My beloved, my love, I don’t understand what happened, what’s happened specifically now. Your husband found out, you say. How he found out—you don’t say. I’m sorry about his discovery. It must have pained him. He—yes, even he—must know, as I do, how wonderful you are. But I can’t help feeling sorry for myself and for you, for the two of us, my Katrina, sorry that our love has thus been doomed suddenly to die.
I’ve never pleaded with you, but I’ll ask just this one time: Can’t you leave him? After all, the hardest part is over. He knows. The secret is no longer a secret. Bring your beautiful daughter and come live with me, with us, here. I can just imagine the kind of life you lead, the comfort and luxury in which a spectacular woman such as yourself must live. Not that you ever showed off or looked down on me, God forbid, your soul is a gentle and good one, but I allowed my imagination to run free. And I, as you know, live a simple and modest life. But we’d have a warm and pleasant home, and the beach is nearby, and the hustle and bustle and chaos of our country also offers a joie de vivre and a sense of festivity and color. Come, my love, come live your life with me. And if you want, my darling, I will come live with you. We’ll find ourselves a small apartment, even just a room would suffice. I’ll paint and you’ll do your interpreting, and we’ll live together, a happy life. Whatever you choose.
But if you don’t respond, this will be my final letter. And suddenly I think to myself: You’re such a selfish scoundrel, so focused only on yourself. You can’t seem to grasp the kind of hell in which your beloved is living, you only remember the handful of days spent together. And not all the other days through which she is forced to struggle with life’s hardships, with life itself, with all its demands and unfairness. And if your beloved says she can’t do it any longer, that all she wants is peace and quiet and tranquility, you have to respect that. If you love me, you wrote, let me go. I could see the tears in your eyes through your written words. And that’s what I am doing, my love, I’m letting you go, if that is what you want. You know where to find me, and I have no idea how to get to you. I love you and I will wait. I love you and won’t be a burden to you.
26
Ya’ara came across Igor Abramovich’s last letter to his lover in one of the boxes. Well, a copy of the last letter actually, as the original had been mailed to Katrina’s post-office box in Moscow. Attached to the letter was a photocopy of the stamped envelope in which the original had been sent, and Ya’ara came to the conclusion that Igor was either a very meticulous and organized man or simply couldn’t let go of anything connected to the woman he loved. Igor’s precise and embellished script appeared on the envelope; Katrina’s name and address had been written with a loving hand, using a fountain pen. Along the edge of the photocopy, in red ink, Igor had written: “Sent on 4/22/92. My final letter perhaps?”
Ya’ara translated the letter as best she could, recording the text on a white sheet of paper, and wondering all the while if her Hebrew version was capturing Igor’s emotions and archaic style that so touched her heart.
She found Katrina’s letters in the same box, inside a small cardboard container. The last letter she sent was the one Igor referred to in his. It truly was a heart-rending letter. She sounded tired and defeated. Let me go, she wrote. I won’t write to you again. I can’t.
One of the other boxes contained a small sketch pad. Katrina’s face adorned its pages, in charcoal, in brown ink, skillfully sketched with love. There were also sketches of a tranquil seascape, a grove of trees, a shaded bench in a public park.
A distinct memory flashed through Ya’ara’s mind for a moment. It was so real she felt as if she could bite into it. She and her mother were walking hand in hand through their old neighborhood, the wind was whipping up leaves and plastic bags, the smell of exhaust fumes was drifting in from the main road that leads to Haifa, with its incessant traffic, the low-rise and shabby tenement buildings so like the one in which Igor and Galina used to live, in Bat Yam. She had sat for almost an hour in front of that tenement building, trying to make contact with the ghosts of Igor and his adolescent daughter, preparing for her meeting with Gal, who herself was already the mother of teenage children.
Ya’ara’s parents also immigrated to Israel from the Soviet Union, from the far reaches of the empire, from Vladivostok. They arrived in the country in the 1970s, after having had their requests to emigrate rejected by the authorities on three occasions. After the first request, her father was transferred from his position in the laboratories of the large oil refinery to the facility’s warehouse. He lost his job entirely after the second request. Their lives went from hard to unbearable, but her father, the stubborn man he was, went on to submit a third request nevertheless. He managed to make a living by working in a local market, at a fish stall. He sold fresh produce when available, but spent most of the time dealing in smoked and salted fish, whose smell permeated his clothes. Ya’ara had no real recollection of it, yet she seemed to be able to feel the slippery and scaly texture of the fish. Her father spent long hours on his feet behind the counter, in the freezing cold, in the filth. Her mother survived the first two requests, but she, too, lost her job at the municipal library after the third. The winter that year was a particularly harsh one: icy winds blew in from the ocean, the heating system went down after the water pipes froze and burst, the snowplows worked around the clock, spewing diesel fumes, the skin on people’s hands cracked and bled, the radio crackled and broadcast reports about large ships trapped in the frozen seas. The sun, even during the few hours of light, was gloomy and gray. A gray sun, her mother said, can you even imagine that? Ya’ara was just a little girl when she heard her mother speak of such things, and her mother’s stories came from a different world, a world that existed somewhere but certainly didn’t exist there, in Kiryat Haim, where the sun shone warm most days of the year, casting a bright glow, painful to the eyes, over the endless rows of tenement buildings and the sparse trees. She listened eagerly to her parents’ stories, which to her sounded like myths from a cruel and frozen land. And she, free spirit that she was, raced to follow the alluring voice of her heart, which pulled her to the sea and the sun and the greenish pool of water in the dark and fragrant orchard that still survived on the edges of their modest neighborhood, on the other side of the dirt road. There, in the shade of the orange trees, she would immerse herself for magical hours on end in books borrowed from the municipal library, thrilling and chilling books, tales of adventure and tales of love, books about unruly orphans (whose hair miraculously turned from red to auburn over the years), books about tough men and books about smart and courageous women. And to go with her perfect Hebrew, her mother taught her to read and write in Russian, too. “There’s no need to be ashamed of the language, maminka,” she said to her. “It’s not just a language. It’s an empire.” And that word, empire, echoed in her head. As a child she would imagine the immensity of the Russian language, the vast expanse it covered between the giant oceans, the millions of people who spoke it, dreamed their dreams in it, and she wandered back and forth between the ancient language that was hers and that other huge language, which was her mother’s, and she also read Russian books that her mother would present to her with a touch of celebration. Those books she’d read in bed, enveloped in her soft blanket, her heart filled with an inexplicable sense of longing.