David never got bored, even when his grandmother was out.
Not far from the house was an old orchard that didn't belong to anyone. Chickens marked with paint wandered about between decrépit apple trees that no longer bore fruit; an elderly goat grazed quietly; ants appeared silently on the tall blades of grass. The town-dwellers – the blackbirds and sparrows – behaved with noisy self-assurance, while the birds from the fields outside, birds whose names David didn't know, were like timid village maidens.
He heard many words that were quite new to him: gletchik… dikt . .. kalyuzha… ryazhenka… ryaska… puzhalo. .. lyadache … koshenya … [25] He could recognize in these words echoes and reflections of his own mother-tongue. He heard Yiddish. He felt quite astonished when his mother and grandmother began speaking it together; never before had he heard his mother speak a language he couldn't understand.
His grandmother took David to visit her niece, stout Rebekka Bukhman. David was struck by the number of white wicker blinds in her room. Edward Isaakovich Bukhman came in, wearing a soldier's tunic and a pair of boots. He was the head accountant at the State Bank.
'Chaim,' said Rebekka, 'this is our guest from Moscow, Raya's son.'
'Go on then,' she urged David. 'Say hello to Uncle Edward.'
'Uncle Edward, why does Aunt Rebekka call you Chaim?' David asked.
'That's a very difficult question,' said Edward Bukhman. 'Don't you know that in England all Chaims are called Edward?'
Then the cat began scratching at the door. Finally she managed to open it with her claws and everyone saw an anxious-looking little girl sitting on a pot in the middle of the room.
One Sunday David went with his grandmother to market. There were other women going in the same direction: old women in black dresses; peasant women in heavy boots; sullen, sleepy-looking women who worked as guards on the railways; haughty-looking women with red and blue handbags who were married to important local officials.
Jewish beggars kept shouting at them in rude, angry voices – people seemed to give alms out of fear rather than compassion. Big trucks from the collective farms drove along the cobbled roadway, carrying sacks of potatoes and wickerwork cages full of hens that squawked at each pot-hole like a group of sickly old Jews. David saw a dead calf being dragged off a cart; its pale mouth was hanging half-open and the curly white hairs on its neck were stained with blood.
His grandmother bought a speckled hen; she carried it by its legs, which had been tied together with a white rag. David was walking beside her. He wanted to reach out and help the hen lift up its powerless head; he wondered how his grandmother could be so inhumanly cruel.
David remembered some incomprehensible words of his mother's: she had said that his grandfather's relatives were members of the intelligentsia, while his grandmother's relatives were all shopkeepers and tradesmen. That must be why his grandmother didn't feel sorry for the hen.
They went into a yard; an old man in a skull-cap came out to meet them. His grandmother said something in Yiddish. The old man picked the hen up in his hands and began mumbling; the hen cackled unsuspectingly. Then the old man did something very quick – something barely perceptible but obviously terrible – and threw the hen over his shoulder. It ran off, feebly flapping its wings. David saw that it had no head. The body was running all by itself. The old man had killed it. After a few steps it fell to the earth, scratching with its young, powerful claws, and died.
That night David felt as though the damp smell of dead cows and their slaughtered children had even got into his room.
Death, who had once lived in a fairy-tale forest where a fairy-tale wolf was creeping up on a fairy-tale goat, was no longer confined to the pages of a book. For the first time David felt very clearly that he himself was mortal, not just in a fairy-tale way, but in actual fact.
He understood that one day his mother would die. And it wasn't from the fairy-tale forest and the dim light of its fir-trees that Death would come for him and his mother – it would come from this very air, from these walls, from life itself, and there was no way they would be able to hide from it.
He sensed Death with a depth and clarity of which only small children or great philosophers are capable, philosophers who are themselves almost childlike in the power and simplicity of their thinking.
A calm warm smell came from the big wardrobe and the chairs whose worn seats had been replaced by plywood boards; it was the same smell that came from his grandmother's hair and dress. A warm, deceptively calm night surrounded him.
49
The living world was no longer confined to the pages of spelling books and the faces of toy bricks. David saw how much blue there was in the drake's dark wings and how much gay smiling mockery in the way he quacked. He climbed up the rough trunks of cherry trees and reached out to pick the white cherries that glowed among the leaves. He walked up to a calf that had been tethered on a patch of wasteland and offered him a sugar-lump; numb with happiness, he looked into the friendly eyes of this great baby.
Red-haired little Pynchik came up to David and said to him, rolling his r's splendidly: 'Let's have a scrrrap!'
There was little difference between the Jews and the Ukrainians who lived in the different houses that looked onto his grandmother's yard. Old Partynskaya called on his grandmother and said in her drawling voice: 'Guess what, Roza Nusinovna? Sonya's going to Kiev; she's made it up with her husband again.'
His grandmother threw up her hands and laughed.
'What a farce!'
David found he liked this world better than his own Kirov street – where an old woman called Drago-Dragon, with waved hair and a lot of rouge, went for walks with her poodle; where a Zis-101 limousine waited outside the front door every morning; where a woman with a pince-nez and a cigarette between her made-up lips stood over the communal gas-stove, furiously muttering, 'You Trotskyist, you've moved my coffee off the burner again!'
It had been night when he and his mother arrived at the station. In the moonlight they had walked down the cobbled street, past the white Catholic church – where a niche in the wall housed a rather thin, bowed Christ, about the height of a twelve-year-old, his head crowned with thorns – and past the teacher-training college where his mother had once studied.
A few days later, on Friday evening, David saw the old men walking to the synagogue through the clouds of golden dust kicked up by the barefooted footballers on the wasteland.
There was a heart-rending charm in this juxtaposition of white Ukrainian huts, squeaking well-handles and the ancient patterns on black-and-white prayer-shawls. Everything was jumbled together – Kobzar[26], Pushkin and Tolstoy, physics textbooks, Lenin's Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder… And the sons of cobblers and tailors who had first come here at the time of the Civil War, teachers from the raykom, orators and troublemakers from the district trade-union soviets, truck-drivers, detectives, lecturers in Marxism…
It was at his grandmother's that David first learned that his mother was unhappy. Aunt Rachel – a stout woman whose cheeks were so red that she seemed to be always blushing-was the first person to tell him.
'Leaving such a wonderful woman as your mother! Well, he'll live to regret it!'
By the following day David knew that his father had left his mother for a Russian woman who was eight years his elder; that he earned two and a half thousand roubles a month in the Philarmonia Society; and that his mother refused to accept any alimony and lived on the three hundred and ten roubles a month she earned herself.
Once David showed his grandmother the cocoon he kept in a little matchbox.
'Ugh! What do you want that filth for? Throw it away!' she ordered.
Twice David went to the goods-yard and watched bulls, rams and pigs being loaded into the cattle-wagons. He heard one of the bulls bellowing loudly – complaining or asking for pity. The boy's soul was filled with horror, but the tired railway-workers in their torn, dirty jackets didn't so much as look round.
A week after David's arrival, Deborah, one of his grandmother's neighbours, gave birth to her first child. She was the wife of Lazar Yankelevich, a machinist in the agricultural-machinery factory. The previous year she had been to visit her sister in Kolyma and had been struck by lightning during a storm. They had tried to give her artificial respiration, but finally gave up and buried her. She had lain there, as though dead, for two hours – and now she had given birth to a child. She had been sterile for fifteen years. His grandmother told David all this and then added: 'That's what they say – but she did have an operation last year.'
David and his grandmother went to call on Deborah.
'Well, Luzya! Well, Deba!' said David's grandmother, looking at the little creature in the washing-basket. There was something almost threatening in the way she pronounced these words, as though she were warning the father and mother never to be frivolous about the miracle that had just taken place.
There was an old woman called Sorgina who lived in a little house by the railway-line with her two sons; they were both deaf-mutes and both worked as hairdressers. All their neighbours were afraid of the family.
'Yes, yes, they're as quiet as mice till they get drunk,' old Partyn-skaya told David. 'But when they get drunk, they snatch up their knives and rush at one another, screaming and squealing like a pair of horses!'
Once David's grandmother sent him round to Musya Borisovna with a jar of sour cream. The librarian's room was tiny. There was a little cup on a table, some little books on a shelf fixed to the wall and a little photograph hanging over her bed. It was a photograph of David in swaddling clothes together with his mother. When David looked at the photograph Musya Borisovna blushed and said: 'Your mother and I shared the same desk at school.'
He read out the fable of the ant and the grasshopper and she, very quietly, read the poem 'Sasha Was Crying as They Cut Down the Forest'.
In the morning the whole yard was buzzing. Solomon Slepoy's fur coat had been stolen – it had been sewn up in moth-balls for the summer.
'God be praised!' said his grandmother. 'It's the least he deserves.'
David learned that Slepoy had been an informer and had betrayed lots of people at the time of the confiscation of foreign currency and gold coins. He had informed on people again in 1937. Two of the people he betrayed had been shot and one had died in a prison hospital.
Night and its strange noises, bird-song, innocent blood – everything was mixed together into a rich, seething stew. Decades later, David might have been able to understand it; but even at the time he was aware both of its horror and of its poignant charm.