The Endless Steppe

by Esther Hautzig

  ‘Good morning, children.’

  Without another word, she picked up a book, called out a page number. It was a fable by the Russian writer Ivan Krylov, and everyone had a book but me. The feeling must have been something like being the only soldier without a gun. I leaned towards the girl sitting next to me and asked if I might share her book. She grudgingly agreed. She was a very pretty girl with short blonde curly hair and eyes the special blue of northern countries. I asked her name but she told me to be quiet, that there was absolutely no talking at all allowed in class.

  My first lesson in school in Siberia was memorable for being a chilly one. Not only did Krylov evade me, lost as he was in a sea of Cyrillic letters, but so did the book itself – literally. My classmate somehow managed to keep slipping it out of my field of vision, which forced me to strain, squirm, and nudge her to bring the book closer. Naturally, I had barely read the first paragraph when Raisa Nikitovna began to quiz the class. To my horror, one question was directed at me. Fortunately – or with more humanity than I was giving that severe-faced woman credit for – it concerned the opening of the fable. As I began to answer in my halting Russian, all the children turned to stare at me; I braced myself against the derisive laughter I expected. But no one laughed. As I was to learn, discipline was no problem in the Siberian classroom, none whatsoever. In that harsh country, going to school was a privilege no one wanted to monkey with.

  When the lesson was finished, Raisa Nikitovna introduced me to the class: ‘This is Esther Rudomin, who comes from Poland. As you can tell, she does not know Russian well and she will have to work hard to catch up. She will share her books with Svetlana. Stand up, Svetlana.’

  Svetlana turned out to be the pretty little girl sitting next to me; the prospect of sharing with her was not heartening. However, I made a prim little speech thanking Raisa Nikitovna and promising to study hard. Would we be learning Russian grammar, of which I knew very little? I inquired. Raisa Nikitovna was not impressed by little eager beavers; she snapped back that most certainly we would study Russian grammar – one day grammar, one day poems and stories. What kind of a school did I think I had come to? her tone implied.

  I sat down.

  Happily the bell rang just then and I discovered that in this school one had a short recess between classes, since it was the teachers who moved from classroom to classroom, not the children. I was immediately surrounded by children firing questions at me which I had trouble understanding and answering: Did I really come from Poland? Where was Poland? What did people speak there? Was it cold there in the winter? In spite of the difficulty with the language, this much attention from my classmates felt more like the strokes of little velvet paws than a barrage.

  The bell rang again and a wizened, dwarf-like man came in. Once again the children snapped to attention, rose to their feet, and bowed. This time I bowed, too. This man taught mathematics, which would now become not only difficult but impossible. He spoke so low that I could barely hear him and scribbled things on the blackboard that were equally unintelligible to me. When the lesson was over and he had assigned a great deal of homework, I asked Svetlana what would happen if I couldn’t do it all. She cheerfully told me that I had better do it, since this teacher was the biggest terror of them all. If there was one thing I didn’t need, I thought, it was one more terror in Siberia.

  As the day went on, I met the men and women who were to teach us German, history, and geography. I learned that here one was graded from one to five – with the usual plus and minus – one being complete failure, two worse than a D, and five being excessively difficult to attain and practically worthy of the Order of Lenin. I learned that the school year was from September until the end of May with a holiday at the New Year and one week off to help with the spring planting.

  History was taught with some curious omissions, one being the late tsar. He simply disappeared from history; not once were his execution and that of his family ever mentioned by the teacher. Nor by me, I might add. Without too much instruction from my parents, I had learned that in Siberia one had better not be a show-off. I would as soon have instructed my classmates in the facts about the tsar – or capitalism, if I had understood it – as I would have offered my head for the block. I had no interest in being a heroine, let alone a martyr.

  But there was one great fringe benefit to the study of history: along with our studies of Peter the Great, Catherine, Rasputin, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, we read the appropriate novels. We read Aleksei Tolstoi’s Peter the Great, we read Dumas, we read Balzac, we read Dickens (as an example of how terrible capitalism was), we read about Spartacus … We read, we read, we read.

  Since I was to study with Svetlana, she was the most likely person to become my friend. But the more attention I got, the more she sulked. I sensed that Svetlana was the queen bee and that I had become her natural enemy. This was confirmed when I asked if I might come to her house to study with her. The answer was a sharp ‘No!’ I would be allowed to fetch the books in the evening when she was quite finished with them, but I could jolly well trot myself home and study alone.

  At the end of my first day at school, I collapsed on the nari. Out of the confusion of the day, three giants emerged to be slain: Svetlana, Raisa Nikitovna, and Krylov in Cyrillic letters. In that order.

  I did not know that in the wings there were one or two more waiting for me.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  One day a piece of cheese was missing.

  I was sitting at the table, struggling with my homework, and Grandmother and Mrs Kaftal were on the Kaftals’ nari engaged in their favourite competition, the remembrance of things past. Who had the most trouble with the servants? Whose husband had the more extravagant taste in jewels? Whose husband killed himself more at his work? was fussier about his shirts? knew the best restaurants in Warsaw? Eyes bright, heads bobbing, these two artists re-created the past as if they were forging armour for their knights.

  I was into my second month at school. The past, World War II, and exile were of far less consequence to me than the problem of x: if y = such and such, and z = such and such, everyone but me would know what x equalled. I was finding the work exceedingly difficult, the teachers strict, and Svetlana more unfriendly as the other children continued to be friendly and inquisitive. But I had not become one of them. I had come from fairyland as far as they were concerned. Although I had been wily enough to demote father to ‘some sort of engineer’, I had been too explicit about upper-middle-class life in Vilna, and my clothes, shabby as they had become, were of much better quality than theirs. Incongruously, as I had sometimes been in the school in Vilna, here too I was the pariah poor little rich girl, the outsider. To be one of them became my greatest ambition; my next greatest ambition was to do well at my work; other ambitions, such as to be a famous writer, were temporarily overshadowed.

  ‘Don’t talk so loud!’ I begged as x refused to reveal itself.

  ‘She’s hungry,’ Grandmother apologized to Mrs Kaftal. ‘Have a little something to eat, Esther.’

  It was early for supper, but I too thought a piece of brinza might help. I fetched it from the hamper under our bed and discovered that at least half of it was gone. I cried out.

  ‘Again?’ Grandmother was close to hysteria. ‘What will we do?’

  ‘Go to the police!’ I shouted, not caring who heard me.

  ‘No! No! No!’ Mrs Kaftal had jumped off the bed.

  Grandmother and I stared at her. True, we all feared the police, but her face had become violently red and she was trembling from head to toe.

  I couldn’t look at her.

  There was a dreadful silence and then Grandmother said, ‘Oh, stop imagining things, Esther, nothing’s missing. Take a piece of cheese and go back to your homework.’

  I did as I was told. I felt hideously embarrassed, as if it were I who had been caught.

  ‘My husband was always very particular about the governesses for
his grandchildren …’ Grandmother went on in a brave voice.

  But Mrs Kaftal pleaded a headache and Grandmother tiptoed back to her own bed.

  It was not the end of missing food. From time to time it would happen again and when it did we all held our tongues, as if the hunger that provoked the theft was a fatal illness to be kept secret from the patient.

  Trouble was our constant dark companion.

  I had begun to cough. At night in the hut, I tried to stifle the cough, but the harder I tried, the more I coughed. Nina and Nikita slept on apparently undisturbed, but the others would stir restlessly. And my parents and grandmother began to fret: no cough medicine, not even milk and honey, no boots.

  My cough became more persistent and the walk to and from school longer and longer, what with the paroxysms of coughing and the need to recover my breath from them. Mother heard that there was a very good woman doctor in the village, one of the new refugees from Moscow. The German siege of Russia had begun.

  Her office was in the village infirmary, and it was not very attractive. But she wore a white coat and a stethescope, and with her hair parted in the middle and drawn back into a bun, she was the prototype of the Russian woman doctor. The second she cupped my chin with her broad hand and looked into my face, I liked her and trusted her. She listened to my chest, my back, took my temperature, my pulse. She had no X-ray machine, there was no laboratory for blood tests, perhaps she would find a microscope to do a sputum test, but she was certain of the diagnosis: a severe bronchitis which must not be neglected or – With their eyes, she and Mother finished the sentence together.

  I was to be put to bed immediately.

  ‘But my schoolwork … I’m having enough trouble as it is …’

  The doctor shook her head. ‘There is to be no trouble with schoolwork. There is to be no school. There is to be only rest. Only rest and no trouble.’ She smiled sadly at Mother. ‘No trouble …’

  ‘No school? Until when?’

  ‘We’ll see. Most likely not before spring.’

  ‘Spring? But I’ll be left behind …’ I wailed.

  The doctor put her arm around me. ‘Already you are not obeying doctor’s orders. I said no trouble, no worry. No worry is the best medicine for you. No worry and rest, rest, rest. The body and the mind. It is the only medicine we have – and we are going to use it.’ Again she looked at Mother. ‘Whenever possible – milk, eggs –’ As if she had committed an egregious social blunder, she blushed and stopped herself. But more than once during that long, long winter this doctor would pay her call carrying with her an egg or a jug of milk or a jar of broth.

  And so I was to stay in the hut that first Siberian winter. It was there that I had my first personal confrontation with tragedy.

  The knock on the door came in the early evening. It was another deportee, fresh from a labour camp, a former lawyer, a prominent one – everyone had been prominent once. The man came to the point in his own time. It was cold in the labour camp, many people were sick. With no care, no medication, they died like flies, but there were trees to be chopped down. He had been sick, very sick – who had been sick? and he had been ordered to chop trees, an old man with pneumonia. It was his sad mission to tell Grandmother –

  Grandmother screamed.

  For myself, my own love for my grandfather had figured so strongly in the pattern of my life up until then that I did not know what to do with my sense of loss, my grief, and my terror.

  White-faced and grim, his eyes blazing with anger as well as grief, my father began the ritual mourning for his father. How this was accomplished I do not know, but morning and evening ten Jewish men gathered in the hut, having trudged through the wind and the cold before and after God knows what labours, to say the prayer for the dead. Father, who had had rabbinical training, led the services.

  These men covered their heads with whatever was at hand – a hat, a cap, a yarmulka that had been grabbed in flight, a handkerchief, a rag – and turned towards Jerusalem: ‘Yisgaddal v’yis-kad-dash.’ – Magnified and sanctified be His name. The beautiful Kaddish.

  On the third night, quite unceremoniously the door burst open. It was the police. The ten men turned and stood still.

  Did they know that to run a synagogue was against the law? And subject to punishment?

  They were not running a synagogue.

  Oh, no? Then what were they doing?

  They were mourning their dead.

  What dead?

  The services were interrupted. Father went to the chief of police. What proof did he have that his father was dead? The chief of police was not easily persuaded. Father went away with the strong impression that there had better be no more communal services for any reason, that the Jewish community was now suspect.

  For eight days Grandmother sat shivah alone except for Mrs Kaftal and me. Once or twice another old woman adrift in Siberia came to pay her respects. At home during this period, Grandmother would have been surrounded by her family, and friends would have come and gone to help her through the initial stage of shock. In Siberia, she endured the eight days of mourning stretched out on the nari, seeming to be herself barely alive. Every once in a while she would say something to reveal that she was lying there reliving the days of their courtship, their marriage, their truly great love for each other. ‘… That was the day he brought me violets, the big purple ones … Karlsbad … like in a romance …’ ‘… every morsel he ate I tasted first … you think, my Solomon would say, it was the kitchen of the Borgias and my wife suspected poison …’

  Traditionally the yahrzeit candle for the dead should have burned throughout the period of mourning, but there were no candles; instead, Grandmother was allowed to turn the kerosene lamp low and keep it burning throughout the night. Oil and wicks were scarce, but Nina and Nikita had great respect for ritual and tradition. There were some others who had it too: old women were sometimes to be seen surreptitiously carrying bread under their shawls to be blessed by a former priest.

  When the eight days were over, Grandmother went out on to the steppe and disappeared for hours. As I remained in the hut waiting for her to return, I imagined that I still heard her cries.

  That night the first Siberian storms came. It seemed impossible that the force of the turbulence, churning over thousands of miles of steppe, would not carry the tiny hut away with it. Not far away from us, the roof of another hut caved in that night. The windows of ours had iced over, but peering through a crack in the door, seeing nothing but the never-ending swirling snow, one had a sense of tumbling through space in total isolation.

  There were many such storms that winter. The first few times I watched my parents bundle themselves into grotesque figures with whatever was available – fortunately they had bought some old cheaply patched pimy boots at the baracholka – and go out into the snow, I was justifiably terrified that I would never see them again.

  Mother quickly learned some techniques for protecting herself. She learned the Siberian way of wrapping her crocheted shawl over her head and across her face, leaving only one eye exposed. She said that with everyone dressed this way, out on the steppe you could go right past your own child unless there was something distinctive about the shawl. The lashes of the exposed eye – or eyes if the cold permitted – froze with a little white crust on them, which I thought was very pretty. Wearing glasses, of course, was out of the question.

  She also learned that goose fat was a necessity. After her first bout with frostbite – the flesh first went white as pork fat, then purple – she managed to get hold of some goose fat and smeared it over her face, fingers, and toes. Even so, she still suffered subsequent attacks, particularly on her fingers.

  Much as I loved the snow, I did not feel deprived when I was forbidden to go out into these maelstroms – except when it was necessary to use snowshoes, which Mother and Father improvised out of slabs of wood.

  As the weeks and months went by and the snow piled up, sometimes nearly obliterating a hu
t, the isolation one felt in a Siberian hut was more than separation or loneliness, it was almost like an additional sense that one had been born with and would never lose.

  I had no one, and nothing, to play with, nothing to read except an occasional book Anya borrowed from the library in Rubtsovsk.

  When the weather would not permit Grandmother to take her misery out on to the steppe, she lay on the nari with it hour after hour, day after day, through that first Siberian winter.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Nina announced that she was going to have a baby and we would have to move. Happy news for her and bad news for us. It was not merely that we had got used to living with these friendly people, but housing had become an extremely serious problem. By now, more and more people were fleeing from the German armies in European Russia and crowding into the Siberian villages.

  Everyone took turns hunting. Even I was allowed to go out when it was not too cold – a relative term if ever there was one – or stormy, and at last we found a place on the other side of the village. Nina and Nikita’s clean and cheerful hut was a dream house by comparison. This dingy little hut with its two tiny dark rooms was occupied by two dour sisters and an equally dour little boy. We were told that we could move in temporarily (a word more promising than threatening to our ears); we were to provide half the heating material for the hut; and the rent was to be double the amount we had paid Nikita. For this largesse, it was also necessary to receive permission from the police. It was granted and we moved to our new house.

  This time there was no buggy and we lugged our belongings from one side of the village to the other. Although at that time Rubtsovsk was still small as far as its native population, housing, and facilities were concerned, it sprawled over a very large area and it took us well over an hour each way and several trips. I don’t know how it was done, but even in that austere time we had accumulated more than our bags and hamper could hold – another pot or two, a sack of flour, a bag of potatoes – and some of it we carried wrapped in sheets on our backs.