Those are the facts.
But the facts could never capture Nerchinsk’s poetry. How exquisitely Nerchinsk sulks upon its gray and sorrowful bluff. How shafts of sun burst through the thick, low blanket of cloud above the village like stabs of hope from heaven. How the entire town seems to sigh as it overlooks the river and the bleak, endless flatlands. How a southern breeze carries odors in from Beijing: duck fat, tangerine peels, industry, and opiates. How the washed-out colors of Nerchinsk are more beautiful than they should be: the land the gray of a gun, the sky a leaden violet, the shadows of the cavernous mines as dark and forbidding as the holes within them. How the mud-soaked roads are dotted with meandering cows and wild dogs, with no visible signs of human life save the prison in the distance, with its barracks, officer residencies, and dilapidated local shanty huts made of clapboard. And all of it sitting on top of the salt that lurks within the depths of the soil, fathoms beneath the ground.
This land contained Perchik and that was a beauty unlike any she had ever known. Nerchinsk was beautiful to Hodel from the moment she first laid eyes on it because, for Hodel, that’s where Perchik was.
Hodel had already traveled 3,500 kilometers by prisoner train from Omsk, a few hundred more with other convicts and wives by carriage, but now they drove east, farther than she believed was possible, through the low, undulating taiga, past endless miles of feral country. At ten o’clock on this particularly cold morning, the carriage crested the rolling hills of the country, and Hodel—who was chained to the prison carriage that had brought her from the train station—laid her eyes upon the village of Nerchinsk for the very first time.
She saw before her the outlines of a village composed of perhaps two hundred ramshackle dwellings, all built of damp black wood, hunched beside the river along the vast open land. Far off, the mounds of the mining assembly were just barely visible.
The carriage halted—horses blustered, clouds of exertion puffing from their mouths, hooves sticking into the frozen mud. Foreign-faced workers entered and removed her chains.
“Now, now, steady, all of you,” said one of the men. “Nothing to get excited about.”
But there was.
Hodel emerged from the back of the carriage rubbing her newly freed arms with relief. She kept her eyes upon the horizon, searching wildly for his form and face.
Then, revealed from the mists of the morning, she saw him. Their eyes locked. “Perchik!” she called out.
They ran, tearing toward each other, across the bluff, the ice and wind and frozen mud.
They knew that all the days behind them had merely led to this very moment. They had gone forward in the trust that they would be reunited somehow in one world or another. It had been close to eighteen months, and now, at last they had found each other.
“My girl!”
They were free. Finally, they could live together in the present. This was a release from every kind of prison.
“I thought you were dead, my beloved,” she said as Perchik swept her into his arms.
There would come a day when Hodel would have names for every color of sky and mud, knowledge of every scent of rain or road or mineral that came from the horizon. She would know where each dog slept, and how to read the clouds, the waters of the Nercha, the scents that wafted upward from the Orient. She would have carnal knowledge of every quality of earth beneath her boots, and know the color and angles of every ray of exquisite, spectral Siberian light. But today? Today, there was only him.
She lifted her head. Beheld his face. Touched the soft place beneath his eyes. Vowed never to lose him again.
Through the darkest days in prison, through shorn heads and hunger, through violations, abuse, hopelessness, and deepest despair— through all of it, they had been moved by the power of their belief that they would have this moment. This singular moment of unparalleled joy.
“Perchik.” She wept, her head pressed against his like two hands in prayer. “Perchik.”
Nothing in this world was worth having that had not been so fought for.
And there, with no division between his spirit and her own, she felt the pounding of his heart as he felt her quiver in his arms, responding in the same instant.
He leaned farther into her, his arms wrapped around the entirety of her frame, enveloping her as if to fuse with her being for eternity—as indeed they both wished to do in this moment and evermore.
“You are home now,” he whispered, hesitating only an instant before leaning in to kiss her mouth, full and eager, for the first time in their life together. It was a triumph of such intense ecstasy that no entwining promise, no ardent avowal, no other utterance of devotion would ever be necessary.
So, without a care in the world—not for the cold, for the filth, or for propriety—at long last, they held and held and held. . . .
BOOK TWO
The Life and Times of Reb Perchik
I am that I am.
—Exodus
seventeen
THE DECISION TO HAVE POLITICAL PRISONERS WORK THE MINES was made out of both necessity and foolishness—for where better to discuss rogue politics with like-minded thinkers than deep within the cavernous infinity of Siberian darkness? This was katorga, the system of frozen work camps in the Russian Empire, which had settled into its shameless stride. Throngs of criminals branded with their crime were being flung across the Urals in chains to labor the land— generally for mining lead ore, salt, and silver, but also in foundries, as well as coal and mineral-processing factories. Many said the revolution began here.
This particularly brutal camp was among the most remote prison camps in European Russia, located in the Nerchinsk okrug, or district, of Transbaikalia, between the Shilka and Argun Rivers, near the border to Mongolia. It had been in operation since the 18th century, and since the establishment of the Nerchinsk Katorga Administration, it had been reserved for keeping political prisoners as far away from Europe as possible. These men—at least in the eyes of the law—were essentially dead.
Perchik lifted his face to the sun and wiped his brow; his skin was sore and tight, hands cracked, lips flaked and bleeding, skin falling away—all from the salt in the mine’s atmosphere. Salt in his hair, in the very tissues of his lungs, filling his nose with a stinging, dry agony. He exhaled and began again.
“Perchik!” came a raspy voice from down the shaft. “Do you have a sip, brother?”
Perchik did indeed. Liquid was at a premium here (and liquid that would not freeze was more valuable than gold). He rummaged through his knapsack and slid the regulation flask down the shaft, where a withering hand reached out from the darkness. “Thank you, brother,” the voice said. Perchik took up his pick and began again.
Mining was harrowing. It was more than the jagged bite of the Siberian elements. More than the backbreaking physical labor performed in a shroud of darkness. No. It was a torture of the mind. A wretchedly lonely, mind-numbing, insanity-inducing task. And if you were very lucky, you could avoid what was cryptically called “the preservation” and escape from Nerchinsk alive. The leading cause of death was not freezing, malnutrition, exhaustion, or starvation—the murderer of Nerchinsk was dehydration. Assignment to the salt mines was, more often than not, a death sentence.
But all these burdens were lightened by the presence of his wife. Hodel was assigned her own tasks with the other women throughout the day and remained with him in the lightly boarded barracks at night, its floors mostly permafrost throughout unending winters, full of plunging temperatures and howling blizzards. They shared a room with ten others, who allowed them the privacy of a drawn curtain in the corner of the room, where they fashioned a provisional home for themselves.
He had been in Nerchinsk for over two years now. Hodel had arrived sixteen months after him, a faded shadow of herself, yet steely and undaunted. The journey itself—for many it took as long as two years— was enough to kill a man; and it did, by the thousands. The transit prisons were racked with typhus, scurvy, small
pox, and syphilis.
Every day of the last eight months they had been together in this place. Perchik marveled at what Hodel had endured to be with him. He could not believe she had come at all.
He ran his tongue over his broken lips and groaned. The thought of what she had abandoned made him ache far worse than any corporeal abuse he could ever endure in the mines. She is a pillar of strength, he thought. Well, if only my uncle could see me now.
To say things had not gone according to plan would be putting it mildly.
There was never a moment in Reb Gershom’s long life that ever indicated he was anything but an elderly man. His mouth was tight and void of color, and his hair had turned white long before old age. A learned man—who, despite his Jewishness, had attended university at the age of just sixteen—Gershom was always revered as tremendously intelligent, though somewhat overly serious.
Gershom’s younger sister, Malkha, on the other hand, had run away from their Orthodox community at the age of twenty-five, after she and her husband had endured the loss of their second child in under three years. Shortly after her departure, her husband hanged himself in the back room of their general store. No one blamed him. He was distraught beyond reason, and her abandonment was a loss too great to bear. It was the greatest scandal the community had endured in decades.
More than any feeling of personal remorse, Gershom felt the situation reflected badly upon his name. He cursed his sister for blackening his reputation with scandal. Blessed be to Him our parents are no longer alive, he thought, and that no children were involved.
But Malkha—blissfully unaware of the scene she left behind her— joined secular society with pleasure. Her body, her mind, even her hair was free for the first time in her life. She cut off ties to her past, changed her name, and threw herself into the throngs of bohemian society with lust and passionate abandon. When she died giving birth to an illegitimate son, the infant was born to a woman without regret, for he had come into this world the child of a contented, liberated woman.
Gershom, for his part, did not mourn her departure. Yet he never anticipated that God’s punishment for Malkha’s sins would so profoundly impact him. His sentence came four years later, announced by a knock on his door.
A weedy-looking woman stood on his doorstep with a young boy.
“He came to us as an illegitimate infant with this around his neck,” she said, presenting Gershom with a necklace that featured the Star of David. “M. Tselen is engraved on the back of it, sir—dead in childbirth. Authorities believe her to be your sister.”
Gershom sniggered. He found it rather fitting that God should punish her wickedness with a suitably grisly premature death; he was pleased with the evidence of the Lord’s sense of perpetual justice.
The woman explained that the vastly overcrowded Terestchenko orphanage would no longer look after Malkha’s boy because the child had living relatives—namely, Gershom.
“That’s why I’m here, sir,” said the woman with a hint of impatience. As soon as Terestchenko had discovered Gershom’s residence, they promptly sent the boy to Gershom’s home, accompanied by a representative to inform him of his social responsibility.
“It is the godly thing to do,” said the representative, pushing the boy toward his unfamiliar uncle.
“Do not speak to me of God!” raged Gershom. “What am I supposed to do with the boy?”
“That’s not my concern, sir,” said the representative, staring at Gershom with the pale gray pallor of an undertaker. “I’m not taking the boy with me. We simply cannot keep a child who has living relatives. If you don’t look after him, you’ll just have to cast him out onto the street altogether—and what would your Lord God think of that?”
Gershom shifted his eyes downward. He glared at the boy with deep disgust.
“He’s a good boy, sir. Obedient, well-mannered, bright. He’ll be a good aide to you! Certainly no bother.”
“Well, if it is the will of God,” conceded Gershom.
The representative smiled, then leaned down and spoke in the boy’s ear. “You hear that?” she whispered. “You are not wanted here, boy. So watch yourself.”
The boy kept his eyes on the floor and nodded obediently, clutching his cap.
Reluctantly, Gershom ushered the orphan into the house. “Come in then, boy.”
Thus their life together began.
eighteen
STALE WATER, HEAVY, MASCULINE SWEAT, RAW FISH, OVERBOILED cabbage, and spoiled kasha—the stench of the dining hall was insidious and distinct. Here the prison’s daily workers gathered for discussion and release, and cramped over familiarities.
Prisoners woke with the sun. In the haze of the dawn, they convened for breakfast, then reported to their designated posts. They worked twelve-hour days without reprieve, their gray countenances rimmed with ice, salt, and tears too frozen to fall.
At every hour of the day and night, Perchik and the other felons were under the constant surveillance of the overseer and the soldiers in charge. But even under these watchful eyes, Perchik had managed to gather a motley crew of exilic companions. They were all assigned to the same rotation, and, for better or worse, they were fated to share their days with one another.
The three and a half hundred convicts of Nerchinsk were almost entirely male. Alongside the violent, the brutish, and the common thieves, some men had been condemned to exile for a variety of baffling offenses: prizefighting, begging with false distress, vagrancy, and taking snuff (a crime often punished by ripping out the offender’s septum), not to mention illicit tree-felling and fortune-telling. This river of unfortunates was purified by the political exiles: cultured dissidents, Polish revolutionaries, aging Decembrists, and aristocratic liberals with a disgust for the autocracy.
But it did not matter why they were there. The prisoners rarely knew the crimes of the men working beside them. There existed a natural balance within the prison’s barriers in which each of the men were on miserably equal footing.
“There will always be a man with more than another,” explained Perchik. “And not just financially, but more intelligence, more strength, even more beauty. This proves the existence of a universal law of unevenness. This is the law that stands in the way of our social equality, and it reveals itself most sharply in backward countries such as our own. Yet under the whip of necessity, our culture is compelled to make dramatic leaps. But how do we reach the cynics as well as the idealists? That is the practical question.”
These political discussions were a daily occurrence, of course— though kept carefully beneath the noses of the guards.
“I do not disagree with that,” said a bristling, bespectacled graduate student across the table.
“We must outsmart this inequality,” Perchik continued. “Overcome it with a social pragmatism. Change now—but with stability. Change bit by bit. A state of perpetual revolution.”
“Ah,” groaned the companion across the table, “a Trotskyite. I should’ve known.”
“A pragmatist.” Perchik smiled.
“I don’t understand how you can dismiss two-stage theory and call yourself a comrade. It is like this meat without salt—tasteless,” the student replied.
This graduate student was Dmitri Pavlovich Petrovsky: thinker, musician, and premature curmudgeon. Dmitri had been born with twines of music lodged tight around his heart. Like rusted barbed wire, they clutched at him, and the harder he struggled, the deeper the barbs would cut. The wounds festered, encased in the pus of his dulled imagination.
In the time the men had known him, none had ever seen him laugh. Life was serious business for Dmitri Petrov, and being convicted for treachery was no laughing matter. A shy man of extraordinary height, it was precisely his shyness, seriousness, and towering physical measurement that made him, above all other qualities and skills, a truly exceptional cellist.
Dmitri Petrov hailed from the tenements of St. Petersburg, his parents leading their family of locally celebrated folk musici
ans. He held reverence for a different variety of music than his parents—classical (far too refined for the folk-based roots he grew up absorbing from his family). But coming from a family of folk musicians in a city as bright as Petersburg made no difference whatsoever to a boy so innately fraught by the simultaneous demands and admonitions of a world in which he felt he did not belong. Depression blanketed Dmitri from the time he could remember, though his family was quick to dismiss it all as family flair or histrionics.
“Nyezhnaya Mitya!” they had said all his life. “Tender Mitya!” They did not—they could not—know what to do with him. Nor did he know what to do with himself.
Dmitri’s broad shoulders hunched over a lanky body as if to protect the heart that ached within. His face was beautiful and surrounded by a mop of dark, messy curls. Large expressive hands with long fingers were often curled into fists and plunged deep within his pockets, or else wringing, itching to be used to play his cello. His small but ferociously intelligent eyes, shielded by the spectacles he’d worn since childhood, held all the world at arm’s length. He tagged along with his family, of course, to play in the city venues with them—folk songs soared and crowds cheered as his father led with accordion, his mother on balalaika, and his sisters on violins. He was grateful to his family for the instrument itself (handed down from his grandfather) and for the ability to play it. But his family, however musical, could not hear his music at all.
After Anatevka Page 9
