For Etina Natanovna Farbarjevich, things turned out differently; her case was championed by Raissa Filatova herself, the first secretary of the district committee. It is perhaps worth mentioning at this point that although Russian is a gendered language, it has no feminine form for doctors, teachers and other workers (first secretaries included), so that any Soviet woman practicing these professions necessarily assumed a kind of masculine persona and with it a degree of toughness, which suited most of them very well. Where else but in the Soviet Union did you come across such emotionally degenerate multi-talents, hardened by hunger and air raids and veteran husbands—women with no interest in feminine endings, feminism or antidepressants? For them, life was too short to bother about such niceties; there was the war-torn nation to take care of, a crippled husband, and of course the children. Raissa Filatova was just that kind of woman, and when she heard that Comrade Farbarjevich had been dismissed with immediate effect, she banged her solid wood desk with her solid palms and shouted: “No way will I let her go! Do you want to send hundreds of children to their deaths, or what? Do you want the entire Union to die? Do you want me to die, damn it? What’s the idea?” The subject wasn’t open to discussion. Someone should have kissed the woman’s reddened hands and cheeks. If only there’d been more like her.
So Etina stayed and continued to run the sanatorium. She could have made a great career for herself: it is said that her doctoral thesis was better than Shura’s; it is said that she too could have been an inventor—who knows what she might have achieved. But Etina, proud Etina with her pinned-up hair, chose the other path and decided to be the wife of an important figure rather than an important figure in her own right. She knew that being important would mean giving herself body and soul not only to science, but also to more than one scientist, and that wasn’t something she was prepared to do—she couldn’t muster the necessary energy. The inevitable was quite enough for her.
* * *
—
Alexander Isaakovich Farbarjevich meanwhile, working illegally at a job that wasn’t his, threw himself into his scientist’s career, and things went fast. When he needed a supervisor for his dissertation, he found a medic who was said to protect Jews, and the man must have seen something in Shura—or else he had a guilty conscience because nobody knew that his surname was really Perlman and that he’d traded it for a Russian one during the war in exchange for a few roubles. This protector of Jews took Shura under his wing and did all he could to help him. Farbarjevich’s paper on prolonging the effect of penicillin in the eye was quite a sensation. Shura observed that any penicillin dropped in the eye was flushed out again by tear fluid half an hour later, so he developed a method of storing semi-impermeable capsules under the eyelid that allowed the precious penicillin to be released gradually and act for up to two days. The method spread like wildfire through the hospitals of the Soviet Union and set the standard for the treatment of eye diseases for decades to come. It is used all over the world to this day in the administration of ophthalmic drugs.
For the rights to his invention Professor Doctor Farbarjevich received forty roubles and a decoration. It goes without saying that there were no patent rights in the USSR, where individuals were duty bound to place themselves entirely at the service of the nation and the perfection of Communism. But as well as a bit of money and a medal of honor, Shura got his first taste of fame. People recognized him on the street and shook him by both hands. That was the great thing about the village mentality of the Soviet Union and its tendency to serfdom: a successful doctor was worshipped the way a film star was worshipped in the West. And in those days forty roubles wasn’t as little as it sounds. A doctor earned sixty a month—plus additional thank-yous in the form of chocolates and alcohol, and you could live off that—if not well, then decently enough.
Shura’s next invention involved the use of light separation to examine the retina. Shura loved the various spectral ranges; he loved interference filters and narrow-band filters; he felt soothed by red-free, red, crimson, blue, yellow and orange filter disks. But when he walked the streets, he resembled a madman, with his dilated eyes—and though he looked left and right, he often seemed not to listen to the people next to him. He also had trouble focusing on objects for any length of time. By this point he was a genuine junkie, not yet hooked on cocaine but well past caffeine tablets. He was constantly thinking up new ideas, inventing and elaborating; he never stopped. His heady ambition was combined with a belief that he could change the world with his inventions, make it a better place, save the nation—he felt like an astronaut flying into the cosmos. People were having more and more trouble getting through to him; he withdrew from everyday life, was often irritable and refused to show an interest in others. But Shura’s second invention struck like a meteorite. He got a call from party headquarters asking him to please pay a visit to such-and-such an artist to have his portrait painted for the city museum—the prerogative of every deserving comrade.
That was Shura’s first portrait; many more were to follow, not to mention larger-than-life bronze head sculptures and photos documenting the casting process. None of them really captured his face; they couldn’t compete even with the photo of him and Afanasyev on my mantelpiece. None of them showed the tousle-headed boy in beige trousers and sheepskin waistcoat who later (older now) sat opposite me over tea-and-quince-jam in his little modern flat in Lower Saxony, smiling as only Shura could smile.
I asked him why he hadn’t packed us all up and cleared out of Russia as soon as the graffiti started to appear: Zhid Farbarzhevich, ubiraisya v Israil’!*2 He’d made a name for himself in America; he could easily have got us out of the country; there’d even been invitations from New York.
Shura shrugged and said: “Because I thought they’d find the culprits. The police were called in, after all.”
Etya snorted. “Nonsense. Our caretaker Petya was nearer the mark. I met him sweeping the street one day and he said: ‘The police are looking? Who are they looking for? Have they asked me? I could point them to the culprit, but no one asks me.’ You didn’t want to leave because you knew you’d be a nobody over there—that we’d all be nothings. And don’t tell me you believed in the country’s future—here it is, that future, and where’s it got you? How long am I going to have to listen to these stories?”
Shura and I stared at the plastic tablecloth and said nothing. Etinka took a big gulp of tea without scalding herself.
“I had the graffiti painted over every time. I had the wall painted so often that the decorators—Gena and Lyolya, they were called; I remember their names—came to me and said: ‘Etina Natanovna, we’re glad to do this for you—we kiss your hands—but wouldn’t you rather move away? This isn’t going to stop, you know, and soon there’ll be so many coats of paint on your house it’ll start to look like a growth.’ ”
We said nothing for a while, then Etinka took my face between her hands and ran her thumb over the stubble on my chin and upper lip. She looked long into my eyes and I could see her trying to make sense of something. Then she combed her fingers through my hair, stroked my neck and got up. Watching her slow progress to the door, I could see her almost hundred years. I hadn’t noticed earlier; sitting at table she’d been the old Comrade Farbarjevich—the pediatric hospital tucked under one arm; husband, daughter and Soviet Union under the other. Time only struck when she got up. When she’d gone, Shura went to his bureau. He was no quicker than his wife—in him too, the century showed. His waistband was gathered in folds under his belly button, held only by a wide black leather belt; he was getting thinner and thinner. He rummaged through the drawers, mumbling something; I couldn’t hear what. It was a new habit of his to talk to himself or, as he put it, “to a friend.” Then he pulled a ten-page manuscript out of a drawer and put it on my plate along with the cookie crumbs—the memoirs which he’d begun to type on his granddaughter’s computer. Only ten pages—I’m afraid that’s all I have. A
nd I do wish Etinka had written too.
But Etinka didn’t believe in diaries or memoirs; she didn’t believe that her view of things was of any worth. One legend, though, has survived without ever being written down: it is said that she dreamed of singing on stage. She never told me; I have it from her daughter Emma. Not that Etinka ever sang. She never had lessons, made no attempt to realize that dream of hers; her daughter, husband, friends never even knew her to hum. It’s true that her eyes would mist over when she heard the music of Iosif Kobzon, but there was nothing unusual in that. And yet it’s said that she would have given all her achievements to appear once onstage; her daughter was quite clear about that. I must admit, though, that when I heard the story I did wonder whether Emma wasn’t talking about herself.
*1A Russian term of abuse for Jews.
*2Farbarjevich, you fucking Jew, fuck off to Israel!
DANYA AND EMMA
In ripe old age—he was well over seventy—Daniil, or Danya, or Danichka stood at my desk, turning the pages of a South American novel he’d found at the top of a pile of books. From the strained way he held himself, I could see he was intent on understanding what his grandson got up to all day in this Berlin flat, where he’d come to visit him for the first and last time. I stood in the hall, a blue Crimea mug in one hand for him and in the other a white mug, cracked at the edge, for me, and I looked at his broad stooped back. He was wearing his usual pepper-and-salt jacket; in my memory he is never anything but sprucely dressed. He opened the novel without taking it from the pile and turned the pages with a moistened finger. A lot of passages were underlined—every five, ten, thirty or fifty pages, some in black Biro, some in blue, though without any method. On page 1150, he paused at half a sentence underlined in red—perhaps because he imagined that I’d gone to the trouble of getting up from the desk or sofa to fetch the pen specially: “…she and Werner and all the young people born around 1930 or 1931 were fated to be unhappy.”
He seemed to be studying the squiggly underlining and I supposed he was trying to decipher the notes I’d made in the margin. I wondered whether he even knew my handwriting. We didn’t write to each other much and if we did, we texted or messaged. I was aware that a lot must have changed for him: my handshake was different; maybe my kisses were different too, now that I had a beard growing on my face. But as he turned to me with the book in his hand, I realized I had no idea how much he knew about the person I’d been before. Did he know enough to compare that person with the person I’d become? Enough to feel any kind of difference? How much had I let him share in my life?
I handed him the cup of tea and we sat down. He asked me whether I knew I’d underlined a lie—that the words weren’t true: unhappiness wasn’t limited to those born in 1930 or 1931; there were no limits to it at all; it pricked and chafed like empty sunflower-seed shells poking through the hessian sack on your back and the cloth of your shirt. At all events, unhappiness extended as far as 1937, the year he’d been born.
He said he’d tell me about it sometime if I liked and show me photos, and maybe even the cine films of his wedding. But I’d have to go to him, if that was what I wanted; I’d have to ask.
* * *
—
My grandfather Daniil had, in a traditional-minded way, been called after his grandfather, who’d been a rabbi. That was as much as Daniil knew about him, and he knew little more about any of the Levites and Cohens from whom he was descended. The family’s knowledge of the Torah had run dry with Daniil’s father, Boris, who had decided that the only way to get through life was godlessly; he’d never have guessed that his own son Daniil would end up believing. But nor would he have guessed how much times would change—or that his newly believing son would spend his last years in the very country where he, Boris, had left his faith at the front.
Boris’s childhood, like that of so many rabbis’ children, was quiet and poor and strict. When he was thirteen, his father explained to him that it was harder for a woman to get a foothold in life than for a man, so he was going to put all his money into educating Boris’s sister Astra. If Boris wanted to go to university, he’d have to see to it himself. In those days, that meant getting top grades at school and generally being a model pupil; then, and only then, would you have prospects of further education—free further education, that is.
Astra went to Berlin to read modern languages at the Humboldt, which admitted female students from the early twentieth century. Whole hordes of ambitious young Jewish women put their heads together in the building on Unter den Linden, and Astra—little Daniil’s auntie and big Daniil’s daughter—was one of them. Besides modern languages, Astra studied engineering, which was how she met her husband. She married him and his respectable German surname in 1932, gave birth to a son (calling him, believe it or not, Albert, after Einstein) and got out of the country just in time in the mid-thirties, settling with her family in Almaty, where German bridge builders were in demand. In the early forties Astra Daniilovna fetched her parents to Kazakhstan, to preserve them from you-know-what, and since there was no leaving Kazakhstan once all the bridges had been built, she turned to giving language lessons. So it would seem that this particular branch of the family led a happy life, far from the horrors of the Shoah. Believe it if you can; I know no other version of the story.
Boris paid his way to a technical university in Bucharest, and it was there he met Clava, the eldest of six daughters born to a devout miller and his two-decades-younger blind wife who spent her days wandering the streets of the city, rounding up beggars to go and work at her husband’s mill—she recognized them by the smells and sounds they gave off. All Clava’s sisters made it to Palestine before it was too late, and presumably they—or at least their offspring—live there to this day. They were all spared by the war—and the party. Not so Clava.
Clava had to share her husband with the party; Boris’s eyes and heart burned for the Communist cause. He had proudly joined the Communist Party at a time when it was still called social democrat; now they were all Bolshevik—and none more than Boris.
Organizational skills, not armed combat, were Boris’s strong point, and the party gave him the task of evacuating all territories at risk of German invasion. One of these was the place where his wife and little Daniil were living; Boris’s colleagues came for them, heaved them onto a barrow and smuggled them over the Dnepr.
Daniil, who was four when they were forced to flee, remembered only isolated scenes, such as his feet swimming away from him in the icy water when the barrow could go no farther—like fish, only that they swam down, not along. Then there was the noise of the bombs, like meteorites striking Earth. He remembered the human bodies at the wayside, lying in their vomit, like fruit trampled underfoot. And he remembered his pregnant mother, shielding her tummy with her hands, and shouting, “Get on the ground!” as she threw a blanket over him. Once, the blanket went up in flames. Miraculously Daniil wasn’t hurt, but he would never forget the smell of singed skin. He made a careful study of the nuances of his mother’s facial expressions at that time, because although she always seemed to stare stonily ahead, he was sure there was something underneath that she was trying to tell him.
When they got to Almaty, Boris’s sister Astra put them up in her cellar. Food was almost impossible to come by in the city; you had to eat what you could wangle, but because Daniil’s father had rendered great services in the war, Daniil was given buckwheat porridge in kindergarten. This was a privilege not granted to all the children; when he took up his spoon, the others stared at him with hungry eyes, and most of the time he was so unnerved he couldn’t eat a thing.
Daniil’s sister Dora was born in the cellar in Almaty, and Daniil stared at the newborn day and night, refusing for days to get off the sheet where the screaming, hungry babe was lying. Then he began to roam the streets in search of things to eat. He always found something, generally stealing from families who were no better
off than his own. Whatever he got hold of—radishes, potatoes, apples, berries—he brought home and laid at Dora’s feet, which were tinier than anything he’d ever seen.
There was barely enough room to sleep in the cellar and Daniil would often lie awake between his screaming sister and his mother, who lay there, huddled and motionless, her eyes closed. One night Clava opened her eyes and Daniil wasn’t there. Fear gripped her. She dashed through her sister-in-law’s house, whispering her son’s name, afraid to wake the others, then out into the garden where her breath left her mouth in a milky broth. She pulled her shawl tighter around her shoulders and looked out into the gray nothingness of the city.
If Daniil’s run away, I’ll only have one mouth left to feed, she thought—and then: Oh please come back. Please, please, please. She must have spoken the words out loud, she realized, seeing her breath white in front of her face. Then she began to shout; she shouted Daniil’s name, and he replied. Whatever was she shouting for? he asked. She knew Auntie Astra was asleep and hated being disturbed.
Clava looked down. The voice was coming from the dog kennel where Bella was kept, the German shepherd Auntie Astra had brought to Almaty along with her German family. Daniil was lying next to Bella in the kennel, only his head peeping out.
“What on earth are you doing in there?”
“There’s more room here than in the cellar, Mum,” said Daniil sleepily, “and I like Bella. She likes me too.”
Clava knelt down and studied the two faces, Bella’s and Daniil’s, looking out at her appealingly, cheek to cheek—four big, round eyes gleaming out of the darkness of the kennel. From then on, Daniil was allowed to sleep next to Bella whenever he wanted.
Beside Myself Page 16
