Ester and Ruzya Read online

  It was an accident that, while many of her classmates courted colleges in Belarusian Minsk or Ukrainian L’viv, Ester found a listing of Moscow colleges in the Bialystok city library. It was a matter of ignorance that she picked one of the most prestigious and competitive colleges on the list, the Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature, or IFLI. And it was a matter of unchallenged chutzpah that she, now an aspiring literary scholar, wrote IFLI asking to be relieved of the obligation to be tested on her knowledge of Russian. Then it was a matter of a simple misunderstanding that she took a letter from the college instructing her to report for her entrance exams no later than August 1, 1940, as a granting of that request. In any case, it was a matter of luck that she went to Moscow: the slip of paper from IFLI served as a railroad pass out of the restricted occupied zone and into the Soviet mainland.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MAY DAY, 1941

  This is not Ruzya’s usual crowd. Gathered in someone’s large apartment, most of them are students, like her, but some are apparently from different schools. There are many unfamiliar faces, and she feels a bit constrained without anyone from the gang around.

  “Why are you so sad?”

  It is the man sitting across from her. He is beautiful, a bit too beautiful for her liking: his reddish brown hair, wavy and over-long on top, is brushed over just so, his brown suit is made of unusually thick cloth, and his thin tie is arranged in the tiniest knot possible. He is tall, too, and Ruzya always notices tall men. She saw him when he walked in, an equally chic girl on his arm, and she felt a little annoyed when he was seated across from her.

  “Your turn.” He smiles. He has thin lips.

  They are playing a stupid game, bouncing a copper five-kopeck coin around the table, and she did not notice it land in front of her. She sends it on and looks around for something to eat or drink or otherwise occupy herself.

  “Let’s dance,” he says, and when she looks up he is already standing, extending his hand to her across the table. She hates to dance, but she likes the way the invitation has been extended. She extends her hand, and they walk the length of the table holding hands, forcing everyone who is still sitting to duck awkwardly. Like most songs played at parties these days, this is a tango, and she and the young man perform a shy, toned-down version of the dance. “Oh, those wondrous eyes / Captured me,” the record player hisses. He says she has beautiful eyes, such mysterious pure gray. She looks up and sees that his eyes are very light, almost watery. He says his name is Samuil and that she has a beautiful smile. She registers that his name is Jewish, and she momentarily resents the sense of comfort she derives from their shared ethnicity; still, she is proud of herself for not having noticed his Jewish looks from the start. She smiles, and he says he especially likes the space between her teeth. She smiles again, but the suspicion lingers: she thinks he might be mocking her.

  “I know where the wine is,” Samuil announces in a stage whisper as the song winds down. “Will you come with me?”

  She is not sure she likes being drafted as his coconspirator, but she follows him. He is thinner than she thought, and he looks dangerously fragile as he weaves through the party crowd, at one point extending a long arm into the kitchen to fetch an open bottle of red wine and a single glass. He opens the balcony door for her, and once they are both out there, he drops, laughing, to one knee. He pours wine into the glass and extends it to her while pressing the bottle to his heart.

  “Allow me to give you this so you may never be sad again!”

  “I shall never be sad again!” she promises.

  He rises and invites her to gaze from the balcony. He actually says “gaze,” and she would suspect again that she is being mocked if the view were not so spectacular. They are looking out over the Moscow River, and they see building lights, bridge lights, boat lights—all reflected manifold in the black water.

  “You didn’t come here alone,” Ruzya says, instantly regretting she had ruined the moment but relieved to have broken the spell.

  “I really didn’t care where I went today or with whom,” Samuil says, turning to her. “There are many parties tonight, and I didn’t know what brought me here. Now I do.” He takes her hand. “Do you like Mayakovsky?”

  Of course she likes Mayakovsky. Who does not? Even Stalin called him “the best, most talented poet of the Soviet epoch,” which seemed simply a statement of fact. But as this boy starts to recite a popular poem, holding her hand with one of his and gesticulating wildly with the other, still holding the bottle, she understands something about him: he is a believer. He means what he says, and he trusts what he hears. He could not mock anyone if he tried.

  Ruzya had her doubts, which, by the time they met, had hardened into permanent skepticism and an ever stronger defense against faith of all sorts, but especially the unquestioning fervor of young Stalinists. Samuil had a penchant for extolling the “knights of the revolution,” who included, first and foremost, Stalin and the founder of the secret police, Feliks Dzerzhinsky. He believed, and that meant Stalin was his ideal and the “enemies of the people” were his enemies. Their ecstatic courtship did not leave space for disagreements about such matters or any other: they were preoccupied with discovering their perfect match in each other. Had their relationship ever matured past its honeymoon stage, or had Samuil ever made it out of his boyhood, perhaps they would have argued. Or perhaps Samuil would have grown into a disillusioned man, someone who shrank from responsibility and, eventually, thought. Or he may have put his passion and his knowledge of the law to the service of another ideal, becoming a critic of the regime. What they could have made of their life together was their dream and anyone’s guess. Fact is, he was twenty-two in 1941, a year older than Ruzya, and he would be dead a year and a half later.

  He had applied to college in 1937, the same year Ruzya, still a high school student, was expelled from the Komsomol. That was also the year when the Soviet military, decimated by the purges and beginning its prewar buildup—the nonaggression pact with Nazi Germany was still two years away, and talk of war was in the newspapers and in the air—drafted all eighteen-year-old men. Samuil had not even begun his studies at the Institute of Jurisprudence when he entered military service. He did extraordinarily well, however; singled out for his abilities, he was shortly shipped back to Moscow to take a job as personal assistant to the dean of the Military Law Academy, where he also became a student. Therein lay an additional source of his fervor: by the time Ruzya met him, he had been serving his country for four years, and, like the best of soldiers, he was readying himself for ever greater battles.

  CHAPTER SIX

  For all Ester could comprehend of her new surroundings when she finally arrived in Moscow in August 1940, she may as well have traveled to another planet. She was joining the Soviet Union’s most wretched generation at what may have been its worst moment. Nineteen forty was the fourth year of the Great Terror. IFLI, the Institute of History, Philosophy and Literature, was just like Ruzya’s school, the site of regular meetings in which young people denounced their freshly arrested parents—or, rarely, refused to do so, usually to disappear themselves. And some of those who performed just as they were expected to, denouncing their parents and swearing their unending loyalty to the Party, were arrested anyway. At the height of the hysteria in 1937–1938, the table at which the Komsomol presidium sat took up permanent residence on the auditorium’s stage, the meetings were held nightly, and some nights as many as fifteen students had to face the crowd to account for a parent’s fictitious misdeeds.

  Like every institution in the Soviet Union, the college was steeped in paranoia: the enemy was everywhere, and anyone could at any moment be exposed as an enemy. Many of the students had been the conscious witnesses, victims, or perpetrators of the first stages of Soviet repression. Some—the children of peasants—had had their lives turned upside down by the collectivization of the 1920s. Others had served as members of the “collectivization brigades,” which went around r
obbing peasants, or of similarly unsavory Stalinist enforcement bodies. Still others had come to Moscow from Siberian cities where their families had been exiled. These were, of course, the lucky ones: most children of “enemies” were banned from pursuing higher education.

  “We were weaned on hatred,” wrote an IFLI graduate decades later. “We were weaned on novels, poetry books, songs, plays, all of them called ‘Hatred.’ Humans had for centuries been weaned on love. And here we were weaned on hatred. Such was our youth, with its springs, its theaters, concerts, arguments, paintings, poems, sports—rowing competitions, volleyball in the college courtyard.”

  IFLI was founded in 1934 to supply a new generation of teachers to replace the ones lost to Lenin’s and Stalin’s policies of systematically persecuting, imprisoning, exiling, and killing members of the prerevolutionary intelligentsia. Unlike the grand and prestigious Moscow State University, which had undergone a thorough ideological cleansing, IFLI was never intended to be anything but a teachers’ college: it was given a building on the outskirts of Moscow, reachable only by way of a long chain of trams. But circumstances combined to make it an island of rarefaction. Old professors who had long been kept away from sensitive young minds were dusted off and sent to prepare the new breed of teachers. They were joined by a few remarkable young instructors, and together they created a college that very quickly became a magnet for the most talented poets, writers, and critics of their generation—and a thorn in the regime’s side. By the time Ester arrived in Moscow in August 1940, what was known as “an ideological takedown” was being prepared for IFLI, whereby the college would be closed and its professors arrested. But these things could take a surprisingly long time in Stalin’s Russia: IFLI felt increasing pressure but lasted into 1941, when the war began and, without ideological fanfare, the college was merged with Moscow University.

  Some of the professors had vanished in the late 1930s, often on the basis of a student’s report to the authorities about something the instructor had said, in class or outside. The interpretive fields of study were riddled with potential pitfalls. One of the older teachers noted that ancient Greece “had the sort of democracy that has never been reproduced since and never will be.” The following evening, he was called upon to retract his careless statement with demagogic flourish at the Komsomol meeting. This was a relatively slight penalty—likely because none of his students had found it necessary to report the misstep to authorities outside the college.

  Discipline bordered on paranoia. One of the generalissimos’ recent decrees made tardiness and absences from work criminal offenses, punishable by imprisonment. The decree did not specifically apply to students, but no one was going to risk setting a precedent. Professors tended to arrive for classes exceedingly early, and, with the meanness of youth, students wished the less-popular instructors would fall victim to some fateful public-transport breakdown.

  But by the time Ester arrived, the main topic of discussion at IFLI was the impending war. The college population was feverish with anticipation. The Soviet media had suspended its anti-German and antifascist rhetoric after the nonaggression pact was signed in 1939, but for the dreamy poets and writers of IFLI, the possibility of war continued to promise a chance at reclaiming their idealism: it promised to redefine the enemy as the person on the other side of the front line, implicitly exonerating teachers, parents, and friends. “Romanticism is the future war with fascism, in which we will triumph,” wrote one of the college poets. (All the IFLI literati considered themselves Romantics.) Of another, his widow would later remember, “Like many of our contemporaries, he breathed a sigh of relief when the war started and the line between friend and foe was redrawn: it now lay at the front.”

  Of course, in 1940, the year when the Soviet press tirelessly trumpeted the country’s friendship with Nazi Germany, few IFLI students dared speak of the war dream. Silence was a matter of habit, a way of life. This was a community of writers, virtually none of whom kept a journal: private notes could be, and often were, used to convict the author of treason, espionage, or whatever other absurd charge happened to be advanced. Instead, they wrote romantic poetry, often extolling love of labor and of their country, and edited whatever subtext there may have been out of the creative process.

  So Ester arrived in a world of profound silence. And pervasive poverty. “I remember the IFLI cafeteria,” writes one alumna. “A standard day’s diet consisted of, for breakfast in the college cafeteria, a starchy drink made from concentrate, a slice of black bread with jam, and a small saucer of beet-and-potato salad; and for supper at home, a precooked hamburger that was half meat, half starch. And there were quite a number of students who could not afford even this level of subsistence.” IFLI memoirs often contain detailed descriptions of the students’ outfits: most students owned only one dress or pair of trousers and one pair of shoes.

  Ester loved it.

  AUGUST 15, 1940

  The first two weeks of Ester’s stay in Moscow passed like a dream sequence of goodwill and good luck. Ever since she got off the train at the grand green Belorussky Station in the center of Moscow and froze in disoriented awe, things have been going her way. One person after another asked her where she needed to go, and people boarded subway trains and trams with her to deliver her to the out-of-the-way college, where she was given a chaperone to see her to the dormitory. An embarrassing incident followed—she was dispatched to the bathhouse, where she was apparently expected to strip and wash in the presence of other women, a behavior that fell entirely outside the realm of possibility. After she refused, a concerned dormitory nurse inquired about the nature of Ester’s presumed illness, and laughed her big blond head off when shame was finally revealed to be the culprit. If rumor of the misunderstanding spread, it only added to Ester’s newfound status as an exotic attraction, the star foreigner everyone wanted to befriend.

  If anyone had any doubts as to how different she was, she laid these to rest during her first exam, the English orals, when she answered with a confidence and mastery unparalleled by her Russian peers. She got a five on a five-point scale. But the pièce de résistance was the second exam, the world literature orals. As soon as she faced the examining professor, the still-young but eminent Abram Belkin, Ester issued several Russian phrases she had rehearsed with her dormitory roommates. Her grammar and pronunciation were still hopelessly mangled, but the kindly Professor Belkin managed to grasp the meaning: in light of her Polish education, Ester was asking not to be questioned on Russian literature.

  “Shakespeare, then,” the professor ruled. “Let us begin simply with summarizing the plot of Hamlet.”

  “Indecision makes beginning,” Ester began confidently enough. “Early ghost—host,” she stumbled and halted.

  “Why don’t you speak German.” Professor Belkin smiled, offering relief that Ester could not accept.

  “I speak English,” she advanced as a counteroffer.

  “I don’t.” The professor seemed not at all annoyed.

  Ester remembered the incident with the German officers who used her as a translator and, without further negotiation, launched into a Yiddish summary of Hamlet. “The prince of Denmark is visited by the ghost of his father, who was murdered some months before. The crime has remained unsolved, but the ghost tells Hamlet that the murderer was actually Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, who in the meantime has married Hamlet’s mother and is now sitting on the throne—”

  “Did you study Hebrew?” the professor suddenly asked in German.

  “Of course,” said Ester, who, even after nearly a year of living under the Soviets, had not developed the habit of editing her past and taking care with her answers.

  “You know, I studied the language a quarter of a century ago. I wonder how much I have forgotten. Please continue in Hebrew.”

  Ester continued, relieved to switch into the language in which she had stood most of the exams in her life, forgetting that the use of this language in this country was a crime. Belkin l
istened with evident pleasure, squinting, his gray head tipped slightly back, for about fifteen minutes as she summarized Hamlet and proceeded to analyze the characters. Finally he gave a satisfied sigh and said, “Very well,” lifting his pen over his examination charts. “A five.”

  At the classroom door, where other applicants kept their vigil, looking for clues in the eyes of exiting comrades, Ester was ambushed by three young men. They seemed older than the applicants, perhaps simply because they were so much more confident. They had the IFLI look: hair slightly disheveled, longer on top and parted on the side, long shirt collars laid over well-worn suit jackets. “Anatoly Korkeshkin,” the first one introduced himself. “Secretary of the Komsomol organization.”

  “Semyon Krasilshik,” a second man picked up. “Reporter for Komsomolia.” This is the college “wall newspaper,” a biweekly publication that is produced by hand and posted along one of the hall walls; IFLI is famed for having the longest wall newspaper in the city.

  “Vasily Kuznetsov,” finished the third man, blond and ruddy-cheeked. “Ordinary student.”

  “Hello.” Ester laughed, mostly at the last introduction.

  “We are going to be your mentors,” declared the one named Semyon, a lanky young man with brown hair.

  “My what?” A Polish speaker can generally understand spoken Russian, but this went beyond Ester’s comprehension. A mentor, as she soon learned, is a peculiar Soviet institution, a way of setting up a big-brother-type relationship between an experienced worker and a novice, a senior student and a freshman, the entire staff of a factory and the school body of an elementary school. The trio did not manage to get this across just then, but Semyon issued forth with a tirade from which Ester was able to deduce that they would from now on be showing her the way. “So you be my guides,” she concluded.