The Free World (15 page)

He and Reuven should have dragged her from that apartment, forced her to go at the points of their rifles. Anything they would have done would have been justified. The condemnation never left him: he had not done enough to save his mother’s life.

That same night they boarded trucks that drove them east to Gulbene. They traveled with the other members of their Workers’ Guard company and also Eduards and his family.

From Gulbene they proceeded on foot, mixed among the columns of dazed and exhausted refugees. Some had already been walking for days, sleeping in the fields, eating whatever they could scrounge.

Without warning, as if for sport, German aircraft would bombard
the road. People would scatter and throw themselves into ditches and furrows. When the danger passed, a feral howling would arise from those who discovered their own among the dead and the dying.

The next morning, they reached the Russian border. Several NKVD officers, mounted on horseback, trotted past in a summary inspection. At the border, a cordon of NKVD soldiers passed swift judgment. A clutch of suspects waited under armed guard beside the wooden border station. Others knelt before the NKVD, pleading not to be turned back.

When his and Reuven’s turn came, they presented their documents to the NKVD guard, an older man, easily in his forties, heavyset, with grease stains on the front of his tunic.

—We are Communists, Reuven said, members of the Workers’ Guard.

Reuven’s Russian, like Samuil’s, had remained close to fluent, accented only faintly with Yiddish and Latvian.

—Where from? the guard asked.

—Riga.

—How did you come here?

—A truck to Gulbene. On foot from there.

—You walked with these people?

—Yes, Reuven said.

—They say they were attacked by German aircraft. You see any German aircraft?

—We saw.

—Show me your rifles, the guard said.

They handed over their rifles and the guard peered into the barrels and sniffed the muzzles. He opened the actions and inspected the chambers.

—You have ammunition? he asked.

—What we were issued in Riga, Reuven said, and he extended the box of shells they’d been given to protect the bridge.

—You too, the guard said, and Samuil did the same.

He opened the boxes and counted the rounds.

—All there, he said disdainfully.

—Yes, Reuven admitted.

—You call yourselves Communists, the guard sneered, but you let the German motherfuckers strafe defenseless people without firing a single shot. Who behaves like this? Not Communists, I assure you.

He leveled his revolver at them and pointed in the direction of the border station, to join the others under armed guard.

—Soon enough, we will find out who you really are, he said.

They took their places with the other suspects and waited for several hours. Intermittently, an NKVD officer would select a half dozen men and lead them into a little copse behind the border station. Short moments later there would come a volley of rifle fire.

Samuil understood that the jaws of death had opened to consume them, and would have consumed them if not for Eduards’s intervention. They were at the front of the line, with one foot in the other world, when he came running to the NKVD officer, waving his Party card, his Gorkom identification, and a personal letter he’d once received from Litvinov.

They evaded death again the next morning, or so Eduards contended, when they leaped from the back of an open troop truck. They had boarded the truck in Pskov with Eduards, his family, and some fifteen others. Several kilometers from the border, Eduards saw the driver wave his hat at an NKVD colonel parked by the side of the road in an Emka staff car.

—Jump now! Eduards had commanded.

They’d jumped and the truck had rattled on without them.

Later that same evening he and Reuven evaded death together for the last time. Stukas and Messers dropped from the setting sun and tore up the road. They took cover in a cherry orchard, and watched through the ripening fruit as the planes skimmed so low overhead that they could see the faces of the German pilots. When the attack ended, a convoy of trucks appeared and there was a frenzied call for men to board. Red Army soldiers rushed about, forcing
men into the trucks, and in the twilight and the commotion Samuil was pressed into one vehicle and Reuven into another. It happened in an instant. Samuil supposed that they were all destined for the same place, but at some point during the night his truck went one way and Reuven’s went another.

O
ne afternoon in late August, on his way home from picketing the Israeli embassy, Lyova witnessed the election of the new pope. After five hours of circular and monotonous marching, he’d stopped and set his sign down at the edge of St. Peter’s square.

—Looked like a nice fellow, Lyova said. You could almost imagine that Jesus Christ himself had had a hand in his election.

They decided that they would go to see his inauguration, scheduled for the following week.

—You still expect to be here? Alec asked.

—Unfortunately, I’ve no reason to expect otherwise, Lyova said.

—No action at the embassy?

—Some Italian Communists showed up with anti-Zionist placards and offered to march in solidarity. We nearly came to blows. Despite what some people say, I still have my limits. I’m not so far gone yet that I’ll join up with a bunch of idiots who get a sexual thrill from shouting,
Zionism is racism!

—What happened to your enemy’s enemy?

—Sometimes your enemy’s enemy is still your enemy. Incidentally, this is how my late grandmother used to refer to me and my
sister. It was how she explained her boundless love.
Do you know how come Grandmother loves you so much? How come, Grandmother? Because you’re the enemy of Grandmother’s enemy.

—And the enemy?

—My mother.

—Her daughter-in-law?

—No, daughter. They were very close, but always arguing. You’ve never heard it phrased this way? I always thought it was commonplace. It’s how my mother now refers to my son.

At the mention of his son, Lyova grew morose. He was so often hustling, clowning, and crusading that Alec had assumed he was unaffected by the kind of loneliness and melancholy one would expect in a man who hadn’t seen his wife and son in more than a year. After all, as Polina hadn’t failed to point out, nothing tangible was stopping him from boarding a plane to Tel Aviv. That he chose not to do this suggested that he preferred the life he was leading in Rome. It occurred to Alec, not for the first time, that he had completely misread someone. At that moment, Lyova seemed to be defined precisely by the feelings to which Alec had believed him to be impervious.

As Lyova brooded, Alec’s mind turned to Masha. He wondered what Masha would have made of Lyova in his state. Just as he’d wondered moments earlier if she’d have been amused by their conversation. Ever since he’d first seen her at the orientation he pictured her presiding in some upper gallery of his mind. He performed for her delectation. He noticed things he would have otherwise ignored, and saw with fresh eyes what was familiar to him.

Though who she was and what she really thought about anything, Alec had no idea. He’d seen her only twice. Once during the orientation and once more in the lobby of the pensione. Both times he had been under the scrutiny of Masha’s mother and brother. A powerful neurotic force seemed to bind the three of them together.

He’d confided this to Karl, with the hope that Karl might have a lead on an apartment or some job for the brother.

Through some unspecified connection, Karl said that he knew of a good place coming available in Ostia.

—How good is good?

—You want a private tour?

—A description would help. I have to tell them something.

—Tell them. A separate bathroom. A separate kitchen. Clean, no bugs. In short, a palace.

—You don’t know of anything in Ladispoli? Ladispoli would be more convenient, Alec said.

—This is what I can do, Karl said. I’ll need an answer tomorrow.

—I’ll ask.

—Ask, Karl said. As a favor to you, I’ll reduce my commission. They’ll get a nice discount and you’ll get yourself another little chickadee.

—She might be more than that.

—It doesn’t matter to me, Karl said. Do as you like. Nobody ever accused you of good sense. The lunacy with Polina proved that. Although, there, I could almost see why. Anyway, if I didn’t know better, I’d recommend some self-restraint. Leave well enough alone. Particularly at a time like this.

—When isn’t it a time like this?

—Spoken like a proper imbecile.

—You don’t think it’s true?

—You talk a lot of shit, Karl said. Careful you don’t step in it.

Alec saw no point in reminding Karl that he recalled a time, not all that long ago, when Karl was not too far removed from this sort of shit. In this respect, they were both their father’s sons. When they’d reached a certain age, they’d learned why their mother had spent so many nights sobbing behind the bedroom door. And if their parents had managed to conceal Samuil’s infidelities from them while they were young, the infidelities were common knowledge to almost everyone else. This was something Alec realized on the occasion of Samuil’s fifty-fifth birthday, when Yuli, their mother’s cousin, got drunk and, in a failed attempt at humor, made some inappropriate comments during his toast.

At the factory, nobody ever mentioned it. People feared Samuil, and knew that he had a network of informants. But though Alec
never heard anything said, he knew that strains of the gossip persisted. He inferred as much from the contemptuous smirks and glances directed at him when he chatted with some girl at work. There was more to those glances than simple resentment over his privileged status as the son of Samuil Leyzerovich. Implicit was that he’d inherited his libidinous appetite from his father, and the suggestion of something more odious, the libel of the rapacious, satyric Jew—which cast him and his father shoulder to shoulder, leering toothily, their trousers agape, members aloft, ready to defile the virginal daughters of the motherland.

In reality, of course, such a thing would have been impossible, not least because Alec couldn’t remember the last time he and his father had exhibited anything resembling coordination of purpose. And beyond that, there was also the matter of the virginal daughters, who had few representatives among the female collective of the VEF radio-technical factory.

Before he took up with Polina, he’d had a few desultory affairs. Without these, the boredom would have been unendurable. Other coworkers dealt with the same problem differently. For lunch three men would each throw in a ruble for the price of a bottle, but Alec didn’t have the right constitution for this. He resorted to persuading some Mila, Luba, or Luda to accompany him into a small utility room that smelled heavily of phenol.

When he met Polina, however, an alternative to the phenol-smelling room had miraculously presented itself. After living under the strict regime of his in-laws for six years, Karl had succeeded in obtaining a separate apartment in a cooperative that was being built in Teika, within walking distance of VEF. For two years, as it was slowly being constructed, he had passed the building every day on his way to work. When it was finally completed, people received letters telling them that they could take possession. Vans and movers arrived. Curtains and lamps appeared in the windows of his future neighbors. Karl was impatient to join them, but Rosa refused to move until the apartment had been prepared to her taste. She and her mother hired an interior decorator and spent weeks deliberating
over the wallpaper, carpets, furniture, and appliances. The decorator had come recommended in the typical way, as a resourceful person, capable of getting her hands on merchandise of incomparable scarcity. However, months elapsed between the deliberations and the arrival of the wallpaper, carpets, and furnishings. Rosa, her mother, and the interior decorator made intermittent visits to the apartment, which otherwise remained unoccupied. The glaring fact of this incensed Karl every time he passed the building to and from work. In retaliation, he began to use the apartment on his own. He invited friends to drink and play cards. He let Alec use it for his liaisons. On occasion, he brought women there himself.

For Alec, it was in this apartment that much of his courtship with Polina transpired. Sometimes they would sneak away during the lunch break; other times Polina would invent an excuse delaying her after work.

The apartment, which lacked a stove, chairs, carpets, and wallpaper, had almost everything else. There were two little beds in the children’s room, and there was a larger bed, albeit without linen, in what was to be Karl and Rosa’s bedroom. A velour couch and coffee table occupied the main room. Karl made some token effort to tidy the place up, but there was usually an array of dirty ashtrays and empty wine bottles on the kitchen counter. To Rosa’s and his mother-in-law’s objections, Karl responded that he would resume living a normal family life when they moved into the apartment.

Rosa refused to make what she considered a premature move. For months there was, between her and Karl, a rancorous impasse. It was finally breached when, one afternoon, Rosa, her mother, and the interior decorator arrived unexpectedly at the apartment. When Rosa opened the door she was confronted by a distressing tableau. The tableau featured Karl in the foreground, on the sofa with a uniformed policewoman in his lap; and in the background, Alec, with his shirt unbuttoned, framed in the doorway to the boys’ bedroom. Alec recalled the terrifically stunned expression on Rosa’s mother’s face, a look of total incomprehension, as if she were witnessing something altogether alien, which her mind simply couldn’t process.

—Oh my God, Alec heard her say, he’s gotten himself involved with the police.

Alec also recalled the scandalized expression on the face of the interior decorator, a tall middle-aged woman, prim and self-possessed, wearing a beige polyester pantsuit, the height of fashion. She looked at Karl and then Alec as if at moral garbage—coarse, low people.

Rosa, meanwhile, turned white.

Karl regarded her with the sublime equanimity of a Chinese.

—You have only yourself to blame, he said.

The policewoman extricated herself from Karl’s lap and smoothed her uniform. Also, Polina emerged quietly from the boys’ bedroom, and thus earned herself Rosa’s unwavering enmity.

—Taking up with common sluts, Rosa said, the tears starting to flow. I’d expect this of your sex maniac brother, but never of you.

—Now, now, Karl replied. No need for insults. Besides, Tatyana has recently been promoted to the rank of investigator, and Polina is a graduate of the polytechnic and a valued employee of the VEF mechanical engineering department. Hardly common.

Alec couldn’t remember where or how Karl had met Tatyana, and that day in the apartment represented the first and last time he ever saw her. Still, because of her uniform, and the capricious, vindictive authority it represented, her role in the episode acquired a special prominence. Mostly, Alec felt, this was because of the way Rosa had behaved. An ordinary person would have been intimidated by the uniform but, to Rosa’s credit, she had been entirely unmoved. And despite the insults she directed at him, Alec admired her subversive integrity.

—I’ll never forgive you for this, Rosa whispered. I wanted to make a beautiful home for us and instead of thanking me you’ve humiliated me in front of my mother, our children, and Alla Petrovna.

—Look, don’t overdo it, Karl said. I told you a thousand times, I’ve had it living with your parents. We finally got an apartment and all I asked was that we move in. And what did I get instead? Alla
Petrovna. By the way, Alla Petrovna, since you’re here, perhaps you could update me on the progress? Any word on our chairs? Our carpets? Our stove?

Flustered, Alla Petrovna was slow to respond.

Rosa’s mother spoke for her and alluded to the item Alla Petrovna was holding in her hands. Everyone turned to look and saw that, yes, in her hands was a thin sample roll of wallpaper. Alec noted a constellation of brown spheres on a pale yellow background.

Considering it, Karl screwed up his face in disgust.

—You’re telling me we waited three months for this revolting pattern? Looks like shit floating in piss.

—What a despicable bastard you are, Rosa sobbed.

Nobody spoke for some time. Karl shook his head ruefully and emptied the contents of a bottle of plum brandy. Everyone seemed to contemplate the next step. It was then that Alec decided to walk Polina out of the apartment. He started to button his shirt. As he did so, the policewoman broke the silence.

Speaking in the declarative, forthright manner of her profession, she said, Karl, you are mistaken. It is a very attractive pattern.

Three days later, Karl, Rosa, and the boys moved into the apartment. The fecal-motif wallpaper went up. A stove was procured. Someone donated a carpet; someone else, chairs. Karl stopped drinking, playing cards, and chasing after women. Finally the master of his own house, he devoted himself to home improvement, a preoccupation more arduous and demanding than fist-fighting or bodybuilding. Just to wangle ceramic tile for the bathroom, a man pitted himself against the mighty arsenal of the Soviet state. In effect, it was as if Leonid Ilyich was himself personally opposed to the tiling of a bathroom. It was the supreme challenge, eclipsing every other human endeavor—sport, sex, philosophy, art, and science. Karl, a pragmatist by nature, had always been inclined this way. And had he remained in Riga, his future would likely have been as a shady, jittery operator in the mold of Alter Schlamm. But instead Karl caught the break Schlamm never had. For the bargain price of five hundred rubles, the state allowed him to forfeit his citizenship and book passage
to the fabled, capitalist West, where speculation was neither a dirty word nor an indictable offense. Where—had he not been confounded by history—a man of Schlamm’s considerable talents would have owned city blocks and factories, not to mention a limousine, a mansion, and a yacht.

Alec didn’t doubt that Karl would attain all this. Though, at present, he was engaged in a lot of petty hustling. Boris the Bodybuilder had departed for San Francisco and bestowed his cart upon Karl as a parting gift. Thus Karl had succeeded Boris in the relocation industry. In the afternoons, Rosa could be seen taking a shift at Piazza Marescotti, holding Boris’s old sign:
MOVING SERVICES. MAN WITH CART
. Karl also acted as broker for some landlords in Ladispoli and Ostia. He made his mandatory appearance at the Americana on Sundays. And then there were additional involvements of a more abstruse nature, about which Alec knew no more than what he heard via rumor—of moneychanging, of used automobile sales, of an illicit traffic in icons.