The Wanting (39 page)

“But you know, all the milk and the meat and the pills, none of it really helped. My belly expanded, but everything else in me withered up. My feet seemed to become so big, and my face! It fell backward from this nose of mine which has become as big as a house—you see what I mean?”

“Not at all,” I said.

“I’m not beautiful, I know.”

“You are beautiful.”

Her lips unfolded into a small, lucent, even pretty smile. “Whatever happened before doesn’t matter, does it? All of that, who cares? What we did out there—it’s all in the past. You said it at the trial, and I listened: ‘The past is irrelevant. It’s the future I care about.’ That’s what you said.”

“That’s exactly what I said.”

“That’s when I knew they would keep their bargain with me.”

“Yes, they’re keeping the bargain.”

“They needed you to confirm the letters. To betray me publicly. That was your part.”

“Yes.”

“I also did as I was asked. I said nothing about her and waited for you to give your testimony.”

“Yes.”

“And now they’re keeping their word.”

“Even they have their ethics.”

She let out a long sigh of relief and allowed her head to rest on the table.

“Head up,” the guard said.

“Months passed. Months and months. But this baby refused to be born. It knew, didn’t it? The kind of world that was waiting for it. I loved that it refused. My baby was a brazen ball of refusal!

“One day he called me into his office. The trial, I guessed, was almost upon us.

“ ‘Collette Petrovna, it is my great sadness that it has come to this. You know very well there would not be a trial if the evidence against you wasn’t conclusive. I’ve showed you document after document proving your guilt. I only ask that you engage me in a discussion of the facts, as two rational people in search of the truth, but you spurn every offer. And now I have to tell you it will not go easy for you. Even if we don’t execute you, you will get ten years, or if you are very lucky six, at severe regime, and you know what that means. And what that means for the child you are carrying. But it can still go otherwise. You can still save yourself.’

“There was a woman, Ladovska, maybe related to the great architect, who knows? She also came to interrogate me many times. She was at the trial, sitting behind the procurator; she was the one with the large chin. She used to say to me, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll give your child to a good Russian family.’ She did this to infuriate me. ‘Why do we give this prisoner extra rations? The baby will be stillborn anyway.’ Then, as always, she would say, ‘Think it over, Collette Petrovna, think it over.’ When they finally presented me with the charges—The Charges in Their Final Form, they called it—I was already nine months pregnant and could do nothing but lie in my bed. I was sick, I was terrified for my baby, I was skin and bones when a woman should be fat and round. They refused to take me to the infirmary because pregnancy is not considered an illness. ‘You think this will have a good end,’ Ladovska said to me, ‘but it won’t. Reconsider before it is too late for you.’ She was the one I hated. She took pleasure in her cruelty. On the other hand, without her, I don’t know if I would ever have been so strong.

“But you know they were afraid of me, too, and I’ll tell you why. If there was to be a trial, they knew I would scream my head off from the first second about my baby. It would break open the
whole trial. Everyone knows the charges are trumped up; they make no bones about it—but to have a baby involved. Even they knew this was too much. And of course they knew I understood this. They were desperate to keep me silent, but they also had to have the trial proceed. It was Vasin who first broached the idea. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I didn’t tell you how Anna was born. Would you like to know?”

“Yes, I would.”

“They had called me in to go over my petitions and witness list, which I knew they would not accept in the first place. Instead, they wanted to introduce me to my lawyer. I told them I didn’t want their lawyer and reminded them I’d presented them with my list of possible attorneys. ‘These are foreigners. You cannot have a foreign lawyer. Even in America you can’t have a foreign lawyer.’ I said to them, ‘Then let Roman Guttman find me a lawyer. I entrust my case to him.’ ‘We already spoke to Guttman,’ Vasin told me, ‘and he won’t do it.’ But I knew this was a lie, because I had the protocols of all the interrogations in my case file and you weren’t among them. ‘But we got you a Jewish lawyer!’ he said. And there, seated in the corner with her hands folded on her lap and looking like a beaten child, was the lawyer, I can’t even remember her name anymore.”

“Fishman.”

“That’s it. Fishman. Poor thing. But it didn’t matter, that’s exactly when I went into labor. Ladovska jumped up. ‘You’re faking! Everyone can see that.’ ‘So what is that all over the floor? Orange juice?’ You know, they are so ludicrous. Whatever they make up, that’s what they believe. Now Vasin leaps into action, but not in such a way as to get his uniform dirty. He dials the phone! Poor Fishman, stuck in the corner, is glued to her chair. Ladovska has her hands on her hips, deciding if I am a great actor or just a woman having a baby. In come the guards, but they don’t know what to do either, so I say, ‘May I please go to the infirmary?’ But it all was happening too fast, probably because I was so undernourished. I was having contractions all the way down the corridors. Can you imagine, we’d take a few steps, a guard
on either side of me, and I’d collapse to the floor. They were very sweet, really. They’d wait patiently for me to stop writhing and then lead me farther into the depths of the prison. When we got to the infirmary, no one had bothered to tell them anything, and the questions started all over again. ‘Well, we’ll have to find her a mattress. The doctor isn’t here till tonight. Sit over there and wait.’ But in the end they took pity on me. That’s often the way it is in here. It was only three hours later Anya was born. And this was when everyone started to panic. The child could not stay in the prison. But what to do with it? What to do with me, if they forcefully took away my child?

“They didn’t wait very long. The next day Vasin came to see me. It was the first time he’d come to me and not the other way around. My breasts had no milk, and they had had to rush out to a party dispensary to find formula for her. He asked if he could feed her. I said to him, ‘Oh, Vasin, you are too kind!’ But he remained cheerful, pulled up a chair, sat very near to me. Never had he been so physically close. Before the baby, everything had smelled more disgusting than I can even describe. I couldn’t get used to it the way everyone else seemed to. Vasin himself had an oily smell, like oysters. But now I realized it was actually some sort of cologne. ‘Collette,’ he said to me, the first time he had ever uttered my name in that way, ‘I want you to listen with an open mind, just this once. On the occasion of this wonderful miracle. Can you do that? When I see this beautiful child, I also do not want it to end up in an orphanage. You might as well be sending it to a labor camp. She’ll end up a thief or worse, because they all do. That’s what they learn there. I know by now you are not going to sign a confession, you are not going to see reason and allow yourself to be rehabilitated. You are determined to continue this Zionist insanity and undermine everything that is good in the Soviet Union. I accept this. I am sorry for you, but I accept it. The trial is going to be happening soon, I am allowed to tell you that much, and there is no avoiding it. You can count on a severe sentence, and there is no avoiding that at this point either, unless you change your mind. But there is no reason the child has to suffer. I have a suggestion,
I offer a solution. What if the child were to go with Guttman? He is the father, after all, isn’t that what you said? What harm could it be if he took the child? Wouldn’t that be the best for everyone?’ He looked at me lying there with the baby asleep in my arms, for they had let me keep her after feeding her her bottle, and then he added, ‘After the trial, of course.’ I knew what he wanted now. My silence for her freedom. ‘Till then, we’ll keep her in a nursery, but you will be able to see her every day.’ And for the first time since I had been in Lefortovo, I felt I could breathe.

“Our time will soon be up, my darling Roman. You have a question for me.”

“No.”

“You want to know …”

“No.”

“Who is the father.”

“Collette,” I said, “I am the father.”

That was the last time I saw Collette. She disappeared into the camps, and then, according to the report of the medical examiner, she died of “natural causes” one year later. But I was already in a far-off land, beginning a new life, with a new child.

T
HE DOOR OPENED AND CLOSED
, open and closed, as if Abdul-Latif thought I might have evaporated into the bedsheets. Each time he peeked in, he made that clucking noise that Arabs often make, and then he would quickly disappear behind the locked door.

Finally he stepped into the room and stood with his hands on his hips, appraising me. “You are not getting better,” he said. “You are not drinking my water. My water is not poison for you.” He strode up to the bedside and grabbed the glass that had been sitting untouched on the night table. “Look!” he cried, and drank half of it himself. “Now you!” He pressed the glass into my hand, but my fingers could not find a way to hold it. He lifted the glass to my lips, but I turned my head away and the water dripped down my chin. He cursed in his own language and slammed the glass down. He began pacing in front of the bed.

“You know, Mr. Guttman, my daughter Hanadi is seventeen. She is the youngest one. She will be married before Marya, I assure you. Marya cannot find anyone she likes, and I won’t force her into anything. Her mother would, but not me. Those ideas are over for me. But Hanadi has had a thousand offers, and she likes too many of them, if you ask me, so she will choose. I want her to be married as soon as possible. It’s the only way to save her. You know what Hanadi has told me? She thinks we should throw you to the crowd. She thinks it’s the right thing to do. We should throw you to the crowd, and then she can go out with her friends dancing. Can you hear them? Of course you can. They get louder and louder. Very
angry. Upset. It’s all the men of the town, and the boys, too. Probably my wife is with them. They want to cut off your head and throw your body at the foot of that Israeli settlement up on our hill. Kfar Tikva. It’s only been there a few years, but they already have beautiful houses, a school, a grocery, a library. At first the soldiers came to push them out, but they returned and rebuilt. Now we have to look at them every day.” He walked over to the window as if to peruse the Jewish village, but the window was too high to look out of, except to see a bit of sky. He came back to me and sat down. “Come in here, Hanadi!” he called out.

The door slowly opened, and Hanadi shyly stepped in. She was very slender and petite, with large, dark eyes, and a smooth bright complexion. Her cheeks were the plump cheeks of a schoolgirl, but her lips were a woman’s. She had tied a green bandana over her forehead and a black checked kaffiah around her neck.

“You see?” he said. “Brigade of Al-Qassam. Woman’s Auxiliary.”

He said something to her in Arabic, and she nodded.

“
Young
Woman’s Auxiliary. But if I tell her to bring you something sweet to eat, she will do that, too. She’s a good girl.” He said something else to her in Arabic, and she left the room.

“You’re thinking, why do they want to harm me? What have I done to them? You can’t in all honesty say you are a civilian, can you? So they are within their rights. Legally, I mean. Being in reserves means you are still a soldier.” He looked me up and down, at the split, dry lips and sunken bloodshot eyes, the wounds still not fully healed and the skin cracking open between my fingers, and he sighed. “I don’t know why I saved you. So much trouble on my own head.”

Hanadi again shyly opened the door. She carried a small plate with some cookies on it. “
Mammoul
,” she said. It was the first time she had spoken in my presence, and her voice was lovely—untinged with the cynicism of Jewish teenagers, just the voice of a young girl on the brink of life—but the little plate shook in her hands; she didn’t know what she was supposed to do with it. Abdul-Latif reached out his hand and grabbed a cookie. “Mmmm,” he said,
biting into it. “Not bad. Nadja, my wife, used to make them so beautifully. These are from the bakery. They’re not bad. Just not the same.” He said something again in Arabic, and Hanadi laid the plate on the table beside me. “If you eat our
mammoul
, you’ll be very thirsty, and then you will have to drink,” he said. “It’s an Arab trick.” And he laughed.

There was suddenly an urgent knocking on the exterior door.

Abdul-Latif called out in Hebrew so I would understand, “Marya, Marya! See who is at the door.” And then he added to me, “Marya is my other one. I better see what they want.”

Abdul-Latif stood up to go.

“My friend,” he said, “if you think this is just another dream of yours, if you think you are still talking to birds, you are very wrong.”