The Little Russian (26 page)

“Thank you. I don’t know what we would’ve done,” Berta said, spreading out a mat.

“That’s all right,” the young mother replied in broken Russian. “An old man gave me this spot two days ago. He said he’d had enough and went home. Funny thing was a train came shortly after that, but he wouldn’t have gotten on anyway. He was too old and not very strong.”

Berta and Mitya made a little encampment by arranging the bundles in a circle around their mats and blankets.

“Mameh, I want to go home,” Sura whispered, her round, frightened eyes soon filling with tears.

The woman’s little girl watched her, glancing at Sura’s doll. She was a pretty girl, dark like her mother, with soft eyes and a full mouth that looked as if it had been stung by a bee.

“Why don’t you show this nice little girl your doll?” Berta said to Sura.

Sura looked over at her and shook her head.

“Why not, it might be fun.”

The little girl got up and took a cautious step forward. “No,” Sura said, clutching the doll to her chest.

“That’s not very nice,” Berta said.

“I don’t care. I don’t want to be nice. I want to go home,” said Sura, tears spilling down her cheeks.

Berta shrugged helplessly. “I’m sorry,” she said to the little girl. “Maybe another time.”

“That’s all right,” the woman said, drawing her daughter to her. “She’s shy too. We understand.”

Berta suddenly sat up. “Samuil?” She jumped to her feet and Mitya did the same. “Samuil!” she cried out, looking in every direction.

“Here, Mameh!”

She whipped around and found him over by the boy with the bird in a cage. “Oh,” she sighed in relief. “Well, don’t go far,” she called out. He ignored her and went back to the bird. “It’s just like him to get lost.
He’s always wandering off.” She sat down, ignoring all the exhausted faces that were glancing over in her direction.

“They are such a worry, aren’t they?” said the young mother. “They like to keep us worrying from one minute to the next.” Her daughter lay in her lap and she stroked her long hair, rocking her back and forth like a baby. “We almost lost this little one last winter . . . she had a high fever. I thought she was going to burn up.”

“Sura had a fever like that two years ago. The doctor said she was lucky to survive.”

“Lucky to have a doctor, I’d say. There was an old woman in our village who came whenever there was sickness, but I never believed in her spells. She cut a length of Olga’s hair and wound it around a knife and put it under her bed. That was supposed to cut her fever.”

“Couldn’t you get a real doctor?” Berta asked.

“I wanted to, but my father-in-law was against it. He said the old woman was just as good. I suspect he didn’t want to pay. I can tell you when Olga grows up she will go to school. She won’t be like her mother. She’ll be able to make her own way. She’ll be smart and maybe even have a trade.”

Sura got up and came over to Olga and held out her doll. Olga sat up and took it tentatively. She fingered the delicate lace collar and the velvet dress and moved over so that Sura could sit down beside her.

After Kata Chaneko introduced herself and took out her embroidery, their little encampment began to take on the flavor of a domestic scene. “So, what have you heard?” Berta asked, watching Kata’s deft fingers move the needle back and forth through the yoke of a child’s blouse.

“A train is coming. They say it ’s a big passenger train, big enough to take us all, but I wouldn’t count on it. I’ve seen lots of trains come and go since I’ve been here, but all of them were going the other way, to the front. Troop and supply trains mostly, hardly any passenger trains. Once I saw one of those special trains, the kind with the red curtains. It whizzed by here like a lightning bolt. People said it was the czar and the czarevitch, but who can tell?” Kata tied a knot and cut the thread with her teeth. “So where are you going?” she asked, looking up briefly.

“To Vladivostok and then to America.”

“Such a long way. Why are you going there?”

“My husband.”

“He is not in the war?”

“No, he was in America when it started.”

“This is good, yes? You still have a husband. Mine is dead.”

“He was in the war?”

Kata nodded. “The Jews killed him. They tell the Germans where to bomb. They have a lotion, you know. The Jews I mean. They put it on and it makes them safe from the bombs.”

Berta stared at her new friend, then let her eyes travel to an old sleeping couple lying nearby. After that she let the conversation slip away. She would’ve liked to look for another place to sit, but Sura was too comfortable with Olga and she didn’t want to make her move. So instead she lay back on her bundles and closed her eyes. Vladivostok was so far away. America was halfway around the world. What would she find when she got there? Would she find Hershel? Would he be alive? And what would she do if he weren’t?

Berta thought she would never get to sleep in the crowded room. There were people all around her, coughing and snoring and talking in loud whispers. The wounded were groaning and there was a cholera patient who kept calling out for a nurse. But she must’ve fallen asleep because sometime in the middle of the night she was awakened by an approaching train whistle. She got up along with the rest of the crowd and started to gather up her things. She could hear the blasts of steam from the locomotive and the clanking of wheels as it changed tracks and pulled into the station. Soon the crowd was on its feet, lumbering forward in an insomnious haze. She called to Mitya, who was already behind her with the bundles. Berta picked up Sura, ignoring her sleepy protests, and took Samuil’s hand.

At first the crowd was hardly moving, inching forward to the platform, a human tide at Berta’s back, pushing her along onto the heels of the people in front of her. A shout from the platform alerted the crowd that the train was boarding. After that they became more insistent, jostling one another for a better position, pushing forward with
growing impatience, unmindful of the belongings of others that they trampled under their feet. A shriek was heard in the crowd. It sounded terrified and put everyone on edge.

“It’s the bird, Mameh,” shouted Samuil over the tumult. “It’s only the bird.” And to prove him right the bird screamed again, but this time his scream was answered by another across the room on the other side. It was the scream of a terrified woman, followed by shouts of men. Then, more screams.

The crowd began to panic. It surged forward, carrying Berta and the children along, trampling everything in its path, an insensible mass of humanity that threatened to eat itself alive. Mitya soon disappeared as the crowd closed in around him and Sura began to cry. In an instant Samuil’s hand was torn from Berta’s. “Samuil!” she screamed. “Samuil!”

“I’m here, Mameh,” he shouted back, and then miraculously his hand found hers.

She saw an old man trip and fall and heard him screaming as the mob crushed him. His wife tried to help him up, but she went down too. Her shrieks were ignored until they were cut off. Kata and Olga were ahead of them. Kata screamed as Olga was torn from her arms. She bent down to pick up her child and was knocked off her feet by the oncoming throng. By the time Berta reached the spot where they had gone down she thought she could see a blue-black arm barely visible beneath the tramping boots.

“Don’t let go!” she shrieked, holding tight to her children while she frantically searched for a way out. They were trapped in the howling blanket of people that stretched from one wall to the other. People were screaming and clawing at one another, struggling to stay on their feet. Clothes were torn from victims’ bodies, their faces misshapen, teeth broken, limbs at odd angles. The floor was sticky with blood and vomit.

Then she saw that even in their panic the people were avoiding the cholera patients. They were going around them as if they were surrounded by a solid wall of fire. Inside, the patients lay on mats breathing their infected air, sweating through their bedclothes and
watching the desperate crowd with feverish, glassy-eyed stares. The crowd skirted their perimeter, sometimes tripping over the invisible line, but always leaping back, choosing the possibility of being crushed into a bloody mass to shitting themselves to death.

Berta allowed herself to be carried along, but she kept edging closer to the north wall. A woman to her right tripped and screamed. She was trampled despite her husband’s efforts to fight off the crowd. He fell too and a man tripped over them both, several more went down, and for an instant she could see a way to the wall. She didn’t hesitate. She got a good grip on Sura and held on to Samuil’s hand and, leaping over a crushed body, she pushed her way through the crowd. At one point she nearly lost her footing but regained her balance and made one last effort to get through, until, at last, she succeeded in breaking free and came stumbling into the north wall and the relative safety of the infected area.

A patient looked over at her as she crumpled to the floor next to his cot, hugging her children, crying and thanking a god that may or may not exist. He tried to say something to her, but his voice was too feeble. It was lost in her tears and the chaos all around them.

January 1915

 

THE MORNING was brilliant and bitterly cold after the snowstorm. The snow was so deep it nearly covered the first-floor windows. A boy arrived in a sledge and handed Berta a note through the kitchen door. It was from Hershel’s attorney, Mendel Levy, and in it he requested to see her in his office as soon as possible.
No appointment necessary.
It was that phrase, more than anything, that made her feel queasy. After her first fearful thoughts she reasoned that it couldn’t be that bad or Mendel Levy would have come up to see her himself. It might even be good news. He had heard from Hershel and everything was all right. There was money she didn’t know about. He had figured out a way to get them out of Russia. They were going to America. She knew it could be dangerous to think like this. She could be disappointed or worse. It was such a long-held belief in the
shtetlekh
, thinking too positively invited disaster, that she just accepted it without question.

Since she had to go to her bedroom for suitable clothes, she put on a heavy coat and gloves. She and the children had been living in the kitchen all winter because she couldn’t afford to heat the rest of the house; now, whenever she had to go out to the other rooms, she had to bundle up as if she were going outside. She pulled on gloves as she walked through the butler’s pantry to the dining room, where the table and chairs sat huddled together under sheets. All the furniture in the house had been covered in white sheets and now the interior seemed to merge with the white snow outside, as if the house had turned itself inside out.

Later that morning, Mendel Levy met her in the reception area of his office and took her hand in greeting. He ushered her down the hall to his private office, all the time chattering about how lucky they
were that they lived in Cherkast and not in Moscow, where the shortages were bad and the lines were impossible. “I hear they have to be up before dawn just to get a can of kerosene. They ’re even burning the fences,” he said, showing her into his office. It was an overheated affair stuffed with leather furniture and the Matisses he was fond of collecting.

After they were settled and tea had been offered and declined, he told her the bad news: The bank was repossessing her house. She stared at him and for a moment didn’t know what to say. Even though she knew the mortgage hadn’t been paid in months, she still couldn’t quite believe it. Staring vaguely at a bronze bear on his desk, she said, “I thought you were going to say you found a way out of Russia for us.”

“Berta, we’ve been through all that,” he said, with a note of impatience. “There is no way out.”

“Not even through Finland?”

“I told you about Finland. It’s impossible. It’s all impossible. Now it’s time to put away these ridiculous notions and start thinking about how you’re going to make it through the war. It won’t be easy and there’s no telling how long it will last. That’s why the first thing we must do is sell your furniture.”

She looked up in alarm. “All of it?”

“I don’t think you understand your circumstances. Your accounts have been wiped out. You have no more money. That ’s why it’s important to start living within your means. Fortunately, I know a little apartment not far from the Berezina. You and the children will be quite comfortable there. It’s a nice apartment. A friend of mine had it for years.”

With the mention of friends she thought of her own and how, in a few weeks, everyone would know that she had been thrown out of her own home. She thought of poor Pavla, whose husband had been sent to Verkhoyansk. Soon everyone would be feeling sorry for her, giving her advice, and calling her poor Berta behind her back. It would be intolerable. “Does everyone have to know?”

“They ’ll be a notice in the paper.”

She closed her eyes.

“It’s the law. But don’t worry, I’ll handle it. It won’t be nearly as bad as you think.”

Mendel Levy was able to convince the bank to post the foreclosure notice on a Friday, in the late afternoon paper, where it wouldn’t draw much attention. After that he saw to an auction house to oversee the sale of the furniture. Of course there had to be advertising to bring in a crowd. Berta stayed home that day and received no one. Alix came by the house afterward to tell her all about it, not that Berta particularly wanted to know. This didn’t stop Alix, however. She eagerly relayed all that had happened at the auction: who was there, what they had bought, and how much they paid for it. She even admitted to buying a few things herself and hoped that Berta wouldn’t think she was being disloyal or callous.

Berta was glad when Alix left so she could mourn the loss of her home in solitude. She spent the afternoon wandering through the empty rooms, cold as ice caves. That night she made a fire in the stove in her bedroom and spent one last night on a mattress on the floor. She lay down under the quilts and listened to the wind rattling the windows. She watched the firelight cast long shadows over the walls as she tried to remember the name of the cellist who had come to play a few years back. The Bach cello suites. A small girl from the academy with long, beautiful fingers. Berta remembered that she had trouble lugging her cello around. Anna Vasilevna, that was it. Good, now she could sleep.