Babi Leto, Babi Yar (Part V)

 V.

He had a place to go which, by coincidence, Oleg had never referenced. Strysky Park was quiet and somewhat lonely above the southern skirt of the old city, wooded like so many parts of Kiev. Much was artificial, though, in the groomed swan pond and faux castle ruins. By the middle of his third full day in the city, Yakov had practiced his Tevye voice at a little clearing near the Rapunzel tower: he envisioned a one-man act that would have the milkman pulling a small cart—lost, as it were, on his route and bewildered by the grandeur of the city. “Flogging a dead horse won’t make it run any faster,” he read, then looked up from the book and improvised lines to no one in particular, “and by horse I mean myself, who is (as he speaks) more out of life than the resident robotnik of this very milkcart”—throwing his head back as if jerked by some bridle. “Yes, being lame from his labors is no vacation, but see how cleverly the roles are reversed: he rests in his stable and watches his dear Tevye toil, not even giving me the tips of his trade! And pulling all day with eyes in the mud, I’ve managed to thoroughly lose my way home.” Yakov flipped his book open to an earmarked page and read verbatim,

“You see the tears in my eyes, Pan Sholem Aleichem, and yet must be thinking, how Tevye misses his horse! But what makes you think it’s just my horse? I miss everything, there’s not one thing it doesn’t grieve me to think of. I miss my horse, I miss my village, I miss its elders, I miss its policeman, I miss the dachas of Boiberik, the rich Jews of Yeupetz, I even miss Efrayim the Matchmaker, may the cholera carry him off! When you get right down to it, he’s nothing but a miserably poor Jew himself who’s out to make a living like the rest of us. Don’t ask me what I’ll do in the Land of Israel if I get there safely, God willing, but I do plan to visit Mother Rachel in her grave. I’ll pray there for the daughters I’ll probably never see again, and think of him, too—I mean Efrayim the Matchmaker—and of you, and of Jews everywhere. Here, let’s shake on that! Be well, and have a good trip, and give my very best to any of our friends you may happen to meet on your way.”

He clapped the book shut and burrowed it into his long pants pocket, and mimed a renewed grasp of the cart handles. “As for my journey today, well, it’s only to get food to my noble lame horse, so tomorrow perhaps the rest of us creatures can eat!”

            “So where is your cap to receive your earned alms?” an amused voice came from a bench behind him, and Yakov pivoted in some surprise.

            “Earned?” he tried to temper an oncoming blush. “That was just reading…uh…a rudimentary rehearsal of…”

            “You’re supposed to say: the cap doesn’t come off of Tevye’s head. Tell them to toss what they will into your cart—well, assuming the cart will be there for the catching.”

            “Will you be my manager, then—with due royalties befitting a manager?”

            “I don’t know. Who would have to answer to the passing policeman?”

            “I haven’t gotten that far. At any rate, I’ve lost my way, remember?”

            They talked on the bench for a half hour before she needed to go—back to work, she said, at the Picture Gallery. “On Stefanyk Street. Do you know it?”

            “No. I don’t know much here yet—I’m quite literally off my beaten track.”

            “It’s this way, through Khelnytsky and Citadel parks—a hard trek up but easy down.” She stood and tugged at his sleeve to join. “Don’t forget your horse cart!” They walked leisurely while she explained that she took lunch breaks up here but always got a bad look from the other women who watched the rooms at the museum, as their breaks were finished in a fraction of time. “They’re resentful, most of them, that I’m the director’s daughter, and that I’m only working to fill the summer hours.”

            “You’re a student, then?”

            “At the mathematics faculty—Papa wants art history, but I don’t much care for that. I’m not sure I care much for theorems and postulates, but at least I’m pretty good at all that, or so my professors say. Are you studying here?”

            “Unofficially, yes. Exactly what you see.”

            “Maybe you’d be good at art history.”

            “Well, I could use a job.”

            “You’d probably have to dress up like an old, grim lady!”

            “But you’re not that.”

            “I’m the director’s daughter. If I stayed there forever, I’d look like them.” They strolled slowly down the hill and stopped at the Stefanyk Library. “Across the street is the museum. This place is nice, too, though the ladies here are just as grim.”

            “All grim things have vanished today. Thank you for the walk…”

            “Yulia, I’m called. And You?”

            “I am a stranger in a strange land—”

            “Moses, or is that another piece of Tevye’s narrative?”

            “Both of those, yes, but you can know me as Yakov.”

            “Then I will.”

            Park gates did not open until 6, and sweepers would catch any drunk that the closing guards would, rather unlikely, miss. By hopping the fence, Yakov would have to remain awake and evade detection, and sort play off the sunrise and disappearing stars. The ground was cold and damp, so he wasn’t tempted to lie down. He found the best place to stay was behind the ice cream kiosk, which wouldn’t open until mid-morning at least. There he also found a fifty kopek coin pressed into the soil; he gave a wry smile at the sum total of his present fortunes. The chessboard on his suitcase lent for potential bet-and-wins, but through his fleeting experience around the city, he saw no such enterprises or public interest in the game. The day would unfold in long uncertainties.

            When Yulia did not show up for the lunch hour, Yakov decided to take his chances as well as his life savings to the museum, even though he wished in part not to see her there. He wondered whether his suitcase would be an asset or obstacle to his plan, and decided to lug it along as a safeguard. He practiced what he’d say to get in, and found it rather natural not to lie: “I’ve come from Kiev, a student of the humanities… No, not just off the train, but I haven’t found my long-term lodging yet—if may I check my suitcase in the cloakroom… My name is Jürgen, and I hope my modest budget will permit me the pleasure…” And indeed these lines ushered him past the sympathetic cashier and up the stairs of the gallery.

            The first rooms allowed no place to sit down, so he suffered the need to stand and observe as much as could—he could not afford to rush through the twenty-or-so rooms and be left with nothing to do afterwards. When he came to a broad painting by Johann Baptist Reiter, he smiled at the opportunity to sit at the opposite wall and study the theme at length. ‘Joseph Sold into Egypt’ included all twelve brothers, halved as it were by the central, glowing figure of the title character; there was no Egyptian—the sale, it seemed, had not been made and perhaps this was a final filial moment to consider all angles of their present and future. Benjamin looked older than his full-blooded brother, perhaps because he, too, had come into the world at cost. There was, of course, no hint of Jacob. Because he was now a student—not merely acting as one—Yakov pursued this thought to a smaller painting by Zigmunt Sidorwicz, whose title ‘Object Proof (Corpus Delicte)’ appeared bent to say too much, even though the ‘proof’ of the artist’s theme required some ardent detective work. The eleven-year girl in the painting, dressed as finely as her young mother, wasn’t asking at this point in the scene, and perhaps her mute stare would have been just as frozen a day before, or remain so a week later, or until she too had a palm-sized portrait of a dashing man attired in an officer’s uniform. ‘He existed,’ the voice of the painting seemed to say, ‘and truly is as central as this frame within a frame within a frame…’

            Yakov asked the guard, sitting at the edge of her chair and not so grim, if many visitors looked long at this painting. “Not as long as you,” she said.

            “Do they study ‘Joseph Sold into Egypt’?”

            “That they do. Some of them.”

            “Do they wonder where the father is?”

            “I don’t know.”

            Between these rooms was a statue that commanded Yakov’s attention, even if he had forced his feet to shuffle past it. Now that he had indicated to the guard his interest in Reiter’s painting, he backtracked to that room and gave the statue a further, passing stare. This retracing was not perfunctory—he really wanted to look more deeply at the physiognomies of Reuben, Levi, Dan, Asher… And, satisfying that, he turned to the room of Salvador Albano’s marble sculpture and stopped. A nude figure about Yulia’s size and shape balanced upon a pedestal, pulling at a rope that bound her wrists. She was, by her title, a slave: intensely looking at an area perhaps two body-lengths away (or one, if it hadn’t been for the pedestal). Her hair lay in a rough attempt at a braid—the hempen manacles just enough to tantalize her manipulation of things. Her body looked ready to spring free and defied any frozen, naïve effect of one who might wonder, in luxury, about paternity or loyalty or loss.

            Yakov went past Sidorwicz and the edge-of-chair guard, then into the next room, where he studied the eviction of a peasant family: Our Lady of Kazan above their open door, a broken sack of coins strewn on the floor—as bribe or insufficient funds. Another guard, when asked, said she had heard a university guide’s interpretation that the painter, Zheledowski, had in large championed the communist cause with this work. The icon wouldn’t save the family any more than their capital. Yakov moved on.

            In a rather large room, strangely, there was no guard, but on a far bench sat the only other visitor yet that afternoon. Yakov surmised he was middle-aged, though his back was to the door where Yakov silently entered. His legs were V-d apart, trembling spasmodically as the heels of his shoes spurred the parquet floor. In front of his uplifted head were two tall paintings of similar style: one with a nymph and another with a faceless woman draped against some angled barrier. Thinking fast, Yakov skulked back one room and whispered to the guard that another visitor was in the throes of an ecstasy inappropriate to the environs. The guard swung her head downward and shrugged. Yakov retreated closer to the entrance and whispered the same thing to the first guard, who followed him to the threshold of the larger room. “Can you do something?” she pleaded into Yakov’s ear. He considered the situation and slowly nodded. Just as softly he asked, “May I borrow your badge, please?” She unpinned it and placed it gratefully into his hand. As he attached it to his shirt and walked towards the absorbed man, Yakov cast a sort of prayer, vaguely cognizant of valleys of the shadows of death and such. Laments were rife in life—the psalmist codifying the basic instinct to complain and give over. Let go, if desperately clutching to the semblance of control we know. “Let go,” he heard himself say, in no larger volume than he had just used with the guards. He was now in front of the grimacing man, partially obscuring the view that he had fixed for his licentious foray. “I’ll have to ask you to leave, comrade.”

            “You can’t do—”

            “On behalf of this museum and all things decent, I must… You see, children visit, as well as guests from many cultures. I myself have the right to be free from your intentions. And you have the right to conform to the expectations here.”

            “Who are you, anyway? I’ve come to this place regularly and have never been—”

            “Both of us have said too much under the circumstances. I’ll escort you this way, comrade.”

            Years of setting circus apparatus, wrangling limelit animals, and pushing through some madding crowds provided Yakov a sinewy sense to his comportment. Even his limp, vaguely apparent and far from being a handicap, lent ethos to his present, gentle grasp of the violator’s shoulder as they shuffled past the witnessing guards and the ticket-taker, down the staircase and into the foyer, where the doorman quizzically took the recommendation to “see this comrade out, please.”

            Then Yakov returned to the where the dumbfounded women still stood, handed back the badge, and continued to look at the artwork. He didn’t go back to the tall paintings, but spent some time in front of ‘Jewish Funeral in the Town’ in the same big room, where he tried to determine whether the impressionistic coffin was being shouldered up or down the alley stairs, by equally impressionistic Hasidic men. The largest painting in the room was Josef Brandt’s ‘Prayer in the Steppe’. Were they matins or vespers, Yakov wondered. The garish red glow from the half sun on the horizon seemed to sear into the icon on the side of a stagecoach, and Yakov’s mind went back to the eviction—all art, he realized, could travel in capillary courses. He spent halcyon time in front of a dozen more paintings in the next two rooms, then came to the second sculpture on display, a Polish piece in bronze entitled ‘A Mother’s Kiss’. It was exactly what one would intuit, minus the dug out interior behind their heads. The child was maybe four years old, clasping wholly his mother’s neck and seizing her with wide open eyes; the mother, with eyes closed and more seeing, kissed her boy’s forehead and all essence therein, and Yakov began to cry. Subtly, of course, as there was no reason to; and, if he thought, like Tevye, about how he might be authored, it wasn’t exactly what one might call—

            “Sir?” a gentleman spoke urbanely from the far left of Yakov’s periphery. “Are you okay?”

            Glancing self-consciously, Yakov swallowed and uttered, “quite fine.”

            “I’m glad for it,” the gentleman said, and approached with a practiced savior faire. “I am the director of this museum—Pyotr Nemcenov—and I have been made aware of your citizenship exploits—”

            Yakov thought quickly, as he had done before, and elected not to speak too soon, but also not to let slip the inertia that arguably comes from answered prayer. “I am a student of the humanities,” he began to say, “from Kiev. I haven’t found my long-term… chance to study further… in L’vyiv, but this day—this remarkable museum—has been—”

            “Your visit to us has been remarkable. Simply said, Comrade, uh—”

            “Jürgen.”

            “Yuri, is it?”

            Yakov flit the possibility, then pronounced more clearly: “Jürgen. My father was of German heritage.”

            “Comrade Jürgen—well! Simply said, you have fixed a fault that has occasionally reared its ugly head, challenging the needs of our total operational security. I think you know what I mean, and I thank you for your aplomb.” The director smiled at the sound of his congratulation and waited a moment for Yakov to take it in.

            “Thank you, Director—I really hadn’t expected any kind of recognition, as I was simply acting on instinct—”

            “Exactly, dear Jürgen, which delights me more than if you were acting on orders. My hired guards—don’t get me wrong—relayed by their instinct what they have had difficulty doing in the line of their orders: this indulgent man has been, to say the least, a tricky problem here—he’s rare, he’s of some repute, and he cares not at all about those he deems inferior. Lenin might have qualified him as counter-revolutionary, and (off the record) if we were fully realized as a state, I’d pronounce likewise. But who am I? Merely a lover of art! And some may say he’s likewise! My service to the state is to be director of such art, and his, we may extrapolate, is to take what we provide into his own vortex as director of something else. And by saying this, Jürgen, I mean to exonerate you from any ramifications but also to remind you of how intertwined we all, as servants to the state, really are… Do you understand what I am saying?”

            Yakov, in a practiced sense, thought rapidly and responded, “clearly, Director.”

            Since neither spoke for a half minute, the moment seemed to have suitably passed. But each of them knew, intuitively, that more was at stake. Yakov calculated in silence and newfound prayer; Pyotr kept his level eye and finally broached this prospect: “we could use a guard like you—especially, if I recall you saying, you’re a student of art?”

            “A student of the humanities—”

            “All the better: you mean by that the study of us all!” Pyotr chuckled.

            “More or less. I mean literature first and foremost, but yes, that probably means ‘of us all’.”

            “Could I offer you a job here, as guard to begin with?”

            “I mostly need a place to stay—a job would be welcome, as well.”

            “Then consider it done, Jürgen. I have need for new watchmen as the fall season approaches. This won’t hamper your study commitment in.. did you say,.. Kiev?”

            “Not in the least, as I’m taking leave from that place.”

            “Then come to my office, Jürgen, to settle the details.”

            “Thank you, sir,” and the details were settled.

            The third lunch break into his new job, Yakov trudged up the hill to Strysky Park as he had the days before, hoping to explain things to Yulia. He had barely seen her on her varying shifts, but recognized her disguised scowl when, to her surprise, one of the veteran guards took him on a training tour. She evaded any introduction to Yakov, while her peers—even the grimmer ones—were positively atwitter. Men worked in the floors below, where many thousands of pieces of art were archived or part of a restoration process; to have a man on their floor meant to have more to think about. And Yulia hated sharing that thought. “Why did you go behind my back to impress my father?” she blurted before he knew she was there. “Why did you embarrass me by parading like a peacock?”

            Yakov scratched whatever small beard he had shaved off in these days of employment. He didn’t smile, but felt relieved that she had broken her silence. He waited for her to say something else, and when she didn’t, he slid into the side of the bench that she had turned her back on. “I’ve missed you,” he finally offered. “And I’ve missed what it means to let fate be guided by faith.”

            She listened to the details of the night he had left Oleg’s flat, the morning in this very park, the contemplation that on fifty kopeks and a chess board he’d try to gamble his way back to Samarkand for lack of anywhere else to go. Yulia turned to him in confusion: “Who are you anyway in this homeless condition? What did you do? Why are you pulling me into…”

            Yakov raised his eyebrows. “Into?”

            “Into your life story, because I’m falling for you if you can’t tell!”

            “I can’t. I mean, I am, too—if that is—”

            “O God, Yakov, we’re going to be late, and Daddy will be suspicious and the hags will hate me more and—”

            “You go ahead first—I’ll take the heat for being late.”

            “Be here after 8 tonight, and walk me to your home.”

            “You mean Samarkand?”

            At last she smiled, and kissed him, and rushed down the hill. “Seven-thirty, then,” she called, and he closed his eyes to keep it all in.

            They didn’t exactly elope; they made believe, though, flirtingly close to Pyotr’s knowledge. He rarely visited the exhibition halls of his own museum, so had no real idea how his daughter and newest employee intersected their shifts through the day. Other guards could see their sometime shamelessness—not that they held hands or frolicked to the shadier rooms. They stayed to their posts, mainly, and when visitors were few they gravitated to a certain piece of art and talked. “How does your father justify so many religious themes? How does he get by?” he asked her as they looked over Tadueuz Ajdukiewicz’ ‘Prayer in the Desert’.

            “I don’t know. Why don’t you ask him?”

            “And does this one with its Sudanese Muslims serve a sort of ballast for the ‘Prayer in the Steppe’ next door?”

            “Are you still praying about me?”

            “Are you?”

            “I’m learning to. Maybe that’s what these pictures were meant to do.”

            “I mean they’re all over this place if you think about it: there’s Leopolski’s ‘Praying Jew’—granted, not such a remarkable picture but well painted—and that ‘Funeral in the Town’—”

            “Do you think they’re praying in that one?”

            “Someone probably… that the coffin doesn’t drop.”

            “I’ve seen that happen, by the way.”

            “A coffin dropping?”

            “A man slipping at the gravesite as the other pallbearers were negotiating the position—it was raining, the mud was uncooperative…”

            “And so he fell all the way in?”

            “No, but he lingered at the edge as if he had time to think about it. Meanwhile, the pallbearers strained against the weight and their own lack of footing—don’t laugh, it was my mother’s dear uncle!”

            “Not laughing, just musing.”

            “About my great uncle?”

            “About the equipoise one has to keep, even in such circumstances.”

            “You mean the way a person walks a tightrope, like you described last night?”

            “What I described was child’s play. But yes, I suppose there is some of that in the most serious of occasions. That is what art does, I’m starting to think: depict the hardest human scenarios in the strokes of very practiced doodlers.”

            “Shall I tell that to Daddy? He might promote you to a guide! Just in time for the gradeschool visits!”

            “Tell your daddy that I love you.”

            “No. Joking aside, he’d banish you and bind me to this prison of prayer paintings forever. Don’t let him know that.”

            “See, that’s what I meant last night: I’ve spellbound many an audience with tumbles and scares, yet nothing about the acts I performed were honest-to-goodness risks. There was nobody I loved at stake. Well, that sounds rather inhuman—I mean that…”

            “…that you’ll walk through fire but not say anything to Daddy.”

            “That I’ll remain a disciple of this ‘prison of prayer’, as you say.”

            “And I’ll do math problems, right?”

            “We’ll have most interesting kids…”

            “Of course we will—they will be born and bred among the swans at Strysky Park!”

            “I’ve known worse launches in life.” Yakov continued to muse. “But perhaps never better.”

[a projected four more chapters to come]