Terrified of her own anger, she blurted, “Why was my husband arrested?”
His laugh was abrupt and mirthless and seemed to cost him something. When his mouth opened, it revealed gray stumps of teeth.
“Sections eight and eleven. Terrorism. Same as me.” He paused to see what effect this admission had on her. None was visible. He went on: “I went in three months before he did. We met in Magadan, winter of ’39. He was very ill. Consumption, I believe, though he said, no, no, don’t worry, it’s only a touch of pneumonia.”
“Did he die there? I was never notified.”
The former policeman shrugged. “I suppose so. People were dying less ill than he was. I passed this way last week. They’re doing track work. A Chinaman and a shovel.”
We were never notified about anything, neither about his trial nor his conviction. During the winter and spring of 1939, the two of us—I was eight years old—traveled to Khabarovsk nearly every Sunday morning and hugged ourselves in the frigid shadows of the prison, hoping that Israel would see us from his cell. By then not even the most assiduous appraiser of women would have discovered feminine beauty in Larissa’s hard, rilled face, but she tried to flirt with the guards and policemen anyway. She gave them gifts and feebly winked. Now she knew that he hadn’t even been there.
“He tried to get word to you, but he had nothing with which to bribe anyone. Pathetic, the ruses he tried… I didn’t know him very well, we were in different work brigades. But we talked in the barracks. He thanked me for my intervention in Kisly Klyuch. He told me about you and your daughter, and about the colonization—in the most optimistic language. I didn’t correct him. Also, he talked about his arrest. The politicals always talked about their arrests, it was our favorite subject. We always compared who was sent for, who was invited to come in on their own, who was beaten, what kind of a trial we got, that sort of thing. We were looking for some kind of pattern, a moral order that would give our punishment meaning. You’d think the state security men would have had the answers, but we didn’t; all we knew was that our arrests had been a mistake. The pattern was never quite established, at least not in Magadan. Perhaps other camps succeeded where we failed. I understand that at Okhotsk, where they had some first-rate German intellectuals, they developed some very provocative theories.”
“What did Israel say about his arrest?”
“The usual. He protested his innocence. He said he had made a remark that was taken out of context. We laughed at him. They all said that. We told him that it was his duty as a citizen of the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics not to make a remark that could be taken out of context by the enemies of the workers’ revolution.”
“It had nothing to do with any remark. They arrested everybody. Nearly the whole Komzet presidium.”
“Yeah, a bunch of bourgeois nationalists. Really, no better than Zionists.”
“On the contrary,” Larissa said evenly. “They were all ideologically sound.”
The man was not accustomed to being contradicted, not even now. His eyes turned cold and as hard as two marbles. He spoke now deliberately, his voice resonant with indignation:
“And they were saboteurs. Wreckers. There was no doubt about it.”
“Was sabotage one of the charges against Israel?”
He waved his hand dismissively at the middle-aged woman. “They couldn’t have messed up as badly as they did without intent. The first year, they did virtually no planting and no building and lost nearly their entire herd of cattle. They misused and broke equipment. They ruined horses. None of those Yids could plow a goddamned straight line. Two thirds of them took one look at real work and got back on the train.”
“We had floods,” she protested. “It was the rainiest summer of the century, roads and bridges were washed away. We had a plague of Siberian tick.”
“Excuses. History accepts no excuses.”
Larissa turned away. She again recalled those lost Sundays, how we returned in the evenings along these same tracks, unable to speak.
“I always assumed you had something to do with Israel’s arrest.”
“No, at the time of his arrest I was felling timber in Kolyma.”
“But before that you were state security,” Larissa insisted. “They were watching us all along. You must have prepared a report on the incident in Kisly Klyuch.”
He smiled as if he had been congratulated. Now his mirth was genuine.
“I noted that he was a troublemaker,” he said cheerfully.
The train bolted forward. One of the packages on the overhead rack teetered, but remained in place. As if the train had been momentarily halted in a foreign country, its motion now carried Larissa to a place of familiar fear. She peered along the line, studying the buckle and weave of the rails for signs of an approaching station.
The former policeman didn’t speak for another hour. Then he said, “One more thing. In the hospital, Shtern showed me a card trick. He was very odd about it. First he performed the trick, and then he showed me how he had done it. I was grateful afterwards: it’s passed time over the years.”
In a monotone, Larissa asked, “Do you have a pack of cards?”
He nodded and removed them from inside his coat. He handed the pack to Larissa. She shuffled and returned the cards. He said, “This is called the Paterson Hop, I don’t know why. Please, take a card, any card. Now hold it for a moment while I place the king of hearts and the queen of hearts at the top and bottom of the pack, like so. You’ve seen this trick before?”
“Yes. Go on, please.”
He performed the trick, perhaps not as smoothly as Israel would have, but every time after great complication and travail the king and queen were reunited in the middle of the deck. Larissa asked him to repeat the trick several times, but didn’t once yield a smile.
That evening I met my mother at the train station beneath the great tin letters fixed on rails running above the station house’s roof. They proclaimed the name of our city in Russian and Yiddish and still do to this day. When a Russian word, running from left to right, meets a Yiddish one, running from right to left, they always draw the eye to the space between them. Now Larissa looked away and searched me out among the figures standing on the platform. She stepped unsteadily across the tracks, her hair escaping from her beret and spilling a gray halo around her. One of the bags slipped from her arms. She stopped, but left it there. Unaccustomed to her desperate expression, I hesitated to help. She didn’t tell me about her encounter on the train until years later.
Six
As waving and shouting Jews dangled from the train’s windows, Settlement No. 1 ground to a stop on a cold, crystalline afternoon in September 1928. The station was no more than a weather-stained cottage surrounded by a scatter of small wooden buildings and some ambiguously agricultural equipment. Neither the buildings nor the equipment looked new. A wide dirt road trailed past some scrubby, mostly leafless trees and then into a meadow. The view beyond the meadow stretched for tens of kilometers to a low range of pale, gray mountains. The settlers fell silent. Larissa wondered if they were overwhelmed by the fact of their arrival or disappointed by the emptiness of the place. She herself had expected to be disappointed; she was now surprised by the bubble of excitement that rose through her body, squeezed her breasts, rushed blood to her cheeks and ears, and pulsed in her head. She glanced over at Israel. His eyes were as soft as a newborn kitten’s.