PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (12 page)

But someone did remember, and that memory persisted through a decade of days and nights, and it lurked in puddles and the glint off farm machinery, hissed in blizzards and flushed summer sunsets that took up half the sky, until it surfaced again on a gray metal desk in a dim, panelled office in the city of Khabarovsk.

It was not as if a mere ten years had passed; the fire
with which Stalin cleansed our country consumed entire lifetimes. It had left one of the men in the office with but two teeth in his head and no hair upon it. A gray, weedy beard hugged the hollows of his cheeks. His left eye was closed from a beating and would never admit light again.

He summoned nearly all his physical strength to remain upright on the wooden chair in which he had been placed. The odor of his soiled clothes revolted him. So did the cologne off the man across the desk, a tall, thin, dark man in a tailored, blue double-breasted suit. He had expected to recognize this man, but didn’t. The official had only briefly looked up when he was brought in and had then occupied the next quarter of an hour studying papers in a file on the desk.

And then the official, glaring, said, “Shtern.”

The prisoner made no acknowledgment.

“The Lenin Toilets,” the official declared. “The Stalin Clap Ward.”

Even in his condition, Israel could not feign forgetfulness. His voice hardly more than a whisper, he replied, “It loses something in the translation.”

The man then read the remark flawlessly in the original language.

Israel tried to smile but something seemed to be broken in his face.
“Ir ret Yiddish?”

“I was born in Kherson and attended
cheder
there until I was fifteen years old.”

“My mother was from Kherson.”

“Grinspan. Elena Samvilovna. Her family operated a laundry that employed six workers. Now, can you explain this remark?”

“You have to place it in context.”

“All right,” the man said, and read the following:

The official returned to the papers in his file folder. His brow creased, he riffled through the papers until he found the sheet he wanted, and then began to write. He suddenly stopped, put the tip of the pencil in his mouth, thought for a moment and then resumed writing. The office had several windows, but they had all been whitewashed and admitted only a wan light. Israel guessed it was daytime, but even though no more than two weeks had passed since his arrest, he couldn’t recall the season.

He said:

“I was being ironic.”

The man finished his composition before he looked up.

“Ironic? You were being ironic about the two leaders of the world revolution? The two greatest minds Europe has ever produced? Did it ever occur to you, Shtern, that there are some subjects, some ideals, too important to be mutilated by satire and ridicule? Or that this characteristic rhetorical effect, this racial stance, could be a curse upon the Jewish people? That it is their inbred sense of irony that prevents their social progress and threatens their physical survival?”

“Well, that’s irony for you.”

“Are you being ironic now?”

Israel’s open eye was glassy and unfocused, his expression vacant.

“No,” he said.

 

This is an invention. Somewhere in Moscow there is located the true record of Israel’s interrogation, shut in a
file in an overstuffed drawer in a locked, unattended room, a probable fire hazard. The file can be presumed to contain trivial data about Israel’s origins, secondary school education and work history, the name of his accuser, the pretext for his arrest, the charges against him, the date of his conviction, his sentence, and his fate, the story of his life that Larissa never knew. But it’s not really information; just markings on sheets of paper, unexposed to human sight for six decades. I suppose I could travel to Moscow (no, I couldn’t, I’d prefer to go to the Congo) and apply (to whom?) to see the file. But invention is easier. And there are still a few facts loose upon the earth.

One afternoon in the early 1960s, Larissa boarded a train in Khabarovsk, by then no more than a five-hour journey from home. Her purchases (a washboard, a
kolbasa,
a dress, etc.) were tied in squirming, odd-sized bundles. With her single free finger, she pried apart the lips of the door to a second-class compartment and slid it open. She carefully lifted her packages onto the overhead rack and took a place on the upholstered bench facing the direction of travel. Only then did she glance at the man who would be her traveling companion. Again their eyes locked.

“I never forget a face,” he said. “That’s my sorrow.”

Her gut turned to ice. She considered whether she should leave the compartment. But that would prove she was guilty. Of what? She didn’t know, but she was sure that she
was
guilty. She pursed her lips and stared through the window at a long grassy field browning in the late summer heat.

“You have a daughter, Rachel Israelevna.”

He said it gently, a slight interrogative perched at the end of the sentence. But to Larissa’s ears, the pronouncement was as sinister as a malediction. She made no sign as she reviewed her choices: flight, denial, confession, supplication.

“She should be in her thirties now. Is she married?”

The motion she made in the affirmative was barely detectable.

“Any children?”

The twitch of a flea: no.

“She lives in Birobidzhan?”

It was a while, measured in kilometers, before she spoke. Larissa was aware that the man was studying her face the whole time, peeling back the wrinkles, creases, and folds, interrogating her skin for its secrets. Her first thought was to ignore the question, play dumb. She studied the passing fields and stands of trees as if it were the newfound land. Yet her companion’s patient gaze kept the question alive, like a rat scuttling under the seats. It was a trick you learned at the Lubyanka.

Phlegm in her throat, she flailed at the question with a muttered reply: “She’s a schoolteacher.”

The train slowed and then lurched to a halt. The couplings between the cars relaxed, something electrical ceased to hum. The train was between stations, on another area of flat grassland, hay brushing against the window. This was a typical pastoral, a vista suitable for lowing cattle—but on the other side of the glass, the midges were murder. There were no cattle. Bitterness
spasmed along her nerves. Why did the train stop? How many hours of her life had been lost on stopped trains? She turned toward the other passenger, venom pooling in her eyes. In the time it had taken for this breakdown, he had become an old man. Age had carved tracks in his face and burned his skin. His jaw quivered.

Terrified of her own anger, she blurted, “Why was my husband arrested?”

His laugh was abrupt and mirthless and seemed to cost him something. When his mouth opened, it revealed gray stumps of teeth.

“Sections eight and eleven. Terrorism. Same as me.” He paused to see what effect this admission had on her. None was visible. He went on: “I went in three months before he did. We met in Magadan, winter of ’39. He was very ill. Consumption, I believe, though he said, no, no, don’t worry, it’s only a touch of pneumonia.”

“Did he die there? I was never notified.”

The former policeman shrugged. “I suppose so. People were dying less ill than he was. I passed this way last week. They’re doing track work. A Chinaman and a shovel.”

We were never notified about anything, neither about his trial nor his conviction. During the winter and spring of 1939, the two of us—I was eight years old—traveled to Khabarovsk nearly every Sunday morning and hugged ourselves in the frigid shadows of the prison, hoping that Israel would see us from his cell. By then not even the most assiduous appraiser of women would have discovered
feminine beauty in Larissa’s hard, rilled face, but she tried to flirt with the guards and policemen anyway. She gave them gifts and feebly winked. Now she knew that he hadn’t even been there.

“He tried to get word to you, but he had nothing with which to bribe anyone. Pathetic, the ruses he tried ... I didn’t know him very well, we were in different work brigades. But we talked in the barracks. He thanked me for my intervention in Kisly Klyuch. He told me about you and your daughter, and about the colonization—in the most optimistic language. I didn’t correct him. Also, he talked about his arrest. The politicals always talked about their arrests, it was our favorite subject. We always compared who was sent for, who was invited to come in on their own, who was beaten, what kind of a trial we got, that sort of thing. We were looking for some kind of pattern, a moral order that would give our punishment meaning. You’d think the state security men would have had the answers, but we didn’t; all we knew was that
our
arrests had been a mistake. The pattern was never quite established, at least not in Magadan. Perhaps other camps succeeded where we failed. I understand that at Okhotsk, where they had some first-rate German intellectuals, they developed some very provocative theories.”

“What did Israel say about his arrest?”

“The usual. He protested his innocence. He said he had made a remark that was taken out of context. We laughed at him. They all said that. We told him that it was his duty as a citizen of the Union of the Soviet Socialist
Republics not to make a remark that could be taken out of context by the enemies of the workers’ revolution.”

“It had nothing to do with any remark. They arrested everybody. Nearly the whole Komzet presidium.”

“Yeah, a bunch of bourgeois nationalists. Really, no better than Zionists.”

“On the contrary,” Larissa said evenly. “They were all ideologically sound.”

The man was not accustomed to being contradicted, not even now. His eyes turned cold and as hard as two marbles. He spoke now deliberately, his voice resonant with indignation:

“And they were saboteurs. Wreckers. There was no doubt about it.”

“Was sabotage one of the charges against Israel?”

He waved his hand dismissively at the middle-aged woman. “They couldn’t have messed up as badly as they did without intent. The first year, they did virtually no planting and no building and lost nearly their entire herd of cattle. They misused and broke equipment. They ruined horses. None of those Yids could plow a goddamned straight line. Two thirds of them took one look at real work and got back on the train.”

“We had floods,” she protested. “It was the rainiest summer of the century, roads and bridges were washed away. We had a plague of Siberian tick.”

“Excuses. History accepts no excuses.”

Larissa turned away. She again recalled those lost Sundays, how we returned in the evenings along these same tracks, unable to speak.

“I always assumed you had something to do with Israel’s arrest.”

“No, at the time of his arrest I was felling timber in Kolyma.”

“But before that you were state security,” Larissa insisted. “They were watching us all along. You must have prepared a report on the incident in Kisly Klyuch.”

He smiled as if he had been congratulated. Now his mirth was genuine.

“I noted that he was a troublemaker,” he said cheerfully.

The train bolted forward. One of the packages on the overhead rack teetered, but remained in place. As if the train had been momentarily halted in a foreign country, its motion now carried Larissa to a place of familiar fear. She peered along the line, studying the buckle and weave of the rails for signs of an approaching station.

The former policeman didn’t speak for another hour. Then he said, “One more thing. In the hospital, Shtern showed me a card trick. He was very odd about it. First he performed the trick, and then he showed me how he had done it. I was grateful afterwards: it’s passed time over the years.”

In a monotone, Larissa asked, “Do you have a pack of cards?”

He nodded and removed them from inside his coat. He handed the pack to Larissa. She shuffled and returned the cards. He said, “This is called the Paterson Hop, I don’t know why. Please, take a card, any card. Now hold it for a moment while I place the king of hearts and the
queen of hearts at the top and bottom of the pack, like so. You’ve seen this trick before?”

“Yes. Go on, please.”

He performed the trick, perhaps not as smoothly as Israel would have, but every time after great complication and travail the king and queen were reunited in the middle of the deck. Larissa asked him to repeat the trick several times, but didn’t once yield a smile.

That evening I met my mother at the train station beneath the great tin letters fixed on rails running above the station house’s roof. They proclaimed the name of our city in Russian and Yiddish and still do to this day. When a Russian word, running from left to right, meets a Yiddish one, running from right to left, they always draw the eye to the space between them. Now Larissa looked away and searched me out among the figures standing on the platform. She stepped unsteadily across the tracks, her hair escaping from her beret and spilling a gray halo around her. One of the bags slipped from her arms. She stopped, but left it there. Unaccustomed to her desperate expression, I hesitated to help. She didn’t tell me about her encounter on the train until years later.