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)
