by Masha Gessen
“So you came here from Ashkhabad?” he begins.
“Yes.”
“Why would you leave a warm place like that to come here?”
“Apparently you know my story, but if you want to hear it from me, I came because my mother is here.”
“Your mother, let me see. Oh, yes. Religious propaganda, if I’m not mistaken?”
“She has been an atheist her entire life. In any case, she was amnestied.”
“An amnesty does not annul the fact of a crime. But I’m sure you, unlike your mother, are a loyal Soviet citizen.”
“I am a loyal Soviet citizen, of course.”
“And a member of the Komsomol.”
“And a member of the Komsomol.”
“So you would, of course, want to help your new motherland in every way.”
“Of course. This country is fighting fascism, therefore I want to help it.” This is a declaration of conditional love, and it maddens Gurov instantly. Color comes to his otherwise bland and colorless face. He is about forty and average in every way but one: he is clearly, conspicuously, well fed. He has a thickness about him, and he has plump hands, and now he reaches into a drawer of his gray metal desk and produces a package of cookies. He puts it on the desk, unwraps the brown paper slowly, and, pushing aside the black telephone, advances the open package toward Ester.
“Would you like a biscuit?”
Hunger is accepting the humiliation of a cookie from him. She concentrates on taking small, indifferent bites.
“I have a form for you to sign. Nothing special, just a promise that, should you hear anything we should know about—you know, about the state of mind among the Poles here—you’ll let us know.” He reaches into a drawer again, and a blank piece of paper appears on the desk.
“I don’t want to sign anything.”
“It’s just a formality.”
“But there is no need. As an honest Soviet citizen, if I ever hear of any plot against the regime, I will certainly let you know. No signatures necessary. But, you know, there is nothing like that circulating among the people I know, because they are all loyal persons not involved in any conspiracies.” This is not a lie, exactly. It is a safe generalization to say that the former Polish citizens, brought to Biysk in cattle cars, forced to dig toilets through the coldest and hungriest winter of their lives, hate the Soviet regime. At the same time, these are Jews who credit the Siberian twist of fate with their own survival. There are, indeed, no conspiracies among them, and no vengeful plans; there is only waiting, and the hope that Germany will be defeated and they will be allowed to leave the Soviet Union. Theirs, then, is a loyalty, of sorts.
There was a misunderstanding between Ester and Major Gurov, and at the center of this misunderstanding was fear. Fear was the most important instrument of control in the Soviet Union. It was cultivated in every citizen virtually from birth. At eighteen Ester had happened into a life where all of her peers had grown up in a world of purges, show trials, and denunciations. Mass executions had been going on since before they were born. People were imprisoned, tried, executed, not just for what they did or may have done according to denunciations or false charges but also for who they were: clergy, landowners, intellectuals, the children of any of these groups. Major Gurov, who was in his mid-forties, had spent his entire working life in these conditions, where everyone he “controlled” was terrified of him, and where he was terrified of everyone above and below him, because purges in NKVD ranks were perhaps even more common than elsewhere. He might never before have seen a person who refused to sign. His hatred for Ester was preordained because she was, in Soviet-speak, “socially foreign,” but his fascination with her stemmed from her unpredictable actions.
“You scum!” Major Gurov rises, placing his potbelly over his desk with unexpected agility. “How dare you even say the word loyalty! Maybe you don’t understand? Well, you will! You will be spending the night here.” He pushes a button on his desk, and an officer enters the room. “Take her to the cell,” Major Gurov says, his face blotchy as he regains control.
The cell is probably a large room, but Ester cannot tell, because everywhere there are backs and bellies and other women’s hair. The cacophony of voices makes her realize there must be scores of women here. Judging from the voices, they are mostly young. They are sitting on mattress-less wooden bunk beds and standing between them as in a crowded tram car. It smells of sweat and sheepskin. The lucky women who have managed to claim space next to the wall hide their faces in their collars and sleep. Others talk about being caught stealing and make predictions regarding treatment and punishment. Ester spots a space at the edge of a bunk, next to someone’s felt boot—it can’t be more than four inches square—and carefully angles herself onto it. She balances her foot against something she cannot see—it could be the leg of another bunk or it could be someone else’s foot—puts her hands in her father’s coat pockets, wraps her fingers around the bar of soap her mother slipped in as she was leaving, slouches as much as she can, squeezes her eyes shut against the yellow electrical light, and goes to sleep.
They let her out in the morning, with her bar of soap but without her passport. If the gravity of her new situation was just seeping in as she walked home through the creaky snow in the still-dark morning, when she saw Bella, one sleepless night thinner, paler, and older, she knew their relative stability was gone.
After seeing her daughter taken away, Bella had run to the Polish representative’s office to ask for help, only to be told the representative could not interfere in the fate of a Soviet citizen. He also told her it was serious.
He probably knew of other cases in which former Polish citizens were similarly harassed by the NKVD, and Bella herself knew of at least one. Mikhal Bekker, a Communist and former colleague of Bella’s from teaching at the Bund gymnasium, had been deported to Biysk because he had a father who had been arrested—for the crime of owning a business. The NKVD in Biysk had probably approached Mikhal as a potential informer because he had belonged to the Polish Communist Party. Mikhal had the bad sense to tell his mother about having been approached, and his mother had the bad sense to run to his boss—Mikhal was by then working at a factory—and beg him to save her son from the NKVD advances and threats, and the boss had the good sense to denounce him immediately, and Mikhal was sentenced to eight years of hard labor for disclosing a state secret.
So at least Bella and Ester knew not to tell anyone. They also knew they were now Major Gurov’s hostages. As Ester was taken down to the cell, Major Gurov screamed that she would see her passport only after she signed. Leaving Biysk, difficult under any circumstances with the ever-harsher travel restrictions going into effect, was impossible without a passport. And in Biysk, he could control what happened to her. He could get her fired, for example. Within about six weeks of that night spent in the detention cell, Ester was summoned to the head of the bottling department at the spirits plant. She was being fired. But why? She worked just as hard as the rest. “I’m sorry, girl, there is nothing I can do,” the boss answered. “Orders from above.”
Next she got a job as a loader at the lumberyard warehouse. That lasted two months. Then, about a month after she managed to enroll in nursing classes, she saw Major Gurov walking by the window. “You’ll see, I’m about to be expelled,” she told the woman sitting next to her. “But that’s impossible—you are our best student!” She was expelled that very day. She did not spend much longer as an accountant’s apprentice before she was told she was unfit for the job. In this case, though, my grandmother, no lover of mathematics, acknowledges that it may have been true.
Gurov’s was a slow way of killing them. Every time Ester was fired, she lost her ration card and she and her mother were reduced to Bella’s 300-gram-a-day dependent’s allowance. That and carrot tea, or hot water, as you like.
NOVEMBER 1943
“He is killing us.” Boris’s look as Ester makes her pronouncement is undecipherable. Whenever he gets very
serious, he looks displeased, as though he could blow up any second. He has a habit of covering his chin and mouth with his right hand—this is to conceal the scar and the dent in his roughly shaved cheek where a piece of jaw is missing—and that makes it even more difficult to understand his facial expression. Ester is forging on because she cannot stop now that she has started. She has decided it is time to tell him: their relationship has gone too far for him to denounce her, and it has gone far enough that he ought to know what has dominated her life for a year now.
Mindful of Mikhal Bekker’s story, she has not told anyone. So they do have her in this sense—passport, ration card, and mind. The most she has let herself get away with, before deciding to tell Boris, is writing friends that she is depressed. They have responded with inane cheer.
You shouldn’t take your troubles to heart. Spit on the asses and on their opinion, look at the world more optimistically, and, just to spite your enemies, live as though nothing had happened. That would be the smartest thing to do, trust old grandpa V.P. I’m sure that if I saw you now, I would slap you around a bit to get the depression out of you. The main thing is to give up your foreigner views and start looking at the world through my eyes. Have we got a deal? Good.
“Grandpa V.P.,” Viktor Pilipenko, the young poet and Party functionary, wrote that a few months before he died of tuberculosis and about half a year into Ester’s ordeal.
Her closest friend from college, Lena Zonina, implored her to find a literary allusion to explain the source of her depression in a way that would go unnoticed by the military censors who were now reading all the mail in the country. Ester wrote that she was being coerced into the role of Tanya from Maxim Gorky’s The Life of Klim Samgin. That character was compelled to inform for the czar’s secret police.
Though they roomed together briefly two years ago, when Lena’s mother was in the hospital, Lena is something of an aberration among Ester’s college friends—a young woman who never lived in a dormitory but lived in an apartment belonging to her mother, an apartment that, thanks to her mother’s status as a member of the Party elite, they did not have to share with anyone else. When other students were evacuated, Lena stayed in Moscow with her mother. Lena wrote back: Your letter worried me a whole lot, and I showed it to my mother. She asked me to tell you that if you are an honest girl and a member of the Komsomol, then you should stop resisting.
Ester has not written back to Lena in six months. Lena sends letter after letter, alternately expressing guilt and worry that something has happened to Ester, and Ester has sat down to write to her on several occasions, but each time a wave of outrage has welled up. What is worse, right after getting that letter, she raged at Major Gurov. When he started in again about her duty as a Komsomol member, she said, “I joined the Komsomol because I wanted to go into the army to fight Hitler. But now I see that you are not the only one who views the Komsomol in a completely different way than I do. I don’t want any part of an organization of snitches. So here is my Komsomol card.” Gurov’s eyes bulged out then. He rose, pulled out his pistol, and shouted so loudly his voice broke on the high notes: “I ought to shoot you now!” This was the second time he held her overnight.
Major Gurov now has her passport and her Komsomol card. Her best friend seems to think she is a traitor. Her mother thinks she is a hero. Ester is the loneliest person on Earth.
She met Boris Gessen at a friend’s house. He is a Moscow Jew, a demobilized soldier, with a wound and medals. He lives with his father, a former journalist from Moscow who was evacuated to the Biysk region, where he now works as the assistant director of a collective farm, the same one where Bella was sent for forced labor. Ester does not find Boris overwhelmingly appealing or attractive, but she accepts his gallant attentions: he travels from the collective farm by train, freezing, to see her, and he brings her potatoes. He deserves to know.
“They come every three or four weeks, and they take me to him.”
Boris lifts his head suddenly. “So that’s where you were that time?”
There was an evening, early in his courtship, when he came to find Ester out of the house: she was spending the night in jail. Bella fumbled, unable to concoct anything convincing, and Boris left miffed, sure that she was on a date with another man, for he could think of no other reason she could not be fetched when he had come all this way, more than an hour by train, freezing, as always, in the cold space between cars, since he did not have a travel pass. Now he feels relieved, and he smiles his invitation for Ester to confirm and clear the misunderstanding.
“Yes,” says Ester uncertainly. Oddly, she realizes she felt guilty. She could tell long ago that Gurov was attracted to her. This, she assumes, is why he regularly gives her biscuits and also perhaps why he has not killed her on any of those days when he has yanked his gun out of its holster and swung it ridiculously over his head, getting redder and redder as he screamed that he would shoot. She realizes she cannot tell Boris why she thinks her tormentor saves her from himself, and that makes a bitter stickiness appear in her throat. She reminds herself that her task is to tell Boris.
“I think we’re both sick to death of the routine; every time it’s the same thing.” She attempts a smile.
Boris nods, his hand covering his chin again. “So, how does it go?”
“He usually begins by saying, ‘So, what are you going to say this time? Are you going to be stubborn again?’ ”
“And you?”
“I say, ‘Aren’t you tired of this yet? I already told you once and for all.’ ”
“My God, Ester.” She knows Boris suspects her of being crazy—or hopelessly foreign, which is the same thing—and sometimes he reminds her of that in this particularly exasperated tone.
“Then he usually starts screaming and cursing about my mother,” she continues. “Then—well, then it depends on his mood. Some days he is very calm and patronizing, explaining that I have ‘a civic duty’; other times he shouts and threatens. He pulls out his pistol and screams, ‘The safety is off! Here I come!’ I don’t know, I guess he tries different approaches. Sometimes we have very peaceful discussions, he and I.” She added the last sentence to make it clear she is not exaggerating her troubles, but now she tastes that guilty bitterness again.
“What else does he say?”
“That I won’t get away from them, that they’ve got me, that my mother is a known counterrevolutionary. That there is a war on, that all decent human beings have to help the Soviet state, that there are enemies everywhere but I am concealing them because I am such a ‘tightwad.’ I tell you, we both keep saying the same things over and over. And I tell him all the time that as soon as I see an enemy of the Soviet state I will come and inform him personally, without signing anything. Why are you laughing?”
“You haven’t thought of anything better to say?”
“I mean, the topic is always the same,” she adds as an unnecessary defensive clarification. “The last few times there has been another man, of lower rank, who was obviously attracted to me. As soon as I am brought in, he joins us. I don’t know what this other one’s name is, but when he is there Gurov acts much more civilized than when we are alone. So then he tries to influence me verbally only.”
Now Boris definitely looks angry. “Aren’t you afraid?”
“Yes, of course,” she answers, and sees she has missed the point of the question. “What do you mean?”
“Aren’t you afraid they will do something to you?”
“Yes, of course, I’m afraid they’ll shoot me. Oh, you mean that? I don’t know, it hadn’t occurred to me, really.”
“Ester, you have to get out of Biysk.”
“Good idea, Boris.” She regains her footing. “I must say that has occurred to me.”
He gets that expression again. Maybe she should not have trusted him. Can she really afford a confidence that is contingent on a romantic relationship? She rises and puts water on to boil. There is a knock, followed by the squeak of th
e outer door being opened by someone who is too impatient or too sure of himself to wait for an answer. She walks to open the inner door and comes face-to-face with a sergeant, who surveys the room and gets a slightly confused look when he sees Boris sitting there in his uniform, a couple of medals and a yellow badge on his chest. A yellow badge signifies a serious injury. A decorated war veteran commands more respect these days than just about anyone, short of the generalissimo himself. It is clearly difficult for the sergeant to fathom what an upstanding citizen, a hero, could be doing in the company of a defiant unreliable like Ester.
“Come out into the entryway,” commands the sergeant.
She follows him, and so does Boris.
“I didn’t ask you to come,” the sergeant says. “I only asked her.”
“We have no secrets from each other,” says Boris sternly, as if it were true. “And I want to know why you came.”
“What relation are you of hers?” asks the sergeant, stepping back slightly, as though beginning to doubt that he has a right to be here.
“I am her husband,” says Boris. “And she is my wife,” he adds, as though that further clarified the relationship.
“Husband?” The sergeant’s voice is higher than it was a minute ago. “Then wait right here. I’ll be back.”
The sergeant disappeared out the door, never to return again. Ester and Boris assumed that he reported back to Major Gurov with the news of a husband, a wounded decorated war veteran of the Great Patriotic War, and Gurov decided to stop hounding Ester. Meanwhile, Ester was faced with the sudden possibility of marriage. As soon as the sergeant left, Boris announced that he could not lie to a representative of the Soviet state, and since he just had, they had to rectify the situation by marrying immediately. He was serious, for the most part.