Good People

by Nir Baram

  His hail of parting at the door:

  Your chant of luring, chant of grieving

  Will murmur in my ears no more.*

  Zhenya said he was too theatrical. Then he gave them parting gifts: pickled herring for Zhenya, smoked bacon for Sasha.

  She returned home towards morning. Her father was sifting through letters in a box. ‘Did you have a good time?’

  ‘Yes, really lovely.’

  Her mother scolded: How dare she go out at night? Where did she bury her shame and her heart? But now her father was being sympathetic. Fondness for him burbled within her. She hadn’t thought a lot about what he had lost, maybe because it was all so predictable, and now she remembered how one day, after he was fired, he started waxing lyrical about the new windows in the institute that had expelled him. He had absolute loyalty to whatever touched his soul, whether it was the institute or Nadyezhda Petrovna; they remained as exalted in his eyes as on the day they first enchanted him.

  ‘Pay no attention to Mother’s shouting,’ he said. ‘She’s suffering a lot. Envy of the young poisons the blood.’

  No doubt he got a cheap thrill from this coward’s revenge. She used to think that if disaster ever struck them their loyalty and love would be on show, but now, as the days passed, aside from isolated flashes of compassion, each of them was being devoured by fear and blamed the other.

  ‘Father, why are you up at this hour?’

  ‘I’m thinking about the story of my life.’

  She heard a foghorn on the Neva, Vera’s children singing, their voices bursting with life. Soot drifted through the shutters. Her nightgown was as damp and filthy as a rag. Faint pain swirled in her belly, passed, maybe hunger. She swallowed some bitter saliva and then dampened her dry lips with spit. She was half-awake, and that’s when the memories piled up.

  She’s walking up stairs strewn with cabbage leaves and cucumber peels: Grandfather’s roomy parlour is crammed with faded velvet furniture, and four giant mirrors extend almost to the ceiling, hanging at an angle as though bowing to the room. They cast multiple reflections, distorted, upside down, until one day Vlada broke one of them, and after that the parlour lost its charm. Narrow alleys are visible from the window, crammed with little workshops, the smell of tar, tinsmiths and cobblers. Grandfather looks at them and plucks at his beard. Those new arrivals, they’ve stolen my view. After the Bolsheviks stole power, rats appeared here, disguised as human beings, and they’re taking over the street. Lots of Jews, he casts a look at her father, thugs from Voronezh, and from villages of illiterates where no trains stop. I’m telling you: in the streets, right down there, the blood of heroes and saints didn’t flow just so that all sorts of Chukhonets could sneak in here and make every last trace of our Saint Petersburg disappear.

  Her father says nothing. Grandfather mocks him as the intelligent while Andrei calls him the ‘murderer from the Okhranka’. Grandfather is actually proud of his twenty years’ service in the Czar’s secret police. He tells Sasha, ‘We took good care of Communist intelligents like your father. But to my regret we underestimated them.’

  When they leave, Grandfather always rumples Vlada’s hair, calls him the enthusiastic Young Pioneer, and explains how gullible the boy is for believing all the Bolshevik tales that his father and schoolteachers and the newspapers tell him. Once, as they were leaving, her father had muttered, ‘Your grandfather makes me grow fond of the Chekists.’

  Sasha and Maxim Podolsky are strolling down the street. It’s a summer night, late, around one o’clock. There’s a light breeze, their sleeves are bare. Maxim says that he heard from his father, who had heard from someone high up, that after Kirov’s death the people in Moscow had decided to deal with Leningrad—the eternal stronghold of bluster, revolt and opposition—with a firm hand.

  Maxim hugs her. ‘We have hard days before us, Sasha.’

  She shook off the blankets. Dust began to filter into her eyes. She closed them, but the tears came anyway. Neighbours had gathered in her room. One of them was holding a lamp. In its light a layer of dust and soot was visible on her body.

  ‘Impossible to remove it,’ they shouted, ‘all the dust and soot of Leningrad has stuck to you. You’ll have to scrape it off. Sorry, we don’t have the right tools.’

  ‘Can’t you buy them?’ she begged. ‘There are stores downstairs. Mother will pay you back.’

  The last dinner. Mother drinks coffee and Benedictine liqueur and in a cackling voice imitates Reznikov, the interrogator: ‘Look, Comrade Weissberg, it sometimes happens that a person wrongs his friend. There are all sorts of reasons for that…Perhaps you aren’t really an enemy of the people. Maybe you were just associated with real enemies who influenced you!’ The twins laugh and plunge their forks into the pork chops. ‘And if a person confesses, then his friend can forgive him. Their friendship will be rehabilitated, and they will be even better friends than they were. But a complete confession is needed…Stay home for a few days and contemplate the history of your life.’

  An hour passes. Father and the twins are playing at riddles: Father asks what temperature all sorts of things melt at, and the twins guess. Sasha is getting dressed in her room. She’s listening to their game, which is being played as if nothing is wrong. Fine, she has no time to be sad now. You don’t sob after you’ve put on make-up.

  Summer in Varlamov’s garden. Nadyezhda is reciting a few sentences from an article she’s writing in response to Ostrovsky’s book: How was the steel tempered? you ask. I’ll tell you: by means of oceans of shitty factory literature, the biggest load of garbage since the journals of Genghis Khan. Monkeys are now more advanced than we are. Russia is full of books, petitions and articles by mosquitoes constantly shrieking: Execute the traitors, liquidate the dogs. And our new history? One huge lie. ‘Stalin carried out Lenin’s instructions and led the Bolshevik brigades,’ they write. Or ‘Stalin in the war against the Whites in Tsaritsyn, in Rostov.’ Or ‘Stalin Defeated Denikin.’ It’s all Stalin. We’ll have to rebuild Russian culture from scratch.

  Silence, cherries being savoured, Varlamov coughs. Nadyezhda is aching for a response, yearning for affection. History is so boring, she says, and moves on to discuss insomnia: Everyone here is insomniac—the black cars, the bright nights, the foghorns, the smoke and the soot from the factories. They all join in and offer examples of their own: the summer dust, the autumn winds that pierce your bones, you’re always in some damned whirlpool. And Nadyezhda again: When sleep comes at last, you glide in European dreams—Paris, Rome, Berlin—and then lightning whips you awake: your fate is here.

  Evening. Vlada is cutting a cucumber, slicing bread; he’s found some sausage, too.

  Don’t expect that Mother and Father will come back soon! he says. They’ll get a few years in a gulag. The sabotage at the institute is even worse than what Pyatakov planned, apparently because of the involvement of the fascists. For quite a while I’ve been saying that the alliance between traitors and fascist infiltrators is going to set us back many years.

  No one answers.

  It’s clear that Father isn’t involved in the matter. He just happened to be in the firing line. Some piece of filth apparently told stories about him.

  No one answers. It’s odd that they still haven’t searched the house. He looks at Sasha suspiciously. They always do a search when they arrest you, or right afterwards. Anyway there’s nothing here. I checked. Mother and Father had enough time to prepare. They even got rid of the book by Balmont.

  Kolya is sitting by her side. She’s tired of consoling him. She hugged him all day long.

  It’s four-six-eight-ten o’clock.

  Their parents didn’t come back from the interrogation. She clings to the hope that Podolsky can tell her something about their fate, but for two weeks now he hasn’t been around. At night, she imagines his severed head rolling on one of the bridges over the Neva.

  She is aware of the weight of time, of all those seconds and minutes until supper, un
til sleep. If Kolya doesn’t fall asleep soon, she will lose her mind. She’s petrified by the thought that tomorrow a long day will dawn, with so many hours and minutes and seconds.

  A door slams, she wakes up, it’s late. The fourth night without Father and Mother. She is starting to accept that every time she wakes up she will remember the fact of their absence. To her relief she’s alone in bed. A silhouette near the door.

  Brodsky’s house burned down; Seryozha and I helped them put out the fire. Vlada’s tone of voice is light and sweetish.

  Was everything burned?

  It was a big fire. It probably had something to do with candles. You know how absent-minded he is, all day long with his nose in books.

  Is he all right?

  Trembling like a rabbit, but all right. I told him that in a little while our house would be vacated, that he should get ready to break in. If we’re doomed to lose the house, at least we’d have the consolation of knowing it had fallen into the hands of a loyal friend like him.

  The last morning. Vlada tells more stories about the fire in Brodsky’s house, about the smoke that hid the stars and the moon. Sasha cooks porridge for Kolya and makes a jam sandwich for Vlada. How could she have been so complacent?

  Five in the afternoon. They haven’t come home. She races to the school. The headmaster receives her in the hallway, makes sure that a few teachers witness the meeting. He says that two NKVD men were waiting for the twins with warrants, and seated them in a car. They didn’t say where they were taking them. He assumes that, as in earlier cases, they will be sent to an institution for boys whose parents have been arrested. He has no doubt that the matter will be resolved in the best possible way, because it is impossible to leave boys without a supervising adult.

  Perhaps she says, Thank you, Headmaster.

  A few hours later she woke up in bed.

  How many days had she been there? She stretched her muscles, wondering whether to get up, and her limbs protested: Now you want to move? She stayed in bed. How many days had she been there? Night-morning, night-morning, maybe another two days. She heard steps. She recognised them: they were his steps. A light turned on in the hallway. She wanted to move but couldn’t. Now he was standing there. His body filled the doorway, pushed the light back. Her gaze rose, trying to take all of him in, and she couldn’t.

  His shoulders supported his neck like two bricks, his hair was twined with cobwebs that hung from the ceiling. His movement towards her was enormous, swallowing the small room. You! she wanted to shout, Maxim Adamovich Podolsky, I know you, stop looking so different!

  She closed her eyes and opened them, he was standing above her. ‘You finally remembered to do a search?’ she asked. Her lips stung and her throat was hoarse.

  ‘Do you remember the play we saw at the end of eighth grade?’ He sounded excited, as if he’d been waiting for this moment for a long time.

  Suddenly she was filled with happiness. If he had come to announce that her parents were dead, he wouldn’t have mentioned any plays, and he wouldn’t fool around with parables.

  She gained strength. I don’t remember, she wanted to say. You and I, we’re always sweeping up memories and putting them in piles.

  He sat on the bed. He was holding a cup in his right hand. He dipped his fingers in the water and moistened her lips. Then he supported her back, and with a delicate movement he helped her drink: a sip, a pause, a sip, a pause.

  ‘Ismene was right,’ he said. ‘It’s foolish to exceed your ability. You aren’t powerful enough to oppose the will of the people.’

  The city wafted from his body: crisp bread and cooking oil and tar, the saltiness of the wind, the sweat of a street bustling with people, a wet leather coat. Hunger went wild inside her, and she imagined bread with goose fat and her grandmother’s meatballs.

  ‘And you, Sasha, have only two choices: Die or become another person.’

  LENINGRAD

  AUTUMN 1939

  The sound of someone breathing: Sasha heard him grunt, exhaling his dreams. She once tried to stay awake the whole night just to throw open a window onto his dreams. In their June nights, when they were sixteen, a dazzling light poured into the city, whitening the stone bridges, stirred in the currents of the river. Midnight, and the strange feeling of a city not sleeping but fainting. They lay in parks or under bridges or even on roofs, exchanging the same secrets, pretending they had never heard them before, guessing at what window a face might appear only to recoil at a cruel blow of light. Sometimes after a few kisses, before they had done anything, he would fall asleep. He was one of those people who went to sleep as soon as they lay down, no matter where. He hid in the mystery of sleep, and she negotiated with his body: pinched his arm, whispered to him, tried to guess his dreams. His imagination flew off to distant realms while his body clung to hers, yearning for her warmth. Are you your body? The question stayed with her.

  Now he was sighing. His right hand tunnelled under her back to link up with his left, which lay across her stomach. She never understood how he managed to do it—she resisted and pressed her back against the mattress, and he had to struggle against her. It amused her to see a person show such determination even in sleep.

  His manoeuvre ended with victory. His arms tightened around her, his stomach was pressed to her hips, his lips on her neck. Now he’d encircled her. Even in winter he slept half-naked, and his nakedness demanded that her body defend him against the cold. Sometimes she was put off and drew away, and would then run her fingers with pleasure over his goosebumps. Sometimes it got so cold that she imagined there were no walls, only the dark trees that swayed in the wild nights and shook off clumps of snow.

  How simple relations were with a sleeping body. You could erase all trace of your actions as if nothing had happened. In childhood she used to dream she was wandering in a world that had gone to sleep and she could do whatever she liked. She turned beggars into kings, and cut noblemen down to size, but she always knew she had to put things back the way they were before everyone woke up. She told Nadya about that dream, and Nadya snapped at her, ‘Girl, don’t you dare even in your dreams to make a mess?’

  The illumination of the room in the dawn light gave her the strange sensation that it was orchestrated against her in particular. She tried to convince herself that she was in charge now, and had arranged the furniture in their new apartment to her satisfaction, but with every glance her eyes sought traces of the house that was lost. At least twice a week she woke in the middle of the night with anguish crouched on her windpipe. She would wander through the apartment, groping for the familiar hallway, the living room, the sofa next to the window until she stopped before the absent mirror. She would realise that it wasn’t Kolya lying in her bed, and in the living room, between two bookcases, there was no black piano with paint peeling from its legs. Resist it as she might, she came to the realisation that the only thing left to her now was loss. What kind of person would she be without it?

  The minutes passed. Their room brightened. The picture hanging opposite the bed—a reproduction of Surikov’s ‘Morning of the Execution of the Streltsy’—was the first thing to emerge. Sasha and Maxim had both liked that painting ever since they were in school. Once a week the members of Maxim’s class used to act out the execution, piling up old wooden beams to look like the platform in the picture. Podolsky sometimes played the judge and sometimes the hangman. The judge would announce the verdict to a chorus of cheers, and the children would crowd around in tight circles. Girls weren’t allowed to squeeze to the front—except for her, of course. Two boys would snatch the trembling little boy whose turn had come, and the hangman would tighten the noose around his neck until the victim coughed.

  The reproduction was their first joint purchase. They laughed when they hung it up, and they laughed when, for just one day, they stole a cartoon version of it that Podolsky had found during a search of some provocateur’s lair, and stuck it on their bathroom door: Stalin and his entourage taking pleas
ure in piling up frozen corpses. They enjoyed tired old jokes from the days when Yezhov ran the NKVD:

  A breathless elephant turns up at the border checkpoint. ‘I have to escape from here,’ he begs the guards.

  ‘Why?’ they ask in surprise.

  ‘Come on! Didn’t you hear the NKVD is purging Russia of sheep?’

  ‘But you’re an elephant.’

  ‘Go tell that to Yezhov.’

  How did the dawn rise in her window? First in secret, as though lazily climbing the walls, until in one swoop it swallowed the night. Then Maxim awoke. He yawned. His white tongue looped out like a dog’s, he stretched his arms, and his chest expanded. She rushed to the silver-plated samovar in the kitchen to boil water, and sat at the wooden table, which was painted a happy orange. At her side was another chair. She heard the water bubbling in the samovar, ‘A Wedding Present to the Young Couple’, that they received from Stepan Kristoforovich and the comrades from the second department. Soon the whistle would blow, and the four little legs would tremble. Sometimes they scuttled a full six inches before the water boiled. She got up, brewed tea, filled two cups and sat down again. In the bedroom bare feet shuffled, then she could hear running water, and the sound of the razor blade against skin, which always gave her the chills, and in a few minutes the tapping of shoes. She sipped the tea and gazed down the corridor. Now her husband appeared, washed, dressed and perfumed. He sat down next to her, and gave her a fond smile that seemed significant. Sometimes she imagined that his ginger sideburns were shaped like smiling lips.

  ‘Good morning, dear,’ he called.

  He liked the morning. He always woke up ready to take the world by storm. But then the passing hours wore him out: the new day never met his expectations, and in the evening he crawled home weary and brooding. And she? She hated the morning. It was clear to her that she wouldn’t make it through the new day safely. She needed at least an hour to wake up in silent preparation for what was to come. After that her anxiety faded, and she felt stronger, and when evening came she felt like putting on her prettiest dress and strolling arm in arm with Maxim, attracting admiring gazes: a tall, handsome young couple, people always said.