The Endless Steppe

by Esther Hautzig

  ‘Too thin for what?’ I asked. ‘You can see the print clearly enough. And it is a wonderful book, The Rain, by Turgenev. If you have never read it, you will surely enjoy it.’

  ‘Don’t tell me, child, that you think I will read this book?’

  ‘Why else are you buying it?’

  He threw his head back and laughed as if I had told him the best joke he had heard in years.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I was annoyed. ‘Books are for reading!’ I wanted to add ‘you idiot’.

  ‘Oh, no, my child, not always. This one is for smoking.’

  ‘For smoking?’

  He looked at me slyly. ‘But no, this one will not do. The pages are too thin for rolling cigarettes. They won’t hold the tobacco.’

  ‘Good!’ I cried, close to tears. And I yanked the book from him.

  ‘Not so fast, child. How much did you say this book was?’

  I doubled the original price.

  The old man became furious and started shouting at me.

  ‘But you said it was too thin,’ I shouted back, hugging the book to me.

  The old man spat on the ground and went away complaining about me to the heavens.

  And I went home as fast as I could, still clutching the book.

  ‘My God,’ Mother said, when I told her what had happened. ‘Now we’ve come down to smoking books. First it was wrapping paper, then newspapers – now books. I hope the war ends before the people smoke up their libraries.’

  That idea was too terrible to contemplate. Books were sacred to me. For people to smoke them, page by page, chapter by chapter, was cannibalistic.

  If books had become more and more sacred to me, it was no doubt because their high priestess was Anna Semyonovna. Anna Semyonovna taught us Russian literature, taught it with a passion and a knowledge of her subject that would have been extraordinary in any place. She had been a professor of comparative literature at Moscow University and she did not regard the students of the seventh grade in a small Siberian school as being unworthy of her attention. On the contrary, she taught us as if she had got hold of us at the optimum moment for conversion.

  She was very old and looked so aristocratic that I imagined her to be the mysterious survivor of one of the former feudal estates. Beautiful soft white hair, startlingly blue eyes, and skin of delicate perfection endowed her with a romantic past in my romantic eyes.

  I topped myself in her classes and we became friends. Many times she seemed to be addressing herself to me, as if she understood that I had a special need. Perhaps I was right, perhaps she too had been sent into exile. It was in her classes that I finally mastered the Russian language and was able to read it with great ease and to write it too.

  There was a price to pay for this proficiency. Anna Semyonovna singled me out to do a paper that I felt was way over my head and made me wonder whether she really was my friend. We were reading Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter and my assignment was to compare the historical facts about the bandit Pugachev with Pushkin’s version of him. This meant doing research and some original thinking.

  ‘Who does she think I am?’ I complained to Mother. ‘One of her students at the university?’

  ‘Why not? You come from a long line of scholars, don’t you? You’re supposed to be a good student.’

  ‘Oh, Mama –’

  But I saw that though Mother was excessively stingy with compliments, her eyes sparkled with pride.

  I spent weeks at the library doing research and during that time the announcement was made that we were to have a students’ newspaper. Since there was no printing press, we were to have a wall newspaper. That is, the contributors would write legibly, the articles would be pasted on to a board which would be hung up in the central hall, and the students would line up to read it. The editor was to be elected by the student body.

  I decided to run for this office.

  ‘You? Editor of a Russian paper?’ Mother asked, incredulous. ‘Three years ago you could hardly speak one word of Russian.’

  ‘Three years is a long time, Mama.’

  ‘As if I don’t know. It’s an eternity.’ She shuddered. ‘And how many more will there be?’

  At that moment, I didn’t care. I wanted to be the editor of that paper. But my reason, my secret reason, part of an elaborate plan, was not journalistic; it was romantic.

  His name was Yuri.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  A young girl’s heart is indestructible. Perpetually hungry and cold, in the land of exile, I fell in love for the first time.

  Everything about Yuri was attractive. He had curly black hair, grey eyes, and a gentle face. He was an upper-classman, and the girl he was always seen with – going to the cinema, walking together in the village – was the daughter of the head of the factory and the belle of the school. She had an easy smile, sparkling eyes, and the most luxurious green quilted fufaika, which we all coveted. She had beautiful sapogy. She had Yuri. That girl had everything.

  Mostly it was in the corridors that I saw Yuri and, at every possible pretext, I dawdled there in the hope of seeing him. And of being seen. But he never saw me at all. He didn’t know I existed and it was to alter that condition that I longed to win the post of editor.

  It was simple. I reasoned that if I were the editor, by some natural law of life Yuri would be a contributor and we would have to be in each other’s company.

  I finished the paper on Pugachev and to my pride but also distress Anna Semyonovna was so pleased with it that she read it to the upper-classmen as a model of what a paper should be like. As it was close to the time when we were going to vote for the editor and I was in the midst of my campaign for that post, the last thing I wanted was for anyone to be jealous of me. I wanted votes.

  And I got them. I became the editor of the school paper. I didn’t exactly win by a landslide. But all things considered, it was a sweet victory, particularly for Grandmother and Mother, who took it as proof that you can’t keep a good family down.

  Working on the paper turned out to be a pleasure. I enjoyed picking and choosing the articles, and I spent hours with Anna Semyonovna, who was faculty adviser for the paper.

  But as for the editorship attracting the attention of Yuri, that was a total failure. Too late, I found out that Yuri had no literary aspirations whatsoever; his interests were purely scientific – maths, physics, and chemistry.

  Not that I regretted being the editor, but it did leave me less time for my new scheme, a rather shameless one.

  I suddenly was overcome with a desire to improve my poor work in maths. Special tutoring was what I needed, I told the principal, who couldn’t deny it. Moreover, I knew just the teacher who could help me best, if she was available – a gentle woman from European Russia named Irena Maximovna. She was available and she would be happy to tutor such an ambitious young girl in exchange for my knitting her a sweater with wool she had brought with her.

  So, three times a week I went home from school first, combed my hair, did everything I could to make myself more attractive, and took a long, cold, dark walk to Irena Maximovna’s house, which, it just happened, was close to Yuri’s house.

  I never saw him there, and I began to seek assistance from fortune-telling cards. Natasha and Nikolay lived by them. Every night, they determined their future from the cards. Money, weather, health – the cards had the answers. At first, I looked down on this as amusing nonsense. But soon I decided that when it came to love, I was in no position to feel superior. Natasha taught me how, and the nights before I was due at Irena Maximovna’s I too read the cards: would I meet my love the next day, would I not? If the answer was no, my desire to improve myself in maths reached a low point, so low that I sometimes missed my lesson. But if the answer was yes, there was a great to-do about pressing my one and only skirt, freshening my blouse, and combing my hair.

  Sometimes the cards were wrong, but often they were right. The law of averages, Father would have said. What did I care about such a
law? Would it get me the attention of Yuri? No, my faith was in the cards. One day – one day, the cards promised it would happen.

  In the meantime, while I was running after Yuri, another boy was running after me. His name was Shurik. He played the guitar beautifully, sang well, and brought me an occasional glass of sunflower seeds. He whittled knitting needles for me out of strips of wood, and with them and bits of wool I had picked up here and there, and saved from my knitting jobs, I made myself a pair of odd socks, all colours of the rainbow. He invited me to walk with him and his friends; he even invited me to the cinema. Sometimes I went and sometimes I would refuse – for no better reason, I imagine, than that Shurik was not Yuri. Shurik and I were friends; that was all.

  One day I was told to announce in the paper that there was to be a masquerade party at school.

  ‘A masquerade party? In Siberia?’ Mother was incredulous. ‘And what pray tell are you going to go as? A snowman perhaps?’

  ‘Oh, Mama!’

  At the word party, Grandmother’s worn, sad face had taken on a soft glow, bathed by memory. ‘So it won’t be a Venetian ball. Our Esther will make something or she will find something –’

  But for me it was to be a Venetian ball. What first real party isn’t? I was as excited as any girl would be, in any part of the world. However, in the midst of the excitement I began to worry in earnest about what I would wear.

  Then I got my brilliant idea. Notices had been posted outside the cinema that a troupe of actors from a repertory company was coming. They would be doing Chekhov. I would go backstage and I would ask – very politely – to borrow a costume.

  Day after day, I walked home from school never minding the cold and the wind as I daydreamed about a billowing white gown. I was not familiar with Chekhov’s plays, but surely the great Chekhov, who knew all about the human heart, would not have neglected to have a character who wore a beautiful, billowing gown? And it had to be white. And a diamond tiara would sparkle on my head. (Mother had scoffingly said snowman; how amazed she would be to see her daughter dressed as the Snow Queen.) And of course the Snow Queen’s escort would be the handsomest boy in school, Yuri.

  A few days of this daydreaming and I became convinced that the gown existed and that all that was needed was for me to pick it up at the theatre at my convenience.

  And so with complete assurance – and a blue-red frozen nose – I presented myself backstage at the theatre. A wizened little woman with beady eyes and pursed lips – not at all what I thought a member of a troupe would look like – wanted to know what I was doing backstage.

  I no longer felt quite so assured. ‘I wonder – I thought – could I possibly borrow a costume to wear to a masquerade party at school?’

  The woman burst out laughing.

  ‘I should say not! One of our precious costumes? Who in God’s name do you think you are? What a strange, strange thing to ask for.’

  On the verge of tears, I wanted to say, But haven’t you found out, lady, that when everything is strange, nothing in particular is? How is it you haven’t found that out, here in Siberia?

  I went home completely dejected. I had absolutely nothing to wear, and nothing to make anything out of, either.

  ‘Mama, they wouldn’t lend me a costume at the theatre.’

  ‘The theatre? You actually went there and asked for a costume?’

  ‘Why not? I would have taken good care of it. And I asked very politely, too.’

  Mother shook her head, in a way that I secretly thought of as her Siberian head-shaking way – all disbelief. ‘To think what a shy child you once were –’

  I didn’t answer; but I knew that I was still shy – in some ways, more so.

  I stretched out on my little bed with my feet up on the wall and concluded that life was a miserable affair and that I was the most miserable member of it.

  ‘Why don’t you see if Anya has something you could wear?’ Mother suggested.

  ‘Anya? What would she have?’

  ‘With Anya one never knows. Run over there and see. After all, she was the prettiest and most popular girl in Vilna –’

  ‘So naturally when they banged on her door, she packed a beautiful ball gown with me in mind. Honestly, Mama!’

  But I went to Anya’s. Not that evening, nor the next. It wasn’t that easy to part company with the Snow Queen. Nor with Yuri, who surely would not notice me in some old rag of Anya’s.

  After I had rather dispiritedly accepted Shurik as my escort, I went to Anya’s. To my surprise, although she had not brought one of her ball gowns, she had brought a flimsy blue georgette with great billowing sleeves, the sort of thing she wore tea dancing in Vilna. Where had she expected to wear this in Siberia? I wondered.

  As she shook out the rumpled dress and held it up to me, I looked at her. Poor Anya, Siberia had not been kind to her, either. Young as she was, working on construction jobs, going hungry – probably starving as much for her gay life as for food – she was beginning to look like an ageing actress, a has-been.

  I took the dress home and also shoes that Anya insisted I wear instead of my thick-soled ones. ‘You simply cannot dance in rubber-soled shoes,’ Anya had said. But how was I going to dance in shoes at least two sizes too large for me?

  I tried the dress on and it collapsed around me like a parachute come to earth; in fact, I looked as if I had made an unscheduled flight and been left dangling in a tree.

  ‘Oh, Lord –’ I wailed; to have come to this from the Snow Queen was more than I could take.

  Natasha and Mother circled me, trying to figure out what could be done to make the dress wearable for me without ruining it for Anya. The solution would be to baste me into it the night of the party: the collar, which came down to my navel, would be drawn into a ruff and the waist would be pulled in. And what would I be going as? I wanted to know rather belatedly.

  ‘As something you’re not,’ Mother said. Then she added, ‘In Siberia, you’re always in masquerade –’

  The night of the party, Shurik said he would pick me up at six o’clock.

  ‘But Shurik, the party doesn’t begin until eight. What will we do from six to eight? It’s only one hour’s walk to school.’

  ‘We will walk slowly. And we will talk.’

  And I will turn into an icicle in my flimsy dress and my thin coat, I thought to myself.

  That particular night, the steppe was enchanted. A white moon had traced a pattern over the snow with millions and millions of brilliants.

  Shurik took my hand. I slipped out of its grasp. He put his arm around me. I stepped aside.

  When we arrived at school, the party was just beginning. I was trembling from the cold and from excitement too. Would Yuri ask me to dance with him?

  No, this masquerade was not a Venetian ball. The costumes were less than glamorous. Here and there, someone wore a grandmother’s old peasant costume or a jacket from World War I; some of the girls of the factory élite had been sewn into old crepe dresses.

  But the belle of the ball was ravishing.

  She was dancing in Yuri’s arms, and she wore a beautiful red gown with fitted bodice and full sleeves and there were many petticoats under the skirt.

  As she danced by, she left a hush of whispers in her wake.

  ‘Where did she get it?’

  ‘Where did she get it!’

  ‘Well, where?’

  ‘Didn’t you see the production of Chekhov’s Cherry Orchard last week? Don’t you remember this dress?’

  I stumbled in Anya’s shoes.

  So! When a little deportee makes a request it’s strange, is it? But when the daughter of the head of the factory makes the identical one, it’s a command – isn’t it? All slogans to the contrary.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  That spring, the cattle cars came again, in an endless stream; this time, it was German prisoners of war they brought. All the goose-stepping arrogance was gone, beaten out of them; they were a bedraggled lot, hungry and
sick. But to us, they remained monsters and we loathed them, all of us – deportees, European Russian, Siberyaki. All of us with reason; the stories of their atrocities were well known by then.

  They were jammed into the same barracks we had lived in when we first came to Siberia, but very quickly new barracks had to be thrown together for the thousands and thousands who continued to come. Dysentery, cholera, and God knows what else killed them off like flies – and, as if they were flies, we didn’t care. We had no pity.

  Mostly, they were put to work digging ditches that were to be used for laying pipes to bring tap water closer to the huts, and for sanitary purposes too.

  Each morning and each evening they were marched through the village in single file. And as they marched, every variety of hate was hurled at them, so that the air itself seemed charged with it. Rubbish was thrown at them. Children screamed hysterically and threw stones at them. One little boy threw a stone that opened a deep gash in a German’s face and a cheer went up. But all the time, the little boy was screaming, ‘You killed my father,’ over and over again. Almost without exception, the children of that village had lost either a father, an uncle, a brother, a cousin; sometimes, there were none left, no male relatives at all.

  There were people who hid from these German prisoners, as if they were afraid that they were still capable of bestiality, as if it had not been beaten out of them thoroughly enough.

  Some stood mute with their hate, their fists clenched with it. Grandmother, Mother, and I were among those. Silently, always silently, we wondered whether walking past us were men who had occupied Vilna, who had very likely plundered it, our beautiful city, who had possibly – The sentence would be unfinished; the silence from our family was a void filled with terror.

  After they had passed, only then would I spit on the ground they had walked, only then did I have the courage to spit, and then I would also join those who hurled curses after them.

  The prisoners shuffled along with their eyes on the ground, never once looking at any of us, never once showing that they felt the hate. They were treated badly – starved, totally enslaved.