them wield power when they had none, to see them poor when they couldn’t stand being poor themselves any longer.
The man she had taken her clothes off for was not a Jew. He was Aleksei Yakovlevich Kapler, the man whose caresses, laughter, and tenderness she craved.
But what about Lioussia? What was he thinking when he held her in his arms, when he made her work, when they dissolved into laughter? Was it possible that he really didn’t care that she had signed the petitions?
The memory of all the weeks they had spent together buffeted her like an icy gust. She felt hot with shame despite the gloomy chill of the room.
The apartment was ringing with shouts. She knew what these heated meetings were like. Everyone would try to make his or her voice heard above the rest. They would be hurling terrible insults at each other one minute, hugging the next. There would be laughing and drinking. She usually enjoyed it, even though endless debates were not her forte. In a way, she was like them. She even thought like them.
She could have gone to them and apologized. Perhaps she should have.
But she didn’t have the strength. It was impossible. Already she could picture their faces, the looks they would give her. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. Caught up in a ferocious battle between pride and shame, she came up with all sorts of reasons why she shouldn’t add to her humiliation. Besides, she didn’t fit into their world. She didn’t get their jokes. They would poke fun at her in Yiddish and she wouldn’t understand. It was their way of showing her that she wasn’t one of them and that she never would be.
The meeting went on for so long that she had dozed off by the time Kapler came in.
“Marinotchka?”
She was too drowsy to move. Kapler didn’t put the light on but left the door half-open. The light from the hall dissolved the shadows. He came and sat down on the floor next to the armchair where she lay huddled. Marina couldn’t help remembering their night together in the alcove at the Mosfilm studios, when he had sat in darkness at the foot of the couch.
She didn’t dare touch him, or stroke his face and neck as she liked to do, or even take his hands in hers.
“There was no need for you to hide,” he said. “You could have come and sat with us. We had some big decisions to make.”
There was a sad, sarcastic edge to his voice, which was hoarse with tobacco. His breath reeked of vodka. As she made no reply, he added, “It’s freezing in here, and so wonderfully refreshing after all that hot air. God, how they go on! Mikhoels has got them all fired up. He’s in Tashkent with the Moscow Art Theatre, MAT, setting up a ‘Jewish Antifascist Committee.’ Those MAT guys are a militant bunch. They’re fighting tooth and nail for the Yiddish theatre, Yiddish culture, and so on, whereas we’re what you’d call casual Jews. Should we get involved? That was the question. Losovsky, Ehrenburg, and a few others have already joined. It seems that Stalin may look favorably on the Committee, but everyone’s scared witless. This kind of initiative could backfire on us. It wouldn’t be the first time. You only have to look back at our good old history to see that it never pays for a Jew to attract too much attention.”
Marina knew Solomon Iossifovich Mikhoels by reputation. He was the director of the MAT, the Moscow Art Theatre. She’d never met him or seen any of his productions, but the MAT was famous clear across Russia. The company performed exclusively Yiddish plays in Yiddish and the productions were a huge success with audiences, Jewish or not. For years, Mikhoels had been considered one of the great masters of the acting profession, the greatest since Stanislavski. A number of non-Jewish actors followed his teaching. Some secretly went to watch him perform over and over again in the hope of understanding his work.
Kapler laughed. It was a half-hearted laugh and less scornful than he would have liked.
“Well, no prizes for guessing what decision we reached. We’re all going to join the Committee. We all knew it even before we’d finished our first drink, but it’s always the same. Nobody ever seems to be able to decide anything without a palaver!”
He grabbed ahold of her hands, pressed her icy palms against his burning face and sighed softly.
“You should have come and sat with us. What are you doing in here? It’s freezing.”
“How long have you known that I signed those petitions, Lioussia?”
“What does it matter?”
“Tell me.”
“Since before I saw you shooting for Kozintsev’s film. It’s no big deal. Everyone signs those petitions, Marinotchka. They’re totally meaningless.”
He had spoken too quickly, tried too hard to sound indifferent, but he was obviously a good actor too. If he was hiding the truth from her, would she notice?
He kissed her palms, the very palms that he had massaged so tenderly back to health. Another question slipped out of her mouth.
“Did everyone here this evening know?”
“Anyone who didn’t before will now.”
“Believe it or not, I had forgotten all about it myself.”
“Oh, there are so many bits of paper that you have to sign floating around this country!”
“You can drop the pretence, Lioussia. I can read and I knew what I was putting my name on. Some small part of me must even have agreed.”
“What’s the point of going over the past?”
“I wanted you to know.”
In the half-light, she could tell that he was smiling.
&n
bsp; “Marinotchka, my love … only the purest Bolsheviks have to know absolutely everything.”
“I was scared, Lioussia. I was worried I might have trouble finding work if I didn’t sign. It was already difficult enough as it was.”
“I know. … We should go to bed, I’m exhausted.”
“I can just imagine what they must think. ‘That anti-Semite is sleeping with Aleksei Yakovlevich Kapler because it’s the only hope she has left of putting a roof over her head.’”
“Kapler sleeps with anyone he likes. Everyone in Moscow knows that, and so much the better!”
“But I read the petitions. I knew what they meant; yet I didn’t see anything shocking about them. They were fine by me, not important, the sort of things that people say without thinking or listen to without taking much notice.”
He laughed and got to his feet. This time, his laugh was more genuine. He pulled her close.
“Don’t worry. You’re my favorite anti-Semite. In small doses, there’s some good in that trash, you know. Otherwise, how would we remember we’re Jewish, that we’re eternally Jewish, even before we’re born and after we die? We have too long a history for us ever to escape from it.”
“I was thinking about coming out, to apologize while they were all there.”
“You could have. They would have liked that.”
“I didn’t have the guts. When I arrived, their faces … I couldn’t. It was impossible.”
“Of course it was. Please get it into your head that I’m not asking you to apologize, Marinotchka. I know who you are. That’s enough for me.”
Aleksei Yakovlevich was soon sound asleep, but it took Marina a long time to drift off. She kept mulling over Lioussia’s answers. The more she thought about it, the more sure she felt that he hadn’t known that she had signed that anti-Semitic filth when they had first met. He had only heard about it that evening from his visitors.
In the morning, in the sweetness of waking, they made love. Although the passion and tenderness that had bound them together for weeks didn’t seem to have waned, Marina sensed that they were farewell caresses.
Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. That had been clear to her since they had first lain down together. Kapler was Kapler. His need to be free and his taste for seduction would forever be driving him off in search of new lovers. Kapler had given her six happy months. It could come as no surprise to her that it was over. The time they had spent together was already one of life’s great gifts.
She tried to convince herself that the previous evening’s party and the anti-Semitic petitions had nothing to do with it, but that was a lie. There was no use lying to herself.
They parted on good terms, allowing events to take their natural course. Kapler went to the War Office where he was assigned to the editorial department of the Krasnaya Zvezda, or the “Red Star.” By that time, the army journal was the most widely read newspaper in the USSR. People would line up in the freezing cold on the day the paper came out to buy it. Its articles told about the front lines, and its journalists were accomplished writers. The best known included Jews, such as Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg. They were risking everything to report on the war and the heroism of Soviet troops. There didn’t seem to be much censoring of their articles.
Kapler was immediately posted to the Volga. He didn’t tell Marina the news until the morning of his departure and refused to let her accompany him to the station.
“There’ll be no farewells or goodbyes for us, Marinotchka. Those are for couples that are splitting up, whereas you and I are life’s threads, crossing and going our separate ways. Nothing can separate us.”
It was an icy but sunny day. Before disappearing down the dazzlingly snowy street, he kissed her on the lips and, for the umpteenth time, made her promise to apply for work at the Art Theatre as soon as it reopened its doors.
Marina soon found living in the apartment on Lesnaya Street without Kapler unbearable. She was overwhelmed with loneliness and grief. Shame and regret made her sorrow a bitter pill to swallow. She had to move on.
Applying to the War Office, she was assigned to a little arms workshop just around the corner from Gruzinsky Boulevard. Before the war, it had manufactured taps and door handles. Now it produced the hand grenades that the soldiers on the front called “potato mashers.” Each day of fighting devoured tens of thousands.
The employees at these workshops were all women. It was the same everywhere. The men were killing, dying, or recovering from their injuries before going back to fight; the women were keeping the country going. Nothing happened without them. Not a single loaf came out of an oven without a woman kneading it. Not a drop of soup was ladled without women growing, harvesting, and slicing the cabbages and potatoes that went into it. They provided everything, including millions of caps and helmets, the steel in the tanks, and the sophisticated assembled parts for the new MiG aircraft, all while nurturing the children.
To start off, Marina was given one of the simplest tasks. Along with four other workers, she packed the grenades into small crates for transport. Each grenade weighed almost two pounds. By the evening, the women had lifted several hundred and could no longer feel their shoulders. They would gulp down their meals at the workshop canteen as fast as they could, eager to be home by dark so that they could collapse into a dead sleep until dawn the following morning.
After a few weeks, Marina found a room in an apartment block where some of her colleagues from the workshop lived. Only then did she stop waking up every morning thinking of Kapler.
Almost a year after the outbreak of war, in May 1942, the Art Theatre announced that it would be opening its doors again at the end of the summer. Determined to keep her promise to Kapler, Marina asked for special permission to leave work a little earlier. Making the most of the fine weather and long days, she walked to the theater. It was the first walk she had treated herself to in a long time. When she came to Kamergersky Lane, children playing soldiers in front of the theater were yelling to one another across the beautiful sober white façade. She pushed the blood-red door open. Her heart thumping, she made her way down the hall hung with portraits of Chekhov and Stanislavski. Both had the seagull as their emblem.
Timidly, she tapped on the door of the secretary’s office. When Marina asked if she could see the Comrade Director, the secretary looked down her nose at her. She must have been in her sixties and it was obvious from her icy gaze that she rarely showed any warmth. Marina wouldn’t have been surprised if she had been asked to come back in three days, ten days, or never. The director’s name, Oleg Semyonovich Kamianov, shone on a large copper plate on his office door. It was a Jewish name. The anti-Semitic petitions couldn’t have escaped his notice either.
Nevertheless, Marina wasn’t kept waiting for more than fifteen minutes. A bald little man bulging out of his old-fashioned suit suddenly appeared at his secretary’s side, his gentle eyes magnified by his metal-rimmed glasses. He spread his arms out wide.
“Comrade Gousseieva!”
He was addressing her as if she were an old acquaintance.
“You needn’t be surprised, Marina Andreyeva. I was expecting you. I’ve heard so much about you from Lioussia Kapler. What a pleasure it is to have you back in the fold!”
Kamianov was not only kind and enthusiastic, he wrote a very authoritative letter. After submitting it to the politruk, the political commissar at her workshop, Marina was questioned for a good hour. Two weeks later, she was relegated to another part of the assembly line where the handles of the “potato mashers” were attached to their explosive heads. It was fiddly work but physically less demanding. Best of all, she was given permission to leave work at three every afternoon to go to the theater.
It didn’t take her long to discover that not a single play was officially being rehearsed at the theater, although it was due to reopen imminently. She could count the male actors in the troupe on the fingers of one hand. There were a few more actresses, but the choice of plays wa
s still limited. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Kamianov was having trouble finding out which works were authorized by the censors. He was wasting hours on the telephone. Nobody was willing to assume responsibility for a decision. Everyone knew that they would have to wait for the Kremlin’s dictates. It had been that way since long before the war.
At the end of July, the theater reopening date was postponed to November. Kamianov suggested turning the delay to the company’s advantage by working on a variety of scenes from the repertoire. It would be a good use of time, a real workshop. The great Stanislavski, founder of the Art Theatre, would have approved. The actors would be their own audience for a while, an unforgiving audience.
Marina welcomed the delay with a sigh of relief. She was already dreading standing up in front of a real audience again. But that was nothing compared to the other terror. She thought she had overcome it, but it was back, giving her sleepless nights. What would happen when Stalin found out that she was back onstage? Because he would find out.
Kapler had assured her hundreds of times that Stalin had forgotten all about her. “You must return to the stage. It’s your duty. Russian theatre is alive and kicking. It needs you. Stalin himself will come and applaud you.”
How she wished she could have believed him, but who could doubt that Stalin never forgot anything, ever?
Despite everything, perhaps Lioussia was right. Even if Moscow was no longer under threat, the war was more grueling and bloodier than ever. The Germans were arriving at the gateways to the Caucasus and the Volga. Stalingrad was caught in a deadly trap. Could it be that Stalin had other fish to fry just then? Surely he didn’t have time to think about erasing the memory of some insignificant actress he’d consumed during an evening of drunken revelry at the Kremlin?