PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (11 page)

He stared down at his audience. One wouldn’t call it a congregation, even though the large wooden building in which he was speaking had been a synagogue just a few years earlier. Now he looked
over
the audience’s heads, at the walls and the women’s gallery on the second floor. All the religious objects had been removed, but there were still sectarian architectural details here and there: a six-pointed star inlaid in the parquet, menorahs in the plaster molding. He smiled benevolently at these symbols and then, nodding toward a rectangular shadow on a wall where a plaque had once been fixed, at the ghosts of the dead.

“So, I say to you, comrades!
Next year in Birobidzhan!”

This was followed by applause—explosive and emphatic, accompanied by cheers and amens, and sustained for several minutes—but not immediately. Immediately there was a silence as complete as the silence between the earth and the heavens. Feeling a chill, Larissa tugged at her sweater. And then the vice-chairman of the local
soviet, a Jew, raised his hands to his chest and drew them apart. Before he could bring them together, scores of other hands were slapping at one another.

Most of their stops were less eventful. The train often came to rest on a track distant from the platform. Surrounded by walls of freight trains, laid into this strip of track as if into an uncovered grave, the settlers never saw the station nor anything of the town in which they had arrived. Just a slice of white sky was visible above the roof of the next train. A jolt and then stillness: they had been detached from the locomotive and the other cars. They lost entire days on these sidings, apparently forgotten by the railway authorities. Larissa once stepped from their car for some air, onto the sparse, muddy grass alongside the track, casually intending to walk around the neighboring trains to the station. But the train alongside their track stretched a kilometer in either direction and there was no way of telling how many tracks away, or in what direction, the platform was located.

Motion! Motion! Idled in Ingashskaya, Larissa would have preferred to move anywhere, even if the train had been shuttled onto a circular track around the station. Under way, the train tauntingly, maddeningly, dawdled across Asia, at no faster than a horse’s trot for hours at a time. Some days the image of the steppe outside her window never changed, as if the settlers were parked inside a natural history museum. Face to face with the terrestrial, Larissa came to understand by extravagant extension the distances and the emptiness embraced by the word interstellar. The nearest star was five billion times further from Moscow than was Birobidzhan. She opened Israel’s map
of the Soviet Union and located their minute progress across it. The scale was one to eight million. If single copies of the map fell evenly upon the surface of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, at the rate of one per second, the entire country would be covered sometime in the afternoon of the second day of the fourteenth week. She did these calculations in the time it took to complete three of the 8,358 kilometers to Birobidzhan, occupying thirty-six hundred thousandths of the journey. The maps would fall with their illustrated sides down, presenting a comforting vista of white paper stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific.

The deeper they crawled into Asia, the less likely they were to come to towns and villages whose people knew anything about Birobidzhan, or knew anything about Jews except to hate them. Militiamen would come on board and study their travel warrants as if studying for a test. The railway was a key strategic link and officials were wary of organized groups traveling along it. At some stops the settlers were not even allowed to disembark to stretch their legs. Although annoyed, Israel defended the precaution. Then at Kisly Klyuch, less than a week from reaching their destination, he overheard one militiaman on the platform call to another, jokingly, that the prisoners all looked like Yids.

Israel, who had been standing at the car’s open door, was out onto the platform in a flash. Three rifles were raised in unison.

“What did you say?” he demanded.

Israel’s face had flushed to his ears and his eyes bulged like eggs.

The soldier, a beardless young Russian giant, snapped, “Immediately return to your place.”

“Who told you we were prisoners?”

“Go back to your place!”

Israel was already waving his passport and travel warrant, as well as other papers provided by Komzet. He appeared ready to beat the soldier with them. “Look at these! We’re a colonization detachment under the auspices of the All-Union Committee for Settlement and the People’s Commissariat for Land Issues. Can you read?”

The militiamen said sullenly, “I can read.”

“Do you see anything here that says we’re prisoners?”

The Russian wouldn’t look at the papers. He said, thin-lipped: “Get into the car right now, or you’ll be
my
prisoner. We’ve got a cell just for kikes.”

“No.”

The militiaman, his rifle above his waist, winced in disbelief.
“What?”
The two other militiamen, Asiatics, closed in on Israel.

From her seat, a textbook warm as a kitten on her lap, Larissa watched this scene performed in pantomime. Israel appeared to ignore the two Asiatics. He was lecturing the Russian, a stubby index finger laid against the soldier’s chest. Larissa’s mouth went dry as Israel began poking him with it. The Russian reddened and shouted back at Israel. Larissa couldn’t tell what was being said, only that Israel was doing most of the talking. Kisly Klyuch: they called this place
Sour Spring.
The men were joined by four more soldiers, including a gray-haired officer. For a moment Israel was lost among them, as if under an ocean wave. Then she saw him whirl at them,
brandishing his papers, pointing at the train and then down the track, back at Moscow. The officer, another Russian, his impassiveness nearly royal, rested a hand on his holster.

The settlers filled the seats by the windows, poised with their knees digging into the upholstery, their hands wrapped around the bunk supports. “Oy vey,” someone said without emotion. Another whispered, “What happened? What is he
doing?”
By their gestures, Israel and the militiamen seemed to be speaking loudly, but the car was engulfed in a subterranean silence. Nearly every passenger received a new sense of the remote, lonely continent to which they had journeyed in the last month. As communists, they had believed they had mastered history; now, as Jews, they knew that history still possessed a stick, a pitchfork, or a gun, hidden in a cellar or a corncrib.

The officer abruptly turned, his back to Israel. The other men fell silent. Israel set his jaw and looked up the platform. Several moments later a square, thick-necked man entered the picture framed by the car window. He wore a black leather jacket, tightly belted. Now the settlers returned to their seats, fearful of demonstrating undue interest in Israel’s fate. Not a man or woman made a sound, not even to clear a throat.

On the platform, Israel and the soldiers looked sullenly at their feet, like schoolboys found truant. The officer, his imperial bearing now diminished, addressed the newcomer. Then Israel spoke. Larissa recognized by his expression that he was arguing with restraint, avoiding fervor and importunity. And then he stopped.

The man in the black leather jacket spoke very briefly. His words received an immediate response. Israel and the soldiers filed down the platform and out of sight. None of the passengers dared look at Larissa. When the officer and two of the soldiers appeared inside at the head of the car, it was as unexpected as if they had stepped from a cinema screen.

The Jews (that’s how they thought of themselves now) sat rigidly at attention. The ones who sat with their backs to the soldiers didn’t move, paralyzed by indecision about the most appropriate gesture of respect. They were all aware, suddenly, that the train car smelled of dirty laundry and the hard-boiled eggs that had become their most reliable diet. Several other soldiers came aboard, followed by Israel and the black jacket, both of them stone faced.

“Comrades,” someone said.

The passengers with their backs turned thought at first that it was the jacket who had spoken, because it was his judgment they awaited. But the words were barely articulated, rising just above a murmur. Facing ahead, Larissa stared cold eyed at the Russian soldier. He removed his cap, revealing an unkempt stalk of strawcolored hair. Without the cap, he looked to be no more than sixteen. “Comrades,” he repeated. “Respected comrades. I beg your forgiveness.”

He turned, but the gray-haired officer blocked his way and whispered something. The soldier glumly faced the settlers, again.

“I beg your forgiveness for what I said.”

A flash of impatience lit across the officer’s face. He
spoke at length to the soldier. The soldier nodded, his face pale.

“I beg your forgiveness for a statement made while performing my duties as a member of the Kisly Klyuch People’s Security Detachment. I was talking with my”—he paused here, unable to locate the appropriate word—“my
fellow,
and I referred to you esteemed travelers as ‘prisoners.’” Blinking furiously, he looked over to the officer, who whispered something. “This was an error of thinking, the result of a faulty political education. I thank your representative,”—he stopped again, and received more coaching—“I thank Comrade Israel Davidovich for kindly pointing out this error. I beg your forgiveness and promise to reflect on this incident further.”

The settlers didn’t respond. There was nothing in their experience that would have suggested what their response should be. Two red rims appeared around the soldier’s eyes. The officer gripped the militiaman’s neck and spoke to him again. The soldier listened carefully. He announced, his voice nearly breaking:

“We of the Kisly Klyuch People’s Security Detachment, on behalf of the workers and peasants’ state, wish you success in your important work!”

For another moment the settlers remained impassive. Then from the car’s last bunk, Morris Kugel cried out, “Bravo! Well said, comrade-soldier! Bravo!” More cheers immediately flooded the car, in both Russian and Yiddish.

The soldier was momentarily bewildered. He blinked. What began as a polite, wary smile slipped from his control and ended as the full exposure of a mouth crookedly crammed with white teeth. The settlers started up a
round of rhythmic clapping and produced a set of drinking glasses and a bottle of schnapps. With the approval of the officer, the soldiers each took a taste, accompanied by more applause. Israel was beaming now, his arms around the “lads.”

Only the man in the black leather jacket didn’t take part. He hung back by the entrance, closely watching the proceedings. His gaze appeared to rest on each settler’s face long enough to commit it to memory. When his scrutiny reached Larissa, she looked away, but she found his image shimmering in the window glass. The ghost’s eyes held hers.

 

The settlers were long under way, their visitors gone, before the embers of their merriment were extinguished. Israel’s comic retelling of the confrontation in Kisly Klyuch, embellished by his commentary, comprised that evening’s entertainment. The bottle of schnapps was emptied. As he concluded his presentation, Israel promised that the militiaman’s simple words would stand as their welcome to the Far East. The settlers had told the soldier—his name was Kolya—that if he were to come to Birobidzhan, they would find him a beautiful Jewish wife.

Larissa’s relief left her skin cold and salty, and the remnants of her anxiety left her fatigued for the remainder of the journey. Israel’s jokes about the encounter mocked her fear. She suspected that she was not alone in her unease.

The travelers’ knowledge that they were almost there
now disrupted the routine of their days and heightened their appetites. Their impatience was transforming and consuming. They could no longer bear to read or play cards. They scrubbed the bathroom, the windows, and the floor until their knuckles bled. The desire to have the trip ended was like a lust. In these public quarters, the sexual wants of vigorous young men and women had been stifled for a month. As the train crossed the map crease into the square that contained Birobidzhan, the settlers’ jests and comments became more risqué, the attire of the women less modest, the looks of the men more direct. Now Larissa would wake in the middle of the night and hear the furtive rustlings of bedclothes, a suppressed gasp or giggle. In the morning, she would search the faces of her traveling companions. Once she imagined that the entire passenger car had been engaged in sex, an orgy that had begun in Belogorsk and ended in Zavitaya. But it was not sex the travelers most hungered for. They stared through the windows, seeking there the image that would present itself when they arrived. Closing her eyes against the sun beating through the tops of the passing trees, Larissa thought she could smell the Pacific.

From the day they had left Moscow the travelers had been beset by arguments, none of them petty. The correct approach to bourgeois nationalism. The success of the New Economic Policy. Its failure. The Five-Year Plan. Collectivization. The Left Oppositionists. The Right Oppositionists. The Trotskyites’ false charges of anti-Semitism in order to defend counterrevolution. The Shakhty wreckers’ trial. What Marx and Lenin did or
didn’t say. What Comrade Stalin says. What Comrade Stalin
means.

Now the debates picked up their fervor. Men and women would shout. Fingers would fly through the air to snare a point. Polemics. Leading questions. Rhetorical questions. Hyperbole. Sarcasm. Irony.

At first Larissa believed the settlers were being incautious. It was only this past December that the Fifteenth Party Congress had expelled Trotsky and warned against deviation from the general Party line. Statements made in the heat of argument were bound to swerve from it. But now, as they neared a land as distant from the Kremlin as the Congo, she came to consider these arguments as expressions of liberty, the promise of their new lives. This was evident in the way the settlers argued: taking every charge and countercharge personally, claiming every issue a matter of principle, seeking alliances among those they secretly admired, turning on those they secretly loathed—all without spoiling their good humor or unity of purpose. And political positions that were taken in the evening were forgotten by the following morning.