After Anatevka

by Alexandra Silber

  But of course, that boundary made nearly every breathing man that stalked the grounds desire her all the more. Irina’s was the plight of all unclaimed women in the camp—no matter how untouchable, she was an ever-vulnerable walking target. The majority of women present were not convicts at all, but were the dobrovol’nye. Hodel first heard the term back at her sentencing in Omsk—dobrovol’nye, the voluntary wives. Those that chose. Like her.

  Marriage afforded Hodel status—something women such as Irina (no matter how vigilant the watch of her father) did not possess. Unmarried or “unspoken for” females were as exposed and as vulnerable as lambs, and known as “free girls.”

  Free girls? Hodel thought the first time she heard the term. Was there even such a thing?

  One day, while scouring the kitchen, Hodel overheard two guards speaking of Irina. Their voices wafted through the tiny window as they polished and re-laced their boots, the smoke of cigarettes floating up with their voices.

  “She can’t hold out forever, can she?” spoke the first. “Sooner or later someone ’as to get her.”

  “What’s the use, mate? What with ‘Daddy’s girl’ written all over her?” replied the second.

  “Ah, her skirt—it’s precious, after all.”

  “Precious, indeed.”

  Like practically everything, women were always in short supply in the Nerchinsk katorga and subsequently were bound to an elaborate underground bureaucracy, which determined a woman’s role within the myriad of camp gangs.

  “You know, it is not just the skirt, of course.”

  “No?” The guard sat there, a stroke of genuine wonder in his voice. “It is the girls themselves! Very useful. Great advantages to being female. Fuck ’em.”

  “Indeed!"

  Free girls were treated like collectibles, trading cards of the flesh. A camp “prostitute” was not like a whore in the outside world—she was bought for a price, then ostensibly belonged to the purchaser until she was traded, lost, or inherited, or her master was transferred to a different camp or otherwise disposed of. Upon such circumstances the girl would then simply submit to a new master. Men could possess only one girl at a time, so they took it very seriously. And the very conversation Hodel was overhearing served as proof that camp officials did not protect the women: they enabled their exploitation.

  “Someone’s gonna nab her, mate!” cackled the first guard. “Some lucky bloke’ll drag ’er out by one leg from the house ’e’s always ’iding ’er in and take ’er over a cart behind the kitchen.”

  “Well, I can’t hardly blame ’im,” said the second. “It’s a need, mate.” Free girls here existed only to satisfy. Such men learned this disdain from the womb.

  “I wish it weren’t a need, mate,” the second guard continued. “I wish I had no need to scratch the itch. But I can’t help it.”

  “Well, scratch what itches—that’s what I always say. Hey, you listenin’?” the first guard said, hitting the second square in his chest.

  “Yes! I am, yes!” the second guard replied, fending off the other with reciprocal blows to the back of the head.

  “What’s the matter?” the first guard said, laughing and continuing the beating. “You deaf?”

  “Oi! Stop it!”

  “Why you ’itting yourself?”

  “Hey! Fuck off, please! And stop gettin’ all flowery—the girls eat the very same runny soup.”

  Well. That was true as anything.

  Age, infirmity, and disfigurement—those were a free girl’s only protections, and even then there were no guarantees. The excessively old or excessively ugly free girls were of good fortune; they were protected from these fates. Competition for the beauties led to feuds that went far beyond the odd brawl; some grudges between men lasted years, even so long as to be passed from one generation to the next. Eventually every woman ended up in one protective arrangement or another—it was in her best interest to seek it out.

  But not Irina. The Gentleman did not see her as the world did, as the woman she was fast becoming. Irina was no free girl and never would be. Irina was the child he still wished her to be—and she would stay that way forever.

  A strange place to bring up a daughter. . . .

  “No, truly—the girls are far better at lookin’ after themselves. Plus they don’t need much food, so they don’t get the bloody scurvy.”

  There were unspoken rules too. There were no polygamous relationships, no prostitution rings, no groups of lovers. Female criminals could not be paired with “good men”—only the other way around. And though homosexuality in the men was forbidden, the homosexual women were always left alone. (Some of the men couldn’t have crossed those girls even if they wanted to.) This was their silent social code.

  “And they get all friendly among themselves—they ’elp one another. Brush each other’s hair. Lord, it is lovely!”

  There were also a handful of arrangements simply referred to as “camp marriages,” insinuating that the marriage was conditional to camp life. These relationships were more loyal (and more permanent) than a criminal “owning” a prostitute like a pack of cigarettes, but it was not sentimental. Marriage was serious, critical business. One man was brutally beaten for having relations with another convict’s wife. Whether a legal marriage had simply transferred geographically or had taken place within the camp, it did not matter—a marriage was a marriage, and it was sacred.

  thirty-two

  HODEL RETURNED THAT NIGHT TO FIND PERCHIK SLUMPED IN HIS chair, head buried in one hand, a telegram in the other. She gazed down upon his hands and saw the peeling skin and never-healing cracks—the roughness he claimed he never wanted to touch his wife with—and the milky white spots that had recently appeared on the beds of his fingernails. Perchik coughed and ran his fingers through thinning hair.

  He was ill. They knew it. The petrification was starting to take him. He would fight to the last. He coughed again; it felt as if his chest were filled with dirty air. Was this the residue of mining life finally filling him? Or just the bitter cold gripping him by the sternum? Or perhaps it was what he feared most: the presence of God appearing from the clouds, as He did to his ancient ancestors. But to punish him for all he had and had not done, God did not materialize before Perchik; he was strangling him from within. Could it be? He hacked once more and gasped for breath.

  “Perchik,” she said, “what is the matter?”

  Perchik remained motionless, unable to rise to her question, and so she took the telegram from his hand, read it, and knew for certain: Gershom was dead. His estate and entire amassed fortune had been left solely to his nephew, Perchik. It awaited him in Kiev.

  Perchik never thought about the Lord in the waking hours back in Kiev. In those early days of 1903, the Lord reminded him too much of Gershom. Gershom’s God was merciless and uncompromising, dictatorial and cruel; not at all the benevolent teacher, the Father Rabbi Syme had depicted Him to be.

  But dreams have a funny way of escorting one into the rich, darkened territories that a conscious mind has no desire to traverse in the light. A passing remark, a comment; dreams are an encumbrance upon one’s ingenuity to outsmart the kernels of truth. Invisible in the day, these truths appear at night like heavy-packed horses—blood beating hard through the veins about their necks, cargo on back, straining along the viscid, muddy fields of subconscious as one slumbers.

  “Uncle.”

  Perchik surrendered himself. For should he struggle, the muddy banks would only draw him deeper in.

  “Uncle . . .” It was merely a whisper.

  It was, of course, the scene he never spoke of. Never thought upon.

  At first Perchik beheld the scene from afar, an audience member rather than a player. Gershom withheld a silent sob. His shoulders heaved, his face tormented, a hand upon the edge of a gilded chair supporting a body turned toward the wall. He was recovering from devastation.

  “Uncle . . .” Perchik said again. This time the voice was not witnessed
but, indeed, his own.

  He was in the scene now—reliving it as one only can in a nightmare, the heat of his distress palpable as if happening in real time.

  This was the scene.

  The one that occurred moments after Gershom had rejected Perchik’s merger.

  The one with that word.

  Standing on the opposite side of the desk from his contorted uncle, he felt each endless layer of inexplicably heavy clothing—drenched and cold with perspiration—weigh upon him, heavy with a lifetime of washed-out expectations.

  “Uncle . . .”

  The air was thick. Neither man was able to process truth adequately, so they stayed still in their respective positions.

  “Perchik,” his uncle finally began, ready like a coiled snake, “your potential. It’s poverty. . . .” Gershom remained facing the wall, body held upright with a shocking strength of sheer will.

  “Uncle, please. Please, I beg you—”

  “Silence!” Gershom swiveled quickly, eyes ablaze. “You disgust me with your pandering repentance, boy.” Gershom coughed viciously, as if to clear away the mucus from his mind.

  An umbilical cord of desperation tied Perchik to this old man. The moment rang out—a moment of supreme choice. Would Perchik cut the cord, or hang himself with it?

  When he had recovered, Gershom narrowed his eyes and spoke again, voice malevolent.

  “I will not be taken advantage of. I will not stomach the humiliation of an ungrateful reprobate to whom I have the extraordinary misfortune of being related by blood. My sister filled me with identical rage. She blackened my name with identical infamy. But your vileness infects me as if it were my own. I will no longer endure it.” Gershom shrank even further into himself, becoming somehow more venomous and concentrated with every utterance. “What appalling vanity.”

  The world blurred and turned with a sickening speed—and at once Gershom began to laugh.

  “Really, you are so unclean and disappointing, all I can do is laugh,” he said, a disturbing sting in his feeble voice. “It is not a lack of empathy! I am entitled. Everything I have sacrificed! I deserve your devotion. Do you not see that you are an extension of my hard-won self?”

  Perchik willed him to explain; to apologize for a lifetime of withheld love. Love as counted, measured, and locked away, like every coin in every one of his wretched accounts.

  I have worked solidly for you all the years of my life. A lifetime of indentured servitude in which I was denied every kindness, every opportunity for growth, learning, and affection; all to serve your grandiose image of your own worth.

  “How you hate me, Uncle.”

  “Yes, boy, it is true.”

  Perchik cried out, his face swollen, eyes bloody with disbelief.

  “Please,” Gershom continued, shaking his head. “You are tethered to me, boy. Try to deny it. Try to be courageous enough to face the world on your own. Without the excuse of Gershom. It is lonely out there without your excuses.”

  A revolting grin emerged on Gershom’s face.

  “My boy. What an imbecile you are. For all your genius, you have no sense. Let Uncle Gershom teach you something once and for all: We do not come into the world full of love, my boy; we come in with an insatiable hunger for it. There’s a difference. . . .” He sniggered to himself. “Oh, is there a difference. You poured your wealth into a venture unworthy of investment.”

  Gershom’s words reached in, ripped Perchik’s sanity from its root, and watched as it squirmed in the cold light of truth, beneath the hateful fingers of the extractor.

  Of every test I have ever been presented with in all my life—every problem, puzzle, or complex theory—I have never been presented with anything I could not solve. I have never not been able to see my way to the answer.

  When Perchik spoke again, it was quiet. “Damn you,” he said, his insides churning with misery. “Damn you and your numbers, your beloved accounts. You emotional miser. You have left my soul in poverty!”

  “It’s odd,” said Gershom, breathing more freely now, sitting down on the chair that had previously been supporting him. “I have lost the will to castigate.”

  Suddenly, Gershom’s previously contorted face fell. He blinked hard as if to clear the fog of knowledge, but it was already gnawing away at his mind: it was Gershom’s heart that had been broken, not his pride. If it had been pride, how easily he might have turned the boy away once and for all. How simple a matter it would have been.

  At last, the old man, seemingly older, said quietly, “That is the gaping hole in my perfection, boy. That is your entrance in. And how you loot—I tell you, boy, there is nothing I detest more in this world than a thief.”

  Gershom thought another moment, and then said, “Will you not sit with me?”

  Perchik did not sit. He could not, in fact, move at all.

  For the first time in Perchik’s life, he could see that his uncle, in his twisted manner, cared for him. He outstretched a hand to Perchik—the old man’s stony face bore no resemblance to the near desperation in his withered reach, and Perchik flinched in horror.

  “Do not dare to shudder from me, boy!”

  “Did I shudder?” said Perchik, choking down hysteria.

  “I do not wish to love things, Perchik.” Gershom turned his gaze toward the window, speaking as if only to himself. “I fractured that long ago. But despite every instinct in me, I have loved you. More than money—can you believe that? More than God Himself. God, who taught me to create you in my image! I loved you, you worthless miscreant; I loved you to despair! Not the kind of feeling one would harbor for a child, no. Nor even for a dog. But that of an artist for his greatest work of art. It crept up upon me. Slowly. In amounts so slight and negligible, they were impossible to calculate.”

  The prison of this duplicitous truth closed in around Perchik.

  “You were my dream . . . and that dream I must now abandon. So sit beside me, and take my hand. Do it now. For I must now forsake you; my son . . .”

  Perchik cried out and left Gershom forever.

  Hodel folded the telegram and placed it on the desk. It was Nerchinsk in 1909.

  “Perchik,” she said, kneeling before him and placing her hands upon his lap. “What would you say to each other now? After everything?”

  “My uncle would only ask whether I made money or not,” Perchik replied, eyes fixed on the telegram. “That is all he’d want to know.”

  “Come now, I’m serious.”

  “So am I,” Perchik said, indicating the slip of paper. “According to this, Gershom looked for me for months. But I am certain that is all he would want to know if I ever returned.”

  Perchik closed his eyes, not wanting to snap at her but unable to utter everything within him in a single explanation; the pulsing shadows of all that had occurred between him and his uncle, the only family he had ever known.

  “When I first met you,” he said, “what I had done—far more than attempting to teach or proselytize or even simply survive—what I was truly doing was nothing greater than running away from home . . .” He blinked heavily. Her heart roared for him. “. . . like a common, petulant child. I disappeared into the night on a train that carried cargo freight.”

  She beheld her husband and scarcely recognized him—so contorted was his person. Not even exile burdened him more greatly than the memory of his uncle and all that had and, perhaps more crucially, had not passed between them. He stood and moved toward the desk, his shoulders encumbered with pondering. He turned over papers (as he often did to protect Hodel from the knowledge of his work), detesting every rush of feeling surging through him.

  “Money conjured up a fog around my uncle. It can do that. Gershom applied himself so”—his voice caught, the words stuck within his throat—“so passionately, I suppose, to the acquisition of money that he forgot me.” Perchik took his eyes from the telegram and looked away. “If the thought of me ever burst through that fog, then another thought crept right in behind
it—that I was merely an imposition.”

  Perchik shrugged his shoulders, this single gesture silently alluding to understanding, forgiveness, a feeble stab at impassivity. Above all, it told her things were better this way.

  “And now,” he said, “I plot the extinction of private property, and Gershom leaves me his entire fortune. Funny, that—neither one of us out of spite . . .”

  Hodel’s own heart broke at that. Goodness, she thought, acceptance is so vast a thing. She believed his peace, yet she saw at the same time how he quietly wore a groove in his desk with his thumb. True peace would be a long time coming.

  thirty-three

  IN OPEN AIR, IN RAIN AND SNOW, IN ICY TEMPERATURES THROUGH the endless cold months of Siberia, long and gloomy were the days and endless was the work. When she first arrived, Hodel had been ordered to haul logs, draw water, or hew wood for fagots and stack them uniform as soldiers. And if the logs were not hearty, the water not clear enough, the fagots not placed sufficiently in tight, symmetrical piles, she was ordered, in a tone colder than the temperatures she worked in, to do it all again. Hodel worked, slogged, and waited. (Waiting was another hell of a convict—one with many depths.) Recently, however, Hodel had been working many a late night in The Gentleman’s office.

  One day, as Hodel knelt scrubbing mold from the lavatory basins, The Gentleman approached her from behind holding a pamphlet.