One way or another, we didn’t know what violations it was all about, but the authorities apparently had a swift and determined grip, no doubt about it. They even tell this story in Berdichev, when Mendel called from a pay phone:
“Hello, is this the NKVD?”
They replied on the other side: “Yes, this is NKVD. Go ahead.”
“You’re doing a bad job!” said Mendel and put down the receiver.
A minute later he called from another pay phone. “Hello, is this the NKVD?”
Someone patted him on the back and said, “That’s right, Citizen Mendel, NKVD. We do our best.”
The next morning, however, to everyone’s amazement, Voitek was neither released nor did we hear anything about the five-ruble fine, which, according to the know-it-alls at the workshop, he inevitably had to pay. Deeply confused, I ran to the synagogue in whose yard, if you remember, was situated the little house of our rabbi.
“Don’t ask me, I don’t know a thing!” Ben-David raised his hand somberly before I even asked him.
“All right,” I said. “I won’t ask you. But why have they arrested Avramchik? He’s eighty years old!”
“First, you went ahead and asked me. And second, if someone is arrested, it’s for some criminal act, not for his age.”
“You believe Avaramchik is capable of such an act?”
“I said ‘someone,’ not Avramchik. And if you please, try to understand what you’re being told: I don’t know anything! Don’t ask me, I’m in a lousy mood anyway!”
We were silent for a while. The rabbi pushed the sugar bowl toward me and poured some tea. In the silence our teaspoons rang against the porcelain cups like little bells.
At one point my tea went down the wrong way, I choked and, coughing, raised my teary eyes to the rabbi. “Just incredible, to get himself into such a mess! He’s just an old man….”
“Eighty years old,” the rabbi helped me.
“In my opinion this is some outrageous blunder, there’s no other explanation. But on the other hand, they arrested three separate people.”
“Well then, three outrageous blunders,” said the rabbi dryly. “This morning Esther took the fast train to Lvov. She will clarify the case, if they themselves don’t have a plague of outrageous blunders over there.”
At the time I didn’t understand him, but when our comrade from the Center, Esther Katz, came back from Lvov, she was even more confused than I was.
“Is such a plot possible?” she asked. “It’s terrible—they’ve started mass arrests in Lvov, the arrested have already started making confessions. You won’t believe it, but do you know whom they’ve arrested?”
“I know,” said the rabbi. “Liova Weissmann. Did I guess right?”
She wasn’t even surprised by Ben-David’s insight, but took it as something natural. She, no less than the rabbi, knew well what that last word—“arrested”—meant in the eyes of the orthodox Bolshevik, if you know what I mean, in combination with the last but one—“they”—regardless of the self-criticism and the skin stretched on a rack. As far as “they” were concerned, certain political inclinations, even if they happened in the early and innocent years of your youth, were looked upon as a virus that for a long time might seem innocuous or even dead, but given the right environment and the necessary temperature, lifts one eyelid, most frequently the right one, looks around, and then in no time at all an epidemic breaks out.
“A big Trotsky-Zinoviev subversive conspiracy has been uncovered. They were organizing destructive acts during the harvest. The traces lead to a foreign country,” she reported matter-of-factly.
“Oh, my God!” I exclaimed. “Avramchik and the harvest! Avramchik and a Trotsky-Zinoviev terrorist group!…The priest and Pan Voitek—well, now I understand…”
“Why ‘well’? And what do you understand now?” the rabbi asked dryly, looking at me with astonishment.
“I meant to say,” I mumbled, “that after all, the two of them, the priest and Voitek, are Poles. A foreign body, so to say…”
“Really?” said the rabbi. “So they are a foreign body. Foreign to whom, if I may ask? Because Avramchik is a Jew, for someone he could also be a foreign body! Ay-ay, Itzik, I’m ashamed!”
To tell you the truth, I felt ashamed, too.
FIVE
My children—that glider enthusiast Yeshua and the parachute jumper Susannah—accepted without reservation the Soviet regime, and gave it their firm Komsomol support for the complete eradication of…and so on, let me not bother you with stupidities. My mother and father were silent and would only turn their heads every now and then from each other to one of the people speaking around the table that Goldstein, the carpenter, once made, because the old were about as familiar with politics as King Solomon was with the moral norms of sexual life. Uncle Chaimle was fully on the side of the authorities or at least this is what he would say—don’t forget he was a Soviet employee with a short time left before his pension, and Sarah was silent and when she would lift them toward me, her greenish-gray eyes radiated sorrow and a feeling of anxiety.
You’d probably be surprised if I told you that the only people who didn’t believe a word, and I mean not even a comma of what was being said or written in the newspapers, were the old men, who continued to gather in the workshop. These wise naifs were, so to say, completely out of it, and thus as completely foreign to all this mythology as, for instance, a true-believing son of Israel on whom you try to foist the story of that Yeshu, who seemed to have resurrected himself, lifted the stone off his grave and taken off for heaven. Of course, they were cautious enough not to utter a single word of comment, but an apparent hint of their appraisal of events was in their shared glances and the speed with which they jumped, like hungry wolves, on poor Rothschild.
Of course, Pan Voitek was released neither the next day, nor the next month, but thank God, he saved himself the five rubles, because he was sentenced to fifteen years of exile in Siberia with the corresponding expropriation of his citizen’s rights. Avramchik and the priest, as simple accomplices—unknown to whom or for what—got off the hook easier, with five years each. About poor Liova Weissmann we never heard anything again. He just annihilated himself, disappeared into thin air like morning mist and was gone.
To this day, I’m still full of regret that at that time I unknowingly let myself become a servant at a foreign master’s table, as our rabbi Ben-David used to say, that I, through the mere fact of accepting the possibility of guilt on the part of the arrested Poles, had followed the malevolent will-o’-the-wisp of my unenlightened soul that led to the warm and comfortable abode of complicity. And this complicity or unconscious participation always begins with the conviction that those closest to you, the people you know best, are innocent and that everything around them is a consequence of some misunderstanding or malicious slander, while the others…. Well, as far as the others and particularly the most distant and the least known to us are concerned, they’re probably the true destroyers and agents of foreign powers and no matter what you’re telling me, there’s no smoke without fire…. And don’t you realize, you fool, that this one, who’s closest to you, whose innocence you’re ready to swear by, is for the other people the unknown one and for them, in particular, the true harmful agent?…Don’t you realize, you fool, that this is how that mechanism is wound up, to make you full of suspicion toward others, and of others toward you?
At that time, and during the next wave of accusations and trials, I couldn’t comprehend then, I didn’t comprehend even later, and I will never comprehend the hidden meaning, the secret and cherished purpose of this unreal, insane—I would even say mystical—passion for collective self-destruction, this all-devouring and blood-thirsty Moloch, into whose flaming and insatiable throat obedient crowds would go, sometimes as if they’d been put under a spell by the smoke of secret shaman herbs, entering in disciplined lines,
here and there even singing psalms of praise, wave after wave, large helpings of tens of thousands of people, and each one of them individually a sacrificial lamb on the altar of the future.
There were of course many who resisted, who didn’t pronounce themselves guilty, who swore and cursed, or whimpered in fear, or wanted to write and let Stalin, who suspected nothing, or so they thought, know all about it and tell him what was being done behind his back, but the line behind them was pushing them at a steady rate toward the flaming throat. And those whose mission it was to push them forward knew in advance, with the doom and obsession of medieval flagellants—those Catholic fanatics who, possessed by evil spirits, whip themselves bloody—that they themselves in their turn would be pushed by the ones coming behind them. And maybe in each of them there was a tiny spark of hope that precisely he would be the one to escape the bitter cup of poison. Maybe, I don’t know.
I’m reminding you that a lot of these feelings and thoughts of mine came to me quite a bit later, when I’d lived through and learned about things that then I’d neither seen yet nor could have known about, but let me repeat to you that the transparent layers of time lie one on top of the other and through this magnifying glass you can see better the truth about old delusions, or, I repeat again, accumulate fresh ones.
The newspapers and radio were emitting new waves of uncovered plots, full and sincere confessions, trials, rallies, and incantations, which were gradually weaving us into a sticky and venomous spider web. I said “radio” by habit—such a device the people in Kolodetz didn’t possess, we had “reproductors”—a truncated cone of black cardboard, hanging somewhere on the wall, from the bottom of which would spring news, music, speeches, articles, and commentaries. You could neither escape nor switch to another station—just the opposite, this single one would latch on to you as its prey and follow you around, biting your behind, no matter where you put yourself in hiding—in the bedroom and under the bed, in the kitchen and even in the street, where the same cones, only now metallic, were hanging from posts, above entrances, and on roofs. As far as I remember, only the public lavatories didn’t have these black funnels. We used to recognize them, and there’s a grain of truth in this, that as a big cultural and moreover free acquisition—considerably bigger than the record players of Uncle Chaimle—out of them, I mean the funnels, would pour and flood upon us not just Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, and not only Chekhov’s Three Sisters or the poems of Mayakovski, which I don’t underestimate at all, but also information about what was being uncovered, about the rallies and revolutions, the trials and sentences, and sincere confessions and repentances related to the above-mentioned Trotsky-Zinoviev monsters and all kinds of other destructive-subversive groups. Unceasing resolutions from labor collectives and military units to Comrade Stalin were read, which expressed the unfaltering will of all the Soviet people, I emphasize all the people, which includes logically my will and that of my family, even my mother Rebekha and my father Aaron Blumenfeld, to break the spine of the imperialist plotters. Shall I also mention those foreign writers and journalists, some of them really big names deserving of respect, who were invited to the trials, running up a Soviet tab at the Metropol Hotel and devouring black Astrakhan caviar, and then writing—and some of them may have been sincerely misled—about the brilliant prosecutor Andrei Vishinksi and the genuine confessions of the prosecuted? Let me not mention as an example and proof any names, so as to avoid condemning them or their descendants and admirers to the same repentance and shame that to this day do not give peace to my lonely nights.
And now I ask, since I don’t have an answer to the question: What in fact was the goal, the hidden meaning, or, if you like, the simple benefit of all this? Was it a gigantic experiment of the One Who Is, with us, the ants, inhabiting the earth and naively considering ourselves the masters of our life and destiny? And is it given to the ant to penetrate the meaning and purpose of God’s experiments, even though, to tell you the truth, if He got a kick out of all this, I would personally participate in the breaking of His Window Panes!
But you’d be wrong with the answer to my question if you were to rush to generalizations, or if you haven’t noticed, or you haven’t wished to notice, that right next to this world of fear, lawlessness, and dark insecurity there existed another, parallel world and it’s this one that confuses me and maybe confused those others, the foreign writers and journalists from the Metropol Hotel: in that second world dedicated and selflessly great scientists were working on earth-shattering discoveries, children were going to school and youths to the universities, excellent books were being written and sincere songs were being sung, world class mathematicians and poets were being born; the depths of the universe were being penetrated and the depths of the atom nucleus; there was a Moscow Art Theater in it and the Bolshoi, and Galina Ulanova; for concert tickets people stood in lines five blocks long, there was the Hermitage, Sholokhov, unvanquishable chess players, Papanin stepping onto the North Pole, Chkalov flying over the ocean, Eisenstein opening a new era in cinema, and the USSR as the most literate and youthful country in the world. Some of it might have been accomplished through violence, I don’t deny it, but the main, the great part, required a free spirit—after all, could slaves have achieved it? And you would again be making a big mistake if you believed the anti-Soviet press of that time that the people were collectively cursing Stalin: in those days and the years that would soon follow, people were throwing themselves into battle and dying with his name on their lips, and let it, his name, be seven times damned and seven times seven. Even the ones who were going to be shot by his own order gave out their last cry in his praise. Whether this was collective madness I don’t know, but this is how it was. I, Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld, the future ZEK 003-476 from the concentration camp in Kolyma, Northeast Siberia, hereby state that this is how it was, and if you’ve got an answer to this riddle of riddles, which, believe me, will tear at human consciousness another hundred and two years, and if you know what milk looks like in fact, please, write to me, I’d be grateful!
SIX
The knot of doubt about the justice or injustice of what was happening around us and what was torturing me with unanswerable questions was split by one single stroke: early in the morning the rabbi Ben-David descended the three steps of the atelier. Pale as half-baked unleavened bread, his lips trembling, he fell into the chair, but couldn’t say a word for a long while.
I asked quietly, “Esther, too?”
He nodded.
“And now?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
My father lifted his eyes from the Soviet picture magazine Ogoniok, which he was only leafing through because he couldn’t read Russian very well, even though, like most people in our region, he managed to speak it somehow, and looked over his thick glasses: “What is it, Shmuel?”
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