by Marek Halter
As for Apron, Marina heard from Nadia that he had gone to the big Waldheim kolkhoz where someone was seriously injured. Although the kolkhoz was only twenty miles southeast of Birobidzhan, it was almost a whole day’s journey away in the snow. On arrival, Doctor Apron had used the Red Army guards’ telephone to pass on the message that he would be away for a good week. Marina got to work with Anna and Vera. The two actresses taught her some of the best known parts in their repertoire, adapted from Peretz’s short stories The Three Wedding Canopies, If Not Higher, The Treasure, and The Magician, together with Tevye’s Daughters, The Bewitched Tailor, and The Railroad Stories by Sholem Aleichem.
Marina worked long hours. Her days ended with Yiddish lessons from Grandma Lipa that left her feeling exhausted but satisfied. She didn’t give a thought to Apron while she was busy. His face, his powerful body, the way he had taken her in his arms to dance now only haunted her at night. She managed to resist the urge to ask Nadia if he was back from the kolkhoz and, whenever Levine stopped by the theater, he would find Marina hard at work with the other actresses. Each time, Vera would shoo him away, telling him not to disturb them.
Two weeks or so after the celebrations marking the Soviet Union’s victory at Stalingrad, while Marina was tirelessly rehearsing her lines for Tevye’s Daughters, trying to improve her pronunciation, the old actor, Yaroslav, came and sat down beside her with a mug of tea.
“Dear oh dear! I’m afraid you might be giving yourself a lot of trouble for nothing, my girl.”
“What makes you say that?”
“A vicious rumor. I have a nasty feeling that it won’t be long before they ban us from performing in Yiddish.”
“Is that so?”
“Well, no, not yet, but the world is full of vicious rumors, isn’t it? And that’s not the worst of them.”
Yaroslav produced a long pipe from the pocket of his robe. He had taken to keeping the ragged garment on from the moment he stepped into the theater. Slowly, he filled his pipe, darting quick glances at Marina. She looked on in amazement. The man in front of her was no longer the imposing, slightly sarcastic actor with perfect elocution and more or less polished manners that she had met a little while ago. He seemed to have given in to old age and sentimentality. Suddenly, he could have been any of the old Jews she had come across in Birobidzhan’s shops, long-haired, bearded, and a little stooped, all the warmth of life concentrated in their eyes, blazing from having seen too much. Or might he be putting on an act to engage her?
As if to answer her question, he smiled and gave her a wink.
“You’re a fast learner. That’s good. And once it’s learned, it won’t ever be forgotten. That’s something at least. It’s a shame you didn’t come sooner, Marina Andreyeva!”
He lit his pipe and took a few puffs, his eyes half-closed.
“You should have seen what it was like ten or fifteen years ago. It was crazy! People were coming in from far and wide—the Ukraine, Belarus, the Crimea, the Urals, Argentina, Canada, and so on! And they all came with the same dream. They wanted to create a new homeland for the Jews! Nobody cared about the mosquitos or the ice. … It’s the truth. … So yes, okay, it was terrible. The mosquitos were worse than the cold. But that didn’t put them off. Even the shots fired by the Japanese in Manchuria didn’t put them off. Those bastards would position themselves on islands in the Amur River and fire at men out fishing. Yes, really, I’m not making it up. We had to send out patrols. There was a song, I remember:
The home guards are keeping watch on the steep banks of the Amur River.
“We were those home guards. And my comrades pulled off some crazy exploits. I’ve known Jews who live off capturing tigers or bears, others camped down in the middle of forests to clear some land. That’s how the Waldheim kolkhoz came to be founded. … Waldheim means ‘house in the forest.’ It wasn’t easy to hold out, but they managed at Waldheim. You’ll see how beautiful it is out there in the spring. Okay, so we were a long way off the half a million Jews that our great Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin had expected. Thirty thousand perhaps, or maybe a few more? But thirty thousand Jews on their own land with nobody to stop them from working that land or breathing freely, with nobody threatening them. Thirty thousand men, women, and children who were no longer luftmentshn, or ‘loafers,’ as they used to call us back then. That was no small feat.”
Yaroslav punctuated his sentences with little jerks of his head. His frizzy crown of white hair sent the smoke from his pipe off in frenzied zigzags. His face looked younger, almost happy, without a trace of melancholy. Those glowing memories seemed to have the effect of a soothing hand on him.
“And it could have got even better. Did you see our film, Iskateli Schastia, ‘Seekers of Happiness,’ in Moscow? That was us, in all earnest, the pioneering Jews of these parts, of Birobidzhan. Heavens above, my girl, what a dream! And some fine acting talent too, don’t you think? Benjamin Zuskin, Maria Blumenthal-Tamarina … Not to mention music by our dear Isaak Dunayevsky. … They’ve all performed here, and with Mikhoels to boot. Can you imagine? Ah yes, we had some wonderful moments. … ”
He remained silent for a few seconds, gazing at Marina as if he expected her to understand those fondly remembered moments.
“Dreams are fabulous, Marina Andreyeva. You have to dream, especially when it’s difficult. Look around you. Things have changed, that’s for sure. But Birobidzhan is still a Jewish autonomous oblast. Take a map and you can put your finger on it. And there’s still a Sholem Aleichem Street in Birobidzhan. The Jews might not be in the majority here, true, but this is our home, more than anywhere else at any rate. If you go to the post office or the Committee building, you’ll find Yiddish lettering on the walls. And what about this theater? Our izbas and dachas are what they are, but we have our Yiddish theater, with real walls! And those walls have heard some awesome performances. Have you seen the list in Metvei’s office of all the musicians who’ve played here? Oistrakh, Gilels, Zak, Tamarkina, Grinberg, Fikhtengoltz … and others whose names I can’t remember off the top of my head. And all with awards from our esteemed Joseph Vissarionovich!”
Yaroslav laughed softly and nodded. His pipe had gone out, but he made no attempt to relight it. His voice had changed, suddenly flat and shaky.
“Let me tell you my theory, my dear Marina Andreyeva. The walls remember the music of our dreams, and that’s what’s making the Nazis go berserk over in Poland and the Ukraine. That’s why they are destroying, destroying, and destroying some more. … They won’t stop at massacring all the Jews in the world. No, they have to destroy our walls as well, to silence the echoes of our dreams. That’s why we mustn’t be afraid to have our dreams, especially when it’s difficult.”
He considered Marina for a moment, his old eyes moist and tender. Then he thrust his hand into his robe pocket and pulled out a strange flower with fleshy indigo blue petals and a furry gray stem.
“Around here, it’s known as the ‘diamond of the Amur.’ Apparently it’s from the orchid family. It grows on the banks of the river from time to time, under the snow.”
He held it out to Marina.
“Take it. It’s a present from Doctor Apron. I went to see him this morning because I’ve been having some trouble that’s quite common in old men like me. We had a little chat about you, and he asked me to give you the flower.”
Marina hesitated. Her hand trembled slightly as she took the orchid. She was surprised at how silky the stem felt, like skin.
Yaroslav studied her face, waited a few seconds and, when she said nothing, added, “If you want some advice from a crazy old man, here’s some from me. Love is nothing but a dream. Sometimes you die for love or for your dreams, and sometimes you don’t. But if you brush them aside and pretend they’re not tearing you apart, your life will be worse than death. You’ll be living the life of a luftmentsh, wandering the earth aimlessly until the end of time. Apron is a good man, Marina Andreyeva. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you otherwis
e. And he’s waiting for you. … Dear oh dear, he didn’t tell me that, of course, but I know he is.”
Late that evening, long after nightfall, Marina went to the hospital. It was one of the few buildings to keep a light shining on its porch. Apron lived above the dispensary. It took him a long time to come to the door. Marina’s teeth were chattering by the time he found her. He scooped her up out of the snow and carried her inside where it was warm.
As they went in, she said, “I don’t care if you get me into trouble. It doesn’t matter.”
Washington, June 24, 1950
One Hundred and Forty-Seventh Hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee
FOR SOME TIME, she had been sitting in a curious position, her arms folded over her chest and her hands resting on her shoulders, as if she were trying to hug herself. While she was talking she looked like a child remembering a good joke, her eyelids practically closed and a smile hovering over her lips.
“And that’s all there was to it,” she said, lifting her head and uncrossing her arms.
There was a brief silence, then Mundt’s big brow creased into a frown.
“To what?”
“Michael and I became lovers. You weren’t hoping I was going to give you the details, were you, sir?”
Wood’s double chin wobbled. I heard Shirley and her colleague stifle their giggles as they typed out her response. A blush spread right across Mundt’s face.
Without dropping his air of civility, Cohn asked, “And what happened next? Did Levine object to your relationship?”
“He didn’t know about it, nor did anybody else. I was careful, and Michael even more so. We never saw each other in broad daylight. Except for that first time, we always met at the theater. That was Michael’s idea. There were lots of nooks and crannies for us to hide in. It was fun. We were like a couple of teenagers. We would sneak in the door to the storerooms at the back of the building. Michael had made a set of keys. He was very good at that sort of thing, because of his surgeon’s fingers, he said. I would tell the women at the dacha that I had to go and rehearse for the production we were putting on for the Birobidzhan festival. If anyone came to check, I could always show myself, but it never happened. Bielke and Grandma Lipa probably guessed the truth, but they kept it to themselves. With Nadia, it was trickier. Perhaps she had her suspicions too, who knows? She wanted to come with me once or twice. We spent hours in the greenroom. She made me repeat the same lines, watched me act out silent scenes. Michael was hiding close by. It was quite funny. Once, he fell asleep in the wings and the cleaners very nearly caught him.”
“Wasn’t there a night watchman at the theater?”
“Why would anyone hire a night watchman for a theater in the middle of Siberia? Anyway, that arrangement didn’t last long. It was only for two months or so, and Michael was away a lot. He still had his rounds to do in the villages around the region.”
“Was he away for long?”
“A few days here, a week there, more if there was a snowstorm. It always felt like a very long time. When he was back, he would tie a red ribbon to the shutters of my window, at the dacha.”
“A red ribbon?”
“Yes, he would tie it there during the night. Nobody ever saw him do it, not even me.”
Amused by the memory, Marina gave a little laugh. McCarthy and Nixon began to lose patience. They weren’t there to hear a love story. Cohn must have sensed that.
“Did Agent Apron tell you anything about what he did when he wasn’t in Birobidzhan?”
“A bit, especially when he was trying to teach me English.”
“He taught you English?”
“Who else could have taught me?”
“What did he talk about?”
“Patients he’d treated, the people he’d met, and the animals. He would take care of them too. There was no vet, except at the big Waldheim kolkhoz. More than once he was asked to see what he could do for farm animals. He enjoyed it. Sometimes he would take pictures of bears and wolves he came across in the taiga. He took some really nice photos. He gave me a few of them.”
“Oh, did he? Where are they? We didn’t find any photos in your apartment.”
“I didn’t keep them. … How could I have?”
“Did someone develop them for him?”
“No, he took care of that himself. He had set up a little darkroom at the hospital. As I mentioned before, he was putting together a file on epidemics in Birobidzhan. He would take pictures of his patients, their houses, and the land around farms. … ”
“And people just let him, did they?”
“Yes.”
“He went near the Manchurian border, did he?”
“Yes, he liked driving along the Amur River, but it was strictly forbidden to take photos there.”
“He never told you that he crossed the river and went over the border?”
“No.”
“You didn’t suspect anything?”
“Suspect what? That he was a spy? No, he didn’t hide anything. Everyone had seen his photos. He pinned them up on the walls at the hospital. Women would ask him to take photographs of them with their children. Of course, later, when I found out … when he told me … But that didn’t matter. … ”
“What didn’t matter? I don’t understand. … ”
“Do you think it occurred to me to be suspicious of him?”
“You could have … ”
“Have you ever been in love, sir?”
“Miss Gousseiev … ”
“We spent very little time together. Michael was a foreigner. Everything he did was different. He wasn’t frightened like we were, and I liked that. Do you think I wanted to spoil the little time I had with him being suspicious of him? I knew all I needed to know, that he was the man I loved. Not like I had loved Lioussia. It wasn’t to prove to myself that I was still alive. It was different. Like exploring another way of life, discovering sides of myself I didn’t know I had, being better than I usually was, loving what I didn’t know, not thinking about myself all the time … ”
“Miss Goussov … ”
Nixon’s gravelly voice made me jump. I hadn’t noticed him lean in toward his microphone.
“Miss Goussov, do you have a shred of evidence to back up what you are saying?”
“Evidence?”
“A note from Apron? A love letter? A line to prove that you’re not making this whole story up?”
“You know perfectly well that I don’t.”
“Apron never wrote to you? Not even a note?”
“They’re all long gone.”
“In that case, why should we believe you?”
McCarthy seized the opportunity.
“Do you think that all you have to do to make us believe you is tell us stories for hours on end, miss?”
Marina Andreyeva had no answer to that. She looked back at them as if they were a pack of overexcited dogs. Resignation snuffed out all the light in her eyes. Exhaustion suddenly sapped her of her beauty. A small gesture of contempt was all she could manage as she replied, “And what about you? Can you prove that I’m lying? You have the FBI and the police at your service. You’ve searched my apartment, you’ve been questioning my acquaintances … ”
It was the answer of someone who knows they’re beaten, despondent and without conviction.
McCarthy and Nixon both had the same grin on their faces.
McCarthy rasped, “Like all American citizens, miss, we have a duty to defend our country by every honest means against the worst threat it has ever faced. Have you been honest, miss? I don’t think so. You’ve lied to this Committee from the word go. We’ve heard nothing but lies and more lies from your lips for the past two days.”
Nixon’s grating voice went on, “In my opinion, the reality was quite different. … I’m going to tell you what really happened. Your bosses at the NKVD deliberately sent you to that Jewish region, Birobidzhan, not to perform Jewish theatre, but to seduce the American, Mic
hael Apron. That was your mission, to make yourself his mistress. We’re only too familiar with that technique so favored by the Soviets. You tricked Levine, if he ever existed, into thinking you were a poor girl in trouble with the thugs at the NKVD. Maybe you fed Apron the same story as you fed us, that yarn about your night with Stalin and his wife’s suicide. That was one hell of a tale, just the thing to bait a US agent, don’t you think? Apron didn’t suspect you. You knew what you were doing. Who wouldn’t believe a beautiful woman like you when she gets going, eh? Apron confided in you. You wanted to find out if he was taking any photos other than the ones he was passing around, photos of Soviet military equipment on the border, for example. And once you’d gotten what you were after, that was it! That was the end of Agent Apron. … God only knows what he suffered at your hands! God only knows what agonies he endured! That was when your bosses came up with the smart idea of sending you over here, to our country, to the United States, with the fake passport you had found among Agent Apron’s belongings. You could use it to pass yourself off as his wife while you were setting up a network of communist traitors prepared to steal the secrets to the bomb. … ”
Nixon paused to catch his breath, very pleased with himself. He was grinning all over his face. Then he cranked up the machine another notch.
“What do you think of my version, Miss Goussov? Quite realistic, isn’t it? Closer to the truth than yours, don’t you think?”
McCarthy and his colleagues didn’t give Marina a chance to answer.
“Who are your contacts at the Soviet consulate in New York, miss? Did you meet Leonid Kvasnikov and Alexander Feklisov when you arrived in New York?”
“How do you explain that you were living in the apartment below Mr. Morton Sobell’s?”
“Of your friends in Hollywood, with the exception of Miss Lillian Hellman and Mrs. Dorothy Parker, who else did you persuade to support the Soviet Union, Miss Goussov?”
“Do you know what fate awaits you, Miss Gousseiev? Jail isn’t the worst punishment you face. In our country, espionage carries the death penalty … unless you agree to cooperate fully with this Committee.”