The Russian Jerusalem (8 page)

‘What do you do in Kiev?' asks the beauty, suddenly a little shy, I can see, in the presence of this cousin.

‘I'm a mathematician,' he tells her.

The old man shakes his head.

‘What, you make a living from arithmetic?'

‘Not exactly. I work in a physics lab,' he replies.

And then he laughs, looking rather like a handsome wolf as he does so.

‘There are stranger professions. Do you remember my brother Lev, the one with red hair? He is a poet. A Russian poet. A member of the Writers' Union. Though a year ago …'

He stops, and I guess at some recent problems.

‘And this is a trade?' demands the old man.

‘You get ration cards, a flat.'

‘So why have you come back to the
stetl
, if everything is Paradise in Kiev?'

‘Family is family. I wanted to warn you. I have heard rumours…'

‘There are always rumours, ‘says the old man.

The Kiev cousin stares at me, while they explain my relationship to the family.

‘He was cleverer than all of you,' says the old man, who is probably the only one in the room who remembers him.

Now the beauty enters the conversation.

‘He and his brothers went to England. Was that such a mistake?'

Yefraim mutters sullenly.

‘It's no safer than here. Look what happened in Germany. The Jews thought they were at home there once.'

The beauty murmured, ‘The Germans have wonderful music.'

‘And for that is it worth losing a Jewish soul?' demands the old man. ‘The Gypsies play their violins, too, and has it brought them happiness?'

She is not afraid of the old man, and he knows it, but he frowns at her. It is an argument they have had many times. He disagrees with all of them in different ways. He probably still reads the books Menachem Mendl loved. But he has endured a harder life and there are no laughter lines round his eyes.

‘His children will go to university,' the Kiev cousin observes.

‘A
Goyishe
university?' asks the old man.

‘So? They learn the laws of science.'

‘And can they grasp eternity, infinity, with all their science? A Jew without God can be persuaded of anything,' the old man sighs.

‘They will learn the great literature of the world,' the beauty joins in.

This incenses the old man.

‘All the writing of the world is filled with violence and fornication. Your
Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary
and our own Yiddish writers are all the same: once you worship art, you cannot worship God.'

‘These are books you have read?' the Kiev cousin wonders, a little slyly.

‘Long ago,' he assures him. ‘When I was younger than you. And I tell you, even if we cannot carry our traditions into the next generation, while I am alive we shall stay here together. In Rechytsa.'

Then the whole family begin to speak at once: about France, that trollop of a country, and what it means that Stalin is Hitler's ally, with Poland split between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

‘Stalin knows what he's doing,' says the Kiev cousin.

The old man is sceptical.

‘And what is he doing?'

‘Building tanks, building planes …'

I want to cry out: ‘Have you learned nothing? Leave. Leave now,' but I can hardly breathe in the hot, sticky air, let alone speak. And the solidity of the room is melting.

On the slopes of the underworld Der Nister rebukes me gently:
And where could they go? To live in Kiev will not make them safe
.

Ehrenburg is sitting in a shabby chair in his Moscow flat with a blanket pulled up to his collar, smoking. On a small wooden table nearby stands a Dubonnet ashtray long ago stolen from a French café. This holds a row of stubbed cigarettes, as well as his favourite pipe. A bottle of wine stands next to it, but he is not drinking. Not talking much either. He coughs every time smoke enters his lungs.

Ehrenburg has not known a calm moment since January. Adrenalin courses through his blood, sending his heart out of rhythm. Now he refuses the coffee Lyubova has made for him. Her coconut cakes make him cough. He is
sixty-two
and frail, with an infection which returns every winter. He takes little notice of it.

Tsvetaeva shakes her head as she sees how little he looks after his health. Every sinew is visible in his neck.

And this is January, his birthday month. There has been an article in
Pravda
announcing the arrest of nine doctors; all with Jewish names, all said to be part of a Jewish conspiracy to poison leading Soviet figures. Zhdanov was said to be one of the victims. Would such rubbish be believed? There were many pure Russians who had reason to hate Zhdanov. And in any case, Zhdanov died of natural causes.

But yes, the people
did
believe the charges. In hospitals, patients cowered away from their doctors; Jewish medical students were sent off to remote areas of the country. First fear. Then hatred. Bewildered letters began to arrive from
mothers with sons beaten up in school, or abused in the streets. Even as they asked for his help, they made it clear that they no longer trusted him.

This month, he is to receive the Stalin Peace Prize in the Kremlin's Sverdlov Hall. He knows the accusations. Survival always suggests complicity. He is already uneasy, thinking of it, before the arrival of an official he hardly knows, even before he is asked to condemn the imprisoned doctors in his speech. He makes clear that he would rather not collect his prize. The public relations disaster of such a refusal is evident and he is not pressed.

We watch him dress, coughing painfully as he bends to pull up his trousers, many times pausing for breath. Lyubova is dressed and ready.

And now we are following him along Little Borotitsky Hill on the north side of the Moskva. There is the Kremlin. A fortified city. Here, Ivan the Terrible arranged his own great Terror. Here Napoleon watched Moscow burn. As we enter, my eyes dazzle with golden boss and spandrel.

When Ehrenburg rises to thank Stalin for the honour he is receiving, he pays tribute to all those defamed, persecuted and enduring interrogation in prison. A chill goes round the hall. People hold their breath.

Tsvetaeva whispers:
Tomorrow, when the speech appears in ‘Pravda', they will add a few words to make it seem he is talking about the West. Nothing is solved by gestures. And the story is far from over
.

At his dacha, in February, we watch him planting bulbs sent by the Queen of England – indoors, naturally: the snow has not yet melted, though there is a wintry sun. Lyubova nervously shows in two new visitors. Both are Jewish, both
significant figures in the Party. They want him to sign an open letter to Stalin,
asking that the Jews be sent to Birobidzhan for their own protection against the wrath of the Russian people.
The legitimate wrath, they say. Carefully. They watch his face. He can see they are afraid.

His refusal is curt. When they have gone, he packs a suitcase for a return to Moscow.

Tsvetaeva tells me:
Dozens of other Jewish writers and musicians have also been approached. Not all have signed. A war hero and an opera singer refused.

But only Ehrenburg has the impudence to write a letter to Stalin directly. Of course, he has no hope of changing Stalin's mind. He has been told of shacks already built for exiled Jews in Siberia, lists of Jews and their addresses drawn up in the major cities. Stalin is well prepared.

Nevertheless, he writes. It is a reckless letter, couched politely and loyally, but reminding Stalin of likely repercussions. His usual trick. He points out that a letter signed by a group of people united only by their Jewishness was likely to stir up the very nationalism Stalin wanted to discourage; that it would surely give ammunition to the enemies of the Soviet State abroad. He wrote as if puzzled what to do, needing advice from a wise leader. He knows it unlikely that Stalin will credit his submissive tone, since he would know of his earlier refusals.

Tsvetaeva sighs:
The original letter will be sent to newspapers with Ehrenburg's name attached to it anyway
.

His winter bronchitis returns, his phlegm is yellow-green and he begins to shiver even when the room is too hot.
Lyubova is unusually stalwart. She brings him tea with lemon, and lumps of sugar. They wait to see what will happen next.

What happens is that Stalin suffers a cerebral haemorrhage on 5 March and dies. There are frenzied tears, panic, people trampled to death in Red Square.

Ehrenburg finds it impossible to feel the appropriate relief. Who can predict what will happen under new leaders in this blood-soaked country? He has seen too much death and cruelty. Sitting in his chair, trying to recover, still coughing badly, he remembers Ukrainians and Lithuanians collaborating with Hitler's murderous troops. All his life he had fought the Fascism of Hitler and the Germans, only to find it flourishing in his own motherland.

As March goes on, the ice floes begin to melt in the Moskva but the streets are like glass after dark and the darkness comes early. The doctors are released. But there are no visitors, and few phone calls, even from people who know him well. It is as if the whole population has been stunned, and can only cope by remaining inside their own flats silently.

Sitting in his chair, with his fever rising over 100 degrees every evening, Ehrenburg's memories go back painfully over the years. Most of the time, he is on the edge of weeping. He and Lyubova only returned to Russia when the German troops took Paris. They had to find shelter in the Soviet Embassy, a refuge possible only because Stalin was Hitler's ally. As Soviet citizens, they could travel back through Berlin, staying in a hotel clearly marked ‘For Aryans Only'. Lyubova saw the notice, but she was more terrified of returning to Russia, and had to be carried on to the train.

How did he learn that Isaac Babel had been murdered? And when? He must have guessed as much during the war.
Or just afterwards, looking through the ruins of Kiev, close by the deathly ravine of Babiy Yar where so many died. Of course he knew. He gave money to Babel's second wife when most people were afraid to meet her. But after the war, when he met the first wife in France, why had he told her Babel was still alive?

What was it possible to feel when the Russian armies took Berlin? Elation? Relief? Hatred? He remembers writing in a poem that he waited for victory as a man waits for a woman he loves, and could not recognise her when she arrived.

At night, while Lyubova sleeps, he sits up in the
half-light
of a single bulb and is reminded how he and Vasilii Grossman put together letters and interviews with Jewish survivors of the German massacres:
The Black Book of Soviet Jewry
. At first, it even seemed the book might be published. But, suddenly, it was forbidden to distinguish Jewish suffering from that of the Soviet people as a whole. There were reasons. One was the newly formed State of Israel, which Stalin had supported with the other members of the Security Council, but always suspected.

When Golda Meir arrived in Moscow, the enthusiasm of the local Jews was unguarded. Ehrenburg shakes his head at the memory but he cannot help admiring their lack of caution. After the Warsaw Ghetto, the rising of Sobibor, after the murders at Auschwitz and Maidanek, how can it not seem miraculous that a group of Jews fought off so many Arab armies? They called out the traditional Passover greeting to Meir: ‘Next Year in Jerusalem'. They stood in the streets to have a sight of the delegation, and some had tears in their eyes. Ehrenburg kept a little distance. He had never been a Zionist; his hope was assimilation, not separation.

The moment he heard that Mikhoels has been killed in a traffic accident in Minsk, Ehrenburg knew it was an assassination. It was 1948. Mikhoels had been sent to Minsk as a member of the Stalin Prize committee, supposedly to review a play. He and another critic were called away from their hotel. Both bodies were found early the next morning. A truck had run over both of them.

That was when Ehrenburg began to understand. That winter, the Kremlin arrested twenty-five new defendants. All were secretly executed on 12 August 1952: ‘The Night of the Murdered Poets'. Ehrenburg thinks with discomfort, as he often has: ‘I am the only one of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee still alive.'

The only survivor.

Well, now he has survived Stalin. With that thought, his temperature falls to normal. Spring comes fully, the rivers of Moscow glint in the sunshine and he begins to write again. A new novel:
The Thaw
.