Babi Leto, Babi Yar (Part VII)

[This section, the seventh of a projected nine, gripped me like no other. If I may be modest and immodest in this confidence, the writing is clumsy but the story is becoming brilliant. I didn't cry over Yakov's unreasonable arrest, but I did and do when I brought the chapter to closure. This prelude, I know, risks an underwhelming reception, but I trust you will read and advise with this depth in mind. By the way, I know I'm overquoting Russian literature. Part of this is due to the scant resources left to Yakov, and part of this is due to an inventory I'm coming to understand in some twenty-five years of accumulating what graces my library.]

 

VII.

“So now that you know my real name, what shall I know is yours?” Yakov put down his rake and leaned against a tombstone. “Javert, by any chance?”

            “Here, let’s sit more comfortably—in fact, may I buy you lunch? I haven’t eaten yet today.”

            “No. But I’ll make you tea at the groundkeeper’s shed.”

            They walked silently there, through leaves Yakov had planned to gather today, the warmth and windlessness of Babi Leto after a blustery harbinger of winter the week before. “I love this season,” Oleg finally spoke. “Calm and dignified with no naïveté about what comes before or after…”

            “What does come after?”

            The path narrowed to force them single file. The shuffle of the leaves diminished accordingly, and with a parallel hush he replied, “Siberia, Jürgen. And I’m not speaking as a Javert. I’ve come to you as a friend—”

            “—a droog or a comrade? And what merits either title anyway? You were kind to a fellow sojourner in a railroad car, wanted to set him on his feet—or keep him in his sights?—and even though this fellow asked nothing of you, you provided to your sense of satisfaction. Here, sit down as I’ll prepare the tea—”

            Oleg did so, lugubriously. The little lake was somewhat visible from the cluttered window, and he looked in that direction for the time Yakov took to wipe clean some cups, unpackage some biscuits and sugar cubes, stir the tea leaves in the hot water and bring everything to the tiny table. “I did say ‘friend’ sincerely, not ‘comrade’. I realize that every fiber of my being can cross each other and betray a wicked and weak man. But I truly have never intended any harm. My wickedness, if it’s so, is to myself—”

            “That’s Svidrigailovian! Not even he can buy his own argument, and his form of dignity—to use your purview of this season—is to put a bullet in his head! It seems a preoccupation—an occupational hazard, maybe—for the Mayakovskys and Esenins among us…”

            “Don’t put Sergie Aleksandrovich there—his suicide is on par with Hemingway’s, drinking beyond what alcohol or aesthetics could muster.”

            “Ladno, then Mayakovsky. And everything his brilliant debacle represents. Your tea, comrade.”

            “It’s not fair what you’re doing, Jürgen.”

            “That’s barely my name.”

            “And should I call you Ilya again? After the goose chase that you engendered for these three years? I was never on your case, nor his—”

            “Whose?”

            “Ilya’s—the real one. Ilya Radomovich Typanov. That very night you left I had no knowledge of that man—”

            “And do you now?”

            “No. Not exactly. Only that he’s still at large and ‘counter-revolutionary’, for all the muck that’s worth.”

            “And by extension of your visit here today, so also am I. You said ‘Siberia’ comes after. There is only one reason anyone ever goes there.”

            “My visit today does not order you there nor warn you away. I’ve said now three times I come as a friend. And a friend visits for no reason at all—”

            Yakov looked out the window. There was an island in that little lake he wanted for some time to develop: build a duck house or two. Whenever he rowed over to pull weeds and prop up the struggling saplings—they always drooped when inundated with too much water—he’d see the nests within the reeds that succeeded and those that did not; since they were out of foxes’ range, all of these creatures arguably should have thrived. He noted, then, that the competing interests of swans and geese had it that only so many nests could and would survive. Yakov’s duck houses would have strategic doors and rampways tailored for a certain size and weight. The larger foul would not complain—he’d see to it that other nesting spots (with or without his intervention) would always have their place. These at least were his plans as of today. “How much time do I have before I face Siberia?”

            “Just acknowledge—even with your eyes—that none of what I say has anything to do with me.”

            Yakov looked down.

            “I understand. But I’ll tell you anyway, as a friend…. And, incidentally, your friend Harel, who also has nothing to do with this, Harel greets you—”

            “He did so in person, just two months ago, if that can add to your files and commission.”

            Oleg sighed and gazed again at the lake. “I wish I had enjoyed the relationship you two have. He views me with suspicion and shares my grief in what is out of any of our hands.”

            “Damn you for saying so! Damn this whole day! Damn your entangled ‘fibers of being’ and whatever else you’ve come here to say! Drink up your tea and get on with it, man! Tell me how long I have to pack up and leave this premature Candidian garden and all the little creatures bereft of the houses I might have built them!”

            “They did not send me here to be a hatchet man. Rather, they are fully aware that I would never hurt a friend, let alone rat on one. They’ve figured out your whereabouts—that’s not Harel’s doing or my own—who knows in this ironic world whether it might even be Ilya Radomovich’s doing! I don’t know! And I don’t support! But as the ‘fellow sojourner’ and one who just might pull the fucking trigger someday, I’ve voluntarily come to drink with you and bid you all God’s peace and say, in fact, you are going to be arrested—not by me, as I’ve never sunk so low and never will. You can in fact run free: I have no one watching me today, and whenever I do, I drink myself to incapacity. And they all know it. I’m rather glad, Jürgen, I only need drink the tea you’ve offered me.”

            In that spirit, they finished what they had, biscuits included. Yakov did divulge his plans for the little island and Oleg told him about some librettos he had been working on. They spoke pragmatically how he might be apprehended by the state, and though Oleg claimed no influence on this front, he agreed with Yakov that the circumstances here in the cemetery, exactly as his rake was ready, then let down, would be the least unreasonable way. Throughout their discussion Yakov never conveyed a single hint about Yulia, who would sleep with him tonight and weep the next two completely alone, as Yakov decided in his own mind to stay these final Babi Leto days and nights in this very shed, a veritable duck house of sorts. And he never conveyed to his friend his truer name, the only one he really held sacred.

            To his credit, upon leaving him for the ‘real’ authorities some three days later, Oleg handed over a carbon-copy ream of papers entitled Doctor Zhivago, with real enough teardrop stains on several of the crumpled pages. “They’ll fit anywhere—you’re going to be unsearchable at this point, because for the most part that nonsense is over—and I don’t care at all if you say I was your supplier. I may join you someday, Jürgen: I’ve recommended that if they have to displace you, the only region tolerable to your circumstances would be around Birobidzhan, as I’ve some small pleasure experiencing myself. It’s not too cold there, the work isn’t inhumane and the people are—well, they are our people. They are you and I.”

            “And Harel?”

            “I hope not. Truly, I have no part in any of their operations—”

            “Fair enough. And greet him. From me, and decidedly not from ‘them’.”

            “Shalom, Jürgen—I hope we will meet again.”

            Yakov led him out of the shed and the cemetery, wordlessly. Dignity would have it that he’d embrace this man, who blubbered a few more things and then was gone.

            Yulia reinforced his trusty suitcase and carefully stitched in the pages of Pasternak below and opposite the faded chessboard. She put in a little bible her father had given her three years ago—for what he presumed would be her isolation in Ivano-Frankivsk. She made room for an extra pair of boots and sewed up any holes in his stockings. Despite his protestations, she packed an equal suitcase of her own things and insisted that she would go with him, insisted on an immediate marriage to naturalize them, so to speak. She insisted that her father intervene on their behalf—

            “He doesn’t know that I exist anymore,” Yakov reminded her, “and to say I do now would add fuel to the fire.”

            “But the world is changing, Yakov—we’ve talked about the Prague Spring eventually coming our way—”

            “We talked post-haste, in the crossed radio messages of tanks rolling in, for freedom’s sake no less, to rectify young passions gone awry.”

            “All to affirm: the governing rationale is blind, deaf and heartless!”

            “And mindless? No method in the madness, pray tell?”

            Yulia clenched her hands and cursed. “What do you know about their methods, and paradigms of mind and madness?”

            “We don’t know anything about anything, Yulia, not where I’m going or what trouble I’ll encounter. When I find out that, I’ll write you and work my way back. But let’s not adhere too much to dreams or nightmares. Your heritage has an emmanuel already realized; mine has an emmanuel to come. Combined, that covers everything, even if the present is a muddle.”

            Though she skipped the week of math lessons and spent these days at the cemetery, dressed as a new widow, she didn’t witness the late-night arrest that transported Yakov out of the city in a matter of minutes. Yakov spoke little to the bespectacled man beside him in the Zhiguli, but he was told of his offenses—false identity, collusion with an enemy of the state and long-term obstruction. These would be tried in a Soviet court in Kiev tomorrow morning.

            “Will there be anyone there to speak on my behalf?”

            “Whom did you have in mind?”

            “I don’t have anyone in mind.”

            “Then why would you even ask?”

            The leather of the back seat of this vehicle smelled new if rather smoky. Yakov opened the window a little bit and resolved to sleep his way through the passing black countryside. He thought mostly of Yulia as the hours rumbled by and felt strangely fortunate to have had these placid years with her in Ivano-Frankivsk. To ask God to grant him more was a bemusing notion, befitting the luxury of this cattle car. As the first glow of sunlight bled into the horizon they were heading toward, Yakov finally fell into a deep and undisturbed slumber.

            And though he was woken up for a half-hour’s worth of proceedings in front of three judges and various recorders, he understood very little of what was being said or done on his behalf. He was asked, as if for the thousandth time, what he knew of the location and activities of Ilya Radomovich Typanov. “No one has ever asked me that before,” he truthfully told them. “I wish I knew.”

            “And do you wish him well?”

            “Are you here to relay that to him when you find him?”
            “Answer the question!”

            “I wish all of us well. I think that is at heart in the communist ideal when one really thinks about it.”

            “Are you being sardonic? Do you want subversion included in your list of crimes?”

            “No to both questions. I simply answered truthfully.”

            “Then why have you so untruthfully represented yourself, especially taking on the name of Ilya Radomovich?”

            “Technically, I used ‘Ilya Rabinovich’. And my cover was out of caution.”

            “Why? Answer wisely, comrade.”

            Yakov took that advice a number of ways. “I was minding my business when other people had unsolicited interest in me.”

            “What business? What solicitation?”

            “The business of playing chess, mainly, as we do nationally and naturally well, the way we do ballet—”

            “Speak to solicitation! What do you mean by this word?”

            “I said ‘unsolicited’, and I only meant that I didn’t seek out any trouble, least of all the apparent concerns of this court.”

            The presiding judge looked at his bench and briefly at the bespectacled man, who may or may not have been paying any attention, his chin lowered and eyes half shut. “Jürgen Johanovich Buchner,” the judge declared in a level, loud voice, “in the conviction of your aforementioned crimes, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics requires your compliance and service to the national interest—a service not honored, I must add, by your refusal to register for military readiness—for a minimum of twenty years of deliberate labor. Upon the recommendation of council familiar with your case, your sentence will be administered in detail by a court in Khabarovsk, and your transit there will commence later today. Do you have any statement for the closing record?”

            Yakov again thought about wisdom in a number of ways. “Only that twenty years deprives a man the chance of building a house and raising a family, which, all due respect to the state, is what I would have done. Now, from unsolicited stories—not from Ilya, Oleg or this bespectacled man—I will move the rocks you want me to, and hope that builds the house that—”

            “Silence! This court will never entertain counter-revolutionary indulgence, and you may shutter that any further attempt will add years to your sentence and distance to your recommended post. Does the court make itself clear?”

            “The court makes itself clear,” Yakov affirmed. “From this time forth I never will speak word.”

            Of course Iago, or any arachnid or antic disposition, is no way forward. Yakov spoke sparingly all the way to Khabarovsk and his eventual placement near Bira, where he was commissioned to work with the preservation of Amur tigers. Somehow his circus credentials funneled him to the tracking and taming of endangered cats that might otherwise be poached: breeding them and weaning the cubs from human touch, providing some their transport to faraway zoos, pulling select creatures from the wilderness and pushing select out. The scientists distinguished themselves negligibly from Yakov and a few other hand-picked prisoners, except for the fact that every ten weeks or so someone in the latter category would suffer a swipe of fangs or claws. Even when Yakov was the one who had to be stitched up, he smiled against the alternative of extracting and crushing rocks.

            He read when he could. The pages of Dr Zhivago crinkled and smudged under the impact of transport—to this outpost and into several trusty hands—and Yakov penciled into his diary the poems more than the plot of faraway love with Lara. The last lines of “Hamlet” intrigued him most:

“And yet the order of the acts is planned,

The way’s end destinate and unconcealed,

Alone. Now is the time of Pharisees.

To live is not like walking through a field.”

He really did not care much about Pharisees. They would play their parts with little provocation. He hardly knew with them where one would rightly start. But deference to ‘zhizn’ in the constant consciousness of life—what Yuri Andreievich probed in the lives of nondescript patients and studied in the fits and spells of Evgeni Onegin and the remnants of Dostoevsky’s sundry progressives and those possessed. “What happiness,” Yakov read, “to give birth to yourself, time and again.” What foolheartiness, furthermore, to leave that ecstasy to caretakers unimagined, to birth oneself—devil of an idea!—into the throes of this rather unbecoming world. The felines in the darkened cages of Yakov’s station had no recourse but to concur.

            In the darkened months that followed, Yakov received occasional missives from Yulia that adumbrated she was fine and he was missed, that no one had replaced him at the cemetery and that the lake still had surface water for the non-migrating birds. Harel wrote more distant shoals of comfort and of prayer—the kind that stored itself above. Oleg sent little things to read—eclectic, ambiguous, ingenuous enough. They were mostly what he could find of interest at Besarabska, save a series of letters entitled Correspondence Across a Room. Had this 1922 publication from Berlin been translated into German, the gatekeepers of postal traffic might have deemed it subversive. But the Russian between these men of letters, Vyasheslav Ivanov and Mikhail Gershenzon, seemed gentle and innocuous.         

            Ivanov was the more ethereal, applying consciousness to the immanence of any culture—the turns of their present Moscow—but remaining transcendent, even by delving deep. “In a given element, such as the sea, there are soluble substances and there are also oil, algae and coral, pearl-bearing shells and whales, flying fish and dolphins, amphibious creatures as well as men diving for pearls.” Oh, such freedom of movement across a sanatorium, even between old men who had lived out the reckonings of Russia’s Silver Age!

            But Gershenzon was not so satisfied. “Only once was the whole fullness of Hamlet ever achieved,” he wrote—and that one time was “within Shakespeare.” He couldn’t have yet known Pasternak’s poem, the attempt to “stand upon the stage” and hope “a different drama takes the scene”—a defiance of the Pharisees, a longing to escape to fields and forests. And even there Gershenzon would find no relief:

“Required by an inherent law to defend itself, the deer developed antlers to defeat or intimidate its enemies, yet in some species those antlers attained such proportions that the animal could no longer flee through the forest and those species are now extinct. Is it not the same with culture? Is there not a parallel to be drawn between our ‘values’ and those antlers? They began as a result of individual adaptation, then became a characteristic feature of the race, finally through excessive growth they turn into a tormenting burden that can even be fatal for the individual.”

            Undeterred, as if having the ability to breathe under water, Ivanov argued for immortality in the miraculous advent of every being that comes into this world.

“I know God in me as a dark birthing place; I know Him in me as the eternal fount of what in me is best and holiest; I know Him in me as the living principle of being, more inclusive than myself, and containing, along with the other qualities that make me up, the quality of personal consciousness distinctive in me. I have emerged from Him and He abides in me. If He does not leave me He will also create in me other forms of His continuing presence in me, that is to say, my own person. God has not merely created me, you see, He is creating me without cease and will continue to create me in the future because He desires me to create Him in myself in the future as He has created me up until the present.”

            They went back and forth, across the room. Gershenzon held that “in perceiving the world we only perceive phenomena and the laws under which intellect operates.” No one could create or be created otherwise. But imagination was limitless, Ivanov countered, as well as memory! “Memory is dynamic, generative.” And here Yakov put the thin book down to conjure up the mother who had held him before the world had turned circus. He remembered her breath on his ear that sometimes hummed, sometimes spoke, sometimes suspended for a kiss. And he would do so, too, he knew—or perhaps it was just a generative act right now—and he searched his mind further to remember her eyes, eyes he knew would be approving and yet widely alert to the trepidation of the times. He couldn’t exactly place them, and scanning across his dusky room, the suspicious lynx glaring at this sentimental keeper offered no help. Yakov knew this adult feline, inadvertently trapped and injured in the process, would not cooperate in the convalescing days that needed to happen. Perhaps she had mewing kits in a burrow that wondered where she had gone. And as ardently as Yakov might generate such commiseration, there was little way anyone would understand each other’s consciousness.