The Free World (6 page)

T
here had been a point—once it became obvious that his sons would leave Riga, that no manner of threats or appeals would deter them, and that his family and his reputation would be destroyed—when Samuil had, for the first time in his life, contemplated suicide. The idea plagued him for weeks. He sought a reason to keep living, to justify his waking-and-breathing participation in the future. Almost certainly he would be expelled from the Party. And then what kind of life would he have in Riga? At best, the phone would ring occasionally when a former colleague’s wife would take pity and invite him for dinner. But could he even see himself accepting such invitations? What could he possibly say to people and what could people possibly say to him? And as for the other alternative—emigration—it was, in its own way, equally bad. But after a lifetime spent eluding death, the habit of survival was deeply ingrained. He could not separate the image of putting a revolver to his head or jumping into the Daugava from the image of the White thugs who murdered his father—themselves doubtless long cold in their graves—dancing, singing, and drinking in celebration. He was not prepared to give them the satisfaction.

In Ladispoli, thoughts of suicide returned. There was nothing
here for a man like him. The young men, like Karl, packed their bags of trinkets and laid them out on blankets near the beach. When the police came, they scattered. When the police left, they returned. To see such things brought back to memory his first lessons in the Soviet Yiddish school in Rogozna. Their teacher had instructed them in the alphabet:

Is “komets” and “alef” O?

O!

Is “komets” and “beys” Bo?

Bo!

Is there a God?

No!

Is there a shop owner?

No!

Is there a landlord?

No!

Men his age he saw tending to their grandchildren, pushing prams, shaking rattles. Emma encouraged him to take the boys. Somehow, it had not occurred to her that this would offend a man’s sensibilities. More than offend. To be a useless old man was bad enough; to transform himself into an old woman was worse.

To break the monotony, Samuil walked. Most mornings he would start by going to Club Kadima, where he could listen to the radio or read the weekly émigré newspaper,
Jews in Transit.
Then he would walk to the beach and skirt Piazza Marescotti. There, among the other peddlers, he would see veterans with medals pinned to their blazers and shirts. There were only several who were more decorated than he, although Samuil would have been hard-pressed to prove this claim given that his medals had been confiscated at Chop by a smug, acne-faced customs clerk.

—Not permitted, the clerk had said offhandedly.

—I shed my blood for those, Samuil had said.

—So you say.

—Here are the papers, Samuil had said, and presented the old typed documents.

—This is of no interest to me. I am not an expert in forgery. The directives are plain: the medals belong to the Soviet Union.

—Look me in the face when you speak, Samuil had commanded.

—What for? You think I don’t see enough traitor Jew faces every day?

The customs agent swept the medals like scraps from the table into a bin containing other items designated as contraband: silverware, medical instruments, brooches, rings, and bracelets. His medals landed with a clatter, and he saw, burning like embers at the top of the heap, his Order of the Red Star and his Order of the Patriotic War—the so-called Officer’s Set. Because of this, Samuil paid close attention to the decorations he saw other men wearing. He saw one man with an Order of the Red Banner, extremely rare for a Jew if it was authentic. He saw another man with a chestful of campaign ribbons, attesting to a prolonged, near-miraculous, frontline tenure. Most, however, possessed the standard commendations that accrued to anyone who survived the war: combatant medal, bravery medal, victory over Germany medal, and the commemorative decorations issued to mark the jubilees of triumph: one decade, two decades, a quarter century. Samuil’s eyes were always primed. He saw a small, one-legged man with an Order of the Red Star. This same man seemed to be everywhere. He saw him mixing with the others at Piazza Marescotti, and he saw him also wearing his Red Stars and playing the violin for spare change in front of a café at the beach. He felt, too, as if he had also seen him at Club Kadima, reading the newspaper. This was confirmed when he saw him at Club Kadima a second time, sitting, his crutch propped against his chair, at the table beside Samuil’s. The man was laughing at something he was reading in a way that denoted a prelude to conversation. Peripherally, Samuil saw the man look up from his paper and turn his face this way and that in search of an interlocutor. As there was nobody else nearby, Samuil did not doubt that he would be singled out.

—Are you a chess player? the man asked.

—I wouldn’t call myself one, Samuil lowered his newspaper and said.

—Do you follow the game at all?

—No more than anyone else.

—But you’re aware of the championships in the Philippines?

—Naturally.

—Do you side with Karpov or Korchnoi?

—Korchnoi is a defector.

—Perhaps I misunderstood you, but you sound as if you disapprove.

—You didn’t misunderstand me.

—Ah, I see, the man said. But I like this Korchnoi. Even if he did beat Tal.

—Are you from Latvia?

—No, Kiev.

—I thought since you mentioned Tal.

—Only as an admirer. Besides, he is one of ours. Though so too is Korchnoi, on his mother’s side.

—I happen to know Tal. After he became world champion in 1960 I helped organize his heroic return to Riga.

—Wonderful man, Tal. A true genius. Although he is in Karpov’s entourage in the Philippines. What can I say, it’s hard to be consistent with one’s allegiances.

—For some, yes.

—It’s certainly been true of me. If I settle on an allegiance it is guaranteed that new and compromising information will emerge. I revere Lenin, I learn he’s a German agent. I venerate Stalin, Khrushchev tells me he killed Mandelstam and a few million others. I tell you, if I worshipped the sun, we’d all end up in the dark.

—During a turbulent revolution some mistakes are inevitable. But Stalin was a great leader.

—Believe me, I understand how you feel. It’s not my intention to start a debate. It remains a delicate subject for people. My tongue, once it starts walking, sometimes wanders where it shouldn’t.

—Criticism is easy. The young generation is quick to criticize. It is easy to criticize if you never experienced life before communism.

—Of course, anything is better than a pogrom.

—That is your commentary on communism?

—I consider it no small compliment. In 1920, the Poles came through our shtetl and behaved like animals. You don’t think my father greeted the Red Army like liberators, even if they took our last crust of bread?

—You said you were from Kiev?

—I lived there since after the war. Before that I was from Olebsk. Not far from Zhitomir. Not that far from Kiev, either. In Volhynia.

—I know it. I was born in Rogozna. Though my mother moved me and my brother to Riga when I was still a boy.

—Yes, I know Rogozna as well. I said goodbye to my leg in western Poltava. I imagine it is still there.

—I have seen you wearing your Red Star.

—Yes? They gave it to me in exchange for my leg.

—Who did you serve with?

—First Ukrainian Front. I was a sapper with the Twenty-third Rifle Corps. As you can see, I am a small man. When they needed someone to crawl ahead, I volunteered. I didn’t want them to say that a Jew was a coward.
There are mines to be cleared. Who will do it? Corporal Roidman requests the honor, comrade Sergeant!

—You’re called Roidman?

—Is the name familiar to you?

—I don’t believe so.

—I’m actually a relation of a famous person. Only by the time she became famous she had already changed her name.

—Whom do you mean?

—Do you recognize the name Fanny Kaplan?

—Fanny Kaplan? The one who shot at Lenin?

—History remembers her as Fanny Kaplan, but she was born Feiga Roidman. We’re
mishpucheh.
My father was her cousin.

—I don’t suppose this was the sort of thing you publicized in Kiev.

—You’re right, of course. But I am a musician. I play the violin. I am an amateur, no formal training mind you, but I have been
told that I have a certain knack. For some time now, in secret, I have been composing the opera of Fanny Kaplan. Her story is a modern tragedy. Do you follow music?

—No more than I follow chess. My brother played in a military band, but I never took it up.

—Ah yes, chess, Roidman said. Which is where we started. Now I am back to what I wanted to tell you originally about the curious incident at the chess match. The game was played to another draw, you see, but Korchnoi lodged a formal protest because, during the match, Karpov’s supporters brought Karpov a cup of blueberry yogurt. Korchnoi claims that this could have been a signal agreed upon by Karpov’s team. A secret tactic. They bring a cup of blueberry yogurt and it means: accept the draw. Or they bring strawberry and it means: knight to rook four. It’s wonderful. There is no limit to human intrigue, is there?

T
he room where Lyova slept was always inundated with sunlight. At first Polina was reluctant to venture out in the morning for fear of disturbing him, but she soon discovered that Lyova didn’t sleep much and always rose before they did. If he was still home when she and Alec awoke, Polina would most often find him reading at the table. He had collected a great number of books that he stacked up near his bed. He also had a large archive of an English-language newspaper that he purchased once a week. It was from Lyova that they heard, on the morning of their medical examination, about the testimony of Shcharansky’s neighbor.

At the doctor’s office, the anteroom was occupied mostly by Italians. The office was a regular medical practice, though the doctor
had an arrangement with the Canadian embassy. Polina and Alec were the only Russians there with the exception of one other couple and their eleven-year-old son. They didn’t need to speak a word of Russian to identify one another. In a doctor’s office, where everyone is wary and secretive, they were more wary and secretive. Still, it didn’t take long for Alec to strike up a conversation. The husband was a metallurgist. He was acquainted with Canada primarily on a subterranean level. Alec asked their son if he was eager to go to Canada. The boy shrugged his shoulders and started to blink spasmodically. “Calm yourself, Vova,” his mother said to him. Polina saw the husband set his jaw bitterly at his wife. “He’s a good boy,” the mother said, defending herself as much as her son, “it just happens to him when he gets nervous.” Under the weight of his parents’ scrutiny, the boy lowered his head, gripped his chair, and blinked harder.

The metallurgist and his son were called first. They reappeared half an hour later, the boy blinking as vigorously as before, the metallurgist smoldering.

—He made him hop on one foot and touch his nose, like in a circus show, the metallurgist said.

—Did he do it? the mother asked with sincere, desperate concern.

—Of course he did it, the metallurgist barked. Why not? There’s nothing wrong with him.

After the metallurgist’s wife returned from her examination, Alec was called in by one doctor and another doctor materialized and beckoned Polina. She and Alec walked down the same short hallway which branched off in two directions. Polina’s doctor turned right. He opened a door to an examining room and motioned for Polina to take a seat on a padded table. The doctor was very well groomed—clean-shaven, but for a tightly clipped mustache. He looked not so much professional as prim, even prudish. He removed his gold wristwatch and deposited it on a metal dolly beside the door, about as far from Polina as possible given the dimensions of the room. He then indicated that Polina should unbutton her blouse, and once she had, he commenced the examination, touching her gingerly with dry hands,
tapping her here and there, applying the stethoscope, and performing all this in such a way as to make Polina feel ashamed of her body.

After he had completed this first stage of the examination, the doctor turned his back and made notations on a form, at the top of which Polina discerned the emblem of the Canadian flag. When he turned in her direction again he gestured for Polina to put her legs up. With a quick movement he reached under the table and snapped two stirrups into position. All of this, from the very first, he conducted without uttering a single word. Without, Polina realized, even so much as a sound. It was this antiseptic silence combined with the physical humiliation of being touched with such disdain that made Polina feel as if she were once again back in the green-walled hospital clinic.

The doctor there had been a woman. She’d walked into the surgery and parted Polina’s knees without quite looking at her. She’d offered no explanation of what she intended to do or when she intended to do it. She said nothing at all until a nurse walked in and then she berated her for not having already prepared and sterilized the patient.

Like a magician’s assistant, Polina had felt as if she had been split in two. The doctor and the nurse pretended her top half didn’t exist and dealt only with her bottom half. Polina relinquished it to them. She concentrated on her top half. She tried to retain this focus in spite of the pain, refusing to cry out, as though what was happening below was incidental and remote. She imagined that the pain was coming at her from a vast distance, as from the unseen bottom of a gorge.

When they were finished, the nurse transferred her onto a gurney. She was rolled out into the hallway and left there, once again, without explanation. Polina thought that she could still feel blood seeping. The loss of blood, the pain, and the cold metal of the gurney chilled her and she started to shiver. She was exhausted and drained, too weak to call out, and yet the tremors became so violent that her gurney creaked from side to side on its rubber wheels. Time and again people rushed by and ignored her. When she saw her doctor
hurrying past, she reached out and caught her by the arm. Through chattering teeth, she told her she was cold, that she wanted a sheet for her gurney.

—How old are you? the doctor asked.

—Twenty-one, Polina said.

—You’re not a child. Pull yourself together, the doctor said.

—Please, is there a sheet? Polina asked.

—Who are you to make demands? You don’t like it here? Don’t fuck so much next time.

When they released her that evening, Maxim was waiting for her outside. She wasn’t really in any condition to take the bus by herself, so, in a way, she was grateful to have someone help her. She only wished that it were someone else. Who exactly she couldn’t have said, even a stranger, anyone but Maxim. She saw him through the square wire-reinforced windows of the hospital doors. He was at the bottom of the stone steps, bent slightly at the waist, listening to another young man who smoked and talked. When Polina opened the doors, Maxim looked up and mounted the steps as if to help her with it. But when he reached the top, the door was already swinging shut behind her. He looked lost for a moment. Polina expected that having missed the door, he would offer her his arm. She looked forward to refusing him, only he didn’t offer his arm. He also didn’t do or say any of the unwelcome things she expected him to do or say, which, curiously, irritated her even more. She looked at him and saw penitence and relief vying for dominion in his face.

—Did you happen to see a kind of chubby girl in a blue cloud-pattern dress in there? a young man asked when Polina and Maxim reached the bottom of the steps.

—I don’t think so, Polina said.

—Raisa is her name. She has shortish brown hair and sort of a dimple in her chin.

—I really don’t know, Polina said.

—Her girlfriend brought her in this morning. That’s a long time. Let me ask you, and please be honest: What do you think, should I keep waiting?

Polina allowed Maxim to escort her home on the bus. From the bus stop they walked the two blocks to her building without speaking. It was only when he had to say goodbye that Maxim delivered his line.

—It’s better for our future, Maxim said.

The following day Maxim brought her carnations and inquired after her well-being. Several days later, he brought carnations again. In a week’s time he returned with more carnations, now on account of the fact that he had, before the abortion, established the habit of bringing her flowers once a week. He presented these to Polina in such a way as to communicate that he believed things had returned to normal. Though she had an indefinable urge to protest, she admitted that things had indeed returned to normal. She couldn’t justify her lingering resentment. Her experience at the clinic had been horrid, but she’d had no reason to suppose that it would be otherwise. Almost everyone she knew had had at least one abortion. Some had gone to hospitals; others, hoping to conceal the pregnancy from their parents, had had their boyfriends pay twenty-five rubles and submitted to the procedure at the apartment of a nurse or a doctor. Not a few of them ended up in the hospital anyway with infections and complications. Compared to these, her ordeal hardly ranked.

In their own way, Polina and Maxim had kept the abortion to themselves. Maxim had given a tin of caviar to the doctor at the regional polyclinic who had referred Polina to the hospital. It was understood that the doctor wouldn’t say anything to her parents. Polina also didn’t share the information with her sister. Which was why, since they did not know otherwise, her mother and her sister each made a point of commenting on Maxim’s extraordinary romantic display.

—Three bouquets in one week. It’s a very refined and thoughtful gesture, Polina’s mother said.

—He’s probably going to propose, Nadja said.

Maxim had already talked seriously about marriage. But he’d refrained from making a formal proposal because they were at a “crucial point in their lives.” To make a major life decision before
graduating from the institute would be rash. They would both have to pass their exams and, ideally, finish near the top of their respective classes. After that, Maxim would have to perform his military service. He would be gone for two months and be obliged to pass another exam. Neither of them yet knew where they might be posted for work.

Much later, when Polina became involved with Alec, she looked back upon her younger self, the girl who at twenty-one had allowed Maxim to dictate the terms of her life. She understood that she had made a mistake. But she also understood that, at the time, she had been incapable of acting differently. Unlike her friends who descended into infatuations, she had never had a great love. Some people’s conceptions of what was available to them coincided with what was actually available to them, other people’s conceptions did not. There were men whom she found more engaging than Maxim but they didn’t much pursue her. They found her too serious. There were many other pretty girls who fawned and laughed more easily. What put those men off drew Maxim to her.

She met Maxim at a party in her friend’s dormitory room. Polina had been sitting and talking to one of her friend’s roommates when she turned her head and saw Maxim standing beside her. Maybe she smiled at him, maybe she didn’t. As if reading from the pages of a courtship manual, Maxim asked if she would care for a drink of any kind. Polina couldn’t think of a reason to decline, and so he returned with a glass of lemon soda and installed himself at her side for the rest of the evening. He ascertained her name, where she lived, what she was studying, her opinion of her program, her career aspirations. Next he proceeded to cultural and recreational interests: movies, books, ballet, musicians, figure skating, volleyball, rhythmic gymnastics. To be polite, Polina answered his questions, and when Maxim asked to see her again she said yes because she didn’t want to say no. She then forgot all about him until he appeared one evening at her door. Her mother told her that she had a gentleman caller, and she couldn’t imagine who it might be until she saw him waiting there. Worse still, she felt panicked because she couldn’t remember
his name. But she experienced her first affectionate feeling for him when he rescued her by reintroducing himself. He didn’t appear to do this because he’d inferred that she had forgotten his name, but because a person was well advised to repeat his name upon meeting someone for only the second time.

That night he took her to see a figure skating competition at the Palace of Sports. He recalled, he said, that she had expressed an interest in figure skating. She recalled having expressed only the same generic interest in figure skating as in volleyball and rhythmic gymnastics. But tickets to the figure skating competition were hard to come by, even two at the very back of the arena. After the competition he took her to a café. He opened the door for her and held her chair. He did everything with precision and earnestness. At some point someone had taken him aside and informed him that, in the civilized precincts of planet Earth, there existed certain protocols. At some point, everyone heard a variation of this same speech, but not everybody took it to heart. Maxim had. In Polina, he sensed that he had found someone who also possessed a respect for the protocols.

Polina didn’t encourage him, but he didn’t seem to require encouragement. He courted her with the measured discipline of a person climbing a long flight of stairs. There was something endearing about Maxim’s doggedness as, step by step, he insinuated himself into her life. He asked to be introduced to her parents. He brought flowers and a bottle of cognac. He also brought a gift for Nadja and subsequently invited her along on outings. She was then only twelve or thirteen. They went to the zoo. He hired a boat and rowed them on the Lielupe River. Nadja teased him in a playful way. When they were in the boat, she hopped up and down in the bow, leaned over the edge, and made a theatrical speech about the cruel, cruel world and the weedy river’s irresistible call.

—I’m going to do it, Maxim, she said. Are you going to jump in and save me?

—Don’t be silly, Maxim said.

—I’m going to do it, Nadja said.

—Polina, Maxim appealed.

—Nadja, Polina cautioned.

—Oh, it’s all just too too much for a delicate girl to bear, Nadja said, and flopped over the side.

The green water closed over her like a curtain. Polina looked back at Maxim with apology and exasperation. They watched the water and waited for Nadja to part the curtain again. Polina stole glimpses at Maxim. Just when Maxim seemed ready to plunge in, Nadja thrashed to the surface, gasped for help, then disappeared again. Maxim waited a few moments longer and then, stalwartly, as if complying with an order, removed his shoes and jumped in after her. A lesser man, Polina thought, would have let Nadja flounder until she grew bored. Another kind of man, however, would have embraced the game.