Ester and Ruzya Page 19

  The moment Bella comes in with Boris, who picked her up at the train station, Ester knows something unpleasant has transpired. A black cat has run between the two of them, she thinks, in Russian. When did she start thinking in Russian? Even while she is wondering this, she embraces her mother, her tiny, strikingly old mother, bundled up in something gray and complicated and covered with a thin cold layer of snow. Bella stands in the dark hallway looking miffed, thrilled, and expectant, all at once.

  “Where is he?” she asks finally.

  “You have to wash your hands,” Ester answers quickly, and starts pulling off her mother’s outer garments, handing them to a silent Boris. The next minute they are in Ester and Boris’s room, and Ester picks a tiny bundle out of the crude crib and hands it to Bella. The baby screws up his little face, appearing ready to cry, but then changes his mind and smiles an open, toothless pink smile at his grandmother.

  “Oh,” says Bella, her voice reaching too high. “He is so—good.”

  She goo-goos, kisses the baby, goo-goos some more, and then she interrogates Ester.

  “Why didn’t you tell me sooner you were pregnant?”

  “I had no idea. No, this is an incredible story. I mean, I did—I didn’t have my you-know-whats and all, so I went to the doctor, and she said there was no chance I was expecting. I believed her, of course, until, oh, sometime in August, when I was standing in line at the bakery and suddenly felt faint, and before I knew what was happening, I’d thrown up right there in the queue. I hadn’t eaten anything, mind you, so I knew right away. By then I was four months along. The doctor was still willing to do the operation, since it was her mistake. And I would have done it if it weren’t for Miriam, Boris’s mother. She very nearly went into hysterics, screaming I could only do it over her dead body. She doesn’t have anything against abortion per se, you understand, but such a late one—I may never have been able to have children again.”

  “Thank God for a wise woman,” says Bella. “So she is good to you?”

  “Oh, she sympathizes: she’s lived with a husband like mine her whole life.” Boris stepped out of the room, red and uncomfortable, when Ester started speaking about abortion. The two women are speaking in Polish, but the language is close enough to Russian that he has been able to follow the drift of the conversation.

  “On the way from the train station he was telling me about you not laundering his socks. I could have killed him.”

  “You don’t have to. I don’t launder his socks.”

  They laugh, and turn to the baby again. “And are you sure you are going to the university enough—now that you are a classics major, isn’t it more demanding?” asks Bella.

  “Oh, yes. I mean, I can’t go every day or to every lecture, but the nanny really is fine, and thank goodness she is working just for room, board, and temporary Moscow registration.”

  “We will have to deal with that issue for me, won’t we?” the older woman asks, her voice audibly lowered by the realization that, even though she is out of Biysk, she will probably have to deal with the Soviet bureaucracy indefinitely.

  Ester picks up the baby, who has grown fussy, and puts him to her breast: she has been a mother for nearly two months, and the motions have grown almost automatic. She looks at her baby, and Bella looks at hers.

  “There is nothing quite like this, is there?” the older woman asks.

  “No,” says Ester.

  Boris, who has brought them tea, is wondering what they just said but quickly tells himself to give up trying to understand the quick Polish chatter that, he suspects, he will always have in the background. He is right: just as she promised, Ester will not be separated from Bella again. Within a few days they will begin the arduous process of trying to register Bella to live in their apartment: they will be denied permission because a former foreigner who once faced charges cannot be allowed to live on a street that leads directly to the Kremlin. Soon Bella will find a job teaching Polish to Soviet intelligence officers: she will be trusted with this sensitive task but not with occupying a few square meters in a communal apartment on Gorky Street. They will devise a complicated scheme for getting Bella her papers—she will be registered as living outside of Moscow, at the dacha—but she will never even consider actually not living alongside her daughter. Every evening for the next twenty years Ester will come home and tell her mother everything, blow by blow: her life, her joys, and her worries, in this same hurried, melodic, and mostly incomprehensible language.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  MAY 9, 1945

  The doorbell rings three times, signaling that someone is here to see Ester, Boris, or Bella: every family in the communal apartment has its own code. It is too early in the morning for visitors, but Lena Zonina is here. When Ester returned to Moscow, she resumed her friendship with Lena easily, without much discussion—once Ester was out of Major Gurov’s range, she found she could forgive her friend’s insensitivity. Lena is all dressed up as though to go dancing—a white blouse, black pleated skirt, and a ribbon in her hair—and she is looking flushed and talking too loud. “Have you heard? On the radio? At six they announced? The war is over!”

  “Is that true? I … I … congratulations! Oh!” Ester feels a little lost: what is the convention for celebrating the passing of a catastrophe? It has been a while since she felt the sense of imminent threat she still remembers from the first months of the war in Poland, and then later, the first year and a half or so of the war in Russia. The last six months, since the front line moved west of places Ester has lived, the war has become a bit of an abstraction. Somehow she has even stopped worrying about her friends who are still at the front: several former IFLI students, including Eda, who left Ashkhabad for the army after Ester left for Biysk. It did not seem like anything bad could happen to an army that was now unquestionably victorious. Still, the news that it is all over feels overwhelming, as though her body had just become lighter, or the light had grown brighter.

  “Let’s go out!” Lena Zonina demands, as though in response to Ester’s unspoken question. “Everyone is out in the streets!”

  Ester pokes her head back into their room, where the baby is still sleeping, and whispers loudly: “The war is over!” Bella’s and Boris’s heads float to the door for quick kisses, and Ester goes out with Lena, pulling on a light jacket as she bounds down the stairs.

  Gorky Street is filling up with people so fast, it seems someone had ordered the floodgates of all the side streets opened all at once. Out of nowhere hundreds and thousands of red carnations float into the hands of revelers, who pass them on to one another like relay batons. Many men and some women are wearing their military uniforms, and these clearly demarcated heroes can barely take a step: passersby gather in groups of five or six and start throwing the soldiers up in the air. Ester and Lena walk about seven blocks to Red Square and turn right toward the American embassy, where the crowd is especially thick. American diplomats have come out into the street, and the crowd is now throwing them up in the air: this is one day when allies are allies, and communicating with foreigners is not a crime.

  Ester and Lena shout “hooray” until they are hoarse. They take hold of no fewer than a thousand red carnations, it seems, and they give away every one of them. Their arms get sore from tossing grown men up in the air—along Gorky Street, in front of the American embassy, in Red Square. They say good-bye at the entrance to Ester’s building and make a plan to meet later to go to a party at the university. Ester flies into the apartment, throws the door to their room wide open, about to start telling her mother about the festivities outside, and stops dead: her mother is sitting at the square polished-wood table, her elbows placed wide apart on the lace tablecloth, her face in her hands, her head shuddering slowly and rhythmically There is no self-indulgence in her crying, and no hysteria: she has years of crying inside her, but she has been given this one day when all emotions are allowed, and she must get it done.

  Ester sits down next to her mother and c
ries too. She cries for Jakub, for Isaj, for her aunts and uncles, for her grandmothers and grandfathers, for her cousins, for her friends, for her dreams, for the last remnants of hope for a miracle. It is finished. There was a war, it is over now, and it took everything away.

  Ester makes tea, sets it on the table, says something, and they keep crying. Boris goes to a party at his graduate school. The nanny tends to the baby, quietly. Eventually, it gets dark.

  When Ester and Lena stepped out onto Gorky Street, they turned left toward Red Square. If they had turned right, walked half a block and crossed the Garden Ring, then walked left for no more than twenty yards, they would have come to a maze of side streets that even on this brightest and happiest of days were empty and gray. A small slouched figure moved through these streets all day and all night, turning right and right and right again, to keep walking in a circle and stay off the main streets. Ruzya did not look up or ahead, and when the fireworks started she only burrowed deeper into her brown jacket and cried louder: she could not hear herself for the racket. She wanted to see no one, or, rather, she knew that the one person she did want to see she could not. She had read Samuil’s letters from the front the night before. The European and American newspapers, which she read for her job, had already announced victory, and it was clear that the Soviet side would follow suit. It seemed like the appropriate moment to take out the white cloth pouch—an old pillowcase—in which she kept the letters and unfold their triangles, laying the sheets flat into a black cardboard binder she had brought from work. It took her three hours to read all that her husband had left her. By the time she was done, she resolved never to do it again.

  Ruzya goes home long after Ester, long after dark, which comes late in May. She goes home after she is sure the Minkins are asleep. It is not because she does not want to tell them about the decision she has made to move out to her own parents’ apartment: she will tell them tomorrow. But tonight, she wants to be alone. She is alone.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  JUNE 1945

  Ruzya has had tears in her eyes since she lay down with the book and turned the light on and then off again when the child would not stop turning and rubbing her eyes. Without getting up, she parted the dusty red curtains and read by the light of the street-lamp. How wonderful that the streetlamps are on again now that the war is over.

  This book is like the world, populated with Spaniards and Americans and Gypsies and even American Indians, and she is lucky to see them, as though through a peephole, a tiny window that only a few people share. This is the essence of living, the skill of grasping whatever joy comes your way, like a book across the censor’s desk, like the light of the streetlamp through the basement’s window, like the visits, every few months, from Colonel Kulikov. He is the dashing man she met two years ago on the train from Ashkhabad back to Moscow. Yolochka, one year old and completely independent, as children are when they first learn to walk, the skinny girl with gray eyes that took up half her face, in that little blue dress with lilac flowers, was running from compartment to compartment making friends with the officers—it was all officers in that car—and Batsheva had said, “It’s you they want to meet.” Now the colonel comes every few months. He has a family in Leningrad, and in any case, he would never marry a Jewish girl, but she loves his visits and his attention and even his tall colonel’s hat. She likes, in a way, that he is so different from the boy who was her husband: it spares her the comparison between her dreams and her life, whose joys are so intermittent. But, like the book says, “It was much better to be gay and it was a sign of something too. It was like having immortality while you were still alive.”

  This book is from a time when war was a distant and glamorous thing. But for all its heroics and all of the author’s apparent sympathy for the Soviet-backed guerrillas, the book could never have been cleared by her department. Not with the old man saying things like “To kill them teaches nothing. You cannot exterminate them because from their seed comes more with greater hatred. Prison is nothing. Prison only makes hatred.” For all their hardness, the men in the book are human, and their conviction, for all its simplicity, has limits. They can argue about how serious—“religious,” they say, heretically—their political beliefs should be. They can argue about killing. Robert Jordan makes her think of her husband. Samuil, too, was righteous, and he was a volunteer in the war, but once he wrote a letter about watching a horse die, and that letter broke her heart, the way he then had to talk himself, there on the page, into wanting to fight. The military censors, simple souls, did not black that part out the way they blotted out the names of towns. When she moved back in with her own parents, she left Samuil’s letters at his parents’ house on the excuse that they would be safer there, but she remembers the words and even the way they fit on the page, the graph paper from his notebook.

  So many of his letters listed their pleasures together: the walks, the cakes at the bakery on Petrovka, the Mayakovsky poems; he promised her, in one of his letters, that when he came back they would take their son—they always assumed Yolochka would be a boy—and go to all the actors and singers they loved and say, “We didn’t hear you all war long. Give us what we didn’t hear!” She recognizes this feeling in a passage in the book where Hemingway describes drinking absinthe: “One cup of it took the place of the evening papers, of all the old evenings in cafes, of all the chestnut trees that would be in bloom now in this month, of the great slow horses of the outer boulevards, of book shops, of kiosques, and of galleries.…” She has never read an evening paper or spent an evening in a café or seen chestnut trees in bloom, or drunk absinthe, for that matter, but she knows that longing from her husband’s letters, and now she knows, from her own life, how happiness comes in tiny bursts. Like a good book.

  Robert Jordan and Maria make love outside, in a “robe,” which she assumes to be a sleeping bag. She and Samuil also made love for the first time outside, and after that they considered themselves married. That was a life of absolutes. “I loved you when I saw you today and I loved you always but I never saw you before.” That is what Maria says to Robert Jordan, and that is how they felt too. Samuil wrote from the service, she remembers: “And we walked away from the crowd. I dragged a bottle from the kitchen. And I knelt on my right leg like a noble knight to hand you your glass. And I already loved you. I loved you very much. And I did not understand yet that I loved you. Did not think.” He wrote that on the first anniversary of their first meeting.

  Now, at the end of the book, Maria is leaving the dying Robert Jordan, and, like a teenage girl enthralled with a romance novel, Ruzya wants to scream, “Don’t go! Nothing can be worth it.” Robert Jordan tallies the time of their love: three and a half days. She and Samuil had eleven months and then another eight months of letters.

  The street cleaner’s broom scrapes the sidewalk overhead. That means it is seven in the morning, and she can sleep for fifteen minutes before getting up and feeding and dressing Yolochka, to drop her off at nursery school and be at work by eight, when the day’s pile of newspapers and magazines and books will already be on her desk. She slips the book under her pillow and goes to sleep with her hand on its newspaper-wrapped spine—a basic precaution to avoid letting it be known that the censors are taking books in and out of the building, and to avoid damage to the cheesy black-and-red dustcover. She dreams briefly of Spaniards and Americans and a Gypsy, and she wakes up with a crick in her neck and a sense of responsibility to remember the book so she can tell her friends, and also the sense that she is terribly lucky to be alive and to know foreign languages and to have a job that gives her great books to read, if only for a night.

  She will always think that For Whom the Bell Tolls is Hemingway’s best book. But she will warn people that reading it can be “pure suffering.”

  People returned to Moscow. The generation that came back from four years of battle found most of itself missing. The Soviet Union lost twenty-seven million people in the war, most of them born in the
1920s. Those were the ones who were killed; several million more returned from German prisoner-of-war camps only to be consigned to Soviet labor camps for “treason”: everyone who allowed himself to be taken prisoner was deemed a traitor. The Jews in the postwar Soviet Union saw even more empty spaces around them than most other people: by some estimates, every other Soviet Jew was dead.

  But those who did return came back unspeakably hungry for life. Beaten and crippled and hardened, they still dreamed, as Samuil had, of “hearing everything we didn’t hear” during the war and reading all they did not read and seeing all they did not see. But the space available for the life of the mind and spirit, a space already small before the war, was now collapsing in on itself, until what was allowed was a tiny dot in the wasteland of the banned.

  Two months after the war ended, the State Jewish Theater, a remarkable Moscow institution led by the actor Solomon Mikhoels, reopened to a packed hall, with Freylekhs, a feverishly festive play about a wedding. Mikhoels was possibly the country’s best-known Jew. “When the theaters open again,” he is said to have promised, “we will have to begin with something noisy and joyous, to shake people up. Enough of this darkness.” He was performing for Europe’s sole remaining Jewish community. Ester was in one of the first audiences of Freylekhs. She had been something of a feature at the theater before the war. The first time she went, invited by Semyon Krasilshik, one of her “mentors,” she translated for him from Yiddish—softly at first, so as not to disturb the other viewers, then louder as other people moved closer and asked her to speak up: the new generation of Soviet Jews did not speak the language of their parents. She went frequently from then on, and regulars recognized her as the interpreter. Now she was back, and so were a few of her regular listeners, all of them transfixed by the frantic happiness on stage.