On this day that had started so ominously, Tamara was assigned to the Station Malyutinskaya, a tiny kishlak deep in Uzbekistan, where the residents have never seen a doctor and where official medicine of the kind my great-aunt practised was as alien as they came. The word kishlak comes from Turkish for ‘winter hut’ or ‘wintering place’, and describes rural settlements built by the semi-nomadic people of Uzbekistan and Tadzhikistan – an idea entirely unfamiliar to urban women like Tamara and my grandma. Tamara’s job was to organise a medical outpost. The family was given a room in the same building where Tamara ran her clinic. While Tamara worked, Faina looked after the two toddlers and, soon enough, the newborn who arrived in these strange and most unexpected circumstances. When the war first descended on them, my grandmother had asked her sister to terminate this pregnancy. Carrying a child at such a time was an act of pure insanity: what chance would they all stand, the infant included? Tamara was a determined pragmatist who would have had no objections in principle to abortion, but she surprised her sister by refusing point-blank to oblige. ‘No, this child will bring light,’ she said, and that was that. When Tamara delivered my mother at Station Malyutinskaya in the early days of January 1942, the baby was named Svetlana; svet means ‘light’ in Russian. (Faina, by the way, was thirty-two when my mother was born; my mother was thirty-two when she had me, her second daughter; and my own second child, Miguel, was born when I was thirty-two, so I guess all eyes are now on Billie.)
All through the ordeal of the evacuation from Ukraine and their remote posting in Uzbekistan, my grandmother continued to search for Iosif. Though her efforts were unsuccessful, she managed to locate her husband’s birth family. Iosif ‘s brother was fighting at the front, and the rest of them – Iosif ‘s mother and sister, Sarah, with her two young boys – had also been evacuated, not to Central Asia but to Chkalov, an industrial city near the River Ural. Eventually, Faina received a notice that Iosif was ‘missing in action’. She knew all too well what the vague sentence stood for: ‘missing in action’ was code for a combatant whose gravesite could not be identified. In her mind, she buried him.
Who knows how my grandmother managed to get through her time in Uzbekistan with two toddlers and a newborn in her care round the clock. It was the war, says my mother when I ask her this question. Grown-ups routinely did incredible things to keep kids alive. As Tamara worked, Faina cooked for the family on a brazier using bricks of dry dung as fuel. The baby, my fiercely independent mother, refused to be put down on the mattress and had to be carried at all times. Once my grandmother spilt boiling water on herself and had to continue performing all of her chores with only one useful arm. The worst was the abundance of poisonous spiders, malarial mosquitoes and even scorpions. (My auntie, four years old at the time, remembers a huge one on the white wall of their room.) Such pests were notorious for spreading deadly disease. (A cousin of Tamara and Faina who was also evacuated to Uzbekistan died from a blood infection following a spider bite.) In 1943 Tamara, Faina and the kids were all bedridden with epidemic typhus. It was a miracle that they got through it without losing anyone. When malaria came, it looked like the end. Tamara, the family’s doctor, was completely delirious. Everyone else was sick. Despite being terribly ill, Faina had no choice but to continue looking after the kids. It was at this moment that she wrote a letter to her husband’s family in distant Chkalov. ‘Save us,’ it said.
How they managed to get through the malaria no one can now say. It must have been sheer luck because you can be as brave and as determined as you like but malaria does not give a toss. Tamara was not allowed to leave her medical post, so at the end of 1943 Faina travelled to the Ural region alone with the three kids. In Chkalov, Iosif ‘s family lived in one room of a two-room apartment. With my grandmother’s arrival, there were eight members of the family living on top of each other in this small space – three women and five children. At night my mother slept in the hall in a washing tub just big enough for a baby. Faina slept in the hall too, on top of a chest. In the other room lived a family of a former local ballerina Galina Valeryanovna, who before the war had had the apartment completely to itself. Contrary to stereotypes about artistic personalities in general and divas in particular, Galina Valeryanovna seemed neither bitter nor resentful towards her involuntarily acquired neighbours. She fancied herself as a fortune teller, using beans for the purpose as was then the Russian fashion, but when she offered her services to my grandmother, Faina was not interested.
Galina Valeryanovna insisted. ‘Let me do it,’ she said.
‘I am sorry, but I do not believe in this kind of stuff,’ Faina replied.
‘Just let me. I can tell you that your husband is alive.’
‘Why are you being so cruel?’
‘Listen to me. Your husband is alive and you will see him soon.’
When my grandfather and his colleagues left Kiev in 1941 and joined the partisans in the forests, they were ordered to move into the occupied village of Nosovka, in the guise of ordinary residents, to set up an underground cell. The three of them spent six months in the village running an anti-Fascist group responsible for supplying the partisan forces with food and medical provisions. My grandfather’s very first job in life had been as a wood-turner, and he had been a skilled, successful craftsman. Thanks to this, Iosif was able to move to Kiev from the small Ukrainian shtetl where he lived and, in time, to bring his parents to Kiev as well, taking full responsibility for their wellbeing. Now my grandfather’s woodworking skills came in handy not only because they provided a credible cover, but also because many farmers in nearby villages were in desperate need of a woodworker of his class; and so the trio never went hungry.
When they discovered that their cover had been blown, the trio quickly left Nosovka and headed into the forest. The next day their house and workshop were completely demolished. Before leaving Nosovka, my grandfather accidentally became a witness to a scene that he could not expunge from his mind: two Ukrainian Polizei shooting point-blank a Jewish couple discovered hiding with a local blacksmith. Determined to avenge the couple’s death, one night my grandfather took a platoon of partisans and set the houses of the two Polizei on fire. When the policemen ran out of the burning buildings, both of them were shot. Iosif was, by all accounts, a formidable leader. During his time in the partisans, he went from platoon leader to company commander and then head of the special division; after the war he was made lieutenant-colonel in recognition of his service.
At the end of 1943 Kiev was liberated, and the German forces were driven out of Ukraine. Early the following year, my grandfather started looking for his family. Told that his wife and sister-in-law were evacuated to Uzbekistan, he set out to make his way there. He knew neither their exact location nor the number of train journeys required to reach them nor, in fact, whether Faina, Tamara and the kids would still be in Uzbekistan years later. And, of course, their survival was anything but guaranteed wherever they were. Yet, just like Tamara’s chance encounter with her university lecturer in Samarkand’s central square, fate – or chance, although to me it does smell like fate – made Iosif fall casually into a conversation with a fellow passenger on the very first train he boarded. It turned out that the man knew Iosif ‘s brother and his family. What is more, he was pretty certain that Iosif ‘s oldest nephew, Arkady, was working somewhere in the city of Chkalov, so my grandfather decided to get off the train there and try to locate his nephew before continuing his journey to Uzbekistan.