by Susan Daitch
How I found rooms in a sort of hotel where there were a few other Russians I can’t begin to explain. One person guided me here, another who knew a few words of Russian, guided me there. At the hotel I was befriended by two chemical engineers, Maksim and Darya Vasilisa, who worked for Petro-oil, a state petrol company located in Rostov. Though this part of the country was under British control, Maksim believed there were rich deposits here, right under everyone’s noses, these hidden reserves only had to be sniffed out and claimed. At first it seemed so lucky to have found these two, even if Darya was stiff, remote, and formal, while Maksim laughed too hard at his own imitations of what he took to be obsequious Persians. We were in my room, talking as if we were old friends. Darya’s shawl slipped, revealing a bare but reddish arm. She stood so close to Maksim, a proprietary proximity, only a few atoms could have slipped between his pumping elbow and her bare arm. As he guffawed, he moved away slightly. The gap of molecules became the length of a small child, and Darya shifted to close it again.
At this point you’re probably thinking that there is far too much coincidence here. How can I have met the same Russians that Sidonie Nieumacher encountered? I have no answers for you, Mr. Bokser. Your notebooks are fairytales, penned by someone who lifted my name, which, in some parts of the world, is not such an uncommon one. Someone who knew pieces of it, but not the whole. Why they did this? Who knows. In the name of controlling land, squeezing oil out of rocks, stranger things have happened. You figure it out. Someone wants to throw you off a scent, how should I know? I insist my story is the true one.
Slowly they earned my trust, especially because they were the only Russians, as far as I knew, for hundreds of miles around. They promised to help me find my way to Birobidzhan, assuring me it wasn’t all that far. They were so enthusiastic about the kingdom to the east where I needed to travel. Petakhov envisioned Birobidzhan, a completely modern city with automobiles that could take flight and also navigate estuaries. The cities have moving sidewalks, the weather as balmy as he has heard California to be. A place where you can give yourself a new name and completely reinvent yourself. He would become Maksim Gorky or Maksim Ispovednik, the Confessor, or Maksim H. Houdini. Lucky Jews. Yes, even here in this far flung corner beyond the empire, they had heard about Birobidzhan, and how wonderful it sounded. A utopian paradise, an empty landscape waiting to be built upon. A bursting gold seam begging to be mined. If only they could claim some Hebraic ancestor they would both be on the next train. They would help me. It would be a pleasure to do so. And some day maybe I would return the favor. Petakhov described how I could take a train to Rostov then switch to another Trans-Siberian line, never having to return to Moscow where I would surely face arrest. He offered me glass after glass of arak, and when I shook my head, he passed the glass to Darya who swallowed its contents in one gulp. When he asked about who or what I’d left behind, at first I was very careful about what I told him, naming only Lapshov who was probably long dead anyway. But now, I think even stories of the dead are dangerous. The fact that I knew this man, went to his apartment out of concern, these were little seeds that planted themselves in Petakhov’s brain.
Maksim asked about who else could have been disappeared like this? He claimed he’d heard rumors, but never knew anyone personally who had their rooms searched and were taken off in the middle of the night. He sounded so naïve, so innocent, like he’d spent his adult life studying bridge spans in barely populated areas, and knew nothing about lists, and doctors’ plots, and the assassination of theater directors made to look like car accidents. Though I didn’t drink with him, bit by bit I found myself believing he was, indeed, this know-nothing nudnik, and slowly the names of those who disappeared from the theater slipped from my tongue.
Petakhovsky spoke like a newly minted Chelmite visiting from that City of Fools. Did he know Birobidzhan was a wasteland of an ethnic homeland, impossible to strike it rich within its borders? Sometimes it’s easier to agree with relative strangers on whom you depend, to a certain extent, than to shout, you know nothing at all! In trying to be amenable, to show him I was sympathetic to his ideas, I mentioned others arrested at the train station. Believing dead people could no longer be harmed, might even be vindicated in some way, I might as well have been drunk and liberating all my thoughts. Would it be possible to find out what happened to Itzik and the others? Maksim always listened so attentively, then spoke with such misguided authority, and Darya Vasilisa backed up every word. Maksim nodded. Darya nodded, too. Though he spent a great deal of time in the provinces: Tbilisi, Baku, Samarkand, Azerbaijan, he knew people, he was proud to say, yes he had some connections here and there. Anything was possible. Maybe he could get some of them out, maybe Itzik. People bartered knowledge for money, why not for people? Darya assured me, this could be done. He wrote down the names of the entire group who had disappeared. Darya made a copy. Is this complete? Can you sign it?
Sign it? Why?
Pause. No one spoke.
Just say to me: sure, Maksim, why not?
The next morning when I tried the door to my room, it wouldn’t budge. I banged on the door. What was going on? Someone made a mistake. Why should I be locked in a room? Silence. It was as if I were barricaded in my cabin on a sinking ship, and everyone else had long since forgotten me as they sped away on lifeboats, at least that’s how I felt. Such silence you can’t imagine. This makes no sense, you might think. Why didn’t anyone hear me? Perhaps now I think servants, other guests, whoever, had been paid off to ignore sounds coming from my room. Later that day I heard a key turn in the lock. There was a pause for a few minutes, then the key turned back the other way, as if checking the door to be certain it was locked. Petakhov whispered at the wood panels: you, Eliana are a Zionist spy. You should be sent back to Moscow. You haven’t fooled anyone. What was he talking about? I laughed nervously and pounded at the door as the sound of his footsteps receded.
The shutters to my windows were hooked closed from the outside. How they managed to do this I can’t say. I could no longer see the streets, nor hear the sound of merchants unrolling carpets in the morning, so I imagined the city empty and silent, a ghost town. My room felt as if it had been turned into a submarine floating in limbo without bearings or radar. The person who brought me meals was mute, illiterate, and resistant to sign language.
Looking back now, I don’t think Petakhov and Ulanovskaya had been sent out to look for enemies of the state in isolated places in order to turn them in, no that wasn’t their job. I believe they were who they said they were, but they acted as if they had something hidden in their pockets, something they knew all too well and turned over and over in their hands, kept far from everyone else. It wasn’t enough that they’d chosen to be sent to this remote place, but the two wanted to be exactly here in Zahedan, a place where they could share a room and never come under suspicion as far as what went on in it. They were nervous, drunk, had been accused of something. It could have been anything. Perhaps Petakhov had once traveled to America, had met with Charlie Chaplin or Diego Rivera, had contact with a renegade group of trade unionists in New York or Chicago. Others had been purged for less, but this couldn’t have been Petakhov’s story. He’d never been across an ocean. I’m sure of it. Further possible crimes: Darya Vasilisa had fallen in love with a visiting British student, envoy, mineralogist, some profession or other, and for a few weeks he fell in love with her turned-up nose, the broad expanse of her face, almost oriental, but white, white, white. Maybe the man promised to take her to London, but left her waiting at the train station, bag in hand, only to be arrested, never to see home again. Or she had unwittingly taken sensitive papers from French embassy trash that just happened to be lying on top of some really interesting garbage, discarded clothing from Paris, so she wrapped the papers around the dress to disguise her theft, because she couldn’t believe a dress so stunning would have been tossed out. She didn’t know what the documents were, she couldn’t even read French, but they were mili
tary secrets transferred by an Esterhazy in the house of Stalin. Petakhov witnessed the assassination of a Trotskyite. It was supposed to look like a car accident, but the man had been shot in the head, and bullet wounds never looks like wounds produced by a shattered windshield. He knows their secrets, what the hired assassins botched. Whatever the reason, Maksim and Darya were in trouble and needed to throw a Christian to the lions. I just happened to come along at the right time on my way to Birobidzhan and managed to fill the bill. They were nobodies looking for a lifeline to pull them out of exile in the desert, a prize to hold up and say: she’s a far greater criminal than we are. See, we’re not so bad, look how we prove our loyalty even from exile in the desert. Even now, these are my assumptions.
On the third night someone I’d never seen before unlocked my door holding a large bundle of laundry. It was after midnight. Though the man was dressed like a Zahedani servant, he whispered in Russian and told me I should collect my things quickly. At first I assumed he was working with the two engineers, summoning me on their behalf, to my deportation or execution. I looked closely at my jailer, though in the dim light, it was hard to see his face. The man looked somewhat Persian, but spoke Russian like a native, this Leonid of Arabia who dropped an armload of blankets on the floor then looked at the bottom of his shoe as if afraid he’d stepped in something. He rubbed the side of his head and his right ear, which was very red, as if he’d just been socked, and told me his name was Venyamin Katzir. I had little more than the clothes on my back, and where I was headed, a hole in the ground outside Lefertova prison, I wouldn’t need much. I asked him if he was working with Petakhov. He shook his head; we should leave quickly before the fellow who’d locked me up should return. He was nervous. There was almost nothing left of my Moscow life; I was wearing traditional Zahedani dress, but underneath was the skirt from the bride’s costume in The Dybbuk, all that remained from the theater that had once been the center of my life. He tilted his head toward the door, and we were gone. What other choice was there?
How had he found me? Entirely by accident. He told me nothing until we reached the street.
Earlier in the week he had visited a teahouse where he had become a regular, and he overheard two men having a heated conversation in Russian. Russians, or Ivans as he called them, came and went from time to time, and apparently their presence wasn’t all that unusual in this city, so far from what I still thought of as ‘my’ or ‘our’ borders. Not only were they speaking with Moscow accents, but one of them, face partly obscured by some kind of thin wool scarf, had a high voice and on closer examination looked like a woman dressed as a man, but let me assure you, that, in its own way, wasn’t so unusual. Women weren’t allowed in the teahouses, so a Russian or European couple might resort to a temporary costume in order to go out as they had been accustomed to. Unnoticed, Venyamin leaned in a bit closer. The woman’s face contorted, a walnut of frustration, and she smelled of garlic and salt. Assuming no one within earshot could understand what they were saying, the pair talked at length about a second Russian woman locked in a room. This hostage was a pawn, a great find who would solve many of their problems.
When the pair got up to leave Katzir quickly swallowed the dregs of his bittersweet coffee and followed the Russians out onto the street. They were so caught up in their argument that they were oblivious to him, and he was able to maintain a fairly close distance. He was a skilled tail, and when Darya paused to make a point clear to Maksim, Venyamin paused too, and pretended to look at a display of narguiles or sacks of dried lemons and tamarind sold on the street. Though they snapped at one another, he also observed them ducking into dusty corners: the alley between the teahouse and an attar maker smelling of jasmine, rose, and olive flowers, then again, 20 minutes later, in an elbow-shaped space at the back of a dyers’ works. Thinking no one could see them, they did things standing up, pressed against a wall, that I’m too old and embarrassed to describe, and allowing I didn’t see first hand, am reluctant to write exactly what they did when they thought no one could possibly witness their sweaty moments of groping. On the other hand, Zahedan was not a city where men and women touched in public, and perhaps that was part of the excitement for them. Darya, the good markswoman, gave the impression she had left interest in men behind her, as if it were an island she’d once visited but now barely remembered, and upon reminder found its culture both baffling and tedious in its isolation and self-absorption. But apparently my first impressions were mistaken, however deeply biased. The way she handled a Mauser, her confidence and expertise — perhaps this was part of her seduction. Who knows what goes on with such people behind closed (or not so closed) doors? After, I don’t know, 15 or 20 more minutes, Katzir got tired of waiting for them to finish up already, and he left, guessing he’d never see those two again.
Three days later he observed Maksim and Darya Vasilisa once again arguing loudly in the teahouse. Maksim wanted to go somewhere, to a site of some kind, and Darya was lagging, holding him up, complaining of sore feet crammed into boots that were too small, yet she would go because he required her company. He was overly concerned with details, recording the amount of money spent on every cup of tea in a small notebook, measuring the sticks that pierced every camel’s nose. Venyamin pegged Maksim as a dumb Moscow galoot, but this was a mistake. Darya Vasilisa gave the impression of a woman who followed this man to what she considered the ends of the earth, who would endure some deprivations, but not all, and now too much was being asked of her. Their bickering grew more heated. Katzir observed bruises on Darya’s face. Perhaps she no longer found Maksim amusing, was no longer sure why she ever had, but now was attached despite her occasional change of heart, as their furtive clutching and pawing revealed. Katzir followed them along the streets unnoticed, until they reached a building, a hotel of sorts. He heard more snippets of their arguments. Maksim was growing tired of her complaints about Zahedan. She didn’t want to be in this dusty backwater, it was an exile, a place to shrivel up under the heat and wind and become a shell of your former self.
As they entered the arcaded doors of the hotel she was still yammering, and so they still didn’t notice Katzir. Maksim waved her away as if she were a mosquito, and he stormed up a flight of stairs, while she remained below, fuming, arms crossed, tapping her fingers against the points of her elbows in acute frustration. Still undetected, Venyamin took a back stairway, and from a position at the top of the stairs was able to watch from the hall. After maybe 15 minutes Maksim emerged from their room pocketing a small pistol. He walked down the corridor, stopped at door down the hall, barked a few sentences in Russian, before finally departing. This was the prison room. They had led him right to it.
As soon as Maksim was out of sight, his footsteps receding into the distance, Venyamin examined the door. He had been an apprentice to a locksmith and was skilled at gaining entry to places that were meant to be secure. “This particular lock was so simple,” he said, and I remember he made a kind of stabbing gesture, “Houdini could have liberated you in his sleep.” As a boy he had studied how locks are made and how they’re disassembled: metal puzzles of latches, spring bolts, and pin tumbler chambers that will defeat you if you fail to conquer them. You can spend countless hours trying to open a particular difficult lock, before you finally triumph. There are no half measures, he explained, you’re either in or left out in the cold. The lock on my cell was an easy business, and in a few minutes, I was freed.
We left the building, and traveled via a series of back streets. As we rounded a corner near one of the markets, I could make out the silhouettes of Petakhov and Ulanovskaya, the very people for whom I needed to be invisible, behind some kind of gauzy muslin curtain, all over one another. Yes, they were just as Venyamin described, it could have been no one else. They argued and fought, then slammed back together again. How did I recognize them so quickly? No woman in Zahedan had Darya Vasilisa’s waved blonde hair. Even in silhouette, no one had that hair. How strange and desperate, this long
sticky kiss, and the volatility of their mutual attraction and repulsion. Maksim, though obsessed with how engineering problems were solved (a concrete dam, a railway tunnel through mountains), had appeared to me as someone profoundly uncomfortable in his own body. His shoulders were permanently hunched, and he had a stiff, self-conscious walk as if some of his bones were fused. His body conveyed him from swamp to desert to city; he didn’t need to know how it worked or what it desired beyond fuel to keep going. There they were, shadows glued together, and I stared. Maybe they were drunk, which was one thing if you were in a room, out of sight, but a dangerous state to be in while walking the streets.
Venyamin quickly pushed me into an archway. The kiss between the two, even between two people who didn’t seem very fond of one another, had a strange effect of eroticizing the street corner: the curved rinds amassed under a window, the sound of someone close by whispering, the resonance of an oud coming from a courtyard, it was as if these dissonant bits and pieces put a spell on you. But we only stopped for a moment to decide which direction our detour would need to take in order to avoid Ulanovskaya and Petakhov, hidden, easily missed, but if you looked closely they were entwined like a couple of Soviet jellyfish. While Katzir was trying to figure out which way to turn to find the train station, the curtain blew aside, Darya opened her eyes, and saw me. She tried to push Maksim off her, but it wasn’t a good moment for him to disengage, if you know what I mean. She pointed and squawked while he dawdled.