The Free World (9 page)

B
efore they left Riga, Alec arranged for Polina to take a three-day immersive course given by an old classmate of his from the English school. The class was conducted in secrecy in the man’s apartment. There were six students, none of whom spoke any English. But for those three days, they were forbidden to speak any other language. The only Russian they heard came from some Soviet instructional recordings. Of those three days, Polina retained little more than two phrases. One was:

Did you go on a motoring tour of England?

The other was:

Why not visit the exhibition of national economy achievements of the USSR?

In Rome, she enrolled in a language class offered by a Jewish vocational agency. A young American girl taught the class, and she spent the first lesson demonstrating the differences between British and American English. At the end of the class, everyone came away feeling like they knew even less than when they went in.

To help her with her studies, Alec and Lyova took to speaking English in the mornings before Alec left for work. Lyova had learned some English in Israel because his civil engineering firm had had a
German client. In Rome, he read the
Herald-Tribune
and
The Times
of London.

Good morning, Al.

Good morning, Leo.

Good morning, Paula.

Would you like a cup of coffee?

Yes, thank you.

It is a nice day.

The sun is shining.

Please open the window.

There are many people in the street.

There are men, women, and children.

There is a cat.

Rome has many cats.

Rome has many beautiful women.

But they are not more beautiful than Paula.

Polina had always been a good student, but she found herself struggling with the language. Alec encouraged her, saying that even his mother’s cousin in Chicago, barely five feet tall, was learning the language. Everyone learned it. Millions of imbeciles spoke it every day. Lyova said that, in his experience, the most important thing in learning a language was confidence. Intelligent people who doubted themselves often had it the hardest.

—How were you in school? Lyova asked.

—In what sense?

—Did you worry very much?

—Only at the very end.

—The exams? That’s nothing. Everybody worries about those.

—I might have worried more.

—Why?

—I didn’t want to be separated from my boyfriend.

—And what happened?

—I scored well. We weren’t separated. Instead we got married.

—Later divorced.

—Yes, it might have been better if we’d been separated. But I didn’t think that at the time.

The truth was that, at the time, she’d wanted desperately to fail and be sent away to some far-flung region where Maxim would never be expected to visit, but she was disgusted with that part of her and wanted to renounce it, smother it, seal it inside a vault of constancy. And so she’d worried about scoring well enough to secure a placement in Riga. As she waited for her grades, she resolved that, if they were insufficient, she wouldn’t simply abide by the decision but would do whatever she could to steer her life onto its proper course.

She went to her father, something she’d never done before. He had just then returned from Gdansk. She waited until her mother and sister were away from the apartment and then told him—careful to keep any hint of plaintiveness out of her voice—that there was something she needed to discuss.

Her father sat at the kitchen table in a wash of afternoon sunlight. He had covered the table with newspaper and spread out upon it the disassembled parts of a hair dryer that had recently stopped working. He’d brought the hair dryer back from East Germany several years earlier as a present for Polina’s mother and it had become one of the family’s most prized possessions. They didn’t know anybody else who had one. Polina’s mother used it sparingly for herself and for the girls, and, occasionally, she loaned it to some of their neighbors. Every now and then Polina would answer the door and discover a woman with her head wrapped in a towel. Another family might have turned this into a small venture and charged for it, but in their home even to intimate such a thing was an abomination. Sometimes a neighbor brought a jar of preserves or a tin of sprats, but only out of the goodness of her heart. When the dryer broke down, another neighbor, an electrician, would conjure the necessary resistor or fuse for which Polina’s father paid the designated market price—not a kopek less—always in front of witnesses and always with a signed receipt. Her father would then go about fixing the dryer himself. Tinkering with devices and gadgets was the closest
thing he had to a hobby. Like others of his generation, he possessed a deep reverence for mechanical things. With Polina’s graduation approaching, her mother had hoped he might get the dryer back into working order so that she could set her own and the girls’ hair for the ceremony.

The hair dryer and the graduation ceremony provided Polina with a convenient way to broach the topic. She tried to frame her words as directly as possible. At first, it seemed as if her father didn’t quite hear her, as if he was too immersed in the coils and circuits of the hair dryer, but eventually, as she persevered, he turned his attention to her.

—You have always been an excellent student. You will do fine, he said.

—I don’t think so.

—Nothing comes of this sort of talk.

—I don’t want to be separated from Maxim, Polina said, conviction trailing a half step behind her words.

—Nobody is forcing you to separate.

—If we’re sent to different places we won’t be able to get married.

—This is a pointless conversation, her father said evenly. I’m surprised at you.

His attention drifted back down to his repair work. He had issued what amounted to his harshest rebuke: the suggestion that Polina was behaving in a way unbefitting “her father’s daughter.”

—I just thought if something could be done, Polina said.

—I’ve heard enough.

Polina knew not to raise the subject again. In the succeeding days her father acted as if the conversation had never happened. When he was home, he kept tinkering with the hair dryer until, one morning, Polina awoke to the sound of its shrill whine. Later that same day, as her father was heading out the door, he called Polina over and somberly told her that there would be a position for her at the VEF radio factory. Before Polina could collect herself to thank him, he was already down the hall.

In the end, both her panic and her father’s intervention proved
unwarranted. When the grades were announced, Polina discovered that she had finished in the top quartile. Her results guaranteed her a position in Riga. Now, if VEF hired her, nobody could challenge the impartiality of their decision. The outcome suited everyone. With her grades, she had vindicated herself before her father; meanwhile, without suffering any adverse effects, her father had been able to demonstrate his love for her.

On the day of her graduation ceremony she sat with her parents and Nadja under the glass roof of the university’s great hall. According to custom, her father held a bouquet of flowers—white, fragrant calla lilies. Polina’s hair, freshly shampooed and styled by her mother, shone brilliantly, as if radiating intellectual light. She wore a new dress of luminous green cloth—the material purchased by her mother and then sewn by a seamstress after a French pattern. Polina was the first in their family to receive a university degree. Anything her father had learned after eight grades of primary school came courtesy of the Soviet navy. Her mother had come from a small Byelorussian town where the pursuit of higher education was rare for anyone, and particularly for women. When Polina heard her name called, she rose from her chair and felt herself propelled to the stage as if by the cumulative force of her parents’ dreams.

In the evening, Polina joined her classmates for a party at Café Riga in the old city. All over town, graduates were dancing and toasting their student days goodbye. A number of her classmates brought their instruments and played the songs of the Beatles, Raymond Pauls, and Domenico Modugno. Glasses of champagne were circulated, and they all dropped the diamond-shaped lapel pins they’d been awarded into them, then downed the contents in one swallow, leaving the shiny blue enamel glinting between their teeth. At around ten o’clock, Maxim left his class’s party and joined Polina at Café Riga. When she spotted him in the crowd, she was surprised by how glad she was to see him. A warm, proprietary feeling bloomed inside her. This man—blinking through the haze of cigarette smoke, intently searching the room for her, rubbing absently at the scar above his eyebrow, where, as a boy, a schoolmate had hit him with a
badminton racquet—this was her man. Out of the many, he was hers, and this simple recognition was enough to endear him to her. Flushed with optimism, alcohol, and affection, Polina fell into his arms and swept him onto the dance floor. Her classmates offered them a steady flow of champagne, vodka, and wine. Before long, Maxim forgot his usual reserve, loosened his tie, and danced with uninhibited, clumsy exuberance as the band played the Beatles’ “Get Back.”

At dawn, as they weaved together along the cobblestones of the old city, Maxim proposed and Polina accepted. Their future seemed as assured as a future could be. Like Polina, Maxim had scored well on his exams and had his choice of prestigious factories. She would take the job at VEF, while he would take a position at the highly regarded Popov Radiotechnika. They would marry, move in with his parents, file a request with the municipal housing authority for a separate apartment, and start a family. They would embark upon productive and satisfying adult lives.

W
hen he was not taking his walks or reading the newspapers at Club Kadima, Samuil busied himself with writing the true account of his life and times. He began with the private intention of having Alec translate and submit his biographical statement to HIAS and the American embassy. As he wrote, he clung to the guiding principle that his work would have corrective and instructive value, and in this way he granted himself license to dwell upon his personal history. For hours each day he settled conspicuously at a card table in the sitting room and demanded not to be disturbed. Nevertheless, his grandsons scampered through the room with impunity and his wife and daughter-in-law often interrupted him with their comings and goings between the bedroom and the kitchen.

To his wife’s inquiry about what he was doing, he said, I’m doing what I’m doing.

While he wrote, he could almost fool himself into believing that he was again in the company of the beloved dead. For those hours, he strongly felt their essence. The feeling evoked in him the deepest regret. It wasn’t that he wanted to join them in the grave or return to the past so much as he wished that they were still living. Had
they lived, Samuil thought, things would have been different. But the best and the bravest never lasted long. This was a natural law, like gravity or the seasons, and he had seen it confirmed thousands of times at the front. As the
frontoviks
liked to say: Our lives are like a child’s shirt, short and covered in shit.

Aside from writing his biography, taking his walks, and reading the newspaper at Club Kadima, there was nothing else Samuil cared to do. Every day, Emma took the boys to learn Hebrew songs. At Club Kadima, a young American with a guitar led a children’s choir. Emma also went with Rosa to hear lectures, mostly by representatives of Sachnut, the Israeli agency. Rosa returned from these lectures spinning Zionist fairy tales.
Only in Israel would they be able to work according to their professions. Only in Israel would they receive decent housing. Only the Israeli state would provide for their welfare. Soviet media exaggerated Israeli hardships, when in fact Israel was an immigrants’ paradise.

From time to time, Emma would try to interest him in some activity or event.

—I am worried about you, she said. Always by your lonesome.

—Do you hear me complaining?

—It’s not healthy.

He felt healthy enough. And he certainly couldn’t see how sitting for an hour listening to some pampered American strumming Hebrew songs on his guitar would be beneficial to his health. The same applied to a lecture encouraging Jewish religious practice by the resident Lubavitcher, imported kosher from Brooklyn, a pale young man with a patchy, wispy beard.

—A very intellectual and pious man, Emma said preemptively, in the rabbi’s defense.

In the end, he had surprised her by announcing that he would like to attend the screening of the American movie based on Sholem Aleichem’s
Tevye der milkhiker.
He had seen the postings up at Club Kadima as he was in the early stages of his biographical statement, very much at the point in his life when he would have gone with his mother and brother to see the Tevye play performed by Rogozna’s
amateur Yiddish theater troupe. This was in 1919 or 1920, when he was six or seven years old. But he remembered the experience very clearly. Once a month, as a treat, his mother would take him and Reuven to the theater. The old synagogue, converted by the Jewish Section of the Communist Party into a social club and theater, was always filled to capacity. It was the only place where he could see his mother smile and hear her laugh. During the performances he watched her as much as he did the stage.

At the end of the evening, Rogozna’s principal actor, Zachar Kahn, the former ritual slaughterer, would make a point of coming up to Samuil’s mother and asking her opinion of the show. He always referred to her respectfully as “the widow Eisner.”

—If I may inquire, how did the widow Eisner enjoy the show?

He struck a memorable figure, Zachar Kahn, a tall man, almost two meters, with a black eye-patch, a slashing scar down his right cheek, and the sleeve pinned where his right arm used to be.

Before the Civil War, Zachar Kahn’s slaughterhouse had been located a few doors away from their house. Because the light in the slaughterhouse was not always adequate, he would sometimes use the Eisners’ kitchen to inspect the lungs of a cow or a sheep he had butchered. The sight of Zachar Kahn on their snowy doorstep, a giant man holding a steaming wax-paper bundle, was one of Samuil’s earliest memories. He and Reuven had both been fascinated by Zachar Kahn, and scurried around him as he unwrapped and scrutinized the glossy, brownish organs. He would let the boys draw near so that they could peer at the grotesque and otherworldly things that made life possible and which everyone—from a mouse to a man—had pumping and sloshing around in the dark hollows under his skin. Grotesque to the untrained eye, the organs were in actuality perfect in aspect and form, Zachar would explain. They were the handiwork of God Himself. If flawed, the flaw, too, was part of His design. Though if they were flawed, then the animal’s flesh could not be eaten. Lifting the lungs to his mouth, Zachar Kahn would blow to see if they would inflate.

The American movie of
Tevye der milkhiker,
though set in a Russian
shtetl, didn’t have a single word of Russian and hardly a word of Yiddish. Americans with Semitic features had been dressed in caftans and shawls while, on stiff wooden chairs, sweating and fanning themselves in the Italian heat, a roomful of Russian Jews goggled at the screen.

—This is what the commotion is about? Samuil asked Emma.

—It’s a wonderful production, a middle-aged woman behind them offered. Believe me. This is my eighth time watching. I’d watch it another eight times. In Russia, God forbid they should ever have a Jewish character in a film. But in America they made a whole movie about us.

At the front of the auditorium, to the left of the screen, a paunchy, hirsute, mountain Jew held a microphone, and provided a simultaneous translation.

A fiddler! On the roof! Strange? Sure. But here in our little village of Anatevka every one of us is a fiddler on the roof, trying to play a song without breaking his neck. It isn’t easy. No, it isn’t easy. So you may ask why do we stay if it’s so dangerous? Well, we stay because Anatevka is our home.

—They could only get a mountain Jew for an interpreter? an elderly man near Samuil complained. That accent. You’d think there was no one available from Moscow or Leningrad.

And how do we keep from falling and breaking our necks? That I can tell you in one word: Our traditions!

On the screen Samuil watched a lurid, fetishistic montage of Jewish symbols: a Star of David, a menorah, Hebrew letters, the worn burgundy velvet cloth covering the bimah. He looked around and saw that his wife, his daughter-in-law, and many others were entranced by it. Somewhere in America, Sholem Aleichem was spinning in his grave. The filmmakers had taken his “goodbye” and turned it into “hello.” What Sholem Aleichem had meant as an acceptance of a new reality and a critique of the outmoded ways had here been transformed into sentimental Jewish burlesque. The movie encouraged a wistfulness and a mourning for the past, but what past? The filmmakers had no idea, but Sholem Aleichem could
have told them. The old man had seen enough, even if he’d left for America and died there before the worst of the horrors.

Samuil had no appetite for the movie, but he stayed out of curiosity. He wanted to see, for the sake of comparison, the actors who played Tevye, Motl, Perchik, and Hodl. He remembered these characters well. Zachar Kahn had naturally been Tevye. Motl had been played by a real tailor named Froim Goldstein. Eudis Fefer, a young schoolteacher, admired for her looks, had the role of Hodl. Aron Zweig, the secretary of the local Komsomol, took the coveted role of Perchik, the fiery revolutionary.

These characters had captured Samuil’s childhood imagination. Months after the performance, he and Reuven were still reenacting what they’d seen, with Reuven assigning the parts. For himself he took that of Perchik and pretended accordingly that Eudis Fefer, as Hodl, was his wife. Samuil became Motl, the tailor, and Reuven allowed him to take Rochl Lieberman—a second cousin who hadn’t actually been in the play—for his imaginary wife. In their games, Reuven would typically set off to attack the bourgeoisie and launch the revolution. At the door he would have an impassioned exchange with Hodl/Eudis. She would declare her love and plead with him to stay, but he would resist heroically and fly out the door. Samuil would hear the
piff-paff
of rifles and he would rush out in pursuit. He would find Reuven mortally wounded, lying in the street or on a patch of grass beside their house. He would drag him back inside and lay him on their bed, whereupon Reuven would clutch a feather pillow to his chest and rasp his dying words to Hodl/Eudis. With his final breath, Reuven would exhort from Samuil a promise that he would take care of Hodl/Eudis and carry on the struggle for revolution. Then Reuven would expire and Samuil would run outside to exact revenge and tumble to his death in a hail of tsarist bullets. Sometimes, for variety, Samuil would get shot as he went looking for Reuven, and he would fall down beside him so they could die together.

In all of their doings, Reuven took the lead. One day he returned from Pioneers with a small oak-handled penknife and taught Samuil
how to play “knives,” instructing him how to throw the blade between his feet so that it stuck in the ground. Another time he taught him the words to a dirty Russian song.

He remembered the conversation he had with Reuven after his kindergarten class was taught about class distinctions.

—Have you talked about this with anyone else? Reuven asked.

—No, Samuil said.

—Don’t.

—I won’t, Samuil said. Only with you.

—The Whites are
burzhoois,
Reuven said. They are the class enemy. The Whites killed Papa. In war you do not kill your own, you kill your adversary. So, since the Whites killed Papa, it means he was against the tsar and in favor of the revolution.

Samuil always found it hard to connect the word “White” with the men who had murdered their father and grandfather. When he thought of the men who had done the killing the colors that sprang to mind were the pale yellow and the cornflower blue of the rugs they wore across their shoulders. He had never seen anyone dressed this way before and, in spite of his fear, he had been impressed by how brash and adventurous it made them appear.

Before the soldiers came, their mother had hurriedly set the table with bread, sour cream, smoked fish, fruits, and vegetables. It was summer, and they had fruits and vegetables growing in a plot not far from their house. Their mother bustled about, gathering items from the cupboards and putting them out on the table. Meanwhile their father and grandfather frantically collected their dearest valuables: a leather pouch with gold coins, a fold of banknotes, and several pieces of jewelry that had belonged to their grandmother. They wrapped everything in a rag and concealed it behind a loose brick in
the stove. From the street came fiendish, terrifying shrieks. When the soldiers burst through the door, a pot had been set to boil.

Samuil remembered their caps and their drooping mustaches. He remembered their drawn sabers. He remembered how the one wearing the yellow rug brought his saber down across his grandfather’s chest in a blur of violent force and the surprisingly feeble noise his grandfather made in response. He remembered quaking and then wetting himself as his mother shielded him and Reuven from the soldiers. He remembered his father’s groans and wheezes during the torture. He remembered his father’s face, and how he kept opening his eyes to gaze at them.