With summer upon us, the hut became unbearably stifling, the vermin unbearably populous, and all tempers reacted accordingly – our landladies’, the little boy’s, and ours. After all, ten human beings were inhabiting this wretched little oven.
Father decided to investigate the possibility of finding us new quarters.
On the north side of the village, there were some dilapidated and unoccupied huts. Unoccupied with reason: there was no heating of any kind, no floors, and no glass in the windows. But they were empty. Father went to the village housing chief and asked if we might enjoy the privilege of occupying one of these huts.
About this time, factories were beginning to be built in Rubtsovsk – among them a huge tractor factory – and with them came a large migration from European Russia of engineers, technicians of all sorts, and workers. In order to house these people, large new buildings were erected near the factories and alongside the huts. The district where they existed became known as the novostroyka, meaning new buildings. To me, these buildings were the ultimate in beauty and comfort. They were painted white and yellow and light green and there were floors in them and some apartments even had bathrooms, but these were only for the chiefs of the factories.
Miraculously, we were permitted to move into one of the empty huts and we were to be alone at last!
The Kaftals elected to stay on with the sisters. Inevitably, seven people who had been virtually bedfellows ended up getting on one another’s nerves.
As for me, the wretched little hut became my dream house. Every day, after working in the potato patch, I went there and cleaned it as best I could. We also picked up manure, mixed it with clay, and either replaced some of the old square blocks in the walls or repaired others. Father got some whitewash at the construction job and we covered the walls with it. And somewhere or other we found glass for the windows.
Before we could cover the floor with fresh clay, we had to dig a cold cellar. Since it would be impossible to keep the potatoes from freezing in an outdoor cellar, we dug one in the middle of our room. Father found some split logs lying around the novostroyka and covered the hole with them. Since the rounded logs were also still covered with bark, they gave our floor an odd look, but no matter: we had our own home and our own stove, an outdoor summer one that Father had constructed of bricks, where we could cook our own little flour cakes and our own soup without lining up to do so – and without any helpful and unhelpful, welcome and unwelcome, hints as to their preparation.
That spring Mother had learned that there was such a marvellous thing as a public bath, a bania, in the village, and to get there became her dearest wish. What if we did eat a little less for a week or two to save up for such a treat? Wouldn’t it be heavenly to feel clean before we moved to our own home?
The bania was in a small building with two entrances, one for men and one for women. We found that Mother was not the only woman with a passion for cleanliness: the line was long; the wait would be a couple of hours at least. We waited.
There were two rooms in the bania; one had stone benches and taps along the walls, the other was a steam room, a rather crude sauna where one used twigs in the Finnish fashion to clean oneself and stir up one’s circulation.
We were assigned a cubbyhole for our clothes and, since we were to use the room with the taps, we were given a basin and a piece of pumice. We filled our basins at a tap, sat down on a stone bench and scrubbed away. The water was hot. Mother was entranced. Now we were quite ready to move.
Outside the hut, there was a small piece of land that no one seemed to be using. With our potatoes, and some tomato plants and corn seed given to us by Svetlana, we would turn it into a vegetable patch.
The plans Grandmother and I were making for this garden inevitably recalled Grandfather and our garden in Vilna. As her eyes filled with tears, Grandmother tested my memory. Did I remember what Grandfather had said about the irises? and the pansies? Did I remember the lilac tree?
Yes, I remembered everything. I remembered exactly where Grandfather had said to plant each flower. I remembered the prize of fifty groshes that each week was given to the child whose flowers looked best. Yes, I remembered.
‘Good!’ Grandmother raised her head; she was proud of me. I had passed the test. ‘And you will never forget?’ No, I would never forget. ‘Good!’ Now my memory was to be honoured, she seemed to say; it was to become the archive of her beloved past.
Could we plant some flowers? I wanted to know. Grandmother was a realist who lived in the future as well as the past; no, we could not, we needed every inch for growing food.
In this world of scarcity, the acquisition of the most trivial or seemingly useless object was a topic for conversation. So Svetlana told me that her father had got a large quantity of hospital gauze. (How and why I did not know or care to ask.) She asked me if I wanted some. I assured her I did; I would use it for curtains.
‘White hospital gauze for curtains, Esther?’
‘You will see,’ I said mysteriously.
I began to save onion peelings and asked Svetlana to do the same. In school, we had learned that onion peelings when boiled in water exuded a yellow pigment which could be used as dye. Svetlana had either forgotten this or else had no need to remember such things. She wondered what I was up to, but I told her it was a secret.
When I had gathered a big pile of onion peel, I boiled it until the water was a pot of pale dye. I dunked the gauze in this, let it stay for several hours, and to my delight it worked. The gauze was now a pretty yellow. I stretched it out and dried it in the sun and then I made our curtains. There were no curtain rods to be had, so we tacked them on with little nails, and my pride in the result was very great. Everyone agreed that the curtains were very pretty and just what this hut needed.
The hut was heaven. We ate when we wanted to, slept when we wanted to, at night we would sit outside and gaze at the Siberian sky where there was always something to see; we would sit there quietly, quietly. Even Mother seemed to regain some of her old zest for life.
It was too good to be true to last.
One day the village housing chief came to our hut when I was alone and told me that the next day we were to have a tenant, whether we wanted one or not.
‘Who is it going to be?’ I asked.
‘Vanya, the bum.’
‘Vanya, the bum …?’ I was horrified.
I had been taught never to call anyone names, but everyone called this one-legged man ‘Vanya the bum’. He was the village beggar and people said he stole. Now this bum was going to live with us? In Vilna, there had been many beggars. Whenever I saw them, I was morbidly affected. Where did they eat? Did they ever bathe at all? And, most important, where did they go at night? Where did they sleep? Thinking about them, I used to shudder.
Now one was going to live with us.
When I gave the news to my parents, they were no less stunned than I was.
‘Vanya, the bum …?’ Father asked.
I assured him that I had heard correctly.
Mother coughed. A signal to Father that she disapproved of his language. Vanya was not to be called a bum. The lecture that followed seemed to me – and perhaps to Father too – untimely, like correcting the grammar of someone who is trying to tell you the house is on fire. The lecture continued: Vanya was not to be called Vanya either. He must have a proper name. We were to introduce ourselves as usual, etc. Perhaps this man has a worthy reason for begging? Don’t you agree, Samuel?
Father not only agreed, but having been rebuked, went on to remind me that we must not judge people by their appearance, etc, etc.
Fidgeting from foot to foot, I listened to everything they had to say, but as far as I was concerned, Vanya the bum was coming to live with us and I was not only terrified but revolted.
Perhaps the village housing chief would have a change of heart, I thought to myself.
The next evening, Vanya the bum stood at our open door.
‘May I come in?’<
br />
‘Of course you may.’ Mother stood up.
‘Good … evening.’ Vanya’s response was tentative.
Regardless of all these amenities, this tall, bone-thin spectre in filthy clothes, with dark bushy hair and a matted beard, was still a bum to me. But I felt Mother’s eyes on me.
‘Good evening,’ I said, going forward but keeping my hands rigidly at my sides. ‘My name is Esther Rudomin. What’s yours?’
‘Vanya.’
His deeply sunken eyes darted from Mother to Father and back to me.
‘My name is Ivan Petrovich, my child,’ he amended, and there was a tiny spark in his eyes.
‘Welcome to our house, Ivan Petrovich,’ my father said.
For the first time, Grandmother, who had been watching this scene more or less huddled in her bed, spoke up. ‘Welcome,’ she murmured.
‘Thank you, thank you. Where may I put down my stick? And this bag?’ The bag was a tattered dusty bundle.
No one had given this matter a thought.
In a tiny room with a hole in its centre and three of its corners already occupied by beds, the obvious answer was the fourth corner. But the intention had been to build the winter stove in that corner.
‘So we will make the stove smaller,’ Mother said, answering our unspoken words, and pointed to the corner. ‘Maybe we can get some wood for a nari, like ours.’
‘Oh, please – don’t worry about me. I’ll be very comfortable just as it is.’ He smiled a little sardonically. ‘I beg your pardon for this intrusion. Your privacy –’
I could see that my parents and my grandmother were as impressed as I was at his language and his accent: this was no illiterate.
Using his stick dexterously, he hobbled off to his corner on his one leg. There, he stretched out on the floor with his head on his bundle and said that he would rest.
It was an awkward moment. It was still early; what were we to do now? Just sit and watch this stranger rest?
‘Please,’ he said with his eyes closed, ‘the child can sing and play and do anything she likes. When I am tired, I sleep and when I sleep, I sleep the sleep of the dead.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
And I meant it. Living with a bum was going to be more agreeable than living with our former landladies, who were forever hushing me and the little boy.
The transformation from village bum to Ivan Petrovich did not take place overnight – either in my mind or in reality. At first he remained a shadowy figure from the dark world of the homeless, the friendless, the outcast. He left very early each morning and when he came home at night, he went directly to his corner – not that there was anywhere else to go. He talked very little, munched on bits of food he had picked up, and went to sleep. But before he ate, he always offered me anything he had brought – a fresh carrot, perhaps, or a beet. My parents always offered food in return, but he always refused. I, on the other hand, used to accept a bit of carrot or beet because I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Recently, Mother had amended her view of the etiquette for accepting precious food: when some was offered, you took a tiny bit if you thought they did not have enough, but that you took; it was only polite to do so.
After a few weeks had gone by, the transformation began: he started to eat with us, sharing whatever he had brought. If we cooked potatoes, we added his carrot to it and called it a vegetable stew. If it was a white beet, we boiled it until we could spread it on bread instead of jam.
Then he began to talk. Ivan Petrovich was a shoemaker from the Ukraine, a man who knew his craft and who had read many books. But once he had talked too much or too carelessly or had been misunderstood. He never did know why he had been sent to prison in Siberia; such a piece of information had been considered superfluous. And when he had been released, he had only one leg left and made his way from village to village begging.
Soon he began to wash himself, which pleased us more than it is polite to say. And to comb his beard. And to carry himself with dignity. He became Ivan Petrovich – for the time being at least.
When he first came to our house, we were the object of much curiosity: What is it like to have a bum in your house? Does he steal? How do you talk to a bum? How does he talk to you? Doesn’t it make you shudder?
But as Ivan Petrovich came to regard himself differently, so did the villagers: he became much less a bum and much more just another human being cast off on the great Siberian steppe.
One day he disappeared. He left as usual early one morning and that was the last that any of us ever saw of Ivan Petrovich, formerly known as Vanya the bum.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The second summer in Siberia was hot and dry, scorching the potato patch to fruitlessness. We tried to save the little patch of corn and tomatoes next to our hut with water lugged all the way from the river. We prayed for rain, but that was a summer of severe drought.
It was also a summer of typhus. Father managed to get fly paper which he hung about our hut and which we were always ducking; every drop of water we used was boiled. I knew that people were dying by droves. I was terrified.
And it was also the summer I saw Deanna Durbin in 100 Men and a Girl four times at the village cinema. In the annals of film fanatics, this would not rate me a mention, but in order to get the sixteen roubles needed our menu became more austere than ever. Whatever my parents thought of my self-indulgence, they never said a word; once again they must have realized how great this other hunger was.
That summer, Deanna Durbin was our super-heroine. Svetlana and the other girls and I talked about her by the hour. We sang her songs and we talked about her smile, her walk, her hair-do. But mainly we talked about her clothes; when the war was over, we would all dress like Deanna Durbin. How this was to be accomplished in Rubtsovsk was no concern of ours; true, there had been a scarcity of clothing even before the war, but … We dreamed on and on and sang Miss Durbin’s songs, and when at last we tired of those, Svetlana, who played the balalaika and had a lovely voice, sang Russian songs. Soon I learned them too, and she and I would harmonize for hours on end.
On Sundays, throughout the year, whenever the weather permitted – and sometimes when it didn’t – all of us children had an odd duty to perform. We gathered at a construction job – it didn’t seem to matter which one – and hauled bricks back and forth in wheelbarrows, dumping them down and picking them up. The practical reason was obscure. As far as we could make out, this activity was an exercise in patriotism – we were doing our bit for the war effort.
During the summer, we children also helped out at the nearby collective farms, weeding potato patches and cornfields and doing other odd jobs. Part of every week was spent this way. The sun blazed down on us, the work was hard, we all complained, and we all rather enjoyed it too. We were together.
September came and there was momentary relief from extreme heat and extreme cold; there was only the wind to contend with. We dug our potato patch and our harvest was frightfully poor. There were just a few pails of small green potatoes. Our corn was good, but sparse. And the tomatoes we had eaten during the summer. The long winter ahead was going to be a very hungry one and we did not discuss the matter of survival. We prayed.
One day the postman came to our house. In those days in Rubtsovsk, his sack would not be a heavy one; what with the war, the huge displacement of people with their whereabouts a mystery, and the remoteness of the village, no one received much mail. As the postman walked the village in his nondescript uniform, whenever he stopped at a hut, the people who inhabited it became objects of curiosity: Who had received a letter? from whom? about what?
As for us, we had received exactly one letter since we had come to Siberia. This was from my Uncle Ben in America, to whom my mother had written on the off-chance that somehow, sometime, it would reach him. His letter had been short and kind and he had enclosed a fifty-dollar bill, which Father exchanged at the local bank for two hundred and fifty roubles. But this money could not be used at the state stores
. The only place it could be used was on the free market, where these two hundred and fifty roubles bought us only one quarter-pound of butter, two pails of potatoes, and a sack of flour. Mother thanked my uncle and told him please not to send us any more money as it was practically worthless here, whereas she knew that in America fifty dollars could still go a long way.
This second letter was addressed to Father and was in a long white envelope. I examined it closely, as if it were something from another civilization. I felt an ill wind blow through the hut.
My anxiety, and my curiosity too, increased as I waited for Father to come home and open his letter; in fact, I came close to opening it myself once or twice.
‘A letter for me?’ Father too reacted with astonishment.
He opened it and took out a long piece of paper. I watched his face as he read: it had gone white and once again he looked the way he had the morning we were deported – old and defeated.
‘What is it, Tata, what is it?’ I cried out, terrified.
Still reading and rereading the letter, Father sat down on his bed.
He could not bear to tell me what was in the letter and with a futile effort at reassuring me, he murmured absurd phrases … it’s nothing, nothing … everything will be all right …
I finally extracted the terrible truth: Father was ordered to go near the front lines to work in a labour brigade. Front lines! Suddenly, this most gigantic of all wars with its bombings and battles and wounded and dead, this war that, in spite of our exile – or because of it – had until this moment seemed unreal, was now at our doorstep. True, even in Rubtsovsk, even I had heard of the ferocious battle that was going on between the Russian and the German armies with the Germans pushing the Russians back to the Volga. But we saw no newspapers, seldom heard the radio. And now the war had exploded right here in this hut.
‘Lalinka!’ Father put his hand out towards me.
The Endless Steppe Page 11
