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

IX.

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

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

            “How did you come to this job?”

            “A mutual friend.”

            “Named Oleg, perchance?”

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

            “Is he still in town?”

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

            “Greet him next time he comes through.”

            “From?”

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

           

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

            “Have you children?” he asked.

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

            “Is your husband good to you?”

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

            “What does he do?”

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

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

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

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

            “Dmitri is a good man.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “You know where I am…”

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

            “So, yes… and what more?”

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

            “I did.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “Who’s Misha Tal?”

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

            “You saw him play?”

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

            “And Kasparov?”

            “What do you think?”

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

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

            “Why?”

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

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

But what god beyond God begins the round

of dust and time and dream and agonies?’”

            “Does Kasparov believe in God?”

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

            “And you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                                            ‘the yellow leaf,

                                    And that which should accompany old age,     

                                    As honor, love, obedience, troops of friends,

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

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

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

            “Pathetic is good in this sense, yes?”

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

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

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

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

            “Not to…”

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

            “Why did you need to get out?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

            “Then you should get it for yourself!—”

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

            “So, seriously, read it first!”

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

            “Ladno, agreed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

            On any day but today.

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

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

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

            “What? What did you say?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Christmas Poem, The Day After They Canceled The Book of Mormon

O boatswain, let this be a lesson
For your children lived and learned
Of hope stirred out of cynicism,
Grace unsought and love unearned,
That even as the inquisition
Mocks the shepherd just returned
Or marks the missionary vision
With a basic truth discerned
Before the mission ever started,
Far beyond the pasture’s hold,
So too the message angels uttered
In a field to shepherds told,
And so the glory first imparted
In a trough, uncounted, cold
And barely noticed, always mattered
More than pentecostal gold.

No doubt we need to feel the fire,
Watch the stars and keep the day
As holy as the world desires,
Festive, bold and on display,
And certainly we should aspire
To give gifts as the wise men gave
And to receive from one another
More than the receipts we save,
But let there be a better lesson
After all the songs have died
To outlast every brief vacation,
Make each day we set aside
Endure, let every inquisition
Stir what’s beating deep inside
And let the challenge of the mission
Move us, ne'er to be denied.

Babi Leto, Babi Yar (Part VIII)

VIII.

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 Pripyet, 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 Krasnoyarsk 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. 

Bronko--our fourth child

Meet Bronko, our flat-coated retriever (with a bit of Border Collie--somewhere between Mom's fourth Irish and my eighth, the breeders weren't too sure;) Born Oct 20th, just in time to celebrate Dostoevsky's birthday! Mother is named Souix and is doing fine with the gradual departure of her ten pups. Mother Katerina is also doing fine, and kids are quite happy.

Christmas Letter 2012

Somewhere along the line, even before a certain ex put my name on a missive about Maria Bartiromo and maybe even before Dan first complained about Christmas lights at the toll booths, I decided to become a Christmas card iconoclast.  Yes, the office calendars go out every year (thanks Josh), but that’s business, and even those stopped going out to family members long ago.

But this year, considering how we will not be with family on December 25, it is time to put the Scrooginess aside.  Kirsten, Andrew and I are looking forward to a Christmas Eve service at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral and Christmas Day in Chinatown, but our hearts, as always, will be with you.

A lot happened in 2012.  Then again, a lot happened last year, too, and the year before, so I’ll forego the urge to catch you up on everything.  Let me just recall and update something I mentioned at Thanksgiving: when we went around the table, I said I was thankful for reaching the point where I was about to enter my first 5K run the following weekend.  Well, not only did I run that race, I won!  True, the victory was for the 50 and over category, and yes, of the 150 total runners there were only four of us, one of whom walked the course, and maybe a 27 minute time is not a big deal, but I still have the medal proudly hanging from my rear-view mirror now.   In a year of elections, heart palpitations, economic belt-tightening and fusses over child support, this is what will carry me into 2013.

With that, Merry Christmas, folks and siblings, and Peace to you wherever you may be on Christmas Day.  We look forward to many more family gatherings in 2013, including those that overcome ocean distances but even these where we can get together on this here Stillwater blog!

Anyway, here's a picture from 2011.  And now, maybe I’ll even think about putting up some Christmas lights.  Then again, I wouldn’t want to shock the neighbors.