Ester and Ruzya Read online

  Ruzya’s entering class, owing in no small part to the good graces and residual ethnocentrism of the Jewish first-grade teacher, who handpicked her group, comprised mostly the children of the Jewish intelligentsia—engineers, teachers, doctors, and more than anything else, accountants. They made a point of not thinking about their Jewishness. Stripped of religion—Ruzya’s parents had given it up with apparent ease—sprung from the Pale, and relieved of the myriad discriminatory laws that governed Jewish life in czarist Russia, they really did not see much point in even a secular Jewish identity. True, Soviet documents always specified the bearer’s “nationality,” which really referred to ethnic origin, but the new generation believed this was done in the spirit of diversity. This generation was fated to live through World War II, and after it, through a viciously anti-Semitic period in Russian history, but most of them, just like Ruzya, retained only the vaguest identification with their Jewishness and found things that seemed too clearly or vocally Jewish consistently distasteful.

  In sixth grade, Ruzya and about ten of her classmates grew into a group of friends that would hold together for six decades. They adored most of their teachers, but one was incomparable. She punctuated her history classes with a single expression: “And this is no mere coincidence.” Ruzya, therefore, knew she would be a history teacher. She would teach school—never college—and inform her youngsters that nothing in the world’s memory was “a mere coincidence.”

  She would indeed study to become a history teacher, but even before she graduated university she would come to think of that decision as the first and biggest mistake of her life. By the time she became an adult, she would begin to see it as a dream from a different era, the era of her childhood. The people of her generation recall the 1930s, and especially the 1920s, before the purges and show trials, as a time of unrelenting romanticism. The first generation born after the revolution, Ruzya and her friends believed they would build a future of equality, where the good things, from food to literacy, would be plentiful and universally shared, and the bad things, from poverty to anti-Semitism, would be but a memory. Every undertaking, be it organizing, building, or teaching, they imagined as heroic.

  Most members of Ruzya’s generation lost their illusions slowly, or not at all. Some managed not to notice or question the purges, even the arrests of friends and relatives: these began when they were children and reached into every apartment building by the time they were teenagers. Some continued to believe every word from the government even as their lives filled with secrets. Ruzya was a doubter, and a lucky one, because every member of her gang seemed to lose his illusions at about the same pace, and this helped keep all of them safe. It was a gradual process, although Ruzya would remember several incidents as eye-opening; in any case, by the time she received her historian’s degree, she was sure that most of what she had been taught was a lie.

  MAY 1933

  Ruzya is strolling with Boba, one of her classmates and also one of the gang. He is stout, round-headed, very talented in the sciences, and very happy, always, to discuss their respective dreams of future heroics. Like all of their friends, they have no doubt that, personally and collectively, they have a giant job of future-building ahead of them, and they consider it their duty to engage in some rhetorical practice as often as possible.

  “I am sure I’ll be posted to a rural school somewhere,” says Ruzya.

  “Probably.”

  “And do you know something? I am not scared one bit.”

  “Why would you be?” Boba asks importantly.

  “Well, it will be uncomfortable, no running water or indoor sewage.”

  “True.”

  “And the children—you know, the children will be ill-prepared. They have a shortage of teachers in the rural areas, and some children may not have attended school at all.”

  “I know that.”

  “But these are challenges. I do not expect things to be easy. And these problems do not scare me at all.”

  “Of course,” Boba says, forcing his voice into the lower octave from which it keeps slipping. “If I thought you frightened of those things, I would not respect you.”

  In another four decades they will have a long and tortured love affair that will ultimately collapse under the weight of their mutual stabilities, but for now their passion is reserved for the Soviet future. Standing in front of Ruzya’s building, just to the right of her apartment’s basement windows, they say good-bye to each other, then nod, acknowledging the gravity and righteousness of their mission and their conversation. But this does not seem to convey the emotion that fills them. So they shake hands.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MARCH 1934

  Food shortages are the rule now, the peasant markets are prohibitively expensive, and it is difficult to buy anything in the common shops anymore, but many institutions ensure a subsistence diet for their staff by letting them shop in proprietary stores. The store to which Ruzya’s father is “attached”—where he is registered to shop, courtesy of the large industrial plant where he works as an accountant—is absurdly far away, very nearly all the way across town. Ever since the twins were born four years ago, it has been Ruzya’s proud duty to make the two-tram journey to buy food while Eva stays home with the little boys. At first Ruzya used to pass the time staring out the window; now that she is practically an adult, she reads the paper on the tram—and then stares out the window.

  She has had the sense that something was missing since she left the house. Her mother calls this “the feeling of an iron left on.” But only now that Ruzya is inside the store has she figured out what it was: she forgot to take a bag. How dumb. Good thing she has the paper: she quickly separates its four pages from one another and fashions each into a small conical paper sack. She extends the first of them to the saleswoman, asking that it be filled with buckwheat. The woman, a supersize blonde in a stained white coat, quickly presses Ruzya’s extended hand down on the counter with her own. “You want to get me arrested?” she snarls, though her voice is barely audible. “Put that away.”

  On the page Ruzya used to make a sack there is a picture of Sergo Ordzhonikidze, a member of the Politburo, the top ruling body of the Communist Party. Using a Politburo member’s face to pack buckwheat may easily be interpreted as counterrevolutionary activity.

  JANUARY 1937

  When class gets out, she is right there waiting for Ruzya. But it does not occur to Ruzya that she is waiting for her specifically, so she starts to walk past the girl, who then falls right into step with her.

  “I’d like to talk to you,” the girl says. Ruzya does not like her. She is good-looking, to be sure, in that just-right way that has always intimidated Ruzya. She has that perfect part in her thick dark hair, that blue sweater over a crisp shirt—just looking at her makes Ruzya feel all wrong. The girl is the school’s Komsomol—Communist Youth League—organizer; this is her official title: every school has one of these. This is not the reason Ruzya dislikes her: after all, she, too, is a member of the Komsomol, as is everyone else, really. In fact, as a top student, she was among the first in her class to be inducted. But this girl goes overboard.

  It has been four years since Ruzya and Boba walked the streets of Moscow conjuring the Communist utopia. A lot of things have happened in that time. Last year, the school began talking about the arrests. Ruzya can allow that all of those arrested were guilty. Or most of them. In any case, she has not spent that much time thinking about their guilt or innocence. It’s what’s been going on at the school itself that has frightened her—the all-school meetings, the loud proclamations, and the children who have so easily denounced their parents. It seems almost routine: an adult is arrested, and the next day the entire school gathers in the assembly hall. A child is called to the stage; some days there have been several students going up one after another. He or she says, “My father [name, surname] is an enemy of the people. I denounce the man, whom I no longer consider to be my father. I apologize to the Komsomol
organization and the Communist Party for not having been alert enough to recognize the enemy living alongside me. I shall forever serve the Party with utter vigilance.” Sometimes the denunciations have sounded bland, tired, and forced, but on the really frightening days they have sounded inspired. Every once in a while—maybe twice, maybe three times—students have refused to denounce their parents. These students never came to the school again: the lucky ones were suspended; the unlucky disappeared—either to an orphanage for children of “enemies of the people” or, if they were older, to prison. Members of Ruzya’s gang have somehow been spared the worst of it—all of their parents are home for the time being—and they have comforted one another in their resolve to remain honorable and loyal should disaster strike. They have been spending time at one of their apartments and discussing this; at the end of every gathering someone, most often Boba, stands up on a chair and shouts into the air chute: “Glory to the Soviets! We thank Comrade Stalin for our happy childhoods!” It has become their tradition to assume that the listening device is planted in the air chute.

  While they were at this, the girl who is now walking alongside Ruzya has been organizing the denunciation meetings and has provided their loudest voice and shrillest presence, browbeating her fellow students into admissions of guilt on the rare occasions when pressure was required. Now she is asking, “So what are they saying about the trial in your class?”

  “Oh, not much,” Ruzya responds nonchalantly. “They mostly feel sorry for Piatakov.”

  Yuri Piatakov is an old-time Bolshevik, a Soviet industrial executive who was arrested last year on charges of treason. Yesterday the show trial began. There are seventeen defendants, four of them well-known Bolsheviks. All are accused of organizing acts of sabotage and terrorism under the direction of the exiled Leon Trotsky; all have confessed—as those arrested usually do. It is not that anyone in the class has expressed particular feelings about Piatakov outside the requisite rhetoric, just that last summer Ruzya stayed at a friend’s dacha and one of the neighbors had mentioned this Piatakov as a wonderful and capable man. This was before Piatakov was arrested, but now Ruzya repeats that neighbor’s words. “He was such a good executive,” she laments. “That’s what everybody says. And now look what’s happened.”

  And look what is happening to the Komsomol organizer. She is losing her famous composure; she is sputtering; her face is turning blotchy “You must come to the Komsomol room with me now!” she squeals.

  Ruzya assents easily. This is her moment, the day she refuses to be a snitch by saying something at once defiant and obviously absurd. She is not herself sure where she got the inspiration for this, but she is glad she did. Then it all goes very quickly. The Komsomol room serves as the setting for an extraordinary meeting of the presidium of the school’s Komsomol organization. All of them—seven? nine? she is not sure, she is so exhilarated—take their seats around a long table for just the few minutes required to vote on the “personal question of R. Solodovnik.” She is expelled from the Komsomol on the spot.

  Ruzya went home excited that night. She told her father of her courageous stand and her consequent expulsion. Moshe was devastated. That night and for many nights afterward he could not eat or sleep. He was certain he would be arrested. The way he worried, with that certainty that they would come for him any minute, meant that terror had now entered their home. Ruzya and her father lay in separate rooms, staring at the ceiling, the wall, with the blankets pulled overhead in an attempt to hide from the insomnia, and Ruzya imagined her beloved father among the men whose faces were now published in the newspapers alongside the articles about spies, saboteurs, and traitors. She realized that she had known all along the accusations were lies.

  With that knowledge came the certainty that it could happen to anyone. Moshe was the chief accountant at a major industrial plant. In the next few years he would be the only executive there to avoid arrest. There was no apparent reason for this. Just luck, perhaps. Or, perhaps, he simply lacked enemies, for no one seems to have denounced him. Even an anonymous denunciation, no matter how absurd—he could have been reported as a Japanese spy, for example—would have landed him in prison. Or perhaps some secret-police clerk carelessly misplaced a piece of paper that should have led to Moshe’s arrest. Even though the number of arrests had been growing for years, 1937 is generally considered the first year of the Great Terror—the period in Soviet history that began with the purges and mass arrests, continued with the show trials and the relentless media campaigns against individuals, organizations, and entire ethnic groups, and cost tens of millions of people their lives by the time it ended with Stalin’s death in 1953. The Great Terror was a mammoth production that, in one way or another, involved the entire country, and Moshe must simply have fallen through the cracks.

  Certainly, Ruzya’s carelessness could have led to Moshe’s arrest. With thousands of people going to jail for no apparent reason, expressing support for a confessed spy and terrorist was reason enough. But the Komsomol organizer at Ruzya’s school must have felt that she and her comrades had handled the matter honorably and sufficiently and did not need to report it to higher authorities. No one came that night for Moshe, or for Ruzya, or for Boba or anyone else in the gang. But Moshe continued to wait, and so did Ruzya, just as thousands of people in the Soviet Union waited every night, unable to sleep, think, or make love, always listening for the car engine in the courtyard, the steps on the stairs, and the banging on the door. For some, the wait commenced when they heard that a friend or colleague had been arrested; for others, when they realized they had let a careless word escape. That first night Ruzya waited for them to come must have been the night she first knew she had no choice. The moment when responsibility for your loved ones’ lives comes into conflict with your aspirations of honor, you choose for the last time. Ruzya could never be reckless again. Her aspirations became her dreams—the dream of staying honest, the dream of staying as far away from the state and its deeds as she could and still survive.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  JULY 23, 1939

  Ester and Isaj have been so taken with reading Brenner aloud to each other—the resistance manifesto was followed by the touching story of a London shopkeeper saving to move to Erez Israel, this story more grounded in daily detail but inspirational nonetheless—that they have not noticed the train slowing nearly to a standstill and darkness descending outside. It seems they will not make it to their campsite in the Carpathian Mountains tonight, so arrangements have been made to sleep in a barn not far from the railroad tracks. They pile in, about eighty Shomrim, arranging themselves on the barn floor in the manner of warehoused timber. Isaj and Ester end up very nearly on top of each other, and though they are wearing their uniforms and bulky sweaters on top, and are surrounded by their giggling comrades, their kissing is intimate. Afterward Ester wonders if this is how women become pregnant; but in fact, all they did was kiss.

  AUGUST 25, 1939

  The eighty Shomrim, their uniforms a touch dustier and tighter for the wear after their month in the Carpathians, board the Warsaw-bound train. The plan is to reach Warsaw in about four hours, change for the Bialystok train, and be home before sundown. They very nearly fill up the train car, staking out places on the wooden benches, where they plan to spend the summer holiday’s precious last hours.

  But the train screeches to a halt almost before it starts moving. A few Polish peasants, one wearing an old military uniform, all toting large bags, get on. They eye the young Jews with a familiar mixture of curiosity and hostility, and sit down. The train starts and halts again. More men board. Some of the Shomrim exchange questioning glances and shrugs. In this odd stop-and-go fashion the train reaches a regular station, where a large and loud group of men gets on. There are no seats now, and these men stand in the aisle, leaning on the benches and on one another, and speak in the overly expressive way of people who are jittery with fear and anticipation. They talk about their wives, the food supplies they are apparen
tly carrying, and the mess the authorities have made, so that these men do not even know where to report for duty.

  “Excuse me, did I hear you say ‘report for duty’?” Isaj surprises Ester by addressing a tall, pimply-faced blond youth standing closest to their bench. The young man quickly glances at his companions, who are older, looks Isaj up and down in a way that leaves no doubt how he feels about skinny young Jews who dare open their mouths, but then apparently decides against confrontation.

  “I guess you did. So?”

  “I apologize, but we’ve been away,” Isaj explains, clearly a bit too ceremonious for the other boy’s liking. “Would you mind telling us what’s going on?”