He more easily comprehended the solid pragmatism that drove the urgency with which Israel pursued romance. Israel desperately wished to be among the first settlers in the new land. Hundreds had already left in the weeks since the Central Committee had given its approval, and Leo himself was about to depart. Israel would not, however, emigrate unmarried. He expected a poor choice of single women among the pioneers.
I once asked Larissa about Ilya, about why she didn’t marry him. We were in the kitchen on the rare occasion that we were alone (we shared the flat on Kalinina with another family). Glasses of tea cooled on the unpainted wooden table. According to some privately held principle, Larissa took hers without sugar.
She didn’t immediately reply. I sensed that I had wandered onto dangerous terrain, but I was fourteen or fifteen at the time and was thrilled by the danger and also by the possibility that the question would cause her anguish. My mother and I were separated by an entire continent of dangerous terrain, much of it pimpled by watchtowers. I was about to ask again, when she said, “I loved him.”
Her eyes downcast, Larissa revealed neither pleasure nor regret in this statement. She pronounced it with the flatness of a diagnosis. I was stunned. She had never before spoken to me of anything so personal. Emboldened, I pressed her.
“Did you love Israel?”
“No, probably not, not at that moment.”
“Why did you marry him?” I asked, with the direct fearlessness of a fourteen year old.
“It has something to do with this place. He had never been here of course, but how he described it… He spoke of trout running in clear rivers…”
I laughed unkindly. “It charmed you.”
She considered this. I looked beyond her through the iced kitchen window, where loomed the gray shadows of trees and nearby buildings.
“No. But he made the place real. Ilya never succeeded in making the future real, our future together, no matter how often he spoke of it. I did love your father, only everything happened too quickly for me to realize it.”
My godmother was more explicit about the way Israel pursued Larissa: single-mindedly, persistently, ruthlessly. There were picnics in the Park of Culture supplied by sausage, wine, and sweets from Yeliseyev’s; presents of books chosen with nearly as much care as with which they had been written; an ardent patter to accompany illusions and sleight of hand; a deft, unsentimental poem; and a clumsy, sentimental confession. According to Rachel (we were on the divan, cuddling for warmth, and she stroked my hair as she unwound a skein of memory, while my mother read a newspaper at the table), Israel had convinced himself that Larissa was his last chance to find love. He had also reasoned that success with Larissa would make all the romantic failures of the past several years historically necessary.
Larissa knew this, and resented that Israel’s supposed love for her had so little to do with who she actually was, that she was no more than a last chance. Also, he was a bit short. One preternaturally warm spring Sunday Rachel accompanied them on a picnic. They shared a blanket near the river edge, Israel between them. Both women lay on their backs, basking, the backs of their heads cradled in their hands. Israel was speaking, but his words were as tangible as the bars of martial music that occasionally drifted over from the attractions. Larissa looked over to her friend, gilded by the sun, her muscular arms bare, her chest broad, her cheeks aglow, and she realized that Israel had committed a signal error: it wasn’t herself that he should be courting. Rachel’s robust constitution was suited to pioneer the virgin lands. She cared about the preservation of Jewish culture. Israel had merely seen Larissa first—at the moment when the woman whose destiny was truly intertwined with his was standing right alongside her. It was Israel’s absurd doggedness that kept him after Larissa. He didn’t notice the stellar luminosity in Rachel’s eyes when she gazed at him; nor did he remark his own pleasure in her company.
This realization should have freed Larissa, but it didn’t. She contemplated both Israel and Rachel and couldn’t imagine how she would summon the frankness to tell them of Israel’s mistake. For weeks she was oppressed by her knowledge. And then one morning after the late return of the frost, she met Rachel as they filed into an unheated lecture hall. Rachel squeezed her by the arm, almost shaking loose her notebook.
“Guess what?” she said. “I’ve made a decision. I’m going to Birobidzhan too.”
The words passed through Larissa like a sharp wind. She was instantly vouchsafed an image of Rachel in the Far East: astride a tractor, buxom and erect, her face to the sun. And there was something additional to this image: Israel standing next to the tractor, his arm lightly about her hip. Larissa knew now what it meant to be bankrupt, it didn’t apply only to capitalists.
“That’s wonderful,” she croaked.
“Isn’t it?” Rachel whispered. The other students were settling down in anticipation of their lecturer. “What’s wrong?”
“You’re so brave. I admire you. And Israel too, of course. I couldn’t do it.”
Larissa was astonished at her own bitterness. After all, the world had been set right. But she now looked at Rachel with fresh eyes. The girl was attractive and smart all right, but her easy enthusiasm often verged on the silly; this life-wrecking decision proved it. Larissa wondered how she had become so attached to her, and whether this attachment was the last manifestation of her own childishness.
And she also wondered now how she had gotten her life so mixed up with Jews. She had never expected to. In the cosmopolitan, revolutionary Petrograd of her adolescence, where she did not know the location of a single synagogue, her supposed Jewishness had rarely laid claim to her attention. In Moscow her attachments to Rachel and Ilya had preceded her realization that they were Jewish. It had been only a coincidence of birth. In the future, she resolved, she would avoid such coincidences.
“But you can do it!” Rachel insisted. “You will! I’m counting on it!”
“You shouldn’t. I have a career ahead of me here. A whole life.”
“Israel’s counting on it! He told me so!”
Larissa flinched. This was like one of Israel’s displays of magic. A trivial object gains in value the moment it’s put out of sight under a hat or in the pink blur of a quick hand movement. How gladdened we are by its return!
The lecturer arrived and the students briefly rose from their seats. Throughout the lecture, cartoon bubbles of frosted breath puffed from his mouth, but neither Larissa nor Rachel could read what were in them. There would always be a certain lacuna in their knowledge of the neural function of the microglia. But something had been settled.
When the lecture ended, Rachel turned to Larissa, her eyes moist. “I’m going to the Far East as soon as I finish my exams. I don’t know Israel’s plans. He’s waiting for you. I wouldn’t be so sure that I was going if I weren’t so sure that you’d be going too.”