Trans-Siberian Express (12 page)

“Run away from the Jew, Kishkin,” Mikhail shouted, starting to run after him, then slowing as Kishkin disappeared. Exhausted, Mikhail sat down on the curb and buried his head in his hands, feeling the anger turn to bitterness. Then tears came, tears of pity for himself.

The next day, he had presented himself to the immigration authorities and applied for a visa to Israel. The clerks were surly and officious and he had to wait for hours before anyone would see him. Then they handed him a long, impossibly detailed application and a battery of forms. When he returned to their apartment, Vera was waiting for him with tears in her eyes.

“They called me from the plant.”

“So.”

“They said you were fired, that you had applied for a visa to Israel.”

“I also applied for you.”

“Are you crazy?”

“This whole country is crazy.”

Vera sat down on the couch, her face pale, her eyes flickering as if she were in physical pain.

“I’ll lose my job soon, too.”

“I know.”

“And none of this bothers you?”

“We’re going to get the hell out of here.”

“To Israel? What is Israel? It is a foreign place.”

“Not to me.”

“I’m a Russian.”

“I thought I was too.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Well, then stay.”

He could see the big tears roll down her cheeks. She was warm and decent, and she had come to the marriage bed supremely innocent in every way. As he had then, he held her gently in his arms, kissing away the tears, feeling the salt against his lips, hearing her soft sobs as she buried her head in his chest.

“It’s a gamble,” he said. “But it’s really pointless to stay. Here we’ll simply survive. There we might have a better chance.”

“Chance for what?”

“We’ll be free.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’m not really sure,” he responded, feeling for the first time his own doubt.

Vera did lose her job and soon they had to give up their apartment and move in with another Jewish family in the same circumstances. Days stretched into weeks and their savings dwindled. They heard rumors that others were getting out, mostly older people, and Mikhail began to haunt the immigration bureau. Vera became paler, thinner, the pressure telling as she dissolved into tears at the least provocation. At night, in the bedroom they shared with the children of the other Jewish family, he would hold her in his arms and feel her thinness while they made furtive, soundless love.

“I can’t take this anymore, Mikhail,” she would whisper. “It is consuming me.”

“Maybe tomorrow.”

“You know they’ll never let us out.”

By then they had told him that skilled engineers, especially aeronautical engineers who had worked in sensitive priority industries, would be put on the bottom of the list. “What list?” he had asked. But the clerks never deigned to answer him.

Finally he told Vera, “I’ll withdraw the application.”

But they both knew it was too late for that.

“They won’t let us out and they won’t let us back in,” he cried.

“Maybe if you threw yourself on their mercy,” Vera had suggested.

“How do you do that? They have no mercy.”

But despite his pride, he wrote a series of letters to his old employers and to the immigration authorities, withdrawing his application for immigration to Israel.

“Everything will be fine again, you’ll see,” Vera assured him. For the first time in months, he saw the color return to her cheeks.

But then came more weeks of uncertainty, more waiting, more haunting the mailbox. When no answer came, Mikhail appeared one day outside the plant, waiting for Kishkin. He stood near the gate, watching his former co-workers turn their eyes from him, more in pity than in fear. This was how it felt to be a pariah.

Kishkin saw him and went back inside. But Mikhail would not be daunted. He returned to the plant day after day, but Kishkin avoided him.

Finally, after weeks of fruitless waiting, Mikhail made a frontal assault, showing up at Kishkin’s apartment at dinner time. Kishkin’s wife treated him politely, like a stranger, and told him that Kishkin was at a meeting, although he saw his old friend’s familiar coat lying on a nearby chair.

“Please,” he said, as Kishkin’s wife began to shut the door. He shoved his foot between the door and the jamb. The woman looked at him with fear.

“You must leave us alone,” she whispered. “He will have to report you.”

“I know.”

Kishkin’s big form emerged from behind his wife. He opened the door wider and stood looking fiercely at Mikhail.

“They’re killing me, Kishkin,” he said.

“I warned you.”

“All right, I know. I’m not asking you to understand. Just for your help.”

“I can’t,” Kishkin said, his expression showing some of the pain he felt. “Your shit will slop over on me.” He looked into Mikhail’s eyes. “I’ve been warned,” he whispered. “You’ve got to leave me alone. I can’t do a damned thing.”

“I’ve withdrawn my application for a visa. I’ll renounce anything I have to renounce. I’ll sign anything, do anything. I won’t be proud. Just say it. Whatever I have to do I’ll do.”

“It’s beyond any hope, Mikhail Moiseyevich,” Kishkin said, shaking his head, his big eyes misting. “You must go, please.”

Mikhail ran down the stairs and went to the river. He walked the streets for hours, cursing his lack of courage for not being able to throw himself into the murky waters.

He spent days haunting the immigration office, urging the arrogant clerks for an interview with the person in charge, whoever he was.

“I’m not a dissident,” he cried. “I am not one of them.” His arm swept the shabby waiting room, crowded with Jews of varying ages, waiting patiently, the mark of hopelessness engraved on their faces.

“They are deliberately trying to drive me mad,” he told Vera. He was extremely nervous and tense by then, easily thrown out of control, on the edge of total paranoia.

The apartment house in which they lived was occupied only by Jewish families, as if they had been corralled there on purpose by government decree. The atmosphere was strained, since most of the tenants had applied for visas to Israel and all were living as if they were suspended in space and time. But unlike Mikhail, most of them took comfort in their Jewishness. They formed Hebrew classes for the children and discussion groups for themselves, all somehow related to achieving a greater sense of identity after two generations of alienation. Mikhail had attended one of the discussions, making himself thoroughly disagreeable by challenging their motives.

“All this attempt at retribalizing is bullshit. The only reason you want to get out is that you can’t make it in this society anymore.”

“That’s only part of it,” someone said. “The persecution, the harassment, they have taught us the meaning of our Jewishness. We were wrong to think of ourselves as Soviets. We must think of ourselves as they think of us, as Jews.”

“But as soon as they stop the harassment,” Mikhail said, feeling his face flush, “you’ll forget about all this Jewishness and go back to being good Soviet citizens.”

“Never again,” someone shouted.

“Being a Jew is not worth the hardship,” Mikhail hissed. “You’re all fooling yourselves.”

Storming out of the room, he came back to the apartment where Vera, pale and wan, was sewing. She was not good at the work, but it did earn them a few rubles.

“They’re all pricks,” he said loudly, running into the bedroom and slamming the door behind him.

He got the idea quite by accident. He had been standing in front of the immigration office, milling around in the crowd, aimlessly reading a newspaper. By then he was totally indifferent to his appearance. He looked like an unshaven bum and he knew he had become a kind of character, an object of comic relief.

Someone had come out of an inner office and walked into the street. It was the habit of the crowd to surround anyone who had come out of the office, to see if they had learned some great piece of news. The man in question was about sixty, bearded, bull-faced, with an air of stubbornness that made him look more like a predator than the victim.

“The bastard said he’d give me a visa.”

“That’s wonderful!”

The man now had the attention of the entire crowd.

“You think so?” the bull-faced man replied. “The visa was to Birobidjan.”

“That hellhole,” someone said.

“I told him to shove it,” the bull-faced man said.

“It’s the worst place on earth,” a woman whispered beside him.

The crowd broke up in disgust, but Mikhail was curious. Stopping by the library, he looked up Birobidjan. It was located at the very edge of Eastern Siberia, a few miles from the Chinese border. In 1934, Stalin had declared it a Jewish Autonomous Region. It now had a population of 40,000 people, about half of whom were Jewish, and it was still described as a Jewish Autonomous Region.

“You don’t believe that shit, do you?” his fellow tenant said, when he had returned to the apartment.

“What shit?”

“In the first place, it’s a hellhole. You freeze your ass off for six months out of the year and the other six months are a nightmare of insects and disease. Some Jewish suckers did help settle the place back in the thirties, but they came back to the cities like flies after honey.”

It was too late. The idea had begun to soak into Mikhail’s mind that here was an opportunity to escape from limbo, to prove to “them” that he was really a Soviet, like a Ukrainian, a Georgian, an Armenian. He began to write carefully composed letters to the immigration authorities, explaining that some Jews had fastened upon Israel as “their place” only because they had no piece of Soviet territory for their own. The authorities had not followed through on their original idea of giving the Jews “their place of territorial dignity within the confines of this great socialist state.” He worked on the letters for weeks in the reading room of the main Moscow library, polishing each sentence, changing, cutting, reworking.

“You stupid ass,” one of his fellow tenants told him one day, after he had attempted to proselytize the idea. “Stalin declared that place for the Jews to get them out of European Russia. It was another form of exile, a special place for Jews to freeze their balls off.”

“Jewish paranoia,” Mikhail responded. “Siberia is coming into its own. It’s rich with resources. Cities are growing by leaps and bounds. What’s wrong with it? Think of the dignity it will give us, a place of our own; a land of our own within the Soviet Union. We’d be proud to have ‘Jew’ stamped on our passports.”

He sent the letters off with a real feeling of optimism.

“You’ll see. I have found a solution,” he told Vera, who was no longer fighting him. She was passive now, brittle as a dry leaf, barely communicative. He knew the authorities would respond. It was just a matter of time.

When the letter came, he ran up the three flights and threw it on the table in front of Vera.

“See,” he said, waving it in front of her. “You thought I was crazy.” The letter was from the Chief of the Bureau of Jewish Affairs in Moscow. It was polite, oddly expansive and committal for a Soviet bureaucrat. The real meat was in the last paragraph, which Mikhail read over and over again until he had committed it to memory:

“We have been considering reactivating the resettlement program in the eastern territory of Birobidjan, which, quite obviously, could provide an excellent solution to the terrible problem now confronting certain gullible Jewish people within the Soviet Union. These misguided people have succumbed to the lies of Zionist imperialists and anti-Soviet internationalists in the capitalist countries. We welcome your application for resettlement and are hopeful that it will serve as an example of the historic respect that the Soviet Union has had for the Jewish people.”

“Can’t you see what that means, Vera?” Mikhail pointed out, trying to break through her indifference. “They will let us lead an honorable life. They want us to settle in our own place.” He felt his face flush and his eyes begin to mist. “We are saved, my darling,” he said, taking her frail body in his arms and kissing her cheek. “Trust me,” he said. “You’ll see.”

With remarkable ease, he received permission to depart and he bought two “soft” tickets on the Trans-Siberian Express. He wondered if Vera was up to the journey. Her strength had continued to wane and she had begun to spend a great deal of time in bed, as if sleep had become an escape. But he would not let himself become discouraged. The authorities had even found him a job in an aluminum extrusion plant. It wasn’t in his chosen field, but at least it was a start and the wages were actually higher than for similar work in other Soviet factories.

There had been a few bad moments. Their interrogation at the Yaroslav station had brought Vera to the verge of fainting. The train agent had been intimidating and Mikhail had been too frightened, he admitted, to stand up to him. He lay on the upper bunk, feeling the bounce of the train along the tracks. It was nice and cozy living in this way, as if he were in a warm cocoon. Vera now seemed to be asleep, for which he was thankful. He had brushed back her hair and kissed her on the forehead, covering her with an extra blanket that the attendant had kindly delivered. At Birobidjan, he was certain he would be able to get adequate medical care for her.

Tomorrow they would start having their dinners in the dining car and he would buy a bottle of wine each night in celebration. It was extravagant, he knew, but it was the least he could do for having been the cause of her ordeal. He felt the tension ooze out of his body, and a sense of well-being crept over him as he began to picture their new life.

ALEX’S
eyes popped open. It was dark and it took him some time to rediscover his sense of place. Someone was moving about in the compartment. Moving his head, he caught Mrs. Valentinov in his field of vision and remembered instantly. Her back was turned and she was in the process of dressing or undressing, he could not tell which, only that the entire length of her body was naked. She was stepping into her underpants, the curve of hard buttocks outlined as she pulled up the pants and half-turned. He dropped his eyelids quickly, then raised them slightly as she fitted her breasts into the cups of her brassiere. He felt his penis harden and rise between his spread legs. As she turned, his eyelids fluttered closed again, but he imagined her putting on her slip, the sound of her movements increasing his excitement. Then he heard her close the door to the washroom, the swish of water in the sink, and the sound of her brushing her teeth.