On the platform, Israel and the soldiers looked sullenly at their feet, like schoolboys found truant. The officer, his imperial bearing now diminished, addressed the newcomer. Then Israel spoke. Larissa recognized by his expression that he was arguing with restraint, avoiding fervor and importunity. And then he stopped.
The man in the black leather jacket spoke very briefly. His words received an immediate response. Israel and the soldiers filed down the platform and out of sight. None of the passengers dared look at Larissa. When the officer and two of the soldiers appeared inside at the head of the car, it was as unexpected as if they had stepped from a cinema screen.
The Jews (that’s how they thought of themselves now) sat rigidly at attention. The ones who sat with their backs to the soldiers didn’t move, paralyzed by indecision about the most appropriate gesture of respect. They were all aware, suddenly, that the train car smelled of dirty laundry and the hard-boiled eggs that had become their most reliable diet. Several other soldiers came aboard, followed by Israel and the black jacket, both of them stone faced.
“Comrades,” someone said.
The passengers with their backs turned thought at first that it was the jacket who had spoken, because it was his judgment they awaited. But the words were barely articulated, rising just above a murmur. Facing ahead, Larissa stared cold eyed at the Russian soldier. He removed his cap, revealing an unkempt stalk of strawcolored hair. Without the cap, he looked to be no more than sixteen. “Comrades,” he repeated. “Respected comrades. I beg your forgiveness.”
He turned, but the gray-haired officer blocked his way and whispered something. The soldier glumly faced the settlers, again.
“I beg your forgiveness for what I said.”
A flash of impatience lit across the officer’s face. He spoke at length to the soldier. The soldier nodded, his face pale.
“I beg your forgiveness for a statement made while performing my duties as a member of the Kisly Klyuch People’s Security Detachment. I was talking with my”—he paused here, unable to locate the appropriate word—“my fellow, and I referred to you esteemed travelers as ‘prisoners.’” Blinking furiously, he looked over to the officer, who whispered something. “This was an error of thinking, the result of a faulty political education. I thank your representative,”—he stopped again, and received more coaching—“I thank Comrade Israel Davidovich for kindly pointing out this error. I beg your forgiveness and promise to reflect on this incident further.”
The settlers didn’t respond. There was nothing in their experience that would have suggested what their response should be. Two red rims appeared around the soldier’s eyes. The officer gripped the militiaman’s neck and spoke to him again. The soldier listened carefully. He announced, his voice nearly breaking:
“We of the Kisly Klyuch People’s Security Detachment, on behalf of the workers and peasants’ state, wish you success in your important work!”
For another moment the settlers remained impassive. Then from the car’s last bunk, Morris Kugel cried out, “Bravo! Well said, comrade-soldier! Bravo!” More cheers immediately flooded the car, in both Russian and Yiddish.
The soldier was momentarily bewildered. He blinked. What began as a polite, wary smile slipped from his control and ended as the full exposure of a mouth crookedly crammed with white teeth. The settlers started up a round of rhythmic clapping and produced a set of drinking glasses and a bottle of schnapps. With the approval of the officer, the soldiers each took a taste, accompanied by more applause. Israel was beaming now, his arms around the “lads.”
Only the man in the black leather jacket didn’t take part. He hung back by the entrance, closely watching the proceedings. His gaze appeared to rest on each settler’s face long enough to commit it to memory. When his scrutiny reached Larissa, she looked away, but she found his image shimmering in the window glass. The ghost’s eyes held hers.
The settlers were long under way, their visitors gone, before the embers of their merriment were extinguished. Israel’s comic retelling of the confrontation in Kisly Klyuch, embellished by his commentary, comprised that evening’s entertainment. The bottle of schnapps was emptied. As he concluded his presentation, Israel promised that the militiaman’s simple words would stand as their welcome to the Far East. The settlers had told the soldier—his name was Kolya—that if he were to come to Birobidzhan, they would find him a beautiful Jewish wife.
Larissa’s relief left her skin cold and salty, and the remnants of her anxiety left her fatigued for the remainder of the journey. Israel’s jokes about the encounter mocked her fear. She suspected that she was not alone in her unease.
The travelers’ knowledge that they were almost there now disrupted the routine of their days and heightened their appetites. Their impatience was transforming and consuming. They could no longer bear to read or play cards. They scrubbed the bathroom, the windows, and the floor until their knuckles bled. The desire to have the trip ended was like a lust. In these public quarters, the sexual wants of vigorous young men and women had been stifled for a month. As the train crossed the map crease into the square that contained Birobidzhan, the settlers’ jests and comments became more risqué, the attire of the women less modest, the looks of the men more direct. Now Larissa would wake in the middle of the night and hear the furtive rustlings of bedclothes, a suppressed gasp or giggle. In the morning, she would search the faces of her traveling companions. Once she imagined that the entire passenger car had been engaged in sex, an orgy that had begun in Belogorsk and ended in Zavitaya. But it was not sex the travelers most hungered for. They stared through the windows, seeking there the image that would present itself when they arrived. Closing her eyes against the sun beating through the tops of the passing trees, Larissa thought she could smell the Pacific.
From the day they had left Moscow the travelers had been beset by arguments, none of them petty. The correct approach to bourgeois nationalism. The success of the New Economic Policy. Its failure. The Five-Year Plan. Collectivization. The Left Oppositionists. The Right Oppositionists. The Trotskyites’ false charges of anti-Semitism in order to defend counterrevolution. The Shakhty wreckers’ trial. What Marx and Lenin did or didn’t say. What Comrade Stalin says. What Comrade Stalin means.
Now the debates picked up their fervor. Men and women would shout. Fingers would fly through the air to snare a point. Polemics. Leading questions. Rhetorical questions. Hyperbole. Sarcasm. Irony.
At first Larissa believed the settlers were being incautious. It was only this past December that the Fifteenth Party Congress had expelled Trotsky and warned against deviation from the general Party line. Statements made in the heat of argument were bound to swerve from it. But now, as they neared a land as distant from the Kremlin as the Congo, she came to consider these arguments as expressions of liberty, the promise of their new lives. This was evident in the way the settlers argued: taking every charge and countercharge personally, claiming every issue a matter of principle, seeking alliances among those they secretly admired, turning on those they secretly loathed—all without spoiling their good humor or unity of purpose. And political positions that were taken in the evening were forgotten by the following morning.