Babi Leto, Babi Yar (Part VI)

VI.

In the often unbusy afternoon spells, Yakov reflected month after month about what would be more likely: ever holding one of those ugly duckling kids with Yulia, marrying her against her father’s wishes, or returning to the unpronounced promise of scholarship with Harel and, if the signs were right, with Oleg. These weren’t mutually exclusive goals, by no means. In the primal conditions of Yakov’s flat, where Yulia lay with him on certain weeknights until (by design) the closing hour of the university library, the secret couple talked about everything. She no longer worked at the museum—her math studies consuming her days—and he saved all his epiphanies and curiosities for her ears only, passing the time at the museum happily enough in a preponderant silence. Some museum workers must have guessed their romance, but not all: they had distanced themselves publically to be most themselves… privately. They joked that they had no kind of Romeo and Juliet death wish, but neither laughed gratuitously at the similitude.

            “So that’s not the derivation of your name?”

            “I’m sure it’s related to youth, and probably something to do with Caesar… I frankly never asked.”

            “My friend in Kiev told me about a character named Julia in a novel by Orwell—”

            “What about her?”

            “That she was an angel in hell. Too dangerous to read, apparently…”

            Yulia nuzzled closer. “What about your own name?”

            “I’m a poor man’s Romeo—can’t you tell?”

            “No, really.”

            “As your father knows, by registering me to this very cozy castle of ours (for now, at least!), I am officially ‘Jürgen’. Jürgen Johanovich Buchner, if that doesn’t raise an eyebrow or two.”

            “Why, then, do you have ‘Yuri’ on your badge?”

            “Because, in your father’s wisdom, ‘Jürgen’ would raise an eyebrow or two. He knows it comes from my father’s side and I think he actually likes the ring of it. But the nature of museum guards is not to distract. My mother, apparently, didn’t much like the distraction either, so she pared it down to ‘Yakov’…. I don’t know what she might have had in mind… It’s the diminutive of Jacob—the trickster.”

            “I’ve heard of him—the one who wrestles all night with God.”

            “Technically, an angel of God.”

            “Like me, you mean? An angel in hell?”

            “Yes, like you, but let’s forget that hell business! How are you aware of any of this stuff anyhow? What opiate of the masses are they mixing into math lessons nowadays?”

            “Look, I’m day-dreaming 9-to-5 just as much as you are; and Daddy, believe it or not, used to tell me all kinds of bedtime stories—expressly avoiding the princessy ones.”

            “Well why, then, are we afraid of his disapproval? I’m not at all a dragon to ransom his princess! Nor a prince charming, for that matter…”

            “But you are a stranger in a strange land.”

            “Okay, but for how long?”

            Yulia turned away, compelling Yakov to consider fate and faith and quietly ask again.

            “For as long as he’s the director. Now don’t ask me anything more.”

            “I’ll quit then—we’ll run away.”

            “I am an only child. You must know how these things go.” They fell silent, and within the hour she was gone.

            Wanting to keep his guards happy, Pyotr Nemcenov turned a blind eye when they chatted during the slow times, or knit or read. Yakov nevertheless asked formally if he might do the latter, to keep viable his prospective studies of literature. “Oh, but of course, Jürgen. And I could also vouch for your transfer to university here—you needn’t go back to Kiev, you know.”
            “Well, I don’t want to shut that door. And I am enjoying a little self-study, so to speak. What I had there, though—and lack here—was access to many books—”

            “Indeed, we have several proud libraries to match. And to set you straight,” Pyotr scribbled out a note on the back of a used envelope, “take this to the library across the street. They’ll be happy to help you out.”

            An overstatement, but Yakov nevertheless was at least tolerated by a taciturn library attendant. After quizzing him on authors and titles he had already read, she curtly relayed to him the rules: he could not browse the shelves, but could request what was releasable from the three wooden boxes of index cards she now pulled from under the counter. A few he recognized from Besarabska, but not many. Babel’s Red Cavalry had a thick red line through it, begging a question why it was still in the box. Yakov was glad to see Uncle Vanya and Cherry Orchard and asked the attendant if Seagull were available. No. No Dombrovsky, which he tacitly craved to procure, and no Dostoevsky except Poor Folk, which had disappointed him. The attendant was at this point drumming her fingers, and when another patron came through the front doors, she took the boxes back under the counter and leveled an irritated look at Yakov: “I’ll be back with your request.”

            A minute later, in the witness of this third party, Yakov had to accept The Quiet Don that she put into his hands. His gratitude was not completely false, though, as he wondered if he would have done any differently had their roles been reversed. Indeed, Sholokhov would make for a reasonable read.

            The other enterprise that occupied him through the winter months was his serendipitous search for Harel. By tram or by foot, Yakov would make his way every day after work to Gorodoska Street and variously browse the placards at the circus building or the railway station. He had found an affordable restaurant on Mikhnovs’ki Street that he could frequent a couple times a week, and so he leisurely ate dinners, looking out the window, reading until darkness set in or the waiter prodded him to move on. He passed the locked gates of the synagogue once or twice in his walk-about of this region, and fully aware he was just as likely to bump into Oleg as Harel, he felt emboldened that the days were passing tranquilly enough, like the Don when all battles had ceased, or the far more interesting Potudan River, which raged subtly, independent, as it were, of warfare.

            He had been granted this fresh novel on his fourth trip to the library, the attendant sufficiently satisfied with his reports on her allocations of The Artamonov Business and The Rout. About the latter, Yakov expressed appreciation of Fedeyev’s exposure of Russia’s far east, and sympathy with Levinson who took all responsibility for the slaughter of his regiment. Such stories made him think more than any theme of Sholokhov’s, he sheepishly offered, and, with this way in, she gave him the library’s lone volume of Platonov’s Potudan River and told him in stony seriousness to read it twice.

            The second time was with Yulia on the coldest string of evenings, wrapped together in wherewithal blankets, “as if the warmth of life had grown dark in him, and Nikita Firsov fell asleep in the quiet of this deserted place. Insects flew over him, a spider web floated above him, a wandering beggar stepped across him and, without touching the sleeper, uninterested in him, went on about his business.” Reuniting in adulthood with Lyuba almost saves him, castaway soldier that Nikita barely ever was: there was no injury to show for his time at war. He walks—they walk—the banks of the frozen river, and silently the thought of slipping in and disappearing becomes a strange narcotic—the slow magnetic force that pulls planets into a reigned-in orbit. It’s Lyuba who breaches the thawing water when Nikita goes inexplicably away, and faceless men of the village pull her out. Maybe Nikita, when he comes back, perceives the nonsense, as he says he’s “already used to being happy with you.” Used to it! Like the notion of slipping into oblivion!

            “I saw a man in Leningrad,” Yulia reflected, “who on the bank opposite Daddy and me walked, fully dressed, down the stone stairs into the murkiness of the Neva and never came up.”

            “What did you do?”

            “We yelled—Daddy flagged down a car, whose driver got out and looked across the vast stretch of river…and shrugged.”

            “What is it about such souls?”

            “Which ones do you mean?”
            Yakov closed his eyes and thought deeply and, pressed by Yulia’s question again, assented that he didn’t know what he meant. He wanted to drift off to sleep, both of them within this bivouac, and pretend they were used to such happiness, here and now...

            In March, while eating at the Mikhnovs’ki Street restaurant, Yakov finally found Harel. Leaving his borsch half-eaten and too many rubles on the table, Yakov dashed across the street and startled the man as he unlocked the gate to the courtyard of the synagogue. Yakov hadn’t rehearsed any gambit or thought through any reason for a reunion—hadn’t the original occasion, after all, been rather forgettable? Nonetheless, Harel smiled pensively and read between the lines on Yahov’s forehead, as if his counterpart wore a phylactery. He welcomed him inside and put on the teapot, and they talked for two hours before realizing how strange it was, such cycles of circumstance. In such oblivion of discourse they hadn’t even brought up Oleg, who had given Yakov a small book of poems by Bialik and which Yakov had carried—rather dog-eared and bent—in his coat pocket all these months. He had planned to dig this out as a re-acquaintance gift, and would have forgotten it altogether had not their discussion turned to books.

            “Golden islands we thirsted for,” the beadle read in Russian, “as for a homeland.” He repeated the line and worked out its translation back to Hebrew.

            “Is it not Yiddish?” Yakov inquired.

            “As the poet spoke it, perhaps; but the original would be in Hebrew.… How we even have it here in Russian is a fair mystery. It would have been rare, you realize, before this era of atheism, and yet—like this holy house—well…. Well. Circumstances are blind on one level, and open to opportunity on another. You are kind, Ilya, to lend it to me.” 

            “I must tell you,” Yakov began to say, “at the risk of everything—”

            “—Then don’t,” Harel waved his hands. “I can discern why you’ve shown up, a half year ago, and now. In a sense it’s been for two different reasons, but—thin soul you have—it’s the same reason.”

            “Which is?”
            “To wander back.”

            “Back to Kiev? You see, that’s where I came from when I met Oleg, and,…well, I should tell you from the very start—”

            “Let that wait. I enjoy the spontaneity and the prospect of your return—let that be my memory today.”

            They met weekly like this on Tuesday evenings, when Harel habitually tidied the synagogue from dust and the odd, sanctioned tourists who would come by appointment. Yakov, who presently heard only Yulia—and now Harel—utter his preferred name, brought with him whatever book he’d be reading; after Platonov, however, the library had to resort to loaning him the more mundane likes of Gorky and Gladkov. For his part, Harel lent him stories by Yushkevich—“Simon Solomonovich, from the Odessa milieu of Babel and Olesha. You say that your Yulia is a mathematician: have her read ‘Algebra’ and glean her thoughts on this. But read it yourself, first. It’s not the sort of thing that would amiably circulate among students of mathematics.”

            That was because its protagonist, Saveliev, was losing his mind—his ‘Savelievishness’, in the stream-of-consciousness by which he was narrated (and which he futilely tried to narrate himself). Leaning lightly against Yulia, enjoying their first warm day of spring at Strysky Park, Yakov read how Saveliev took a bleak hotel room, “‘crawled into the cot, which had been lying in wait for him a long while, curled up into a ball like a puppy hound, and fell to solving a vacuous algebraic equation:

(A + B) – (A + B)

in which A was none other than he, Saveliev, his wife and children, while B was all the rest: riches, influence, joys, Marinka, his stallion Richard the Third. A + B = all Savelievishness.’”

            “What again was the cause of his loss?”

            “It’s not explicit in the text. Somehow the members of his family are strewn about Siberia…”

            “Read on.”

            Saveliev seeks signs—a rooster which indeed crows to usher in a last-ditch dawn, then a mess hall to supply some somatic nourishment, only for the lost soul to sit unsatisfied among the ‘guise of humans’, grimacing, growling, waiting for fats and albumens. Too famished, perhaps, Saveliev can hardly fashion a hempen noose any better than solving a tautological mathematical sham.

            “And this is what your friend gave us to read?”

            Yakov smiled in spite of her question, and shut the book. “I don’t think there’s anything here for us to solve, but rather the Savelievishness to consider.”

            “Ours? What are you saying?”

            “Not ours. Ours would go by a different name.”

            “And tell me in the same breath it would be different in nature!”

            “Art reflects reality, but reality doesn’t have to reflect art.”

            “So no associative property… Tell that, please, to your Harel.”

            He did, and Harel blithely vowed not to overstep his humble territory, which he agreed was the fate and faith Yakov sometimes discursively broached. In many ways Yakov had no desire to go back to his lonely life east, walking literal tightropes and shelling the vulnerable little crowds of their pocket cash. He missed the distinction Kiev had offered him, but even there he couldn’t imagine being happier than he was now. Nadia was a fading memory and no rival to Yulia, immeasurably. Ilya would be… well, he’d be anywhere at this point. Intuitively Yakov wanted to find out something of his situation and, encouraged by Harel, nose around Besarabska to rummage a suitcase-full of books for their Tuesday exegeses. His problem, though, was his identity card and how he would or would not succeed against the train inspectors. Upon this point, Harel offered to lend Yakov his identity card—they resembled each other in appearance, especially as Harel’s picture some years ago had him beardless, and Yakov would not be able in many months to grow the modest beard Harel had now. Yakov naturally had some misgivings traveling as someone else, and moreover traveling without his friend to enjoy the anticipated excursion, but Harel waved him off with all good wishes that Yakov would wander there well, and wander safely back.

            Which more or less happened. Yakov wasn’t even checked on the way to Kiev—a night train that slogged in the steady May rain—and he ran into no unusual treatment at Besarabska. A few familiar booksellers were there and greeted Yakov fondly; none of them, however, had any knowledge, let alone dealings, with Ilya, and conversation about him was pursed. Yakov bought Red Calvary, figuring the Stepanyk library would appreciate the donation, Bely’s Peterburg, Bunin’s Cursed Days, stories by Zozulya and Zamyatin and Zoschenko—“you’re surely working the alphabet backwards, Yakov?”—“No, sincerely these are exactly the authors I’ve had in mind.” There was no Pasternak or Bulgakov or Mendelstam; instead he took Leonov’s Thief and Ivanov’s Adventures of a Fakir. He scanned the few collections of poetry and decided on Morits and Bobyshev. There was nothing of Yiddish or Hebrew origin for Harel, and not one of the booksellers hinted that anyone had asked for anything like that before. Perhaps to move him along—he had browsed their tables far longer than was conventional—one merchant gave him Turgenev’s Fathers and Children on the house, and that was as ‘out of the pale’ as he was going to find around here.

            “And what about Dostoevsky—his Idiot?

            This query was duly ignored, and Yakov moved away from the market to his familiar bench at Taras S, reading through the afternoon Leonov’s Thief, which interested him most. No one came by, not that he glanced up very often. The morning drizzle had subsided while Yakov had stayed undercover in the market, and now the chilly gray afternoon kept many pedestrians inside. He was tempted to saunter over to Trukhaniv Island for old time’s sake, see if any non-adversarials were there to play a game of chess. He mused that he had brought along his checkered suitcase but forgot to pack the pieces—a soldier without ammunition or a clown without tricks. His only other plan for the day was to skulk around the back entrance (actually a prudent block away) of the Kobzov circus, to see who would arrive for the evening’s performance. But this surveillance was unfruitful on several levels, and thankfully, perhaps, the rains recommenced and Yakov returned to the train station to catch the same train that had begun his initial odyssey, half-expecting the déjà vu of Oleg and the pretty forewarner, the approving sunbeams through the windows of the L’vyiv voksal and the resumption of his life there again with Yulia, Stefanyk street, and Harel.

            “Documents!” he was prodded awake by a gruff pair of policemen. He handed over Harel’s identification card and quickly realized that he had neglected to memorize any details, including the holder’s birthdate. “Harel,” the officer mispronounced the accent. “What patronymic?”

            Paralysis gripped him but he had no choice but to try out his instinct, this fate and faith that had been rather theoretical of late. “Harelovich, sir.”

            “Why isn’t that listed here? Where are you from?”

            “Lvov. My father Harel died before I was born. Fighting the fascists, sir.”

            “You were born during the war?”

            “Yes,” Yakov ruminated during and after this convincing guess.

            The officer frowned and looked at the mug shot, and then more closely at Yakov’s face, which benefitted from the shadows of the compartment. “Ladno,” he mumbled, and gave the document back. The other officer hovered behind for a moment more, jotting a note in his record book and throwing a glance at Yakov, who was settling back into the bed. “Peaceful night,” he bid, and Yakov sleepily echoed the same.

           

            Twice more through the summer months Yakov managed this trip, his practiced sense of Harel’s information barely necessary, as it turned out. He did become entangled in his further effort at Besarabska to find out about Ilya and, separately, a hushed rumor of a volume of Brodsky’s poems. He could tell by the mannerisms of two new booksellers that his requests were pulling him further away from the familiar corner of the market, into a dark other side. He calculated in this tidal flow and protested that he wasn’t so interested after all—

            “—in whom?”

            “In… in… what were we even talking about?”

            “Don’t play stupid!”

            “On the contrary, comrade, I’m playing things rather smart.” Yakov straightened up and reversed the armload of his escort and, as he was able to do that first day in the museum, tugged the larger man behind a kiosk. “Now that you’ve blown my reconnaissance, please show me your merchant license and citizen ID.”

            The larger man looked stunned and blinked rapidly to get things straight. “What? You show me yours.”

            “Dolt! What merchant license could I possibly have when I’m playing the role of a buyer?”

            More blinks. “Then…, then show me your investigator’s badge.”

            “And I would do that before you show me yours? And yours would trump mine, comrade? What kind of amateur do you think you’re dealing with? I’ll have you know I’m in a major campaign to get to the bottom of samizdat distribution of—now do you remember whom we’re talking about? Huh?”

            “Ilya Radomovich, of course.”

            “No. No! We’re talking about Josef Brodsky and what his influence means to our little, counter-revolutionary community here—”

            “I’m assigned, sir, to—”

            “You’re lousing up the bigger picture, if you can remotely imagine. Now, what you’re assigned to is yours to figure out, and believe me, I’ve had many a pointed occasion to imagine just that. Go to it. Find Ilya Radomovich and, if you see me around, clue me in to that success. And just maybe, as a result, that will assist me in finding the elusive Josef Brodsky. Are we understanding each other, comrade—and may I remind you we haven’t yet exchanged names?”

            “Pikanov. Dmitri Pavlovich.”

            “Very well. I’ll remember your work.”

            “And yours?”

            “I’m the one looking for the broader picture, got it?”

            “Yes, sir.”

            Harel liked that story, but concurred with Yakov that their book grab at Besarbska had likely come to its end. They hadn’t gotten Brodsky, but then again they hadn’t yet probed half of their current bounty. And now, as a new autumn was immanent, Yakov needed to relay a new face of things. Yulia had been assigned a teaching job in Ivano-Frankivsk, a hundred kilometers south. Her father could do nothing but approve—the position was appointed without anyone’s doing; he could also perhaps imagine his leading male guard going with her, but Yakov had instead prudently indicated his return to Kiev earlier that summer: his ‘self-study’ had run its course, and all was ordained in the sentiment that “Jürgen, we’re going to miss you here.”

            Yakov regretted deceiving this benign, potential daddy-in-law. He hated deception generally and wondered—fate and faith—why he constantly had such corners to slither out of. Harel offered no rationale, but did recommend him to a friend he knew in Ivano-Frankivsk, someone essentially doing similar work as he, a ‘Harel-where-you’ll-have-him,’ so to speak. The synagogue in this provincial city hadn’t survived the Great Patriotic War in the same way as the one on Mikhnovs’ki Street; the partially Jewish cemetery, on the other hand, had fascinating staying power in the morphisms of Cossack, Czarist and Soviet rule: beside a lake, about the same size of that at Strysky, on the southwest edge of town there was need of a groundskeeper, an attendant for all graves of all persuasions and creeds, and Yakov ended up devoting far more care to this job than he had at the museum, or any frail thing free-lance.

            Yulia was happy teaching mathematics to fairly willing students in the center of town. Pytor came down to see her three times a year—always announced, so at those times Yakov made himself scarce. Harel visited the happy couple about the same amount of times, now bringing to them the books that he could rummage, in teleological gratitude. As months and then years went by, Yakov relinquished any desire to reconnect with Kiev—all the more reason he had relished the ruse to look at the ‘bigger picture’ and shake himself free from the nagging encumbrances (all due prayers for Brodsky and Ilya). And it was with this thought, and the hope that Yulia’s unusual day-off due to nausea was the prospect of pregnancy, that Yakov, shouldering a rake, focused on the figure loping toward him.

            “Health to you, Jürgen.”

            No one could have traipsed through his mind the same way, as he conjured the fairness of his life,

                                                            ‘the yellow leaf,

                                    And that which should accompany old age,     

                                    As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,

                                    I must not look to have; but, in their stead,

                                    Curses not loud but deep, mouth-honor, breath,

                                    Which the poor heart would fain deny, and dare not.’

And hoping vaguely this was just the fourth act of that play—but knowing instinctively it was further on—Yakov swallowed the surprise and sweetness of what he had come to love and repeated, strangely, “health to you, Oleg.”

[more to follow in this projected 9-section story]