After Anatevka

by Alexandra Silber

  “Oh, that’s nothing,” Grisha continued. “You should have seen the fence they put up around the factory where I worked in Petersburg. It was an abomination.”

  “No one asked for your life story, Grisha,” Dmitri snapped.

  “Oh, sit on your cello bow,” Grisha shot back.

  “Well, I don’t think I would enjoy that as much as you.”

  “Piss off.”

  “Ah, ‘piss off’—the retort of the inarticulate!”

  Hodel could no longer take it. “Both of you be quiet!” she barked. “It is too cold.”

  Just then, Yevgeny approached with a broad smile, holding a dog nearly half his size.

  “Hello!” Yevgeny cried in sheer delight. “Look! Look!”

  “What on earth is that?” Dmitri Petrov asked.

  “It’s a dog!” Yevgeny lifted the dog toward them.

  “I know it is a d—” Dmitri Petrov caught himself and pulled back his tone of frustration. Hodel had recently teased him about having a temper. He was endeavoring to be better, though he insisted that he did not have a temper; it was merely that Yevgeny had an effect on him. He closed his eyes, took a breath, and said calmly, “Where did you get the dog?”

  “He crawled under the fence over there!” Yevgeny exclaimed, gesturing with his shoulder.

  There it was, clear as anything: if you looked hard enough, you could see the dog had indeed burrowed a tunnel under the fence through the frost. The plainness of the action pleased Hodel. She looked back at Yevgeny, beaming. “Well done, little one!” she said, wrapping her hands around the dog’s snow-covered face, scratching behind his ears.

  “Isn’t it marvelous, Hodel?” said Yevgeny. “Look at him—he’s got nothing! No owner, no food. But he is free! Look at him! Take it in!” With that, he placed the dog on the ground and watched as the creature took off, racing away and coming back, then repeating the pattern in an attempt to get Yevgeny to chase him.

  “The rains fall, but he doesn’t mind; he bathes in his freedom!” Yevgeny picked up a stick from the ground and ran toward the dog, then tossed the stick for him to fetch. Yevgeny turned back to them, his smile somehow warming the entire day.

  “What shall you call him, Yevgeny?” asked Perchik.

  “Dmitri!”

  Dmitri Petrov scoffed angrily as Grisha doubled over in hysterics.

  “Yes! In honor of you, Mitya! Now we shall have Dmitri the dog and Dmitri the person. Isn’t it lovely?”

  Dmitri Petrov looked to Hodel and Perchik for assistance in the matter, but they both just shook their heads and smiled, the entire proceeding deeply amusing to them both. Perchik extended an arm and patted his friend on the shoulder. He was met with a stony stare.

  “I am leaving,” Dmitri said. He folded his arms angrily and headed toward the barracks. They watched him go, muttering to himself, kicking the ground as he walked. Perhaps it was best.

  Hodel turned to Perchik and they shared a laugh. Honest cheerfulness—the kind not manufactured or played at—was hard to see these days, but here it was. Perchik’s thinning face produced a smile so spirited that Hodel’s heart heaved. He pulled her toward him and kissed the side of her head, overcome with the joy of it all.

  “Just wait until I show Anatoly,” cried Yevgeny. “He so loves dogs!”

  They all watched as the dog returned to his tunnel and slid to the other side of the new, imposing fence, then back again, his every atom free of care, his only interest merriment.

  “Well, I’m going back,” Grigory Boleslav said. “Watching creatures have that much fun in internment just depresses me.”

  They all turned to go, and in the distance Hodel noticed The Gentleman, noticing her.

  She turned back to Yevgeny. He watched as the dog dug his way to the other side for the final time, under the fence and out of sight, as if he sensed the play was done.

  “Look at that,” Yevgeny said, suddenly reverential. “The dog does not know borders. We should learn from him.”

  thirty-five

  THE EVENINGS COULD BE BRUTALLY BORING IN THE FILTHY BARRACK structures.

  With what little they had, the men put into the maidan, an institution combining a black market and a gambling den, along with the kinds of games that could only be found in bachelors’ barracks. Were it not for these games, their songs, and the stealthily acquired drink aplenty, all sanity would have been lost.

  The men wore their work rags around the clock, but prisoners were known to gamble away or sell even their work rags for cigarettes. Or sex. Or vodka. Tonight, like all the others, was just such an evening. The men staked out their corners of the room. Their quarters were in a state of overcrowded, arrant disrepair—dark, encrusted with a coating of muddy ice, all caved-in lamely, as if against a crutch.

  They were assembled as usual in what was beginning to feel like their assigned places: Tenderov lay reclined upon his bunk reading a slim, beaten volume of poetry, occasionally picking up his hand and making a play at the card game Grigory and Anatoly were both taking more seriously (but had trouble keeping track of due to Yevgeny’s constant comings and goings with the dog). In the farthest corner, away from all the men and merriment, Dmitri Petrov sat upon a chair playing his cello; his flowing motions brought hushed vibrations to the room that floated above the cacophony of men. His eyes were closed, his forehead tense, but every other part of him seemed at ease in a way he never was in the life beyond his music.

  Dmitri Petrov finished his song, opened his eyes, and looked at the men. They were crouched, playing cards on the ground.

  “What happened to the card table?” he asked.

  “We burned it.” replied Yevgeny.

  “Burned it?” repeated Dmitri.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” The heat of Dmitri’s temper was rising.

  “Well, fire is very hot,” said Yevgeny, “and it was very cold.”

  “It is always cold.”

  “Well, look, we had a bit of a discussion about it and then we—”

  “Burned it.”

  “Yes.”

  “For firewood.”

  “That’s what I said, yes.”

  Dmitri Petrov considered this in disgust.

  “If it is any consolation,” chimed in Grigory, “it burned very well.”

  “Oh, well then!”

  “Indeed, Mitya!” Yevgeny said cheerfully to his bunkmate. “Quite bright! All those great games and laughs we shared were in the wood!”

  “Yes,” Grigory said with a smirk. “It went up in an instant and burned so brilliantly, as if it had been doused in alcohol.”

  “Woof!” Yevgeny laughed but could see that Dmitri was distressed, so he moved closer to console him. “Look, it’s all right, Dmitri Petrov. We simply play on the floor now.”

  “Good God, what is the point of anything anymore?” Dmitri slammed his bow down and stood, clutching his head. It was precisely the overreaction of a thinking man whose mind has been kept idle in a prison camp.

  “Dmitri, it is only a table!”

  “Only a table? It was all we had!” Dmitri cried. “What will you all burn next? Our beds? The roof? My own cello—shall you use it for scraps as I sleep?”

  “Calm down, Dmitri,” Grigory barked. “Get ahold of yourself! Hysteria does not become you.”

  That was how it was when Hodel entered that night.

  “Good evening, men,” she greeted, a little breathless. Locking eyes with Dmitri Petrov, her face conveyed all the probing curiosity of her thoughts. “Mitya, Perchik says to meet him.”

  “Meet him? At this hour?”

  She nodded. “Yes.”

  “Very well.” Dmitri placed his cello on its side and grabbed his coat. “Not a one of you is to touch or stroke or even think of burning that cello—not out of any desperation. If a man even looks at it sideways, I will burn him!” He stared them down and stormed out with the look of a tiger about to shred his prey.

  “Touchy,” muttered Grigory B
oleslav, eyebrows raised.

  “Basta!” declared Anatoly, clapping. “I win!”

  Grigory and Tenderov handed over their trinkets, three cigarettes, a little vile of liquor, a pair of fingerless gloves.

  “Well, I’m off for some air,” Andrey Tenderov declared, folding his book and rising. “Losing makes the air stuffy.” He smiled, grabbed his coat, and left as Anatoly counted his winnings.

  Dmitri stood reading the decoded pages as Perchik retched upon the rocks near their meeting point.

  “Do you see?” Perchik asked, wiping his mouth as he rose for air.

  “I do,” replied Dmitri, rigid.

  Perchik retched again, trying hard to muffle the sound through dry lips and thick saliva. The last few weeks had brought a successively more withered Perchik; his guts ached, and he returned from the belly of the mines with an ever-growing thirst.

  “Are you all right, comrade?”

  “I am, I am, read on, please,” Perchik said. His tone was clipped, tense, and so unlike his usual self that Dmitri jolted in response.

  Dmitri looked at the unbound pages in his hands. The title was a bit blurred, as if from an ancient printing press, but clear nevertheless: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. And, at the bottom, a signature: Vladimir Lenin, 1909.

  “I scarcely know what to say,” Dmitri muttered. “It is certain?”

  “Most certain,” said Perchik. He lowered his voice even further, to the slightest hint of a whisper. “Dmitri, this is not only an ideological unifier. It lays the foundation for real life. This publication will eradicate all philosophic doubts about the practical course of revolution—it will make our theories a reality. More crucially, it is proof that he is alive and in Europe just as I suspected! Our friends would not have dared to contact us so brazenly if it were not so.” Perchik’s eyes were wild, gears turning in his head.

  “Who are these friends you speak of, comrade?” Dmitri asked. “Why be so secretive?”

  “I cannot say.”

  “No!” Dmitri said. “You can say and you shall. You wanted me involved—well, I’m involved. We are friends, Perchik. We’re practically brothers out here in this godforsaken place! I collect and deliver your post, do all that you say, and I don’t even know who the messages are from? I deserve better. Tell me.”

  “It isn’t safe.”

  “What? Less safe than already being in internment, doing physical labor in easternmost Siberia?”

  “Fine, fine.” Perchik sighed and looked around them. “The messages are from Leonid.”

  “Trotsky?”

  “Shh!”

  Dmitri rasped in an angry whisper. “All right, comrade, you had me taken. I thought you were a dreamer. I had no idea you were this involved. I am out—I cannot help you further. I am a musician; I am a graduate student and terrible editor of a university newspaper. I have not the stomach for actual politics!”

  “Dmitri. That is not true. You are a good man. A brave one.”

  “Nonsense. I am not capable of this kind of courage!”

  Perchik took Dmitri by the shoulders and looked through the lenses of his glasses, square into his eyes.

  “It would not be courage, comrade, if you were not afraid.”

  Dmitri hesitated, nodding. “What of your ‘friend’ himself—is he not threatened by—”

  “Leonid Trotsky is a theorist, and we all know it!” interrupted Perchik. “Lenin is powerful. A doer—and we must do. Quickly.”

  Dmitri shoved the papers into Perchik’s chest. “Fine.”

  “We must get out of here,” said Perchik.

  “You think?” Dmitri rasped in exasperation—as if needing to get out of Nerchinsk was news.

  “I am serious. We must escape this place, Dmitri.”

  “Escape?” Dmitri cried, only to be grabbed by his collar and shushed by Perchik. Dmitri now spoke in anger below his breath. “We are weak and starving—and oh, that’s right, imprisoned—five thousand kilometers from Petersburg. How are we to escape now?”

  “We must find a way to distract the guards and officers. Create some kind of grand diversion—a disturbance so epic, it will occupy them for just enough time for us to flee.”

  “Us?” Dmitri grabbed his eyes hard behind his spectacles. “Who exactly is ‘us’?”

  But Perchik did not answer that. He grew very grave as he spoke. “The People matter, Dmitri Petrov. We matter. Though we whisper here in hiding, there are thousands weaker still, whose voices cannot be heard at all. We must speak for them. Work for them. Believe for them.” Perchik grabbed Dmitri by the shoulders and shook him so hard, his glasses jumped. “We have developed a talent for enduring calamity. The great calamity has yet to arrive, and when it does, think how prepared we shall be.”

  Not a soul alive had ever been capable of soothing Dmitri Petrov, let alone rallying him. He nodded. “All right,” he sighed. “What now?”

  “I will develop a plan with our allies—”

  “How?”

  “Never mind that! Listen, Dmitri. When they question you—and they will—you must profess that you know nothing. Can you swear that to me?”

  Dmitri had never seen Perchik like this before. He gripped his head and took a long breath, his mind tied up in bleeding knots. He could not contemplate failing Perchik.

  “I swear.”

  “It will be brutal—”

  “Enough! I said I swear!” Dmitri turned away. Perchik placed a hand upon his shoulder.

  From down the road, Anatoly called to them. “Hark, boys, what’s all that noise up there about? Come then, it’s freezin’. Whatever yer gabbin’ about can wait. I got a glass ’er two o’ liquor with yer names upon ’em! It’s my winnings from the maidan.”

  Dmitri could not meet Perchik’s gaze. “All right, then, Anatoly,” he called, and moved to leave, but Perchik grabbed his arm.

  “Bruises will heal, Dmitri Petrov,” Perchik whispered. “The world might not.”

  thirty-six

  PERCHIK LAY SLUMPED OVER HIS WORK, FAST ASLEEP. REMNANTS of tea sat in the bottom of his glass, papers sprawled and candles snuffed out. Somehow the objects captured the current essence of Perchik himself. Day after day, the men descended down coffin-like staircases into the bowels of the earth, the only light from flaming lamps and the mouths of the mines above their heads. The fact that he had his wits about him was more a miracle than a blessing.

  She gazed upon him now—overworked, worn. It was late, and as was usual for the last few months, Perchik had returned from the mines only to spend the remainder of his waking hours poring over his papers. It was becoming more and more difficult to deny that he was physically withering. His nose bled constantly, his extremities were always cold, the skin all over his body had lost elasticity. He was growing progressively more lethargic, and sometimes, at night, he would riot against the cramping in his extremities—his limbs wriggling as worms might fight a hook.

  But still, she gazed upon him and stared, breathless for a moment. What was it about Perchik as he lay curled at his desk, enveloped in the mining shirt of coarse, tarnished linen and fraying trousers? What moved her so as she saw him sleeping there, his visions sprawled before him, laid out like a map of all the universe? Drawings, diagrams, and plans, everything he aspired to build, invent, or create, set before him in neatly coded piles.

  Her nightdress had fallen open slightly, and she gathered it around herself as she looked over the weighty volumes, candles that had extinguished down to nubbins, and endless sheets of scribbled, coded papers. She was careful not to startle him. Perchik’s left hand was outstretched, having fallen almost elegantly atop his notebook like a small sculpture, as if he had collapsed into this slumber in the middle of a thought. The fingers were still holding his pencil, the side of his palm blackened with lead as it always was from the hours of writing from left to right in Russian—he always preferred to write in Hebrew for that very reason, and she smiled to herself at these details that made up their marr
iage.

  Her eyes moved toward the hand, and she could not help but peek at the smudged scrawl below it. It was a coded telegram from the West, which Perchik had decoded lightly below the type. It simply read: Empirio-criticism. Below that, in his own hand, Perchik had made a note: The People are important.

  That was all it said. She could hear the steady beat of his heart, the quiet purr of his breathing, and she was at once torn apart with tenderness, unable to keep from pressing her ear to his back to listen.

  He sat up suddenly, at once alert. “What is it?”

  “Darling, you must come to bed,” Hodel said. She carefully marked and folded his notebooks.

  He glanced out the window into the inky blackness. “What is the hour?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. But you must rest. Besides,” she smiled coyly, “I am freezing all alone in there.” She extended her hand to him, and he placed his lead-smudged hand in her own. She kissed him as she helped him rise. He clutched her for a moment, but then, with a sense of defeat, he moved away.

  “I can’t.”

  This was another recent, more devastating development, though Hodel wasn’t sure if it was a symptom of his health, a result of stress, or something greater.

  “It is all right, my love,” she soothed.

  But it wasn’t. Not for him.

  “This letter. I must finish it,” he said, turning back to the table. “It is important.”

  “Tomorrow, Perchik. It can wait.”

  He followed his wife to bed.

  In the middle of the night, it awoke them: a wretched scream. And then another—the kind from the guts, a cataclysm of horror. Commotion outside mounted as Hodel rushed to the door to witness the scene.

  Irina stood outside her father’s house—feet bare, hair unraveled in a whip of anguish, the frosted earth staining the sheet that half covered her body. Her feral eyes looked at the glowing mouth of her father’s door. The Gentleman exploded from the house as she inched backward through the mire. With one swipe of efficient malice, he gripped her by the hair, lifting her up like a kicking rabbit beneath the fist of a furious farmer. He smacked her hard across the jaw, his stoic face betraying a pain so great, a disappointment so profound, that the icy blue of his eyes practically burned within the rims of his spectacles.