by Susan Daitch
Most of the family looked at me as if I was a dispensable oddball, so fine, send her to Moscow, what does it mean to paint pictures? They had no idea. Moscow, a city of underground trains and ice sculptures like blue houses, was not an easy city for me, coming from a smaller metropolis, and at first I missed my family terribly, considered returning, but never did. Moscow, of seemingly infinite electric lights and a tangle of streets too complex to be accurately mapped, all this became a heady delight. I felt like I’d gone through a tunnel and come out an entirely different person, but I made a lot of mistakes. No one had told me how much money it would take to live as a student, even a poor one, but I made friends quickly. Who were these people who came from all parts of the Soviet empire? Ukrainians with their geometrically painted eggs, Georgians with their all-night parties, Tatars hiding their Korans. I felt very small beside them, my past a secret tucked away in a pocket, never to be openly discussed. The drawings I did as a child of the people and things around me seemed to have no connection to my classes, where everyone believed fanatically in Dada or was devoted to constructivism as if they were warring sects of competing religions. Groups formed, this person stopped speaking to that person. You’d think they were building monuments, not arguing over ephemera.
I constructed drawings embedded with photographs cut from newspapers, black and red floating shapes, puns lifted from Chagall, El Lissitzky, Malevich, and Altman, printed in block letters. These pictures were full of secrets that some of the students deciphered while others shrugged and moved on. I soon abandoned painting with its endless debates about planes and abstraction for something more practical: design. Then my money really did run out. One of my teachers recommended me for a job at the Soviet Yiddish Theater (SYT). At first I thought he mumbled something about emet or emes, truth, the letter on the Golem’s forehead, but no he was talking about only a small troupe, insignificant, a dry bone tossed to a starving dog. I could tell he was thinking ‘this is good enough for her, and then she’s out of my class,’ but little did he know it was, for me a very exciting place to be. How did he know about this theater in the first place? He would never have told me. By the way, remove the first letter from emes and you get meis or death. Erase this letter from the Golem’s forehead, and that’s the end of him.
My first day I walked to a part of the city I’d never seen before; no trains or buses could take me all the way to the doors of this theater, located in a drafty wooden building that smelled like it must have housed, somewhere in its many floors, archives of moldering paper, genizahs of old plays, lists of actors, drafts of set designs, forgotten props and costumes. The director shook my hand, asked my name, and without much reflection, instructed me to join a fellow named Lapshov, a set designer who rarely left his basement workshop.
Down a narrow iron spiral stairway I found Lapshov, a giant paint-stained man, small eyes behind round black glasses. He nodded and pointed, gave clipped instructions. Lapshov seldom spoke to his apprentices, whether we were beneath discussion, or his preoccupations were elsewhere, I couldn’t say at the time. Working for him was a very different process from the art school I’d been immersed in only a few days before. The link between drawing or plan and three-dimensional execution had to be as direct and as feasible as a blueprint for a bridge or an airplane. The things had to work, to swing open, fly through the air, snap shut. Yet the moment when ink soaked into a page was mesmerizing, pure color, and the resulting drawing less static than the work I’d done in classes. Then, one way or another, the flat thing developed angles, levers, gears. A notebook of sketches wasn’t a static thing: a market square shifted into a series of alleyways or the interior of a house. A costume designer’s journal was full of people transformed into demons, beggars, a fish, a sorceress. Flip the pages, and it’s like an animated cartoon.
Actors were always coming and going through the swinging doors, from the stars (luminaries within a very small universe, it might be better to call them people with big parts) to extras and a fairly large number of crew workers. Often I needed to watch rehearsals, and during these study breaks, feet on the chair in front of me, I found myself drawn to one actor in particular. He wasn’t a romantic lead, but a comic actor who contorted his features into all kinds of hysterics. Itzik, it must also be said, had a mean streak, his comedy had an edge of sarcasm. Yet he was very charismatic, and so people tended to overlook the fact that his mimicry was deadly, especially if they felt included in the joke rather than the object of it. He had long straight hair that swung out fan-like when he moved his head, and Asiatic eyes, like an Uzbek. He made faces behind Lapshov’s broad back, pushing his nose up with one finger, pulling his cheeks down with the other hand, for example, but paid no attention to me whatsoever, and how I wanted to be included in the jibe, even if it meant making fun of Lapshov, who had never thrown acid at my often inadequate efforts. Or anyone else’s for that matter. Now that I look back, many of Itzik’s targets were harmless schmucks. Itzik slouched in seats with his legs slung over the legs of a golden-haired actress or a confident fellow actor waiting for make up, gesturing into the air. How were these people blessed by his attention when they didn’t even know how lucky, how singled out they were, while I waited outside in the cold? How to participate in the circle of his knowing humor without incurring the risk of becoming the object of it? (You might ask why did I want this? Why embrace this engine of pranks and cruelty? Sometimes one is infatuated one night, and by the following morning, afternoon at the latest, you see the ass’s head where a human head was, realize your mistake, and look for the exit signs.) I began to take great care in how I dressed before I arrived at the theater, even if my work involved painting, sawing, gluing, I wore what nice clothes I had. Sooner or later maybe he would notice me, I hoped, thinking we had all the time in the world.
After about six months working with Lapshov we were painting sets for The Travels of Venyamin the Third, a play based on Don Quixote. Venyamin III, from the small town of Tuneiadovka (Droneville), dreams he’s married to a daughter of a tsar. It was a fantastic set in which actors dressed as bottles of wine and roast chickens had to pop out of trap doors and fly through the air. I painted all morning, but Lapshov never showed up for work. This was unusual; the workshop was his whole life, as far as I could tell. Maybe he’s sick, I said to the director. He shrugged. For a week Lapshov didn’t appear. In the middle of the day, instead of taking lunch and trying to eavesdrop on Itzik, I made my way to Lapshov’s apartment building on Pavlovskaya Street and stood for a moment at the big double doors, entrance to the courtyard. I knew little about him, really, what was I getting myself into? I didn’t have much time to make a decision, lunch break was finite, and so finally summoned the courage to inquire at his neighbors if he was ill. He lived alone, this would be the right thing to do. I told myself Lapshov would have done the same for me, though why I believed this as a kind of false fuel to go forward, I don’t know. Maybe he would have. Maybe the answer is a resounding no. There was no answer at his door, so I tried some of his neighbors in the hopes they would have some idea where he might be. No one behind any of the doors I knocked on knew who Lapshov was. If the doors opened at all, I was met with only blank faces. A man dangling a bottle by its neck as if to either spill its contents or swing at me, told me to get lost. I trudged back to the theater. Later I showed the address, scrawled on a piece of paper, to the director and he said, yes, it was the correct address. Lapshov would never be seen again in this life or any other, he said, and I should take over his job. I was too young and truly had little actual experience, but there was no one else. Lapshov, wherever he was, left no forwarding address. Lapshov died, do you think? There’s no funeral, no memorial service, nothing, I asked? The director shook his head. No shiva? The director told me to get back to work, please, don’t even speak about this anymore. Okay, sorry, I said, but truly I was very bewildered.
Over the next few months others in the troupe disappeared, and without anyone offering direct e
xplanations finally I understood why this was so. The arrests were made in the middle of the night. Poof. The next day maybe Aronovsky, Boris, Rabinovitch, Yulya, Rosenberg, don’t show up. Bit by bit we were being eaten away. Replacements came and went. The core, who for unknown reasons were not yet arrested, became more nervous and suspicious of one another.
We called a meeting in secret, not all the troupe, just the few who had been there from nearly the beginning, and discussed what should we do. Dialogue went like this: Was Ginzberg an informant? He has parties. He invites everyone. Yes, but he’s the kind of person who serves you a wonderful fragrant cup of coffee, and just as you bring it to your lips, you realize there are sharp tacks sticking out from the brim. What about Leonid? He’s always taking notes. He’s a production manager. That’s his job. What’s to inform? We performed plays where Jewish landlords looked really bad, and rich merchants act from self-interest only, ruining their families and everyone else. Naïf! Moron! Someone shouted. Informants make up stories. It doesn’t have to be what really happened in any known city, on any known planet in the solar system. We talked about disbanding, but then what? Still, they would find us. It wasn’t so easy to dissolve into the chaos of movement that characterized the city. Anatoly, the carpenter, made a suggestion no one had voiced before: we should leave for Birobidzhan, the autonomous region advertised as a Jewish homeland as far east as you could go before you got your feet wet. He had seen Seekers of Happiness, starring Benjamin Zuskin as Pinya Kopman, shot in the exact province, a beautiful place. Itzik said no, this is a worthless plan. The oblast that was promoted as a treasure box waiting to explode with arable land, fruit trees, and rivers of gold was a swampy capital dominated by mosquitoes the size of bulldogs half the year and an arctic wasteland the other half. We would find it populated by the only Yids stupid enough to believe the teardrop-shaped province lying on top of China was a paradise. Or maybe they had come from someplace worse, if it was possible. He, Itzik, wasn’t going anywhere. Everyone argued back and forth. The Moscow State Jewish Theater was already installed at the Kaganovich Theater in Birobidzhan. This was a well-known fact. There was no room for a little nothing group like us. We would only get their crumbs. But at least we’d be alive. We’ll have our own theater eventually. Fat chance. You’ll have your own bug spray, that’s what you’ll get. Finally it was decided the troupe would apply to travel to Birobidzhan as a theatrical entity, anyone who wanted to stay in Moscow was welcome to. The disappearances had made everyone so nervous that debate petered out, and the truth was, most were in favor of leaving as soon as possible. By the time the meeting ended you’d think bags were already packed.
Applications made at the KOMZET (Committee for the Settlement of Jewish Toilers on the Land) were accepted, the process of packing up sets, costumes, props, and winding up our own lives in Moscow was begun. On a late spring day we were at the crowded Yaroslavksy train station, ready to board. I saw Itzik, who had changed his mind, in the crowd, and then in an instant, he was gone. His gray hat had been toppled from his head, his arms grabbed by two unknown men, his suitcase trampled underfoot, and he was hustled out of the station. The snapping up of the acidic satirist was more painful, more pathetic than the disappearance of our youngest, sad-eyed set painter just the week before. Itzik had always seemed like the kind of person who could do a back flip at the last minute and escape down a fire pole, so when he appeared vulnerable, paralyzed and mute as he was dragged away and disarmed, towed away like a rag doll, it flipped all certainties into chaos. As I looked into the crowd others began to disappear in the sea of bodies. Ordinarily I’m very short, but in heels, standing on tiptoe I made out someone who was only a seamstress, pulled into a van, Belkin who wrote melodramas, his eyes bugged out as if he were being strangled, Zapir, the carpenter, a rigger of mechanical genius who could make actors fly through the air was pushed to the ground and dragged away. Gone before my eyes were Zeisser who played Lear and the diva, Malvina, who played the bride in The Dybbuk. Pulling a scarf over my head, I melted into the mass of bodies pushing toward the rails. Police boarded the trains and some of the passengers held back, a reflexive movement like a giant jellyfish recoiling from a poke with a stick—if that’s where the police are going, you may not want to move in that direction. Then I slipped off those high heels, and in stocking feet, the pavement cold under my heels, lowered so my head and shoulders, an instant hunchback disappeared beneath the surface of the crowd. I pushed my way to the end of platform where the passenger cars gave way to the freight cars. The doors to these cars were still wide open. I passed cars laden with boxes, crates, bundles of clothing, barking dogs. Finally I found the last car, which contained, among other things, our trunks and sets. I hid between angular flats, phantasmagoria that looked like the inside of a giant watch. Stairs, platforms, sharply painted shadows used in the brothel scene from God of Vengeance, the town square for the village of fools in The Travels of Venyamin the Third, reconfigured again for the marketplace in The Sorceress, the graveyard, scene of possession in The Dybbuk. The sound of boots and a clicking noise I imagined had something to do with guns could be heard just outside the open doors. Two officers began to speak perhaps only a few feet away. Did they whisper the names of those yet to be rounded up? Did I hear them say Eliana Zoyakovno, that one, over and over? Maybe, maybe not. Between cracks in the flats I could make out elbows leaning against the metal run where the doors would be slid shut. What was holding up this train? Shut the doors, let’s move already. The two police leaned and smoked, waiting for what, I can’t say. One threw a stub of a smoked-down cigarette into the car, and I put it out with the heel of my shoe, still held in my hand. Finally their voices diminished, and I assumed they had left. The day wore on, it grew hotter, then the chill of the evening took over, and still the train didn’t move. Other men, inspectors of some kind and other police, came round and looked in each car before the doors were slid shut and locked. I could hear them speaking in loud voices. When they climbed to have a look around I shrank against a plywood gravestone.
“What’s this?”
“Building materials. Nothing.”
They unlatched a trunk.
“Old clothes.”
They didn’t even know what it was they were looking at. These inspectors must have been newly hired from some backwater who only wanted to be done with the Yaroslavsky station and go out for the night. They jumped down and locked the doors behind them. Still the train didn’t move. I fell asleep.
When I woke up the car was moving. Light came through in slivers here and there. I stretched and tried to find a crack in the wood wide enough to afford a view of the passing countryside as we sped east. What can I tell you about it now? I couldn’t see very much: plains, farmland, mountains, more mountains, some desert-like landscape that I took for outer Mongolia. What did I know, and what did it matter? I didn’t have a map and had lost any sense of time, but I had escaped and would soon be safe. The train stopped in a few towns here and there, but with my limited vision from my hiding place, no signage could be seen. As far as I knew I was the last of the group, and when I arrived in Birobidzhan I would make my way to the Kaganovich Theater and find work, easily. The smell of paint was still viable enough to be inhaled if my cheek was close enough to a flat. Climbing into a trunk, I nestled into a well of costumes that had been sweat in and not washed very well. It was comforting. I’d brought food with me for the trip across the Soviet Union. The journey on the Trans-Siberian was supposed to take many days, but after I don’t remember how long, the train came to its final stop. I’d packed quite a bit of food to take for the journey, and had maybe half left, but I wasn’t eating so much. So as I said, the train came to a stop, the doors to my car were unlocked and slid wide open.
I hadn’t expected to arrive in Birobidzhan so quickly, but there I was. The bright sun shown in my eyes, even as I peered around the edge of the door. My first impression was that the town looked nothing like the photographs we’d been shown.
The buildings appeared quite old and in the middle of a desert ringed by mountains. Dazzling sunlight poured into the car, light that should never have shone on angular expressionist flats meant to represent the landscapes where dead souls possess brides and deluded tradesmen look for the lost tribes in a city of fools that turns out to be just down the road. Unlike the Yaroslavsky station bustling with people and anxiety, this station was nearly empty. Men who watched me jump from the train car wore long shirts, baggy trousers, ridged caps of felt shaped like pillboxes. There were daggers in their belts, but a few carried guns as well. Perhaps I’d landed in the Crimea, and these armed men were Krimchaks. When I spoke to one in slow Russian, thinking it wasn’t his native language, I was right, it wasn’t, and he answered me in a language I’d never heard before. Guttural sounds slid, then seemed to end upward before coming to a stop. The language was not the Sibero-Korean dialect Itzik had imitated as he told us what to expect from natives in Birobidzhan. It was Farsi. The train had been traveling south, not east, and this was its last stop: Zahedan, Iran.
You know this city, so I don’t need to describe to you what it was like to find myself in a country where I didn’t know the language, had the wrong kind of currency, and knew no one. In those first hours I felt I’d landed on the other side of the moon, and groping in the dark with dwindling supplies of oxygen, could no longer see the earth. Where was I? Thousands of miles lay between my point of origin and where found myself standing. There were few women on the streets, and since my coat only fell a few inches below my knees I was stared at continuously, unable to speak to anyone, unable to pay for food with worthless paper rubles. A man offered me a pomegranate, but I’d never seen one before and didn’t know how to eat it. He split it open with a knife and handed me a cluster of seeds encased in red juice, their skins burst between my teeth.