Marusya and Ivan did not continue to see each other much longer. He was straightforward and reliable—politically competent, and morally steadfast. But in April he was arrested. The trial was carried out quietly, drowned out by other, more celebrated cases of that fateful year. When Ivan’s house was searched, among the catalogued drawers and boxes full of quotations from Lenin, excerpts from the French newspaper L’Écho de Paris, with a review of Trotsky’s last book, The Revolution Betrayed, were found. Marusya, whom Ivan had asked to translate the article, had underlined in red pencil this shocking phrase: “Without wanting it himself, the Georgian with the low forehead has become the direct heir of Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Catherine II. He destroys his opponents—revolutionaries, true to their infernal faith, who are consumed by a constant neurotic thirst for destruction.”
Ivan honestly denied having a knowledge of French during the interrogation. He did not name the person who had marked the passage—firing-squad words—with a red pencil.
Two months later, all those involved in the case were executed as Trotskyites. Ivan had never been a Trotskyite. Though he was a true Leninist, this had no bearing on the matter. It was 1937. Surviving the year would be difficult. But people survived. Some of them.
44 Variations on a Theme
Fiddler on the Roof
(1992)
Tusya was aging beautifully. She thinned out, became smaller. Although her back, which had been disfigured in childhood by osseous tuberculosis, became still more bent, her hands were not affected, and her wrinkles lay on her face like a beautiful geometric grid. Her vision gave out, but she had acquired a large magnifying glass, which she became adept at using, and assured Nora that reading this way had its advantages: you missed nothing, as though not only the letters were magnified, but their meaning as well. She was pushing eighty. Physically, she had grown decrepit, but her clarity of mind and her wit had remained intact. Nora occasionally took her to theaters. She came to pick her up in the car, sat her in the back seat, and led her to the staff entrance of the theater. Leaning on a polished black cane with a silver sheep’s head as a knob, Tusya waited while Nora parked the car. Then they walked arm in arm, two genuine leading lights of the theater world, venerable connoisseurs, and visitors to all the significant theatrical events.
Tusya’s students didn’t forget her, and invited her to all the premières and guest performances that were worthy of attention. She attended with pleasure, dressing up theatrically, piling big Asian rings with turquoises and cornelians onto her thin fingers. For Nora, every such outing was a holiday. The years had not been able to dim the excitement of a première for her, and Tusya’s presence always heightened this feeling, independent of whether the play was good or just so-so.
The theater they went to on this occasion was not a favorite of theirs. Although the director enjoyed acclaim far and wide, he was, in Tusya’s opinion, mediocre. The playwright, who had adapted the voluble Sholem Aleichem’s works for the stage, was talented and much sought after, but his work still carried the aura of the student skit. One of Tusya’s best students, a set-and-production designer, had invited them. They were staging the story of Tevye the Dairyman, and Tusya didn’t have very high expectations of it. She still remembered when Mikhoels played the role in 1938.
In the audience, the air was charged with happy anticipation. When the comedic actor—an actor beloved by all, who specialized in playing bewitchingly honest simpletons—took the stage, for some reason against the background of a looming eight-armed cross, the audience howled with delight. To begin, the actor announced: “Here, in our village, Russians, Ukrainians, and Jews live side by side…” What followed was a mixture of nauseating gobbledygook about the friendship of the peoples, presented with the intonations of a Jewish joke, good-natured and bittersweet, and lowbrow literary clownery, which made Tusya ever more dismal and gloomy, and the audience ever more giddy and cheerful. At the end of the first act, the Jewish wedding gave way to a pogrom, carried out by the peaceable Russian neighbors on the convincing grounds that “it’s either thrash them, or get slapped with a fine by the authorities ourselves!”
The Cossack sergeant was torn by the contradiction between a sense of duty—enforcing the pogrom ordered from on high by the powers-that-be—and a neighborly compassion for the simple Jewish peasants, sympathy toward the Jewish dairyman. According to the playwright’s view, the pogrom was instigated by one villain, a kind of local Ilse Koch, anticipating by many years the gas chambers organized by other bad people of German extraction.
The pogrom was successful. Tevye walked out onto the proscenium carrying his bleeding youngest daughter in his arms, and then left a red imprint of his enormous bloodied workingman’s hand on a white wall. The bells started tolling; the pogrom thugs broke into a Cossack dance; the well-intentioned sergeant asked him to stay calm; the good priest opened his arms; Tevye howled to his Jewish God, who had failed to intervene, thereby awakening the young and enlightened Jews to revolutionary action. Sholem Aleichem had already been laid to rest in his grave in a Jewish cemetery in Queens more than seventy years before, and his soul spoke the long-buried language of Yiddish with the souls of six million European Jews who had formerly occupied a country with indefinite borders that was called Yiddishland.
Thunderous applause.
“Unbelievably base and trite,” Tusya whispered to Nora.
“Base? Why?” Nora was surprised.
“If you don’t understand, I’ll explain later.”
They stayed until the end of the play. Then they left to go home, in the middle of a stormy ovation, repeated bows from the actors, the director, the playwright. Nora hadn’t seen Tusya in such a despondent state in a long time.
The elevator in the apartment building was broken, so they had to climb up four flights of stairs. They wended their way up slowly, stopping to rest on every landing. Tusya was silent. Nora refrained from asking any questions.
They ate whatever there was on hand—pasta, served with grated cheese. Tusya found a bottle of wine in the cupboard. She drank in the European way, without toasting. Several times she seemed to be on the verge of saying something, then decided against it. It was already after one in the morning, and their conversation still hadn’t gotten off the ground. Nora went home, the unsaid words still hanging in the air. Tusya usually came up with such brilliant analyses …
It’s possible that they would never have returned to this subject had Tevye the Dairyman not come up again in a telephone conversation. This time, a proposal came not from Tengiz but from Efim Berg, a director from the provinces—a person with a reputation as a troublemaker, who had mysterious connections. He was, in fact, not really from the provinces; he had studied in Moscow, staged plays in Leningrad, and for five years worked as the head director in one of the oldest theaters in Siberia.
The first thing Efim asked Nora was “What is your ethnicity? Are you a Jew, by any chance?”
Nora was taken by surprise. In her passport, she was identified by the ethnicity of her mother—Russian—but she had never concealed the fact that her father was Jewish.
“Half, on my father’s side,” she said.
“You will do, then,” Efim said, and invited Nora to take part in a staging of Fiddler on the Roof.