The Free World

by David Bezmozgis

  He recommended that Samuil also prepare a contingency plan.

  —Contingency plan, Samuil said. What is my contingency plan?

  —America, Josef said.

  —America, Samuil snorted.

  —Well, where else?

  —Where else? The other place.

  —What other place? Israel?

  —The grave.

  —I understand your perspective, Samuil Leyzerovich, Josef said. But please remember that I speak to you as a friend. It is not too soon to start making preparations. Half an hour. An hour. You fill out some forms, saying you weren’t a member of the Party, and that’s it.

  —My youngest secured himself a job with HIAS. I’m acquainted with these forms.

  —So, then.

  —My hand would turn to stone before I wrote such a thing.

  —Yes, I understand, Josef said, it’s a problem. But the Americans regard Communists the way the Canadians regard invalids.

  —Stone, Samuil said.

  —Samuil Leyzerovich, these are not your memoirs. In one’s memoirs—which are, so to speak, between one’s self and one’s soul—one must be truthful, but not, I would suspect, on an immigration form that is only between one’s self and the American immigration service.

  —It is not a question of where one writes it, Samuil said. Apostasy is apostasy. It is always between one’s self and one’s soul.

  Samuil felt that this statement possessed finality. It was as solid and imposing as a fortress. He identified himself with this fortress. His argument was himself. He felt as if aglow with moral satisfaction.

  He left Club Kadima still aglow. However, before he reached home, the glow began to fade. He thought more about what Josef had said about the Party Story document. It disturbed Samuil to think of the dozens, the hundreds if not thousands of Party Stories being written by traitors and prevaricators to please the Americans. Samuil envisioned the dossier the American diplomats were compiling, full of false testimonies. In the end, it would lead to a gross distortion of the historical record. Samuil recalled life before the Communists and life after the Communists. He remembered the excesses of the bourgeoisie and the abject existence of the proletariat. He remembered hunger, cold, filth, penury, and, worst of all, the smothered hopes of gifted, honest proletarian youth. No one who had not experienced these things could legitimately judge the Communist state. Of course, he acknowledged that, at times, mistakes had been made, that opportunistic elements had wormed their way into positions of power, but the system could not be judged on the basis of rogues and impostors. Rogues and impostors could not be allowed to qualify the essential Communist picture. In order to see this picture, a person would need to take up residence inside Samuil’s head, where the real events of proletarian struggle and triumph were housed like a breathing archive.

  In the weak light, Samuil saw the smudged face of his brother and of the other bookbinders, bent over the lathes in the chill of Baruch Levitan’s miserly home workshop.

  He saw himself and Reuven stepping briskly through the dark streets of the Moskovsky district, risking beatings and arrests, to collect copies of Der emes and Der apikoyres that Hirsh Kogan had smuggled in from Russia and dropped in a barrel behind Ozolinsh’s blacksmith shop.

  He saw the burning and undernourished faces of the girls on the education committee, folding pamphlets into the night after twelve hours at their sewing machines. Their pale, quick hands, their frayed coat sleeves, their serious expressions: Chaverte Rivka Shapira, Chaverte Shulamis Garber, Chaverte Malka Averbukh, and the great beauty, Bluma Fabrikant. All dead.

  Where were they in the record of history? None would be found in the revisionist volumes of the émigrés’ Party Stories. In their place would be complaints over congestion in communal apartments, shortages of chocolate and of denim pants, repression of Zionist-nationalist organizations, and holy outrage over an anti-Semitic taunt shouted by some drunken bus driver.

  5

  Before they left Riga, Alec arranged for Polina to take a three-day immersive course given by an old classmate of his from the English school. The class was conducted in secrecy in the man’s apartment. There were six students, none of whom spoke any English. But for those three days, they were forbidden to speak any other language. The only Russian they heard came from some Soviet instructional recordings. Of those three days, Polina retained little more than two phrases. One was:

  Did you go on a motoring tour of England?

  The other was:

  Why not visit the exhibition of national economy achievements of the USSR?

  In Rome, she enrolled in a language class offered by a Jewish vocational agency. A young American girl taught the class, and she spent the first lesson demonstrating the differences between British and American English. At the end of the class, everyone came away feeling like they knew even less than when they went in.

  To help her with her studies, Alec and Lyova took to speaking English in the mornings before Alec left for work. Lyova had learned some English in Israel because his civil engineering firm had had a German client. In Rome, he read the Herald-Tribune and The Times of London.

  Good morning, Al.

  Good morning, Leo.

  Good morning, Paula.

  Would you like a cup of coffee?

  Yes, thank you.

  It is a nice day.

  The sun is shining.

  Please open the window.

  There are many people in the street.

  There are men, women, and children.

  There is a cat.

  Rome has many cats.

  Rome has many beautiful women.

  But they are not more beautiful than Paula.

  Polina had always been a good student, but she found herself struggling with the language. Alec encouraged her, saying that even his mother’s cousin in Chicago, barely five feet tall, was learning the language. Everyone learned it. Millions of imbeciles spoke it every day. Lyova said that, in his experience, the most important thing in learning a language was confidence. Intelligent people who doubted themselves often had it the hardest.

  —How were you in school? Lyova asked.

  —In what sense?

  —Did you worry very much?

  —Only at the very end.

  —The exams? That’s nothing. Everybody worries about those.

  —I might have worried more.

  —Why?

  —I didn’t want to be separated from my boyfriend.

  —And what happened?

  —I scored well. We weren’t separated. Instead we got married.

  —Later divorced.

  —Yes, it might have been better if we’d been separated. But I didn’t think that at the time.

  The truth was that, at the time, she’d wanted desperately to fail and be sent away to some far-flung region where Maxim would never be expected to visit, but she was disgusted with that part of her and wanted to renounce it, smother it, seal it inside a vault of constancy. And so she’d worried about scoring well enough to secure a placement in Riga. As she waited for her grades, she resolved that, if they were insufficient, she wouldn’t simply abide by the decision but would do whatever she could to steer her life onto its proper course.

  She went to her father, something she’d never done before. He had just then returned from Gdansk. She waited until her mother and sister were away from the apartment and then told him—careful to keep any hint of plaintiveness out of her voice—that there was something she needed to discuss.

  Her father sat at the kitchen table in a wash of afternoon sunlight. He had covered the table with newspaper and spread out upon it the disassembled parts of a hair dryer that had recently stopped working. He’d brought the hair dryer back from East Germany several years earlier as a present for Polina’s mother and it had become one of the family’s most prized possessions. They didn’t know anybody else who had one. Polina’s mother used it sparingly for herself and for the girls, and, occasionally, she loaned
it to some of their neighbors. Every now and then Polina would answer the door and discover a woman with her head wrapped in a towel. Another family might have turned this into a small venture and charged for it, but in their home even to intimate such a thing was an abomination. Sometimes a neighbor brought a jar of preserves or a tin of sprats, but only out of the goodness of her heart. When the dryer broke down, another neighbor, an electrician, would conjure the necessary resistor or fuse for which Polina’s father paid the designated market price—not a kopek less—always in front of witnesses and always with a signed receipt. Her father would then go about fixing the dryer himself. Tinkering with devices and gadgets was the closest thing he had to a hobby. Like others of his generation, he possessed a deep reverence for mechanical things. With Polina’s graduation approaching, her mother had hoped he might get the dryer back into working order so that she could set her own and the girls’ hair for the ceremony.

  The hair dryer and the graduation ceremony provided Polina with a convenient way to broach the topic. She tried to frame her words as directly as possible. At first, it seemed as if her father didn’t quite hear her, as if he was too immersed in the coils and circuits of the hair dryer, but eventually, as she persevered, he turned his attention to her.

  —You have always been an excellent student. You will do fine, he said.

  —I don’t think so.

  —Nothing comes of this sort of talk.

  —I don’t want to be separated from Maxim, Polina said, conviction trailing a half step behind her words.

  —Nobody is forcing you to separate.

  —If we’re sent to different places we won’t be able to get married.

  —This is a pointless conversation, her father said evenly. I’m surprised at you.

  His attention drifted back down to his repair work. He had issued what amounted to his harshest rebuke: the suggestion that Polina was behaving in a way unbefitting “her father’s daughter.”

  —I just thought if something could be done, Polina said.

  —I’ve heard enough.

  Polina knew not to raise the subject again. In the succeeding days her father acted as if the conversation had never happened. When he was home, he kept tinkering with the hair dryer until, one morning, Polina awoke to the sound of its shrill whine. Later that same day, as her father was heading out the door, he called Polina over and somberly told her that there would be a position for her at the VEF radio factory. Before Polina could collect herself to thank him, he was already down the hall.

  In the end, both her panic and her father’s intervention proved unwarranted. When the grades were announced, Polina discovered that she had finished in the top quartile. Her results guaranteed her a position in Riga. Now, if VEF hired her, nobody could challenge the impartiality of their decision. The outcome suited everyone. With her grades, she had vindicated herself before her father; meanwhile, without suffering any adverse effects, her father had been able to demonstrate his love for her.

  On the day of her graduation ceremony she sat with her parents and Nadja under the glass roof of the university’s great hall. According to custom, her father held a bouquet of flowers—white, fragrant calla lilies. Polina’s hair, freshly shampooed and styled by her mother, shone brilliantly, as if radiating intellectual light. She wore a new dress of luminous green cloth—the material purchased by her mother and then sewn by a seamstress after a French pattern. Polina was the first in their family to receive a university degree. Anything her father had learned after eight grades of primary school came courtesy of the Soviet navy. Her mother had come from a small Byelorussian town where the pursuit of higher education was rare for anyone, and particularly for women. When Polina heard her name called, she rose from her chair and felt herself propelled to the stage as if by the cumulative force of her parents’ dreams.

  In the evening, Polina joined her classmates for a party at Café Riga in the old city. All over town, graduates were dancing and toasting their student days goodbye. A number of her classmates brought their instruments and played the songs of the Beatles, Raymond Pauls, and Domenico Modugno. Glasses of champagne were circulated, and they all dropped the diamond-shaped lapel pins they’d been awarded into them, then downed the contents in one swallow, leaving the shiny blue enamel glinting between their teeth. At around ten o’clock, Maxim left his class’s party and joined Polina at Café Riga. When she spotted him in the crowd, she was surprised by how glad she was to see him. A warm, proprietary feeling bloomed inside her. This man—blinking through the haze of cigarette smoke, intently searching the room for her, rubbing absently at the scar above his eyebrow, where, as a boy, a schoolmate had hit him with a badminton racquet—this was her man. Out of the many, he was hers, and this simple recognition was enough to endear him to her. Flushed with optimism, alcohol, and affection, Polina fell into his arms and swept him onto the dance floor. Her classmates offered them a steady flow of champagne, vodka, and wine. Before long, Maxim forgot his usual reserve, loosened his tie, and danced with uninhibited, clumsy exuberance as the band played the Beatles’ “Get Back.”

  At dawn, as they weaved together along the cobblestones of the old city, Maxim proposed and Polina accepted. Their future seemed as assured as a future could be. Like Polina, Maxim had scored well on his exams and had his choice of prestigious factories. She would take the job at VEF, while he would take a position at the highly regarded Popov Radiotechnika. They would marry, move in with his parents, file a request with the municipal housing authority for a separate apartment, and start a family. They would embark upon productive and satisfying adult lives.

  6

  When he was not taking his walks or reading the newspapers at Club Kadima, Samuil busied himself with writing the true account of his life and times. He began with the private intention of having Alec translate and submit his biographical statement to HIAS and the American embassy. As he wrote, he clung to the guiding principle that his work would have corrective and instructive value, and in this way he granted himself license to dwell upon his personal history. For hours each day he settled conspicuously at a card table in the sitting room and demanded not to be disturbed. Nevertheless, his grandsons scampered through the room with impunity and his wife and daughter-in-law often interrupted him with their comings and goings between the bedroom and the kitchen.

  To his wife’s inquiry about what he was doing, he said, I’m doing what I’m doing.

  While he wrote, he could almost fool himself into believing that he was again in the company of the beloved dead. For those hours, he strongly felt their essence. The feeling evoked in him the deepest regret. It wasn’t that he wanted to join them in the grave or return to the past so much as he wished that they were still living. Had they lived, Samuil thought, things would have been different. But the best and the bravest never lasted long. This was a natural law, like gravity or the seasons, and he had seen it confirmed thousands of times at the front. As the frontoviks liked to say: Our lives are like a child’s shirt, short and covered in shit.

  Aside from writing his biography, taking his walks, and reading the newspaper at Club Kadima, there was nothing else Samuil cared to do. Every day, Emma took the boys to learn Hebrew songs. At Club Kadima, a young American with a guitar led a children’s choir. Emma also went with Rosa to hear lectures, mostly by representatives of Sachnut, the Israeli agency. Rosa returned from these lectures spinning Zionist fairy tales. Only in Israel would they be able to work according to their professions. Only in Israel would they receive decent housing. Only the Israeli state would provide for their welfare. Soviet media exaggerated Israeli hardships, when in fact Israel was an immigrants’ paradise.

  From time to time, Emma would try to interest him in some activity or event.

  —I am worried about you, she said. Always by your lonesome.

  —Do you hear me complaining?

  —It’s not healthy.

  He felt healthy enough. And he certainly couldn’t see how sitting
for an hour listening to some pampered American strumming Hebrew songs on his guitar would be beneficial to his health. The same applied to a lecture encouraging Jewish religious practice by the resident Lubavitcher, imported kosher from Brooklyn, a pale young man with a patchy, wispy beard.

  —A very intellectual and pious man, Emma said preemptively, in the rabbi’s defense.

  In the end, he had surprised her by announcing that he would like to attend the screening of the American movie based on Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye der milkhiker. He had seen the postings up at Club Kadima as he was in the early stages of his biographical statement, very much at the point in his life when he would have gone with his mother and brother to see the Tevye play performed by Rogozna’s amateur Yiddish theater troupe. This was in 1919 or 1920, when he was six or seven years old. But he remembered the experience very clearly. Once a month, as a treat, his mother would take him and Reuven to the theater. The old synagogue, converted by the Jewish Section of the Communist Party into a social club and theater, was always filled to capacity. It was the only place where he could see his mother smile and hear her laugh. During the performances he watched her as much as he did the stage.

  At the end of the evening, Rogozna’s principal actor, Zachar Kahn, the former ritual slaughterer, would make a point of coming up to Samuil’s mother and asking her opinion of the show. He always referred to her respectfully as “the widow Eisner.”

  —If I may inquire, how did the widow Eisner enjoy the show?

  He struck a memorable figure, Zachar Kahn, a tall man, almost two meters, with a black eye-patch, a slashing scar down his right cheek, and the sleeve pinned where his right arm used to be.

  Before the Civil War, Zachar Kahn’s slaughterhouse had been located a few doors away from their house. Because the light in the slaughterhouse was not always adequate, he would sometimes use the Eisners’ kitchen to inspect the lungs of a cow or a sheep he had butchered. The sight of Zachar Kahn on their snowy doorstep, a giant man holding a steaming wax-paper bundle, was one of Samuil’s earliest memories. He and Reuven had both been fascinated by Zachar Kahn, and scurried around him as he unwrapped and scrutinized the glossy, brownish organs. He would let the boys draw near so that they could peer at the grotesque and otherworldly things that made life possible and which everyone—from a mouse to a man—had pumping and sloshing around in the dark hollows under his skin. Grotesque to the untrained eye, the organs were in actuality perfect in aspect and form, Zachar would explain. They were the handiwork of God Himself. If flawed, the flaw, too, was part of His design. Though if they were flawed, then the animal’s flesh could not be eaten. Lifting the lungs to his mouth, Zachar Kahn would blow to see if they would inflate.