by Lev Golinkin
“Get good at saying them: you’ll be using them a lot.”
“Wait, so if someone says something to me, then I should say ‘I don’t understand,’ right?”
“Correct. Then you wait for their response, and then you say, ‘Please speak slower.’ ”
“But what if I still don’t understand them?”
Lina shrugged. “Just go back to the first sentence. Keep alternating. Eventually you’ll get somewhere.”
She ducked out of the room, giggling, and I returned to my troops. “Ai do-unt un-der-stand. Pleez speek slou-er. Ai do-unt un-der-stand. Pleez speek slou-er” softly echoed around the room.
* * *
February 7 finally gave us something to look forward to. It was Gera Zhislin’s birthday, and our two families had a little celebration. Yura and Dad went to the balcony fridges and dug up the last sardine cans they had brought from Russia. Someone, Vicki I think, conspired with Agnes Binder to bake a cake. Gera arranged the Zhislins’ suitcases in the middle of the room, stretched a bedsheet over them, and we had a dinner table. Afterward, the adults were sipping tea and I was curled up in the corner with my coloring book, when Yura’s neighbor rapped on the door. “Samuel, they’re looking for you.”
“Who’s looking for me?” Dad asked.
“HIAS. They’re waiting on the phone,” the neighbor replied, and Dad bolted downstairs, Gera’s party frozen.
Dad returned shortly, looking disturbed. “We need to pack right now—we’re going to Vienna.”
“Vienna?!” Yura jumped up. “I thought they were sending us to Rome.”
Dad shook his head. “No, you’re staying. Everyone else is staying here for now. But we, just our family, are being moved to Vienna.”
“Why?”
“They didn’t say … They just said to be ready at six,” Dad replied, and the birthday party ended, or rather transformed into a moving party, one that lasted long into the night.
As Dad was packing, he decided to make up a bit for the loss of the hundred schillings Mom and Lina had to pay at the bridge by selling Binder a tea service we had hauled out of Russia. It was an amalgamation of chipped cups, plates, and saucers that used to belong to my grandmother. Much of the service didn’t survive our night on the border, but Dad had salvaged what he could and stored the pale green remnants, carefully wrapped in shawls and shirts, in a suitcase. During our emigration, and for many years afterward, it boggled my mind to think that of all the things to lug through the border, Mom and Dad had elected to bring a cumbersome and unnecessary tea service. It would certainly not make my list of survival items. What were they going to do, host a refugee social?
What I knew but didn’t understand was that everyone in Russia, regardless of ethnicity or income, owned a tea service. Tea was mandatory; tea was the common denominator. From Siberia to Uzbekistan, no matter who came to your door or when they arrived, they were always offered a cup. A tea service was more than a set of cups and saucers: it represented a meal, which represented a home, which represented a life. As impractical as they were, those faded green teacups held the hope of once again having friends and entertaining guests, and it was hard for Dad to part with them. His one consolation was that the service went to the Binders, a family who had already demonstrated their abundant hospitality by welcoming some two hundred refugees to their remote mountain hotel.
HIAS’s bus was punctual as always, and for once we were grateful for the early departure time. Everyone else was going to Italy but for some reason our family had been singled out, and we didn’t want to share our situation with anyone, since that would only have amplified our worries. The Zhislins were an exception, of course. Although our two families had known each other for less than two months, we shared a trust forged out of our ordeal at the Soviet border. Their room at Binder’s was a safe haven for us, and vice versa, and it was hard to say goodbye. The Binders and the Zhislins were the only ones who knew about our departure. Igor and Yura helped us load the suitcases in the predawn haze.
* * *
*1 And when I say “English” I mean English, because Tamara Alexandrovna taught strictly British vocabulary and phrases, proclaiming all else to be a corruption of the noble tongue of Merrie Olde England. This had hilarious consequences, because after we came to America it took my sister a good two years to weed all the greengrocers, letterboxes, knickers, and bangers out of her lexicon.
*2 My favorite example is vzbzdnyt, an archaic word that means “to back out of a situation due to fear.” V-Z-B-Z-D-N—in a row! I can’t pronounce it. My parents, lifelong Russian speakers, can’t pronounce it. I’m not even sure if it’s anatomically feasible for the human larynx to create the word.
A LAYOVER IN PURGATORY
Vienna, Austria, February 1990
Thick fog enveloped the road during the ride to Vienna. A handful of families were already on the bus, and by the time we reached the capital we had swung by a few other hamlets and picked up more. No one spoke. It was as if the anxiety that is such an integral part of the refugee makeup just waited for us in Binder’s parking lot, counting down the days until we would step through the lobby, ready to latch on to us again. At the outskirts of the city, the bus stopped at a shabby apartment building, the driver yelled out a name, and a family got off. Several stops later, we rumbled through a dilapidated neighborhood and idled in front of a large white house surrounded by a cast-iron fence, and the driver called out “Golinkins.”
Dad and I dragged the bigger suitcases through a withered garden and into a shed, where they joined a colony of other luggage, then made our way to the front atrium, where our arrival was greeted with a loud chorus of groans, gurgles, coughs, and farts. The first floor was a single giant room diced up into little compartments by bedsheets draped over outstretched ropes. These curtains, together with the cacophony of bodily noises, gave off the look and smell of a makeshift field hospital. Shortly after our entrance, the sheets started pinching and rippling as their inhabitants shambled out to get a glimpse of the newcomers. The watchers were old, and none looked healthy. The house itself had seen better days. Judging by its vast size and location, it could’ve originally been a villa for a minor lordling or a wealthy merchant. But now the paint was peeling, empty niches with long-gone statues gaped from the walls, and high above, crusty wires for what must’ve once been an enormous chandelier curled down from the ceiling. The vestigial luxury, the decaying garden and decaying people, cast a melancholy gloom over the ex-villa.
“Welcome. I’m Nadya.” A heavyset babushka with a thick braid wheezed up to us. “Your room is upstairs.” The second floor consisted of a hallway with about five rooms off it. A modest kitchen occupied one end, a large communal bathroom took up the other, and across the hall from the bathroom was our new home. The attic room had a small window, a table in the middle, and a cot in each corner. Sloping ceilings slid down on us, making it impossible for the adults to stand anywhere but in the center. We tossed the bags under the table, and each person claimed a cot; Dad and I, “the men,” shared, as usual.
Nadya, like those people we saw on the curtained-off first floor, was stationed in the villa on account of health problems. The curtain dwellers were migrants deemed too infirm for relocation to the crammed, filthy shelters of Rome (two families per room was the norm in Italy). Expediting them straight to America was also out of the question, since HIAS first needed to find sponsors who’d guarantee health care coverage. Joint’s only option was to retain them in Austria, out of the way, yet close to a hospital. The old villa, Nadya explained, became Joint’s purgatory, a place to keep her and those like her until something changed.
A chronic heart problem and shortage of breath didn’t stop Nadya from serving as purgatory’s unofficial manager. By the time the day was over, Mom and Dad were enrolled in Joint-run English classes, Mom in a beginner’s course, Dad in an intermediate one. Dad also signed up for what could be called Living in America 101 seminars, where volunteers culled from U.
S. synagogues and Jewish centers lectured on topics such as credit cards, civil rights, customs, and résumés.
He continued to work for the Vienna engineering company that Peter had introduced him to. The firm wasn’t comfortable with allowing him to take home schematics (and Dad didn’t want to risk being caught with them either), so he kept the designs in his head, writing out calculations on napkins and newspaper margins at the villa, then returning to the plant. Mom’s old profession also came in handy, and she could rarely walk down to the first-floor curtains without encountering someone waiting for a consult. She monitored vital signs and dressed wounds, and it seemed that just the notion of having an in-house doctor, even an ex-doctor, provided the villa residents with comfort.
But Lina hit the jackpot. As soon as we presented ourselves at Joint’s Vienna office to receive our weekly food stipend, the beleaguered clerk caught Lina’s English and immediately conscripted her to work for Joint.
“Isn’t that illegal?” asked Lina. “I thought we can’t work in—”
“Yes, you can,” the clerk cut her off. “Joint’s exempt from the ban on employment. Here’s your bus pass. See you at six-thirty tomorrow.”
“One moment, please.” Lina turned to us and switched to Russian.
“What?” snapped Dad.
“I’m not sure I want to do it,” Lina dithered. “I’m afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“I’m afraid they’re going to kill me!”
“They” were the five heavily armed gentlemen at Joint’s guard post who looked as if they considered anything short of violence to be a waste of their time. Rumor had it the guards were Iranian Jews, but years later when I asked a Joint member about it in one of my interviews, they refused to comment on the subject. What I can say is that the fierce, bearded men who loomed behind the desk looked like promising young jihadists plucked fresh from a terrorist boot camp. Joint’s security measures were born out of a grim reality—Islamist terror cells were targeting Soviet Jews in Austria, and nothing shouted Bomb me! like a small foreign office staffed with American Jews. But Lina wasn’t thinking about potential terrorists somewhere out in the ether; she was concerned with their comrades standing ten feet away from us.
“Let me see if I understand,” said Dad. “You’re afraid that the guards—Joint’s own guards placed here to protect Joint workers—will kill you?”
The jihadists were studying us, pensively stroking their Uzis. Lina emitted a series of squeaks.
“You’re taking the damn job,” Dad sighed. “And try to remember that your idiocy reflects on us all.”
“Take the job, dear,” encouraged Mom, and suggested that Lina view this as a wonderful opportunity to gain valuable Western work experience, all while helping other refugees in need.
“Definitely take the job, dear,” I piped in, and asked Mom if I could have Lina’s cot in case she was detained. I was tired of bunking with Dad.
Joint’s newest employee glared at me during the entire walk home.
After a few days of not being murdered, Lina came to enjoy her work. Joint operated several other purgatories similar to the one we resided in, and my sister spent her days zipping all over Vienna. She visited the elderly, consulted with doctors about treatments, assisted people with paperwork, translated for incoming refugees, delivered food, mail, and stipends, and on one occasion helped coordinate an effort to get a young Bosnian refugee a kidney transplant. She even charmed the guards … to a degree. They still stared at her with hopes of bloodshed, but once in a while one of them would throw what could be interpreted as a non-hostile grunt in her direction.
The one question Lina, or any of us, did not ask HIAS or Joint was why our family had been singled out and moved to the villa in the first place.
* * *
Life in the house was quiet. For the first time since those chaotic months leading up to emigration, things calmed down, and the initial gloom we felt upon entering the villa quickly dissipated into a welcome sense of routine.
The old folks took it upon themselves to maintain order in the house. The more mobile ones swept the floors and scoured the downstairs kitchen. Once March came around, they migrated outside, and soon enough the once-withered garden had orchids and alpine roses, attracting hordes of insects and little birds. Property lines didn’t mean much to the babushki, who ventured into neighbors’ yards to trim shrubs or water the plants. Others (including Grandma) entrenched themselves in the main foyer, monitoring the front door. Any resident entering or exiting the villa had to first run through a gauntlet of questions—Where are you coming from? Where are you headed? What’s in that bag?—the standard, annoying old-people interrogations we were used to back home. These daily inquisitions were nothing compared with what befell strangers. Any outsider attempting to enter the villa found himself unceremoniously detained and prodded by a throng of old women until someone provided a reason (a plausible reason) for his intrusion. One spring afternoon, Mom, Lina, and I had to rescue a very confused and incapacitated Peter from being ruffled and poked at in a dusty corner of the downstairs atrium.
“Why,” the baron panted, once extricated to the safety of our room in the attic. “Why are your elderly women so angry?”
“They’re not angry,” Mom explained, as she helped Peter smooth out his suit. “They’re doing their job, making sure strange people don’t enter the house. It’s part of their nature, to protect.”
A familiar image of grim, frozen Russia is the babushka, the old woman, hunched and determined, head wrapped in a scarf. Her gnarled face stares out from old Ellis Island photographs and modern cable specials, and never fails to elicit awwws from concerned Westerners who’d love nothing more than to hug poor, helpless Granny and tell her that everything’s going to be all right. That is misguided, and potentially hazardous. Women who had survived long enough to become grandmothers by the 1980s were Russia’s rocks. Their generation had a hard life, even by the unforgiving standards of Mother Russia. Forged from the crucible of wars, famines, and purges, the babushki had witnessed entire populations of husbands and sons vanish into the grave. These women were instilled with a fierce matriarchal instinct, the notion that they were responsible for the welfare of all society, not just their kin, and underneath their kerchiefs the babushki watched, and listened, and remembered, and commanded.
Peter may have found some comfort in knowing he wasn’t the only Westerner to learn who was truly in charge in Mother Russia. Paul Christensen, my Boston College professor who traveled to the USSR in 1989 to research post-glasnost labor movements for his doctoral dissertation, never forgot his first meeting with a babushka. Christensen recalled landing in Moscow, dropping off his bags, and strolling to the subway to explore the Evil Empire. Moscow’s cavernous metros are deep underground (they were designed to double as fallout shelters) and accessible by immense escalators, so long that Christensen’s ears popped on the way down. Stationed at the bottom of each escalator was a babushka with a bullhorn, there to ensure everyone acted like a decent Soviet citizen. Christensen had just hopped onto the platform when: “Young man! Yes, you, young man, come here!” the bullhorn blared at him.
For a few long moments, Christensen squirmed as the babushka stared, twitching her lips as if she’d just swallowed something vile and Christensen was to blame. The Russian commuters coasted by like wayward students slinking past a hall monitor. Two trains screeched up to the platform, brakes echoing off marble walls festooned with mosaics of peasants farming and Lenin preaching to attentive workers. Unwelcome images of half-starved prisoners hacking at frozen boulders in Siberia began to flicker through Christensen’s mind when the babushka finally broke the silence.
“Young man: the streets are cold and windy. Where is your hat?”
Christensen gazed around at the sea of fur bobbing past him. He was the only one with a bare head. “My hat is … at home?” he said, half asking the woman.
“Well. Turn around, go back, and get it,�
�� snapped the babushka, blocking Christensen’s path into the station, and leaving him with few options. “Faster, young man,” the bullhorn echoed up the escalator shaft, “before you get sick!” and Christensen found himself running. Up to the street he ran, and to the nearest store to purchase a hat, one that remained firmly on his head for the duration of his stay.
Paul Christensen was a smart man, a PhD candidate, and it did not take him long to absorb a crucial lesson of Soviet survival: never cross a babushka.
EVA
Vienna, Austria, February 1990
The first time I heard the rumor about the house with the red door was the day after my family had been moved to the old villa, when Nadya caught me sneaking outside in just a sweater. “Go to the house on Schüttelstrasse, the house with the red door,” the stolid caretaker told my parents after corralling me indoors. “It’s where people receive free clothing.”
“I thought the Joint guy was making some sort of American joke when he said all you have to do is ring the doorbell and this crazy woman named Eva will give you whatever you need,” said Nadya’s husband, Vova, in the awed voice of the converted. “But I swear it’s true.” Mom and Dad looked skeptical. Nadya, who appeared used to this response, waddled up to the nearest first-floor curtain.
“See?” She plucked at a European sweater triumphantly worn by a shriveled old man. The geezer sat up, spitting out a glob of phlegm. “And these shoes, and that coat.” Nadya moved down the row. “Where else would they get them from? All from Eva, and she has children’s stuff, too!” The grinning geriatric models, together with the prospect of a warm Western coat for me, convinced Mom it was worth at least a look.
Suspicion was an appropriate reaction from people bred in the Soviet culture of survival. To be sure, families and close friends looked out for one another, but this was different. “Take,” not “give,” was king in the land of constant deficits, so the idea of a person freely giving out perfectly good clothes seemed … unnatural. But the temptation was too strong, and we set out to find Madame Eva’s on a frigid February afternoon after my parents’ English classes and Lina’s workday with Joint. We walked along the Danube Canal, in the older part of the city, on a path bordered by stone, the concrete barrier of the canal to our right and rows of stone houses on the left. The walk was long, around a half-hour. The wind blew mercilessly. Vienna’s wind is impulsive and brutal. It comes from the east, gathers strength over the Hungarian Plain, then rips through the city, flaring up then dying down or changing direction in an instant, pushing, piercing. A woman who gives out free clothes. Our doubts were strong; the gusts were stronger.
