Lament: A Soviet Woman and Her True Story

LAMENT:

A SOVIET WOMAN & HER TRUE STORY

Liz Mackie

Published by NOSTALGISTUDIO at Smashwords

Copyright 2018 / 2020 Elizabeth Mackie

This book is dedicated to my sister Claudia.

2nd Smashwords Edition

© Copyright 2018, 2019, 2020 by Elizabeth Mackie, Published by Nostalgistudio

Cover image: Altered photograph, Bira River, Birobidzhan

LAMENT is a work of fiction based on historical characters and events.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Front

To Readers

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Glossary

Print Sources

Author’s Afterwords

PART ONE

ODESSA | BIROBIDZHAN | ODESSA

(1)

Two sisters grew up in a small Ukrainian town on the outskirts of Odessa. They lived with their mother and father in a small house on a narrow, muddy street. They often said how glad they were to be their parents’ only children. Many families in their town were much larger and those children had far fewer toys or nice things in their homes; sometimes those families had even too little food for everyone to eat more than one meal a day. The two sisters never went hungry, although they were poor. They knew they were poor because their mother said so, they heard her complain about it a great deal as she sat day and night in the front room, sewing dresses. She suffered from grief, disappointment and eye-strain headaches and was not an affectionate mother but rather a proud one. She insisted that her two daughters be cleaner, more polite, better-dressed and better-educated than all the other girls in their neighborhood; and for the most part they were. From their mother they’d learned to be thankful to be only two.

Their father in his bachelor days had peddled dress trimmings bought wholesale—ribbons, beaded fringes, bands of embroidery and lace—town-to-town to home seamstresses; this was how he’d met his wife-to-be. The trimmings dwindled to a sideline once he began peddling the dresses she made. His clientele which he described as specialized encompassed some dozen penny pinching old women who clung to the elaborately-trimmed flounces and wraps of their youth. Upon delivery every stitch they’d examine through various magnifying lenses and some deduction for every crookedness perceived would be marked against the bill. Reporting home with the final payment the poor man would cringe as his wife shook fistfuls of worn small bill currency and summarized: she’d ruined her hands and her eyesight, squandered her talents on sewing these freakish old-fashioned dresses he insisted on selling, now she was good for nothing else, to produce a wardrobe for a normal human woman she couldn’t, only for hideous ungrateful miserly crones. Which was her punishment, of course, for erring, misled by who knows what and choosing—him, to marry. Her husband. Their father. She’d retreat into a darkened curtained corner and he might spend a night or even two sleeping on top of the work table. Their mother couldn’t help her emotions, he’d explain to the two girls. She was grieving her parents, who’d been killed in a pogrom during the Civil War, both in one night; she still blamed herself for not being there to protect them even though she’d certainly have failed to. As for his own parents, dead too, in separate pogroms, as a man he grieved them less, he said.

His daughters appreciated their father as a basically cheerful presence in and around the home but always agreed with their mother, that he was a foolish failure of a man who couldn’t really do anything.

The older daughter’s name was Liza. Tall, with the mother’s long tapered hands, thin face, and ferocious gray eyes, she possessed an excellent set of teeth but her skin was blemish-prone. Unmusical and bad at games, Liza was a great reader of Party-sanctioned material, an ardent and opinionated socialist who idolized the Revolution and its heroes. At fourteen, claiming political cause, Liza ate a bread roll on Yom Kippur and forbade her family any further signs or practice of the Jewish faith. Or tongue: if one of them let a Hebrew word slip back into their household Yiddish, she’d hit the roof. Already less religious than many in their neighborhood, the family acquiesced without protest. Liza’s will was strong, she could even be a bully. But when it came to learning to speak Ukrainian in accord with Comrade Stalin’s policy for the national cultures, they left Liza on her own. Ukrainian was very hard—in truth, even she never spoke it easily or well. The rest of them stuck with the Yiddish-Russian mix they knew.

Little Musya was almost six years younger and never reached much past her sister’s shoulder height-wise. Quicker, lighter, merrier, she laughed more showing smaller teeth, ran more, played more; she loved games, crowds, promenades, most public amusements. She hated fighting. Her earliest dream in life was to become a major motion picture star. Pinned to the wall above her mother’s work table was a postcard photograph of the most beautiful woman in history, a great actress of silent film tragically dead at a young age of the 1919 influenza: Vera Kholodnaya, whose funeral cortege Musya’s mother had glimpsed from the very front of a curb, one among thousands of mourners thronging Odessa’s streets on that mournful occasion. Musya wanted to be exactly like this woman—except she would live. She’d live and thrive and be even more famous, more beautiful; she might even go to America like Anna Sten and make movies in Hollywood. Into the looking glass that hung in the tiny room she shared with her sister, Musya spent long afternoons staring. Big dark brown eyes like her father’s, a round face, full lips—not narrow like Liza’s—clear skin unlike Liza’s, a thick head of reddish-brown hair with an interesting wave: she considered her hair to be probably her best feature. As a great actress she was sure to have many suitors, men who would crave her, men who would threaten themselves for her. Some—most!—she’d reject. One knelt trembling at her feet, he clutched a razor, he could only sob. Down she reached with one small sturdy hand, a gesture to console, a gentle smile playing across her lips because she must refuse him. The scene swam, wavered, her eyes had filled with tears.

Why did she refuse? Was there another? No, there was no one. No one yet.

At thirteen she amazed everybody by publishing a prize-winning poem in one of Odessa’s Yiddish-language journals. Musya had never really distinguished herself in the intellectual sphere, she’d never struggled in school but neither had she made notable efforts or successes. And here she was, an author. Modestly, she acknowledged what had happened: the girls in her class had created a collection of poems to circulate among family and friends; her poem had impressed an instructor who’d submitted it for competition. Best of all the poem would soon appear alongside its Russian translation among other Voices of Soviet Youth, hard-bound in a book from Moscow, an honor to be accompanied by state store coupons for rationed goods.

Musya had titled her poem Who Will Love Me? A young woman ponders her future; she tries to match her flaws and her advantages to the requirements of several nameless, handsome and intrepid men. A soldier, a writer, a worker, an engineer, a famous actor (naturally), a doctor in the provinces—each will find some traits of hers irresistible and others less so; the wrong fit in every case. She resigns herself to being alone. What Musya never told anyone was that her poem came almost word-for-word from dramatic speeches she’d delivered at her mirror, practicing farewells to devastated lovers. She had no intention of ending up alone, absolutely none. And in the end the Moscow edition contained a new concluding line to the effect that she would be loved always, in the best way, by the Revolution’s wise and compassionate leaders. The state store coupons arrived at the same time, as promised. Musya promptly traded them at a market near her street for an old gramophone and two recordings of fast jazz foxtrots.

A year or two later, it was Liza’s turn to astonish the household with a sudden demand that they start keeping shabes. Where, she asked to know, were the family’s tablecloth, candlesticks, cups, prayer books—were they hidden in the floor? Shocked, her mother and father protested. They owned nothing of the kind. Whatever they’d customarily used, some of it silver, had been burned up with their parents in their cottages by Ukrainian Jew-haters in 1918. It was sad, but there were no heirlooms. And there’d be no shabes celebrated in this home, not after so many years. Who even remembered the words? Or the recipes to which dishes to serve? They were a modern family, Soviets down to the tips of their tongues as she herself had insisted they be.

Infuriated by everything in this conversation Liza stormed out again, gone they had no idea where, leaving them mystified. Her behavior and habits had changed of late, true. At twenty, she worked as a junior inspector at an electrical supply warehouse, a good position. The Komsomol and study groups had always claimed her spare time. Zealous since girlhood in soliciting volunteers for every Party initiative of the day, she was tolerated and avoided by their neighbors in equal measure. Just that week, Musya had been unsurprised to spot Liza receiving a firm rebuff at a nearby doorstep; this was as usual. The difference was in her sister’s manner, slightly stooped and strangely humble. And the plain dark shawl—that was a change. So was the way she’d taken to covering her hair. She’d never sat on the edge of their bed rocking forward and back as her lips moved almost silently in every appearance of prayer before, either. The tiny book she kept studying was beaten-up but new. It had been months since they’d heard her try to speak one word of Ukrainian. And now this—shabes. Why did she want such a thing? What was she up to now? And why was she so angry? The signs were ominous.

Now Liza absented herself on Friday evenings without explanation. Her family didn’t seek one. While curious, all three, to see what happened next in this drama unfolding so close to their lives, at the same time they hoped to avoid nearer involvement. Unlike Liza, they didn’t enjoy meetings and politics frightened them, they never joined anything. As the father said, this way they avoided many crooks and murderers. So when the denouement came—when the denouement entered, shook hands, sat down erect in a chair—their initial relief was intense. Because clearly this had nothing to do with any decision taken by committee.

It was only a man.

His name was Kotz. He was reading to become a law student. Boris was his first name but Liza only ever called him Kotz. They’d met in a bookstore. Then they’d courted at a weekly shabes meal nearby, an underground affair of strange nostalgists—older students, mostly, it sounded like. Kotz was several years older than Liza and a few inches shorter. Above an unimpressive beard his colorless hair was thinning; his handshake was sponge-like; he had a metallic voice and a nervous cough. Without explicit shabbiness, his appearance advertised an utter absence of prosperity. His suit was probably his own but was badly made and no longer fit limbs nor trunk, especially the arms of the jacket looked stuffed with bread dough. Facially not one of the Kotz features was prepossessing, the lips, in Musya’s view, least of all, being long, moist and notably purplish. She felt really disturbed. Granted, no one would have expected her humorless, thin-faced sister to attract and capture a male of the heroic type—but surely even Liza could do better than this!

Her mother and father might have been thinking exactly the same. An uncomfortable silence prolonged itself in the cramped front room. The work table, shoved to one side for the hour, seemed poised in threat to reclaim its territory. The stranger called himself a student-worker correspondent, he’d published letters in the Russian and Yiddish press, both: he wrote beautiful letters, Liza said. Kotz gave a complacent nod and through wire-rimmed spectacles directed a watery, unemotional gaze at his surroundings. The family’s quarters, he observed, were large: had the house many other tenants? Of course many, three or four households on each floor plus the man in the basement (a drunkard, they didn’t add), him; to count all the others was not even possible. Sinking back into their own indignation as into a featherbed, Musya, mother and father fell silent again. Liza didn’t say anything. Pale, blemish-striped, she sat rigid with up-tilted chin, gripped by a high-pitched tremor, she kept glancing between her family and the man at her side, her eyes triumphant, as if Kotz represented proof of some claim she’d made that everyone had doubted. The couple displayed no recognizable signs of mutual affection.

Yet a couple they were. With a last, quick cough, Kotz made it official. He said he wished to marry Liza the first rose of their family but that he considered even more important than his wish to be her husband was his desire to make Jewish history with her. Marriage he regarded as a means to advance the Jewish race and populate its future; he and Liza would be pioneers and their children the premier citizens of a new homeland for Jewish culture, national in form, socialist in content—in fact a future socialist republic of Soviet Jewry. Which, he explained, was a place already as real as the room they were sitting in—even as they sat talking, with every second that passed it grew realer; for the realization of another plan sprang up every minute there, with new buildings, new streets, new factories, new telegraph lines; while Jewish plows claimed huge tracts of wilderness for high-yielding agriculture. Where? In the Far East, near the southern border with Japanese Manchuria, a place called Birobidzhan.

No, said the mother.

Liza shouted, Mommy—yes!

At once the room became noisy and hot with all the passion the strange scene had lacked. Their gray eyes flashing, mother and daughter raged at each other: This, this! cried the mother was what she’d heard whispered, she hadn’t believed it at first, her crazy daughter knocking on people’s doors again—where she used to order all the old women to disinfect their doorsteps, now she was selling this scheme to move to the end of the world? Wholly discredited, by the way—people had been coming back from Birobidzhan for years saying how awful it was there. The neighbors were dumbfounded, they were complaining. How could Liza’s family show their faces again on the street? They couldn’t, she’d shamed them too badly. The only shame, Liza rejoined, was unbelief. Which meant—the mother demanded to be told—what? Of what was she accusing them?

Hah! said Liza.

Hah? the mother said, and flung more recriminations. From the random words and wheezy noises he was producing it was evident that Kotz felt duty-bound to impose calm but lacked the capacity. Musya looked across at her father’s bewilderment. She reached over to give his coat sleeve a tug and he roused himself as if from stupor.

Liza, he said, you want to leave us? Why?

She burst into tears. With extraordinary hesitation and awkwardness, Kotz took her hand and patted it; he had short thumbs. He answered in Liza’s stead, Tovarisch, sir, you know, soon it will be very bad for the Jews here.

But it’s always bad for the Jews everywhere, the older man answered reasonably. Why go to China for it?

Collecting herself a little, Liza managed to sob that she didn’t care, she didn’t, whether her family approved, their approval meant even less than their permission, it meant nothing. When at last she’d found a man she truly respected, a man of faith and not a man of surfaces. He doesn’t care that I’m not pretty like Musya! she declared.

They all looked at Kotz; through her tears Liza looked at him hardest. He let a few seconds pass before it occurred to him to speak. Then he blinked several times, his froggy lips twisting. At last he murmured: But dearest, to me you are much prettier than your sister! And Liza leaned against him gratefully.

Musya shrugged to herself. Boris Kotz had produced a gallant phrase. She didn’t believe him.

Everything happened as Liza wanted, of course, so that she wouldn’t make life impossible. Mother and daughter reconciled over the wedding arrangements, their tastes coinciding. The in-laws were polite, normal people, less inclined than their son to ideology and not religious in the least; the rotund Papa Kotz kept the accounts in a wine warehouse and his pretty wife liked birds, she kept doves and finches. The warehouse was controlled by her brother-in-law, who not only loaned them the upper floor for the wedding feast and hired musicians but also made a risqué toast and a generous cash gift to the new couple. That they would need it nobody doubted. Flushed with celebration, his lenses steamed, Liza’s new husband cried out that he’d toiled long enough among books—today he was trading his pen for the handles of a plow. He wanted to farm, he wanted to raise wheat and grapes and pumpkins big as planets for the glory of the Soviet Zion. The speeches dragged on; then came more drinking, more singing, more dancing. While she had a good time, Musya vowed that her own wedding would be a far more sophisticated affair, one with a jazz band and a husband who didn’t pass out at the table, one with less motherly weeping.

Their train left the next day in May 1934.

(2)

With Liza gone the place felt bigger and very much more peaceful. The angry ever-shifting world of politics and policies, sloganeering, five-year plans and Party leaders, all receded. This was a relief.

Musya didn’t mind being the only child at home, in fact it suited her. She adjusted happily to having more space—all the space—in the tiny room she’d shared with her sister. The whole bed, the whole little armoire, every shelf and all the drawers were hers. She expanded accordingly, happy to find that she could be almost as untidy as she liked and not be scolded. What’s more, bitter complaints no longer greeted her choice to play gramophone records on Saturdays. Her delicate experimental hairstyles ceased to raise a single condescending sneer and she could spend hours at a time posing and speechifying before the looking glass—hers now, too—without interruption. All this she felt could only benefit her career: for film stardom still drew Musya.

She was popular and had a circle of noisy, lively girlfriends whom her mother called The Geese. The friends shared a passion for cinema and labored nightly over thick scrapbooks devoted to favorite performers whose lives and loves and looks were their incessant study. As for the classroom, her last few years at school left Musya uninspired. She no longer wrote poems, although she kept a brooding photo-portrait of the tragic Mayakovsky pinned to her bookshelf. She did well at tests and might have qualified for university but didn’t want to try, the regimentations of student life held no appeal for her. What she wanted was to surround herself with freedom and empty space, she wanted to ease the way for fame to find her.

Fame—and love. Somewhere out in the world, the man who would love her drew breath. He was parting his hair, straightening his necktie, smoothing the edges of his moustache with a polished thumbnail. In acts of clairvoyance she pictured her own image appearing, sudden as a comet, in his mind; she looked into his green eyes and watched how the pupils expanded and shrank, as if gulping the thought of her.

One night she and The Geese went to a party with dancing and there he stood, the man of her imagination, waiting in line by the punch bowl. In life he looked older but better, more tangible. Someone told her he had a good job in Odessa at the film studio. So it was meant to be. Next they were introduced; he reacted with boredom and Musya couldn’t think of anything to say; his name had sounded like Rudy but she couldn’t be sure; perfumed overpoweringly with attar of roses, his hair oil made her sneeze three times in quick succession; he wished her good health after the first two and walked away during the third. Their encounter had lasted sixty seconds, even less. It didn’t matter—time was a trifle, three sneezes were probably lucky. Fate was at work. She awaited their next meeting. Months passed, most of her seventeenth year which she filled with daydreams of long conversations and kisses passed, she loved this man who might be named Rudy. But she never saw him again.

Almost without noticing she finished with school. At the age where Liza had clamored for permission to enter the professional workforce, the younger daughter asked nothing of the kind. Instead she announced her choice to join the family trade. On the sales side, that is, not production: she was a decent seamstress but sewing tired her. Lately the father’s elderly clientele had grown almost numerous; for Musya to take a hand in fittings and deliveries made sense. She’d be helping. And since the city streetcar had extended a line right to the edge of their town, she could make half a dozen house calls in Odessa and be home for dinner—all on her discounted student fare, still unexpired. Motion, interest, variety, fresh air—how far preferable to a dull dingy warehouse position was this job she proposed to do? And for the meanest of salaries, just a little pocket money she asked, plus a small commission.

Her parents hesitated. The father had a nominal employment at the Privoz market and knew how to get his daughter added to the rolls there; but his dress sideline was illegal and how much help he needed was uncertain. The mother who possessed a longstanding health exemption knew she could have used the extra needlework; but getting Musya to sit quietly at the work table for any length of time had never been possible. At the same time the parents knew her lively spirits would suffer cruelly from the routines of a Soviet workplace. So they agreed to her half-whimsical scheme—not without reluctance, and not without warnings. If she wanted to do nothing but ride around on streetcars and put up with Odessa’s worst old women all day long by herself, Musya’s mother insisted she learn and memorize a few hard truths suitable for adulthood.

Truths about men, especially.

Men were prisoners of violence, the mother explained. Screaming from birth, fighting by instinct, they passed their lives in violence until they died of a build-up of wounds. Nothing Musya did, nothing she could ever do would change the nature of one single man. However placid he seemed, however many consecutive years he might appear to be passing in peace, all this was vapor, illusion. Violence would find him. Suddenly, the lunging attack, the bloody scream; murderous mindless horrors were never more than a heartbeat away wherever men were. Their prison came with them, bringing no hope of escape. And while women must naturally pity this sad fate of men, they shared the dangers and suffered its consequences. More than their fair share, women suffered. Women grew wary and went in fear of what might befall their daughters, especially in cities and most especially in Odessa, a city so full of students, sailors, draymen, drunkards, artists, thieves, pimps, foreign tourists, financiers. Only if their daughters swore to exercise the utmost care at every moment, only if they vowed to make a daily pledge of silence modesty and chastity, could mothers continue to breathe evenly and sleep a little at night.

Musya looked over at the father and thought he seemed embarrassed by this speech. She didn’t associate him with any sort of violence—neither did she most grown men she knew. Granted, the majority of her screen idols led with their fists or their bayonets; but that was cinema. Mommy had clearly spent too much time at her work table, she’d fallen out of touch with real life and into some dark sort of dream world. Nevertheless, Musya made a solemn promise to shun strange men in every form.

Now began a wonderful time for the younger sister. Relieved beyond words not to be stuck like some of her friends behind a hot lunch counter or on an assembly line, she greeted each new day with the sensation of spreading her wings into luxurious flight. Freedom was the sound of the streetcar tracks, humming to herald the trolley’s approach, rattling beneath the grooved wheels, shrieking when the hand brakes tickled too hard. Her arms laden with bagged dresses, Musya held the joy of these morning rides tight and devoured the fast-moving views. The right side, the left side, the front window, the rear platform, she tried every vantage point; they were all good. Odessa was gorgeous. Sunshine spangled down through blossoming tree branches onto pavements and cobblestones. Women draped mattresses over balconies and lingered there to converse across housefronts. Sailors in white walked arm in arm laughing or leaned at the windows of newspaper kiosks counting out cigarette change. Great sculpture-decked buildings of stone reared up like icebergs at street corners, where whole avenues ran ribbon-lined with bright awning canvas shading the windows of elegant shops. An enormous floating opera house drifted in and out of view. The next vista opened briefly onto an ancient world; Musya spied golden temples stacked on a lush green hillside. Then it was gone and in its place came glimpses of white sails, towering ship masts, hoisting cranes, steam funnels painted with stripes—the great fleets at anchor and docked in the emerald harbor.

Another year had passed. Musya knelt comfortably on the thick pile of an old Turkish rug, her mouth full of pins, adjusting a hem on an ankle-length skirt for a client. Along with a taste for the previous century’s fashions and a controlling share of the flat above her late husband’s former drapery concern, the widow Tsigal maintained an important collection of memories whose major highlights dated to the reign of Alexander II. Four prolonged sightings of the tragic Liberator and his Empress on holiday had stocked the widow’s shelves with anecdotes for life. Maria Alexandrovna she recalled as a great beauty:

And around her a light, it shone, this I saw myself, a light not from nature. She was a saint.

The widow bought many dresses, far more than she needed, really, more than an old woman could wear; Musya’s mother suspected her of running a re-sale line among her former drapery customers and had tasked Musya with seeking signs or proof but Musya hadn’t found any. The widow Tsigal liked Musya and had given her some silk handkerchiefs and several boxes of imported chocolate as gifts. Milord, the Tsar’s setter, she’d seen too, for he and Alexander were never parted:

The dog also was a saint, the widow said.

Musya nodded vaguely, happily. She’d heard all this before and wasn’t really paying attention; no answer was required with her mouth full of pins. She looked up. Lemony light skimmed from the waves in the distant harbor had spilled all the way down Vorovskogo Street to dance in laughing ranks on the low ceiling, drawn there by her secret happiness.

His name was Leon Flohr. He had soft brown curls and a small soft brown moustache that Musya’s lips adored—to be brushed and tantalized by this moustache her mouth yearned like a castaway for home and shelter. Leon Flohr’s lips were shapely and usually curved in a smile. His brown eyes were merry and mocking. He dressed in the latest styles, mastered dance steps in minutes, and had the biography of every top film star and director by heart. Musya smiled. They were soul mates.

All at once the widow Tsigal said something very shocking to Musya. Don’t get a baby, she said. A pin dropped from between Musya’s lips onto the carpet and vanished among the hand-knotted fibers. She combed with her fingertips in search. Oof, the old woman grunted above her head. Already? You’re sure?

Musya denied it, truthfully, she wasn’t pregnant; but her alarm was extreme. How obvious was it that she had a man and his love? To what other eyes had she become transparent? Did her mother know? A little cry escaped her as she located the sharp end of the pin with an index finger.

She’d met Leon Flohr in City Park where she’d been walking with The Geese, a slightly melancholy old school friends’ reunion that she hadn’t been enjoying. Other people’s news made her own life feel insubstantial. The park was too crowded as usual, the pebbled paths overrun by noisy children. Finding nowhere for their whole group to sit down, the friends had hardly room to walk. An orchestra flung discordant patriotic songs into the dusty twilight from a bandstand perch. Musya had been wondering how long before she could leave when a strange man suited in cream-colored gabardine swooped into their midst and started talking: one young man to five young women. Despite his fine suit, her initial impression of Leon Flohr was that he planned to ask one of them or perhaps all five of them to loan him some money. It was strange. Handsome, slim, not very tall, he talked fast in a fluent jumble of Russian and Yiddish. The Geese stood blinking beneath his confident dual barrage of self-promotion and relentless flattery. To one of them he sang a phrase from a popular dance tune, he had a pleasing tenor voice. In the midst of a silly boastful tale about racing a motorbike illegally up and down the Richelieu steps he kept catching Musya’s eye with his own. Behind him a fountain was playing, he stood in his pale well-tailored suit before a curtain of silvery water. She wished, Musya realized, he’d really ask her for a loan after all because that would give her a reason to see him again; maybe they could even craft an arrangement pledging him to pay her back gradually across multiple meetings. With this thought, she’d smiled her first of many smiles at Leon Flohr. He appealed to her.

The loan request never transpired. Leon always had plenty of cash, from a hundred different sources all around Odessa it came to him, handed over in the pursuit or conclusion of various deals. What did he do? Nothing specific. He introduced sellers to buyers, he helped men move contraband, he brokered small unregistered property transfers and publicized some private gambling rooms discretely. Even more than Musya’s his workday crisscrossed the city; he took most of his meetings at cafés and hotels. Where did he live? Officially, with his family in the Moldavanka. He still visited and paid his mother’s rent sometimes but had no fixed address, only here and there a room, a club, a corner of a flat, even a limestone cubbyhole he’d reach through someone’s cellar floor. Leon worked night and day: sleep bored him. He disliked sitting motionless except in a cinema and he hated to read more than a paragraph. Even so, by noon each day he knew the entire contents of all newspapers solely from conversations he’d had or overheard. He got a lot of shoe shines. His life’s ambition was to own a steam yacht and a stable of racehorses; admiring extravagance, he never saved a kopek. He took Musya to beautiful restaurants, he drove her all around town and even out to the countryside in a car he owned for a month or two. That summer he’d taught her to swim in the Black Sea, they’d gotten sunburnt and tanned together, lying side by side on the crowded strip of yellow beach, watching processions of clouds like giant gleaming brass-fronted warships breast the azure heavens at full sail. She’d gone to bed with him, maybe a dozen times in four different rooms. Musya enjoyed this although the mad passionate obsession she’d been led by cinema and fiction to expect had so far failed to seize her. Most of all she liked to lie quietly beside Leon Flohr while he talked—sex made him talkative—and stroke his naked chest: she liked the way the hair grew in sparse uneven patches down his sternum, on his stomach, across his upper arms. His pale gently muscled flesh emitted light, he was like the Tsar’s setter dog to her that way, Musya supposed; except she knew he was no saint. He’d said they could marry if she became pregnant but somehow or other she hadn’t.

Pray to be childless. The widow Tsigal gripped Musya by the shoulder now as she guided herself off the footstool onto the floor. Musya stood up to help her out of the new dress in progress; she was small but felt herself towering over the old woman. Who told her that the next big war had begun—another from Germany—and a Jew-hater was leading it. Terrible times were at hand, soon, times worse than the worst of the bad times before, such times were coming. That you bring no child into these years—this is my prayer for you.

That day she sent Musya off with more chocolate than usual. Was it a premonition? Feeling uneasy, unlike herself, Musya boarded the streetcar towards home. She wished she could stay in Odessa and dine out with Leon but he was selling some live pheasants, or buying them—Musya wasn’t sure only she knew he wasn’t free. The streetcar grew uncrowded as it rattled further into the outskirts. Musya looked around at the passengers who remained. They all looked familiar; she must have seen every one of their faces dozens of times. And yet they were strangers. Of their feelings, their hearts, she knew nothing—of what they might be capable, she was suddenly afraid. Their eyes looked like stones to her and the rolling streets seemed full of shadows unrelated to the lateness of the day or the nearness of autumn. At the end of the line, her stop, Musya leapt off the platform before anyone else and hurried homeward.

The mother held a telegram. The father, home first today, was holding the envelope. That these printed, folded, flimsy yellow paper scraps signified disaster, Musya had no doubt; the details, she wished she could be spared from knowing. She didn’t want to know. Her knees knocked together like jellies in bowls at the sight of her parents’ solemn, unspeaking faces. What could it be?

Leon Flohr!

It flashed into her mind that Leon had been badly injured, maybe some freak poultry accident had occurred and she was summoned her to his bedside, he was probably hospitalized, possibly he was dying; Leon, from his deathbed, had dictated a message of love that he’d sped to her, here, at home. Where her parents had no idea of his existence. Musya took a big lungful of breath and prepared herself for a terrible scene with tears—her own tears, at least.

Then the mother spoke. With difficulty, through clenched teeth:

Your sister, she said.

Musya blinked, she flinched at this absurdity. Her sister? It made no sense. Liza her married sister had returned home to attack Leon Flohr and put him in the hospital? How could this be? And why? Her mouth opened and closed several times, she couldn’t speak; like a fish she stood gaping, the father said. He told her to sit down with them at the work table. Then he tugged the telegram from between his wife’s fingers and passed it across. She read:

SEND MUSYA TO ME URGENT & SUPREME IMPORTANCE. MUST COME AT ONCE. PRAY FOR US.

That was all. Front, back, she looked: no more message. Two, three times more she read the message that was there. It said no more to her. Pity gripped her heart for Liza who had clearly lost her mind. Panting, at the same time, with relief that Leon wasn’t involved, she wrestled back a shout of laughter. When the mother told her to start preparing for a journey, Musya did laugh. She couldn’t grasp what she was hearing—a mother who never made jokes produced this gem so unexpectedly. Astonishment kept her open-mouthed with goggling eyes until the father said to stop and not to worry. A brief visit, a month, nothing more, with the travel she’d be gone all of two months at the most. After all, she owed a visit, long overdue. She’d never met her nephews, Liza’s boys. Finally that would happen. This trip would be good.

Yes, good, said the mother in an absent voice. One bag only you’ll need.

Musya said she didn’t think so. In her view the probability ran far higher that this trip would be bad, very bad, terrible. To deny it and pretend otherwise was almost as ludicrous as the idea that a single bag could accommodate any two-month travel wardrobe. How could her mother be serious? She couldn’t, she wasn’t—she was simply infected by Liza’s incredible craziness; here it was again, worse than ever, strong and direct from the Far East, insanity folded in yellow paper and flung at them like a poisoned dart across the length of the continent. Remembering a newsreel she’d seen not long before, Musya added an objection: the Far East was a war zone.

The father waved a hand. We won that war.

Of course this had been in the newsreel, too. Feeling trapped, she slammed the telegram down onto the work table and started shouting. First her lunatic sister had tried to turn them into socialists—then into Ukrainians—then into Jews. What next? When would the tyranny end?

We are Jews. The father spoke calmly. He covered both the mother’s hands that she’d been wringing with one of his own, to still them. Yevrei—look. Even the government says so. He always kept Musya’s internal passport with his own because she was careless. Now he pushed the folder across the table at her. There it was in black and white, her nationality. ЄВРЕИ: Hebrew. Don’t lose that, now. You’ll need it to travel.

Musya kept up a struggle, she argued and wept, she fought like a lynx but it was no use, she could tell the mother wasn’t really paying attention. Which became obvious when she slipped her hands from her husband’s to take a pencil from her apron pocket and jotted .1 on the back of the telegram envelope.

It was the start of a packing list for Musya’s trip to the Soviet Zion.

(3)

The train journey lasted thirteen days, including the two it took to reach Moscow. That was north; then Musya’s way led east, almost to the last stop on the Trans-Siberian line, almost to Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean coast.

About one quarter way around the planet.

In 1934, when Liza and Kotz embarked as honeymooning pioneers on the Russiya Number Two to Birobidzhan, the movement of Jews to the Soviet Far East was still a respectable project. The settlers came from all over the world, even America, to public fanfare; they starred in newsreels and inspired musical films; literary celebrities visited and returned home to write novels about them. The new couple’s train fare had been nothing at all—and they’d been given cash travel grants. All this Musya remembered.

Five years later the project looked close to defunct, all unattended desks and fading poster slogans on the walls of the connecting stations. Why this state of things should be, Musya had no idea; what’s more, she didn’t care. All she knew was that instead of being cheap, her fare to what was now called the Jewish Autonomous Region was rather expensive. Adding its cost to the countless gifts, toys, bolts of cloth, sewing tools and sweets and other foodstuffs that her parents had gathered and wrapped into parcels—six in number, all large, an outrageous burden—the family’s savings were practically drained; for her return fare they’d have to rely on the kindness of Kotz as son- and brother-in-law. Musya had nothing to contribute, she’d lived like a bird on the wing, living on air, spending everything she earned. Now she was travelling with just enough cash money to sustain herself for two weeks on tea, hard-boiled eggs, biscuits, meat pies, the occasional blintz or a chicken leg; she shopped through the train window at stops where food vendors thronged the station platforms. She budgeted carefully, never let go of her purse, and still arrived penniless.

For the first week of her journey she expected Leon Flohr to appear at any moment. She hadn’t been able to send him a message, not knowing where in Odessa to send it; but Leon knew where she lived, she’d told him. After a day, maybe two, when he missed her, he’d speed there. She pictured the scene in the front room, Leon in a pale suit, gleaming, fists clenched, tall with outrage. Muschka (he tells her parents who crouch in gloom, shame-faced) is his now: they don’t deserve her. Then he rushes off in pursuit. Every stop and delay on the Moscow-bound train Musya thought her lover must have engineered for the purpose of boarding—her heart pounded—and searching the cars for her. She clutched the bakelite handle of her travel bag. The authorities must be on Leon’s side, for once; quite likely her parents’ treatment of her was criminal, sending her like this to Birobidzhan, their presumption trampling her basic rights. Under the soaring vaults of the Kievsky station she looked all around for him, she thought he might have overtaken her and would appear to welcome her to Moscow with flowers; he’d have a car waiting or even a carriage drawn by midnight black steeds, and their hotel room would end in a balcony with panoramic river views.

Her train departed Moscow late at night. Soldiers were everywhere, in the streets, the squares, the stations. She lingered on the Yaroslavsky platform until the last possible moment, straining her eyes to pierce steam clouds thickened by coal smoke for a glimpse of Leon Flohr among the drab uniforms, but he didn’t appear. The next morning she awoke in motion. Greenish-brown at the bottom, bluish-gray at the top, bisected by a horizon line perfectly level, the view was monotonous to say the least. Musya decided to be realistic. Leon would never come looking for her after only a day or two: it might take him almost a week to go pound on the door of her home and demand information. Would he strike her father in the face and knock him to the floor? Her poor father! Musya hoped not. In distant parallel another motorcar appeared and rode alongside the Trans-Siberian line, toy-like, tethered to her soaring heart. Then gone. Next time Leon would be driving, she’d recognize the love that fueled his breakneck pace.

The hours after sundown when she lost her view were awful.

The triple shelves of her platskartny carriage were full of women travelling alone or with young children. The sounds and smells of infant care were fairly relentless. The W/Cs at either end were occupied around the clock and a steady crowd ringed the huge carriage samovar, whose hot water always seemed to run out just before Musya got there. By the samovar the carriage provodnitsa—as the conductresses were called—had their den. The bench Musya shared with her heaped belongings doubled as a sleeping bunk with an inadequate curtain for privacy. She couldn’t keep the curtain drawn by day because it wasn’t allowed, the provodnitsa scolded her for trying. They scolded her for oversleeping, too. She was vaguely aware of a feminine conviviality that ebbed and flowed around the carriage as other women boarded, met, exclaimed, boasted, shared amusing stories, reached their destinations, parted friends. Musya heard herself described as the little zhid who was going to Birobidzhan. She made no friends nor did she try to. Hourly she imagined her fellow passengers’ consternation and envy when the whole train screeched to a grinding halt at the very midpoint of desolation and Leon Flohr with his curls windblown and fresh leapt aboard, dashing the provodnitsa’s senile protests to atoms with an easy laugh. Then yet another dusk surprised and drove the daylight to extinction. Jammed in among the six enormous parcels, Musya studied her own round pale face reflected in the window glass, forlorn.

One day they passed nothing but tree stumps in every direction for six full hours. Musya began to picture Leon arriving with an accomplice or two—for he could never reach her now without the aid of a dedicated team, not realistically. The distances involved were too enormous. This, she heard the other passengers agreeing, was the part that always felt long. Maybe Leon’s handsome accomplice would be sympathetic to Musya, he might become a friend to her, even something like a brother. She heard a passenger’s voice rise from the doldrums:

What kind of maniacs can believe they rule this far away?

Musya had to laugh although she didn’t see the good of criticizing. A few others laughed and other women hushed them. The carriage fell into an uneasy silence, hypnotically rocked to a steel rail lullaby. When Musya opened her eyes again, a low bright green forest was almost crowding her view; this was the taiga. Its great cool breath enclosed her like tunnel walls. Up and down the carriage mothers were unpacking shawls and little mufflers and supplemental swaddling clothes while the porters fed the iron boiler stove until it roared. Distantly from another carriage they heard voices and handclaps, rhythmic and musical—men in song, the wheezy reeds and bass stops of a bayan accompanying.

The taiga revealed itself. Trees gave way to marshes that led into forests that ended in swamps; the cycle repeated; ground level was a cloak of bright green, every shade, some aglow. The monotony was total, just as it had been on the steppe: indeed it felt a little like the grasses of the steppe had turned gigantic around the train that burrowed busily past stems thick as tree trunks and flooded hoof prints big as ponds. Otherwise a chill damp was pervasive and thick fogs were chronic at any hour of day or night. It was a region of heavy industry and mass labor, Musya gathered, into which many of her fellow passengers would be disembarking on the way to work settlements, assigned there. A few other women she thought very romantic, the ones headed for the environs of prison camps to be near their husbands. Admiring their saintly glamour she wished for a way to befriend them but spent more time picturing herself in their place, with her beloved condemned to hard labor in Siberian chains; she’d be self-sacrificial as a Dekabristi princess, another Trubetskaya choosing exile by his side. Maybe Leon would be guilty as charged of a genuine crime and he’d beg her from his knees to forgive him. She’d touch his poor unbarbered face. She’d leave herself in tears.

The train went along day and night. With the carriage emptying of wives and children, more men boarded. Bound for eastern ports and sea voyages, freight seamen, a pair of them, had found their way onto the bunk facing her own. Musya turned from the dull fogbound view to converse, she could see no harm in this although the provodnitsa’s disapproval was obvious. Neither sailor was at all good looking but they’d both spent time ashore in Odessa. She found a lot to talk about with them in easy Russian. Soon the conversation turned to the present journey’s apparent endlessness and one of the sailors told of an amazing invention that the Americans were keeping top secret, one which enabled them to travel vast distances without the use of fuel or even motion. It was a suit, he explained, whose wearer could simply levitate, hang in mid-air, and let Earth’s rotation do the rest:

Over Europe one continent, over Atlantic first Ocean, over North America second continent, over Pacific second Ocean—in less than one day only, from Moscow longitude to Vladivostok longitude. Then, what, a few hours south? Think how fast compared to now!

Musya nodded eagerly. Although a little frightening the floating suit sounded terrific. No doubt about it, she agreed, these American United States with their capitalism, sometimes it really seemed to help them get ahead.

An angry shout and a few loud footfalls heralded the appearance of a tall man in a handsome tunic uniform with red stars on the sleeves and hat brim: he was security police, NKVD. And not disposed, he said, to listen to degenerates spread misinformation about advances in effortless travel. Suit—what suit? He barked a disparaging laugh. Do you not know it does a man no damn good to levitate—not unless he escapes the planet’s gravitational pull!

Yes, one of the sailors said instantly. This does.

The newcomer sneered. An anti-gravity suit? You say the Americans have invented an anti-gravity suit?

They said yes and he started shouting, threatening the seamen with kicks and arrest; he chased them off. Then he took their place on the bench opposite Musya’s, gave her a long hot-eyed look, and begged her pardon; but he was a patriot. America-worship was a poison corroding the veins of the Soviet people. He said to put her worries over the matter away. Latitudinal or otherwise, American physics would get its people exactly nowhere. Humanity’s first functioning anti-gravity products were bound to originate in the Soviet Union whose socialist science, he explained, was vastly superior to all science elsewhere because it had never been polluted by foreign influences. Musya didn’t know what this was supposed to mean but she agreed with him. She found him terrifically good-looking once she got used to the sight of him and his large pores. He was a black-haired man, very close-shaven. How was she enjoying her journey—how did she find the views, he wondered, of this great land they crossed? It was very big, she hazarded. He agreed in full:

Immense!

His name, she learned, was NKVD Trooper Alexey and the salient facts about him were two in number: he loved his country, and he loved pretty girls. Thus he was the happiest of men. To his way of thinking, in the productive force of pretty Soviet girls the unstoppable advance of historical materialism achieved its latest triumph—for were they not all singularly forward-thinking and accomplished? She admitted that she might be.

I am a poet, she said.

He removed his cap with exaggerated pathos. "Farewell, leafy groves! You faithful ones, you—ah, Pushkin. They discussed books for a while and then, more knowledgably, films. The officer loved epics, battle scenes. She ventured to ask whether their train was nearing a war zone even now. This amused, even charmed him. She felt her hand patted: Ah, my dear. All over, finished. Our Red Army knocked the clockwork out of those Japanese and sent them back to the toy factory. Those maniacs will not be heard from again for three hundred years, mark my words."

She and Alexey talked for almost two hours, a full-out flirtation on both their parts, Musya felt. When one of his colleagues came rattling through on a carriage inspection he sprang up hastily and left her in an instant, tempering the exit’s rudeness with a wink that seemed to vow his swift return. Certainly she expected him to return.

Smiling at the window, Musya thought of her silly old poem, the prize-winner. Who would love her? Would it be the black-haired trooper—would he love her? Was she now and had she always been fated to be loved by him? This particular man—his career advanced by leaps as she pictured the effects of her influence—was she about or destined to become the wife of an NKVD commandant? If so, her eyes popped wider. She pictured some opulence, an elegant party, with fingertips to painted lips lifting toast triangles heaped with black caviar, careful of her champagne satin gloves. Would she love only Alexey now? Or would she take a lover? Musya pictured the entrance of Leon Flohr—she threw herself into his arms! And then in the next scenario, she didn’t. She pictured him in tears, she pictured herself torn, suspicious. Why had he not come for her sooner? Then Leon Flohr didn’t come for her, they met by chance, they met in passing at a nightclub—nothing happened, not right away. At last Leon fell to his knees and begged her for another chance but she said no, she chose fidelity to her husband, Alexey, whom she called Alyosha.

She expected the trooper’s return at every moment for the next three days; then hourly; then less. But she never saw him again. The journey dragged its way along enormous rivers into a stretch of warmer climate, marshier, steaming where sun-struck. Evening brought the welcome signals of a station’s approach. But it was barely a depot, where a handful of snack vendors passed alongside on the bare ground. Chips of light marked the windows of a small settlement carved out of the taiga. Yet surely the place ought to have been ablaze with light, given the volume of audible current flooding the area—the power plant had to be immense to make so loud a humming sound, so steady.

"Gnus!"

The carriage floorboards clattered as the passengers and provodnitsa rushed into violent action together on every side. Gnus! Gnus! Some lit lamps and citronella coils, others rushed from window to window slamming what they could. Sooty smoke stung Musya’s eyes and throat. She slapped at her arm and saw insect wings smashed up in blood—her own, she realized. Gnus: they bit. That had been the sound of them—that many. And people lived here! Musya exclaimed, she thought it was really horrible to establish inhabitants in a place where they’d be driven mad and devoured.

Where you are going is worse, they told her.

She didn’t believe them; although a memory stirred of the mother reading aloud from a letter Liza had sent, an early one, in which she’d complained about the Biting Insect Population, she’d called it. Had this complaint been a recurring one in Liza’s letters home? Perhaps it had been, Musya thought now. In truth she hadn’t always listened with full attention when the mother read them aloud at the work table; and she hadn’t read more than a handful on her own because she hated her older sister’s handwriting, the sight of it always depressed and strained her nerves.

She’d absorbed enough, even so, to have gathered that Birobidzhan was a kind of paradise-in-the-making for people exactly like her sister: industrious, high-minded, tiresome. But Musya wondered; for some at least among the settlers might feel much the same as she. A picture rose to mind of her own arrival there, its first catalyzing effects upon the region and an isolated, disaffected minority begun to coalesce into a clique, even a circle with herself dead-center, its leading light and star. A handsome boy she pictured, too, coming from the pumpkin fields outside town one day to market and meeting her eye in the sunshine; she based his image on a boy she’d glimpsed somewhere among the steppes who’d stopped loading hay into a cart to watch the train pass by, she could see him leaning on his pitchfork, easeful and attentive. And so handsome: a farmer. Bored, just as she was bored, by all this modernity, all this civilization surrounding them with its niceties and chatter, its politics and news, its cafés and motorcars, its pale suits—this intelligent, sensitive young Jewish pioneer, his skin smooth and honestly sun-browned, his large hands roughened by productive labor, his plush mouth sweet from the apple that she’d toss him when they met, that first day, soon—would he love her? Their love at first sight sealed, of course so.

Maybe a couple of months on the land would do her good, Musya decided.

What else did she know about the Soviet Zion from five years’ worth of Liza’s telling? That its climate saw extremes of heat and cold unknown in Odessa raised no concern as she’d be gone before the winter came; it was now early October 1939. That famous writers came and visited and sometimes shook hands with Liza before they left, she remembered with traces of her original envy. She knew that the American settlers had all come and gone; that the local government was always changing; and that a sizeable population of Korean families lived there and grew rice, which she thought must be picturesque if not quite worth seeing. That downtown Birobidzhan boasted its own modern Yiddish Theater was the fact whose recollection kindled Musya’s imagination into the liveliest activity now. She’d been able to pack one nice fashionable dress she felt sure would outclass any other in so provincial an audience. Maybe at some point in her visit the company would even be casting for extras or an ingénue; or else the production’s leading lady could fall ill, quit the stage, or elope with an aviator, leaving the handsome playwright-turned-director brokenhearted and in extremis, mere hours from ruin. Musya his future savior smiled to herself: she was on the way.

Through a late morning the train drew near to Birobidzhan, capital city of the Jewish Autonomous Region and in the approach little different from its brother and sisters cities that lined—widely spaced—the Trans-Siberian’s eastern frontier route. Blasted and barren and waterlogged, scarred by earth machines, virtually treeless, dotted with ramshackle mining works where she’d pictured melon fields and wheat, hay wagons creaking on chalk roads and lambs leaping in green grass paddocks; but she didn’t see a single farm, not one, before the brake whistle’s long shrill cry signaled the station’s approach. The sound plunged Musya into a painful dilemma.

For, arriving penniless, she had still to thank the provodnitsa with a little something. Though hard on her at times the conductress and her colleagues had been vigilant in Musya’s service for over ten days now, of this they were using these final minutes to remind her; and she admitted it readily. It was true. She owed the provodnitsa. Who knew, somehow, she didn’t know how they knew, exactly how much cash she had left upon her person—none, zero—and they joined her in hoping that any relatives waiting to greet her on the Birobidzhan station platform had come equipped with moderate to heavy sums in bill or coin. Otherwise, if not, they could discuss the bolts of cloth and dry goods and other contents of her parcels; which the provodnitsa knew backwards and forwards as well, they knew better than Musya did, actually. She hoped it wouldn’t come to that but was preparing herself to part with an ample moiety. In the meantime she regretted having to fix every bit of her attention on this debate in the carriage interior whilst her first views of the city presumably rolled past unseen; in sum, she arrived penniless, fretful and vexed.

(4)

Boris Kotz had already hired a handcart for the baggage before her arrival. What that transaction had left