Babi Leto, Babi Yar (full draft--see final comment)

I: Yakov

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

           

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

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

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

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

                             you see these suckers time to time

                             trying to take what isn’t mine—

                             they have three mouths, I have one

                             you got money, they got none—

                             just that cherry’s shared delight

                             worth twice your bid, you get it right

                             look here—

he lifted one of the cups to reveal nothing—

                                           he’s famished or he’s full?

                               The chase for cherry is his pull—

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

                           Ah, that’s me—

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

                                                         I’d let you cash that in!

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

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

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

            “You won’t move them again?”

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

            “Just those two cups?”

            “I have no better chance than you.”

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

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

            “You win.”

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

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

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

           

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

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

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

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

                             you see these suckers time to time

                             trying to take—

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

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

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

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

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

II: Nadia

Yakov’s career in the circus left plenty to be desired, but years passed peacefully in the capacity of clowning and managing the clean-up crew. He was one of the last to leave the evening performances, but, the deal was, he could arrive later than the other clowns, especially as his face paint was sparse: an exaggerated teardrop from each eye over a rudimentary daisy. His shaggy hair required no wig, and his costume was simple: anything not too loose to allow him to go from stilts to high wire to unicycle, as if he were less a contracted performer and more a ‘common’ man running his way through the other acts. Every evening had its predictable features, but Yakov’s role was to create some improvisation—sort of like that bear had, he occasionally reflected.

            What was left to be desired was companionship. Who would imagine a central figure in the entertainment industry to be utterly lonely? “Lots of us are,” said Nadia, who tumbled atop the trotting horses. Yakov talked with her sometimes after her performance, which he watched intently, in the darkest shadow. Nadia’s jealous husband grabbed the bridles as soon as she made her final dismount, and, taking her bow, she backed gracefully into the same shadow. “I’d rather live with the horses than with him,” she mumbled, but maybe that was the result of an afternoon tiff. Yakov saw sometimes there was passion in their body language and conjectured that a jealous husband was more desirable than an indifferent one.

            “How do you unwind after the show?” Yakov asked her.

            She winced but sniffed out a smile. “I read, he watches television, I cook, he drinks, we eat…we…you know.”

            “What do you read?”

            “Really?”

            “Sure. I’m always in for recommendations.”

            Nadia looked more directly at him. It was dark, but with such light from the ring she could see his eyes glisten. “Mostly last century sort of stuff…. Romances, published diaries, sad creatures lolling about the countryside. Boring, maybe?”

            “No.”

            “Kuprin is good to read. Leskov. Tolstoy, of course.”

            “Of course.”

            “I’m reading Resurrection now.”

            “That’s nice.”

            “And you?”

            “Me what?”

            “are reading?”

            Yakov didn’t want to lie, and she’d heard his voice enough to tell. “I don’t read too much—that’s why I need recommendations! Kuprin?”

            “Alexander. Start with ‘Garnet Bracelet’—I’ll bring it tomorrow.”

            “Yakov!” a voice hissed, “you’re on, you ham!”

            He instantly had to be a jester and stumble into the final act.

            Nadia brought a volume of Kuprin’s short stories the following evening. “I said to start with ‘Garnet Bracelet’, but actually that’s the last story here.” She handed it over and looked down at a rip in her stocking—she had mislanded on a leap from horse to horse tonight and, instinctively, tumbled as best she could to the circus floor, catching a hoof on her thigh but nothing more. Yakov witnessed it in fright and was set to dash to her rescue, but then she popped up and even remounted the inside horse as they ringed around her.  “In fact,” she mumbled, “start with ‘Emerald’, for my sake.”

            “What’s that about?” Yakov tried to lure her eyes.

            “A horse. A racing horse that,... well, you’ll see.” She smiled tightly and decided not to look up to him. “Sergey!” she instead let out to her husband, approaching with a bridled horse, “train her to trot closely! She almost killed me by broadening the gap.”

            Sergey jerked his head at Yakov, whose sad eyes betrayed nothing he could figure out, and then back to Nadia. “You fell. That’s too bad, but don’t level it to my training of these stupid animals. For that matter, discipline the beasts yourself!” He threw the bridle lead to Nadia and glared once more at Yakov, who looked down at a non-existent tear in his costume. He slipped away before he knew he’d crumble; his experience as a clown and hustler never felt more inchoate than in the face of true relational dynamics. He could always fool a fool; he only felt a fool himself when an intimate and knowing pair was involved.

            He glanced at the bewildered horse as he slunk off, wondering if she read any of his feelings. Who cared if there were power in numbers; there was, theoretically, solace in pairs, and this mare was supposed to figure out her synchronized trot to make Nadia’s flips land right, so that Sergey’s fragile ego would hold on to whatever he conceived it to be.  How complicated the world is, to perform an honest act with another, on behalf of another, despite the suspicions of another, to accommodate for that other, to placate the other, to… never, or not… give up trying…

            It was a chess game, on this day-off from the circus, on Trukhaniv island in the middle of the Dnieper River. Yakov came here every so often to survey the action and walk hours on end in the unlikely wilds of the urban mesh. Kiev was a city surrounded by forests—there were thousands of miles of paths, paved and otherwise, to walk within what could reasonably be called the city limits. There were better chess venues, to be sure: logically, in front of the university, or the greens in the Oblomov region in the north of the city. Yakov loved venturing south and west of the hustle and bustle, where families would spontaneously light up their portable grills for shashlik and seasoned eggplant. He remembered nostalgically the first time he walked these outer parks, seeing unclaimed dogs curl their brows at such family delights and hoping—as he indeed saw one such scenario played out—a scrap of discarded shashlik fat would turn into the hem and haw of whether to take this young mutt beyond the park—“Papa, please, we’ll take care of him!”—“but who will walk him in the deep freeze of winter?”—“oh, Papa, we will, and anyway he’ll be trained by then”—“by whom?”—“by us”—“by me,” says Mama, who is always last to weigh in on such primary questions—“by us!” says the unison voice of children—“by us,” says the Papa siding with his wife, not at all convinced that they’ve won.

            Yakov dreamed of a wife. He couldn’t identify exactly with such a papa, rotating bits of meat on a shashlik skewer while fending off the sweater tugs of his fickle children. They’d forgotten the stray dog by this point and were now pressing papa for coins for the stand-up swings. Mama seemed happy not to have coins, not to tend to the grill. She accepted the quiet puppy into her lap and began checking it for fleas, at the same time stroking its still short beige fur. The co-existence—let alone love—would have to happen here, in her approval, a veritable leap of faith.

            The adage he loved most in such reflections was the timeless and semi-logical “live a century, learn a century.” He walked many days seeing tableaux like this and envied their learning through living. I’m just a quarter-century so far—there’s more life to live. Yet shall I wait for the bona fide learning ‘til I’m pushing up daisies? Of course not,.. of course not. The ratio didn’t prescribe so much. It was a chess game. And by ‘game’, it was, of course, the sum total of how you made due with your and your opponent’s king’s gambit or bishop’s prerogative…

            These were honest, expected moves. Occasionally, especially in speed rounds, Yakov would set his queen off her color and open with more moves to the left-hand side—he realized most players didn’t love that bank for offense anyway—and by the time he could castle (and not be caught out for the shyster start), he had his rival in unfamiliar territory. It was never a question of how the queen could get where she was, rather how…unforeseen, as the bishop is clearly here and my pawns are doing what they should, and usually the knight’s in a good position to bust things up… Of course the next game would have to be different—clearly set, with an alternate gambit, but since Yakov had won the first move, he would more likely-than-not win the afternoon.

            He didn’t need to do this, he knew: a circus salary and an assigned apartment sufficed, especially since he had no expensive habits. But maybe now he’d start buying some books, fill the huge wall unit that even the most mendacious flat already had, pre-installed. He had never driven a car, but wondered about the countryside. It would be nice to have a car. Everything he had ever seen had been from train windows. To have a little car, to meander, or to have a little garden spot—why not a dacha, even here, on Trukhaniv island…

            Pow! the sucker punch came from across the board. “you shitty yid, you think I didn’t see you juke the last guy with your misplaced queen? Now what’ya got, huh? Here’s your fuckin’ double-or-nothin’ on my cheatin’ queen”—and the angry man jumped his key piece over a fence of pawns for a sudden checkmate. There was little Yakov could do here. He calculated, knowing two hundred rubles in two bills were in one pocket and a more fluid hundred in another, so, pleading nothing—rather saying he never came here to cause trouble—he pulled out a hundred from the richer pocket and dropped it squarely in the center of the board. It satisfied the angry man, and Yakov slinked away feeling neutral: not happy about his swelling cheek, not richer for his unequivocal gains, but free to walk without pursuit, and dream.

            And read. ‘Emerald’ was indeed an excellent story, and terribly sad, thinking mostly about Nadia. Such a majestic creature, so strong and sentient and… star-crossed—Yakov liked that term, even if he couldn’t name the most common constellations. Somehow the movement of celestial spheres made sense to him, and inevitably their trajectories would cross, and maybe even clash with whatever gravitational expectations that might have been charted out. That’s sort of what Yakov liked. Heaven also played its shell games—luring in the assurance of predictability, that Venus, for instance, spins backwards and Pluto disparages the uncanny plane of other orbits. Then throw in the comets, the black holes, the stray Melancholias (what he wouldn’t yet know)—he’d see that before his live-a-century would be up—and Yakov’s universe was pleasantly incomplete.

            More visceral than ‘Emerald’ was the story ‘Gambrinus’, about an Odessa pub that housed Sashka and his little dog Snowdrop, until the latter was smashed against the pavement by a badly drunken patron. Sashka played violin and whistle pipe for the constant turnover of sailors, gypsies, sojourners and local tramps, then shuffled off to an amorphous war (defining, with his lack of contact, its obsolescence), then returned to a valiant, weathered, vivacious if withered redoubt at the pub with his violin. Mme Ivanova, ageless between all realities, reflected all measures of hope for his return. One would suggest they were better off than a married couple: daily interactive, in love with what the other brought to an otherwise sweltering and friendless place.

            “He was a Jew,” Yakov told Nadia, right before she was to go on to the next night’s act.

            “What?”

            “He was a weirdly, wandering (but not really) Jew.”

            “That’s a story by Leskov, but..,” she hissed, “get out of my way!”

            The horses were trotting towards them, with Sergey behind, swatting and swearing. As Nadia strode with them into the center ring, Sergey grabbed Yakov by the arm. “You keep out of her way—and don’t think I don’t see you two talk.”

            “We have to talk—our acts transition—”

            “I’ll break this arm. Nobody will notice or care. You’d be just clowning around. And I don’t. Stay the fuck away.”

            So he had to. And since he guessed that she would in time reread ‘Gambrinus’, he penciled in a note on the spine margin of part III, near Mme Ivanova’s request to
                        “Play something, Sashka, will you?”

                        “What would you like me to play, Mme Ivanova?” Sashka

                     asked obligingly. He was always exquisitely polite to her.

                        “Something of your own.”

His note was merely: “afternoons chess at Taras S.”

            That park was across from the university renamed after Taras Shevchenko, by Stalin’s grace. The terracotta façade of the main building defined this part of Kiev—not strictly Soviet red or Decembrist crimson, rather stoic in hardened russet clay. Here Yakov didn’t play for bets. There were moneyless students who’d play between classes, and largely this wasn’t an atmosphere to make a spectacle of oneself and run off. Yakov’s ulterior motive, besides the prospect of meeting Nadia off-hours, was to soak in the culture, to get used to browsing at book tables at the nearby Besarabska market.

            His evenings at the circus were miserable. He had left Nadia’s book in her changing area, but avoided her as deliberately as she did him. Sergey was always scanning, and in his frustration to catch and punish, he collared Yakov and seethed: “You think it’s a cat-and-mouse game, huh? Well I’ll pound her tonight to see how you’ll stay in your shadows!” And he did. Nadia almost couldn’t perform the following evening and she stayed home the next two. Sergey had told the manager (who believed him) that she had fallen off a horse training for a new stunt, and that she was too embarrassed to speak about it. Yakov cried bitterly alone, and thought hard about quitting this evil place. Instead, he replaced the trademark teardrop on his facepaint with an emerald star. He couldn’t know if Nadia noticed when she returned, because she didn’t look at him. He arrived as late as he could and she and Sergey left before the finale, which through the manager’s consent she was now exempt.

            The main thing, for Yakov, was that she wasn’t hurt; as much as he could tell, from the even deeper shadows where he watched, she was strong and agile as ever on the animals. It was silly, he conceded, that he would have meant much to her in the first place.

            “I was wrong,” came a quiet voice behind him. Yakov closed his eyes on the words he had been only half-reading in the bustle of Taras Shevchenko square, and Nadia brushed his arm as she sat down. She smelled beautiful, like always, and though he tightened his eyes shut, he grinned and shook his head.

            “Wrong?” Bashfully he looked to her.

            “About the wandering Jew. Here, it’s actually about a monk named Ivan—the ‘Enchanted Wanderer’ of the title.” She handed him the book she drew from her bag, filled to the top with groceries. “I re-read it last night and only one little part has a mystical rabbi who exiles himself to the deserts of…well, your Samarkand, I imagine. And he buries himself to the neck in the sand…for seventeen years.”

            “Why?”

            “God provides. Sort of a spiritual test in reverse.”

            They sat silently for a moment, then Yakov asked, “when did you re-read ‘Gambrinus’?”

            “Maybe last night also.” She looked at him intently and didn’t return his warm smile. “Maybe three weeks ago—what difference does it make?”

            “None. You’ve made my life happy either way.”

            “Don’t, it’s…dumb.”

            “I’ve been able to read situations on a street since I was really little. I’m pretty natural at a chessboard. But I’ve never cared for reading pages before. I’m still not very fast—I have to read certain sentences a lot of times…”

            She reached for what he had set down. “What’s this? Envy—where on earth did you get this?”

            “Here, or at Besarabska actually. I traded Kuprin’s Yama for it—”

            “These have been banned for years. I’ve only heard about Olesha, in a tiny article when he died a couple years ago—they called this novel a trick.”

            “I’m only half-way through. The trick for me is keeping up with it. They keep on talking about a machine named ‘Ophelia’, but not what it’s supposed to do…”

            “And what was Yama like?”

            “Like it says—the pit of Odessa’s sex trade. There wasn’t anyone like Sashka in it, or Emerald… I guess it succeeds in the point that it’s hard to get out of something. Or you shouldn’t get into what you can’t… or shouldn’t—” He stopped short—he didn’t want to belabor anything, or rush. Still, he sputtered foolishly when he tried to transition, “what about you?”

            “What about me?”

            “Um, you look fine at the show, but…”

            “But what?”

            “…but I can’t imagine what your husband does when.. I see him scowl at me and would rather he get that rage out in my, um,..”

            “I told you—he watches television.”

            Yakov nodded his head. “It’s just that when he said he’d—“

            “Mulchat! Stop thinking about him.”

            “I’m thinking about you.”

            “Look, this isn’t why I came here. I found your note and another sappy story for you to read—though I see you don’t need anything from my old shelves—“

            “Not the case—on the contrary: look,” Yakov paged to a place in Envy he had dog-eared: “listen to this guy Ivan Petrovich who ruins the Ophelia machine and—where is it?—‘avenges my era’—he means the olden days, not the modern world—that’s when I’m thinking of you—‘They’re eating us alive,’ Ivan says, ‘they’re swallowing the nineteenth century the way a boa constrictor swallows a rabbit.’ See?”

            “See what?”

            “I barely understand this century, but how could I know anything of the past without reading?”

            “Why do you need to know about the past?”

            “Well, why do you? Why do you read Leskov?”

            “He writes about horses, and that’s my present life.” She stood up to go.

            “Here, Nadia, please take Olesha—it would be good to swap centuries.”

            She put the worn book in the middle of her bag and arranged a loaf of bread and vegetables to cover. She snatched a frond of grapes and gave them to Yakov, who shrugged as if he had no need. “You’re skinny. Davai.”

III: Ilya

Yakov quit the circus a few weeks later. Nothing had changed there—only once did Nadia glance his way when she was certain Sergey was nowhere to take notice. Even then, any semblance of warmth was hard to figure. He had kept to his routine at the university park, right up to an hour before the show. Though he always prepared on time (the advantage of easy facepaint), the manager was getting edgy.

            “With respect, sir,” Yakov told him, “I’ve enjoyed my job here but need to move on.”

            “Move on?”

            “Yes—I mean, not out of the city necessarily, but to do something besides clowning. I know some can do it into their old age, and maybe I’d return—maybe I’ll have to—but I must try other things.”

            “You’ll regret this, and when homesickness kicks in I won’t have to take you back, you know.”

            “With respect, sir, I came to tell you, which isn’t always the case in this trade.”

            “What do you want then?”

            “Just two shows more and nothing said to anyone.”

            “I’ll need two weeks to fill the position.”

            “I’ll stay one week max.”

            “You’ll stay long enough to train someone in.”

            “If he can be found this week.”

            And that’s how it went. Yakov managed to find his replacement himself, having seen a number of charlatan routines in the city’s thoroughfares and back alleys. The other clowns were nervous at the sight of a newcomer (the manager kept his word and did not reveal Yakov’s resignation), but since the intern interacted with them well, Yakov knew all the more he wouldn’t be missed.

            And he wouldn’t miss them. He had met a distributor of old books named Ilya, an unassuming man who took a liking to Yakov and trusted in his learning curve. Even though the retailers at the Besarabska bazaar didn’t want extra competition, Yakov appealed to them to let him have a little space during the morning rush in exchange for the word-of-mouth he’d give their ware as he peddled a suitcase full of books throughout the city. It was illegal to free-lance in metro stations, but people did, and Yakov thought he’d have an advantage if he used his suitcase as a chess table—easy enough to paint thirty-two alternating squares on the leather side—and prop it up with a compact army stool. He packed another two stools to lure passers-by into a quick game or a browse of the on-display books that he propped where and how he could—on a wall ledge or at his feet. He’d tell folks, as promised, that they could find a wider array of titles at Besarabska, and to be sure to say that Yakov had sent them. He earned less than his wage at the circus, but read more and more, and felt more fully human even when policemen remonstrated and made him pack up and go.

            He’d head to Taras square by mid-afternoon, there to fill out the day with just chess or personal reading—nothing more to display. He hoped and did not doubt that Nadia would see him, and most of these spring days were well worth the wait. He had landed upon an epistolary novel by Viktor Shkolvsky—ZOO, or Letters Not about Love—that had been smuggled in from Berlin, where the emigrant writer had lived in the early 1920s; he read it twice to decide that he’d give it to Nadia, even if by instinct he was loathe to script out anything.

            And instinct, he was aware, is as mindless as heartbeats. In a fleeting moment with Ilya, who was sitting with Yakov one late afternoon, he gave up the rare copy. “I love this passage,” he flipped to Letter Four, “but I’m pretty vague on the context.”

            “I haven’t read this at all, so I’m all ears.”

            “You don’t read what you sell?”

            “And, to make that notion worse, I sell what I don’t read! But da vai—what struck you?”

            “This—it starts:

                             I’m not going to write about love. I’m going to write only about the weather.

                             The weather in Berlin is nice today.

                        The sky is blue, the sun higher than the houses. The sun looks right into Pension                    Marzahn, into Aikhenvald’s room

—well, I should get to the relevant point—”

            “No,” Ilya assured, “I’m setting the scene in my mind, and, moreover, I’ve got nowhere to run off to.”

            “Really? So I’ll just skip a couple lines to where it gets interesting:

                             Today is February 5 . . . I’m still not writing about love—that’s the title, see, but that’s not where I wanted to… ah, here:

                             I don’t like the weather to be freezing or even cold”

            “Which will set up the challenge to the dislike, yes?”

            “I guess so—this is where it departs and, well…”

            “Read on, I’ll shut up!”

                             “Because of the cold, the Apostle Peter denied Christ.”

Yakov looked up and expected to meet Ilya’s eyes, which were closed in a smile.

                        “The night was cool and he walked up to the fire, but at the fire sat public opinion:                  the servants kept questioning Peter about Christ and Peter kept denying Him.

Here he capitalizes ‘Him’—” Ilya didn’t respond or open his eyes.

                             “A cock was crowing.

                             The cold spells in Palestine are not severe. There it is certainly warmer than in                          Berlin.

                            If the weather that night had been warm, Peter would have remained in the darkness                      and the cock would have crowed for nothing, like all cocks, and in the gospel there                               would be no irony.

Yakov paused at that. He was conscious that the present spring air was as pleasant here as anywhere on the planet. And that in general, irony wasn’t something he’d given much thought to. Lots was done for nothing, let alone cocks’ crowing. But the gospel harping (or hinging?) on such details? What did he know of the gospel, anyway? Still, he read

                                 “It’s just as well that Christ wasn’t crucified in Russia. Our climate is continental—                  severe cold and blizzards; the disciples of Christ would have flocked to the fires at the                      intersections and would have stood in line to deny Him.

Capital ‘H’ again—“

            “You tell a good story, Yakov, but a shitty exegesis!”

            “What? What’s that?”

            Ilya smiled bigger in his opened eyes. “May I borrow that book?”

            “May you borrow! It’s technically yours, or at least I’m indebted to your provision. You’re the reason I was able to read it in the first place.” And though Yakov imagined Nadia receiving it more deeply, even with half the spirit, he handed it over.

            As if Ilya knew what traipsed through his young friend’s mind, he pulled out of his haversack a volume of Tsvetayeva’s poems and said, “Don’t sell this one—I’m not sure we’ll procure another. And she’s too good to give up.”

            Nadia did show up a couple days later, and Yakov was glad for the chance to hand over Ilya’s treasured book. He tried for a moment to bridle his enthusiasm, asking about the circus and his replacement. “Normal. He’s no great shakes—doesn’t have your timing or range. But I don’t really pay much attention.”

            “Have the horses been good?”

            “You surely mean Sergey.”

            “Okay. Has he been good?”

            “He’s my husband. What do you want me to say?”

            “That he’s been good.”

            Nadia hadn’t even sat down yet—Yakov had risen when she approached—and she shifted her body as if she now needed to go. She again had a bag of groceries that Yakov cavalierly took from her hand and placed on the end of the bench. “What, are you hungry?” she asked without mirth.

            “Not really.” He sat down and jerked his head slightly to the remaining space on the bench. “Care for a game?”

            Finally she smiled, and sat. “Of checkers? Or maybe charades…” Yakov swept the pieces from the suitcase top into his lap and lifted the lid to pull out the book of poems. He set it on the top of the lowered lid and began assembling the pieces around it in their starting positions. Nadia breathed through her nose and looked at him. “I only have a couple minutes.”

            Yakov continued to place the pieces one at a time. “I’ve played maybe twenty times today. My tag-phrase, which I thought I’d get tired of myself when I first starting using it, is ‘every game is different.’ And it’s true, even for the shoe-in wins. So much true that I never think of funneling things to a formula, though that’s tempting in this business.”

            “Mine, too…. Did you know I started out on the trapeze?”

            “No, you never told me that.”

            “Actually, Sergey, too. He had a bad fall, catching just the edge of the net and breaking his collarbone.”

            “Did you fall?”

            “Of course, but not that badly. You know you’re going to slip once in a while and you just let yourself drop—no problem. But bad falls happen for two reasons: stretching a trick beyond what’s wise, or getting bored with a routine that you could practically do in your sleep.”

            “Which was the case for Sergey’s fall?”

            “I don’t know. I wasn’t watching, and he didn’t want to talk about it.”

            “Whenever you fell, which was the more likely case?”

            “I suppose boredom. I can concentrate well on a challenge, and I still like the flips and flying. What I didn’t like then was the pendulum rhythm of it all, the counting out. Or the formula, as you put it.”

            “Don’t the horses make the same effect?”

            “They’re thinking creatures and they move, more or less, with me, more like a dance. The trapeze bar could care less.”

            Yakov was about to ask even if Sergey was on the other end to catch you? but thought better. “So the horses have treated you well…”

            Nadia sighed and picked up the book. “What this?”

            “It’s for you. I meant to give you another one that features St Peter...”

            “Huh?”

            “This one is great—” he beckoned the book to his hands and turned to a creased page. “It’s entitled ‘Much Like Me’ but I’d call it ‘Passer-by’. It’s sadly her tombstone poem so maybe not the intuitive place to start…” and gave it back to her, and she silently read. Yakov picked up one of the black knights that he knew was getting loose at its base and tried to tighten its little screw. When Nadia had finished reading, he asked, “does any line stand out?”

            “You mean lines, don’t you?”

            “Sure. It’s that good, isn’t it!”

            “It is that good, but you also know what I mean—”

             “Well, I…”

            “The single line, or phrase rather, that I like is just ‘cemetery strawberries’—I don’t need the follow-on that they’re ‘sweeter and fuller than any other.’”

            “True. The image is enough.”

            “But you like the lines…”

            “I like all the lines.”

            “You want me to say

                        Think of me simply and

                        Simply of me forget”

            “Not if you don’t want to.”

            “I don’t want to.” Nadia turned to her bag of groceries and stood up to go.  “I don’t have anything to give you in return—I honestly passed this way on a whim.”

            “See, exactly like Marina’s poem: ‘Passer-by, stand still!’”

            Nadia paged through the little volume and, after a little deliberation, showed Yakov a certain title. “You’ve read these all? Even this one—‘I’m glad your sickness is not caused by me’?”

            “Of course,” Yakov grinned, “it’s my trade after all.”

            

            Truth told (and not yet to him), Yakov wasn’t in an official trade because Ilya had never registered him as a bookseller. Besarabska was mostly a food market, but plenty of ware, from parakeets to perfumes to car parts wound around the sides and enclaves, from the huge art deco hall to the train station. It was a destination point for all kinds of shoppers, if just as itinerant in feel as the metro thoroughfares. Policemen walked around as much to scan what they would later buy as to ask for papers, and wait for bribes. Yakov hated this environment for its mundane bustle and lack of imagination. Unlike the parks, where he could engage in a game or sit back and read without interruption, here he had to flit his eyes to ensure a browser wasn’t going to walk away without paying, or else stare vacantly at the thousands and thousands of passers-by. Good riddance, he thought. I’m here merely to justify the rest of my day.

            He was jolted, then, one mid-summer evening when a knock on his door compelled him to justify his lack of employment. “I work for Ilya Radomovich, at Besarabska.”

            “No.” The bespectacled man spoke without emotion and referred to a document on his clipboard. “You used to work at the Kobzov circus, which reserved you this flat, and now you don’t. So you’ll have to register somewhere else and, in all likelihood, prepare to move out.”

            “I am registered, I’m sure—”

            “Are you? Were you ever registered for military service?”

            “What’s that have to do—”

            “Were you?”

            “No.”

            “Right. No. You skirted that requirement and now you are falling into such habits.”

            “I was never summoned—”

            “Nor did you take any initiative to serve the union. Citizens like you, Jürgen, buckle the system a bit. But just a bit: your type of petty sabotage only comes back to make you miserable.”

            “I’ve never tried to sabotage anything.”

            “You’ve never rigged anything?”

            “I haven’t broken the law.”

            “And you know the law?”

            Yakov did not, really, know where to go from this statement. He had been reading, by coincidence, the parlance of Porfiry Petrovich with Raskolnikov, and then, more abstrusely, the mental meanderings of Svidridgailov. Knowledge of the law, civil or natural, had almost nothing to do with justice, and an administration of orders (as this bespectacled man was ostensibly doing) had even less to do with either. Yakov could have replied, ‘I do not know the law’ and also ‘just as you.’ He did not. Instead he asked, “how much time may I have here?”

            “Your problem isn’t here, Jürgen; your problem is registering as you need to. The state is not intent on kicking you out, firstly, or having you play hide-and-seek. But to remind you of the terminus technicus ‘sabotage’, you risk not an eviction but a reassignment to Siberia.”

            “What?”

            “Yes, we know”—and the ‘we’ included a heavyset man who impatiently barged his way past his bespectacled partner, to size up Yakov’s sparse furnishings—he picked up the splayed copy of Crime and Punishment and flipped it to his boss, who tucked it into his case. “We know that you didn’t weather well the Kyzyl Kum; rest assured there’s not such a desert in Siberia. Listen! I’m here to tell you to register—fast—and not with Ilya Radomovich!”

            “What’s wrong with Ilya? He’s above board—”

            “He’s not your concern, especially if he hasn’t registered you.”

            “Is he in trouble?”

            “Good night, Jürgen. You have four days to settle your situation.”

            Ilya was not at Besarabska the next morning, or the next. The other booksellers had no information and were rather guarded about Yakov’s queries about ‘registration’. Not that he came off as a mole—Yakov thought about that in reverse, that one of them might have signaled him to the authorities, to push him out of their space. He thought he had been on friendly enough terms, but then again, they likely disparaged the way he scooted off at the noon whistle, so to speak, with a suitcase full of books that otherwise would have remained at the market. Yakov never went out drinking with them; he didn’t smoke or tell jokes. Sure, he covered tables for anyone who needed to go urinate, and he was generally considerate about buying a couple extra samsa to offer as a mid-morning snack. He tended to a teapot over a little electric heating coil—forbidden in this section of the market, for fear of fires—and taught the basics of the shell game when there weren’t any browsers at the tables. No, Yakov was no mole, as unknown as he was. But anyone could be a mole, especially if one wanted to stay rather unknown, free to burrow away and surface only as needs would have it.

           

            There was one person he felt was rather trustworthy, for the sometimes extensive interactions he had with her at Taras square. Her name was Irina, a widow who lived with a ‘rascal’ of a son: “fifty years old and loafing around the flat until wherever he goes and whatever he does half-way through the nights—he never tells me.”

            “And your best guess?” Yakov fiddled with the chess pieces she was not here to play. He knew she’d detract from potential customers, but then again, she came to the park like clockwork with her Pomeranian, park herself on a nearby bench, stroll several times up and down the promenade, feign interest in the books she’d never buy and, when invited to, sit and chat.

            “My best guess is that he’s ashamed to say, even to himself. Prodigal son, he is. But he’s all I have, along with this little furball.”

            They’d talk about the dog, the day, the details of ‘loafing around the flat’, the small talk that spilled out of Besarabska or the television set. Then she’d always say the same farewell: “Yakov, be happy, until next time.”

            “Actually, Irina,” Yakov said on this day, “next time may be long in coming. I need to move on, and I’ll ask you this favor: you remember Ilya, the tallish guy that sat with me a couple weeks ago?”

            “I’ve seen so many sit with you, playing chess—”

            “Well he was just talking books,… anyway, he’s slightly balding and tall, usually wears a brown jacket,…named Ilya…my supplier of books. I’d like him to know that I’ve gone to Lvov and will probably find a similar situation there if he wants to know.”

             “Lvov? Why do you need to go there?”

            “Because, as it turns out, Kiev has only been a stop on my way west. Longer than usual, admittedly, and it tempted a definition of home. But…”

            “I understand. And am sad. When will you go?”

            “Tomorrow.”

            “I’ll look out for this Ilya for you.”

            “And one more, perhaps? You’ve probably never seen her, but, well, her name is Nadia; works at the Kobzov circus…; has a jealous husband, not that I’ve—”

            “Be at peace, Yakov. You’re not my prodigal son. I’ll keep an eye on your bench as long as I can get these old legs to work.”

            “You’ll tell no one else?”

            “It’s between you, me and the dog.”

            “Thank you, Irina.” And he left the beloved bench without looking back.

            His plan this evening was to sneak into the circus—not literally, but inconspicuously, for dread of being recognized by the staff. He hadn’t shaved for several days, so that would be a slight cover. He still had in his wardrobe a square Tajik cap and light robe that he had never worn here, and with a rub of soot especially around his eyes and in his stubble, he could pass as a random visitor. He mumbled a Tajik phrase when he took his ticket and settled into a corner on the top row. The acts unfolded predictably and Yakov’s replacement, as Nadia had attested, was a very ordinary clown, playing less to the details of the given act and more to the darkness of the crowd. Intermission was tense: Yakov could neither move nor sit still. He strategized what he’d say if, enshallah, Nadia would recognize him and Sergey not. Or, God forbid, vice versa. He had a believable alibi ready that he needed to come back to work and would convince the manager that a Tajik caricature would broaden the clown corps. But by the end of the performance none of those thoughts mattered. There were no horses tonight, “the whole week,” explained an usher who didn’t recognize Yakov when he questioned their absence. “That act is on loan, joining their Akhal-Teke cousins.”

            ‘Fitting,’ thought Yakov, ‘that Nadia has gone east. Maybe she took Ilya along, and may they happily realize what I couldn’t find there, or here for that matter.’

            As Yakov trudged back home, he was met at the landing by the bespectacled man. “You're making progress, I assume?”

            “As a matter of fact, I’ve just returned from Kobzov.”

            “They took you back?”

            “I’m making my bid. What do you think?” Yakov spread his arms out to show the fullness of the Tajik robe.

            “I think you miss your old home.”

            “No. I really don’t. But I can bring that ambience here, for everyone’s entertainment.”

            “Perhaps you can. I’ll attend your performance tomorrow to see what I think.”

            “Please do. And much thanks to your spur to get me registered.”

            “You’re not being ironic, I hope.”

            “I hardly know what that means.”

            The next morning Yakov walked to Besarabska, to ascertain once again that Ilya hadn’t made an appearance. The other booksellers were visibly nervous, as their stock was dwindling. “I’m on it,” Yakov proclaimed, and slinked off to be anything but ‘on it’. Instead, he left to visit Trukhaniv island for old time’s sake, and walked the long way down the bluff, lugging his familiar suitcase, packed with his better clothes and the few books he had left. On the island he played a couple honest games, winning and losing without bets.

            Feeling quite liberated, he walked across the bridge and south to Pechersk, a monastery he had always wanted to visit but never felt fit to enter. It was not a place easily open to passers-by: the reconstruction of several khrams was slowly proceeding on the auspices of the preservation of national treasures, and public traffic was largely discouraged. Still, Yakov slipped in and absorbed the timeless spirituality of the place. Centuries of interred mystics and exponential prayers provided ample boost to existential doubts. In Yakov’s now-worn suitcase was an unread volume by Sholem Aleichem, the impetus to an idea he wanted to enact in Lvov (at the risk of calling it a plan). From his naïve notions, Tevye the milkman had the ironic misfortune—a rather vague notion—of being father to well-meaning, faithfully Jewish daughters. Well-meaning and faithful should never plague anything, least of all themselves. Of the hundred-or-so monks wandering about Pechersk (largely unseen, for myriad meanings), these daughters—and their father, and probably their mother, to be sure—probably spoke in a more resonant voice than anyone realized. Yakov could read Aleichem’s account in a matter of hours, but he did not want to do so just yet.

            Time on the train tonight would provide such an opportunity, and, beyond that, he’d need more meanderings in places like this. Pechersk was necessarily peaceful. Its effect sheltered Yakov the rest of the day, and he walked rather assuredly to the voksal, staking his bet that the night train would have a sleeper cabin available to him. And, stars aligned, it did. Little did he know, as he waited a placid hour on the station platform, the bespectacled man and his thug at this very moment were ransacking his flat.

IV: Oleg

“You’re traveling the night through?” asked the other traveler in the cabin assigned to Yakov. There were beds folded into the wall, so another could still join them.

            “Yes, to Lvov.”

            “You’re reading Sholem Aleichem and you’re pronouncing his city like Russians do? It’s ‘L’vyiv’, and he’d give it more a Yiddish accent.”

            “Good to know. Yes, then, L’vyiv.”

            “Why do you want to go there?”

            Yakov turned to look more fully at the middle-sized, middle-aged man. In his hands was not a book but a bottle of vodka he was beginning to unscrew. Yakov thought quickly but didn’t speak too fast. “I’m a student. Of literature, as you can see. I haven’t been to most places I’ve read about—haven’t been to Leningrad, for instance, where so much is set…and so I figured I could use a trip to Lvov—L’vyiv—”

            “You’re a student of literature and haven’t been to Leningrad!” He leaned in to whisper, “you can call it Petersburg for my taste.”

            “No, I haven’t been there.”

            “You’ve been to Moskva, surely.”

            “I have not. I’ve learned what I’ve learned in Kiev.”

            “Mercy! Then this is an adventure for you.”

            “Well, it could be. I’ve been interested in Alexander Kuprin, so Odessa might be bigger in my future—”

            “Kuprin! A dinosaur. You should be reading Bulgakov. Black Snow. Heart of a Dog.”

            “How did you come to literature?”

            “I spent time in prison. You can read there to your heart’s delight. Heart of a dog’s delight.”

            “But not such titles, surely?”

            “At a certain, lower rank, at the grubbier of prisons, no one bothered to check titles. I made good with my guards and didn’t ask for much, so…it was easy to get what I wanted. They wanted this—” he gestured to the bottle—“and I was far-and-away the best in the ward at making it—provided I had the right equipment, which they sometimes provided. If you ever get arrested, young—what’s your name?”

            “Ilya.” He figured it wouldn’t disadvantage his friend to have such tracings to Lvov.

            “I’m Oleg. Or Olesh, if you like.”

            “Pleased to meet you.”

            “If prisons are meant to be hell, Ilya, you might as well embrace it, and that’s the first way toward climbing your way back to earth. Here, drink up!”

            “I don’t really—”

            “Da vai, you don’t really ‘study’ literature. You drink it up.”

            The train pulled into Boyarka, the first stop outside of Kiev, and a beautiful young woman slid open the cabin door. She asked, shyly it seemed, whether the third space was available, and Oleg exclaimed “of course!” She said she only needed to go to Berdychiv—a couple hours away—and that she was very tired and didn’t drink, if it were agreeable just to sleep that stretch. “But of course,” again came the voice of the master of the cabin. Yakov was quite appreciative of this chance just to sleep.

            A half-hour out of Boyarka, the three already bedded down, she slunk out of their cabin and didn’t return until, as Yakov estimated in his sleeplessness, the two hours it took to get past the Kozjatyn junction. Then, rather abruptly, she shook the two men of the cabin awake (Yakov needed no shaking) and asked in a cloying politeness if she could please change her clothes before she was to meet her mother—“I can’t have her seeing me so frumpy”—which wasn’t quite the case, but who was to argue? Yakov left the cabin immediately, while the groggier man nearly tumbled out of the middle bunk and groped his way out the sliding door, which she closed and locked.

            “You know what she’s doing,” Oleg mumbled.

            “Changing clothes, as she said.”

            “She’s going through our luggage. You got anything valuable?”

            “No.”

            “Me neither. She’s going to disembark rather disgusted with us.”

            “How can you be so sure?”

            “I’m not. But I have a hunch. I ride this train an awful lot and anything can happen between the first and penultimate stops. It’s how I was first arrested: I was drawn into an innocent game of cards that turned argumentative, and then into a big brawl; since I held my money—and plenty of it, at the time—I was the one implicated as some sort of gambling bandit. I could have parted with the money, naturally. But at a certain point, you lose your bearings and have no idea how to placate this person or that.” He had fully awakened by now, and rapped on the closed cabin door: “how’s it going in there, sweetie?” No response, but general rustling. He returned his quiet commentary to Yakov. “I’m a Jew, if you hadn’t noticed.”

            “Really? I am, to a certain extent, also Jewish.”

            “Mazel tov to the both of us, then. She may also be a Jew, but my bet would be no.”

            “What does your being a Jew have to do with your story?”

            “Arrests happen for a lot of reasons, and sometimes just the reason of being who you are. I was a ‘political consultant’, shall we say, of Shostokovich’s Thirteenth Symphony, the one called ‘Babi Yar’. Have you heard of it?”

            “I’ve heard of Yevtuschenko’s poem—”

            “Yes, then, that’s it. I was a commissioned reader of his poetry, especially as Dmitri was putting the finishing touches on that opus.”

            “You’re a musician?”

            “I’m a dabbler, but that’s neither here nor there. I worked to ensure the success of the premier in Moskva and tried like hell to get it performed in Kiev—at the massacre site, no less. I had plenty of sponsors but not on the governmental level, so I had to keep that side of things rather veiled. Getting musicians to practice the piece, doubling and tripling their standard fare for the risk they thought they were incurring—albeit, most were aware it was a hands-down success in Moskva… Well, we made some in-roads, but couldn’t pull off the ultimate event. I had money enough but I guess not the charisma, the ‘street smarts’, as they say in America…. It’s a skill we don’t teach our pioneer boys and girls. Except this girl, maybe—” he put his ear to the cabin door and spoke evenly, “I think our ‘train smarts’ compatriot is finished, yes?”

            She opened the door and indeed looked very elegant. She thanked them for their gallant patience and moved down the narrow corridor to wait for the train to enter the Berdychiv station. There wasn’t any disgust in her expression as she bid them good-bye. And neither of them checked their belongings before they climbed back into their bunks and slept their way to L’vyiv.

           

            They woke to the conductor’s knock and a bright dawn. Oleg stepped out to use the loo, then returned and Yakov did the same. The train pulled into the ornate station and the passengers stepped out. Yakov had nothing more to do than look up at the huge trusses and sunray atmosphere through the sky windows. Oleg stood by him and, after a moment, inquired whether he had a place to go.

            “No, not specifically. I took the night train to give myself the fullness of a new day.”

            “That’s how you travel?”

            “Well, not that I’m so experienced—not having been to Leningrad, as you know—”

            “St Petersburg, remember? We’re in context. It’s odd: I’m a Jew—you say you’re somewhat that, too—and I’d far prefer we call a thing for what it is, even if in this case it’s a Christian pretext for a czar’s apotheosis. Which, lo and behold, passes on to Lenin for the same dubious reasons. Anyway, do you have even a direction to go, now that you’re here?”

            “I’m quite natural in city parks and markets, so that’s where I’ll head.”

            “Hmm. Well, I live in the Klepirov village on the nearest trolley line from this station. You’re welcome to stay a night to figure out your plan—I can show you where Sholem Aleichem lived, just blocks away from my house, or what you might expect out of our modest open markets.”

            “Why would you make such an offer?”

            “No reason other than I empathize with your process. No one nowadays reads Aleichem and explores such origins. Just as no one sticks their necks out over Babi Yar.”

            So they walked to the trolleybus and commenced a small tour of L’vyiv, down Prospect Gorodska. “Here’s the only synagogue that survived Nazi annihilation,” Oleg pointed out, at the Brothers Mikhnovs’ki street. “And on the other side is where Olesh Babiy lived—I’ll tell you about him later.” Yakov took mental note, but wondered about Oleg’s zeal and patronage, not to mention the presumption of ‘later’. The mental departure didn’t last long, though, as the familiar and grand prototype of a circus building loomed on the left side of the boulevard.

            “I didn’t tell you that I worked as a clown in one of Kiev’s circuses.”

            “Oh, is that so? Well, we have exactly what you see—no competitors and arguably little interest, though they purportedly pack in an audience, not that I’ve ever been witness to it…. So, here: we’ll get off at the next stop, Leontovich—sometimes referred to nostalgically as the Bryhidky Prison, not that I’m so intimate with the place!”

            Something sinister in the joke caused Yakov to think twice about his company. He had never attached himself to those who knew the ‘insides and out’ of things—not with Ilya, not with anyone at the Kobzov circus, and certainly not with anyone in Samarkand. Oleg was kind to offer him the lay of the land, but Yakov hadn’t asked for such guidance and this fact weighed heavily on him as he trudged reluctantly up Leontovich street. Still, he went into Oleg’s little flat and accepted the scrambled egg breakfast he cooked up for him.

            “The rest of my day is to look over some manuscripts and musical scores, and of course to rest up—I didn’t say, I suppose, but I’ve been rather back and forth between here and Kiev.”

            “I’ll not be in your way,” promised Yakov. “I’m sure I’ll find a place to stay tomorrow night and beyond—”

            “Worry yourself not, young Ilya. Consider the couch yours and let the days unfold as they will.”

            The very first unfolding set in motion the tenor of the day. Under the fresh shirt Yakov had packed in his checkered suitcase he found a roughly scribbled note that, on the face of it, he had trouble deciphering:

Don’t trust this guy—

I’ve seen him on this train before

And while I’m no ace at this stuff

I’d say he’s a snitch.

So, that said—all well!

(nothing’s taken)

He crumpled it into his pocket and put on that fresh shirt and went out. Oleg, unknowing, bid him also an ‘all well’, and advised him to reconnoiter the Klepiriv market and Rappaport street, toward St Theodore Square, as he pointed out on a tattered map, and the inevitable meanderings folks took toward Rynok Square, at the city’s center. Yakov thanked Oleg as he left, taking only his still unread Tevye, the Milkman, on the tacit prospect that he wouldn’t return.

            And if he wouldn’t return, he knew he’d miss that faithful checkered suitcase, as much a crutch as anything. It was fine and good to see another diverse market, with the mash of humanity and commodities; it was peaceful to walk past the perfunctory, closed synagogue near St Theodore Square and into the vast grounds of the High Castle, decorated overtly with statues of upright lions and Soviet remembrances. Yakov had trouble conceiving a similar role for himself here as he mindlessly assumed in the Volga region, or cities younger in his life, and further east. L’vyiv appeared rather insusceptible to rackets and raconteurs. And in such a mindset, he opened Aleichem’s novel and began to read.

            The history of Yakov would not be worth a fur hat (as Tevye would say) made out of a pig’s tail if there weren’t (as Tevye would know) a consciousness of the narrative relay. “He addresses his author like a compatriot,” Yakov reported to Oleg that evening, “like he himself is the whisper in the writing. Wouldn’t any of us like to be in such strange control of the story that happens to us, and because of us, and, and, in spite of us—”

            “Yes. It’s the tour de force of Shakespeare when he makes Macbeth say that life is a tale told by an idiot—in this case, Pan Sholem Aleikem is Tevye’s idiot!”

            “But it’s all reverse-like: Tevye’s the fool—the idiot, if you like—and there is no way he can be other than what his author makes him.”

            “Tell me more of your day, young Ilya,” Oleg requested, topping off both glasses of wine.

            Yakov thought, feigning the enjoyment of the alcohol; he could begin by addressing the note balled up in his pocket; he could proclaim his rightful name, or rather milk the pseudonym for as long as he wanted to be invisible. “I don’t have much to say,” he shrugged, “that doesn’t stray from Aleichem’s text. I imagined Tevye at every step—when I was at the bazaar and asked around about jobs, for instance, I gravitated to the kafir and cheese tables first!”

            “Any luck?”

            “Only an old butcher gave me an offer. His son is off in the arctic fleet, his own hands are like the cold hams he chops; the flies, he says, are his only company…”

            “An optimist! So you’ll help him out?”

            “I told him that I’ll buy mutton only from him when I find my fortune.”

            “Fortune!”

            “Again, it’s Tevye on my mind. The poor and the rich have one thing in common: a preoccupation with fortune. Of course it’s all relative, wealth and luck and fate and circumstance. His daughters are his treasure and his debt, like he inherited them from some mischievous genie. I was enjoying his dilemmas—so was he, heart of hearts, with the likes of strong-headed Hodl and wayward Chava—until it came to Shprintze—”

            “—this is the daughter who drowns herself?”

            “the very one. Jilted, I guess, but I’m not sure by whom. Ahronchik meets her at Tevye’s Shavous, an ill-conceived invitation if there ever was one. Of course he falls in love with Shprintze, and of course Tevye protests, then relents, then negotiates, then… what does he say, let me find the page… ‘If we had any brains to speak of, we’d realize that things are the way they were meant to be, because if they were different, they wouldn’t be the way they are…. Doesn’t it say, in the book of Psalms, to trust no one but God? Just leave it to Him: He’ll see to it that the worms are eating you like fresh bagels, and you’ll thank Him for it too.’”

            “Hmm. Vintage stuff. The lovers run off?”

            “That he’d be able to handle—it had its precedent with Chava and Fyedka. No, the boy’s uncle intervenes and insists that no cheesemonger’s daughter is going to solicit his family affluence. And humiliated Tevye doesn’t stand up for Shprintze, neither does Ahronchik or anyone else, and all the considerations of love and luck and values and compromise crash out this time. It’s here that Tevye remembers his audience—Pan Sholem Aleichem, whom he hasn’t seen for a year and to whom he’s been telling this whole sad tale. ‘What was it I wanted to ask you? Oh, yes: have you ever seen a drowned man?’”

            “Doesn’t he mean ‘woman’”?

            “He specifies ‘man’. And implies himself, though the next line generalizes and probes further: ‘mostly one dies with one’s eyes shut, but a drowned man’s eyes are always open. I just thought you might know why that was…’”

            “And that’s it?”

            “Tevye apologizes ‘for taking so much of your time’ and begs you—his own author? his reader?—not to think of him too badly.”

            “And do you?”

            Yakov took up the last gulp of his wine. “Not more than for myself,” he eventually said, placing the glass rim-down on the table, “and by that I don’t really know what I mean.”

            Days followed like this: Oleg would cook a big breakfast, supply Yakov a book (poems by Bialik, for instance), suggest an area of the city to get to know, turn to his messy desk and wait for the evening to drink and debrief. There was nothing in his demeanor that suggested the woman on the train was right, but Yakov couldn’t dismiss her from his thoughts and thus talked about Tevye, Bialik, Yevtushenko, Bulgakov—anyone but Ilya, the one he’d left and the one he claimed to be. He was ready for the inevitable query: ‘what is your long-term plan?’ Literature studies would reasonably resume in Kiev in a few weeks, and reasonably he was getting everything and more out of this study abroad. Why talk about himself, he would argue. I’m here to talk about writers and their texts, and Providence has arranged for Oleg’s tutorage. But Oleg never asked the inevitable and waved away his guest’s promise to find a way to pay for things—“I never intended to freeload.”

            “We all do that, young Ilya. And in a sense, I’m leeching off of you. I hadn’t thought much about the Brothers Mikhnovs’ki synagogue until you broached it yesterday. Let’s try, you and me, to see who runs the place, whatever that entails.”

            Plenty, it turned out, including dozens of shrugs and some suspicious looks, a few professors at the university and some of their apprentices. A man named Harel was someone who could let them in, by appointment only. It would be a dour tour of unkempt premises, they were warned, and indeed the following day it was. Harel stuck to history and gave no hint that Sabbath prayers were uttered here, or anywhere. Nor did his visitors ask, but they were reminded in subtle strains that tours were by appointment—Oleg reached into to his pocket to draw out some coins, which Harel mechanically took—“you have my contact if you desire a return.”

            But such a return was discouraged when, late that same evening, an assistant dean knocked on Oleg’s door. Oleg greeted him with false warmth, “How good to see you again, Viktor Ivanovich, I had meant to knock on your own office door earlier today—”

            “Yes, well, the pleasure shall have its chance after all. You will let me in for a drink, I trust.”

            “Why not?” Oleg said, and backed in as a lobster.

            Yakov rose and uttered a ‘stvrastvuete’ to the academic, who eyed him with interest.

            “Health also to you,” Viktor Ivanovich returned. “I hope not to steal time from your visit, comrade—”

            “Ilya,” Oleg voiced as an introduction.

            “Ilya…and your patronymic, as I prefer addressing in full?”

            Oleg didn’t have that to provide, and a full six seconds ticked off the clock before Yakov blurted “Rabinovich” with a self-conscious chuckle, gesturing that he was deferring to Oleg.

            “Ilya Rabinovich,” put together the assistant dean, “with pleasure.”

            “From Kiev,” Oleg supplied, “on holiday.”

            “I see, I see. A student, I presume?”

            “Yes, of literature.”

            “So you must greet Professor Gorsikov from me, as he and I go way back.”

            Yakov nodded and sat down. The next minutes would be rough, he imagined, and he’d have to resort to a gentler kind of shell game, to initiate points of palaver or else stay ahead of Viktor’s routine. He could answer to his interests in literature easily enough, as well as the general flow of student life at Taras Shevschenko; when specific names came up, Yakov smiled and answered that he was only in his first year, still struggling to keep up with all the details, and that his mind often drifted back to Samarkand, where he was more accustomed to professors named Djora Djokayevich and Atamurat Ismanov and Hukberdy Gurdov—perhaps he had heard of these esteemed colleagues? To Yakov’s satisfaction, these were the names of real people who indeed taught him at junior level how to read and solve riddles, and he enjoyed thinking of them now.

            Oleg brought in a new bottle of vodka and a plate with three glasses, plus sliced pickles for ‘bitters’ to follow. “Viktor Ivanovich comes at a good time—I hope, at least, all is well with you.”

            “To health, comrades,” he answered and threw back his hundred grams. The other men did likewise. “All is well with me, thank you, and—” pouring himself another— “all will be so. I’m in line for promotion this term.”

            “Congratulations!”

            “Thank you, and I know you will understand what I’ve come here to say.” He filled the other two glasses and waited for Oleg and Yakov to raise them. “Very well. I’m being promoted because I run a sound ship. No leaks, nothing to patch. A scoured clean deck that keeps the vermin out. Now I know you are not that—don’t hear me the wrong way—but the nature of students, wouldn’t you agree, is sometimes to seek knowledge in the wrong places. Today was suspicious, comrades, and not on the up-and-up. Promise to stay clear of my premises, especially if you nose around for counter-revolutionary relics.” He drank this time without losing eye contact, and glared the others to drink to this promise.

            “But Viktor Iv—”

            “I’m less interested in your response, Pan muzikant, as you readily know, than that of Ilya…forgive my memory… Radomovich?”

            Yakov gulped and took a pickle, pacing himself deliberately. “I hope you aren’t offended, gentlemen. There is less tradition in my side of the Union for this kind of thing”—he held up the pickle and chomped it and gave eyes to both men to follow suit. Oleg jerked and looked at the assistant dean, who was now smiling like a crocodile. “My response is not to correct you, for one thing: you have authority that is worthy of your protection. The relic you refer to reminds me of the victory over the fascists, which surely inspires a generation like mine, who barely know what your generation sacrificed in such a fight.”

            “Is that what you want me to believe?” Viktor swung his head to Oleg, who tensed up his shoulders and raised his eyebrows. “Ilya Radomovich?”

            “His name is—”

            “Wait,” Yakov said, “I think this needs to come back to good terms. I’ve given my response, which you asked to hear first; Olesh, can you corroborate? What was your interest in what we saw today?”

            Oleg looked at him with annoyance, but still took the question with equanimity. “As Viktor Ivanovich knows me well enough, I have served the Union loyally in the work of commemorative music and the struggle of the oppressed. Young Ilya here,”

            “Rabinovich,” Yakov mumbled.

            “Ilya Rabinovich came to Lvov reading Sholem Aleichem—that’s not against the law nor against the harmony of our Soviet peoples. Have you, Viktor Ivanovich, read anything from this native author of ours?”

            “I have not, and am not so certain he would pass muster at the faculty in Kiev. Worth inquiring about, at any rate. Regardless of that, I have made my point clear, yes?”

            Yakov poured a third glass for them all and, with calculation, drifted off to oblivion. He could hear Oleg and Viktor argue on some other topics, evidently about the insides and outs of university powers. He heard talk of ‘tourma’—but renditions of prison quite different than what Oleg recounted to Yakov on the train. He heard his adopted name spoken in dubious tones, by both men. And then he thought he heard the whispered rush of Irina, but then again, he was by that time slipping into sleep. At a little after 3am, when he came to, he silently gathered his things in his suitcase and tiptoed to the door. He thought of leaving a note—Oleg had been good to him, after all—and though it didn’t make complete sense, he dug out the softened crumble of paper that he hadn’t tossed away, and figured that the woman’s handwriting sufficed for his own farewell.

V: Yulia

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 eight 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: depicts 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.”

               

VI: Harel

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 nine to five 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 leasable 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 Cavalry, 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.”

VII: Javert

“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 birds 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.

VIII: Maksim

How Yakov aged in seventeen years patrolling the Biran forests could be telescoped in his summer of 1986. Chernobyl had blown its top and from May Day onward the state mounted a clandestine scramble to contain the catastrophe. A half million ‘liquidators’ were gradually trucked into Pripyat, even as the residents of that small city had been evacuated with just a few hours notice, naïve to the problem, never ever to return. One wonders how many Pripyat young men volunteered to come back for the emergency duty, or whether their presence would add fuel to the fire. Soldiers on the Afghan front likely viewed their new call-up as a reprieve; miners from Tula were more staid about the job at hand, not used to this kind of heat or the mandate to keep their facemasks on, which they largely ignored. Geiger counters were in the hands of every commander, and recommendations of roentgens per time of exposure were muttered about, then adjusted, then reported in myriad ways. There had to be a public campaign to engender the heroism of Soviet peoples everywhere, and there had to be a conveyor belt of ‘biorobots’ to sustain what the confused machinery could only start. There had to be minds in this mindless mess, and dutiful servants to enact unintuitive orders.

            Like killing dogs and cats.

            Yakov had fired tranquilizers into countless wild cats, had trained to defend himself from animal ambushes, but he had never aimed to kill any creature, and those that died on his watch received his utmost veterinarian care. He still had the status and encumbrances of being a prisoner, but the job compelled some chance to roam the wilderness and use his own judgment. Now, in the forests and fields west of Pripyat, he had to adopt a posse demeanor and hunt against his better judgment.

            There had been some choice in the matter. The Birobidzhan delegation interviewing select prisoners gave no hint that any sentences would be curtailed, but that service in the national interest would be noted. Conversely, they warned, sabotage or attempted escape would result in execution. In this cognizance—even without the warning of radioactive dangers—some of the qualified prisoners in Yakov’s ward declined the offer, preferring instead their acclimated lives. Yakov sensed, however, that after the scurry of rounding up volunteers, the Birobidzhan delegation would be back with new orders to crush rocks and kill unpatriotic spirits.

            Yakov blissfully left those doubts behind. The train rolled through Chita and Irkutsk and Krasnbgoyarsk before any awakening dawned: he would never return to the Evrey Autonomous Oblast and the Amur tigers he had come to appreciate, if not love. Humans he loved, though more in the abstract and with circumspection. Yulia’s letters had ceased coming years ago, well before Harel wrote him last, also long ago. Yakov would triple and quadruple his correspondence to them, but knew that his lack of anything to say would render these letters, and him, pathetic. It was far easier to write to released or transferred prisoners who could envision an anecdote in the wild and empathize. Oleg would have been in these ranks, had Yakov the unction to reach back to him, if just to express gratitude for early packages of newspaper clippings and books.

            Yakov opened one of them for the first time in fifteen years. Written in the cover Oleg reminded him, “Bulgakov was my first recommendation, and maybe, as I fear from your silence, my last. I could in maudlin strains repeat Sharik’s sentiment (as I dog-eared the page): ‘Beat me, do what you like, but don’t throw me out.’ But I’d rather you simply enjoy the allegory, and be well.” The daylight of July provided much time to read on the train, and Yakov perused the novel twice more: once for where he had been, again for the prescience of what he would do. “Kindness,” he read, “ is the only possible method when dealing with a living creature. You’ll get nowhere with an animal if you use terror, no matter what its level of development may be.” Dog-earing this page, Yakov studied his fellow passengers and decided to give the book to a young Evenk who had said little to anyone the whole trip. They were just passing over the Dnieper and Yakov looked outside for anything he could recognize. Trukhaniv Island was in the distance, obscured by a misty horizon.

            “We’re almost at the exclusion zone,” the Evenk said, “I won’t be able to finish before we may part company.”

            “Then pass it on to someone else.” Yakov smiled, “I know this book by heart!”

            Disembarking at Ovrich, Yakov saw the Evenk and most other sojourners load onto buses aimed east.  He and a few others he knew (two from his Bira facility) were told to stay put, then marshaled to a makeshift barracks that would be their training station for the afternoon, harbor them for a night and expel them as all liquidators had to expect—their jobs being technical, dangerous, and fluid to the vagaries of the situation. The orders for Yakov’s cohort were blunt: hunt all creatures in toward the river and then hunt them out. Shoot arbitrarily, without thinking about their soft eyes or ability to comprehend. Their owners, if they had them, were long since evacuated, and beyond a desperate starvation through winter months, they’d carry radioactivity in ripple effects, contact by contact, litter by litter. Wild boar and deer were rife in the woods east of Ovrich, and since they had no such illusions about winter keep, they’d be harder to track down and kill. At any rate, it was the height of July, even though the russet leaves tricked the non-colorblind into believing Babi Leto was sneaking in this year before a first frost. Culling the cattle and sheep was like shooting fish in a barrel, so to speak. Disposing of them betrayed the outlandishness of the mission, that their mortality resided somewhere between their absent tenders, the ionic charge in the air, and the scrub units that showed up and shot, counting quickly the fallen on a clipboard and slogging farther east, as if in chase of a front-line enemy. Yakov thought of the Leningrad siege and imagined eclectic beasts organizing a resistance to his squadron’s efforts. Nazis then didn’t have such an open walk of the place and in fact dug in to the burrows that would represent the ultimate grave of that operation. Three years of stalemate, even if pawns kept dying in rotation. He interrupted such thoughts to pull the trigger on a gaggle of confused geese, but then got back to wondering.

            The road to Radcha was somber and slow, thirty-five kilometers of flushing out animals from farmhouses mostly, shooting them as precisely as possible—the chief rule was to fire away from humans, some of whom were local squatters, daring arrest. There was a bus creeping along at perambulatory pace for just such complications—insubordinates who had to sit with officers and supplies as they wheeled farther into the restricted zone, until an empty bus coming back from Pripyat would stop and transfer them out. A fire truck also accompanied the walking posse, hosing down houses and carcasses to cleanse them from the fallout. This method seemed useless to Yakov, who fathomed a flood on the proportion of Noah’s would still not wash away this strange poison. There was no prospect of rain today, and the unmitigating sun quickly dried what the fire hoses drenched. Evaporation would send radioactive elements back into the air, Yakov reasoned. Under his heavy orange suit and surgical mask, Yakov sweat enough to imagine some purging effect, but the grime was an insidious insular system, resonant of the whole trap they were understanding themselves to be in.

            There was a small hotel at Radcha that provided a necessary respite by twilight of that first day. It would provide the only shower and warm meal on schedule, as each liquidator picked out camping supplies from the bus for their more serendipitous routes in days to come. Vodka and songs poured out through the evening, despite orders that work would resume at sunrise. Yakov participated enough to fish out a map from one of the reveling commanders, touting his ability to detect tiger lairs from the relief lines of land around the streams. “Comrade Buchner, there won’t be any tigers tomorrow!” the commander roared. “Tell us instead where the Yeti might be!”

            “Who knows what monsters we’ll find out there,” called out another, and, while Yakov committed a dozen villages and valleys to memory, the drunken table conjured jokes of magic fish and salacious bears and dim-witted Chukchi. Yakov slinked off to his room and slept soundly, if vividly dreaming the night through.

            They all hiked to Aleksandravka, on the Belarus border, finding less farm animals but more wildlife. A delegation of hunters brought in from Mazyr expanded their ranks, but only temporarily: it was from Aleksandravka where groups of three would set off in specific measures to carpet the forest, fifty kilometers east to the reactor zone, twenty kilometers north to south. Each trio would have a sergeant, a local tracker and, in most cases, a prisoner.  Orders were strict to remain within the vision of the other two, and routes were drawn up to ensure flanking trios were staggered well behind, out of shooting range yet still sealing the swath. Yakov was grouped with a sergeant from Khabarovsk and an obese hunter, and, putting up his mask for the day’s trek, he was pleased with this draw.

            They started a northeasterly trajectory towards a village named Davljady, the plan being to reach the swampy swirls of the Pripyat River and follow it to the ghost city, or however close they’d be allowed to walk with rifles in hand. No trio was assured whether this journey would take two days or three, but they were forbidden to stay out a fourth, no matter the circumstances. If anyone in the group were to fall ill, they’d need to find the nearest clearing and call in a helicopter transport. If anyone in the group were to get lost, all groups would be notified. If anyone, free or imprisoned, were known to escape duties, sergeants had the authority to fire on the individual. Nobody, when this final instruction was read out, asked what would be the protocol if a sergeant escaped duty. At any rate, within this vast red forest, there was really nowhere to escape to.

            About eighty meters apart, communication among the riflemen was almost non-existent. Yakov tallied the kills he was commissioned to make from Ovrich to this point, some four kilometers out of Aleksandravka. There had been seven dogs and five cats (the latter naturally more elusive); thirteen cows, a sow with her litter, nine sheep; dozens of geese and chickens (they were rather a blur); two deer and two boar. Foxes and owls he saw others shoot, and he grew numb to the hundreds they tallied. An abandoned stable of horses was a dilemma for the squadron, and it was decided by the chief officer to open their gates and fire through the roof, ‘missing’ the frightened animals as they galloped into the woods behind them. In reflection of this, Yakov wondered why he hadn’t tried to miss some of the meeker dogs. He was praised by the group for his good eye and steady sense of purpose, though now was not the time to recognize virtues, least of all in prisoners.

            His thoughts went from listing animals to recalling the features on the map, which—apparently more dangerous than his issued rifle—he was not allowed to carry. The sergeant had reaffirmed their coordinates and pace when they had rested for a rudimentary dinner, and they had decided together that Davljady was possible by nightfall, alleviating a need to set up camp. A light rain was falling now and things were getting hard to see—even each other against the surreal orange glow of pines. Shots were hardly heard now, making eerier the environment. And in this haze Yakov nearly stumbled upon a decaying corpse, and a plan.

            It was not a beast of the forest, but a man, apparently dead for several days. He didn’t have any kind of uniform or equipment—he looked more like a disoriented farmer than a liquidator. He manifested no open wound or broken limb; Yakov surmised that the radiation must have killed him. No scavenger had bothered with him yet nor had anyone else patrolling these woods. In this recognition, Yakov calculated quickly. By chance the man might have…ah, yes! His identification document, worn smooth to the curve of his pants pocket, with a laminated portrait photo taken many years before—the date of issue 1977—perhaps when he finished military service to become whatever he would be. He looked reasonably like Yakov did in 1977, or some such netheryear. The dead man was just thirty, and beneath his birthplace of Poltava was a scribbled-in address of an apartment in Buhunsky district, Zhitomir.

            Looking around, Yakov realized he couldn’t manipulate the site too much. He was reasonably sure, with fading light, that a following trio wouldn’t encounter this corpse, especially without the benefit of a sniffer dog, which ironically would have made the whole operation easier. To cover the corpse with pine needles would indicate foul play, complicating all things thereafter. Yakov kept the document and walked on, noting as many landmarks as possible. A shot rang out in the distance to his right, and Yakov ran that way, hearing excited howls from the obese hunter. “An elk!” he panted. “It’s only wounded—let’s trail him!” The sergeant joined their jog, conveniently leading them more rapidly to Davljady. They never caught up with the elk, and Yakov tacitly exulted that something could survive the carnage of the day, and that perhaps the victorious elk would auger good luck for his midnight escapade.

            Davljady had small homes that were easy enough to claim for the night, and in fact several residents had not yet been compelled to evacuate (or were escaping the mandate, which the sergeant wasn’t in the mood to pursue). The trio asked around for beds and a stove, and with them they received hospitality: they enjoyed omelets and pelmeni and vodka—the obese hunter eating more than his fill, but also the sergeant and, for reasons different, Yakov. Each had a room to themselves, a luxury heaven-ordained, and Yakov took the initiative to ask the host for a clean change of clothes. Rummaged up were some grandfather pants and a shirt, which fit well enough. Yakov then packed his own clothes into his duffle and, fighting exhaustion, lay down to rest and not sleep.

            In a panic he awoke, feeling instantly he’d lost his rare chance; the full moon, which might have lightened his slumber, assured him that time was still on his side. Stealthily he exited the house and hustled through the woods using memory, instinct and prayer. And moonlight. The landmarks were difficult to discern in reverse, but they nevertheless unfolded as if encouraging the gambit. He clutched his rifle in the anxiety that he’d encounter anyone on night patrol; he knew he could never kill a human, but then again, two days ago he knew he could never kill any creature. And he knew he would never kill himself. But in a way, that was precisely what he was setting out to do.

            Removing his clothes—those of ‘Maksim’ (rehearsing the name)—he contemplated the absurdity of exchanging all guises of identity. ‘The clothes make the man,’ he mused, and though he wouldn’t put on the dead man’s shirt and pants, he rolled them reeking into a ball that he’d have to carry away, and then carefully dressed him with his own. He gagged at the feeling of wearing his dank boots but had no choice, and jamming his own boots onto the stiff feet of Maksim was just as ghastly. His attempt to curl stiff fingers around the grip of the rifle was futile, so he simply lay it on the ground. He did manage to loop the duffle around the shoulder. And though he was absolutely certain he had placed his own identity document and prisoner papers in the pants he had laboriously put on the cadaver, he double-checked anyway and then bid himself adieu.

            The moon was long since down by now, and reconnoitering was nearly impossible. Yakov realized he could meet the same fate as the old Maksim he’d left—then there would be no mystery about either man. Someone might say, ‘oh, that isn’t the face of the man from Zhitomir’, but no one would second-guess the body of an escaped prisoner. Nobody would call that body ‘Yakov’, just as no one would ever again call this groping, still living absconder ‘Jürgen’. It was always a shell game, he relented, and being thrust around—even by his own machinations—was taking its toll. He could feel the effects of radiation, too, coupled with the exhaustion of his enterprise, and breathing through the mask only added to his lightheadedness.

            He staggered toward Aleksandravka and then south. Dawn had broken and Yakov was dehydrated; several streambeds he had crossed were dried up in the summer, and maybe nuclear, heat. Biting his lip would bring no relief, nor would thinking about other alternatives. He had not been a fan of the characterizations Hemingway crafted, savaged by war and dead-set not to think about things too much; oddly, thinking about them or Sharik or Zhivago carried him through to a fadingly familiar structure that at first seemed a mirage.

            The approach was different than two days ago, but now, unmistakably, Yakov cried with delight to see the barn where the horses had fled. Three had come back and whinnied at this second-time stranger. He looked around for a water tap and quenched his thirst, then realized the animals were suffering just as much. He found a bucket and sacks of grain in a storage closet, and trembling in fatigue, managed to fill the bottoms of some troughs. The straw in the stables was rotting, but Yakov flipped over what he could and collapsed in relief that here he might sleep, and maybe not die.

            Hours later, he awoke to the sounds of a truck engine headed toward Aleksandravka. He eyed the horses as a way of bidding them silence, and perhaps they read his mind. This wouldn’t be the only passing vehicle today, though, and he decided to nourish the animals more thoroughly, as well as himself, courtesy of an apple tree. He found a hat and jacket, saddle and reigns, and approaching one horse after another, decided on the Karabair, the most empathetic to all that had come to pass. Yakov had ridden occasionally around the Biran wilderness, and he felt it peculiar at the time, prisoner that he was, atop a stallion. Now, in the advent of his freedom, he felt all the more an alien.

            His recall of the map served him well, and he rode south through the woods to the Noryn River, east just a ways until it joined the Uzh, then west along its banks all the way to Korosten. This city was well out of the exclusion zone, and his immediate worries were over. Zhitomir, his new official address, was eighty kilometers due south and perhaps that would be a wise destination. L’vyiv was inconceivably farther, Ivano-Frankivsk farther still. Kiev was closer and maybe it would make most sense to trot there and seek out Nadia and give her the Karabair.

            The abundance of such choices underscored how lonely he had suddenly become. He dismounted and spoke out each destination to the tired eyes of the mare, bidding her please to choose. He conscientiously reminded her of the way they had come, to factor that return for justice’ sake. Evening was upon them and both only wanted to rest. Morning would bring a gnawing hunger and no further insight, but again Yakov talked through each option. He led the mare to the stream to drink deep, then released the reigns to let her go. Decidedly, he went the opposite direction.

IX: Sharik

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 and 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 poems 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 they 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.”

Daniel Martin Vold Lamken (December, 2012)