Babi Leto, Babi Yar (Part I.)

Yakov was born in a complicated set of circumstances, from his breach position to the problem of his parentage. His mother made him Jewish, herself circumcising him against the explicit orders of her husband, who off-and-on doubted the boy was really his. His wife was faithful, he knew, yet also a rape victim several times over by the Schutzstaffel that spared their lives at Babi Yar—luckily?—on the condition of their collaboration. She was clearly a Jew, but he was a German emigrant (now Soviet citizen). When asked why he left the Reich, he simply said “out of love.” “With Jews?” “With my wife.”

            A risible idea, and perhaps useful, thought Commandant Radomski, who was in need of local moles to set up the Syrets labor camp. This mixed couple would supply language, lists and legerdemain to ensure their conjugal love never blended to other loyalties—none, save this SS contract in blood. When Yakov was born he was declared ‘Jürgen’, and his mother used each name with him deliberately:

            “There is a God who loves us, Yakov, no matter what any of us do.”

             “Every little trick counts, Jürgen, for making sure you get ahead.”

            He was still a toddler in late September, 1943, when Syrets had an uprising. Radomski put to death dozens who did not escape but quickly realized the fifteen who succeeded would require outside help. Jürgen’s mother swore she had no knowledge of them, but her pleas were in vain. As SS guards dragged her out of their tiny flat, her husband screamed at them, “why not me? Take me—I can find out more!” She never came back, disappearing like the Nazis did some six weeks later. Now, from the winter of ’43, Yakov would hear only his intended name and know himself as the last remains of his mother.

             The reassertion of Soviet governance made them prisoners again, as German collaborators were put to death or, to prevent Yakov from becoming a cumbersome orphan, exiled to central Asia. Samarkand was the city where Stalin’s dart landed, and Yakov grew up there among other German refugees. His father was shredded, bereft of all roots or reason to live, but he took the job offered him to manage the books at the local circus. This area of the earth actually never needed a Moscow mandate on acrobats or the way they could draw a crowd; it was easy enough, then, to keep the perfunctory books and codify the inertia of listless, layered cultures.

            Years passed, and while his dad sunk into books and vodka, Yakov became an adroit observer of how things ran. The circus of Samarkand was not strictly what was billed. Fire-eaters, strongmen, plate-spinners and jugglers were all intent on what they could get on the street more than under the big tent. Yakov followed them and the cardsharks and hustlers: he reveled at the simplicity of the shell game that always preyed on self-assurance (of the spectator, not the sheller). Yakov wasn’t bright—he didn’t overthink what ‘self-assurance’ meant, let alone the victim’s arrogance or the trickster’s cockiness.  What he did understand, imminently well, was the pattern of patterns, the ways things tended to work: always the whirl-about ball settled close to the predictor, and almost always in the patter before exposing this fact, the predictor would flick through his wallet, eyeball a jeerer, stare too intently at that damned shell to the point of unblinking blindness, and at that indiscernible moment the silent switch occurred and the hustler asked just one more time if the choice was sure, which it had to be by now. The lift to empty space exhilarated the crowd and lured in a line of better-thans, and occasionally—as part of the pattern—one was allowed to win.    

            Partly because his father would flay him if he ever went in that direction, and partly because he was too scrawny to withstand the inevitable beatings by some of the dupes, Yakov did not practice this side of the circus trade. Instead, he trained as a tightrope walker—an apprentice, anyway, when his duty to sweep the grandstand floors were done. His quota of falls, naturally, would determine whether or not he’d tenure on the high-wire, and he was about at limit when, on a rather raucous night he slipped and splayed his legs to prevent the full fall, yelped at the jolting pain but managed to cling upside-down like a three-toed sloth. The audience howled, and when he recovered enough to wince toward the stanchion, he began to feel the crowd as a kind of hope: he’d turn clown, wave wildly and feign confidence and fear as the final few feet of cable let him have the spotlight.

            Before the show ended he rummaged through the equipment shed for some stilts cast aside many clown years ago and rushed into the arena fireman-style, propping them up against the high-wire latter and climbing upon them to learn on the spot, clownishly, in front of everyone. To be clumsy now made some sense, but Yakov also had a developed sense of balance and no apprehension of added height. He pirouetted once by accident, then again on purpose, ran to keep from falling forward, skulked backward and figured out a way to wave—quickly, clownishly, as before. His dismount was on cue with the confused rush of two animal trainers, who were ordered by the ringmaster to put a halt to this hijinx. The crowd roared approval at this choreography, and Yakov pretended to swim upstream as his handlers logged him out of the arena.

            His manager tore into him after the show but knew, as did the sanctioned clowns, that Yakov was a star tonight, and would indeed have his further chances.

            That glow lasted a lucky few years, until one night when the clowns followed the dancing bear and—without provocation from Yakov’s view—the bear charged into his stilts and sent him tumbling, slithering now with a broken left leg as the bear growled a contemplation of a fuller mauling. That did not happen, though, and the spotlight seemed to draw the bear back to his predictable role, while Yakov was pulled to the umbra. The manager knew the animal would need to be put down and he ground his teeth at the inanity of it all, but Yakov insisted even on the summoned gurney that everything was his own fault—his height confused the creature—and that he himself would make amends, restore the bear’s sense of reality.

            They shot the bear and fired Yakov. The bookkeeper seemed to take this as a cue and drank four bottles that night alone, never to wake up from this resort.

           

            Though his father had spoken little about his mother or, even less, about Kiev, Yakov vowed he’d go back to his origin once his leg had healed. He never again walked without a limp, but the main of things was set: Stalin’s mandates were to be reversed and no one questioned Yakov’s plan, or lack of one. His train took him past Bukhara across the Amu Darya to Charjou, where he disembarked for a few days, as if to reconsider. He had very little money—hadn’t really thought of scouring his father’s hiding spots, which inevitably would have been emptied anyway by those that removed his body. Part of his time in Charjou was to gather himself.

            He slept in a swimming pavilion on a river lagoon and ate persimmons, cantaloupe, sunflower seeds and grapes from the dacha gardens lining the canals. On one dostum he found some metal tea cups and practiced the shell game with a large grape. He knew its oval shape would not lend to the roll of a rubber ball, but he was surprised how dexterous he was with the swirl of the inverted cups. He imagined a little audience and his need to patter. In Samarkand the language of the street was Tajik, much different than the mix of Uzbek and Turkmen here. Yakov was best in Russian and decided to develop lines that began in that language, blurred at points in Tajik, especially before bringing the shells to a sudden stop. Before leaving this dacha, he carefully tore a square of the baize cover. He also realized that cherries from a tree in the adjoining yard would roll better than oblong grapes, so he picked the ripest ones to test and filled his pockets with those that succeeded through the pattern.

            Charlatans play on the ebbs of traffic; merchants waiting to catch the train back to Bukhara sometimes had minutes and money to spare, a window for a game of chance. Yakov limped to a spot between the rynok and the train station and spread out the baize square. He stood upon it and put the stack of tea cups on top of his head. Then he took three cherries out of his jacket pocket and juggled them, taller and taller until one sailed high and into the stack of cups. Still juggling two, Yakov timed a dip into his pocket for another cherry, and quickly then another. He bucketed three of the five into the topmost cup, and by this time, he had some spectators.

            “Da vai,” he called to one bystander to recover one of the errant cherries. He bid him to toss it straight up, and completed the catch with his head, punctuated with a Tajik “oh-wah!” He missed the other cherry thrown his way, yet this helped put an end to the monkey business and instill a sense of his fallibility. Beginning his patter he scooped out the cherries and pocketed all but one. He flipped the tea cups into his left hand and then to his right, separating them as a harmonium player would stretch out his instrument. He instantly knelt and began the swirl:

            you see these suckers time to time

            trying to take what isn’t mine—

            they have three mouths, I have one

            you got money, they got none—

            just that cherry’s shared delight

            worth twice your bid, you get it right

            see here—

he lifted one of the cups to reveal nothing—

                                                             famished or he’s full?

                                    The chase for cherry is his pull—

                                    what’s yours? Who’s hungry for a win?

                                    Ah, that’s me—

he fingered the outer cups and switched one with the middle, which, lifted up revealed the wobbling cherry—

                                                            I’d let you cash that in!

                                    If you can do what I can, you double what you are.

                                    Who’s in? Da vai! You know these suckers aint so smart—

tapping each cup before a final swirl. A heavy man threw down a ten ruble note, which caused Yakov to improvise his prepared speech. “You hold it, sir—you haven’t lost it yet,” and, handing the bill back with his left hand, he rotated the middle cup out. The man took back the bill and pointed down at the new middle. “That’s your bet?” Yakov queried, to which the man grunted ‘of course’. “You sure?” He looked unsure but yelled “da vai” for confirmation. Yakov delicately opened the new middle cup to nothingness and quickly said before the fat man’s groan, “I’ll double or nothing for ten rubles more.”

            “You won’t move them again?”

            “You still have you money—you keep it all if you win.”

            “Just those two cups?”

            “I have no better chance than you.”

The fat man pointed to one and Yakov mimicked his move, to make him sure.

“Yes! that one.” As delicately as before, Yakov opened to the cherry. The crowd’s reaction nearly drowned out Yakov’s even tone:

            “You win.”

            And so he did. Nothing for the fat man, nothing this time for Yakov—except a line of confident followers. The next two lost—one to double-or-nothing, the other refusing that offer. The third fellow decided that putting the force of his foot on his cup of choice was all that was needed to beat Yakov, and indeed this leadfoot won—and set up the next two who tried the same technique, and they lost. Onlookers could see what Yakov would do—he’d continue to question the bigness of the bet or to see the money that would back it up, and when the victim shifted his weight to check what money he actually had, the shells would imperceptibly shuffle. One or two from the crowd would call out this trick, but the guffaws from the rest drowned them out, or the victim couldn’t tell anymore where his loyalties lay.

            In forty minutes, Yakov earned eight hundred rubles. The bets of ten were long ago past, and the last bet of one hundred Yakov lost, on purpose to save steam for the next afternoon. A couple hounders followed him after he folded up his baize square, asking where he lived, but that was easy for Yakov to deflect: “I live under one of these shells.” And he mixed into a trolleybus crowd and exited when there was little way of trailing him further. He bought some samsa and mors at a kiosk and sat on a park bench. He watched beautiful Turkmen women walk by in their lackadaisical gait. Some of them looked at him. He would not win with them, he mused, though evidently, some men did.

            Dusk settled and the lights around the park went on. There was a billiard hall that caught Yakov’s eye, but he knew he wouldn’t hustle well with his gimpy leg. Why not just shoot around? he posed to himself, but shook off the notion. Maybe tomorrow. He went into a restaurant and ordered shchi and sashlik, and ate slowly. By the time he returned to the swimming pavilion, the stars were the only lights in sight. He groped for the narrow bench that would be his bed, and cursed his lack of memory, as he had wanted to purchase a pillow at least.

           

            Three days in Charjou were essentially the same: he’d swim, bide his time ‘til afternoon, perform his shell routine in different parts of town, then people watch—not for calculation sake, but to enjoy thinking about their innocence. The suckers were innocent, too, but different. And he was innocent in his own way. Like the Iago he once saw in the converted Samarkand circus, Yakov never quite lied to those he fooled, but made them fool themselves; for that short routine, he had to tacitly echo “I am not what I am.” Honestly, Yakov wasn’t nearly so duplicitous; he really did not know what he was.

            He took a train to Astrakhan and from his window saw a lean wolf loping in the salty desert. Must be lost, even if there were a pack. A wandering Jew, maybe—not lost, but avoiding pogroms. What better place to hide?

            The desert stretched the entire day, and the Astrakhan station met him in near darkness. He hadn’t wanted to use his winnings for hotels quite yet, but this city would not lend so easily to his obscurity. There was more money to be made here, but a lot more work and risk—the patter would have to change and the escape routes more defined. Astrakhan had miles of city parks along the Volga, but more law enforcers to move along hucksters or chase down thieves. And this was the point Yakov vowed to distinguish: he’d hustle (without lying—the gamble was the game and everyone knew that truth) but he’d never steal. Well, he thought, I did pilfer the teacups and some food… He groggily vowed he would pay back the loans to make a living. There, he thought—surviving isn’t stealing.

            The next day Yakov slept in. The Oktyabriska hotel at first claimed no space, but Yakov put an extra twenty rubles on the desk, and a room was found. The shower was not hot and there wasn’t any soap, but Yakov figured he didn’t need a deep clean—he had scoured himself with sand in his final swim at the lagoon. Plus, the patter needed a modicum of grime.

            you see these suckers time to time

                                       trying to take—

“Tschyot, durak! Get on with it, would’ya?” The clientele here wouldn’t suffer fools, even if they were just as drawn to gamble. “It’s business, not fuckin’ art.”

            Some of the conventions worked the same—double or nothing the first loss and be sure to let that ploy win. Win without taking, take without winning, lose liberally enough to keep the con alive. But the tactics had to change. One man forced Yakov to back away once he stopped the swirl. “This one!” he said, himself picking up the cup to the rubber ball—Yakov had bought several at the Univermag to replace his bruised cherries. Now everyone would practice that ploy, even if the stupid next guy didn’t follow the swirl in the first place and picked up the cup to nothing. The third and fourth succeeded, though, even as Yakov whipped up the routine. He had to find a way to get the ball out of the loop altogether, which was difficult insofar as the patter deliberately included peeks and exposed rolls, shell to shell. The crowd had to have glimpses and hints of the prize, and shelling total emptiness would, of course, annihilate the scam. He never had to show the victim which shell had it in the end, he never had to take their double or nothing bids, but eventually he’d need to roll that ball back out of his sleeve and into the rotation. He couldn’t sustain this orchestration for more than forty minutes—in some cases half that of his experience in Charjou—and much of the day was moving around for resets.

            Stalingrad was no better, and by his second day in Kharkov, Yakov was back down to nothing in his pockets. He factored in some necessary losses to entice a crowd, but increasingly—as if the word was out on his tendencies—he couldn’t balance the deliberate losses with the ones out of his control. His wins were engendering more vitriol from the victims: in Charjou, the anger was vocal, tempered with ridicule by fellow dupes; in the Volga region, the anger was more tangible, the crowd pressing in for compensatory justice. There weren’t any jokes to complement the patter, and, bad leg and all, Yakov would shuffle as quickly as he could from an argument, taking up his apparatus but leaving the disputed bills behind.

            By and large, Yakov regarded these failures philosophically. He wouldn’t be shelling forever, just as his apprenticeship on the high wire was mainly a means of brewing confidence. He enjoyed being a clown—his juggling was improving enough that his way of drawing crowds was less to basket little balls into teacups and more to create the smiles that he was missing. His was getting used to his limp and imagined factoring that into an act—limp on stilts, for instance, or practice walking on his hands. The circus at Karkov was none too interested in vagabonds like him, but Kiev, he heard, had more competition than the central, iconic ‘TSIRK’ he saw in every large city. It hadn’t exactly been his plan when he left Samarkand, but then again finding a plan along the way was the larger point.

            Yakov set his baize square in a brazen spot at the railway station and won easily, even with a diminishment of his patter and shiftiness. He needed 20 rubles to complete the purchase of a train ticket, and in ten minutes he had fifteen times that much. Police would be showing up soon, and, with some scruples, Yakov called out a young onlooker from the crowd who was glued to the action. The crowd demurred at the prospect of taking advantage of a kid, but Yakov put up his hand and guided the boy to shift the shells around for himself, to get the feel of the motion. Yakov asked him to stop when he felt ready, then pointed to a shell he knew was empty. The boy, delighted, lifted to nothingness and accepted Yakov’s ten-ruble note. “Double or nothing!” a man laughingly called out, but Yakov was already walking away. He bought his train ticket and didn’t return to claim the teacups and baize square, which, of course, hadn’t been his to begin with.