He stared down at his audience. One wouldn’t call it a congregation, even though the large wooden building in which he was speaking had been a synagogue just a few years earlier. Now he looked over the audience’s heads, at the walls and the women’s gallery on the second floor. All the religious objects had been removed, but there were still sectarian architectural details here and there: a six-pointed star inlaid in the parquet, menorahs in the plaster molding. He smiled benevolently at these symbols and then, nodding toward a rectangular shadow on a wall where a plaque had once been fixed, at the ghosts of the dead.
“So, I say to you, comrades! Next year in Birobidzhan!”
This was followed by applause—explosive and emphatic, accompanied by cheers and amens, and sustained for several minutes—but not immediately. Immediately there was a silence as complete as the silence between the earth and the heavens. Feeling a chill, Larissa tugged at her sweater. And then the vice-chairman of the local soviet, a Jew, raised his hands to his chest and drew them apart. Before he could bring them together, scores of other hands were slapping at one another.
Most of their stops were less eventful. The train often came to rest on a track distant from the platform. Surrounded by walls of freight trains, laid into this strip of track as if into an uncovered grave, the settlers never saw the station nor anything of the town in which they had arrived. Just a slice of white sky was visible above the roof of the next train. A jolt and then stillness: they had been detached from the locomotive and the other cars. They lost entire days on these sidings, apparently forgotten by the railway authorities. Larissa once stepped from their car for some air, onto the sparse, muddy grass alongside the track, casually intending to walk around the neighboring trains to the station. But the train alongside their track stretched a kilometer in either direction and there was no way of telling how many tracks away, or in what direction, the platform was located.
Motion! Motion! Idled in Ingashskaya, Larissa would have preferred to move anywhere, even if the train had been shuttled onto a circular track around the station. Under way, the train tauntingly, maddeningly, dawdled across Asia, at no faster than a horse’s trot for hours at a time. Some days the image of the steppe outside her window never changed, as if the settlers were parked inside a natural history museum. Face to face with the terrestrial, Larissa came to understand by extravagant extension the distances and the emptiness embraced by the word interstellar. The nearest star was five billion times further from Moscow than was Birobidzhan. She opened Israel’s map of the Soviet Union and located their minute progress across it. The scale was one to eight million. If single copies of the map fell evenly upon the surface of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, at the rate of one per second, the entire country would be covered sometime in the afternoon of the second day of the fourteenth week. She did these calculations in the time it took to complete three of the 8,358 kilometers to Birobidzhan, occupying thirty-six hundred thousandths of the journey. The maps would fall with their illustrated sides down, presenting a comforting vista of white paper stretching from the Baltic to the Pacific.
The deeper they crawled into Asia, the less likely they were to come to towns and villages whose people knew anything about Birobidzhan, or knew anything about Jews except to hate them. Militiamen would come on board and study their travel warrants as if studying for a test. The railway was a key strategic link and officials were wary of organized groups traveling along it. At some stops the settlers were not even allowed to disembark to stretch their legs. Although annoyed, Israel defended the precaution. Then at Kisly Klyuch, less than a week from reaching their destination, he overheard one militiaman on the platform call to another, jokingly, that the prisoners all looked like Yids.
Israel, who had been standing at the car’s open door, was out onto the platform in a flash. Three rifles were raised in unison.
“What did you say?” he demanded.
Israel’s face had flushed to his ears and his eyes bulged like eggs.
The soldier, a beardless young Russian giant, snapped, “Immediately return to your place.”
“Who told you we were prisoners?”
“Go back to your place!”
Israel was already waving his passport and travel warrant, as well as other papers provided by Komzet. He appeared ready to beat the soldier with them. “Look at these! We’re a colonization detachment under the auspices of the All-Union Committee for Settlement and the People’s Commissariat for Land Issues. Can you read?”
The militiamen said sullenly, “I can read.”
“Do you see anything here that says we’re prisoners?”
The Russian wouldn’t look at the papers. He said, thin-lipped: “Get into the car right now, or you’ll be my prisoner. We’ve got a cell just for kikes.”
“No.”
The militiaman, his rifle above his waist, winced in disbelief. “What?” The two other militiamen, Asiatics, closed in on Israel.
From her seat, a textbook warm as a kitten on her lap, Larissa watched this scene performed in pantomime. Israel appeared to ignore the two Asiatics. He was lecturing the Russian, a stubby index finger laid against the soldier’s chest. Larissa’s mouth went dry as Israel began poking him with it. The Russian reddened and shouted back at Israel. Larissa couldn’t tell what was being said, only that Israel was doing most of the talking. Kisly Klyuch: they called this place Sour Spring. The men were joined by four more soldiers, including a gray-haired officer. For a moment Israel was lost among them, as if under an ocean wave. Then she saw him whirl at them, brandishing his papers, pointing at the train and then down the track, back at Moscow. The officer, another Russian, his impassiveness nearly royal, rested a hand on his holster.
The settlers filled the seats by the windows, poised with their knees digging into the upholstery, their hands wrapped around the bunk supports. “Oy vey,” someone said without emotion. Another whispered, “What happened? What is he doing?” By their gestures, Israel and the militiamen seemed to be speaking loudly, but the car was engulfed in a subterranean silence. Nearly every passenger received a new sense of the remote, lonely continent to which they had journeyed in the last month. As communists, they had believed they had mastered history; now, as Jews, they knew that history still possessed a stick, a pitchfork, or a gun, hidden in a cellar or a corncrib.
The officer abruptly turned, his back to Israel. The other men fell silent. Israel set his jaw and looked up the platform. Several moments later a square, thick-necked man entered the picture framed by the car window. He wore a black leather jacket, tightly belted. Now the settlers returned to their seats, fearful of demonstrating undue interest in Israel’s fate. Not a man or woman made a sound, not even to clear a throat.