Five
But someone did remember, and that memory persisted through a decade of days and nights, and it lurked in puddles and the glint off farm machinery, hissed in blizzards and flushed summer sunsets that took up half the sky, until it surfaced again on a gray metal desk in a dim, panelled office in the city of Khabarovsk.
It was not as if a mere ten years had passed; the fire with which Stalin cleansed our country consumed entire lifetimes. It had left one of the men in the office with but two teeth in his head and no hair upon it. A gray, weedy beard hugged the hollows of his cheeks. His left eye was closed from a beating and would never admit light again.
He summoned nearly all his physical strength to remain upright on the wooden chair in which he had been placed. The odor of his soiled clothes revolted him. So did the cologne off the man across the desk, a tall, thin, dark man in a tailored, blue double-breasted suit. He had expected to recognize this man, but didn’t. The official had only briefly looked up when he was brought in and had then occupied the next quarter of an hour studying papers in a file on the desk.
And then the official, glaring, said, “Shtern.”
The prisoner made no acknowledgment.
“The Lenin Toilets,” the official declared. “The Stalin Clap Ward.”
Even in his condition, Israel could not feign forgetfulness. His voice hardly more than a whisper, he replied, “It loses something in the translation.”
The man then read the remark flawlessly in the original language.
Israel tried to smile but something seemed to be broken in his face. “Ir ret Yiddish?”
“I was born in Kherson and attended cheder there until I was fifteen years old.”
“My mother was from Kherson.”
“Grinspan. Elena Samvilovna. Her family operated a laundry that employed six workers. Now, can you explain this remark?”
“You have to place it in context.”
“All right,” the man said, and read the following:
D. B. LIPSHIN: Spinoza? Why Spinoza?
M. I. KUGEL: He was only one of the world’s greatest philosophers.
LIPSHIN: Yes, and a Jewish philosopher.
KUGEL: What’s wrong with that? So was Marx.
S. V. BESSERMAN: Marx was a historian.
KUGEL: If you’re going to build a great university in a Jewish republic, you should name it after a Jew.
LIPSHIN: That’s chauvinistic! Shall we name the concert hall after Mendelssohn?
M. B. VEYNSTOK: We could!
LIPSHIN: And the sports stadium after some great Jewish athlete? And must the Chuvash university be named after some great Chuvash philosopher? Good luck. The revolution was founded on internationalism, and if we’re going to succeed in Birobidzhan, we’ll have to overcome these petty national chauvinisms.
KUGEL: But what’s the point of Birobidzhan, if not to secure our national identity?
LIPSHIN: In an internationalist context! Our first allegiance is to the world proletariat. Before we start naming our heroes, let’s examine their class credentials.
I. D. SHTERN: All right, I go along with Lipshin. I say we name everything after Lenin and Stalin and get it over with. Lenin University. Stalin Stadium. The Lenin Concert Hall. The Stalin Library. The Lenin Toilets. The Stalin Clap Ward.
The official returned to the papers in his file folder. His brow creased, he riffled through the papers until he found the sheet he wanted, and then began to write. He suddenly stopped, put the tip of the pencil in his mouth, thought for a moment and then resumed writing. The office had several windows, but they had all been whitewashed and admitted only a wan light. Israel guessed it was daytime, but even though no more than two weeks had passed since his arrest, he couldn’t recall the season.
He said:
“I was being ironic.”
The man finished his composition before he looked up.
“Ironic? You were being ironic about the two leaders of the world revolution? The two greatest minds Europe has ever produced? Did it ever occur to you, Shtern, that there are some subjects, some ideals, too important to be mutilated by satire and ridicule? Or that this characteristic rhetorical effect, this racial stance, could be a curse upon the Jewish people? That it is their inbred sense of irony that prevents their social progress and threatens their physical survival?”
“Well, that’s irony for you.”
“Are you being ironic now?”
Israel’s open eye was glassy and unfocused, his expression vacant.
“No,” he said.
This is an invention. Somewhere in Moscow there is located the true record of Israel’s interrogation, shut in a file in an overstuffed drawer in a locked, unattended room, a probable fire hazard. The file can be presumed to contain trivial data about Israel’s origins, secondary school education and work history, the name of his accuser, the pretext for his arrest, the charges against him, the date of his conviction, his sentence, and his fate, the story of his life that Larissa never knew. But it’s not really information; just markings on sheets of paper, unexposed to human sight for six decades. I suppose I could travel to Moscow (no, I couldn’t, I’d prefer to go to the Congo) and apply (to whom?) to see the file. But invention is easier. And there are still a few facts loose upon the earth.
One afternoon in the early 1960s, Larissa boarded a train in Khabarovsk, by then no more than a five-hour journey from home. Her purchases (a washboard, a kolbasa, a dress, etc.) were tied in squirming, odd-sized bundles. With her single free finger, she pried apart the lips of the door to a second-class compartment and slid it open. She carefully lifted her packages onto the overhead rack and took a place on the upholstered bench facing the direction of travel. Only then did she glance at the man who would be her traveling companion. Again their eyes locked.
“I never forget a face,” he said. “That’s my sorrow.”
Her gut turned to ice. She considered whether she should leave the compartment. But that would prove she was guilty. Of what? She didn’t know, but she was sure that she was guilty. She pursed her lips and stared through the window at a long grassy field browning in the late summer heat.
“You have a daughter, Rachel Israelevna.”
He said it gently, a slight interrogative perched at the end of the sentence. But to Larissa’s ears, the pronouncement was as sinister as a malediction. She made no sign as she reviewed her choices: flight, denial, confession, supplication.
“She should be in her thirties now. Is she married?”
The motion she made in the affirmative was barely detectable.
“Any children?”
The twitch of a flea: no.
“She lives in Birobidzhan?”
It was a while, measured in kilometers, before she spoke. Larissa was aware that the man was studying her face the whole time, peeling back the wrinkles, creases, and folds, interrogating her skin for its secrets. Her first thought was to ignore the question, play dumb. She studied the passing fields and stands of trees as if it were the newfound land. Yet her companion’s patient gaze kept the question alive, like a rat scuttling under the seats. It was a trick you learned at the Lubyanka.
Phlegm in her throat, she flailed at the question with a muttered reply: “She’s a schoolteacher.”
The train slowed and then lurched to a halt. The couplings between the cars relaxed, something electrical ceased to hum. The train was between stations, on another area of flat grassland, hay brushing against the window. This was a typical pastoral, a vista suitable for lowing cattle—but on the other side of the glass, the midges were murder. There were no cattle. Bitterness spasmed along her nerves. Why did the train stop? How many hours of her life had been lost on stopped trains? She turned toward the other passenger, venom pooling in her eyes. In the time it had taken for this breakdown, he had become an old man. Age had carved tracks in his face and burned his skin. His jaw quivered.