The Free World

by David Bezmozgis

  —You know, you really are like a darling little doll, Olya teased.

  —I don’t like being called that, Alec said.

  —No? Why not? What’s wrong with being a darling little doll? Some people would say it was nice.

  —Not me, Alec said.

  —That’s too bad, Olya said.

  —Why? Alec asked.

  —Do you like girls? Olya said.

  —Of course I like girls, Alec said. I’m not queer.

  —Well, there are lots of girls who like dolls.

  —So what? Alec said.

  —So, Olya grinned, would the little doll like to come with me to see The Tramp with Nargis and Raj Kapoor?

  Before they set off, Olya safely stashed Alec’s bicycle in the courtyard of her building. Then she took Alec by the hand and led him down Krisjan Baron Street to Perses Street and then over to Suvorova, where the Palladium movie theater stood.

  Since Alec hadn’t planned on going to a movie, he had almost no money on him, but Olya paid for him and also bought him an ice cream. On their way to the theater and also while climbing the steps to the balcony, Olya talked about her love of Indian movies and of The Tramp in particular. Already, she had seen it six times. Once with her mother, four times by herself, and once with Karl. She’d memorized nearly all of the dialogue and knew the lyrics to all of the songs. On Suvorova Street, as they had approached the Palladium, she sang one of the ballads, releasing Alec’s hand long enough to demonstrate some dance steps—prancing backwards and making big, sweeping flourishes with her hands. Onlookers gawked at her, a few smiled, more raised their eyebrows disdainfully, but if Olya noticed she clearly didn’t care.

  The tickets Olya purchased were in the balcony, in the front row, at the railing, high above the gallery, from where they could peer down upon the scattered people below. In those moments before the movie started, Alec became aware of the magnitude of what he was doing. He still didn’t know where it would lead, but even if nothing else happened he felt that he had crossed a boundary. His parents didn’t know where he was. He was in a movie theater alone with an older girl—a girl who happened also to be his brother’s girlfriend. He had lied to her, and he anticipated that he would lie to his parents and to Karl when he got home. He had a sense of all of this, an intimation of significance, but he couldn’t have formulated it in words. Later he came to see this moment as the one in which he took his biggest stride out onto the promontory of life.

  The movie, as Alec recalled, was incredibly long. For its entire length he concentrated far less on what was happening on-screen and much more on what was happening in the span of centimeters that separated him from Olya. He followed her silent example, and stared raptly at the screen while his hand, in incursions measured in fingerbreadths, crept up her arm and across into the folds of her strange garment. He didn’t even know where his hand was going, but like an advancing army, it took whatever territory was conceded to it.

  When Raj Kapoor performed the film’s signature song, “A Tramp, I Am,” Alec’s hand gained Olya’s breast. As Kapoor sang, Alec felt for the first time a nipple, like an independent living thing, grow rigid under his touch. This was part of the great tantalizing secret guarded by the adult world. It was the forbidden thing paraded around in plain sight. Parents or teachers would describe the function of a locomotive, a diode, or a molecule, but wouldn’t say a word about what was going on between everyone’s legs. This knowledge you had to acquire on your own. Often as not, in the dark—possibly even while an Indian actress executed a bizarre, jerky, melodramatic dance around the mast of a sailboat. I wish the moon would look away / while I make love to him, Nargis sang, which Alec took as encouragement to allow his hand to explore further, drifting down to Olya’s thigh. Once there, he became indecisive, unsure if he could proceed. But then, with her own hand, Olya reached down and guided Alec through a gap in the fabric and onto the warm, faintly moist cotton of her underpants. She raised the elastic where it hugged her thigh, drew Alec’s hand into the opening she’d created, and left him there to make sense of the soft, mossy, alien landscape.

  When the film was over, they walked together back to Olya’s building. Hours had passed and the streets had assumed their evening character. As before, Olya held Alec’s hand and rattled on about the movie as if nothing more had happened. In her courtyard, she went directly to the spot where she’d stashed Alec’s bicycle and wheeled it out for him. Alec kept waiting for her to acknowledge what had transpired between them, to utter some pledge or promise of a future meeting. But she gave not the slightest indication that this was on her mind, and instead made Alec wonder if she’d been in some kind of trance during the movie and couldn’t remember what she’d allowed him to do. The thought that he might never be able to touch Olya again sickened and astonished him. Even though he knew he shouldn’t, he couldn’t stop himself from offering to return the following Sunday to see the movie a second time.

  —Sorry, Olya said, today was the last day. Tomorrow they start The Cranes Are Flying.

  And that was it. Olya went into her building and Alec cycled home in a state of anguish and reverie—the paramour’s companion feelings. When he came home, he sensed that he was no longer the same person. Climbing the stairs to his apartment, he felt imbued with a new knowledge. And as he readied himself for the inevitable beating from Samuil, he consoled himself with the thought that no amount of beating could revoke what he’d learned or undo what he’d done.

  12

  My dearest Brigitte,

  It was wonderful to get your letter and to hear your voice again, if only on the page.

  It’s strange that you would have seen Maxim on that day, though not so strange to hear that he’s looking well. Perhaps he’s found a new woman to take care of him, someone more suitable than I was. I’m sure there’s more than one who would leap at the chance for the apartment alone.

  Here, we continue to wait for our interview with the Canadian embassy. Everyone we’ve spoken to says that we should expect to spend the fall and winter in Italy. And maybe even the spring. I know that this doesn’t sound like a horrible predicament to be in, and yet I still haven’t quite adjusted to the idea. There had been uncertainty every step of the way getting to Rome, and I’d somehow expected that once we got here everything would be made clear. In any case, there’s nothing we can do but wait, and, as everyone tells me (including you), make the most of it.

  You’d be surprised how I’ve made the most of it so far. For five consecutive Sundays, Igor and I went to the Americana to try to sell all the ridiculous things we’d brought with us. I’ve managed to sell nearly everything we brought, including a few things for other people—apparently, I’d developed a reputation. Now that everything has been sold, I have gone looking for other work. Igor told me that I didn’t need to, in fact, he encouraged me not to. He thought I should just be a woman of leisure, a tourist in Rome. He says that we can survive perfectly well on the money we get from the Jewish Agency and from his job at HIAS.

  For one week, I tried, but I just don’t have the right constitution for it. I went to beautiful tourist attractions and felt strangely out of place. I felt like a solitary person in a crowd. For the week that I was supposed to be a woman of leisure, I just wandered around the city feeling idle and aimless. I told Igor that he needed to recognize that he’d married an incorrigible proletarian.

  So, in short, I went looking for a job. Many Russians work here. Men like Igor, who speak English, get jobs with the Jewish agencies. Men who don’t speak English sometimes get work at construction sites. Others, like our roommate, give tours of Italy to émigrés. There are cultured women who take émigrés through museums and galleries in Rome. And there are also Italian shopkeepers who hire Russian girls to cater to their Russian clientele. The day before yesterday, Lyova introduced me and Igor to a shopkeeper he knows in Piazza Vittorio.

  We went at the end of the day, as the market was closing. I was nervous, as you can imagine.
Igor and I had made plans to meet Lyova in the Park Borghese and we waited for a half hour for him to show up. The Park Borghese is very big and we thought maybe he’d gotten lost, or that we were waiting for him in the wrong place. But just when I really started to despair, I spotted him from a distance, jogging toward us with a picket sign. He was coming from the Israeli embassy, where he and four or five others occasionally stage protests. In Hebrew, Italian, and English his sign read: “Israel, Let Your People Go!” Igor contended that the English had a grammatical error.

  The two of them alternated carrying this sign from the Park Borghese to Piazza Vittorio. It isn’t a short walk and it leads through the middle of the city. I think people took us for avantgarde street performers.

  The shopkeeper Lyova introduced me to is named Giovanni. He is probably in his fifties. His wife works with him. We were only able to exchange a few words, but they seemed like warm people. They sell leather goods for women and men—shoes and coats and even skirts. They’d hired a Russian woman once before, and Lyova has dealt with them and he says they are fair. Their shop is small and the salary they offered is modest, but I will get to keep a percentage of my sales. Honestly, I don’t anticipate that I’ll make much money. And Igor still believes that I’m foolish to take the job: Why would I choose to spend my days surrounded by cowhide when all the splendors of Rome are spread out before me? But it’s hard to explain to him that I miss order and I miss routine. For that I am prepared to forgo splendors. When Giovanni offered me the job I was so happy and grateful and relieved that I nearly gushed like a little girl. All I could think was that now when I woke up I would have someplace to go.

  Tomorrow will be my first day. Wish me luck! I will work in the afternoons on the days I have my English classes, and on the days when I don’t have classes I will work a full shift.

  And, by the way, since I know you’re wondering, the things that Igor disparaged as cowhide are actually quite stylish. It is customary, Lyova says, for employees to be given a discount. So, if nothing else, I might be able to pick up something nice for myself—and maybe even for you.

  13

  In the fall of 1942, when he was in hospital recuperating from a fractured skull, Samuil had had as his neighbor a young man named Srul Brunstein, a Yiddish poet dying of a lung wound. From his cot, Brunstein would recite his poems. There was one that Samuil remembered very distinctly because it captured his life the year he turned seventeen, after his uncle spat blood, became an invalid, and lost the bindery. He and Reuven went door to door, offering their services to anyone and everyone. They appealed to the relatives of boys they had known in Hashomer Hatzair and Betar. Most listened with half an ear and gazed over their heads. Some made symbolic gestures that consisted of a day or two of casual work, sweeping the floor or delivering packages.

  Kh’shlep arum a zak mit beyner, was how the poem went.

  I drag around a bag of bones

  In the streets to sell

  No one, however, wants to buy my wares,

  No one.

  Sorry, I did encounter a buyer once

  But he needs real bones, dead bones.

  Not like mine, alive and still in the flesh …

  Their uncle was confined first to his bed, and then, for six weeks, to a tuberculosis ward in Kemeri. Their cousins were still children, thirteen, twelve, and ten years old. Their aunt took in laundry, and their mother continued to work at the coat factory. Money needed to be found for food, for their uncle’s medicines and treatments, and for rent.

  For two weeks, in winter weather, using their bare hands, he and Reuven cleaned out the charred remains of a burned-down house. At night they returned to their cold apartment, covered in soot, their hands torn and numb, having eaten nothing all day but a piece of black bread. Their mother, herself exhausted from work, waited for them with a basin of water and a bar of soap.

  From dawn to dusk, in the worst weather, they managed in thin spring coats. Alongside them worked other members of the Jewish proletariat.

  The revolution was coming, nobody doubted this. The only question was when and what form it would take. The Zionist-Socialists believed in one revolution, the Revisionists in another, the Bundists in a third. Reuven and Samuil were careful to keep their views to themselves. They said only that the days of the old order were numbered.

  No longer able to afford the rent on two apartments, they moved back in with their uncle. Quarters that had been cramped when they were children were more cramped now that they were adults.

  For eight people, there were three beds. Samuil and Reuven shared a bed with Yaakov, their oldest cousin; their mother slept with the two girls, Rakhel and Fania; and their uncle and aunt had a bed to themselves. At one end of the apartment, farthest from the door, a corner was curtained off where a person could attend to his physical needs.

  Like cattle, Reuven said. But they knew of comrades who had it worse.

  Through one of these comrades, they eventually found their way to Baruch Levitan, who hired them as bookbinders for the workshop that dominated his apartment. Counting Baruch and themselves, there were seven bookbinders, squeezed together amid the Levitans’ beds and household implements. They would arrive for work just after dawn, so as not to squander any daylight. Most workdays lasted twelve hours, the last of which were conducted in near-darkness, since Baruch refused to switch on the electric lights until you could no longer tell Stalin from Trotsky.

  They spent no more time at home than was absolutely necessary. Only to sleep and to see their mother. Too proud, their uncle hadn’t reconciled himself to his illness or to his dependence on his nephews. He still tried to assert his control. Nothing they did was right. They did not lay tefillin or join him in morning prayers. They refused to keep the Sabbath, or go to synagogue on the holidays. They broke with Betar. They dropped any pretense of minding him.

  Instead, they spent many evenings with their old neighbor, Eduards. Through him they were able to meet non-Jewish workers, Latvian Communists. It was also there, through Eduards’s daughters, that they continued their studies. The same daughter who had tutored Reuven in Latvian loaned them the writings of Thomas Mann, Maxim Gorky, and Romain Rolland. She also schooled them in the international language of Esperanto. She used primers in combination with issues of Sennaciulo, a weekly journal whose title meant “Nationless.”

  Later, they continued independent of her, and to the consternation of Baruch Levitan, they practiced the language at work.

  Kioma horo estas nun, Reuveno?

  Estas jam tagmezo kaj kvarno. Kial vi volas scii, Samuilo? Cu vi malastas?

  Mi sentas etan malaston, jes.

  Cu vi volas mangi ion?

  Mangeti, jes. Mi certe ne deziras grandan tagmanon.

  Kien ni iru, do?

  La kafejon ce la stratangulo? Sanjas al mi, ke gi estas malmultekosa.

  Ni iru tien. Verdire, mi tre malsatas! *

  Many nights they slept only a few hours. But such was the life of the revolutionary. In biographical accounts of Lenin, it was said that he rarely slept more than four hours. This idea was reinforced in the speeches they heard given by Max Schatz-Anin, an old Bolshevik tortured and blinded by Denikin’s men during the Civil War. Of the few authentic Bolsheviks in Riga, he held claim to the most illustrious past. There was the torture and mutilation, and there was also his personal acquaintance, not only with Peters and Lacis-Sudrabs, but with Voroshilov and Kaganovich. Sometimes, after a full day of work at Levitan’s, they spent four or five more hours binding books and pamphlets at Schatz-Anin’s publishing house, Arbeter-Heym.

  He and Reuven were nearly always together—in the dreary confines of Levitan’s workshop, at rallies, lectures, and cell meetings. They rose together in the morning and retired together at night—often falling into the bed already occupied by their cousin Yaakov. A cheerful young man, blessed with a head for numbers, he’d secured a position keeping the accounts for Vasserman, a successful linen broker. Vasserman paid poorly
and rarely said a kind word to Yaakov, but their uncle believed that Vasserman would be Yaakov’s salvation. Vasserman was in his sixties and had no male heir; certainly, their uncle believed, he was grooming Yaakov to succeed him in the business.

  Their cousin had little faith in Vasserman’s largesse, but he didn’t particularly care. Whereas Samuil and Reuven rejected Zionism, Yaakov had ardently embraced it. As soon as he was issued a certificate to enter Palestine, he would bid Vasserman, and Riga, and the rest of it goodbye. And though Samuil and Reuven derided Vasserman as the epitome of the preening bourgeois, Yaakov noted the man’s virtues. Once, for Purim, he’d presented Yaakov with a packet of Turkish cigarettes. Another time, he’d given Yaakov a bargain on an old phonograph. Yaakov loved music and, during his military service, he’d picked up the clarinet, just as Reuven had picked up the concertina. Samuil, who possessed no musical talent, had picked up only a high proficiency with the Browning M1919 machine gun.

  Both Yaakov and Reuven were partial to American “hot jazz”—chirpy, upbeat music. In a small clearing of floor space in front of the phonograph, Yaakov and Reuven would teach Rakhel and Fania how to execute the modern dance steps. Samuil could still picture them, vivid as life, in the sepia glow of the kerosene lamp, dancing to “Mister Brown,” one of his cousin’s favorite songs. The song was inane, and consisted of only one line, which was repeated by different voices in different accents and registers. Because there was so little to it, it had lodged in Samuil’s mind. For years, the words in the song were the only English words he knew.

  How do you do do, Mister Brown?

  How do you do do, Mister Brown?

  How do you do-do, do-do, do-do, do-do, Mee-ster Brown?

  Sitting on the bed, Samuil would watch his brother and his cousins, stepping happily and clumsily on the bare floorboards. Across the room, their mother and aunt would be watching as well.

  —When the revolution comes, Yaakov asked, will it be permissible for me to listen to “Mister Brown”?