So they went and of course when they got there, all the grand flats and magnificent houses had been taken by high-up party officials. Goodness knows how they got there so quickly, but they came crawling out of their holes and took over the little town of Chernivtsi, so that all that was left for Etya and Shura and their daughter Emma was a flat far from the River Prut with small windows and a view of a blank wall. Etya wasn’t having any of that. She shook her head very firmly and kicked up a huge fuss. She’d had a clear vision of their new flat on the riverbank, and was determined never again to live in such inhumane circumstances as she’d known during the war, with no medicine for the baby, and often nowhere to sleep but flat, exposed fields that served as everything at once: dorm, vomit pit, shithouse, changing table.
She rattled off her list of expectations, not stopping until a flat was found in the center of town, with double doors, and windows overlooking a park, and the Prut only a walk away. On the floor above them, the first secretary of the regional committee had a flat with exactly the same layout.
But if Etinka had organized a decent flat for the family, she didn’t often get to see her husband there; he was busy at the hospital, fighting those two postwar classics, goiter and tuberculosis. Shura dreamed of the beautiful high-ceilinged rooms and the leafy view as he dozed off on the bunk in the doctors’ mess. He used the word “home” when he told Etinka about his dreams and she thought, well, maybe that was something.
At about the same time Shura was appointed chair of the regional ministry of health, an office he assumed with the passion and conviction of a zealot, barely losing enthusiasm even after 1953 when the entire party was convinced that he and his like were responsible for the death of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. His colleagues were jailed by the dozen, but Shura remained a staunch believer in socialism to the end. He wasn’t blind; he saw what was going on around him and knew that, had it not been for a sign from the chairman of the KGB office in Moscow that he rated Shura’s work highly—his work, his hypnotic smile, his entire manner (in spite or perhaps because of the patronymic Isaakovich and the surname Farbarjevich, Shura knew how to make himself liked)—had it not been for that sign, he too would have been sharing a cell with his Jewish colleagues, fifteen and sometimes twenty men to a room.
Shura used the word komnata, room, and he described these rooms to me in great detail. The detail had been provided by those colleagues of his who had seen those “rooms” from the inside; he passed on what was passed on to him, and the retellings all resembled one and the same film that everyone would watch years later on Soviet television. I didn’t distrust Shura; I knew he’d never deliberately whitewash a past that had ploughed so many furrows in his face. But I distrusted the flowery language he used because I have a fundamental distrust of my mother tongue, which is improbably better than the world it comes from—more florid and momentous than reality could ever be.
* * *
—
This sign from the party chairman—the sign that preserved Shura from the “rooms”—was something he told me about at length, and the story went like this: Alexander Isaakovich, his wife and his little girl were on two occasions invited to the dacha of a superior party official to stir jam into black tea and nibble at sushki.
Some of you may find this picture a little too reminiscent of the pictures adorning your bargain-basement samovar, but that’s exactly what it was like: a young family in the flower-filled gardens of Chernivtsi, painted in just the same colors, and just the same naive style as a cheap samovar. They dunked their sushki in the sweet black tea, squinted at the American-looking mid-range car that was parked in the vine-covered garage construction—a dark blue Pobeda, a “Victory”—and held sophisticated conversations about Russian literature and the German-Soviet war. They did this twice. After the second occasion, they were given to understand that people like them couldn’t expect to be received in such circles indefinitely—and by “people like them” the powers that be meant nishchie, paupers. However well-read they might be, the young couple couldn’t rely on their knowledge of Russian literature to pull themselves out of poverty. This was conveyed to them with great tact and politeness, but Etina and Shura had acquired a taste for the life and wanted more. They tried every path open to them and each one, without exception, took them by way of the party, in which they believed with pure-hearted faith.
Then came 1953, delo vrachei, the doctors’ plot. It’s hard to credit, but you had to give reasons for firing someone in the Soviet Union—even a Jew. In Shura’s file the reason for dismissal was “insufficiently qualified.” He left—was made to leave. Were his concerns about feeding his family really uppermost in his mind at that time? Who can say. We must remember that his wife wasn’t fired, and that as head of the pediatric tuberculosis clinic, she was senior enough to provide for the entire family—and indeed half the children on her ward. Deep, ineradicable humiliation settled on Shura’s slightly protuberant eyes like a greasy film. By then he’d seen a lot and heard a thing or two—there’d been some wrangling over the zhid*1 Farbarjevich during the war—but Shura had never been deserted by either the state or his party, his real reason, his only reason for believing in a future after the horrors of the war. What good was a future without the party? Where would they go if the party let them down? What good was it Lenin saying: “You must take the path of justice, comrades!” if Shura was left sitting on the street watching the party stride ahead without him? Without Stalin and without him.
A doctor from a nearby hospital offered to share his wages with Shura if he’d relieve him of three-quarters of his work. Before long, the doctor had stopped going to work altogether and was letting the Jew do the lot. This worked out rather well because all Shura wanted was to see patients and talk to people—anything to avoid sitting around at home, waiting for the knock on the door, waiting for someone to come and take him away—him and maybe his wife and maybe his daughter. He knew it could happen at any moment, and then they’d be gone and no one would say anything, because all those who might have said something were already gone. It wasn’t that Shura felt fear, because he didn’t, but he didn’t want to abandon himself to his disgust at the silence on the streets and on the corridors and in the consulting rooms—his disgust at having to be an ant.
* * *
—
In his memoirs, Shura wrote: “I always knew that everything that happened to me was ultimately for the best.” What can you say? A true socialist. And indeed he claims in that slim document that he’d never have made it out of Odessa’s gangster district to become one of the biggest names in the USSR if it hadn’t been for the summer of ’53, when, as he puts it, “I got off scot-free because I’d been fired.”
The summer of ’53 was a real Chernivtsi summer. The asphalt melted and people hardly ventured out—except of course to watch the local soccer team; some things were sacred. To survive the scorching heat, everyone in town ate ice creams on sticks. The ambulance stood ready for action at the stadium gates, snapping up the occasional sunstroke victim. But one ambulance wasn’t enough to cope with what happened in the summer of ’53. The ice creams, at eight kopeks a piece, were eaten by all 746 spectators, and most of them had two or three each. Contrary to regulations, these ice creams had been produced using ducks’ eggs, and those ducks’ eggs were long past their use-by date. And so the whole town fell to puking—or at least that’s what it looked like, and it’s what it smelled like too, for the whole of that long summer and on into the autumn.
Two people died of food poisoning—they were the ones who’d gobbled three ice creams. About a hundred sustained permanent damage—they were probably the ones who’d eaten two. And somehow or other, the ducks’ eggs contrived to leave about ten people crippled for the rest of their lives. Nobody in the city of Chernivtsi (with one exception) touched another ice cream until the next summer.
Among the afflicted was Shura and Etina’s daughter, Emma. She was thi
rteen at the time and not remotely interested in soccer, but she liked going out and mingling with other young people; it was one way of escaping the claustrophobic atmosphere of her tiny room in the communal apartment where her family had been forced to move when her father was suspended. She sustained no permanent damage—just puked for twenty-four hours without stopping and complained of awful headaches for days afterward—a habit she never lost.
Also among the afflicted was Dyadya Iosif, uncle to Emma’s future husband Daniil, who was still in Belz at this time, schlepping sacks of potatoes on his young back to earn money for the family, and especially for his little sister Dora. Iosif soon got over the vomiting—and was the only person in town to go and buy himself another ice cream the very next day.
A culprit had to be found for the match-day hygiene disaster. The whole town had been poisoned; somebody’s head had to roll. Well, all right, it wasn’t the whole town and there were no guillotines in the Soviet Union, but as I said, Russian-speakers tend to hyperbole; they think in hyperbole. It’s no exaggeration, though, to say that the Chernivtsians were looking for a culprit to stand against the wall—one last cigarette and then God help you. A procedural plan was drawn up, stipulating that this culprit had to be chair of the health ministry, a position that Shura had occupied only three months before. But he’d been fired; his head couldn’t roll.
The office was now held by a woman, a certain Inna Vasiliyevna Timosheva who had the reputation of being a zheleznaya, an iron lady. This woman had somehow managed to wangle the job with no medical qualifications or indeed any qualifications at all. Nobody quite knew how she’d done it, but in the same way, she also managed to avoid being shot. She got to sit in one of the “rooms” instead, or maybe she was sent into exile, but the rooms are more likely, though not necessarily the best option—not at this point in history and not afterward either, but still. Shura, at any rate, narrowly escaped death. What a good thing Joseph Vissarionovich was obliging enough to kick the bucket when he did, so that Shura lost his job rather than his head, with those soft purple eyes of his that got darker and darker as time went by.
Shura kept working, calmly and illegally, doing the job of his Ukrainian colleague and looking neither left nor right, but straight ahead into the future promised him by Ulyanov.
* * *
—
Etinka didn’t think much of Ulyanov; she didn’t think much of the dead—whether or not they were embalmed and mummified and lying in state in open coffins. She believed only in the living, and was determined to belong to them. But her will to survive had covered her beautiful face in a shiny coat of wax, and her little patients and hospital colleagues and even sometimes people on the street would stop and salute when they passed her, like people passing Lenin’s mausoleum.
Management of the pediatric tuberculosis sanatorium had been transferred to Etina after the war. Tuberculosis was the top killer in the USSR even before the war, so you can imagine the situation during and after. You could say people were dying like flies, except that they weren’t: unlike flies, they died slowly, spitting blood, the children with big beseeching eyes that Etina tried not to look at. Every day, between five and fifty child patients were admitted, some of them still infants, and Etina cut the tuberculosis out of their bones and lungs herself, as she’d learned in the war, and then nursed them herself. She had a reputation for doing everything in person; there is said not to have been a single child in the two-hundred-and-thirty-bed sanatorium who didn’t pass through her hands. She even tackled the building work more or less single-handedly; she was always having extensions built—“There’s not enough room, anyone can see that. What do you expect me to do with the children—stack them in piles?”
Etina’s capable socialist hands were always clad in turquoise plastic gloves. One day, one of these gloves ripped in the middle of an operation. It was late at night and she noticed the rip and even saw a drop of blood on the left glove, but she was so tired she could hardly stand. She went on operating for as long as she could, then collapsed onto the sofa in the corridor and went to sleep, still wearing her shoes—the red ones with the medium-high heels. (She’d chucked the turquoise surgeon’s gloves.)
She was the first to notice the symptoms. First her voice grew hoarse in the afternoons. Her high, imperious voice, which sounded like a siren’s song when she wanted something and like a cannon shot when she didn’t, grew gradually fainter, like that of a sleepy child. Next, the lymph nodes in her groin and under her arms swelled—and by then she knew. Soon she had all the symptoms—night sweats and shivering fits and fever—and there was no pretending it was mere over-exhaustion.
She had the infected hand put in plaster, hospitalized herself and took charge of her own case, giving the young doctors hoarse, but firm instructions on how to treat her. At the same time, she continued to run the sanatorium from her sickbed.
Shura sat in Etina’s sickroom, watching her talk to three nurses at the same time. One of them was administering drugs that were never approved for use in the West because of their high toxic content; the other two were being given orders to relay to the children’s ward.
Etinka rated her survival chances at ten to one and prescribed herself streptomitsinizoniazidpara-aminosalitsilovaya kislota. You could compare it to going to Chernobyl for a dose of radiotherapy, but that would be jumping the gun—Chernobyl was still in the future; this was the late forties.
Shura sat in his wife’s room and said nothing. When at last everyone had gone out, she said: “What will you do when I’m dead?” She asked him straight out; she wasn’t one to beat about the bush. She was very lucid, still electrified from talking to the nurses; when she put the question to him, her face twitched as if she were plugged into an electric socket.
“Keep going, of course, what else?” she said, answering her own question, because still Shura said nothing. “Stop looking like that. It’s no help to me at all.”
“What would be a help to you?” Shura was sitting over by the opposite wall; he wasn’t allowed to get close to his wife.
“Take Emma to Khava’s and get her hair cut.”
So Shura did. For the first time in his life he took his daughter by the hand and off they went to Khava’s, Emma somewhat taken aback that her father was going anywhere with her at all, let alone to a hairdresser. Khava and her husband Roman had also come to live in Chernivtsi and she ran an improvised beauty salon in their living room. “Fancy seeing you here, Professor Farbarjevich!” she said when she opened the door to the two uncertain faces. “Have you come to have your eyebrows plucked?” Shura was embarrassed. Etina always cut his hair and he’d never let anyone near his eyebrows. He felt that a socialist had no business to be in a place like this; in the chink between the bathroom door and the shower curtain he’d even glimpsed a sliver of naked female leg. He was suddenly reminded of the woman with the Pioneer-red lips who’d sat opposite him in the acting school he’d been so keen to attend. He set his daughter on the barber’s chair on the balcony (her hair really did look like a bird’s nest) and vanished into the kitchen.
Shura looked at his close-cropped fingernails and his shiny shoes. He looked at the clock ticking away on the wall, its crooked hands scratching the dial, and he thought to himself that if Etina were to die, he wouldn’t do anything at all, simply because it wasn’t going to happen; it was quite impossible. He needn’t bother his head over it; she wouldn’t leave him on his own; she was a woman with a strong sense of duty.
He turned out to be right. Etinka refused to be broken either by the disease or by the toxic drugs. Her expression for it was sebya nodnyala—she’d pulled herself out, like Baron Munchausen pulling himself out of the swamp by his own pigtail. “Anything else would have been ridiculous,” she’d say to me, laughing, and her husband would give her a shy sidelong glance. By then his eyes were as dark as blackberries and the chapped skin around his mouth was gray.
Etina was every bit his equal when it came to super-heroic exploits. How could it be otherwise? She’d survived the war and saved a daughter who was doomed to die from birth.
* * *
—
Etina and Shura’s daughter Emma was seven when Etinka fell sick, and she didn’t see her mother for almost a year. This didn’t much bother her because they’d never had a lot to say to each other anyway. She had her father. He, it is true, was lost in the higher reaches of science, but he radiated a sense of calm that was as much as Emma needed. Self-sufficiency was what she was best at anyway. Emma was a delicate little thing, prone to dizzy spells. She liked reading, especially poetry—she had whole reams by heart—amused herself with a bit of piano and a bit of acting, and spent hours in front of the mirror running her fingers through her freshly cut ash-blond curls. It would never have occurred to anyone to call her ideological or socially aware, let alone politically minded, but when news came in ’53 that the great leader Stalin had died, she surprised everyone—her nanny Alina, the cook Darya, and most of all her parents who were, for once, both present—by falling into a faint. She sensed that it was a momentous event and probably one that boded no good.
Years later, her parents would tell this story as if it were an episode in the life of a true Soviet child, devastated by the immense loss—a child who would, of course, have given her life for the great leader, except that it was too late for that now: the children of the Soviet Union were all irrevocably orphaned.
* * *
—
Etina’s 1953 resembled that of all Jewish doctors: she got the sack. Or rather, she almost got the sack. The necessary papers were lying ready in the health minister’s office and he signed them all without even glancing at her name. Posnimali was the term used back then—taken down. Every Jewish doctor in the great and mighty Union was to be taken down like an unwanted portrait, even right out at the edge of town and in the remotest villages. That was the idea, at least.
Beside Myself Page 15
