by Nir Baram
Over his shoulder she could see a woman watching them dance.
‘That’s my wife,’ Alyosha said, maybe sadly. She was with two other women, and the three of them whispered to each other. His wife listened and then straightened her body. Her gaze—amused, almost friendly—was fixed on Sasha, translating itself in her imagination: Dance with him, my dear. I’ll lend you my husband gladly. But really, just between us, how many dances do you have left?
A strange flame was kindled behind her eyes, as sometimes happened to her mother. Valeria’s behaviour that day now became explicable to her: it was a kind of lament for the dead. As if she had been yearning to shake her husband and shout: Wasn’t I worth more?
She realised that she wasn’t dancing with Alyosha anymore. She was just hanging on to him, being pulled around. Nearby she saw Grobman from her school, the girl from the theatre who saw to the sets. She heard the nattily dressed fellows from the Ministry of Foreign Trade laughing away—all of them doubtless amazed that she had dared to come here tonight. In desperation she looked for Zhenya among the tunnels of crimson light and found her at last, hiding in the shadows. Zhenya’s sympathetic nod was replaced by a tense look. She knew that Sasha needed her, and glanced at Alyosha’s wife and her companions as though to find out whether they understood that it was her duty to help her friend. Was she actually asking: Will you permit me to help Weissberg’s daughter?
She woke up in her bed with a hangover. She stretched lazily and raised her feet to the wall. A shout of pain came from the twins’ room. She listened without moving. Another shout, this time sharper. She wanted to call out: Mother, where are you? Can’t you hear them screaming again? But she knew her mother would not answer.
Sasha got out of bed. In the living room she could see her mother was hunched in her father’s rocking chair. The shock of the icy floorboards seared her bare feet. She skipped up the stairs and burst into the twins’ room. Vlada’s small space between the wooden screen and the wall was empty. Kolya was curled up in bed, and Vlada was standing next to him in his school uniform.
‘Kolya,’ she said.
He didn’t answer.
She gave Vlada a threatening look, and he rushed to defend himself. ‘He’s such a baby. He wants to stay home. I told him we have to go to school today.’ A triumphant smile puffed out his pink cheeks. She remembered baby Vlada in her arms as she kissed his cheeks and said, ‘Mama, it’s unbelievable, they’re the colour of peaches.’ Later, when he was older and wanted people to think he was grown up, he used to douse his face with cold water to wash away the pinkness.
They both knew he was right. She took a deep breath. Her irritation transferred itself to Kolya, that spoiled little brat who didn’t understand the twins had to show up at school today and behave as if nothing had happened.
‘Get dressed at once!’ she ordered him.
Kolya sat up in bed. She noticed that his face, which his mother used to praise for its ‘angelic beauty’, was spotted with little pimples.
‘Yes, get dressed already, baby! Mama will make you your porridge,’ Vlada taunted.
The complacency in his voice sickened her. ‘Shut up!’ she shouted.
Kolya began to dress. She left the room.
Vlada hurried after her. ‘Did you check?’ he asked.
‘Not yet,’ she answered.
Downstairs they could hear footsteps against a background of a sleeper’s breathing. They were both silent, horrified by the import of his question.
‘We can’t talk now,’ she told him.
Vlada grabbed her hand. ‘In a week or two they won’t be here.’ She heard the suppressed venom in his voice. ‘You have to check whether you can be our mother. Ask your friend from the NKVD. Otherwise we’ll end up in an orphanage or in prison.’
She listened to the clink of cups and the running water. Every familiar sound was precious to her now, like her mother’s voice, rising and falling. ‘Vla-da, Kol-ya, wash your faces and come down. You’re late.’
Vlada leaned against the yellowed wallpaper. Sasha gazed at the pattern of crowns on it. She discovered shades of yellow that she hadn’t noticed before. ‘Do you remember Benoît, the biologist who was Father’s friend?’ he said. ‘He and his wife were exiled to Saratov in 1935, and then sent to a labour camp. Their children were bundled off to an orphanage. There were relatives who wanted to raise them, but they were worried that the children were also under suspicion, and in fact they were.’
He was looking at her. She knew he was beside himself with anxiety. He had always despised her parents’ circle, all those ‘weakling bourgeois poets, who complain instead of working’. He was convinced that their father hadn’t put his soul into the revolution, hadn’t appreciated the party’s achievements enough, hadn’t educated his children in the correct spirit, had thrown his lot in with unhelpful people. Like her, he understood that he and Kolya were in danger because of their father’s sins and their mother’s habit of turning a blind eye, and he was certain that if they had heeded his warnings none of this would have happened. At last he was being taken seriously, it was a kind of victory, but he might well be sent to an orphanage or a labour camp, and he would have no future in this country.
He was a kind of victor-victim. Sasha trembled and a malicious laugh flickered inside her. She immediately suppressed it, ashamed of her spitefulness. How pitiful she was.
‘Children.’ Their mother’s voice chimed again.
‘I’m telling you. You have to find out now!’ He loosened his grip on her, as if trying to figure out whether his feckless sister—who had disappeared the past few nights, out partying—understood the extent of her responsibility. ‘After all, you love Kolya,’ he said and drew away from her.
How humiliating for his fate to depend on his sister, ‘the lazy princess of poetry’, who was above doing any actual work: she had some job in a library for three months, and had then copied plans in an architect’s office, filled in all the application forms—and left. Last year she had decided not to enrol in the university, because she only wanted to study with Zhenya, and had idled away the summer at Varlamov’s, earning twenty kopecks a day for supposedly working in the garden.
‘Vlada,’ their mother called. ‘Don’t fight in there.’
He turned around and went back into his room.
Sasha’s throat tightened. How sorry she was that he had said that last thing. She stood in the kitchen, behind her mother. ‘Where’s Father?’ she asked.
‘In bed, imagining that he’s a tragic hero lying in Dagestan with a bullet in his chest, like his beloved Lermontov.’
Everything at home was now steeped in sarcasm. She considered getting dressed and hurrying to Podolsky’s office, to tell him how they were suffering, but there was no point in that either. In the last few days dear Maxim had gone to ground, and she didn’t know how to reach him.
Suddenly she wanted everything to be over, for the punishment to be meted out. They must have been guilty of something, so let the axe fall.
In the afternoon, too, Valeria hounded her husband with chores: she sent him out to line up for bread, then to the seamstress, then to the neighbours to borrow matches. When he came back she mischievously asked him if he wanted to shake out the sheets. He looked exhausted and peeved and mumbled something under his breath. Finally she announced that he could go back to bed.
He took off the old coat with raglan sleeves, padded with thin goatskin, and stroked the lining with his fingers, as if to remember every stain and seam. Did you tell them? Sasha wanted to ask. Did you tell them that the coat was a present from the doctor from the Kikabidze Division? That has to be worth something. But he left them and lay down on his bed, with his Jewish books around him, which he had secretly obtained, with great difficulty, and whose titles, according to her mother, all sounded exactly the same: Antiquities of the Jews (Josephus), The History of the Jews from Jesus Christ to the Present Time (Jacques Basnage), The History of the Israelites from the Maccabe
es to the Present Day (Isaak Markus Jost), The History of the Jews (Heinrich Graetz).
‘Half a year ago he couldn’t remember that he was Jewish,’ her mother sneered when he reached the bedroom, ‘and now he’s full of Jewish history, including in French, though he can barely read it, even with a dictionary. Maybe in five years he’ll get to the Present Time. Suddenly he’s full of the bondage of Egypt, the Babylonian Exile, the expulsion of the Jews from England, France and Spain. He won’t let up—Kishinev, the Black Hundreds, Petliura, Dreyfus, Beilis—cowards like him become true believers in God in seconds. Apparently he understands that his stories about the Civil War, where he served on all fronts and met all the heroes at the same time, don’t interest the NKVD at all. Now, according to him, he’s not guilty of anything. It’s his Jewish destiny, always ending in catastrophe, that’s the culprit.’
She mercilessly poked fun at her husband, not because she wanted to get even with him, but because she hoped to expunge him from her soul. She was rebelling against his idiosyncrasies as if she was only just now aware of them.
Sasha had more important things to discuss with her, such as how to protect the twins, but her mother just said, ‘Not now, Zaichik,’ and found another urgent chore to do.
It was one of Valeria’s talents: to bury certain subjects, whole periods of her life, in some recessive part of her mind. For years she had hidden her husband and Nadya there, and now, too, she managed to deny the simplest facts. How did she do it? After all, the boys walked past her, spoke and breathed, roamed around the only house they knew, and yet their mother would not broach any discussion of their fate.
Sasha realised that Vlada was the only one she could talk to.
…
The last weekend in March.
Sasha lay in her bed as though in a coffin. She alone remained in the house.
Trains departed from Leningrad, who knew where to, and on them the bodies that once filled this house. Nightmares stalked her sleep, and in her waking hours she was feverish with memories and guilt. Sometimes a single reproach broke through, in Nadya’s hoarse voice: Was it you, you cursed girl, did you bring this disaster down on us?
Although, when her father returned from the first interrogation and told them that they had asked him less about Nadya than about the Physical-Technical Institute—eight of whose ten directors had been arrested—and about the United Centre, she still believed that if she hadn’t given the poems to Podolsky their fate would have been different.
Outside—the noise of the city. There was no choice but to hear it. ‘Through bloodstained panes sometimes it is hard to see Europe,’ wrote an anonymous author in an article called ‘Letter of Complaint to Comrade Pushkin’, but she had no expectations that her family would become a landmark on this city’s map of grief. After all, there were people more eminent and courageous. But she constantly heard the bustling city and was tormented by the ease with which it had shaken them off. She dreamed she was standing at the foot of a high chair in which Barabash, the owner of the German hair salon, was sitting, dressed in an elegant suit because to her surprise he was now the head of an important institution. Barabash, she complained, didn’t Father help them plan the Magnitostroy Steel Plant in the Urals? Didn’t he refuse their request to manage the nitrogen plant in Gorlovka? And didn’t he also tell us that Leningrad was the only city for us?
Can’t you help us?
She had always been the negotiator: Mother, I’ll be back late, not now, Kolya, maybe later, girl, don’t get out of the bathtub with only a towel, Zaichik, where were you? Come back by dinnertime.
Now inside the house everything was silent. Enfolded in the sheets, which had absorbed her perspiration and the oil from her hair, she searched for traces of Kolya: the scent of her father’s cologne that he used to borrow, the smell of his hair. Her fingers groped around the bed, pursuing him. She discovered the hollow made by his sharp elbow, until she realised it wasn’t anything left by his body, but rather traces of her own.
Her imagination tickled his smooth skin. Like touching silk, yes?
Her mother chuckled. She was sitting up straight in the living room, watching them through the walls.
Am I doing something wrong? He isn’t really fifteen, is he? It’s like sleeping with a child. If he was eight, it would be fine, wouldn’t it, Mother? All the memories and images came to rest for a moment, and the contact she felt with him faded from her body. There was nothing now between the expanse of skin that still gave itself over to the caress of her fingers and his total absence. The talons of loss dug into her body.
There was no air. She gasped for breath in the darkness. Another breath and another. Do you really want to get away from here? What life does the future offer you?
Disgusted with her own cowardice, she threw off the sheet, spreadeagled, and sucked in the cold air. She prayed that her mind would be silent, but it immediately kicked up a din again, creating a chaos of memories. In the archive of her mind their nights were already forming an epoch.
On Monday her parents had been summoned to another interrogation. All week long they had been sifting through their life histories, indeed not so much sifting through them as packing them up. Sasha was in bed again, guessing that it was evening. She, too, was sifting through her life history.
Father and Kolya were busy. They were sitting at the desk, and Andrei was dictating a letter to him addressed to the Supreme Economic Council. Better for it to be written by hand than typed. Father blushed while talking up his loyalty to the party and his own worthy qualities, pouring out information about innovations he had introduced at the institute.
Vlada was standing by the window. He had recommended that Kolya write the letter, because his handwriting was rounded and feminine and touched the heart, and they needed some heart in Moscow to be touched a little bit. But when he noticed Kolya’s self-satisfaction and his boastful voice, like the voice of a minor official who has become privy to a secret, his expression darkened.
Near the cupboard Mother was sorting old papers, and she said to Sasha that the matter was closed, the verdict had been signed. Father ought to have accepted their offer to manage the factories in Gorlovka but now it was too late. Sasha wondered how much sincerity was in this surrender to fate. Maybe Mother could not believe that what had happened to other people would happen to them. For they weren’t exactly like the others, were they? Their circumstances were so different; many events that took place here couldn’t have happened anywhere else, or to other people, so it wasn’t conceivable that soon they wouldn’t be here.
At dinner her father cheerfully observed that maybe the letter would still help. In the books of Jewish wisdom it was written: ‘There is no weed that doesn’t have a star in heaven.’
‘So now you’ve become a believer in God,’ Vlada muttered.
As though he’d been waiting for the opportunity, her father hurriedly explained the flaw in Jost’s book, how it ignored the Jewish people during the biblical period and jumped directly to the Hasmonean era.
After dinner Sasha slipped out again.
‘Don’t you dare,’ Valeria said, ‘your little brother is begging you to stay.’
Vlada looked at her with indifference mingled with a hint of triumph. His suspicions were confirmed: it was futile to expect anything from their frivolous sister.
There is no suffocating person who can’t find a party somewhere, she joked to herself. She floated out and fell into the street and the refreshing chill. She slipped on the ice and buried her face in the snow. A fleeting moment of purification.
She and Zhenya passed the time in Kostya’s house. Kostya was Zhenya’s boyfriend, a guy who had avoided the army and hadn’t been arrested, a true magician, Zhenya gushed, a black-market-and-dance-bar type, expensive restaurants, played billiards all day long and made a fortune. He also had good wine. They drank, giggled and danced in the middle of the room. He clung to them from the back, embracing them both. His fingers pinched their hips, they
pushed them away, he lectured them: Comrade girls, be less individualistic, more cooperative, learn how to fuck in groups. Sasha kissed him. He invaded the gap between her and Zhenya, slipped under her sweater and undershirt, kissed her navel. His tongue was hot. She stretched, and his tongue slipped down her belly, she stifled a moan, heard her breath.
The heat disappeared. She saw his head moving under Zhenya’s sweater. She stood neglected in the middle of the room and felt the place where his saliva was drying on her skin.
Zhenya said to her secretly that in her opinion he had a death wish: they killed his father, maybe he wanted to die. He had foreign currency and bought clothes for the women he liked in Torgsin. He frequented the famous nightclubs in Moscow: Metropol, National, Savoy, with artists and theatre directors and architects.
Then he said, ‘Nadyezhda Petrovna? I’ve never heard of that poet. The only Nadyezhda Petrovna who interests me lives in Moscow, and she sews the best dresses in Russia.’
Sasha was amused. ‘It’s wonderful that you know such special people,’ she said.
Now she lay on the sofa next to Zhenya’s boyfriend. She rested her head on his belly. He leaned towards her, lifted her head and brought his tongue to her lips. His hand groped under her skirt. ‘How many guys have you been with already?’ He blew warm air into her ear.
She ignored his question. She had kissed a few boys, and also Osip Levayev, but she had only slept with Podolsky. Pleasure spread through her when his hand slipped between her legs, and two of his fingers touched her. He moved them delicately, arousing desire in her for full, strong contact. She led him to lie on her, but Zhenya was complaining: she wanted to go home and wouldn’t leave her alone with the boy. He got up. At once Sasha was assailed by all the worries that had disappeared for the past few minutes.
At the door the guy hugged her and whispered some lines from Pushkin:
A comrade’s broken words on leaving,