by Masha Gessen
CHAPTER SEVEN
JUNE 15, 1941
In the last six weeks Ruzya and Samuil have walked the length and breadth of Moscow. They have exhausted their repertoire of Mayakovsky poems. They have carried out comparative studies of ice cream served on street corners citywide. Like all young Moscow couples, they conduct their relationship in the street. Ruzya is still living in the cramped basement apartment with her parents and the twins, who are now eleven years old. (Her older brother, Yasha, is by this time a married man, no longer living in Moscow. A professional pilot, he has been test-flying planes in Sverdlovsk.) Samuil, his parents, and his teenage sister occupy two adjacent rooms at the end of a communal apartment’s corridor. On the one occasion the couple spent time there, when the rest of Samuil’s family was occupied outside the home, they overheard a neighbor’s loud lament regarding Ruzya’s too well-worn coat, left carelessly to hang in the entryway: the neighbor would have to report to Samuil’s mother that the boy was keeping inappropriately shabby company. From the pinched look on Samuil’s face, Ruzya gathered that, much as he would wish otherwise, his beloved mother was not above such concerns. They have stayed out-of-doors ever since.
There is no better time to walk the streets of Moscow than the months of May and June. An occasional chill provides the excuse needed to press close to each other, but it is never too cold to stand still and stare endlessly at the lights in the distance or at each other, struggling finally to say the obvious and finding no relief even after releasing the words that have crowded out all others. They have done all the known routes: the romantic Boulevard Ring, the animated Garden Ring, the foreboding, vast granite embankments of the Moscow River. They have lingered on bridges, under streetlamps, and next to monuments. They have taken that extra circle around the block, that extra ten minutes on the bench, that extra moment just inside the entryway of her building before parting. They have told each other about their exams—they are both finishing the fourth year of five-year programs—the pressure and the cramming, but still school has receded into a haze. They have told each other they are in love. Somehow, using interjections, silences, and sighs, they have now come to a new agreement: their relationship should pass into its next stage.
Their initial plan’s elaborate nature betrayed their fears. They decided to take a boat down the Moskva-Volga Canal. Samuil said it was an appropriate choice because the new channel, which connected the Moscow River to the Volga four years earlier, making the Soviet Union’s landlocked capital into a world-class port city, symbolized that in the future nothing would be impossible. What he meant, they both knew: their plan called for leaving town. Once aboard one of those beautiful new white boats, they would choose a stop—they all had names like Sunny Meadow and Green Harbor—to disembark and wander until they found seclusion in one of the parks that, according to the papers, lined the canal. They went to the river port early that afternoon—it was their day, they knew, because neither had exams on a Thursday—and stood in line for two hours. They felt a bit out of place among the white-shirted and straw-hatted families with shiny children whose very presence seemed designed for the neoclassical splendor of the port, with its alleys of round streetlamps lighting the approach to the white boats. Ruzya, at Samuil’s request, wore the rust-colored dress she had had on at the party where they met; he, for utilitarian reasons best left unspoken, had donned a trench coat. Trying hard to ignore the moms, dads, and nannies, all of whom, they felt certain, could plainly see their intentions, they engaged in that sort of regressive chatter couples in love easily fall into. He called her “Puppy” and held her large hands and told her he was ecstatic to be in her paws. She told him he had peas in his eyes and made a production of calculating their number: “4,817 little ones and 599.5 large ones.”
The line was cut off no more than ten people in front of them. There would be no more boats that day. It was as if some force had pushed them apart—they let go of each other’s hands and breathed their separate sighs of relief at the collapse of their thrilling and frightening plan—then allowed them to reunite, their bond cemented now by the momentary lightness of separation. “I now consider us husband and wife,” Samuil whispered, putting his arm around her.
They walked most of the way back into town: four or five hours, sore feet, and a new kind of planning. Now that they considered themselves married, what would they do? His parents were leaving for the dacha the following weekend, but the prospect of facing their friendly and nosy flatmates frightened Ruzya, who after that single visit to Samuil’s home was convinced his family would reject her. Her own parents and younger brothers were planning to leave in just over two weeks to spend the summer at a dacha Moshe had been building for years. He had a dream, a most bizarre one for an urban, educated Jew—he wanted to have a vegetable garden. This summer, finally, following years of scrimping and saving and countless arguments with his wife, he was going to commit his family to three months of digging, watering, and fretting. Once they were gone, Ruzya and Samuil could set up housekeeping in her parents’ apartment.
Today, three days after their failed boat expedition, they feel a new legitimacy. Separated for days by their exams, they meet now in town, she in the rust-colored dress and he in the trench coat, and they take the tram to Sokolniki, a giant park whose carefully trimmed alleys give way to what, in urban Russia, passes for complete wilderness: a mixed forest where squirrels and even moose wander virtually undisturbed. Ruzya and Samuil venture far enough to feel that it is unlikely they will be seen by anyone other than the animals. They lay down Samuil’s trench coat, and they become husband and wife.
PART TWO
WAR
1941–1942
Ruzya and Samuil
CHAPTER EIGHT
JUNE 20, 1941
Salomea is running. She is a student at the Textile Institute in Moscow—she came here from Bialystok a year ago—and she is running to see her friend Ester at IFLI, because Salomea has just received an urgent unsigned telegram: ESTER’S PARENTS GONE TO VISIT UNCLE ZALMAN STOP SHE SHOULD GO VISIT FRIEND STOP. Salomea knows that Uncle Zalman is the Goldbergs’ refugee relative whose family was deported to the Russian Far North last year. The telegram means Ester’s parents have been arrested. Salomea is scheming as she runs, imagining Ester can move to Salomea’s dorm room to evade the secret police.
They hold a silent war council in Ester’s room at IFLI. Salomea hands her the telegram, and Ester then hands it on to Eda, her roommate, a Jewish girl from Grodno. All three of them have relatives interned on both sides of the border, in the ghettos in the German-occupied part of Poland, and in the forced-labor settlements in the Russian Far North. All have been expecting just this sort of news about those in their families who remain free. All know, of course, that walls have ears and they cannot discuss the matter at hand out loud; nor do they need to.
Eda and Salomea look at Ester questioningly. She scoffs: “I am here, anyway.” Translated, that means: I am far enough away, and surely they won’t come looking for me. There is no reason to hide. Eda and Salomea nod their agreement. Now Ester sits down on her bed and weeps, and her two friends sit on either side of her, holding her hands and occasionally wiping away her tears. She is crying for her parents and for her home. Going back to visit, as she planned to do in just over a month, is no longer possible: that would mean risking arrest. Not that she has anyplace to go: their apartment and everything in it have surely been confiscated. Every time she stops crying she thinks of Isaj, who was clearly the one who sent the telegram and whom she may not see for a long time, and the tears come again. She is so alone in the world now, it is as though she could feel herself swaying in the winds from every direction. By evening, she has a chill.
JUNE 22, 1941, MORNING
Another message, a small triangle, this time delivered by the post. My dear beloved daughter, I am passing through Moscow. Papa is not home, so do not go there yet. Papa is well, but he is not with me. I’m in a hurry because the train is about
to move. I will write again as soon as lean.
Ester thinks of Isaj’s triangles: they were an affectation, his version of fashion. She has never had to consider the idea that a triangle in place of an envelope means that the letter writer was lucky just to have a piece of paper on which to write. Ester has heard that when people—some people—find a triangular piece of paper with an address written on it, they will affix a stamp and drop the missive into a mailbox. It is the least—or perhaps the most—they can do for those who are being taken away. Ester understands that Bella has been sent into exile while Jakub was kept in Bialystok, presumably to face trial.
The last wave of arrests and deportations swept through the annexed Polish territories on the night of June 19, 1941. According to secret-police documents, ten categories of “unreliables” were targeted, among them “participants in counterrevolutionary parties and anti-Soviet nationalist organizations” (category 1) and members of their families (category 8). Jakub, as a Zionist, would have fallen into category 1, which numbered 2,059 people in the region that had been designated Western Belarus. They were separated from their families at so-called concentration points—what amounted to transit camps—and placed in prisons on June 21, the day before Germany invaded the Soviet Union. Bella, despite her Bund membership, must have fallen into category 8, which was why she was among the 22,000 to 25,000 people placed on the trains going through Belarus and Moscow on their way to Siberia. Five of the twenty trains never made it: German bombs destroyed the railroads ahead of them, and the deportees were allowed to disperse—a sort of liberation that almost certainly spelled death for the Jews among them, for they were released into open fields that would become German in a matter of days. Bella was lucky: she was on one of two Bialystok trains that arrived in the Siberian city of Biysk on July 4, 1941, bringing 3,002 deportees, most of them educated people, who were to be put to work on the collective farms. Without a trial, all of them had been condemned to twenty years of forced labor.
JUNE 22, 1941, MINUTES AFTER NOON
The twins come bounding back in just after Ruzya has sent them out the door and settled in for an afternoon of studying. The minute the eleven-year-olds return, they are shouting in agitation. The boys, both sporting the schoolboy’s regulation stubble on their heads, are inexplicably short and pudgy—no one else in the family has their build—and they look frankly ridiculous when they put on a show of boyish joy and bravado, or whatever it is they are trying to portray at the moment. “War!” they scream over and over. “Hooray!” “War!” They start skipping around the room.
“What are you talking about?” Ruzya asks, alarmed. She has put them under strict instruction not to return home before dusk, and this may or may not be the reason she suspects their screams are not just part of some game they have dragged in from the street.
“War!” they shout again, in unison. “There is a war on!” They point toward the street, as though war had just erupted right there on First Kolobovsky Lane.
Ruzya attempts to look out the window, though, of course, she cannot see anything from the basement. A few people run past, and that could mean anything. She turns on the radio. The foreign commissar, Vyacheslav Molotov, is explaining that, just over eight hours ago, Germany broke the terms of the bilateral nonaggression pact and violated the borders of the Soviet Union. Ruzya feels tears start to pour down her face, and she pushes aside the stupid twins and runs out the door. “Our cause is just,” Molotov is intoning. “The enemy will be beaten. We will be victorious.”
She is running along the crooked lanes of her neighborhood to the huge Garden Ring, where she turns left and keeps running, breathless, inhaling her own tears mixed with the diesel fumes of trucks stalling at an intersection, until she reaches the large building where Samuil lives. There are others running up and down this street, each person on a separate path, and there are smaller and larger crowds everywhere, surrounding the radio loudspeakers mounted on lampposts, but none of them sees one another. She does not manage to catch her breath in the elevator to the fourth floor, and she is still wiping her face with a white handkerchief when Samuil opens the door. He is already wearing his uniform, dark green-brown trousers tucked into tall boots and a long shirt belted with a leather contraption meant for a gun he does not yet have.
“I’m on my way to the academy,” he says. If there is a war, certainly all of the Military Law Academy’s students and staff are expected to report for service.
“I’ll walk you there,” she says, and a sudden fear that he will be taken away from her today, that he will go to the front as soon as he reaches the academy, crosses her mind.
In fact, he will not go for nearly eight months—but the fear stays with her from this minute on. That, and the fear that Moscow will be bombed.
JUNE 25, 1941
Eda is running into the dorm and up the stairs, storming into their room and grabbing Ester, dazed and half-dressed, to drag her out into the street.
“What happened?”
“Come quickly, now!”
They stumble out the door of their redbrick building, and Eda takes a quick moment to orient herself. It has been three days since the war began, and everything is different: the trams are no longer running and even the crowds are changed, thick and anxious. She struggles to get her bearings on the street where they have been living for nearly a year.
“This way.” She pulls Ester along.
“Why? What is going on?”
“Listen, your Isaj, he was walking down the street. Maybe he is looking for you.”
Now Ester is silent and they run up Stromynka Street, zigzagging around people dragging heavy sacks—some with supplies of grain or other food, some with their radio receivers, which everyone has been ordered to turn in, some with whatever they have deemed worth hiding away from their home—until they are just behind a man in a wrinkled dark suit and a flat cap, carrying a leather travel case. Eda points at him. It is not Isaj’s back—too broad and fleshy, even under the suit—but Eda’s conviction moves Ester to skip a few steps ahead of the man and turn abruptly around before shaking her head “no” to a disappointed Eda.
Eda, of course, has seen Isaj only in a couple of photographs, and these were group photos of Ha-Shomer ha-Zair, which made everyone look generic. Maybe she thought the man looked foreign—with his leather case he did, vaguely. Maybe she thought she had noticed some feature that made Isaj stand out in any crowd. Maybe she just thought anything is possible in this city, where nothing is the same anymore.
Ever since the first announcement three days ago the radio has been broadcasting instructions on how to behave during the air raids: turn off the lights and go down to the bomb shelter or into the metro (this is the cable radio on lampposts and in those buildings that are wired; wireless units are illegal now: the more the Germans advance, the more radio frequencies they can put to their own use). By the first night all the streetlamps had been turned off and lightbulbs in courtyards and entryways changed to dim blue ones, which are said to be invisible from the air. Black curtains or any dark cloth that happened to be available went up over the windows everywhere in the city. Practice air raid alarms began on that first night. Many people now carry gas masks wherever they go; Eda and Ester have no idea where they might be procured.
And if only the gas masks were the only change in the streets! The Russians, so sullen and resigned ordinarily, have been supercharged with anxiety They line up outside grocery stores and savings banks, and more and more of them are crowding the waiting halls at the railroad stations, trying to get themselves and their belongings on any train going east. And then there are the conscripts. General mobilization began June 23, and suddenly every other man seemed to be wearing a uniform. That day, or the next, they first started marching through the streets—to and from railroad stations, or their barracks, or draft offices—sometimes with song, always out of sync, and always alongside them are women running, sometimes with children, all faces streaked with tears. Dogs run
, too, and then linger in confused clumps after the women disperse.
Tomorrow the war effort will take over Ester and Eda’s dormitory building, which is being turned into a barracks and conscription point; the residents will be moved to a school building elsewhere in town. Ester and Eda have, of course, resolved not only to move but to join the effort. Ester has been making the rounds of draft offices, telling the story of two girls from Nazi-occupied Poland who made their way to Moscow specifically to join the Red Army and fight the Nazis. She repeats this version of their histories so frequently and so insistently that she has already grown to believe it. So far they have had no luck: the draft officers seem not to know quite what to do with women, and foreign ones at that. Yesterday she was asked if she was a member of the Komsomol. Most Soviet young people joined in high school, when Ester was attending the Hebrew Gymnasium in Bialystok. “Join the Komsomol, and then we’ll talk,” the officer told her. She will join today.
JULY 5, 1941
An entire week has gone by, and Ruzya has only just learned that it happened. A friend of Grisha’s, someone she has met once or twice, came by to tell her. Grisha Petrosyan was the smartest boy in Ruzya’s school gang, and one of her best friends—nothing romantic, but he came over every day, to see her and play chess with her mother, for Eva counted supreme mastery of the game among her many talents. In a group of brilliant and hopeful young people, he was the star. In 1938 he was admitted simultaneously to two faculties of Moscow University, and he was among the first students to be awarded the Stalin Stipend, the highest honor bestowed on young scholars.