* * *
—
It was cold in the cellar, colder than outside, and the cold was heavy with the smell of damp earth. If they heated at all, they heated with the sunflower-seed shells that were dumped behind the market square—a sea of dry shells, prickly as brushwood, there for the taking. And plenty took; Daniil darted between the lumbering men with a big sack whose coarse weave couldn’t protect his back from the pointy shells when he lugged the fuel home. He left a load at Auntie Astra’s and took the rest into the cellar, emptying it in front of the stove, then sitting down at the end of Dora’s mattress and warming himself at her little feet.
The war invalid from the next building, who had only one leg—and only half of that—managed to get hold of sugar, which he burned on sticks to make lollipops that were shaped something like cockerels. He liked Daniil and let him help sell the lollies. The child’s bright eyes and rosy cheeks were good for sales; people preferred to buy sweets from a cheerful boy with black curly hair than from a foul-smelling cripple. Daniil earned four kopeks a piece—a lot of money for him. He put the coins in his socks and ran home as fast as he could, terrified of being robbed by the other boys, who envied him his status as lolly-seller.
Daniil’s mother made money by selling homemade plum jam. Her jam was famous; people came from the other end of town to try it and Daniil acquired the nickname Don Jam in school because he seemed to eat nothing but jam sandwiches. When Daniil’s mother wasn’t boiling up fruit and sugar, she was busy tending rosebushes. She had a reputation for ringing strangers’ doorbells and asking if she could take care of their gardens for them—especially the roses, which she was particularly fond of. When the householders asked how much she wanted for the work, she said: “Nothing.” Most people paid her anyway; they weren’t to know that if she came to them for work it was because she only really felt at peace with herself when she was gardening.
She was a strange person, who did a lot of looking, but not much talking. If times had been better, she might have gone out into the mountains and lived off herbs and roots, and her hair would have grown long and green, and her skin transparent and luminous. But times weren’t better and Clava couldn’t find any real use for herself, so she took care of others. She took care of her children and her sister-in-law’s children and her neighbors’ children and the children from the next street—and years later, when she was old and sick and dying, she said not a word about her pain, though she must have been in agony; it was the year when there was nothing but Pyramidon, after a gang of local doctors had made off with the entire stock of more effective painkillers and drugs and gone east with them. Clava’s son Daniil, by then an established geologist, came from the mountains of Tajikstan to visit her—he’d managed to take a month’s leave, because he knew it would be the last month he’d spend with his mother—and she didn’t talk about herself at all, but said to Daniil: “Will you promise me something, my boy? I’m worried about your father. He always forgets to wear a scarf and it’s cold out; he’ll catch his death.”
* * *
—
When Daniil’s father returned from the war—the family were back in Chernivtsi by then—he didn’t have a tooth left in his head; there’d been nothing to eat but herring. “They didn’t even give us water,” said Boris and then set about raising his son who’d turned into a khuligan in his absence—a word that may sound like “hooligan” but means something different, namely wild-little-rascal-who-smokes-like-a-grown-up. Rascals like Daniil found cigarettes in attics and sneaked them out of men’s pockets on the market, selling them back to the same men at five kopeks a piece, or more. Thus Daniil rose from lolly-seller to tobacconist. He smoked about fifteen a day himself, depending on sales and the emptiness of his belly, and he continued that way for forty-four years, only stopping when he realized that I was stealing cigarettes from him. I was exactly the same age as he’d been when he started and he knew I wouldn’t stop as long as he was effectively supplying me.
Until Boris returned from the war, Daniil had no adult authority, but he was an authority himself, the leader of a gang of boys who’d once robbed him regularly. He was renowned for his skills as a thief, for the cheeky way he had of twisting his lips into a smile and whistling, and for managing to lead friends and neighbors up the garden path without incurring their wrath. Word got about that he exchanged everything he stole for useful things for his sister and mother—or at least that’s what he managed to make people believe.
“Don’t be too harsh on that son of yours, Borya,” a neighbor said, trying to coax the horrified father into leniency. “I know he’s a thief, but it’ll stand him in good stead.”
“He’ll end in jail. Is that what I lost all my teeth for?”
“Now, look here. Your son wangled this collection of photos out of my two boys, quite valuable photos, you know the kind I mean—girls in stockings, bottomless and all that, quality work—filched it from them and sold it on. And who did he sell it to? To me! Then he takes the money to my wife—my money to my wife—and points at the blue woollen shawl around her shoulders. Bold as brass he stands there, legs apart, hands on hips, and says he wants the shawl. For his sister, he says. Because it’s so cold and damp in that hole you live in and his sister’s always coughing.”
“Did she give him the shawl?”
“Of course she did—and the money stayed in the family.”
“And where did your boys get hold of the porn pics?”
“Stole them from me, what else?”
* * *
—
At the age of eight, Daniil possessed a whole arsenal of grenades and firearms. They were all over the place, he said. You stumbled on them in the street; you could go gathering them like mushrooms. The boys shot at empty houses with them, and sometimes at each other, but what they liked best was to throw the ammunition on a fire and watch it explode, shooting out in all directions, sometimes hitting one of the boys, sometimes a passing stranger. Once, an old woman in a head scarf was caught, a bent old babushka, who fell flat on the ground when the shell went off.
The first thing Boris did was to destroy his son’s weapon arsenal. Daniil looked on with tears in his eyes as his father threw his treasured collection into the slaughterhouse pit. There was a beastly stench of blood and shit as the gleaming blades and heavy pistols sank into the brown-red wormy gall at the bottom.
But that wasn’t the real punishment. The real punishment was the talking. Boris told Daniil about the war; he told him stories of what he’d seen and done—stories that went on for hours and invariably ended with the question: “Did I go and fight in the war so that my son could become a good-for-nothing?”
One of the stories that Daniil had to listen to over and over—the story of Musya Pinkenzon—was particularly painful to him, because the boy killed was his age. Musya was Daniil’s second cousin and twelve years old when he was shot dead by an SS officer for playing the “Internationale” after being ordered to take out his violin and entertain the regiment. Daniil couldn’t bear to hear it anymore. The images had branded themselves on his mind; they haunted him—the shattered violin, the screaming mother, the crowd of people staring at the ground as if frozen. He begged his father not to tell it again, but Boris was unrelenting. He believed that was the only way to get his son to understand what had gone on around him: to give him nightmares.
Jews from Belz and its environs had received orders to assemble in the market square. Musya’s parents had sent him to his music teacher in the hope that she’d hide him, but when Musya stood at her front door and looked into her shrunken eyes, he knew it was hopeless and ran back into the street, too fast for her to catch him. He ran and ran, his violin dangling at his chest—he was never seen without it; the local papers had described the five-year-old Musya as a musical prodigy, a wonder child—and he found his parents in a tightly packed crowd of people that looked more like one person, blurred
and faceless. He screamed “Mum!” and at first his mother didn’t want to identify herself, hoping her son would be taken for a neglected Moldovan child, but when Musya made a beeline for his parents, she let out a shout.
The SS officer emptied his entire magazine, half of it into the boy’s body, the other half into the body of the violin. Boris had seen the boy look the SS officer in the eyes and heard him strike up the “Internationale” without a word. From then on, he knew the meaning of the word “hero.”
Daniil would rather have had a hiding from his father than have to listen to these stories anymore. He didn’t believe them; he didn’t believe any war stories except his own. As far as he was concerned, his father’s stories were fairy tales, a way of creating a world that made sense. But the world didn’t make sense; Daniil had worked that out long ago. He’d also worked out that his father hadn’t lost his teeth for him, but for the war—so Daniil owed him nothing; if anything his father should settle his score with the war. He told him as much, and then said, “Now hit me, if you want,” but Boris never hit him. Boris, who’d had to look on as the two soldiers he shared a gun with raped an entire family, mother, father and son—Boris, who hadn’t dared intervene or run away, and whose memories of the war and its heroes had mingled to a red-brown wormy gall where he drowned his own nightmares—never again raised a hand to anyone. He’d forgotten how, so he talked instead. He talked on and on.
In order to preserve his son from a life on the streets and sure imprisonment, he found him work with a chandler, and soon Daniil was familiar with the smell of beef tallow—a smell he was to remember all his life. In the summer heat of southern Ukraine, the boy dipped cotton wicks into the seventy-degree yellowish white goo, absolutely riveted by the stuff. The skin on his face soaked up the smell of grease and more than once he thought of plunging his head into the melting vat and vanishing forever, but then he remembered Dora and resumed his work, pulling out the cotton thread with its thin coat of tallow, letting it dry, dipping it in again.
Daniil attended school regularly again. He got better grades and sometimes even very good ones, completed tenth grade and left school without any certification because by then they’d stopped issuing certificates to people with surnames like Pinkenzon.
“They knocked two points off because they said I made a political spelling mistake,” Daniel explained to his father.
“What do you mean, a political spelling mistake?”
“Apparently I spelt ‘communist’ with an ‘a’: ‘cammunist’. And apparently that’s libel and I should be glad they don’t summon me to the nearest party headquarters.”
“And did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Spell ‘communist’ with an ‘a’?”
“What do you think?”
* * *
—
It was made clear to Daniil that a Pinkenzon had no business studying at the universities of Lviv or Moscow, but in Grozny they didn’t seem to care and took all comers. Boris summoned him with all the gravity and pathos he thought the situation merited and said: “My son, I have enough money for you to go and take an entrance examination anywhere in the Union of the Socialist Soviet Republic—and I mean anywhere. But it will only buy you a one-way ticket. If you pass the entrance exam, you can stay on and study and work and let us know that’s what you’re doing. If you don’t pass, you can stay on and work and let us know that too. If you want to come back, you work until you’ve earned the money for a return ticket.”
The rabbi’s son had renounced God, but he hadn’t abandoned his father’s methods of upbringing.
Daniil nodded, looking his father in the eyes and pitying him his toothless mouth and the meaningless babble that came out if it. He knew he’d pass the entrance exams; he wasn’t the least bit worried about them—nor was he worried about making money. But he’d never forget that he’d been cautioned in spite of his good grades—“be grateful that you were even allowed to finish school.” That did worry him. He stared doggedly at his father and took the money for the one-way ticket.
In Grozny, Daniil passed oral and written exams in Russian, mathematics, physics, chemistry and a modern language—in his case, German. The teacher who examined him in this last subject and would later become his mentor and guardian angel was called Frida Isaakovna Garber.
He’d enrolled for German without ulterior motives. He’d never thought of leaving the Soviet Union; he didn’t even know you could. It wouldn’t have crossed his mind that he might spend the last years of his life in provincial West Germany, sitting at the window drinking tea in his only decent jacket, communicating with his grandchildren on a mobile telephone—Russian with one and German with the other—and paying visits to doctors with his daughter, because by that time his German was beginning to fade from his memory. Most things, indeed, were beginning to fade from his memory, but the name of his German teacher, Frida Isaakovna Garber, shot out of his mouth like a bullet.
* * *
—
Daniil had to choose a sport and picked boxing—rather than endurance running or swimming, which required even more endurance. “Am I an animal or something?” he asked bitterly. “I’ll take up boxing—it’ll come in useful if anything happens.” A bit of podrat’sya i razoitis’, as it was called in those days: fighting and separating.
He imagined the training as a kind of kulachnyi boi, that traditional form of fist-fighting held in the villages on Christian feast days to celebrate the local pack of boys, who would get into a huddle and thump each other with their fists as the older people stood around, looking on. Daniil was only a flyweight, but his university boxing teacher, a former Russian champion, threw him on the mercy of a middleweight who knocked him about so badly that after their first encounter in the ring, Daniil spewed half a tooth and could have sworn he saw stars—at any rate, he saw sparks and flames flying out of the middleweight’s ears. Whatever it was the man did, Daniil wanted to be able to do the same. He watched the middleweight spread his fat arms as if he were drawing a bow, bring his right glove in front of his face, and keep throwing with his left, while his feet bounced up and down around Daniil like rubber balls. It was like watching modern ballet. Daniil ended up seeing a lot of sparks and stars, and his nose often came off the worse for wear, but he never gave up.
Of course Daniil couldn’t really compete with someone a head and a half taller than him, but the two of them got into the habit of going out for a drink together after training, and for three years they told each other things they didn’t tell anyone else, even confessing to one another that the older they got, the more they understood their fathers—a thought that freaked them out so much, they had to drink faster. They also admitted to missing their sisters terribly; this made them come over all weepy, but that didn’t bother them. After graduating, they drifted out of touch—then, some time later in Volgograd, they happened to meet in Chekists’ Square. They stared when they saw each other, couldn’t stop staring, and then they embraced, and kept embracing, only to push each other away, hold each other at arm’s length, stare some more and fall into each other’s arms all over again. They threw up their fists and bounced up and down, circling and dodging each other. They laughed. They threw punches and took punches, and they laughed and laughed.
“You’ve forgotten everything, you bloody egghead,” the middleweight shouted.
“Let’s go and have a drink,” Daniil replied, throwing a hook just past his chin.
* * *
—
Daniil liked his studies, he liked his friends, he liked Grozny. On one occasion, he even saw Muslim Magomayev and Iosif Kobzon when they came to the city to vie for the title of Merited Artist of the USSR. Daniil and his friends had no money for tickets, of course, but they knew which trees to climb for a good view—it was almost like having seats in the front row of a box. All in all, Daniil was happy in Grozny—lonely, but happy.
>
Twice a year he went home to visit his family—once in the summer and once in the winter. He would kiss Dora’s cheeks until they were quite red and his mother said: “That’s enough of that!”
One of these visits coincided with the wedding of a distant relative who seemed to have the same lips as Daniil and the same big earlobes—another Pinkenzon. Somebody-or-other was marrying another somebody-or-other—what mattered was that things were, in the broadest sense, staying in the family; it was a proper Jewish wedding with seventy guests—fifty more than fitted in the Pinkenzon family’s tiny abode. For that was where the celebrations were held—though it wasn’t the half-pretty, half-starved daughters of the house who’d been claimed by matrimony. Oh no. Uncle Pavel, the master of the house, was marrying off his niece, an orphan so poor that even Pavel’s daughters wrinkled up their noses at her.
Also resident in the flat was Auntie Polina, who wasn’t at all pleased that the family wanted her to open up her room to the wedding guests. She was in her late fifties, but looked closer to a hundred, had a severe limp and was usually to be found lying on her two mattresses, creaking and groaning, as if to make up for the missing bedstead. The family decided not to bother arguing with the old thing and to make do with the one room, so they hung a rug on Auntie Polina’s door—one of those good Ottoman rugs with a lavish floral pattern in the center, and red and green flourishes around the edges—to keep out the noise of seventy men and women and quantities of alcohol. Even so, Auntie Polina spent all evening banging her galoshes against the wall.
At the wedding, Daniil sat generalom, which is to say at the head of the table. He didn’t know why he was granted this honor and he didn’t ask, but it made him feel like one of the grown-ups; his nostrils flared, making his face even broader than usual. The guests drank a lot—an awful lot—and they sang, and Daniil joined in; for the first time in his life he was singing in front of people he didn’t know. Everyone smoked and stubbed out their cigarettes in the butter dish and threw the stubs in half-full vodka glasses, and Daniil was happy in a way that was new to him. He suddenly realized that he’d never been to a party like this. When everyone got up, he didn’t dance, but he clapped loudly to the beat, slowly and ponderously, keeping time with his chin. That evening he had an inkling of a different kind of life, but it was barely noticeable, a mere tickle at the tip of his nose, so faint that he couldn’t work out where it was coming from and had soon forgotten all about it.
Beside Myself Page 17
