The Little Russian (2 page)

To avoid them, the boy’s father forced open the widow Yehsohua’s window and climbed in. The boy tumbled in after him and landed on the floor. When the old woman saw the two figures in her front room she screamed and ran to the back of the house. They ran after her and found her standing in the kitchen, stabbing the air with a butcher’s knife, her wispy gray hair standing out in tufts about her head. She screamed in Yiddish, “Get away! Get away or I’ll kill you.”

“Chainke,” the boy’s father whispered furiously, trying to quiet her. “It’s me. For God’s sake,
stop screaming!
”

The old woman stopped. She stared up at them and then burst into tears. “
Ah, es iz ek velt!
” It’s the end of the world, she sobbed and sank to her knees. “They’re coming. The Cossacks are coming!”

“Calm down, Chainke. It doesn’t help to make such a racket.”

“I don’t want to die.”

“Then keep quiet, woman.”

He went to the window and looked out on the alley behind the house. It was dark and deserted. Satisfied, he forced the window open and stuck his head out to get a better look around.

“Where are you going?” she cried, struggling to her feet.

“We can’t stay here. We have to get home.”

“No!” she cried, grabbing hold of his sleeve. “You can’t leave me here all alone. You have to take me with you.”

“Stop it now!” he said as he disentangled her fingers. “You want to bring them down on our heads? Stay here and keep the lights off and don’t make a sound. They won’t come for you. You’re an old woman with nothing to steal.”

But she wouldn’t be comforted and kept pleading with him not to leave even after he swung one leg over the sill and lowered himself to the ground. The boy was about to follow when he heard footsteps coming down the alley.

“Stay inside, son. Get down and keep her quiet. No matter what happens, don’t move,
farshtaist
?” The boy nodded to show he understood.

The footsteps grew louder, punctuated by the sound of a tambourine, and then, from out of the gloom, a husky voice thick with drink asked, “Hey, who’s this? A
zhyd
? It is a
zhyd
. Hey, Yasha, I found a
zhyd
.” It was two drunken muzhiki—one of them carried a tambourine, the other a sack of pots and pans thrown over his shoulder.

The boy peeked out through the torn curtains and watched as they circled his father, giving him a little shove and a poke with the tambourine. “It is not a
zhyd
, you horse’s ass. It’s the
starusta
. Hey, want to join our party, Your Excellency?”

The boy’s father shook his head and declined the offer of vodka, but the man insisted. When he refused a second time, the big one with the tambourine grabbed his head and held it while the other one pried open his mouth and poured the vodka down his throat.

The boy slid down below the sill and lay there panting and nauseous. His heart battered against his chest while the room swelled and
contracted like a living thing. In the next instant he felt the warm flood of urine, and tears spilled down his cheeks. His gaze fell on the knife that lay glinting on the floor near the prostrate figure of the widow Yehsohua. She moved it away and held a finger to her lips. He didn’t argue with her; his hands remained limp at his sides, his legs useless, his eyes fixed on the dull handle of the knife.

Outside a bottle smashed against the building. The two men were arguing about where to find more vodka. When the boy looked out again, he saw them dragging his father off, a tambourine keeping time with their footsteps. As they began to fade into the gloom, the boy thought he saw his father look back once, only once, before they shoved him out to the street.

September 1903

 

EVERYONE KNEW that if you wanted to reserve a first-class compartment all to yourself, you had to buy four tickets in advance. And since Berta Lorkis had been dreading this long trip for months and months, every excruciating aspect of it from beginning to end, there was some consolation in the fact that four first-class tickets would be waiting for her on the foyer table the morning she left Moscow.

She came down on the left side of the double marble staircase, always on the left for descent, her footsteps echoing off the high ceiling, her hand gliding over the lotus flowers carved into the banister. There wasn’t another house in Moscow with a foyer like this one, with its Egyptian columns each topped by a brilliantly colored sphinx. She couldn’t be sure, but she doubted if there was another one like it in all of Russia. Even though she didn’t design it or build it or even own it, she lived in it. It was the address she gave to cabmen and new acquaintances, the room that greeted her visitors when they first arrived, and that was enough for her.

It was early and the house still smelled of late-night bliny, smoked sturgeon, and cigars from the party the night before. There was a wineglass in the corner behind a chair and one up on a window ledge; a few stray ostrich feathers littered the floor. Under a mass of orchids on the amber table was a cream-colored envelope containing four first-class tickets, a note wishing her a safe journey, and two hundred rubles. The note was from Rosa Davidovna, the matriarch of the Malkiel brood and a second mother to Berta. Berta hadn’t expected the crisp fifty-ruble notes.

The coachman in his bottle green caftan opened the front door and
announced that the luggage had been loaded and the carriage was waiting. She thanked him and put the envelope in her traveling case. When he was gone she checked her hat in the mirror that hung over the table. She had been right to wear this outfit. The color suited her and the skirt fit her like wax. She checked the back to make sure her belt was straight and fluffed up the flounces on her skirt. She made it a rule never to wear wire in her collars, only whalebone, only lace-trimmed satin petticoats that wouldn’t rustle, and only straight in front corsets. She always gave herself nearly a quarter of an hour to put on her gloves, because they fit her that well.

Berta met the coachman at the bottom of the steps, where he had the carriage door open. He took her traveling case and placed it on the seat inside and then took her arm just under the elbow and helped her into the carriage. It smelled of Mendel Afanasrevich’s lime shaving soap and the boot wax that his valet favored. There were fur rugs and a leather lap blanket neatly folded on one side of the seat and a newspaper that had been carelessly dropped on the floor. She folded it back along the seams, smoothed out the corners, and laid it in her lap. It would pass the time on the train.

The coachman climbed up on the box, clicked his tongue, flicked the whip, and the coach lurched forward. Soon they were crossing the Bely Gorod, heading down Nikolskaia Street and on through the Garden Ring to the Arbat. Here were many multistoried limestone buildings decorated with black signs in gilt lettering announcing the names of the stores in Russian and sometimes in French. Bells rang out from the numerous churches, proclaiming the hour each in their own way while horse-drawn trolleys clanged up and down the street depositing passengers on nearly every corner and picking up more. They continued on across the Borodinski Bridge, to Berezhki Street and then on to the Bryanski Station, where Berta was to catch the train west to the Ukraine, or Little Russia, as it was called.

Berta, like so many Great Russians, thought of Kiev and the surrounding provinces as a Russian outpost: provincial, backward, but Russified to some extent. She had a respect for both the Polish and the German influences there, but agreed with the authorities that the
Ukrainian culture and language had little to offer. It was banned in the schools and in the government institutions and was thought to be the purlieu of reprobates, lazy slum dwellers, and rustics. Berta was born in Little Russia, a small fact that she never bothered to share with anyone of consequence. She was a Great Russian, as anyone could see by her fierce accomplishments, tasteful dress, and overall refinement.

Throughout the two-day journey from Moscow to Smolensk and Gorbatchovo to Bakhmatch, Tchernigov, and Kiev, Berta spent her days alone in the comfort of her compartment, reading, sleeping, and watching the dark pine forests of the northeast gradually give way to the undulating farmlands in the west. She luxuriated in the solitude and savored the feeling of disconnection, of being suspended between two worlds, a stranger to all, without ties and the expectations that went with them. Then, about 130 versts south of Kiev at a wheat center called Cherkast, an intruder appeared at the door of her compartment. She was a red-faced woman in light-colored muslin, looking hot in an embroidered bolero jacket and high-collared shirtwaist and wearing a hat so enormous, so generously laden with feathers, artificial flowers, and tropical foliage, it was a wonder she got it through the door.

“Sorry, this is a private compartment,” Berta said, with a note of alarm when it became apparent that the woman meant to move in with her traveling case, parasol, and numerous packages.

The woman stopped fanning herself with her ticket. “It is?” She shifted her packages to examine her ticket and checked the number on the door. “But this is number five. I’m in number five.”

“That is impossible. I booked the whole compartment.”

“You did?”

“Of course.”

As it turned out, the woman’s ticket was marked for Berta’s compartment. By rights the railroad should have corrected the mistake and accommodated the lady elsewhere, but the train was full and there was no place else for her to go.

“I am so sorry to intrude,” she said as she came back in, taking the seat across from Berta and spreading out her things on the surrounding seats. “I won’t get in the way. You’re so kind to offer me a place.”

Berta gave her a cold, quick smile and tried to ignore the vulgar rustling of the woman’s taffeta petticoats. At that point she could’ve made a fuss, but she was young and the woman was old, at least over forty, and she had learned from experience that waiters, cabmen, and guards on trains always placed age above beauty. She could’ve chanced it, but in all likelihood she would’ve lost and then she’d have to spend the rest of the journey with a sullen fat woman not three feet away. So reluctantly Berta accepted her fate with something approaching equanimity.

For the first few hours the two women sat in amicable silence, reading their books and glancing out the window at the passing landscape. There were wheat fields of tawny stubble, haymaking stations, women in garish head scarves raking the tall shafts of grass into carts, farmhouses made of logs covered in plaster, thatched mansard roofs, and horses harnessed under great bowed yokes called
dugas
. Everywhere there was color: lion-colored hayricks, black earth, silver bark, red-belted tunics, embroidered shirts the color of Easter eggs, all set against a hard blue sky.

After a while the woman excused herself, got up with some difficulty, and made her way to the door. There was plenty of room in the compartment, but she was so large and her journey so precarious that she obviously thought it prudent to apologize in advance. When she was gone, Berta took the opportunity to examine the woman’s hat, left lying on the seat next to her gloves and a leather-bound book suitable for traveling. Berta knew there was much to learn from a hat. This one looked like it came from the salon of the Allschwang Brothers on the Petrovka, but on closer examination, it was easy to see that it was a well-made imitation, expensive, but not of Moscow quality. Berta didn’t have anything against imitations. They weren’t for her of course, but they were serviceable for those of a certain class. She wasn’t a snob. Quite the contrary, she was modern, forward thinking, and liberal, clearly more suited to the new century than to the last. And besides, she was in Little Russia now and had to expect that kind of thing.

By the time the woman returned, Berta had replaced the hat exactly where she had found it and was sitting back on the horsehair cushions,
her feet tucked under the flounces of her skirt, pretending to read her book.

“The porters are going from compartment to compartment,” the woman said, taking her seat. “It’s never a good sign when they make an announcement in the middle of a journey.” She was a nervous sort with a motherly face and an ample bosom that rested comfortably on her midriff whenever she sat down. She kept smoothing her skirt over her prominent belly as if that would make it go away.

“I wouldn’t worry about it. It can’t be too serious. We’re still moving. If it had to do with the train or the tracks, we’d be at a standstill.”

A few minutes later there was a perfunctory knock at the door and the porter opened it without waiting for a reply. “I regret to inform you,” he said with an officious twitch of his moustache, “that there will be no fish on the menu today.”

“No fish?” the woman replied, dabbing at her moist cheeks and upper lip with a handkerchief. It was a hot day and the window was stuck.

“I’m sorry, Madame. The fish in Cherkast did not meet our standards. But we did manage to pick up a fine joint of roast beef.”

“Roast beef for lunch? No, I don’t think so. That’s all right, I’ll find something. Please don’t worry about me.”

The porter withdrew and the woman gazed forlornly out at the Dnieper River flowing patiently beside the tracks. “Can you imagine that? A whole river out there and no fish for the train. And all this time I thought this was the good line.”

Fortunately Aleksandra Dmitrievna Tretiakova was a strong woman with a healthy attitude toward life. She prided herself on eating right, getting plenty of sleep, and walking on those rare occasions when the weather permitted, so it didn’t take her long to rise above her difficulties.

“So where are you from, my dear?” she asked, plumping her pillow and putting her troubles behind her.