The Endless Steppe

by Esther Hautzig

  ‘But it did!’ I cried out. ‘It did! The thirty roubles – they’re gone –’

  I had a rather spectacular fit of hysterics, weeping and gasping for breath.

  The two women stood absolutely still for a minute or two, trying to absorb this latest misfortune.

  The next thing I knew I was in Mother’s arms and she was stroking my hair. ‘Oh, my darling, we have lost so much more in our lives than this thirty-rouble note. You must stop your crying and your shivering. Everything will be all right.’

  Grandmother had gone to the pot of very watery soup that was our supper for that night.

  ‘A nice cup of soup, Esther …’

  ‘No, no. I can’t eat. Now or ever. There will be nothing to eat for the rest of this month …’

  I was on the verge of starting my hysterics all over again.

  And Mother started talking – to me, to Grandmother and to herself I am sure. Standing in for Father, she was assuring us that everything was going to be all right: we would not starve, we had friends, didn’t we? (Grandmother and I nodded, although we knew that for Mother to ask anyone for a crust of bread was unthinkable.) We would find something to sell.

  She stopped talking.

  Selling food one got at the state store on the free market was illegal and punishable to an uncomfortable degree, rumour had it. When she picked up the piece of bread we had left, I knew what was going through her mind.

  ‘I’ll do it, Mama.’

  ‘No, not you –’

  We argued back and forth and, frightened to death about it as she was, and indeed as I was too, it was settled that I would try to sell the bread the next day.

  ‘Before Tata left, he told us we were strong women and that we would get on well without him,’ Mother said. ‘And so we will.’ She put her hand on my head. ‘But you will be very careful, Esther, won’t you?’

  The next day after school I went to the free market with our piece of bread. I carried it under my coat, as surreptitiously as the old women with the bread they wished to have blessed. I was becoming skilled in the ways of deception and no one caught me. I sold the piece of bread for twenty roubles, which reduced our loss to ten roubles.

  Whether inspired by Mother’s including me among the strong women who would get on well, or frightened by the prospect of starvation, that was the day that I decided that somehow or other I too must earn some roubles.

  After supper, I waited for Grandmother to finish pushing back her cuticles – a process I thought would never end – and lie down on the mattress of straw, which even her tiny frail body had begun to make a bed of lumps. When I heard the pathetic little wheezes that accompanied her troubled sleep, I signalled to Mother that I wanted to talk to her. As I talked of my intention to become a breadwinner, I watched Mother’s still beautiful but ravaged face for praise that surely was due me for being such an enterprising person. But Mother’s face remained strangely opaque.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, considerably deflated.

  Then, as if she were pleading my case before some unearthly court, she murmured: ‘She is only twelve years old, she helps keep house like a little old woman, she studies like a Talmudic scholar, she carries bricks back and forth –’ She caught her breath. ‘No. Enough is already too much. Esther, there is nothing more you can do that I will permit you to do. Just do well at school, that’s all I ask. The way things are, you will need every drop of education you can get. For the rest – you leave the roubles to me.’

  ‘But, Mama –’

  ‘Esther! Please not tonight. Tonight I don’t have the strength for your “buts”.’

  ‘But I can knit and I can embroider, can’t I? You and Miss Rachel taught me how, didn’t you?’

  Mother’s lips twisted. ‘But of course. All the gentle arts –’

  ‘Well, I will use them right here to make some money.’

  Mother was absolutely certain that rough as life was, every single woman in Rubtsovsk knew how to knit just as well as I did.

  ‘But we can ask around, can’t we? You ask your friends and I’ll ask my friends. We’ll spread the word.’

  For me, spreading the word meant that I had to admit to my friends that I needed work badly, that we really did not have enough food to see us through the winter. As my hunger grew, my pride shrank and so did my price – although I apparently still kept my head up as high as I could get it. I reduced it from ‘some’ roubles to a little bit of milk or a cup of flour or some potatoes. Still there were no customers. Mother was right; everyone in Rubtsovsk did know how to knit and didn’t need me.

  I had given up all hope when a young woman came to our hut late one afternoon. She had some old white wool: would I knit a sweater for her little girl?

  Would I? Presented at last with a real live customer, I was so flustered that I could barely talk.

  ‘Don’t you know how to knit?’ I asked the lady, more incredulous than businesslike.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Then –?’

  She held out her right arm and to my horror I saw that most of her hand was gone. I looked away quickly. Mother, who thought of everything, had not thought of this.

  The woman showed me the wool – barely enough for a sweater for a midget – and said the sweater was to be a surprise for her little girl, who was not well.

  ‘I cannot pay you much –’

  A dreadful thought buzzed around me: Ought I to take anything at all from a poor crippled woman?

  ‘– but I have a cow. Would one litre of milk and maybe a pail of potatoes be enough?’

  Milk? And potatoes? The buzzing stopped. I was thrilled.

  ‘Could you possibly have it ready for the New Year?’

  Oh, yes, I assured the lady, although how this was to be done with everything else I had to do, I did not know.

  ‘My little girl will be so happy,’ the lady said.

  That makes two little girls, I thought.

  Mother was amazed and, it turned out, delighted. She showed me how to start the sweater, but I had to rip it out a million times before I really got going. I worked on it whenever I had a spare minute and far into every night. The light in our hut was very poor. We had one small kerosene lamp and were so short of kerosene that we kept the wick down as low as possible. Moreover, the lamp had to rest on the one and only table, which was not close enough to the stove to keep my fingers warm. In order for them to be nimble enough to knit, I had constantly to jump up to warm them at the stove. But at last the sweater was finished and neatly pressed with an iron borrowed from Anya, who had surely gone hungry to acquire one.

  My customer greeted me warmly and said I must meet her little girl. Having been told only that her child was ‘not well’, I was not prepared for the pinched and white-faced little creature who sat up in bed to stare at me in a most peculiar way, with her little eyes squinting and her head twisting this way and that.

  After a few stilted words – the little girl spoke in a wee little voice – the mother ushered me out. ‘My little girl is going blind and there’s nothing we can do about it. I am glad you did such a good job on the sweater. Whenever she wears it, it will make her happy.’

  She gave me the milk and potatoes and I walked home filled with pride.

  That night, as we feasted on the milk and potatoes, I saw a bright future with customers lining up in front of our hut to offer me work.

  ‘She is her father’s daughter, always the optimist,’ Mother said, shaking her head.

  ‘And a good thing it is,’ Grandmother retorted. ‘If she had not been such an optimist, would we be drinking this milk and eating these potatoes?’

  Mother did not answer, but I could tell that she was wondering how many crippled women there could be in one little village.

  Indeed, it was a long time before I saw another customer, and since the nights had become too cold for stealing, fuel had become a most serious problem.

  Mother and I kept staring at the few sticks of woo
d that were left as if we thought that our eyes would bewitch them into multiplying.

  ‘What are we going to do, Mama?’

  For a long time, she didn’t answer. Then she jumped up and studied the logs covering our cellar.

  ‘These are longer than they need be. We’ll saw off the ends, that’s what we’ll do.’

  ‘But we’re not strong enough –’

  ‘Of course we are. All we need is a saw.’

  I started to giggle.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘I don’t know. Sawing up your house to heat it seems funny to me.’

  Mother began to laugh too.

  ‘Tata would think we were crazy,’ I said.

  ‘No, he wouldn’t. He would be proud …’

  I borrowed a saw from Svetlana, whose house seemed not only like a horn of plenty but a bazaar compared to ours.

  Huffing and puffing and unimaginably awkward, Mother and I went to work with the saw. Watching us, Grandmother let out little shrieks: ‘Watch your foot!’ ‘Your hand!’ ‘Oh, my God!’ ‘Stop! It’s better to freeze to death than –’

  It was a great deal of work and the return was barely enough to warm the hut for a week.

  Mother stretched out on her bed, her body heavy with aching muscles and depressed spirits. ‘Perhaps – perhaps we should ask Uncle Yozia if he knows where we can get some wood,’ she said.

  Uncle Yozia and his wife, Zaya, were new friends whom mother had met at the baracholka. He was an engineer and she was a piano teacher and they had come to Siberia from Kharkov when the tractor factory was built a year or two earlier. I fell in love with them at first sight.

  Uncle Yozia had the most beautiful hands I have ever seen on a man. In our family, where the snobbism was to have been a scholar or a poet, I had watched adult eyes travel instinctively to a man’s hands. That a scoundrel might also have the hands of an artist simply didn’t occur to me. But whatever sensibilities those hands bespoke was more than confirmed in his funny gentle face, a face that reflected serenity, along with a half smile – enhanced by a slight cast in one eye – that gave him the air of a man with a joke tucked up his sleeve.

  And Zaya. Zaya’s round, cheerful face with sparkling green eyes was a magic lantern that transformed a dark smelly hut into a sunlit place.

  Yes, I loved them very much.

  That they had so warmly befriended some Polish deportees said something else about them too. For Yozia and Zaya, although they were Jews, belonged to another social set in the village. There were ‘crowds’, groups of people who associated only with each other and rarely mingled with anyone else. Having come with the tractor factory from European Russia, they belonged to the élite. They lived in one of the ‘beautiful’ white houses where they had a two-room apartment and a bathroom!

  There was much that they offered us, that they would have been more than happy to give us – some food, a real bath – but Mother always politely refused. Fenced in by her pride, Mother was a difficult woman to help. ‘Why?’ I would ask, angry and bewildered, when she would refuse a gift of a luscious piece of meat for instance.

  ‘We do not want our friendship to be a burden to them.’

  But, I thought, if you are supposed to be generous, who are you supposed to be generous to? Only those who don’t need it? It was very confusing.

  There was only one thing that Mother had not been able to resist: Zaya, who had given up trying to share anything with Mother, had dropped a cake of soap on our table with feigned casualness just as she was about to leave. Mother’s reaction was instantaneous and extreme: she grabbed the soap as if it were going to change the course of our life and her eyes glistened with tears as she clutched it to her bosom. ‘Soap!’

  Uncle Yozia threw his head back and laughed. ‘It’s as they say, there is no tyrant like a woman whose enemy is a speck of dirt.’

  ‘You can laugh,’ Mother said, beginning to laugh herself, ‘but after a nice bath and fresh clothes, one can face anything better – even the gallows.’

  With Mother restricting its use as if she were a miser, that evening she, Grandmother, and I felt the first soapy water touch our skin since that June morning ages ago! Soap had it all over clay and pumice too. We carried on and cooed with delight.

  However, that cake of soap was the only thing Mother had accepted from Zaya and Uncle Yozia. When she considered asking Uncle Yozia about wood (about, not for), admitting that we were in great need, I knew she was desperate.

  ‘And shouldn’t we ask him to tell his friends about my knitting?’ I asked, trying to take advantage of Mother’s weak moment.

  ‘No!’ she said sharply. ‘He wouldn’t like it. He thinks you do too much already. He’s worried about you. He doesn’t think you look well. I don’t want to tell him you would take in knitting. That would make him feel sorry for us. We do not want their pity, Esther. Only their friendship –’

  ‘But, Mama –’

  ‘God in heaven, what “but” have we got now?’

  ‘But, Mama – asking for work is not asking for pity. You said so yourself, your very own self. Isn’t work something to be proud of?’

  ‘You and your “but”.’ Mother smiled. ‘Only this time, you happen to be right. But –’

  I laughed. ‘Mama, you have some “buts” too.’

  ‘But let’s wait,’ Mother said, a little sheepishly. ‘Let’s not ask Uncle Yozia about the knitting for a few days. Let’s – let’s – Esther, what about that handsome lady we see around the village –’

  ‘The one you say looks like Anna Karenina?’

  ‘Yes. What about telling her that you knit?’

  I looked at Mother in utter amazement.

  ‘But, Mother – she’s a complete stranger! I don’t understand you …’

  Mother was silent.

  Then, ‘I don’t understand myself. Only – I think it’s precisely because she is a stranger, a complete stranger, living in a strange world …’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  We learned that her name was Marya Nikolayevna, that she had escaped from the German invasion of Leningrad, and that her husband was a high officer in the army. (The baracholka had become our newspaper, giving us the latest news from the front and tidbits of gossip.)

  On a wintry Sunday, with the huge sky heavy with clouds warning that once again a storm was on the way, the people on the baracholka were trading with the special desperation an impending storm always bred. And yet, storm or no storm, all heads turned as Marya Nikolayevna made her appearance. Wearing a sealskin coat and diamond earrings, she strolled around the baracholka like royalty visiting a charity bazaar.

  That day I had gone to the baracholka for the sole purpose of talking to Marya Nikolayevna. I had nothing to sell and no roubles to spend. It was to be my third and last attempt to open my mouth in this lady’s presence. That day I looked up at the clouds, thought of the storm to come, our bare larder, and our short supply of wood, and said to myself that it was now or never: today, I would ask this lady if I could do some knitting for her.

  I pushed my way through the shivering, shabbily dressed crowd to the lady in the sealskin coat. Close up, she was even more beautiful than I had thought. Her skin had remained fair and incredibly luminous, as if even the ferocious climate, so cruel to other women, had been subdued by this royal creature.

  Hoping it would take forever, I stood aside and waited for her to finish her inspection of a beaten-up teapot. (What, I wondered, did this great lady want with such an object? I had forgotten for a second that in Siberia all sorts of things were in short supply, even for the very rich.) When Marya Nikolayevna concluded that this pot was not for her, after turning it every which way, I forced myself to go up to her.

  ‘My name is Esther Rudomin –’ I began, my name sounding unfamiliar to me.

  The icy wind that was blowing up didn’t help; as I stood there shivering in my skimpy threadbare little coat, lifting my face to talk to the lady who was pulling her sea
l coat closer around her, it blew my words away so that I ended up having to shout that I was looking for work. But this wind carried Marya Nikolayevna’s words down to me without any effort on her part at all: ‘And what kind of wool do you have, my dear?’ I told her I had absolutely none. ‘Then,’ she said, laughingly, ‘I suggest you get some. If you can in this godforsaken place –’ And, with an airy wave of her gloved hand in the direction of the top of my head, she walked away.

  So that, I thought, was that. All that courage, all that loss of pride for nothing.

  That same blasted wind blew the smell of roasting sunflower seeds my way and, feeling the need to torture myself further, I ambled towards it.

  ‘Little girl, little girl –’

  I turned and saw Marya Nikolayevna holding something reddish in her hand.

  ‘Can you make a sweater out of this, little girl?’

  Almost in a trance, I went closer and saw that the object she was holding up was a filthy, old, badly torn machine-knitted skirt. If it had been chain mail, I would have said yes.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Marya Nikolayevna sounded somewhat sharp.

  ‘Absolutely.’ In this case, desperation was the mother of conviction.

  ‘And we can settle the price now?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘You do not have to consult your mother?’

  ‘Certainly not.’ I lifted my quivering chin.

  ‘So! Let me see –’ By now educated in the ways of the baracholka, I detected the gleam of the sly and compulsive bargainer and I waited apprehensively. ‘Let me see – I will pay with a bag of flour, a pail of good potatoes, and, since I just today bought a cow, I will also pay with several litres of milk.’ She smiled as if her generosity were an adorable weakness.

  It had been shrewd of this lady to fix this niggardly price with a child. Mother would have taken the measure of the coat, the earrings, and the new cow and driven a hard bargain with the rich lady of the village. As for me, though I reasoned that with such riches this lady was truly a millionaire, my pride kept me from bargaining.

  Not that Mother wasn’t still proud too, but it was a pride that was being battered, eroded – and changed – by the years in Siberia. Her pride would not permit her to ask for help from Uncle Yozia, but it did not stop her from bargaining with the best of them on the baracholka.