Expulsion

by Marina Sonkina

  The hand is now immobile, its voyage cut short by a click. Yet, in its tired deepness, it holds all the memories of the three-faced time; all the pages it has written and the space it folded and unfolded and the voices of the dead it has resurrected, the voices softened and deepened by death.

  But the time has come when writing is no more. The mystery of the world in which, Borges believed, there was nothing that was not mysterious, now eluded his earthly eyes. Only the hint of yellow was spared to him. Yellow, the colour of the sun; of gold; of harvested field; of sand; of maiden’s hair.

  The hand of a visionary became the hand of a blind man: oblivious to anything but touching.

  Borges tells us an old Japanese legend of a haiku that once saved the world.

  In ancient times the Japanese Divinities got together to pronounce their judgement over Man. Seeing the evil of man, they decided to destroy him. Then one of the Gods remembered that there was something fitting in the space of seventeen syllables. He had intoned a haiku. After that the world was saved.

  Borges also tells us about his friend Xul who had said to his wife that he would not die so long as she was holding his hand. At the end of the second day she had to leave him for just one moment. When she returned, Xul was dead.

  The eye of the camera holds Borges’ hand forever.

  PART II

  •

  BIRD’S MILK

  THE SHINY RIVETS on the edge of the leather suitcase gleamed under the lamp through the irregular spaces between the crocheted snowflakes of the doily covering the lid. The suitcase belonged to the confined rooms of my childhood as solidly as did the old kitchen table, the rickety étagère, the bespectacled old television set with a glass filled with water in front of its screen.

  With time, the suitcase itself became furniture: first a TV stand, then an end-table at my grandparents’ bed sporting on top of a starched doily an assortment of disparate objects, most of which had nothing to do with going to bed or getting up: a darning mushroom, a sugar-bin, and a china ballerina on one gilded foot.

  “When are they coming? We’ve run out of sugar,” my grandmother said, inspecting the empty bowl on top of the suitcase. “You know Liza has a sweet tooth.”

  “Won’t hurt them if they use sliced apples instead,” my grandfather said. A severe diabetic, he had no use for sugar and was convinced that his own strange tea drinking ritual would suit everybody just fine.

  My grandparents would fall into prolonged silences interrupted only by the sound of a spoon rattling in a glass. My grandfather never drank tea out of cups but preferred a glass in a simple metal holder. Why he needed to stir slices of apple into his tea was a mystery to me: perhaps he liked to watch them whirl in the water, a little chasing game, he created; or perhaps, the chime of the spoon reminded him of the morning tea trays rattling glass on metal, on the long-distance trains when he was the chief railways inspector before the war.

  The Levins were an elderly couple, always dressed in dark baggy coats. They would remove the galoshes from their felt boots and put them side by side — one pair small, another big — in the hallway, leaving two muddy puddles of melting snow on a thread-bare mat. The knock of their knuckles on my grandparents’ door was purely symbolic: hardly a sound emerged. They were strangely quiet, these two guests. Sitting, they never changed their postures, and no chairs ever cracked under their weightlessness. Auntie Liza, with her prominent Jewish nose and heavy half-closed eyelids, resembled a small tired bird. It was impossible to imagine this woman ever being young or vivacious. Her husband, whom everybody, including his wife, called simply Levin, was tall and emaciated, with a mass of black hair that sharply contrasted with his crumpled face and pale lifeless lips. Levin rarely spoke, but when he did it was always the same monotonous note: “Joseph, if Vladimir goes to Minsk to get the papers, I’ll wait in Moscow till he returns. You know it’s my last chance.”

  “Where are you going to stay in the meantime?” my grandfather said.

  “Why do you ask?” my grandmother said, grumbling. “As if they had a place to go . . .” She looked hesitatingly around the room. “They could stay with us while waiting.”

  “Oh no, we won’t inconvenience you,” Aunt Liza, eyes downcast, said. “Levin has already got six orders from Ryazan. I’m sure there will be more, once we arrive and people hear about us. We were planning to leave tomorrow.”

  “Going without a passport? Ryazan is not a small place.”

  “I’m telling Levin, small villages are much better: out of sight, out of mind,” Aunt Liza said without lifting her eyes. “But he won’t listen to me.”

  “I’ll take a risk, it’s only three or four days, right? I’ll make a good buck and pay Gromov for the passport.”

  “I wouldn’t count on three days,” my grandfather said while stirring his tea again. “It can be a week, two weeks, you never know. As for Vladimir . . . you know my son. He doesn’t always knock at the right door. I can’t go . . . people might recognize me . . .”

  “You? Well, that’s out the question, Joseph, that’s understood.” Levin sighed. “But I don’t want to put your son at risk either, not on my account. Though, I think it’s safe. I was told by people I trust.”

  “You think so? What if it’s a trap?”

  “Look,” said Levin. “Gromov knows the guy. He is Kazimir’s relative, completely reliable.”

  “And where is Kazimir?” my grandfather asked, moving his glass away and putting both hands on the table. “You tell me, where is Kazimir?” He pointed to the suitcase in the corner. “This has been waiting for him for eight years.”

  “He will return,” Levin said quietly. “You’ll see. But you should have opened the suitcase and looked inside.”

  “If he returns, why would I open it? It’s your brother’s. You should take it.”

  “Where would I put it, Joseph? I have no home. Besides, it was entrusted to you. You should keep it till he returns.”

  My grandfather bent towards Levin: “He will not return. Don’t fool yourself.”

  There was silence.

  “There is a difference between fooling oneself and having hope,” Levin said finally. “Without hope, where would I be now, Joseph?”

  Again there was a pause. My grandmother brought out two more glasses in metal sleeves. She put a plain saucer with a small heap of round cracknels on the table. The tea she poured into both glasses was pale. Auntie Liza took one cracknel, soaked it into her tea, and bit on it with her few remaining front teeth. Levin held the glass without drinking, warming his transparent fingers with its heat. I was afraid to look at his mutilated right hand. His thumb and an index were missing.

  •

  It was only recently that the Levins found each other after 12 years of labour camps. In 1936, Levin, a biologist and the Director of a Research Institute, had confessed that he was a paid Trotskyite agent, a tool of the German-Japanese-American intelligence services assigned to drown the conquests of the Socialist Revolution in its own blood by growing a deadly virus in his Institute’s lab. The virus killed 1470 horses, 3304 pigs, and 1900 cows in one district alone. His wife Liza confessed that, as her husband’s accomplice, she dreamt up a “smoke tax” and personally collected it from all the peasants who had chimneys in the nearby villages to finance the subversive activities of her man.

  Miraculously, the Levins had survived the camps: Levin felling trees in Solovki, 150 km off the Arctic Circle, and Liza in Siberia, half a continent across, near Turukhansk. Liza turned out to be a fine calligrapher and painter, and instead of building the Salekhard railway road — the “Death Road” as women in the camp nicknamed it — she painted murals for the “Red Corners,” the official rooms outfitted with Lenin’s busts and red banners. She also designed Lightnings, Gulag propaganda bulletins.

  The two beat the odds again when they reunited — only to discover that the mi
racle of their reunion was marred: their son Leonid was nowhere to be found.

  The day after his parents’ arrest, men in civilian clothes took the five-year-old into an orphanage, where both his first and last name were changed. That was, no doubt, the manifestation of justice but also mercy, aimed at removing the shameful stains from the boy’s biography by a simple act of severing any links with his parents, the accursed enemies of people. As Comrade Stalin had pointed out, no sons should be held responsible for the crimes of their fathers.

  When all their efforts to find Leonid lead to nothing, Auntie Liza gently but firmly slipped into another world. She would tilt her bird’s head to one side listening intently to God’s divine lisp which she alone could discern. Aunt Liza never questioned God’s benevolent intercession into her family’s affairs: it was only a question of time, and of all people, Liza knew everything there was to know about time. She also knew that God, in his infinite mercy, after munching some sounds in his ancient mouth, would dictate to her the initial letter, then the first and the second syllables of her child’s assumed name, and finally, reveal all: first, patronymic, and the last name. None of it would be as sweet as the boy’s real name: “Leonid Lvovich Levin.” No, it would be a rough name, in itself a guarantor of survival of its bearer. Something like Boris Petrovich Stepin, or Petr Andreevich Drozdov, a name with sharp corners, more palatable in this world.

  The moment would always come when Aunt Liza would quietly move her tea glass to the side, get a pencil stub and scrap of paper out of her old purse and make some quick notes in her elegant tiny writing. She anticipated the revelation of the secret with humility, that moment when she’d see the name appear on paper, the right one, and then fill her mouth with its new sounds, savour them, sing them quietly to herself, and finally carry them to the Central Information Bureau in her open palm, so that in a month, at most two or three, her little boy now grown up, still pale and scraggy but all right, would run into her arms out of piles of stamped and signed papers, the jumble of metal orphanage beds, lice-infested shaven heads, steel mugs and plates, railway stations guarded with dogs, forlorn locomotive hoots, abandoned construction sites, entangled wire, fallen electrical poles, frozen dirt, coal piles soiling virgin snow across the immeasurable indifferent white expanses of her land: “Mama, mamoshka, I’m here! I knew you would find me!”

  “Sonia,” my grandfather said, turning to me. “Go out and play. Go.”

  “Leave her alone,” my grandmother said, closing the curtains. “Where will the child go? It’s late.”

  “Come, come over here, then,” my grandfather said. “What’s today, Sonia, Monday? Check if the candies in my pocket grew all right. Give me your hand, right there, see? Now, which one you want? A Bear of the North or a Golden Rooster?”

  “Bird’s Milk,” I said firmly. “I want Bird’s Milk.”

  “No, that one doesn’t grow on Mondays . . .”

  “Tuesdays, then?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  “How about Thursdays?”

  “Well . . . maybe. But Friday is more likely.”

  “Ah, you’re cheating! Candies don’t grow in the pockets. You buy them in the store.”

  “Who told you that? Have you ever seen any candies in the store?”

  My grandfather was right. In 1948, there were no candies or apples to be bought, but as a former secretary of the regional party committee and a War Hero, he was entitled to a special food ration from the party’s internal food distribution centre.

  “Look,” my grandfather said, “here is Bear of the North. Did you see it yesterday? No. So what happened overnight? It just grew . . .” He pointed to his pocket again.

  “I want Bird’s Milk.”

  “But birds don’t make milk, didn’t you know?”

  “Yes, they do. If you say candies grow in your pocket, then birds make milk too. And besides, I just had Bird’s Milk yesterday. They are the best candies in the world!”

  “Where did you get them?” Aunt Liza asked, suddenly awakening from her trance. She scooped the scraps of paper into her purse and gazed into my face.

  “Tanya gave me,” I said.

  “Tanya . . . who is Tanya? And where did Tanya get them from?” Aunt Liza’s eyes seemed alight. “Up North that’s what I craved for most, candies . . .”

  “Her father brings Bird’s Milk from the ‘organs,’” I said quietly, looking away.

  Tanya’s father was a prosecutor at Lubyanka. He called Lubyanka the “organs.”

  I felt guilty having tasted Bird’s Milk while Aunt Liza had not and now wanted it as badly as only a little girl would.

  “Aren’t there lots and lots of candies, up North, Aunt Liza?” I asked. “Don’t bears from the North live there?”

  “No, my sweetheart, there were no candies at all. But what does Bird’s Milk taste like, tell me?”

  “Like . . . like . . . like chocolate waffles.”

  “Chocolate waffles ...” Aunt Liza mumbled and looked away. She turned back to me. “If Tanya ever gives you another candy, will you treat me to one?”

  I felt sorry for Aunt Liza. He eyelids looked so heavy. I wanted to hold them open with my fingers. “When I grow up and earn a lot of money, I’ll buy you a whole box of Bird’s Milk!” I said.

  “Joseph, let’s open Kazimir’s suitcase, and see what’s inside,” Levin said. “Maybe there are some papers, or some clothing Vladimir can use if he goes to Minsk. Wouldn’t it be good if . . .”

  “Now go and play with your dolls, Sonia,” my grandfather said.

  “I don’t want dolls,” I said. “I want to see what’s in the suitcase.”

  Without the doily, the suitcase looked naked, ominous as if a stranger had suddenly appeared in the room. It wasn’t new. Cuts and scars traced diagonals across the black leather. My grandfather pressed hard on the metal buttons. The two clasps popped up. The women held their breath. The lid fell open. The papers inside were faded, a disappearing print in an unfamiliar script. My grandfather removed the newspaper. I could smell tobacco and a faint odour of eau-de-cologne. My grandmother stared at the clothes: canvas tennis shoes, striped, foreign-looking shirts, a belt with a bright-golden buckle, turtleneck sweaters the likes of which none of us had ever seen. But none of it seemed to interest my grandfather. He rummaged. He was looking for papers about the fate of his vanished friend Kazimir Levin.

  There were none. Instead, from underneath the heap of clothes a piece of fabric emerged, a print, shimmering tiny pink and purple flowers on a pale-blue meadow. It was a woman’s scarf that must have somehow lost its way on the road of war before finding its unlikely shelter. My grandfather stepped back. My grandmother tentatively stroked the scarf, then handed it to Aunt Liza who suddenly with a small whimpering pressed it to her face, then returned the scarf to the heap of alien clothing.

  The scarf was only a prelude. My grandfather’s excavation had unearthed from the bottom of the suitcase the photograph of a woman. She was beautiful, a face framed with thick black curls, exotic, not Russian. Her lips were parted slightly with a hint of mischief as if she was gazing at a marvel no one else saw. I wondered whether the girl owned the scarf.

  “I didn’t know he had a woman in Spain . . .” my grandfather said, examining the picture.

  “Kazimir’s fiancée,” Levin replied. “They met in 1939 in Barcelona, shortly before it fell to the Nationalists. He was going to bring her to Moscow and marry her here.”

  My grandfather looked at Levin and said nothing. Then, in reverse order, he started putting clothing back in the suitcase: the photograph on the bottom, sweaters, shirts, tennis shoes, and finally, the newspaper. He locked the suitcase and carried it back to the bed.

  “I hope Kazimir will return,” he said without looking at any of us.

  Kazimir was born in Lithuania. Together with his elder brother, Lev Levin,
he came to Moscow to make the revolu­tion. That’s where the two brothers met my grandfather, then an aspiring Komsomol leader. The three friends be­came inseparable. But the revolution was soon over, replaced by the Civil War. These were exciting times. “All men are Brothers! Down with the Rotting Corpse of the Bourgeoisie! Labour will Rule the World!” You could feel the air crackling with euphoria. Kazimir was good with horses and with sabre in hand he galloped from the Western to the Eastern Fronts, cleansing capitalist filth from the world, protecting the oppressed, summarily executing the enemy, all in the name of comrade Lenin, the World Revolution and International Proletariat. But when the Civil War came to an end leaving in its wake the Heroic Collectivization, Heroic First Five-Year-Plan, Heroic Construction of the First Metropolitan in the world, Heroic Conquest of the Arctic, Heroic Stakhanovism Movement, Heroic Three-Months-on-the-Ice-Floe-from-Pacific-to-Antarctic-without-Food; Heroic Soviet Woman-the-Mother-of-ten, also the World’s First Parachute Jumper, Kazimir yearned for another revolution. He found it in Spain’s International Brigades. When the Republic failed, he fled to Russia, stopping at my grandfather’s. He was trying to arrange the papers to get his fiancée across the border. One sunny morning he went to the post-office to send her a telegram. Nobody saw him again.

  “Now at least we know what’s in the suitcase,” Levin said. “You keep it, Joseph. Keep it.”

  “I will,” my grandfather said. “But I won’t send my son to Minsk, Levin. This is a frame-up, don’t you see? You have a ‘wolf’s’ passport, that’s true. You can’t live in Moscow, or in any other city, but at least you’re alive . . .”

  “Alive! You call this a life?” my grandmother said, interrupting. “Nobody would even register them! They tried Tver, they tried Ryazan, they tried every damn pin on the map. No place would have them!”

  “Sh-sh!” my grandfather said, putting his index to his lips.