Oswald's Tale (16 page)

8

In Love with Ella

Pavel had begun to notice that Lee and a girl named Ella Germann would spend time together at Horizon. Lee was often at her worktable, and many times they were together at lunch. Lee never spoke about his friendship with Ella, but then, Lee was not one to go out of his way to show feelings. For that matter, he wouldn’t even say he had been to bed with a girl. There was one, for example, huge as a horse, Magda. She was easy to get. Some people said her husband made her that way. When men were on the late shift, some would even have a dispute whose turn it was to have a poke. She weighed 120 kilograms—264 pounds. She was called Our Horse, Our Refrigerator.

Pavel doesn’t think Lee did anything with Magda, but he could tell you that Oswald wasn’t dropping on his knees in front of Ella, either. Still, when two people get together five times a week, that becomes suspicious. Pavel thought Ella was interesting in her way, but she was Jewish. Pavel wanted to explain that he was not an anti-Semite, it was just that she, personally, was not his type.

EXTRA PAGE
(not included in formal diary)
¹

June.

Ella Germann—a silky black-haired Jewish beauty with fine dark eyes, skin as white as snow, a beautiful smile and good but unpredictable nature. Her only fault was that at 24 she was still a virgin due entirely to her own desire. I met her when she came to work at my factory. I noticed her and perhaps fell in love with her the first moment I saw her.

Now, at fifty-five, Ella is soft-spoken and very careful in her choice of words. She has a high crown of dark hair turning gray, and delicate aquiline features.

She would say that her childhood is not of interest, because she had been very timid as a child. She always did as she was told to do and stayed at home a lot. And even when she was an adolescent, her friends told her that she consisted of nothing but complexes. So, it might be, she suggested, that she was of no interest to the interviewers’ project.

Her recollection is that she was four years old when the war started. She was living in Mogilev, a small place, with her grandparents. The first time their town was bombed she was so frightened that all memories from that time are lost. Her grandmother, however, told Ella what happened.

This grandmother was very strong. At her job she cut huge pieces of meat from cattle, and the child was in awe of her strength. When German planes started to bomb overhead, Ella just “jumped into her,” as it was put, and hugged her neck and stayed there through an entire day. Nobody could remove Ella. It was as if the grandmother had to “wear” her all day long. Other children cried, other children talked, but Ella was quiet. Some parents even remarked, “Look! The child doesn’t express emotion.” They thought Ella was strong, but she realizes now she had a great shock.

Ella’s family happened to be Jewish, but she knew nothing about it. Her grandmother was born in a very religious family and told her about a
talis
and a
yarmulke,
but she had never seen either.

Unlike her grandmother, who took care of her, Ella’s mother had her own life. She was single at that time, since Ella’s father was dead, and she wanted to arrange her life in a proper way; she was a very good singer but unable to make her career. Ella’s mother would work all day at other jobs and then at night would often be out with her girlfriend at a movie or going to one club or another; in fact, she was always busy and did not pay a great deal of attention to her children. She was very pretty and full of presence, yet she did not become the singer and actress everyone expected. Finally, in order to make a living, she had to work in a chorus, and such difficulties went on through Ella’s childhood.

At one point, she remembers, her mother was fired from a job and stayed home and wept for several days. She had two children to support, and two parents. Ella’s grandfather was ill, but he used to go and buy something from somebody for one price, then move to a marketplace and try to sell it for more.

Of course, children are children, Ella would say, and they really cannot accept too many tragic events. While now she can see it was a miserable life, at that time she never felt unhappy. In her school, other children were no richer, all were equal, and she had friends and a lot of happy moments. They sang and had games. Besides, theatre was always present in their family. They knew some actors and actresses, and discussed their performances, and there was never a year in Ella’s life when she did not go to theatre. Her mother remained mysterious, however. Even when Ella was sixteen or seventeen, she did not know her mother’s private life. Since her mother was beautiful, however, and very emotional and romantic, she kept waiting for someone who would be up to her standards, “the prince in her life.” Maybe that was why she never married again. Or was it that when men came to visit, they saw two children plus two grandparents in one room, and it frightened them out of such a desire.

As Ella grew up, she liked to dance waltzes, but then her favorite soon became the fox-trot. She did hear of this American band leader, Glenn Miller, and then saw Mr. Miller and his orchestra in a film called, in Russia,
Serenade of Sunny Valley
(which might also translate into
Sun Valley Serenade
). She remembers that one U.S. film she liked was
Twelve Angry Men,
because she was able to compare the jury systems in both countries. After that, she no longer trusted what she was being told about America—that rich people were only a small group and most people were poor. She remembers that people in those days would whisper that even the unemployed in America had a level of life equal to Russians who were working. On the other hand, she did believe that the United States government could start a war.

Of course, she was not really interested in technology or politics. When she and her girlfriend went to see a movie, such a program would usually start with ten minutes of news showing Soviet achievements in agriculture and industry, then they would see pictures of demonstrations and unemployment in capitalist countries. She and her girlfriend would usually come in one quarter of an hour late, which was when the real movie would begin.

She loved all of Deanna Durbin’s films—a beautiful woman, beautiful stories, nice clothes, nice furniture. She was much more attracted by this side of life than politics, but then, at fourteen, she already understood that something in politics was wrong. She remembers walking along a street with a girlfriend and saying, “I think that Stalin doesn’t understand what’s going on in our country because he is receiving false reports.” This was a close friend of hers and they could share such a thought. She couldn’t say it at home, but her closest friend agreed. They saw already how small bosses lied to bigger bosses, always showing the best side of everything in their work, and so people on a higher level must also be doing that with Stalin.

Not many of her girlfriends were political. Dates with boys interested them more. It left Ella a little apart, but that was all right. She started to go out with young men very late—she was nineteen before she had her first date. It caused her no difficulty. Ella considered herself a person who was not envious. Maybe not a hundred percent not-envious, but mostly. And she liked girlfriends who were advanced beyond her, because they came to her and spoke of their experiences. She could learn about life through them, because they needed somebody with whom to share stories. One of her friends once said, “Listen, I like one young man, and I want to meet him, but it’s difficult. Could you do it with me? We’ll walk past where he lives and maybe we’ll see him.” So, Ella immediately put on her coat and went along, because she had begun to understand how important it was for her friend to meet this young man. And never once did the thought occur to Ella, “Maybe he will like me.” No, she just wanted her friend to have her chance.

At that time, her mother was still a temple of perfection to Ella, and interested most in herself. Ella pities her now. Her mother never had a normal life. Now, Ella lives with her daughter and her grandchild and is a teacher and worries whether she has time for them. Teachers are always a little bit crazy, Ella would say. They not only give so much to other people’s children, but when they come home, they have notebooks to check and don’t have time for their own sons and daughters. Still, Ella cooked for her children, washed for them, worked for them as her grandmother had cooked for her.

All the same, there was a time when she thought she might be an actress like her mother, and Ella performed a lot in a public theatre, but finally decided she wanted to go to a University.

She failed her entrance exam, however. She couldn’t get a high enough rating in the Byelorussian language. All her other marks were very good, but she couldn’t sit and wait another year to pass Byelorussian, so in September, along with a good many other girls and boys who didn’t get into Minsk University, she went around to a few factories, and was taken on at Horizon as a trainee. All the while, she still kept trying to enter Minsk University. But, for two years, she couldn’t. Now that Stalin had died, bribery was prevalent. People in the University Entrance Commission even told her that they were given lists of people who should be accepted. If your name wasn’t on such a list and you did well, they might insert false marks to create mistakes for you. All she knows is that after two years of study, her Byelorussian was good, yet she kept receiving 2’s, a very low mark.

Once, when she took part in a poetry reading competition, one of her judges spoke of giving Ella the highest prize, but then, as she learned later, she was rejected because she was not Byelorussian, not “national cadre.” Therefore, she couldn’t represent Minsk in a national competition; being Jewish was looked upon as belonging to a separate nation. It didn’t matter if you were Jewish and a Communist or Jewish Orthodox—you were part of another nation and could not represent Byelorussia. That did not build her confidence.

In her factory, however, it depended more on who was your boss. If you happened to be working under some person who hated Jews, you could have problems, but it didn’t mean everyone was anti-Semitic; and with a good boss, you could have quite a nice life and job. So, she didn’t have factory problems.

When she finally started dating, you couldn’t even say it was true dating. A boy might get tickets to the opera and take her, but often, before she would accept, he would have to talk to her for a whole month about going out with him. She thinks her development was very slow.

By the time she met Lee, she was already twenty-three and had dated many young men. She would go out with someone a couple of times but then realize she didn’t feel anything toward this person, so why continue? On the other hand, it was boring to sit home. Sometimes she would even go out on a date without any feeling that it could be the right man for her.

Meanwhile, she was still determined to get some higher education. What helped was that the Byelorussian Minister of Education had just developed a new law: If you worked in a factory plant for two years, you were put on a list ahead of others who were applying.

So, Ella not only got into Minsk University but had a scholarship, and could quit factory work. Two years later, however, she received a bad mark on an exam and they took away that scholarship. She had to move, therefore, from day study to night school, and resumed her job at Horizon. In fact, they welcomed her back. Ella was already well known because of her participation in amateur concerts. Indeed, the person in charge of personnel told her he was going to put her into a good department that assembled radios.

When she came in on her first morning, she remembers being introduced to Lee. All that week he kept looking at her during lunch break. She knew that if she went up to him and asked for a favor, he would like that even if lots of girls wanted to be his friend. She noticed that when he would walk along the factory aisles, many girls would cry: “Hello, Alik, hi!” as if he were of special importance.

Now, in her night school classes, she was working on some English text and had to translate a number of pages by a certain date, so it was not wholly a pretext to get him to help her. There was some real need. While this would not characterize her in a positive fashion, she would say, she sometimes did use men to do small things for her. For instance, there was an engineer she did not like particularly, but she was not good at drawing certain kinds of wiring schemes, so she asked him to help, even though she had no intention of dating him. For Lee, however, she did not have negative feelings. Since the American seemed to find her attractive, why not ask him to help translate her assignment? In fact when she did ask, he smiled, and they agreed to meet in a smaller workroom that afternoon. She assumed there wouldn’t be anyone else there, although as it turned out, a few workers were still present. She and Lee sat down at a small table where a radio was playing music.

Lee spread out her pages and turned off the sound without asking whether anyone wanted to listen. But Max Prokhorchik was also working there, and he became indignant. He came up and turned the radio back on. Lee turned it off; Max turned it on. Then Lee turned it off, and said, “Russian pig!” Whereupon Max stalked off.