Babi Leto, Babi Yar (Part IX--the last)

IX.

Eventually, the sojourner would touch all these compass points. He never called himself ‘Maksim’ but responded whenever addressed as such. “Call me Yakov,” was his quiet, constant request when people wanted to know him further, and steered clear of anyone who might have remembered him otherwise. The exception would have been Harel, who, according to a new keeper at the synagogue on Brothers Mikhnovs’ki Street, had died of a heart attack. “So it was painless?” Yakov asked.

            “I suppose; I hadn’t the pleasure of knowing him.”

            “How did you come to this job?”

            “A mutual friend.”

            “Named Oleg, perchance?”

            “Why, yes—you know him as well?”

            “Is he still in town?”

            “No, he moved to Moscow about six years ago. He’s been back a few times since.”

            “Greet him next time he comes through.”

            “From?”

            “Sharik,” Yakov said, and shook the hand of the nodding man.

           

            The cemetery at Ivano-Frankivsk had reasonable upkeep, but still no duckhouses on the island. Yulia agreed to meet him here when he contacted her through a number given by the existing tenant in their old flat. She had gotten married, she whispered on the phone, and didn’t want her husband to know of him. Lunch the next day would provide them a decent chance to see each other. They embraced on the grounds and headed to a bistro nearby. Yulia’s smile was sincere but no longer softened with love. She asked how he had survived his prison sentence, and Yakov spoke about the basics, knowing their hour would fly by too quickly otherwise. He said he had released himself early through the call for Chernobyl liquidators, but withheld the details. “Arbeit macht frei,” he concluded, and she lowered her eyes not to see if he meant that to be a joke. Soup had come and they wished each other priyatnovo appetite.

            “Have you children?” he asked.

            “Yes, two. Anton is in the fifth class and Anya the second.”

            “Is your husband good to you?”

            “Why wouldn’t he be? He’s kind, as you’d expect, and a great father.”

            “What does he do?”

            “Well,” Yulia surveyed the restaurant as if to pluck out the answer, “you wouldn’t like what he does.”

            “Why? What in the world do you imagine I wouldn’t like?”

            “Dmitri distributes armaments. You know AK-47s, I’m sure.”

            “Not really.” Yakov hunted for a trail of something reasonable to say. “I used rifles in my surveillance of forest animals. That’s what I know of weaponry.”

            “Dmitri is a good man.”

            Yakov thought she’d go on, but when she didn’t, he supplied a vacant “yes.”

            “He’s wisely tapped into the direction of Kalishnikov sales—the factories in Ishmash and Kovrov produce far more than our military can use, and the surplus needs bidders, auditors, handlers, and routes. Anyone can be one of those roles, but somebody needs to coordinate the whole thing, and that’s Dmitri. We’ve talked about what it means to have such power and access to markets—the naïve in this regard will not succeed. We’ve assured each other that this business cannot get out of hand.”

            “Why ‘out of hand’? What chaos do you imagine?”

            Yulia took two spoons of her borsch before answering. “The world is chaotic, Yakov—maybe you didn’t pick up on that in Siberia—”

            “I was beyond Siberia, dearest Yulia, and in fact smack in the middle of Armageddon, if you’ll imagine. Some of my colleagues stared Hiroshima in the face. Others of us stared down tigers, bears and lynx. Still others calculated where the landmines would be logically buried lest they’d blow up mindlessly in Afghan mountain trails. Which, by the way, encourages the skills of mathematical probabilities…. Are your still teaching maths?”
            “Are you being cruel?”

            Yakov looked into her eyes. “I love you and would never wish anything cruel upon you.”

            “Don’t you think your ghostly re-emergence is cruelty enough?”

            “It’s not cruelty, Yulia, but rather the turn of time. I don’t subscribe to that ‘wheel of fate’ nonsense. I never presumed you’d be dead or alive, or me neither. I’ve always been able to bustle out of a situation—whatever that may be—and move on. Consider me an itinerant variable, if your equations will have it. I don’t much care if I’m factored one way or another. I don’t even care if I’m a rational exponent or not—”

            “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Yakov—”

            “Probably not. I would have benefited from your classes. As it’s turned out, I’ve learned much about the creatures of this earth and not enough about my own species, and all that we’re capable of.”

            “So tell me about those creatures—maybe we’ll figure out some links.”

            Yakov picked any day of his time in Bira and narrated its routine. At a certain point they realized that distributing Amur Tigers to zoos might have had the same underpinnings of Dmitri’s work, but neither of them wanted to pursue that line of thinking too far. Instead, their meal now finished, Yakov said, “I’ll let you go, Yulia, to get back to your kids as you must.”

            “You know where I am…”

            “Yes. That’s more comforting than any reciprocal statement. You know where I’ve been…”

            “So, yes… and what more?”

            “That’s enough. It’s enough to know that you loved me.”

            “I did.”

            “And I, too; and still do. And have ample rations to travel east. It’s been ages, you know, since I’ve spent time in Kiev.”

            All semblances of the Soviet had ended, and Yakov had grown visibly old. Nothing in the 1990’s added or detracted from his adumbrated sense of self. He was the Jew of Zhitomir when he wanted to be, the outcast of western Ukraine and eastern Russia (beyond any ridiculous demarcations), the erstwhile foil of circus routines. Ultimately, he took a job as a wrangler near Chodosivka, twenty kilometers south of Kiev. There, in the range between two small tributaries, Yakov groomed horses and trails for the steady traffic of nouveau riche to learn how to ride.   

            By contrast, more and more people in Kiev stood outside the vestibules of metro stations selling the scraps of their lives: lampshades and fishing lures and outdated clothes. The scene at Besarabska was busy as usual, yet painfully bland. Books still were sold but no longer mattered: their vendors looked faraway when anyone asked about an author or plot, wishing, it seemed, that they rather had a hand in the jewelry stores and boutiques redefining Khreshchatyk. “I have no place in your world of necessity,” Yakov read openly from a novel Ilya would have had to shield with his life.

“You did not let yourself be weakened by complacency, no matter how artfully our common enemies urged it upon you. Therefore there is nothing purer or more powerful than that truth which you brought into the world. Crush us then, us permanent students and voluntary attenders of the faculty of useless knowledge.”

Looking up from the page, Yakov hoped to see his long-lost friend or at least some reminder of his demeanor. Instead he was gruffly reminded the price and to take it or leave it. “Would you yourself buy this book, tables turned?” Yakov asked wanly.

            “Dombrovksy? Za chem?” the vendor proudly scoffed.

            “For what, indeed,” Yakov echoed, and paid him the ambivalent market value.

            Such jaunts to Kiev only happened on Mondays, his day off after completing early morning chores at the stables. Yakov aimed variously to play chess at Taras S and Trukhaniv, and along the way by happenstance he availed himself to some pupils at a modest hourly rate. They weren’t so exciting to play—their outcome needed to supply their demand—but Yakov kept saying “every game is different” in even a metaphorical sense (as he knew by now some games were all too mundanely familiar). “Or let me quote Misha Tal,” to any of his pupils who thought beyond the strategies and squares, “‘every game is like a poem, valuable and unique in its own right.’”

            “Who’s Misha Tal?”

            “One of the sharpest an most imaginative players, ‘the magician from Riga’ he was called.”

            “You saw him play?”

            “No, not even on television. But you hear from those who did. And you think about styles of play. Botvinnik was a bulldozer plowing through middle games; Tigran Petrosian was a fortress of defense, waiting sometimes hours behind a ‘hedgehog’ gambit or sleeping tiger guise; Karpov was—still is—a boa constrictor, keying in on each position and forcing his opponents to flinch, only luring in the squeeze.”

            “And Kasparov?”

            “What do you think?”

            “Well, the greatest, isn’t he?”

            “He’s the answer to Fischer, whom he never played.”

            “Why?”

            “Both perhaps could lay claim to being the greatest, but Gari wanted others to share in that light. Bobby wanted no light at all to let loose, and hated humanity more than he hated himself. In this game of kings and philosophers, he was occasionally the former and never the latter; Kasparov reminds us to govern ourselves well, smile against the rise of machines, rail against the tyrannies never seem to go away. Borges writes poem that reminds me somewhat of Kasparov:

‘God moves the player, he, in turn, the piece.

But what god beyond God begins the round

of dust and time and dream and agonies?’”

            “Does Kasparov believe in God?”

            “Or a ‘god beyond God’? I don’t know. But he surely thinks about it, and with feeling to boot.”

            “And you?”

            Yakov moved his queen’s pawn to the center of the board. “With feeling, to boot.”

            Years passed like this, quietly between Chodosivka and Kiev. Horses and pupils and books and memories were not exactly companions, exactly, but he remained content with them and the kindness that came with most people he encountered. He kept a samovar—less to be old fashioned than to fit the warmth of his A-frame on the road to the stables; he told stories to those who’d stop for tea, but mostly he listened to what made for their eclectic journeys. Then they moved on while he remained, which suited each to each. He was glad to be rooted finally, and relatively free.

            He loathed the notion of hustling now; when he saw someone caught in that web, he suffered vicariously and, depending on the circumstances, conveyed his experience in the matter. On one such occasion, coming back from Taras S to his metro link home, he encountered a classic ‘pigeon drop’ from across the street: a tourist walking happily out of his upscale hotel sees a small bag falling out of the pocket of a frumpy, fellow pedestrian; he picks up the packet and gives it to the fellow with words in broken Russian; he’s thanked profusely; then the fellow pads down his frumpy pockets and asks, ‘but where is my other packet?’ to which the tourist reasonably shrugs his shoulders; now an undercover policeman enters the scene as if randomly on his beat; he flashes to both what seems to be a badge, then brusquely inquires to what had just happened; the frumpy fellow dwells on the loss of his second packet while the tourist justifies his ethical act on the first; the policeman demands to see what both men have in their pockets and, collecting wads of cash from both, asks the frumpy man to count what should be his original amount; the tourist is confused and gathers what he can in a hastily returned wad and advice to steer clear of street crime, for sir it is rife.

            Seeing far too much already, Yakov traversed the street to blow the lid off this scheme. “I’m also a witness, but I haven’t seen your badge,” he leveled at the con.

            “Who the hell are you?” the faux policeman barked.

            “I’m Yakov, reformed harlequin and practicing vigilante. And you?”

            “I’m the reason you should have stayed on the other side of the street!” While the frumpy man slunk to the shadows of an alley, his undercover buddy pummeled Yakov with fists and feet. The tourist fretted about what now was his witness but didn’t intervene. Blood was gushing from Yakov’s nose and mouth, and each kick to the abdomen caused him to choke against the grin he insisted on keeping, knowing he would not die in this fracas but would make a lasting impact on all concerned. “Damned old man! You really think you matter?”

            “I know I do,” Yakov wheezed, “because…nothing you’ve just done…matters…and,” bracing for another crack to his ribs, “all else…,” slipping out of consciousness, “does…”

            Someone called an ambulance—perhaps the tourist who retreated to his hotel, or the concierge there on his behalf. A hospital in the city took him in despite his lack of ID or insurance card, and when he awoke in a dimly lit room, he attempted to leave without a stir. But he’d be detained: his three broken ribs still needed monitoring; his intake record needed a name and background information; his cost to the state needed some compensation on his part or anyone who could claim him. He cooperated with several nurses’ questions, but they were bemused with most of his paperwork. Yakov? Just Yakov? Born late October, 1941? From Kiev, but not from a hospital here? Parents—casualties of the war? Their names? Professions? Yours? Employer’s name? His telephone contact?—ah, now we’re getting somewhere. They weren’t pleased to release him with just a single name Yakov, but the owner of the stables paid triple his expenses and promised to follow up with better information later. “The fact is,” he said, “he’s been the best handler of horses I’ve ever had, and that’s all I’ve asked of him, to keep that up. He’ll take this season easy to recuperate, but I guarantee he’d give your child good lessons, dear doctor, if ever the spirit moves you.”

            Thereafter, trips to the city were monthly rather than weekly—merely to buy and trade books at Besarabska. Yakov’s duties were also cut back for a natural slide into retirement. He was granted the A-frame for as long as he wanted, as his boss liked that samovar ambiance (even if he himself was too busy to visit). Younger handlers took care of the chores now, and riding lessons were spread out to a larger corporate crew. They appreciated having a wise old saw around the place with his puppy hound named Sharik, for no reason they’d imagine. The daytime work now was theirs, allowing more time for Yakov to review

                                                            ‘the yellow leaf,

                                    And that which should accompany old age,     

                                    As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,

and knowing he had humbly surmounted the vaulting ambition of Macbeth—and that through unrequited honor and love—he counted himself among the very blessed of the earth and happy, if consigned to life-long loneliness.

            Yellow leaves were falling (as fitting) around his seventieth birthday. He took his troop of friend Sharik into Kiev and walked from Pechersk to Taras S, then sat the mid-morning through watching the world go by, with Sharik occasionally taking chase. He had taken his chessboard into his haversack somewhat reluctantly—no battles, no contracts or bets today, but the years had garnered the game no such limits, after all. He began setting up the pieces beside him on the bench and his gestures must have done the trick: a woman his age, still beautiful and stern, stopped in her tracks and called his name in incredulity. Yakov looked up and blinked, focusing against the liquid blur that would confirm all things: “your trademark teardrop,” she said, “—it’s back!” Yakov raised his left hand to brush it away but another streamed in its path. He rose unsteadily to her softer query, “what happened to the emerald star?”

            “Oh, Nadia,” he gasped as she met his embrace, “I…you...remember that pathetic detail?”

            “Pathetic is good in this sense, yes?”

            “Ex..exqui… It’s exquisite. I’m sorry to blubber like a baby. And on the eve of my eighth decade… I can’t believe—”

            “It’s meant to be, then. Are you here alone?”

            “I have Sharik—here, boy!... well, that’s him over there. And you?”

            “I’m walking alone. But Sergey, you want to know?”

            “Not to…”

            “He’s the same. We’re the same. And today I said I need to get out, and so he said ‘get out’.”

            “Why did you need to get out?”

            Nadia slid the chessboard enough to sit down. “Evidently to see you.”

            They talked in the park until it began to drizzle, then decided to walk to Besarabska for some lunch and a browse of things there. Yakov insisted on buying Nadia a book from his erstwhile favorite stalls; “and if not here, I know better places with much more to choose from—”

            But Nadia had already set her eye on Tolstaya’s On the Golden Porch—“for you,” she said, “if you haven’t read it yet.” He grinned that he hadn’t, as she dug into the volume. “Look, if I can find an example…. She’s grittier than her famous ancestors, decidedly a style all her own. I’m eager to read her follow-up Sleepwalker in a Fog—do you have that, by chance?” she asked the vendor, who bellowed out the request to neighboring tables, none of which stocked it. “Nichevo,” she said, still paging through the one in her hands. “Ah, here’s something good! Yakov, you like history, yes? You’ll have to transport yourself to the Leningrad siege and a crazy woman Sonya naïvely seducing a married Nikolai, who, in the winter freeze, is at death’s door:

‘Nicolai lay under a mound of coats, in a hat with ear flaps, with a horrible black face, caked lips, but smooth-shaven. Sonya sank to her knees, pressed her eyes to his swollen hand with its broken fingernails, and wept a bit. Then she spoon-fed him some juice, threw a few books onto the fire, blessed her lucky fate, and left with a pail to get some water, never to return. The bombing was heavy that day.

            That, basically, is all that can be said about Sonya. A person lived—a person died. Only the name remains.’”

            “I’ll gratefully take this, Nadia, and search for Sleepwalker. In the meantime, let me get The Wonderful Deer of the Eternal Hunt for you. I haven’t read it—”

            “Then you should get it for yourself!—”

            “—but I have read the ‘Landscape of Loneliness’ in a periodical some years ago. Since then, Svetlana Alexiyevich has stuck in my memory—”

            “So, seriously, read it first!”

            “No, I’ll read Golden Porch. And please, you preview Wonderful Deer.”

            “Ladno, agreed.”

            The rain was still steady as they departed the center of the city to Lukjansivs’ka, by metro. It wasn’t her direction home, but Nadia said she liked this part of Kiev, its calm and contemplative side.

            “Wouldn’t that be Pechersk? or Trukhaniv, or any number of parks?”

            “Here is where I like to go, no disregard to the others. Seeing how it’s not walking weather, would you be in the mood for a matinee? Kievs’ka Rus’ is showing Melancholia.”

            “By all means. What have you heard about this film?”

            “That the world will end, but not before an ethereal celestial dance.”

            Yakov was in heavenly spirits and wanted nothing more than the world to end like this. “What shall we do with Sharik?” he logically asked.

            Nadia smiled at the obstacle and suggested, “play blind—he can come off as a seeing-eye dog, yes?”

            “Well, he’s so-so in cooperative skills… But would it make any sense for a blind man to go into a cinema?”

            “From what I’ve heard, there is a hell of a soundtrack…”

            It was Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, relentlessly alluring and oppressive. Sharik remained in the merciful care of the box office lady, who had asked ‘does he bark at the moon? Yes? Then he’d go spastic at this one!’ So Yakov didn’t have to feign blindness. With Nadia, he was mesmerized in the opening minutes by the sit-back, slow motion fall of a Friesian, a stallion that later in the film refused to cross a wide-enough footbridge over a negligible stream. His rider, Justine, was the leading melancholic in the story; ‘the earth,’ she reflected, ‘is evil—we don’t need to grieve for it.’ The planet at this point was moments away from destruction, beyond any romantic fix or metaphysical magic. Constantly, Yakov thought, the world is subject to the subjectivity of man. An astronomical fluke—a huge and straying sphere, hidden behind our sun no less!—magnified the objectivity of our existence. Not objectivism, to be sure: Ayn Rand might have just as well been Rasputin, for all her ego-centricukooness. And she’d die just as confounded as Justine (who remained conscientious in her melancholia) or her sister Claire (who relied hopelessly on her lemming-like husband). Yakov didn’t himself believe the world was evil, but he readily enveloped the seeking hand of Nadia at this juncture, and as the world ended in front of them for the final half hour, they remained so enjoined.

            “Wagner was brilliant,” whispered Nadia as the credits rolled, “but a fool!”

            “How do you know that?” Yakov equally whispered.

            Nadia kept clutching his hand. “How don’t you know that, after all your years?”

            Sharik was eager to see them—both, Yakov made believe—and they exited the theatre to a modest sunset in a rain-expelled sky. The day would end soon, perhaps not on the levels they had just witnessed in the ‘false fire’ as Hamlet proclaims. Kiev had indeed braced itself for an untimely end, and Yakov saw it fit now to tell Nadia how it felt to be part of the liquidator ranks.

            They walked from the theatre more slowly than the falling Friesian, and neither asked ‘where should we go’ as they nosed north, instinctively perhaps, to the park Nadia had frequented, in similar forays (if rather alone) away from Sergey; Yakov, for his part, had almost never darkened this part of the city. Why would he have an occasion? There weren’t any chess players (publically, at least) and stores and street life was saturnine. On any day but today, Yakov would be pulled south of the city, as if by gravitation. His horses would greet him, and he them. He’d warm himself the samovar and open Tolstaya, finishing such texts typically as eyelids drooped and day gently took its leave.

            On any day but today.

            Benches on the promenade at Babi Yar filled up with people meeting after work, drinking what they brought, laughing, kissing, watching when the wanted to, closing eyes and cares for even a little while. The ravine, with its narrower walkways, had fewer patrons but more activity, from joggers to pilgrims to birdwatchers searching roosts in countless trees. Playground equipment was here and there, worn old and rather sunken too far into the sandy soil. The rain had tricked the flora into believing spring was sneaking in—“jaro,” Yakov ventured to say about the warm and vigorous noun following the grandmotherly tenders of ‘babi’. “Nothing here befit the atom bomb of evil those two days in ’41. Look how peaceful the place is!”

            “I cringe to admit I like it here and come here often. Come over this way—I want to show you my favorite spot.” Nadia (no one, really) had no sense of Yakov’s nativity, and only once had Yakov sussed it out himself, when his drunken father described being pulled out of line in sight of certain annihilation, the cacophony of screams and gunfire and stench of bodily innards spilling to the ground and air. His mother was unbuttoning her clothes as commanded before being pulled out of line violently—his father assuming to be raped and clawing after her but realizing through quick German that they were being spared if only they’d shut up and follow their unique selection. Details might have followed had father not vomited at that point, and passed out. Yakov tried the next day to learn more but was rebuked for trying to keep the damned memory alive.

            “I’ve avoided it, I guess. Not actively. It would have been my own grave a month before I was born…”

            “What? What did you say?”

            Yakov veered over to a bench. Sharik was far ahead so Nadia called him, then sat down as well. She looked intently at him as he told her as much as he knew; she offered questions that made him know more, and, in turn, ask her what she made of the horrible miracle. She framed it more as a fortuitous burden, one that defined his goodness out of sheer evil—“the earth is evil?”

            “No. Not the earth. I didn’t really buy that part of the film. But like everything needing a home, evil inhabits the earth and seeks out the most innocent and least suspecting. The scar here is everlasting, not the thing that caused it.”

            “You were going to show me your favorite spot…”

            Nadia smiled. “That was a lifetime ago. But come, before it’s too dark.”

            They cut over to the west side of the promenade and through a thin grove.  A bistro and an entrance to the metro threw distant light on what they were approaching: a round, stone table of a monument, with three figures facing what might be the limited corners of the world—just one really facing, as it turned out, Yakov scrutinizing each in turn. The one really facing was an angelic little girl, casting a toppling benison on the place; behind her, on her left, was a younger boy seated, arms reaching up and neck wedged open, compelling an eternal blank look straight above; beside him and behind, his counterpart in a slumped clown whose neck might have broken alternatively. Of the three, it was the most dressed and least human—a doll, in fact, that seemed to die of disuse. The day’s cut roses and fallen leaves were on his lap and at the feet of the other two; by head position alone, only the clown could have seen them there.

            “Is it too much?” Nadia fretted after a few minutes. “I didn’t associate this one with you before.”

            “It’s just right,” Yakov mused, “and you can associate all three with me. Especially if this remains your favorite spot.”

            “And—don’t forget—my favorite time of year.”