The Free World (13 page)

R
iga was two cities the day the Soviets came. Samuil remembered marching and singing along Elizabetes Street while stony faces gazed down from the windows. Come another year, and these people would be in the streets offering bouquets to a different army.

How quickly it all happened, and how astounding it seemed, even when the tide was in your favor.

The morning after the Soviets arrived, posters and handbills appeared across the city. Edicts were announced and meetings convened. In a matter of days, nearly every outward sign of the old regime was eradicated. New names appeared on streets and institutions. Everything that Samuil had considered imposing and intransigent shrank meekly out of sight. The state police, who had for so long pursued and harassed him and his comrades, now themselves scuttled for cover. Usually, to no avail. Measures were taken to eliminate them. The streets were patrolled by new men in new uniforms.

As for him and Reuven, they joined up with the new militia, the Red Guard. Reuven was twenty-nine and Samuil was twenty-seven. Their revolutionary credentials were impeccable. For patrons, they had Schatz-Anin—installed as editor of a Yiddish newspaper—and
Eduards, who was appointed to a position within the Gorkom, the municipal government. Among their tasks, they were entrusted with converting Levitan’s workshop, and others like it, into cooperatives. Politely, in measured tones, they explained to the proprietors how their lives and the lives of their workers would be improved. They went from shop to shop, moving purposefully through the streets, aware of the eyes that followed them and the conversations that died at their approach. The vulgar allure of power was very strong, but they did not succumb to its temptations. In all of their dealings, they were mindful of themselves as representatives of the Party. They were encouraged to imagine themselves as physicians, and the revolution as an organism, beset by toxins and contagions. Some toxins the organism could tolerate and neutralize; others were lethal. These had to be purged. And it was up to them, as the physicians, to distinguish between the mildly disruptive and the noxious, and to err on the side of caution.

In the first weeks after the arrival of the Soviets, there were very many physicians like themselves, circulating among the population, issuing diagnoses. Goods wagons were prepared at the railway station to expel the contaminants. Among them was their cousin Yaakov. Reuven had seen his name on a list. This, they both realized, was the test of their revolutionary mettle. Samuil remembered how they had discussed the matter between them. They decided that they would be committing no crime by telling their cousin what he was bound to learn anyway in short order. This way, at least, he would be able to prepare himself for the journey.

That evening, in front of their family, Reuven delivered the news. There were six of them in the apartment then, the girls having married and moved out.

It was hardly unexpected. Conspicuous class enemies like Vasserman had been rounded up. The Zionist organizations had burned their membership rosters—as though, even without the rosters, everything wasn’t abundantly known.

Folding his hands on the kitchen table, their cousin said, What’s
the point in making a fuss? This is the nature of our times. Samuil and Reuven bet on one horse. I bet on another. My horse lost.

—Don’t spout nonsense. What a fool you are, their uncle growled. And turning to Samuil and Reuven, he commanded: You two heroes of the revolution, go to your commissar and have him remove Yankl’s name from the list.

—It’s not possible, Reuven said.

—You have no idea what is possible, their uncle countered. You think these people are pure as the driven snow? I fought with them and I fought against them, remember. For a liter of spirits they would denounce their own mothers.

He removed his wedding band and held out his hand for his wife’s. Their mother volunteered hers as well.

—Here, their uncle said, offer these. Tell them it’s a contribution to the revolutionary cause.

—If we said that, we would be shot. And with good reason, Reuven said.

—Then I’ll do it myself, their uncle said.

—Then you’ll be shot. And Yankl will have to say kaddish for you on the train.

—Can’t you do anything? their mother asked.

—We can help him pack.

Their cousin observed the conversation as if it involved someone who was not him.

—Monsters, their aunt hissed, we took you into our home!

—Mama, stop it, please, their cousin said, and moved to console her.

At that moment, Samuil had felt his resolve weaken. Sympathy grabbed him as if by the lapels and thrust him toward his family. It was possible that their uncle was right, and that a word from him or Reuven to the appropriate person could spare their cousin. The temptation was immense. Samuil knew that he had to master it. Not in great battles or debates was the fate of the revolution determined, but in moments like these. The revolution’s success or failure depended
upon thousands upon thousands of tiny, individual moral dilemmas. To resolve them properly, clearly, and bloodlessly was the challenge facing every Soviet person.

Samuil presumed that Reuven was waging the same battle and arriving at the same conclusion, but his brother looked at their uncle, aunt, and cousin and said, They will come for him tonight. If he’s here, they’ll grab him.

Nobody mistook his meaning.

—What’s the use? Yaakov said. Where will I go? The Germans are one way, the Russians the other. And in the woods, the Aizsargi and other nationalists.

—Never mind that about the nationalists, their uncle said. I fought side by side with them in 1919. We embraced each other like brothers.

—It’s no longer 1919, Yaakov said.

That evening, they helped him pack his things. Their mother and aunt stripped the shelves bare and also appealed to the neighbors for dried fruit, tinned fish, and bread. Samuil and Reuven made a bundle of their warmest clothes—a wool sweater, a hat, gloves, and Samuil’s one pair of sturdy boots. Whatever money was in the house they turned over to Yaakov, much of it sewn into the lining of his summer jacket.

Once they were finished, nobody went to sleep. They sat and waited for the guards to arrive.

—I leave you my phonograph and records, Yaakov said to Reuven, and added wryly, Play them at your peril.

Around three in the morning they heard footfalls on the stairs and then the knock on the door. Two comrades, a man and a woman, vaguely familiar to Samuil, delivered the order. They showed no surprise to find everyone awake, and their quarry packed and ready to go. After a brief exchange, Reuven succeeded in gaining their permission to accompany Yaakov to the rail depot.

—He is ours; we will take him, Reuven said.

That night, as the first tint of color seeped into the sky, they drew up to the railway depot, where the goods wagons stood waiting. Even
before they reached the site they heard the susurrus of countless, unintelligible voices. At the depot, they saw a horde of thousands, massed together in disarray. Dozens of armed NKVD guards and members of the local Communist militia encircled them. Occasionally, there was the bark of an order. Samuil and Reuven watched carefully to make sure that their mother, aunt, or uncle did not get lumped together with the condemned. Samuil knew it could easily happen. There were, among the thousands, many women, children, and old people. If one looked, one could find many mild and careworn faces. The uninitiated might presume them to be innocent. Their cousin also appeared mild and innocent, yet he was a Zionist, a dangerous element. The same applied to the others. Latvian nationalists, capitalists, bourgeoisie, members of the former government, priests, rabbis, Hebrew teachers: every one a potential threat.

Because their aunt and uncle refused to leave while the train remained in the station, Samuil, Reuven, and their mother also stayed. They lost sight of Yaakov immediately after he took leave of his parents, and they didn’t see him again until shortly before the train was set to move. As people were being forced up into the wagons, there was a loud confrontation at one of the doors. Samuil looked over in time to see Vasserman protesting something to an NKVD officer. Swinging his rifle butt, the officer knocked Vasserman down. Standing beside the fallen Vasserman was Yaakov. Samuil watched his cousin help Vasserman to his feet, and then into the wagon. When Vasserman was on board, Yaakov pulled himself up behind him. The NKVD officer bolted the door and Samuil never saw his cousin again.

O
n her first day at work, Giovanni and Carla, his wife, gave her posterboard and multicolored markers and gestured at the assorted merchandise. She composed signs in Russian and arranged them in the window display. That same afternoon she made her first sale to a young man from Mogilev. He and his wife came into the shop and wandered cautiously between the narrow aisles.

—His whole life he’s had one dream, the wife said.

—A brown suede blazer, the man said.

Polina barely knew her way around the store, but she found a rack of suede blazers, some of which were brown, and one of which fit the man from Mogilev. They went through the motions of haggling; Polina conferred with Giovanni and Carla; the Italians wrote a figure on a piece of paper; and the man from Mogilev realized his life’s ambition.

—That’s it, now he can die, his wife said.

—If I die, bury me in it, he said.

She made her second sale not long after to an older Italian man, squarely built, dressed like a laborer. Carla greeted him familiarly and Giovanni saluted him from behind the cash register, but the
man explained that he wished to speak with Polina. Polina didn’t immediately understand what was being asked of her. There was an uncomfortable moment when everyone seemed ill at ease, but then the man addressed Polina in Russian and relieved the tension. He apologized for imposing upon her, and for his shaky Russian. Twenty-five years earlier he had been a university student in Leningrad. Since then, he’d had few opportunities to practice the language.

—I was there a long time ago, the man said. I was there when Stalin died.

He recalled the ranks of people in the street, old women and schoolchildren in tears. For the modest privilege of speaking to her in Russian, the man bought a belt and a pair of sandals.

Before he left, the man shook hands firmly with Giovanni, and Polina noticed two things that had previously escaped her. One was the collage of photographs and newspaper clippings that Giovanni had tacked onto the wall behind the cash register: a posed photo of a soccer team, above a small maroon and orange banner; newspaper clippings showing the faces of smiling men, whom Polina took to be politicians; other clippings showing grainy snapshots of younger men, whom Polina took to be either criminals or victims; and framed portraits of historical eminences. Of all these, Polina recognized only MarxEngels, the stern two-headed deity of her girlhood imagination.

The other thing Polina noticed was that the outer three fingers on Giovanni’s right hand were misshapen, as from an industrial accident.

Back at the apartment, when she mentioned these things to Lyova, he explained that Giovanni and Carla were active in the Italian Communist Party. Communists and merchants—in Italy, the two were not mutually exclusive.

About his fingers, Giovanni told her himself. After she had worked at the store for several weeks, he saw her looking at his hand; he lifted it, turned it back to palm, and declared,
Fascisti.

There was no other talk of politics. The Russian signs in the window drew people; others came from word of mouth. Polina and her employers settled into a comfortable rhythm. The hours blended
together. She felt a contentment she hadn’t known in a long time. Walking to and from work, she seemed for the first time to see the city. Details came to her peripherally, when she wasn’t looking. Now when she came home she told Alec about a marble hand incorporated into the brickwork of a wall in San Lorenzo, or the statue of a king tucked under a palm tree in the Giardini Quirinale, or the graffiti on the store facing theirs that read
Hitler Per Mille Anni.

A
fter a day at the briefing department, Alec would also come home and recount one or another of the day’s oddities for Polina and Lyova. One was a story about the man from Cherepovets who’d arrived with his wife and young daughter during a thunderstorm. As soon as they’d been assigned to their room, the man had gone in search of a HIAS representative. In the corridor, he’d stopped Alec. He insisted that he had to go immediately to the U.S. embassy because he had highly sensitive information to impart. Outside, the rain was coming down in torrents. Not bothering with an umbrella, the man raced out into the street, Alec trailing after him, calling out which way he should turn. By the time they reached Via Veneto, the man was drenched, his eyes glaring urgently, and his scalp, through sparse black hair, showing obscenely white. He looked like a lunatic, which explained why the marines held him at the door, one of them drawing his club. Alec did his best to speak for the man, but the marines cut him off. The sergeant lifted the receiver from his desk, and then they hustled the man upstairs. Three hours later, he emerged: dry, his hair combed, and with an American flag pin on his collar.

Another time, a commotion had erupted in the pensione after the
arrival of a new batch of émigrés. Members of the briefing department hurried over to quell the uproar. At the door to one of the rooms, an old woman was shrieking at her neighbors—an elderly couple. The angry woman’s adult son and daughter tried to calm her, but to little effect. Remarkably, it turned out that the old man was the woman’s errant husband and the father of her now grown children. During the war, this man had been wounded at the front and discharged. At the time, his wife and two young children, having wisely evacuated from the Ukraine, were living in a kolkhoz in Uzbekistan. The man traveled there to reunite with them. Also living in the kolkhoz was the wife’s cousin and her family. Depending on which version one believed, either the cousin seduced the husband or the husband seduced the cousin. Either way, the result was the same. One night, the two lovers vanished. They disappeared into the vastness of the Soviet Union, not to be heard from again. Until now, when, after all these years, fate had conspired to make them neighbors in a Roman pensione.

A different kind of story involved a fat man from Lvov traveling with his wife and teenage son, also fat. Upon their settlement into the pensione, the father drew Alec’s colleague, the myopic Oleg, into his confidence and asked how he might avail himself of the services of a reliable surgeon. In Lvov the man had flourished in the underground economy. When it came time to leave, he had been unable to find a means to transport his valuables abroad. Everyone had heard accounts of sealed railcars loaded with expensive goods, and of the astronomical bribes paid to high-ranking border officials. But he had failed to get to the right people. Desperate for a solution, he’d converted a great proportion of his wealth into gemstones and rich foods. In the year leading up to their departure he had himself, his wife, and his son on a strict regimen of eating. He gained forty kilos. His wife and son also put on a lot of weight. When they’d all attained a satisfactory size, a surgeon creatively implanted diamonds and rubies into their bodies. For the man and his son, he made incisions that mimicked appendectomies. For the wife, he created a caesarian
scar. Now that they were safely in Rome, they needed someone to cut them open so that they could retrieve their fortune.

—It reminds me of something I read in Josefus, Lyova said when Alec told the story.

Besieged from without by Romans and their Arab allies, robbed, starved, and persecuted from within by rival Jewish gangs, scores of ordinary citizens had tried to escape the city. A small minority swallowed gold coins so as to avoid detection by the Jewish guards. One, who made it to the Syrian camp, was found picking coins out of his stool. A rumor spread through the Arab and Syrian camps that Jews were leaving the city stuffed with gold. Immediately, the Arabs and Syrians took to slaughtering the refugees and searching their bowels.

—A story like that makes you sentimental for the gentleness of the Soviet border guards, Lyova said.

—We crossed at Chop, Alec said. Not to get into specifics, but those bastards did everything except slice us open.

—Yes? Lyova said. And did they find anything?

—The same thing they’d find if they searched me yesterday or today, Alec said.

The crossing at Chop remained a sore point, one that Alec avoided bringing up. Unlike nearly all other emigrants from Riga, they had had to cross there instead of at Brest.

Rosa maintained that no comparable horror could have existed at Brest, but Alec had met any number of people who believed that what they had witnessed there was the height of savagery. A man, traveling with his wife and invalid son, described how an inspector had demanded the boy’s prosthetic arm and, in an ostensible search for contraband, splintered it with a hammer. He heard about monsters who interrogated and terrified small children. He heard of an incident involving an old man who’d been denied access to the lavatory, and who’d soiled himself and then sat for hours in his own filth. And recently a woman had described how her son had been detained by the Brest customs agents, roughly handled, and then beaten by
the police. Alec had gotten to talking with the woman after he’d taken note of her and her two children at the orientation meeting. Out of every group of new arrivals there were invariably some who caught his attention. Typically, these were attractive girls and women. He gravitated to them and offered his assistance. He wouldn’t have said that it was because he had an ulterior motive, but simply because he saw no reason to repress a natural inclination. No matter how bad life got, the presence of a beautiful woman made it impossible to despair completely. Even Christ, in his crucified agony, had had the solace of Mary Magdalene’s face, which—if the devotional paintings could be trusted—hadn’t been bad to look at.

But beauty didn’t decide all. In the case of this woman and her children, Alec had been acutely conscious of them while he delivered his rote orientation speech. Would someone else have been quite so drawn to the truculent hoodlum and the dark-haired girl at his side, with the dramatic, arched eyebrows and large, coltish eyes? As he spoke she played a game in which she sought his gaze, peevishly dismissed it, and then commanded it again.

They were from Minsk, the mother said. It was the three of them traveling together. She was a widow. Her husband had died when the children were still small. The children now appeared to be in their early twenties. The girl introduced herself as Masha, and her brother appraised Alec stonily and gave his name as Dmitri. Given Dmitri’s appearance, Alec wasn’t at all surprised that he’d been detained by the customs agents and then beaten by the police. Like those of Minka, Iza’s albino friend, Dmitri’s hands and neck were festooned with prison markings. It looked like he’d spent a fair portion of his young life behind bars. Alec had noticed that men like him passed through the halls of HIAS in no small number. The Soviet authorities had been only too happy to clear the jails and prisons of Jewish criminals. The unambiguous message from the Kremlin to the Knesset was:
You want Jews? Here, take these.

Efforts were made to divert some of the convicts to places other than Israel. To spread out the criminal element. The criminals were usually more than happy to comply; the immigration offices less so.
It wasn’t easy to get the criminals past the interview process. Short of wearing gloves, there was no way for them to conceal their ring tattoos, and one glimpse at these was usually enough to settle the issue.

—We would like to go to Boston, said the mother, who gave her name as Riva Davidovna Horvitz.

She was a lean, dark-complexioned woman, once appealing, Alec supposed. Now she had the severity of a person who had been marked by misfortune and did not wish to conceal it.

While Riva spoke about the rigors of their emigration, Alec found himself constructing fantasies and stratagems about her daughter. Masha had elicited in him the same feeling he’d had when he first saw Olya on Karl Marx Street. In the intervening years, for all his conquests, he’d rarely had that feeling again. There were very few women who possessed perpetual mystery—who revealed less than they knew and remained, at some level, mysterious even to themselves. Occasionally, Alec saw a woman and suspected that she was of this type, only to discover that he’d been mistaken. But there was something about Masha that compelled him. She looked to have what Olya had had—beauty like a long blade, carelessly held.

Polina’s allure had been altogether different, she had been like the still point at the center of a gyre. He’d seen her, day after day at her desk in the technology department. Beside her was a stern old matron. Every time Alec thought to approach Polina the matron had been at her side, discouraging him with castrating looks. For at least a month he contemplated ways to breach the system of defense and get to Polina. At first, he wanted only a few words, just to see if he could elicit a smile. That was all. Nothing more. Just for a start.

Then finally, the afternoon he approached her with Karl in tow, her sentinel had vacated her post. Alec had made his silly, brash proposition, and succeeded in getting Polina to join them for a drink. She’d said little that evening; she’d let Alec entertain her. After she finished her drink, she discreetly checked her watch and rose to say goodbye.

—You can’t leave yet, Alec had said.

—I can’t? Polina had asked as if allowing that there might be substance behind Alec’s words.

Alec had looked up at her from his place at the circular café table, hardly big enough to accommodate their glasses and ashtray.

—You see, Karl said, my brother can’t bear to have a woman leave until she’s confessed that she thinks he’s the most desirable man on earth.

—Do many women say that? Polina asked.

—Surprisingly, Karl said.

—Or not, Alec offered.

—So this is the reason I can’t leave?

—Only if you think it’s a good reason, Alec said.

—Honestly speaking, I don’t, Polina said.

—Then it isn’t.

—So what is?

—There are many. Very important ones. To list them all would take some time. Please sit and I’ll buy you another drink.

—Your reason to stay is to hear the reasons to stay? Polina asked.

—Not good enough?

She had gone home that night, but Alec had perceived an opening. Not long after the evening with Karl, on the day of the annual Readiness for Labor and Defense Exercises, Alec had finagled his way into Polina’s group. The testing was done according to department, but Alec, in part because of his father’s status, but mainly on account of his own gregariousness, moved fluidly throughout the plant. It raised no eyebrows when his name was included with those of the technology department. Broadly speaking, nobody cared about any of the official and procedural events. Celebrate the workers on the anniversary of the Revolution? Why not? Honor the Red Army on Red Army Day? Who could object? Either was a good excuse to avoid work. Lenin’s birthday? Stalin’s first tooth? Brezhnev’s colonoscopy? Each merited a drink, a few snacks, and maybe a slice of cake. So, too, the Labor and Defense Exercises—only with less drinking and without the cake.

The morning of the exercises, Alec took his place among the
young workers of the technology and transistor radio engineering departments. Dressed in tracksuits and running shoes, they crossed the street from the plant proper to the site of the VEF sports stadium and target range. At the range, .22-caliber rifles awaited them, having already been retrieved from the armory. Members of VEF’s athletic department—the trainers and coaches of the factory’s various sports teams—had already prepared the field for the shot put, the long jump, the high jump, and for the short-distance footraces. The trainers and coaches roamed about with their stopwatches, measuring tapes, and the lists of the norms that had to be met. Somewhere, presumably in the Kremlin, a physical culture expert had determined the basal fitness level young Soviet workers needed to possess to establish their superiority over the Americans and the Red Chinese. Should these foes come spilling across the borders, they would encounter a daunting column ready to repulse them with heroic displays of running, jumping, shot putting, and small-arms fire.

Before the start of the events, Alec sought Polina out and tried to strike a bargain with her. He told her that he wanted to see her again.

—You’re seeing me now, Polina said.

—One more evening, Alec said. All I ask. In the scheme of a life, what’s one evening?

—Depends who you spend it with.

—A valid point, Alec said.

To reach the decision, Alec proposed a contest. If he scored better at the rifle range, Polina would grant him another evening; if she scored better, he would leave her in peace. Perhaps because she was beguiled by the prospect of a game, Polina agreed.

—I should warn you in advance, Alec said. Last summer, in the officers’ training rotation, I placed eighth in marksmanship.

—Out of how many? Polina asked.

—Sixteen, Alec said.

—That doesn’t sound very good, Polina said.

—No, it doesn’t, Alec said. That’s the idea.

—I don’t understand, Polina said.

—Well, I was specifically trying for eighth place.

—Why is that?

—In the army, it’s best to be somewhere in the middle. Trouble usually finds those at the bottom or at the top.

—So you mean to say that you’re a good shot?

—Eighth place, Alec said.

—In that case, I should tell you that last year at Readiness for Labor and Defense, I finished second in my department. They awarded me a ribbon and printed my name in the factory newspaper. My husband pasted a copy of it into an album.

Alec noticed that Polina didn’t brandish the word “husband” like a cudgel. She seemed to place the same emphasis on “husband” as she did on “ribbon” or “album.” But Alec wasn’t fool enough to believe that she’d included the word innocently. In a sense, since she hadn’t unequivocally rebuffed Alec, anything she said about her husband verged on betrayal. Any information Alec had about him was information he could use against him. For instance, the fact that he was the kind of man who would preserve something printed in the factory’s idiotic newspaper. Then again, it was possible that Polina found such a gesture endearing. It could be that she was implying that this was precisely the kind of man she wanted. A man unlike Alec, who, in his ironical sophistication, couldn’t hope to access or appreciate such pure, sentimental feeling.