The Little Russian (25 page)

Her waiter brought over a silver pot of coffee, poured a cup, and set it down in front of her. She was about to thank him when the door
opened and a frigid blast of cold air came in along with two officers dressed in greatcoats and lambskin hats. One of them had a paper under his arm, the other a small bundle. Both of them noticed Berta right off but were too polite to stare at a pretty woman sitting alone.

“We’ll have a table,” said the first one, smoothing his carefully trimmed beard. Like so many others he looked like the czar. He gave his coat and hat to the waiter.

“And two brandies,” said the other, adding his things to the pile. The waiter handed their things to the girl at the hat check counter and showed them to a nearby table.

“They’re not all like that, you know,” said the shorter of the two, taking his seat. “I had a lieutenant in my unit once and he was downright decent. A good man and I trusted him. We all did.” He crossed one leg over the other and Berta noticed that his boots had been outfitted with heels to make him appear taller.

“That’s just like you. You’re such a child. You’d trust anyone,” said the other.

“I’m telling you he was honorable.”

“How would you know?”

“I know, that’s all.”

“And suppose you’re right. That makes one. One good Jew out of how many, five million?”

“I don’t know about the others and neither do you. You accuse me of being gullible and yet you seriously believe they cut the phone lines and reconnect them to the Austrians.”

“Why not?”

“Impossible, for one thing. Do you know anything about telephone lines?
Baba
’s yarn. Old crones making up stories to stir up trouble.”

“So maybe it isn’t true, but everybody knows that 90 percent of them are traitors and the rest are spies. If they didn’t do that, then they did something else. I’d bet my life on it.”

Berta pretended not to hear their conversation. She stared blankly into her coffee cup and then looked up out the window at a passing convoy of army trucks that belched out clouds of blue smoke from their exhaust pipes. She had heard the rumors of Jews hiding gold in
corpses and sending them to the Germans, of floating messages in bottles and signaling the German artillery with lanterns and flags in the trees. Everyone was convinced that Jews were collaborators. Nobody thought to question otherwise.

Whenever she was confronted with something like this she pretended not to hear. Over the years she had perfected a look of disinterest, as if it had nothing to do with her, as if she had no thoughts on the subject. In truth it had everything to do with her. It filled her with humiliation for being a Jew and for not defending them. She was angry at the anti-Semites but also angry at the Jews for holding themselves apart and making themselves so conspicuous. It made her miss her parents. Sometimes she thought she ought to do something, say something, but she never did. Instead she kept quiet and justified her cowardice by reasoning that it was important to get along and not make a fuss.

“And I suppose they had something to do with Odessa?”

At that Berta looked over at them.

“Could be, hadn’t thought about it.”

“Absurd. Now you’re really stepping over the line. I wash my hands of you.”

“Blaming me for the truth?”

“What happened in Odessa?” she asked, not bothering to make an excuse for interrupting.

The two men looked over at her, obviously pleased by her question. “It was in the papers tonight, Miss. The Turks shelled the city and sank a gunboat and blocked us in.”

“A blockade?”

“So it seems. There were two German battle cruisers.”

“And there’s no way out?”

The officers exchanged a look. “Well, no, that’s the idea of a blockade, you see.”

“So we’re trapped here?”

“I suppose you could put it that way.”

The officers wanted her to stay and tried to entice her with details of the event, even though she had no interest in any of it. When the
waiter came by, she gave him a ruble without glancing at the check, gathered up her things, and left. Out on the street she went first in one direction and then another, knowing that something had to be done but not knowing quite what.

 

IT WAS after midnight when Berta arrived at the Cat Gut Club, located in the cellar of a warehouse on Podkolokony Street in the heart of the Lugovaya Market. It was a popular gathering place for artists and poets and scions of wealthy families out for an exotic evening of poetry readings and music. On special nights the dancer Marianna Golitsyn dressed as a gypsy and performed on a mirror sometimes wearing underthings, sometimes not, depending on her mood. Mostly it was a place for all the classes to come together and drink “pineapple juice” from teacups. It’s what they were calling vodka since the czar outlawed it at the beginning of the war. It was also the place for paying bribes, selling information, and buying cocaine.

When Berta came down the steps the first thing she noticed was the smell, which only grew steadily worse as she descended into the club. Despite the vases of flowers that lined the wall, the whole place stank of faulty plumbing. It was worse in the lobby, so bad she had to keep her gloved palm over her mouth and nose until she managed to weave through the crowd and enter the main room.

The club proper was a cavernous space built beneath the street. The ceiling and walls had been covered with rough patches of gray plaster to give it the appearance of a cave. Berta stood on the bottom step and scanned the crowded room looking for Yuvelir. It was packed with a rowdy crowd of officers and enlisted men, their women drinking alongside them, smoking cigarettes right out in public. Everyone was singing and clapping while in the center of the room enlisted men were dancing the
kazatska
, their arms folded across their chests, their legs shooting out from under their torsos as they jumped up and down
.

Berta was surprised by the gaiety in the room. How could they be in such high spirits with a war going on? Didn’t they realize that hundreds of thousands of their compatriots were dying at the front? She looked at their drunken faces—at the young officer grabbing a
woman and pulling her down on his lap, another falling backward into the crowd, a girl with smeared lip rouge squinting through a haze of cigarette smoke—and realized it wasn’t gaiety that filled the room that night, but a desperate attempt to deny the inevitable. These were officers about to lead thousands of untrained peasants to their death. These were enlisted men about to meet the enemy without guns or bullets. Since there weren’t enough arms to go around, they would be expected to
earn
their rifles by prying them out of the hands of their dead comrades. Looking around at the singing and dancing and drunken lovemaking, she understood that it wasn’t a party she was witnessing, but a last supper.

Berta spotted Yuvelir seated in the back with five young officers and walked over to join them. He jumped to his feet and reached out for her hand. “Madame Alshonsky,” he said with mock formality. “What is the world coming to when Berta Alshonsky graces us with her presence in a hole like this?”

“I’m sorry to interrupt your party. I really can’t stay.”

“Nonsense. Come sit with us.” He kissed her on both cheeks and pulled over a chair. “Gogochka, get Madame Alshonsky a pineapple juice.”

The talk was all about war: stories of horror and heroism, who was gone and who wasn’t coming back, of the government’s mismanagement, the crumbling supply lines, and the faltering munitions factories that were struggling to keep up with demand. The usual spy rumors came up, but thankfully no one mentioned the Jews. They all knew she was Jewish. No doubt they were raised to be anti-Semites, but civilized ones, who kept a check on their views when in the company of Jews of Berta’s class.

She waited for as long as she could and then she leaned in. “I have to speak to you,” she said to Yuvelir. The waiter had just come and put down a platter of
zakuski
in the center of the table.

“What now? Can’t it wait?”

“No, it can’t.”

He’d been turned down for service when he tried to sign up during the initial flush of wartime patriotism. The army said his politics were
too radical and they didn’t want him. With all his friends gone he had nothing to do but help in the various wartime charities and write his memoir, which he thought was interesting enough to be published. But tonight a few of his closest friends were back and the last thing he wanted was to be pulled away from them.

She rose and the gentlemen got up in deference. She said her goodbyes and then turned to Yuvelir. “Come along, Misha, you’re going to walk me home.”

It was late and Podkolokony Street was shrouded in thick fog. It had snowed while she was in the club and now the wind swirled the snow into drifts around the lampposts and up against the buildings. Every now and then a candle appeared in a window, but mostly the street was dark and deserted. Occasionally, a figure materialized out of nowhere, a leering face in the gloom. There was a distant screech of laughter, then a man’s drunken cry. Someone was calling for help. They passed an old woman sitting on a curb with a baby in her arms. She held out her hand for a coin. Berta ignored her and walked on. Everyone knew where these beggars got their babies—they rented them by the hour off the nursing mothers, hoping for a little pity and a few kopecks to buy lodging for the night.

“I have to get to Vladivostok and you have to help me,” she said. Up ahead they could just make out the lights on the bridge that spanned the ravine. Once they were across they would be out of the market and the neighborhood would gradually get better.

“Why?”

“I’m going to America.”

“It’s too late to go to America.”

“Not if I leave from Vladivostok. But I need you to get me a travel permit.”

“Do you know how far that is?”

“I don’t care.”

“Nine thousand versts.”

“Will you help me?”

“It ’ll take you a month, maybe more. It’s hard traveling. What about your children? Berta, be reasonable. It’s impossible.”

“Don’t tell me what’s possible. I want you to talk to your father.”

“I’m not even speaking to him. I can’t ask him for a favor.”

“Misha . . . I need this.”

“He makes me grovel. He can be awful.”

“Then ask your uncle.”

“What makes you think I’m on better terms with him? He’s just like my father. They even look alike. People are always getting them confused.”

“Then ask somebody.”

“I don’t even know where to begin. Berta, I love you, but you’re asking too much.”

“Do I have to list all the things I’ve done for you? Is that really necessary?”

Yuvelir took in a deep breath and let it out in a rush. He shook his head in consternation and kept his eyes on the ground in front of him as he walked beside her. “Sometimes, I don’t know how you get me to do these things.”

She laughed and took his arm. “My poor
dorogoy
.”

“And I suppose you’re going to need rail tickets?”

Yuvelir walked her all the way back up the hill and slept on the sofa in her parlor. The next morning he had breakfast with her in the kitchen because the breakfast room had been closed up. She sat with him at the long worktable in the center of the room and watched him sip his tea and butter his scone. He wasn’t used to getting up in the morning, so he wasn’t very talkative and didn’t even complain about missing a night with his friends.

 

THE CHERKAST train station had been donated by the rich merchants of the city as a testament to their wealth and good taste. It was supposed to rival Iaroslavl Station in Moscow. It had a medieval spire on one side, an elaborate rotunda of glass in the middle, and two round moderne turrets on either side of the large double doors. It was costly to build, but it gave the people of Cherkast a beautiful railroad terminal and the merchants a sense that they were every bit as wealthy, as cultured and as worthy of respect, as their Muscovite counterparts.

That was before the war. Now when Berta walked in through the massive double doors, carrying her bundles and trailing her children and Mitya, the gardener’s helper, whom she had hired to see her safely on the train, she found that most of the expensive tile floor, the one that had cost thousands and thousands and months of negotiation, was covered with men, women, children, and all their belongings. There were families, old couples, and wounded soldiers who had been treated and released; most were stretched out on blankets on the cold floor, napping, smoking, and playing cards. Against the north wall were recovering cholera patients who had been dumped there because their beds were needed by the wounded. Children made a game of leaping over them, until their mothers saw what they were doing and screamed at them in panic.

Berta had expected this. She had heard what the train stations were like and had prepared for a long wait. But when she walked in that day and actually saw it, smelled the multitudes, heard the hacking coughs, and saw the mass of bodies stretched from one wall to the other, she had to force herself to enter.

“I don’t want to go in, Mameh,” Sura said, holding on to the folds of Berta’s skirt.

“I know, darling,” said Berta, “but remember, I said there would be lots of people. And you said it would be all right, because they were just like us. Just people who wanted to take the train, remember?”

Sura nodded wordlessly but kept clinging to Berta’s skirt. Samuil spotted a boy with a bird in a cage and went over to investigate. “Don’t go far,” Berta called after him, but he didn’t need his mother to tell him not to get lost.

When Berta looked around for a place to put her things, nobody would meet her eye. They all ignored her and let her stand there with her bundles and her frightened child clinging to her skirt. She had to step over several old men, peasants who grumbled at the intrusion but made no effort to give her room. Then a young woman in the crowd motioned her over. She was a mother too and had a daughter about Sura’s age sitting next to her on a mat. She was a peasant in a rumpled skirt and felt boots, who looked up with puffy, sleepless eyes. Berta and
Mitya moved forward on tiptoe, stepping over several people before getting to the little place that the woman had made for them by gathering in her bundles.