PU-239 and Other Russian Fantasies (8 page)

She didn’t hurry, but neither did she primp before the mirror. She was wearing the same plain olive dress
that she had worn to her lectures that day. At the foot of the stairs, at the place where the shoe boxes had been assembled, Israel now kept vigil, fashionably dressed in a pressed shirt and vest beneath his open wool coat, a fedora in his hands. He bowed at her arrival. The guard who had been there the first night monitored their exchange.

“I received your invitations,” Larissa said, by way of a greeting.

“And the flowers?”

“The flowers too. They’ve become something of a fire hazard. You seem surprised to see me,” she observed. “You did call on me, didn’t you?”

“Yes, many times. This is only the first I’ve been able to persuade someone to give you a message. You’d think this was a convent.”

She replied stiffly, “The working people of this country have paid with their blood so that I may attend university. I didn’t come to Moscow to dance in nightclubs.”

This time she was fully sincere. She added, “I’m the first in my family to receive a higher education.”

“Who said anything about nightclubs?” Israel shook his head, frowning. “I’m a former commissar in the Red Army. My unit fought in Belorussia and Bashkiria. I never received a higher education, but, you’re correct, among the things we fought for was for the right of peasants, workers, and Jews to attend university.”

She bit her lip. “Sorry.”

“And we also fought for the right of the people of this country to produce the world’s first example of proletarian high culture, free of bourgeois cant and chauvinism.
Look, I have two tickets to a concert tonight. Will you join me?”

“I need to study.”

“Then why aren’t you at the library?”

“What kind of concert is it?” she asked suspiciously.

“If I give the wrong answer, you won’t come? It’s music. What can be bad?”

She frowned, exposing a dimpled chin. He loved it.

“Where?”

“At the Jewish State Theater,” he conceded. “It’s klezmer. Jewish music.”

She betrayed not the slightest inclination to agree, but he had her trapped. It was the klezmer. She paused before she answered, as if to consider the proposal. At the mention of the Jewish State Theater, the soldier had screwed up her eyes. Larissa raised three fingers.

“Get another ticket. Rachel will come too.”

“Can we ring her?”

“She doesn’t have a telephone.”

“A ticket’s not a problem. But the concert begins at eight,” he said, gesturing helplessly at his wristwatch. “If you want to fetch her, we’ll never get to the theater in time.”

But Larissa insisted, unsure of the source of her obstinacy. Did she think she needed a chaperone? Or a witness? Forty-five minutes later, Rachel was startled to discover the two of them in her foyer and in each other’s company. She tried to hide her smile of wonderment. Embarrassed, Larissa studied her muddied, unborrowed boots.

A wet snow was falling when they returned to the street. After a quarter of an hour, Israel gave up the hope of a taxi. A densely peopled tramcar lumbered by, and he rushed the two young women onto the back of it. The car bolted forward. In the swaying, steaming throng, Israel, Larissa, and Rachel lost sight of each other—except for Israel’s outstretched arm, which gripped an overhead strap, severed from his body. His wristwatch bobbed before Larissa’s eyes, showing the time well past eight. As the second hand clicked through its stations, the heat and the sour, familiar odors of garlic and unwashed bodies made her drowsy.

Outside the tramcar, a sliver of electricity flew from the conducting wire and froze in white ice the gallery of pedestrians to be found along Myasnitskaya that winter: gesticulating sidewalk vendors, grimacing prostitutes, gypsies, rag-sellers, comb-sellers, and old women holding like icons other small household goods for purchase. They seemed no less distant than Tokyo.

Just when the tram made its turn onto Sadovaya, the humming of its electrical motor died. For several minutes none of the passengers spoke nor took any notice of the thickening coagulum on the highway. The car was stalled precisely so that it obstructed not only the traffic exiting onto the ring road, but also the flow of vehicles already on the inner, clockwise lanes. Time passed. Perhaps all the passengers were lost in reverie, except Israel, who somehow managed to bully his way to the driver’s box at the front of the car. There was a distantly heard argument before the doors sighed and the passengers, at first lingeringly and regretfully, clattered out.
Israel ran his two companions to the other side of the boulevard and at last succeeded in forcing a taxi to a halt.

“This is going to be some great article,” Israel moaned.

“You’re supposed to write about the performance?” Rachel asked, wincing. “Oh dear, I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right, it’s already half written.”

The concert had just completed by the time they arrived at the theater, which was down a flight of stairs in a courtyard off the Arbat. They swam against the rising surge of the departing audience, variously outfitted: semiformal evening dress, khaki military-style “French” jackets, threadbare overcoats. Since the proletariatization of culture and the distribution of free tickets by the unions, overalls and flowered peasant kerchiefs had come to dominate the theater halls. This audience was no less proletarian, but by its physiognomy, speech, and bearing it was also indisputably marked as Jewish. Israel led Rachel and Larissa to a large room behind the stage, where several men and women milled around a samovar and a plate of pastries. Their eyes lit when Israel strode through the doorway.

“Don’t ask,” he said, his hand raised and his face contorted in a parody of epic suffering. “I’m sure it was a wonderful concert. Please, allow me to introduce my friends.”

Israel seemed to be known by everyone at the theater, even the visiting musicians, young men from the Ukraine no older than Larissa or Rachel. They had performed in conspicuously unfrayed work clothes. Now they brought some folding chairs together, again raised their instruments, and offered Israel a brief, remedial recital.

“It’s not for me,” Israel said agreeably. “It’s for my readers. But I’ll take a little vodka, if you have.”

There were four men with instruments: a violin, a set of drums, a standard tenor clarinet, and a wide bass clarinet of ebony and chrome. An accordion and a trumpet lay on the chairs. A fifth musician, a thin man with a sparse red beard, was the vocalist. They all looked to the bass clarinetist for their lead. He kissed the reed and embarked on a growling, slithering crawl through the scale’s nether regions. The clarinet and the violin came in, not timidly, but with great care. At first the music was something alien, hardly music at all, and then it was established as klezmer by the arrival of the giddy, fiddling violin. The vocalist stepped before his colleagues and began to sing in Yiddish, looking directly at Israel.

When it was over, Rachel whispered to Israel, her face stretched into a gesture of incredulity: “What was that?”

“Socialist klezmer. No kvetching, no schmaltz, just good honest folk songs for the Jewish working man. Comrades, please, one more piece.”

The second song was also political, something,
Rachel murmured to Larissa in explanation, about a young boy who gives up
cheder
for the Komsomol. But Larissa took little notice of the explanation. She was completely absorbed in the music, which was not about the Komsomol at all, but about something and someplace intimately familiar. Her lips were dry and slightly parted, her head cocked, her eyes blind, like those of an animal that had just caught a scent.

“All right, friends,” Israel said when the musicians had finished. “That was wonderful. You’ve exceeded your norms. Come on, let’s have a drink.”

The vocalist thanked him on behalf of the band, selfconsciously bobbing his head, and retired to a cup of tea. Officials from the theater approached Israel to be congratulated. He said some encouraging words to a few lingering stagehands.

But the bass clarinetist wasn’t finished, even after the other musicians had laid down their tools. At first it appeared that he was blowing and fingering his instrument without musical intent. Then Larissa detected the familiar, submerged melody, and the low notes tongued her entrails. The song, “At the Casting Away of Sins,” was something that had belonged to her grandmother, a hymn at bedtime. No one, she was sure, had ever before heard it played this way: fast, syncopated, loose, and ironic. The musician’s eyes were closed behind a pair of heavy black-framed glasses. Sweating, he rocked as if in prayer. The violinist slid back to his chair and in a moment had stealthily joined him. The other musicians, minus the singer, came in too, each either playing for
himself or in competition. The four brought the piece to an unexpectedly raucous conclusion.

Israel smiled. “The old sentimental tunes. They were the best, of course. But these are new times—”

He was interrupted by the bleat of the bass clarinet. Another song. The tall, dusky musician burrowed into the music like a feral animal, and his colleagues followed. The vocalist remained seated, for political reasons. The song was immediately recognizable: A mother braids her young daughter’s hair while describing the man she is destined to marry. The man is strong and kind and the lyrics promise a happy future—but the melody reveals the mother’s sorrow, for the passing of time, as well as for the ruins of her own marriage. Larissa’s hair had once been braided; this melody was as familiar as the swollen, unjeweled hands that had braided them. But now when she closed her eyes, it was not as if she had returned home; it was as if she had never left the tramcar. She was enveloped again by garlic and body odor, hateful and seductive.

No one took notice precisely when Larissa began to sing. She herself first thought she was only humming, but in fact she was silently mouthing the words and then whispering them. The musicians adjusted, leaving just enough room for her voice to edge in between them. By the time she opened her eyes, she was singing fully, her diction distinct and knowing. Her face displayed intense concentration and something like disapproval, the same expression that she had assumed during the Komzet party. The mother’s personal sorrow expressed a race’s, and it became thoroughly Larissa’s own.

In deference to the newcomer, the musicians at first reverted to the traditional arrangement, but the bass clarinetist forced the music across the measure and brought the others with him. Larissa didn’t need to struggle to keep up: jazz seemed to be the way she had sung it her entire life.

No applause or comment followed their performance. The musicians put away their instruments almost furtively, as if caught in a shameful act—and in fact, they had been. The girl’s husband was destined because the marriage was contracted by a broker, a disgusting practice outlawed by the Soviets. Such nostalgia would never have been approved for the evening’s official program. The bass clarinetist gave Larissa a long, appraising look before dismantling his instrument, and then a nearly imperceptible, conspiratorial smile.

Larissa had never sung for Rachel, nor for anyone else in Moscow. Despite their years of friendship, Rachel hadn’t known Larissa even
liked
music. This surprise did not amuse her; very quickly, like the last frames of a torn cinema film, the confidences she had offered Larissa flickered by in recollection. This time her smile obscured a wince.

Grinning, Israel said to Larissa, “I thought you didn’t know Yiddish.”

“I do. A little.”

Larissa reddened. Her parents and grandparents had spoken Yiddish at home only when they didn’t want her to understand, but there had been so much they didn’t want her to understand that she had become fluent.

At the same time, she had developed another facility. Her father and grandfather played violins and her mother the clarinet, and in the small, overfurnished drawing room cluttered with photographs of forgotten and neverknown ancestors and relatives, plus her own cot, she sang to their instruments. She carried the memory of this intermittent family harmony like armor.

“Comrades, I thank you,” Israel said, placing his emptied glass next to his chair. “Take a look on page three tomorrow. You’ll like what you’ll see.”

“You work for Komzet on the side, don’t you? That’s what they said. Am I right?”

These words were spoken by the vocalist, who had reapproached Israel with tentative steps.

A wide, welcoming smile stretched across Israel’s face.

“Damn right.”

“Well, Comrade Shtern. Sign me up. I’ll go.”

“Of course you will. You’re a Jew.”

“And the Russians won’t let me forget it.”

“In Birobidzhan, you won’t want to forget it. And you won’t have to perform in some
kockenshteindit
basement underneath a bakery either. We’re going to build you a theater with five hundred seats, cloakrooms, dressing rooms, recital rooms, lobbies walled by mirrors and lit by chandeliers, everything. It will be entirely for the preservation—and celebration—of Jewish culture. There’ll be Yiddish music, drama, cinema, and wireless broadcasts. Our cultural works will be all around us, as plentiful and natural as the air we breathe. And why shouldn’t they be? I want all you boys to come. Will you make me that promise?”

The drummer chuckled and turned his head away, avoiding the question. The other musicians didn’t reply.

Israel went on: “It’s remarkable how many times in the course of a day I’m approached by young, brave, healthy, hard-working Jews who ask me about colonization. It’s taken hold of our national imagination. There’s no denying it: we are about to write a new chapter in the history of the Jewish people. My friend, leave me your name and address. We’ll be in touch.”