“And please excuse the accident,” the woman said in her lilting voice.
Grisha nodded affably. He wanted to say something that would keep the woman and boy there next to him, but he couldn’t think of anything.
“Pyotr, is it? What do you want to be when you grow up?” he asked in a formal, stilted way.
Pyotr responded with his own discomfort, screwing up his face and shrugging at the same time.
“That’s too far away on a day like this,” the woman said playfully.
“I suppose so,” Grisha agreed, because he enjoyed hearing the vibrant voice that seemed so much younger than the speaker. He really didn’t understand why anything was far away on a day like this. His death seemed to be lurking right outside the garden gate—behind the Kremlin wall?—and might leap out to grab him at any moment.
“Why, it’s simply glorious for this time of year. Just look at it!”
She bobbed her head and waved her arm in the direction of the trees, bushes, flowers, and lawns.
Grisha stared obediently but did not see what the gray-haired woman was talking about.
“Have you ever enjoyed the Alexandrovsky so?” she trilled.
Before Grisha could consider a reply, a small serious voice at his feet informed him, “Babye leto!”
“What?” Grisha asked, looking down at the child, who already was shrinking back, surprised at his own bold utterance.
“Babye leto,” she explained politely.
“Was he speaking to you?” Grisha asked, mildly perplexed.
“I hope not,” the woman laughed gaily.
“No, I didn’t mean—” Grisha stammered, feeling himself blush.
“He might have been, though,” she said with good humor.
“No, I don’t think so,” Grisha mustered lamely.
“I was just explaining to Pyotr the special name for the wonderfully warm days in autumn—babye leto—the last blush of youth experienced by an older woman. And he wanted to share it with you.”
Grisha nodded. “Babye leto,” he repeated slowly.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
“Yes, I suppose it is,” Grisha said thoughtfully.
“What doubt can there be? It makes it a blessing to be alive,” she said.
It is a blessing to be here with you, Grisha thought. As for the babye leto—oh well, just being alive was a blessing. And how long would that last?
“Pyotr, run along, dear. Be careful not to harm the officers of state security.”
Grisha smiled, a touch ruefully. The NKVD didn’t need anyone else’s help in destroying its own officers. Pyotr nodded and ran down the boulevard with childish abandon.
“They have a lot of energy at that age,” Grisha said with a hint of envy.
“I’ll say they do,” she agreed, accepting the implications of his statement.
“Babye leto,” Grisha repeated, not wanting to lose her company.
“Yes,” she said softly, then added in a normal tone, “I left my book on the bench,” excusing herself.
“You had better keep an eye on it,” he agreed and began walking over to the bench.
The woman quickly caught up to him. Slightly uncomfortable at his solicitude, she fell silent. At the bench, she reached over and picked up an old, frayed volume of what Grisha assumed must be a novel printed before the revolution. The gold letters on the cover had worn and faded into illegibility.
“Do you mind if I sit down?” Grisha asked, ignoring her motions to depart.
“Oh, no, not at all,” she said, seating herself with dignity, placing the book on her lap.
Grisha sat, too, at a respectful distance.
“Pyotr seems to be quite a bright young boy. Serious, but brimming with energy,” he said, aware that he was repeating himself.
“Thank you,” she said with the echo of a trill in her lilting voice.
Even Grisha’s awkwardness didn’t spoil her enchantment with the child.
“I’m afraid I’m not very good with children,” he confessed.
“Well, it wasn’t your fault that he almost ran you over. Adults are still permitted to enjoy a garden, too,” she said with the return of her vivacious tone.
“Yes,” Grisha agreed seriously. “You see, I never had any.”
“Oh,” the woman muttered, politely acknowledging that she had heard the remark.
“I always thought we would, my wife and I—but we never did—and now it’s too late,” he admitted with unabashed self-pity.
“I’m sorry,” the woman sympathized.
“Do you have any other grandchildren?” Grisha asked.
“No,” the woman smiled sadly. “I don’t have any grandchildren.”
“Oh,” Grisha replied. “You seem so attached to him.”
“I am. He’s my son,” the woman said with the hint of a smile that suggested she had been embarrassed by the misconception many times before.
In spite of himself, Grisha couldn’t help looking closely at the gray hair and clear face. She was not young. Fifty-five at least.
“Excuse me,” he said forthrightly.
She nodded quickly in acceptance. “Everyone thinks so. They would be fools not to.”
Not knowing what to say, Grisha commented, “He’s a lovely child. I envy you.”
“You see, for many years we didn’t have any children either, my husband and I. He was even considerably older than I am. We had long ago given up hope—and then, as if three decades had not gone by, there we were—expecting.” She paused. “You can imagine how surprised we were. At first we simply couldn’t believe it. It seemed so improbable. Even embarrassing at my age.”
“You must have been very happy.”
“Oh, yes, oh, yes.” She smiled quietly in remembrance. “So happy.”
Couples strolled past. Not far away, two small children played with a ball. More than their ineffectual pushes, their gurgling sounds seemed to propel the red sphere.
“Your husband must be very happy with such a special child,” Grisha added graciously.
“Yes, he was. For the first year he was almost afraid to touch him. He called him ‘our sacred doll.’ Then”— she paused—“when he wanted to hold him, it was already too late.”
Grisha knew what was sure to follow; without turning toward her, he asked, “And where is he out there?”
“Solovki,” she said.
He didn’t want to look, for he knew what he would find: tears in her eyes. But he did look, because he wanted to see those eyes, their beauty and their accusation, for Colonel Shwartzman had sent many to the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea, from whose monastic prison none returned. When he looked, however, he was surprised. Neither tears nor accusation greeted him, only a plea for help. Help for her husband, Pyotr’s father. Grisha did not understand how a man could survive the agony of separation from such a wife and child.
“His name is—” the woman was saying, but Grisha shook his head, and her voice dropped off.
“There was a time many years ago when I would not have helped you. Then I could have. Now that I would like to help, it is too late. I cannot. I . . . I shall not even make it to Solovki. I can’t even deliver a message.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she murmured.
Grisha nodded. He, too, was sorry.
“Is Solovetsky as bad as they say?” she whispered, her voice husky with fear.
Grisha nodded but could not look at her. He heard her catch her breath, and he nervously began to straighten his tunic, but quickly stopped, as he felt the shame of his uniform on his flesh.
“You must believe that if I could help you, I would,” he implored, but as he did so, he really didn’t know whether it was true. He wished it were, and it was very important that she believe it.
“I hope your wife has you with her for many years,” she said kindly.
At the mention of his wife, Grisha smiled wryly.
“Isn’t she with you?” she asked in gentle solicitude.
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br /> “After a fashion,” he answered enigmatically.
She respected his reticence, and they sat quietly. Grisha stood up.
“I had better be going,” he announced.
She nodded as if appreciating his having spent precious time with her, given his busy schedule. Then she asked, “Why were you laughing so heartily by the monument just now?”
“There was a time many years ago when revolutionary thinkers brought joy to my soul,” he explained.
“I see, babye leto,” she said quietly, with her own sad understanding of the term.
“Yes.” He nodded to her ever so slightly, as if they had a set of gestures that only they could understand.
As he departed along the path that led deeper into the garden, Pyotr came running by him, his hoop rolling along with a metallic swish as if it were a great scythe whose deadly blade reached all the way to the Solovetsky Islands in the frigid north seas. As he entered the linden boulevard he heard an insistent young voice calling, “Citizen Colonel!” and he turned back to find Pyotr racing up to him with the brown cloth bag. Breathing heavily, with small beads of sweat rapidly forming on his temples, the child proffered the object.
“Citizen Colonel, you forgot your bag,” the boy announced.
“Thank you. Yes, I did,” Grisha said, taking it.
“You’re welcome,” the boy responded and turned to sprint back to his elderly mother.
“Good-bye,” Grisha said.
“Be careful, I think there’s a bottle inside,” Pyotr informed him, his brows knitted with the burden of serious information.
“I’ll try, Pyotr,” Grisha said with dolorous resignation that the boy neither heard nor saw, since he was already darting down the tree-lined path.
CHAPTER EIGHT
GRISHA CHOSE ANOTHER BENCH UNDER THE INTERLACED branches of the lime trees. Placing the wine next to him, he sat down. Not ready for any more encounters, he wanted to savor the one he had just had. Grisha had told the truth: no one returns from the Solovetsky Islands. If Pyotr weren’t already an orphan, he certainly would be. Nothing less than a miracle could save his father, and yet, Grisha mused, if it weren’t for a miracle, Pyotr wouldn’t be in this world now. Grisha, however, couldn’t find much solace in that. After all, if his family had used up its quota, how could Pyotr expect another miracle? And even miracles had limitations; the secret police permitted none. Whoever her husband was—most likely a tsarist officer, perhaps a guards officer; the woman was very aristocratic in the most natural manner—he was as good as dead.
But, again indulging in self-pity, Grisha envied the anonymous recipient of the miracle called Pyotr. What family did Grisha have? His wife, Rachel Leah, in the closet—“Is she still with you?” “After a fashion.”—and what a degenerate condition she was in!
Grisha looked around at the lush greens of the lime and linden trees, the lawns still a dark healthy swath and the deep golden flowers hinting at the autumnal harvest only weeks, perhaps no more than days away, when the cold would bring the vernal warmth to a sudden, definitive end. Grisha himself couldn’t revel in the babye leto; he evoked it more as tribute to the gray-haired woman. There were no beautiful days in which to die, at least not for him, not yet. Not every autumn has a babye leto, and unfortunately, not every revolution has one either. The Glorious Red Revolution had needed one for some time. He must have been an anomalous sight, an NKVD colonel laughing lustily in front of the Monument to Revolutionary Thinkers. Had she understood that Grisha really wanted to help her, or had she realized the truth? Where had it all gone wrong? Lenin himself had chosen the names for the monument!
It all was very confusing, and part of him—Colonel Hershel Shwartzman?—didn’t want to think about it. What had happened, after all, had to have happened, hadn’t it? There was a revolutionary logic, based on revolutionary necessity, that had started it all. Another part of him—Grisha?—was curious as to how it had all come to this. Indeed he, the son of a Volhynian Jewish merchant, was seeking refuge under the spire of the Kremlin’s Trinity Tower of Russian Orthodoxy. Why hadn’t they changed the name of the tower? Was there something in that? He wondered: was there a deep insidious clerical plot that had undermined the revolution? Stalin should be told of this.
Stalin? That was the madness he was trying to hide from. He would love to escape that murderous madness, but there was no escape, only a temporary refuge in the tsar’s gardens under the tsar’s wall, under the Holy Russian Father’s Trinity Tower. Did the Great Genius of Humanity, Joseph Stalin, have to be told that? He knew all—or did he? Was Stalin “they,” or was he their prisoner as well? Why should Stalin be concerned with only a simple colonel in the NKVD? How could he be concerned with millions of simple people?
Grisha knew they were arresting by quota now. Could a nation have so many enemies? Soviet Russia was not just a dog chasing its tail; with the aid of the state security services, Soviet Russia had the misfortune of being the dog who had successfully caught its tail in its sharp-toothed muzzle and was devouring itself, past the tail by name and into the muscle of the hindquarters! How could it chase anything else? What if the German fascists attacked?
Grisha had welcomed Stalin’s accession, he admitted that. Stalin was a decisive manager at a time when things lacked focus. Stalin had launched the collectivization of agriculture. Millions of kulaks had been shot, millions driven from their land. Famine followed, and millions in the villages and towns died. Grisha, too, had referred to collectivization as “the logic of the struggle,” but wasn’t it a daunting logic? The people weren’t ready for collectivization. The only way to force them into it was to shoot them, and shoot them they did, just as they had shot the tsar. But the tsar had deserved it! It was a shame they couldn’t bring the tsar back to life and shoot him over and over again instead of the kulaks.
Although they couldn’t resurrect the tsar, they had imbued him with some great life force that tainted all “former people” in any way related to tsarist Russia. The tsarist plague emanating from the Romanov grave was so powerful that it infected the children of “class enemies.” What would be Pyotr’s future as the son of aristocrats, son of a tsarist officer? Grisha himself had succeeded in obliterating his bourgeois past because Russian Volynia had been ceded to the Polish Republic after the World War. Later, in the Civil War with Cossack regiments, Grisha had fought over the area, only to be driven back by Pilsudski. The bitter loss of Grisha’s home province had probably saved his life in the Stalinist years—until now. It didn’t, however, prevent Svetkov from taunting him about Rachel Leah, his bourgeois wife who sat in the closet waiting. Who could know what she was waiting for? She had been there so long, she herself probably no longer had any idea.
And to think that he had married Rachel Leah because of a bench! Now he was a fugitive on one in the park. Over thirty years ago, however, he had been a fugitive under a synagogue bench in that backwater of Krimsk that had laid him low. Well, Grisha thought, that’s some progress: in thirty-three years he had managed to rise from the floor to the furniture. But in Krimsk it had been coincidence that the young talmudist Yechiel Katzman had led him to the refuge of the empty prayerhouse. As a young Marxist revolutionary fleeing the tsar’s police, Grisha had awakened there to realize that he had slept in the very house of worship that his own father had offered as a gift to the Krimsker Rebbe. The rebbe, however, refused all gifts, both large and small, and when Grisha’s father had dedicated the building in the rebbe’s absence, the great brass chandelier had crashed upon him in lethal bourgeois tragedy.
Grisha had forced himself to overcome his childish fear by returning to sleep in the prayerhouse. And Grisha, too, had almost died in the very same place, when the peasants in an attempted pogrom set alight the great wooden structure. Their incendiary clamor had awakened the sleeping Grisha; trapped in the flames, he had plucked the holy Torah scroll from the Ark of the Law. Fleeing the fiery vestibule, Grisha had burst into the arms of the Krimsker Rebbe, who was
rushing inside the blazing building to save the very same Torah scroll. Escaping certain death, they emerged spinning like a top with the scroll clutched between them. The peasants, mistaking the singed, fiery figure of Grisha for the devil himself, had fled in fear. In some magical way, the Krimsker Rebbe had identified Grisha as his father’s son, Hershel the son of Chaim Shwartzman. The rebbe declared that Grisha had received the Torah of Mount Sinai, and in order to maintain the brilliance of the holy sparks (heaven forbid they should turn into cold ash), he awarded Grisha Rachel Leah, his pure daughter, as his wife.
And the very next day, instead of Yechiel the young talmudist, Grisha, still aching from his burns, married her. Within weeks the Krimsker Rebbe and his rebbitzen departed for America, whereas Grisha, his wounds healing, returned to the Communist struggle against the tsar. Grisha assumed that he and Rachel Leah would separate, returning to their own intense, all-absorbing worlds, but he had not appreciated his new bride’s dedication and madness. Although as a dutiful wife she had physically followed him into his world, spiritually she inhabited only her own. Their separation was not a possibility, because she would not leave him. For thirty-three years she had followed him as if he were a straying prophet who one day would return to her Torah and, presumably, to Krimsk. Grisha shook his head in wonder; when it came to believing in historical necessity, Rachel Leah made the Bolsheviks seem like the atheists they claimed to be.
As Grisha sat in the fading light of the Alexandrovsky Gardens, he felt a surge of sorrow that Rachel Leah couldn’t enjoy such a pastoral scene. But for her there was no babye leto. Had there been, Grisha would have left her. Comrades had intimated that a crazed religious wife was hindering his career. No doubt she had—might he not have been Svetkov’s superior? Grisha had always silenced his critics by asking what they suggested he do with her. Then he would suggest that if nothing else, he was loyal: loyal to the revolution, loyal to the party, and loyal to victims of bourgeois oppression, namely his wife. He believed that the opiate of religion had dulled her senses beyond repair. Some day Soviet security would triumph, and there would be appropriate facilities, but until then he could not desert her.
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