“I see. Glide, glide! And with whom do I have the pleasure of performing the Paterson Hop on behalf of the striving proletarian masses?”
“Larissa,” she said dully.
“Larissa,” he repeated, contemplating the fact.
Israel had a thick, pugilist’s nose, as well as a pugilist’s muscular, hairy arms. He was a compact, balding man with bushy eyebrows, and in repose his expression was fiercely birdlike. Yet he moved gracefully, his touch light. His instructions to the other couples were clear and direct. Soon the small dance floor was filled. Larissa gave up her pretense of inability and unsmilingly matched him step for step. At twenty-nine, Israel was the youngest man on the Komzet presidium, but he was older than most of the men and women attending the party.
The needle slid into the disk’s gutter. Israel stopped and bowed to his partner. She didn’t return the bow.
“Excuse me, Larissa, but I must leave you for a moment,” Israel said. “The fools in the kitchen are giving away my birthright. I’ll be back.”
“Thank you for the dance, but I’m leaving now—”
“Stay,” he commanded.
At the kitchen table a half dozen men were sitting around a large, crude map that had been heavily marked and annotated. The map was sketched in heavy black ink; the regions it denoted were labeled in handwritten block letters. The irregular but inconspicuous shape of the depicted area represented an idea only to the men at this table, and perhaps to two or three others. At the edge of the map, in the outland territories, lay a sheaf of smudged, typed pages. Mikhail Beinfest had picked up one of the sheets and was reading from it in an urgent whine.
Israel interrupted, “We’re still talking about soil acidity?”
A few men grimaced, a few others shook their heads to express their annoyance. Israel glared. This informal meeting of the Komzet presidium was intended to be decisive. But not everyone on the executive committee was present; there was not even a quorum. It looked less like a deliberative body than a game of pinochle. They were speaking in Yiddish.
“Israel, it’s important,” Leo Feirman said wearily.
“No, it’s not.”
The agronomist Bruk explained again. “We must quantify the arable land. There’s a direct correlation between the soil’s acidity—and it’s very acidic—and how much livestock the land can support. And, Israel, it’s not only a matter of soil quality. There’s a single bridge across the Bira in the vicinity of Tikhonka, and it won’t carry a truck or a tractor. The roads, such as they exist, haven’t been tended in years. How will we supply the settlements? We also have to recognize the high, persistent activity of midges from April through August—”
“Midges? Midges? This is the most important moment in the history of the Jewish people in two thousand years, and you’re worried about midges? Of course there’s going to be midges. There’s going to be locusts and hailstorms too. And you’re lucky there’s any bridges! You’re lucky it’s not the damned tundra, for God’s sake. You have to build a homeland, just as you have to build communism. What did you think, they were going to give you Cornwall?”
One of the men said, “They promised us part of the Ukraine, or the Crimea.”
“Forget the Ukraine! Forget the Crimea! Not in a million years are they going to give you the Crimea. The Crimea! They’ll give the Crimea to the Zulus before they give it to you, you stupid, ungrateful kikes!”
Felder growled, “Don’t raise your voice. This fucking kitchen’s hot enough.”
“Midges. Let me tell you something. You blow this, and you blow it for all time. The Jewish people are just about at the end of their history. Count the Jews who have been forced off the land in the last ten years. Count the Jewish shopkeepers who have lost their businesses—more than a million, according to Leshchinsky! Count the Jews who have fled to Moscow and Leningrad since the Revolution! How long do you think the Russians will tolerate it? Soviet power won’t be enough to stop another round of pogroms. And then do you think we’ll ever have another opportunity like this again? Or are we supposed to wait for the Messiah?”
“Israel,” said Feirman, and sighed. “The midges bother the cattle. The Cossacks report very low milk yields. The Koreans don’t even eat dairy.”
“Good, we’ll live like the Koreans.”
“Israel.”
A swirl of brown caught his eye. The cardigan was being passed across a doorway framed by three intervening thresholds. The sweater had been borrowed, he surmised, and now it was being returned.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
“Israel, we can’t wait—”
“Comrades, this issue must be decided by a quorum of the full presidium.” He stopped and look back at the six gray, revolution-worn men. All had once carried guns and banners, faced bayonets and declaimed to thousands. Now their moment had passed or was passing. Israel had been the one to insist on this ad hoc meeting, under the cover of a holiday party, hoping to hand the presidium an accomplished fact. Now he shrugged at the need to change tactics. “This is a pointless argument in any event. Comrade Stalin has offered you something. Tell me how you would quantify the possibility of refusing it.”
Israel found Larissa in the foyer on the edge of a chair, struggling with a pair of high, fashionable brown boots. They were probably borrowed too.
“We’ve hardly talked.”
“About what? Look, it’s been a long day. I made a mistake coming to this party.”
“It may have been the best mistake of your life. Allow me please to walk you home.”
She shook her head. “I live close by, in a student dormitory. Anyway, my friend Rachel is leaving with me.”
Israel hadn’t noticed the other woman, for whom I’m named, standing beside her, already dressed for the street in a luminous red coat and shawl. She smiled pleasantly, amused at Israel’s persistence.
“I’ll accompany you both…”
Larissa said dryly, “This matter of walking a woman home: it’s a rather bourgeois manifestation.”
Israel stared at her for a moment. Only the slightest suggestion of playfulness, nearly a mirage, shimmered around her eyes. He grinned at it.
“So they’ll shoot me for walking you home. Let me find my coat.”
In fact, the dormitory was only two blocks away and Israel had just begun to explain the work of the Committee for the Rural Placement of Jewish Toilers by the time they arrived. Thick snowflakes tumbled from the black sky. Larissa did not invite her companions into the lobby. She politely shook Israel’s hand, kissed Rachel, and then fled beyond the building’s single heavy wooden door. Rachel lived on the other side of the city. She told Israel he should accompany her only to the tram stop.
“No, I’ll see you to your place,” he insisted, and did, paying her fare and walking her up four flights to her communal flat, all the time talking, talking, talking. It was all politics, about which Rachel maintained a resolute indifference, but she basked in the heat of his attention. He lectured, he orated, he parodied, he cited, he argued (with absent interlocutors), and he asked rhetorical questions that, so that she would not miss the point, he answered himself.
And then he rushed back to Larissa’s dormitory. It was a barrackslike affair, converted from a shoe factory and named for Lenin. He pushed open the door into a dim, gaslit corridor guarded by an armed young woman in an ill-fitting Red Army uniform. His smile was not returned. At the head of the corridor another woman, stout and middle-aged, sat behind a heavy desk. She glowered as he approached.
There was no possibility of being allowed upstairs; as he made the request, he perceived that the soldier tightened her grasp on her rifle. The woman at the desk would not even accept a letter for Larissa, grimly shaking her head.