The Free World (14 page)

But whatever she meant, she’d tacitly agreed to the contest.

Refereeing the shooting range was Volodya Zobodkin, one of the company of young Jews with whom Alec and Karl played soccer on the beach at Majori. Zobodkin, like Iza Judo, was a graduate of the Institute of Sport, and now he coached the VEF soccer club. When Volodya distributed the rifles, Alec asked if he could get one with a reliable sight.

—Who are you, Zaitsev? Volodya chided. This isn’t the Battle of Stalingrad. Just aim in the general direction of the target.

—Do you have one with an adjusted sight or not? Alec persisted.

—What’s with you? Volodya asked. Have you been drinking? It’s not even lunch.

Without much elaboration, Alec told Volodya what he’d arranged. Volodya glanced quickly at Polina, raised an approving eyebrow, and sorted through the stack of rifles for something suitable. He handed a rifle to Alec and then offered to find another, grossly inferior one, for Polina.

—There’s one here that practically shoots sideways, Volodya said.

But that wasn’t the kind of contest Alec wanted, largely because he sensed it wasn’t the kind of contest Polina would accept. She seemed like the type who respected rules, including rules that dictated the breaking of other rules.

Alec shot first. For all his pride at having placed eighth, Alec had to admit that he couldn’t compare the effort required to achieve mediocrity to that required to achieve excellence. Everything naturally flowed toward mediocrity; for this the world needed little in the way of your cooperation. Whereas total incompetence or extreme proficiency demanded some application.

To his credit and mild surprise, Alec shot well. Volodya called for cease-fire and presented Alec with his perforated target, a cluster of holes grouped reasonably close together, reasonably close to the bull’s-eye. Even if Polina shot better, Alec felt that he’d performed well enough to warrant the date.

—Is this how you shot in the army? Polina asked.

—I’ve never shot so well in my life, Alec said. But then I’ve never had such motivation. As my teachers used to write in my school reports: Alec is personable and shows signs of intelligence, but is lazy, inattentive, and lacks all motivation.

For the sake of equity, Polina shot with the same rifle Alec had used. Alec watched her assume the prone position and take careful aim, the rifle’s stock pressed correctly against her cheek, its butt in the crook of her shoulder. As she shot, Alec stood behind and slightly to the side and used the opportunity to evaluate her in a way he hadn’t been able to before. Unchallenged, he let his eyes linger on
her small lobeless ear, the creases at the corner of her squeezed-shut eye, the strong, sculpted tendons of her neck, and the fine symmetry of her profile. He watched her shoot with steady regularity, squeezing off a shot and then sliding the bolt to chamber the next round. It looked to Alec as though she were shooting to win, which he couldn’t but construe as a bad sign.

Later, when things between them were better defined, Polina explained that she had shot the way she did not because she wanted to avoid seeing him again but because she couldn’t perform otherwise.

—The graveyards and songbooks are full of people like you, Alec had remarked, a fact she had not disputed.

After Polina had finished shooting, Volodya collected her target and compared it against Alec’s. Polina had shot well, but there was no doubt that Alec had shot better.

—Imagine that, Alec said, feigning bashfulness.

—Maybe it’s not too late, Polina said. You could still make general.

—There’s a disturbing thought, Alec said.

After this they ran, jumped, hurled the shot put, and killed time un-til the exercises were finished. As Alec was leaving the stadium, Volodya caught up to him and congratulated him again on his great triumph. He wanted to inform Alec that his shooting performance had earned him more than the date with Polina. It had earned him first place overall. As the top shooter, Volodya explained, Alec would be in line for a commendation as a Voroshilov marksman, and this would include official recognition at the Young Communists meeting and special mention in the factory newspaper.

—Come on, Vovka, Alec said, don’t spoil the day for me. Write I came in eighth and give the honor to some other schmuck.

—Next in line is your girl, Volodya said.

—Perfect, Alec said. Her husband likes to paste articles from the factory newspaper.

The following week, when Polina’s name was printed, an acquaintance spotted it and told Maxim. As before, he asked for a copy.

Polina described to Alec how she’d had to watch Maxim paste the silly article into the album. If only he weren’t so foolish, Polina had told Alec, which he took as no ringing endorsement of his own appeal as a lover. But Polina always spoke plainly. If only Maxim weren’t so foolish, she’d said, she would have remained faithful to him, never taken up with Alec, and lived a regular, quiet life.

I
t was at the front that Samuil had become aware of the intersection between the dreamlife of the living and the afterlife of the dead. When he stole a few minutes of sleep under an artillery barrage, his fallen comrades had visited him. Later, when he had abandoned all hope of seeing his mother, uncle, and aunt alive again, they appeared too. For a time he couldn’t sleep without encountering their ghosts. After he’d received notice of Reuven’s death, he couldn’t close his eyes without meeting his brother. In these dreams, Reuven was sometimes whole, the way he’d been when Samuil saw him last; other times he was disfigured, wounded in the legs or with a shattered face. But no matter what shape he was in, his brother seemed calm, at peace, either unmoved by or unaware of the fact that he was no longer among the living. Nights Reuven or his mother failed to materialize, Samuil felt disconsolate. To think that he would never see them again, not even in his dreams, filled him with sadness and apathy. He had known better than to share these feelings. He’d seen many of his fellow soldiers succumb to the same bleak and despondent feelings. These were men who’d received bad news in the field post—confirmation of a relative’s death or of a wife’s inconstancy. He saw his comrades mutilate themselves, commit suicidal acts in combat,
attempt desertion, and make defeatist, ill-conceived statements. More than once Samuil referred these offenders to the NKVD and the military tribunals, having no illusion about the fate to which he’d consigned them.

Now again, all these years later, Samuil found himself regularly visited by his mother and his brother in his dreams. The dreams were like a precious gift and Samuil knew that if he spoke about them it would only cheapen them. Sometimes his mother and brother appeared as they had been when they died, still young. Other times, his mother and brother appeared as if they, too, had aged in the intervening years, looking nothing like themselves and yet remaining somehow intrinsically themselves. The one constant in all the dreams was that Samuil himself never varied. He was always an old man.

When Samuil started writing the account of his life, it hadn’t occurred to him that this concerted effort at remembering would summon his mother and brother back into his dreams. In many ways, the project no longer resembled the original design. It had become an excuse to immerse himself in the past. There were certain things he wrote down, things that he felt suited the original purpose, but there were many other things that he didn’t write down. These things he simply turned over in his mind.

He thought of Emma’s grandfather as he’d been in his waning days. Samuil and Emma were then newly married. They were living with Emma’s parents in the small Latgalian town of Baltinava. Emma’s father, Yasha Aronovich, a formidable military man, had been posted there to impose order. Aizsargi, collaborators, Hitlerites, Latvian nationalist rabble camped in the forests, defying Soviet power. Samuil served under his father-in-law, patrolling the streets, fielding denunciations, and leading troops into the forest to flush out the bandits. Meanwhile, Emma’s grandfather, Aron Moiseivich, her father’s father, spent his days at home. Samuil would return in the evening to find him exactly as he’d been in the morning. It seemed that he did nothing but gaze off into space. What are you doing?
Samuil had once stopped to ask. Old Aron had languidly turned his head and replied with one word, Remembering.

How sad, Samuil had thought at the time. What a dreary existence. And now that he’d arrived there himself, he saw that he’d been wrong. Everyone and everything was in the past, his entire life, bustling and crowded with people whom he wished to meet again. What he wouldn’t give just to speak once more to even the supporting players. To see in the flesh a man like Zachar Kahn, Hirsh Kogan, his cousin Yankl, or even Baruch Levitan. How had it happened that the people in the past, all long dead, now seemed to him to be the real people, and the people in the present, including his own children, seemed to him evanescent, so nearly figments that he could imagine passing his hand through them?

Still and all, the present wouldn’t leave him be. Daily it interrupted his excursions into the past. Always, it seemed, with a new annoyance.

Under the influence of the Lubavitch rabbi whom his wife so adored, she and Rosa had taken to lighting candles of a Friday night. The rabbi had provided them with a set of flimsy tin candlesticks, a box of ceremonial candles, and a sheet of paper upon which were printed out, phonetically in Russian, the words to the appropriate prayers. Neither his wife nor Rosa understood a syllable of what they were saying, but they gibbered on anyway. The rabbi and his local accomplices also distributed, free of charge, a challah bread and a bottle of kosher wine to complete the spectacle. At first Emma had made the tentative overture to Samuil, but he had categorically refused. She then went down the ladder to Karl. If he was home when the sun set, Karl, for the sake of domestic harmony, consented to wear the yarmulke and mumble the
Boruch atohs
off the sheet of paper. But if Karl wasn’t there to oblige, Emma and Rosa conscripted the boys.

—Perfect little yeshiva
bochers,
Samuil observed.

—And what would you have them be? Rosa countered.

She had already gotten them into the traditional costumes. She’d
outfitted them with little tzitzis so the fringes peeked out from under their shirts, and with black yarmulkes, too big for their heads. Eagerly, in their singsong voices, his grandsons chirped away in Hebrew, and turned back two generations of social progress.

—Why stop at the bread and the wine? Samuil said. There are more blessings. There are blessings for everything. God forbid you should skip any.

—If you know them, by all means.

—That train left long ago.

—Very well, Rosa said. We’re doing what we can. We’re only just learning. Look at your Soviet Union. Sixty years and they’re still building communism.

—Some are building; others are wrecking. Then there are those who will say anything for the price of a kosher chicken.

Rosa turned to her dinner and knocked her cutlery emphatically against her plate. I do what’s best for my children, she said.

—You set a fine example, indeed, Samuil retorted.

—You disapprove, Samuil Leyzerovich, but you have no trouble eating.

—My dear, these days I have trouble with everything from the moment I open my eyes. What would you suggest I do?

Everyone had passed the medical examinations except for Samuil. The Italian doctor hadn’t failed to note Samuil’s elevated blood pressure, his arthritic back, the shrapnel wounds to his shoulder and side, and the scarring in his lungs from the tuberculosis he’d contracted either from his uncle or at boot camp in 1941. His passport gave his age as sixty-five, but his time at the front had added at least another decade. Soldiers in their twenties went gray in a matter of days. Sometimes, it seemed, overnight. Only those who fell immediately died young. In the end, Samuil believed, fast or slow, the war took them all.

—Your son works for HIAS, Roidman had said when Samuil told him what had transpired. In his position, I’m sure he can find a route.

—You don’t know my son, Samuil said.

—So what will you do?

—It’s of no consequence to me. My existence will be the same wherever we go. But my sons have become fixated on Canada. Two months ago they hadn’t even considered it, and now they’ve convinced themselves that it is the only place on earth. And, if not for me, they could be there tomorrow. Naturally, they’ve forgotten that they started this mess. They did this to their father and now he is a weight around their necks.

—I’m certain it will turn out for the best, Roidman said.

—On what do you base this certainty? Samuil asked.

—On nothing, Roidman said, his eyes twinkling. I’m an optimist. A short, old, one-legged, stateless Jewish optimist.

Roidman did look particularly optimistic that morning. Under his blue blazer he wore a freshly laundered shirt. There was a smart crease in his trousers, and the fold at his missing leg was neatly and precisely pinned. Over his left breast gleamed every one of his medals and ribbons.

The occasion, Roidman explained, was a trip he was making into Rome.

—An immigration interview? Samuil presumed.

—Bigger, Roidman said, rising with the word. Recently they held the funeral for the old pope,
alav hasholem.
Today, they crown the new one. As your son said, many important people will attend. Mondale with Carter’s wife. The king of Spain. Waldheim of the United Nations. The duke of Luxembourg. And our friend Trudeau. I want to see if he will recognize me.

—Trudeau?

—Who else? From the crowd I will wave with my crutch. “Pierre, I am here; it is me, Josef Roidman. Perhaps you remember my case?”

—You’re an unusual man, Josef.

—These are unusual times.

And when had the times not been unusual? Samuil wanted to say. But he could see that Roidman was eager to get to his train station and his funeral.

Only in the summer of 1940, when the Soviets annexed Latvia,
had he thought that the world was getting sorted out. Caught up in the spirit of the times, he and Reuven had assumed noms de guerre. In their new Soviet passports they were no longer Eisner but Krasnansky, the name chosen by Reuven because of its evocation of the Communist color.

—The Krasnanskys make the revolutions but the Eisners pay the bills, their uncle had sneered.

Within the Party they were trusted and respected, but at home they were held in contempt. Their uncle and aunt wouldn’t look them in the face, and their cousins spurned them. They never forgave them for Yankl.

—Explain to me Ribbentrop-Molotov, their uncle said. Has Hitler stopped using your Communists for target practice?

—There are higher considerations that we do not understand, Samuil said, though he had asked almost exactly the same question at a Party meeting.

—It is a painful sacrifice, Reuven said, but Stalin has a plan. It is possible that the fascist invasion of the capitalist countries will inspire the masses to rise up.

—If you believe in such nonsense, Hitler will be on our doorstep tomorrow, their uncle said.

Samuil had thought their uncle a fool. Then, one Sunday, they attended a regular meeting of the Komsomol, where a Red Army major informed them that Hitler and his fascist vermin had, that very morning, mounted an unprovoked attack upon the peaceful citizens of the Soviet Union. The shameless, cowardly enemy had advanced into eastern Poland and was pressing the offensive into the Baltic republics. The German gains, the major assured, were temporary, the result of their criminal and underhanded tactics. In a matter of days, the forces of the Red Army would counterattack and force the enemy to retreat. Nevertheless, preparations needed to be made for the defense of the city.

That same night he and Reuven were each issued a rifle and a box of rounds, and posted to guard the entrance to the rail bridge over the Daugava.

Samuil remembered well the oddity of their assignment. He and Reuven stood at the mouth of the railroad bridge, the broad, unperturbable Daugava flowing beneath them, and wondered what they might do should the enemy appear.

—Two men with rifles cannot hope to do much against the German army, Reuven said.

—Then why put us here?

—There are always the local saboteurs, Reuven proposed.

They remained at their post for the next three days, during which an unaccountable calm reigned over the city. These were the last easeful hours he spent with his brother, the two of them reclining against the girders of the bridge, smoking cigarettes, watching the trains pass and the men fish on the banks of the river below. Even the weather was calm. Members of the Workers’ Guard were de-ployed at crucial positions, but otherwise the city’s inhabitants continued about their business. On the second day, when the Germans were reported to have taken Vilnius and surrounded Liepaja, Samuil saw the first columns of evacuees trickling east. On the third night, the government made the drastic decision to relocate to the border with Estonia. And the next day, the commander in charge of their Workers’ Guard company ordered them to undertake a more mobile defense.

Walking home they saw, in the more affluent neighborhoods in the center of town, people loading automobiles and hired carts for the evacuation. Among them were many Jews, racing about in a state of agitation. In Moskovskaya, windows and doors were thrown open, and people lowered their belongings onto the street. Elderly men and women sat among the bedding and the battered household items, keeping a lookout for thieves.

At home, they discovered their mother, uncle, and aunt pretending that nothing out of the ordinary was happening. Their uncle was sitting at the window, skeptically watching the havoc below. Their aunt was sweeping the kitchen floor, and their mother was sewing a button onto one of their uncle’s shirts. When Samuil and Reuven came through the door only their mother looked up with a penitent expression.

Reuven inquired why they’d done nothing to prepare for evacuation.

—Because we have no intention to evacuate, their uncle said.

—The Germans could be here tomorrow, Reuven said.

—We had Germans in 1919, their uncle said. They behaved better than your Communists.

—Have you heard nothing about Hitler?

—I’ve heard, their uncle said. He’s no friend to the Jews, but it’s the Bolsheviks he’s after. Everybody who knows me knows how I feel about the Bolsheviks.

Their aunt looked up from her sweeping and said, How can we leave? If we go off into God-knows-where, how will Yankl ever find us?

Their own mother, Samuil still believed, had remained as recompense for Yankl.

—Boys, their mother said. Even if he wanted to go, your uncle, in his condition, could not survive such a trip. And if he stays, I must stay also. The girls have their families and your aunt could not manage to care for your uncle on her own. They need me.

—They, and we? Reuven asked.

Reuven had been thirty years old then, but he had spoken the words as if he were a child.