by Nir Baram
…
The next morning there was a commotion when he got to the office. The receptionist greeted him in tears, and Carlson’s young assistant sneaked away, pretending not to see Thomas. He went to Carlson’s office, and was astonished to find Frau Tschammer sitting in his chair, shuffling through his papers. It was clear that disaster had struck.
‘Thomas!’ She stood up. There was a ripple of panic in her voice. ‘Mailer has gone to New York. He didn’t say when he was coming back.’
She was staring at him. In the end, even Frau Tschammer believed in his talent, in his storied reputation: if the staff at Milton encountered an abyss, before anyone could even think of moving, Thomas would have already have leaped into it and, God knows how, landed on his feet. He would blaze a trail across it, and everyone would follow.
Thomas didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t summon the strength to trade barbs or make toxic small talk with Frau Tschammer. It was all pointless now. After all, collapse was a simple matter.
‘Frau Tschammer,’ he said, ‘the Milton Company is liquidating its business in Germany. And if we had been brave enough to examine things as they truly were, we would have seen it coming long ago.’
LENINGRAD
WINTER 1939
That night the iron bed creaked in her parents’ bedroom. Sasha could hear them still discussing whether or not to sign the protocols of the investigation, even though it misrepresented their answers, and whether or not to write a confession. They ran through the same names over and over: A confessed and only got a short sentence, B confessed and disappeared, C refused to confess and was liquidated, D refused to confess and in the end they decided he was innocent.
Her father had already been interrogated twice, her mother only once, and to their surprise they were allowed home, to reconsider their pleas of not guilty. Meanwhile her father wasted time collecting documents and letters that testified to their good character and their loyalty to the party.
The next day an article appeared in the newspaper about the discovery of a counter-revolutionary cell in the Physical-Technical Institute. Two agents from the West, Germans, had joined forces with the last followers of Pyatakov, and, under the influence of the Unified Centre, led by the criminals Trotsky and Zinoviev, they had plotted ‘to sabotage major industrial facilities’. Monstrous treachery had been discovered in the institute: ‘Enemies of the people planned to kill thousands with a single goal: to defile the revolution.’
That day her father was fired. He returned home at 10 a.m., closed the shutters in the bedroom and lay down on the bed. Her mother had been busy with housework since early morning, pickling mushrooms and beans, making wild berry jam, her white apron stained crimson and brown. Sasha was listening to a record on the gramophone. Arthur Rubinstein, whom her father had called ‘a pianist for sentimental salons’, was playing the first movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. In a moment the Funeral March of Chopin’s Second Piano Sonata would be heard, and then the finale would thunder, a piece that her father called ‘the greatest musical manipulation of the nineteenth century’. Sasha always listened to music in the same order: Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, sometimes Mendelssohn, and finally Schumann. She dusted the little shelf on the bookcase that was allotted to her: Schumann’s ‘Carnival Jest from Vienna’, Hanon’s piano exercises for beginners, copies of Le Nouvelliste, yellowed issues of Nir magazine, a book of poems by Balmont with a dedication to her parents.
Mother had not played the piano in a long time. She used to play with the twins and she and Kolya had occasionally performed together. A few years ago, after a few weeks of practice, they even played a short piece from a Borodin symphony, ‘In the Steppes of Central Asia’, which Kolya renamed ‘the evil steps of Asia’.
At 2 p.m. Valeria called her husband. ‘Andreyusha,’ she shouted. ‘Andreyusha, I need you!’
He shuffled into the living room in underpants and a filthy undershirt, as if he’d been fished out of a deep sleep. Thin strands of silver hair dangled on either side of his head. Her mother told him to pick up a heavy jar of cucumbers and place it next to the window. He looked at her incredulously. ‘You called me for that?’ he whined.
‘Yes, exactly for that.’
He hoisted the jar up, pressed it to his chest, carried it to the window and thumped it onto the shelf.
In the afternoon Vladimir and Nikolai returned from school, and hovered at the door to the apartment. Kolya lazily leaned his long, slender body—a beanpole, according to Maxim Podolsky—against the wall. Next to him, Vlada stood erect in his grey coat, with blue and black ribbons on the sleeves and two rows of buttons on the breast, like an old officer’s coat. Vlada wasn’t tall like Kolya, but his body was broad and muscular, and it seemed as if he always demanded more space for himself. His hair was short, his face flushed with a babyish pink that softened the severity of his know-it-all expression.
Apparently someone at school had read the article. Sasha wondered at the stories that circulated in the schoolyard. Boys were usually obsessed with punishment—guillotines and nooses inflamed their imaginations—and were disappointed to learn that most traitors were shot. Once they had some fun at the expense of a boy whose father had been arrested: they painted their faces white, pounded their chests and roared like bears. Then they extended their index fingers, raised their thumbs and ‘shot the traitor’.
Their mother looked at the twins and at the jar of jam, and then she glanced at Sasha. Each was hoping that the other would recover her wits, break the silence and scold the boys: Kolya, Vlada, don’t stand at the door like a pair of dolts! Quickly, wash your face and hands and sit up at the table. But all Sasha wanted to do was hug Kolya and stroke his hair—it looked smooth from a distance, but felt like straw when you touched it—and to assure him that he should forget the nonsense Vlada had told him at school and remember that Vlada couldn’t cope with his own fears, and that was why he poured them down his brother’s throat like medicine.
But she couldn’t chastise Vlada now. His expression of terror at a catastrophe he didn’t yet understand showed that he had never believed in his own doomsday scenarios. In fact he had prepared Kolya for a nightmare that he didn’t think would come true.
Valeria spoke at last, and her voice was so muffled that it seemed to be emerging from the jam jar. ‘Children, wash your hands and sit at the table.’
Vlada headed for the stairs and disappeared into the attic. Kolya wandered aimlessly around the house, sliding his fingers along the walls, pressing his face against the window, stroking the books on the wooden shelf, touching the back of the armchair, gaping at their father’s charcoal drawing of the moustachioed war hero Chapayev. Andrei was proud that they had met at the front in 1919. The minute they parted he sat on the ground and drew him from memory.
Her mother, still on her feet, looked at the stairs and at Kolya, as though expecting the twins to recover and come to the table. Then she wearily returned to the jars.
Sasha went up to the roof. Rain slashed down, but a warm April breeze lurked in the cold air. The bald black branches of the birches shone silver and above the river the sky was grey up to the horizon. As it darkened in the twilight the horizon was like a gate about to close upon the city.
Some branches at the top of the alder tree knocked against the windows. How many letters of complaint had they sent about that? Kozlov, who worked with her father at the institute, had volunteered to trim them, but her father didn’t want to risk it. Suppose someone complained that they were taking liberties with the building, disturbing the neighbours? They would be evicted. ‘For two metres of cold floor, a window looking out on a filthy courtyard and a little iron bed, in which a man can lie on me but not next to me, I will marry a horse,’ Nadya wrote once, and as a kind of joke she had sent the entire article to the editor of Izvestia, Comrade Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin.
Now Sasha felt exposed on the roof she was so fond of, as if the neighbours’ eyes were jabbing her from ev
ery side. ‘Sometimes,’ Emma Rykova had laughed once, ‘you have to plan the look you’re going to throw at a neighbour who’s accused of crimes: the way you look at your neighbour who was a friend can’t be the same as the way you look at a neighbour whose face disgusts you, or the look you give a neighbour you slept with behind his wife’s back.’
She returned to her room and saw a slip of paper lying on her pillow, with a sentence in Vlada’s handwriting: ‘Good citizens wear red stockings in the winter.’ She was furious: the notes in her sock drawer were a secret between her and Kolya. She went over to the drawer and fossicked for the red stockings. Inside one of them she found a small folded note: ‘Hurry up and check whether you can be our mother.’
She silenced the callow impulse to scold Kolya for blabbing. Even with catastrophe in the offing she was still concerned with petty account-keeping. The time had come to leave the world of childhood behind.
At dinner Vlada was lively. He had spoken to the nephew of the head of the Komsomol at the Physical-Technical Institute, a reliable fellow: the party’s decision to purge the last remnants of Zinoviev’s and Trotsky’s Unified Centre was logical. All the sabotage committed by enemies of the people in mines and factories, in industry in general, would soon disappear.
Kolya said that at school someone had told him in secret that, after their parents were arrested, the twins would be expelled and sent to an orphanage.
Vlada snorted and declared that it was nonsense. Comrade Stalin had stated explicitly that children would not be punished for the sins of their parents. Boys weren’t guilty if their parents hadn’t done what was required of them.
Andrei shook his head as if he didn’t believe what he was hearing. Sasha was desperate to see her weakling of a father impose his authority. She imagined him sending Vlada away from the table, caning him, and the boy crumpling beneath his father’s rage.
If she got even in her imagination, then her anger would fade: if you surrendered to it, imagination was a perfect god of vengeance. Vlada’s black eyes sparkled. She despised his habit of shocking their parents, and understood the remorse that haunted him when he realised that the scars left by his words wouldn’t easily heal, his disappointment at learning that there were other people in the world who would read his actions in their own way.
Vlada whispered something in Kolya’s ear, looking both conspiratorial and amused. Despite the danger threatening them, Vlada would continue to scare Kolya until that poor boy found it hard to breathe; he would conjure up the dark abyss into which their severed heads would roll before restoring his hopes by describing the crafty moves that would save the day.
The closer Nikolai drew to Sasha, the more bitter Vlada became. His wildness was tinged with cruelty. The previous winter, after he had attacked Kolya one morning and pressed a pillow over his face, pretending to be an NKVD operative, their father had built a plywood barrier between their beds. Each boy was left with a thin strip of space. Vlada had smashed the plywood twice. Once again there was nothing to separate them. Nikolai complained that while he could put up with Vlada’s voice at night, he couldn’t stand the sight of his face. Their father had brought in Koslov from the institute, who built a barrier out of heavy wood, and screwed it to the wall. He told Vlada that if he broke it he would build a cement wall, like in a prison.
‘Vlada, if you don’t shut up, I’m going to peel your skin like an onion,’ Sasha said, gripping a knife.
‘Zaichik, that’s completely unnecessary!’ Valeria scolded.
Her father smiled at her, but when he realised that her mother had noticed he reverted to looking like some stranger.
‘Just try it,’ Vlada challenged her and looked at the knife, fascinated. She expected him to answer back again to show that he wasn’t easily intimidated and then shut up. Her father dipped a piece of bread in goose fat and offered it to her mother, a trick that sometimes won her heart.
Valeria waited until the performance was over. ‘Andreyusha,’ she said, ‘why don’t you play your game with the children?’ She was spoiling for a fight, taking pleasure in frustrating Andrei’s hope of hearing the usual sentence: ‘Andreyusha, you’re tired. Why don’t you go to sleep?’
Meanwhile Kolya was prattling about the blue sled: every winter they used to decorate it with swirling ornaments like butterflies and trees, but this year they hadn’t, and, besides, the cord was almost completely frayed, and they had to get thicker rope.
Suddenly Vlada asked sweetly if she had decided what course she would take at the university. ‘This year you and Zhenya are registered together, right?’
Sasha had expected a poisoned arrow of revenge, but the precision of his attack stunned her. No doubt, the boy had a rare talent for identifying other people’s weaknesses. Around the table the clink of knives and forks stopped, and Vlada bent over to tie his shoelace. His sharp movements, as if his body were made of something flintier than skin and bone, gave her the creeps. Maybe she was frightened by his perfect control over his body. An image arose in her memory: a father, mother and little girl in front of a building in the university. The father pointed at it. ‘Here you will study and study,’ he said, ‘until you’re the smartest woman in the Soviet Union.’ And the mother said, ‘Like your father.’
You idiot! she wanted to shout at her father. Where was Nadyezhda Petrovna then? At what bend in the road was she waiting for us?
The university hadn’t been on her mind in the past few weeks. She knew that no academic institution would accept Weissberg’s daughter. There would be no study of history, no physics, perhaps no studies at all. Maybe she could get a job somewhere but that was doubtful. She was desperate to escape the apartment, to see Zhenya, to go to the movies or listen to music. Maybe they’d sit in Café Europa, and then dance in some club full of artists and actors and foreigners, as well as shady fellows who invite you on holiday in the Crimea. This house suddenly seemed rotten to the core; maybe it really did deserve to be obliterated.
Her father said that he had read something interesting in a Jewish history book that day, and before her mother could interrupt him Sasha shouted, ‘How silly of me! I made a date for this evening…’
She pushed her chair back defiantly, got up and shook off Kolya’s look of betrayal. In her room she changed into her blue dress in a hurry and put on the ‘little accessories’ that one of Zhenya’s boyfriends had bought for them once in Torgsin: a black silk scarf, boots with a tapered heel, decorated with shiny brass buckles, a fur coat. A few minutes later she slipped out the door.
‘Mother, I’m meeting with Zhenya. Maybe we’ll see some other people. I’ll find out whether they’re talking about us. I’ll be back late.’
Zhenya and Sasha went down the stairs to the basement of what had once been a mansion. The corridor leading to the dance floor was dense and laden with perfume. In one of the rooms leading off it she saw two foreign men with their hair combed back leaning over a billiard table. Zhenya waved at the tall doorman in his grey uniform, and he waved back. She took Sasha’s arm, and as they pushed through the crowd she muttered disparaging remarks about the girls who weren’t ashamed to be seen here wearing rags. When they reached the doorman, he greeted them, but Zhenya ignored his existence.
Columns topped by arches divided the hall into booths, where large and noisy groups sat. Red wooden stools were scattered next to a stage where a quartet was playing happy dance music.
‘Well, you see I wasn’t exaggerating,’ Zhenya said proudly.
They sat at a table for four. A few young men were sitting in the next booth, and Zhenya boasted that they were from the Ministry of Foreign Trade. Two of them approached and invited the girls for a drink. Zhenya asked for a bottle of Château D’Yquem. The men looked alarmed.
‘That sounds really expensive,’ Sasha said.
‘Don’t worry,’ Zhenya laughed. ‘Kostya has an account here.’
When it arrived, Zhenya kept filling Sasha’s glass, chatting away about the delicacy of Fr
ench wine. ‘Drink a lot,’ she advised. ‘Forget about the bad things.’ Then Sasha caught sight of a handsome young man standing by himself against the wall. Zhenya knew him, his name was Alyosha, and he had just come back from a job in the embassy in Japan.
‘You want to?’ Zhenya suddenly hugged her.
‘Now?’ Sasha was surprised, but she let Zhenya force her up and drag her over. They stood in front of him, bowed, and together they recited the rhyme they had once written:
A prince with crown
Is needed in town.
Princesses two, with hearts so true,
Let him choose:
One for glory, and for the other: end of story.
Alyosha chose Sasha, and Zhenya withdrew with little steps. ‘Eighty-two–seventy-four,’ she announced. It was the tenth year of their competition.
The young man led her to the floor. They danced a rumba. He danced nicely, step-slide, step-slide, and they moved together marvellously. In his arms she leaned on his shoulder, her lips floated over his neck and she breathed in the delicate odour of his body. She moistened his skin with the tip of her tongue. ‘At the tumultuous ball, I met you by chance,’ she said in his ear. Her body leaned into him, and she was already tempted by his slightly pouting lips, when she became aware of a kind of halo of dust around her. Everyone saw it, except for him. He was too close. Her tongue grew dry, her movements grew stiff and heavy, and that lightness of desire, which had bubbled up inside her, vanished. All it would take was for Alyosha to pop into the bathroom, and one of his friends to say, ‘That’s Alexandra Andreyevna Weissberg. Do you know what her father’s been accused of? Don’t you read the newspaper?’