Isaac's Torah

by Angel Wagenstein

  “So, in your opinion,” I said, “everything is chaos and chance. But I have a rabbi who believes in the mystery of the road and in its final meaning. He believes that the goal is predestined.”

  Mark Semyonovich shrugged his shoulders. “Rabbis are by presumption religious believers. I’m not.”

  “And you don’t believe in the final victory of a new society of Reason and Justice?”

  “What does the Soviet Union have to do with all that? Have you seen the Moscow metro?”

  “I’ve never been to Moscow,” I said.

  “What a pity. It’s the most beautiful metro in the world. The deepest escalators take you up and down mechanical stairways. We are rushing up, as they say, toward the shining peaks of communism. But we’re on the wrong escalator, which requires us to run and run, swimming in sweat, up the escalator that leads down. And so we move in place, singing rousing songs until we’re out of breath. But one day we’ll be dead tired of the senselessness of this movement, we’ll stop running, and the escalator will take us down to the place where we started out. Mark my words: the Soviet Union will collapse inevitably. It has to. But this will also happen in the same abrupt, illogical, and unsystematic way, in order to generate new chaos, full of new joyful surprises.”

  A strange man was this Mark Semyonovich and strange were the reasons that had brought him to the camp. If I had to sum it up in one word, it would be “love.” He was maybe the only one of this colorful tribe who had turned up here accused of love—love toward the daughter of a high-ranking (almost as high as the Kremlin clock) Bolshevik and state functionary, who through his people had more than once warned the movie director to take his dirty hands off this enchantress, promised to the son of a still higher ranking—say, almost at the height of the red ruby star—tovarishch, after whose name they had already christened one average Soviet town, one island, one canal, two dams, one tractor factory and some schools and kindergartens. And when this enamored movie fool didn’t get the hint and continued to meet in secret with his goddess (so he naively regarded her), the father and future father-in-law got upset and, heaping on citizen Lebedev all the rage, vengeance, and moral decay of power, sent him for nothing, literally nothing, here to the 70th parallel.

  In this connection I remembered a camp joke—because it may seem strange to you—but the most beautiful jokes and the most beautiful songs were born in the camps or their ideological vicinity, which at least in this respect, and not only in this, made them different from the Nazi ones.

  A camp boss is interrogating three newly arrived prisoners: “How long is your sentence?”

  “Ten years.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said that Stalin is leading the country to its death.”

  “And you?”

  “I also have ten. I declared that the Short Course in the History of the Bolshevik Party is a complete scam.”

  “And you?”

  “Also ten.”

  “For what?”

  “For nothing.”

  “Don’t lie!” said the boss, getting angry. “For nothing we give five years!”

  Such jokes don’t reflect the whole truth, or at least the truth exactly as it was in life—because the movie director Mark Semyonovich Lebedev, called by fellow inmates simply Semyonich, hadn’t been sentenced to ten years, or even five—he was just staying there without a sentence, with limitations in space but no limitations in time, and such victims of lawlessness, who were not small in number, were constantly bumping up against the Great White Silence of the GULAG.* The only hope of Semyonich was some kind of miracle, for example, that the newspapers—and here, even with delays, an occasional issue of Pravda arrived for the local bosses—would announce, seemingly casually, that the tractor factory, named after the aforementioned father-in-law from the Kremlin, had been renamed after this and that congress of the party or this and that anniversary of the October revolution. Whoever was able to decipher the codes of such announcements would understand that the position of the aforementioned boss had started to wobble, and, following the laws of chaos, Mark Semyonovich, like a rabbit out of a hat, could jump out in the center of Moscow. Of course, he had no illusions that the enchantress would throw herself on his neck, because by now she had a three-year-old son and was pregnant with a second child—a future builder of shining communism, kingdom of Equality and Justice. And by that beautiful time the child would be in the hands of the nanny, the three servants, and the cook in the dacha just outside of Moscow with eighteen rooms, beautifully located by the dam, still carrying the name of the father-in-law, who was renowned and beloved in the area with his merry homespun character and his record catches of pike and rudd. I’m sorry about the long sentence, but the road to communism isn’t short either!

  * GULAG—Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, which means Camp Management Headquarters, but I hope you realize this is an understatement and I mean the whole camp system of course. [Mr. Blumenfeld’s note]

  TEN

  I was arrested, as you know, in Vienna at the beginning of September ’45, but don’t get the idea that the Soviet court authorities were dying to see me. They had quite a lot of other, considerably more pressing work with former policemen, activists, and all kinds of assistants to the Nazi occupation authorities, and my case was dispatched helter-skelter in April the next year. And so it was off to Kolyma that I was transported at the end of May with a group of prisoners who were at first like slender creeks that merged into streams at different regional command posts and railway junctions, until they gradually grew in size to a great Siberian river. They were reinforcements for the copper and the lead–zinc mines, for processing lumber liberated from the camps and cutting stone—reinforcements for the seriously thinning camp ranks, on the one hand because of the massive release of prisoners who were to be included in the alarmingly dwindling army units at the fronts, and on the other because of the devastating consequences of the Great Hunger that had affected in different degrees the whole country, but which had inflicted particularly serious human losses in the Kolyma Constellation. It was then, they say, that the guards’ shaggy Siberian shepherds began mysteriously disappearing, and in the deep crevices of rocks—the work of ice and the untamable element of the sea—even during my time one could see bones picked clean and traces of fire. Here the prisoners used to kill seal pups in cold blood, to which the guards as a rule closed their eyes, especially since the locals were also doing their part in the collective diminishment of the population of Greenland seals.

  And so, I happened to arrive at the 70th parallel in the second half of May and for the first time tasted the charm of white nights, when the sun does not go down and only the hanging piece of iron that painfully reminded me of Special Site A-17 and the Radish divided conventional night from day, the time for labor and the time for rest.

  After it became at last clear that a former typhoid patient could no longer make his contribution to the mines, Adonai again—for the nth time!—placed a sheltering right hand above my head, on account of which I apologize to Him for the hot threats, made by me from time to time, to break His window panes, and I was included in the group of translators who were facilitating contact between the guards and the low-ranking German POW’s, who were occupied mainly with logging.

  Here’s the place to inform you that as a result of in-depth historical research, it has been indisputably established that since the time of Nebuchadnezzar and Amenhotep II until today, all through these years of war, slavery, and revolution, the Jews have made pronounced attempts to exchange healthy physical labor for translation or editing activity. The multi-ton basalt newsstands with the latest headlines, inscribed by Jewish slaves with cuneiform Babylonian signs or Egyptian hieroglyphs, testify to the present day about this inclination of the Jew toward the more intellectual variants of slave labor. To say nothing of the Jewish translators without whom the emperor Vespasian could have har
dly made his way with the large numbers of prisoners from the Judean war, who couldn’t curse in any language other than Aramaic, since Russian was still out of the market. But this is a different issue, let’s not digress.

  This is how I got to know Mark Lebedev, who spoke German badly, but had enough to get out of the copper mines. And maybe above him, the mischievous fool, there was also laid an invisible protective hand, I don’t know.

  So, Semyonich said, resting his arm on my shoulder, with eyes fixed on the melting midnight silver of the ocean: “Watch and fill your soul with light. Because then the time of the Black Sun will come, when you will know if it is day or night again only by the clanging of the iron. Here we call it ‘St. Peter’s Bell.’ Because when you hear the iron for the last time, you’re already there with the good sergeant Peter, guardian of the celestial concentration camp, no matter what it’s called—heaven or hell. So, this is how it is, old boy, at the 70th parallel: an endless white night when the sun doesn’t go down, and an endless black day when the sun doesn’t rise. If you like, you can exchange them and in biblical style call the light day and the night darkness, but in that case it will also be conditional and change nothing, because if you had a watch you would’ve learned by now that it’s three after midnight, for example. And your nose is at the moment being burnt by the sun and will soon look like a peeled snakeskin, if you don’t put seal fat on it that I’ll give you.”

  “And how do you know what time it is?” said I naively.

  He patted me on the shoulder. “Cheer up, pal. When you spend some white nights here, you’ll learn to tell time by the unsetting sun. It’s harder during the black days, but you’ll get good at that too—when there are no clouds, the stars will become a Swiss Omega for you with twenty rubies, because the sky also rotates around us. Galileo has the opposite opinion, but let him mind his own business, I have my personal observations!…I’m telling you this to give you courage, because according to your sentence you have altogether ten days and ten nights to serve. Where else in the world do they give shorter and more merciful sentences?”

  A pair of patrolmen passed by us and the senior sergeant whistled deafeningly: “Come on, hurry up and get inside, the sun will be rising soon!”

  Lit by the rays of the bright midnight sun, we obeyed the order and went in to sleep a little in one of the dozens of monotonous brick buildings of the camp town, above which dominated the three-story headquarters with its offices, infirmary, radio station, and everything else needed by your average Soviet camp set up at the 70th parallel south of the Pole.

  Don’t be surprised by such midnight walks, because the wire fences of the camp were far from here and with Siberian generosity delimited a rather large space, within whose boundaries there was relative freedom of movement. Of course, it wasn’t like this everywhere—there were camps with a considerably stricter regime, close to hard labor, according to the gravity of the actual or imaginary crimes, but I’ve already told you that everyone sees his little bit of truth through the keyhole of his own experience. That’s why the memories and judgments of the Soviet camps are so diverse and even contradictory, which is natural for a country in which even more all-embracing than the Stalin constitution was the Law of the Spontaneous Movement of Particles, creating a saving chaos, and formulated in the middle of the twentieth century by the movie director Mark Semyonovich Lebedev.

  This was an endless, blinding silvery night, in which there were no events or signs of any kind to separate one segment of camp life from another, with the exception of the clang of the “morning” iron and the repeated, monotonous, and lengthy crossing over to the Germans, who lived at the far end of the camp in four dwellings, segregated from us, with three hundred people in each.

  When the water of the melted snow that had turned the taiga into a boundless swamp withdrew to the layers of permafrost and made room for the passionate northern spring, we, along with five hundred Germans, were transferred to a temporary summer bivouac—a vast meadow with thirty or so wooden barracks and a field kitchen, the so-called Kommandirovka, or “Business Trip.” This considerably shortened the road to the wood-cutting area in the taiga, where the diesel tractors, trucks, and all kinds of machines rattled and smoked night and day—if the concept of “night and day” is applicable, month after month, to one single, long, glowing white night.

  The work wasn’t heavy at all, far from it—what was unbearable were the clouds of mosquitoes, huge as flying elephants. In order for you to understand this page of the apocalypse, I’ll tell you that we became witnesses to the panicked flight of a flock of many thousands of northern deer from the thick clouds of mosquitoes chasing them, called here “The Abomination.” A flight north and further north—to the cold. They, the pathetic deer, hadn’t eaten for days despite the abundance of fresh vegetation nor could they take a rest, but just ran and ran in their drive to dip into the iciest river waters and plunge into the thickest ooze of the swamps. And if some poor sick female, just skin and bones from this constant running, lagged behind, she was immediately surrounded, completely covered, suffocated by the thick buzzing of the mosquitoes. Then literally in front of our eyes, the poor animal would bend its front legs, as if falling on its knees for mercy, but there was no mercy and soon, completely drained of its blood, the animal breathed its last on the damp moss. The huge carnivorous Siberian ants finished off the rest.

  Our situation was relatively lighter, because the bluish diesel smoke, mixed with the smoke issuing from the fires all around and hovering over the camp, created considerable discomfort not just for us, but, thank God, also for the mosquitoes.

  Like the camp, some kind of rhythm to our life here was also provided by the “Bells of St. Peter” and the brief lunch break, with the invariable oatmeal, and, rarely, some bone, whose meat had gone to the pot for the guards.

  On paper, they were considered free people, these uniformed guards, and this was also one of the great Siberian delusions, the northern fata morgana. Because a guard in any kind of prison, say in Moscow or Rio de Janeiro, when off duty is free to walk around town, gape at the shop windows, and even occasionally buy an ice cream. Here, at the 70th parallel, the concepts of “on this side” and “beyond” the wire fence were as conditional and illusory as the concepts of “night” and “day.” Because what was there beyond—in the free world, outside the “zone”—if not thousands of kilometers of tundra, wild rocky mountain ridges, endless swamps, taiga, and again mountain ridges, and again swamps? And what differentiated the camp inmate from the guard apart from the right of the latter to run over to the nearby completely alcohol-soaked settlement of Yakuti, Chukchi, Nenzi, or other similar revolutionary Eskimos, to get completely smashed on thick samogon—a secretly produced vodka from all kinds of junk, rotten potatoes, and, people would say, editorials from Pravda to “raise the degree”? And if, in the low log cabins, amid the stinking smoke of makhorka—something like wild tobacco—there happened to be some equally soused female guard from the neighboring women’s camp, one could expect in the foreseeable future the appearance in the world of a new Soviet citizen. He would grow and mature politically like many similar beings around his alcoholic parents, in the free swampy territory between the two camps, covered in the summer with red berries and impassable in the winter, when even the short-legged northern deer, adapted to everything and taken in by the deer raisers to spend the winter in fenced enclosures, snuggle together to warm themselves with their breath.

  But gradually the sparkling silver magnificence of the white polar night started to fade; the shadows, quite short in summer, began to lengthen. As soon as the snow began falling, we were brought back to the main camp, and, imperceptibly, the Black Sun returned, when for a long time thick darkness would embrace the Siberian North.

  It was December 24, that night when the Catholic and Protestant world prepares to celebrate Christmas. Insofar as Orthodox Russia celebrates this event the night of January
7th, one could not rely on mercy from the bosses; moreover, the Russian Christmas was not itself an official holiday. Nevertheless, to everyone’s joy, and as a sign of God’s hand, people received the news that the thermometer at the entrance to headquarters had dropped to 43 degrees centigrade below zero.

  This meant that on the next day there would be no work and that in fact the holiday with which the German, Baltic, and western Ukrainian prisoners were concerned had been declared by nature itself, since, according to regulations, work could go on down to minus 40 but not a single degree lower. “That’s how it is with us here,” explained Semyonich, who continued to introduce me in a patronizing manner to the secrets of camp life. “Not only here, but all over the Soviet realm life goes on normally in the range between minus 40 and plus 40 degrees.”

  “What’s this plus 40? The Karakoum Desert?”

  Semyonich looked at me in surprise. “What desert are you dreaming about? I mean the Soviet standard for the degrees of vodka!”

  How could I have known that this would be our last conversation! But the iron struck, and for Semyonich this was indeed the bell of St. Peter. The doctor, a mild and sad Armenian, Robert Boyadjian, also a prisoner, diagnosed a massive heart attack. This was the end of a naive and amorous movie director, who tried to jump higher than the Kremlin wall!

  “And what now?” asked the doctor in confusion.

  “Leave it to us, you’re a novice.”

  The body of Semyonich was laid in his own mattress, emptied of straw, and made out of burlap for sacks. Taken outside, at a temperature of minus 43 degrees, it became stiff fast and we, six prisoners, guarded by a little soldier, carried him away on our shoulders beyond the wire fence, to the camp graveyard. For hours on end the surrounding darkness was broken by the flames of the fire that was needed to soften up a little the earth turned hard as granite; for hours on end we silently warmed ourselves by lying on the snow sack with The Person Who Made Movies. Finally we managed to dig a shallow hole and laid in it the stiff body, covered it with earth and piled up stones to keep predators from digging it out. We doffed our caps and the icy wind like boiling water burned our ears.