After Anatevka

by Alexandra Silber

  “Well, all right, then, Dmitri,” the Voice continued, unfaltering. “I simply need to know the plans you and Reb Perchik are embroiled in. Please. It is most urgent.”

  “Never.”

  “Come now—do not let your sentiment interfere with your politics. I thought more highly of you than that.”

  “I swore to him.”

  “Oh poo, you swore! Such a shame! Friendship is so sacred—no imperial rifles could ever shoot your promises to shreds!” The Voice bit hard into the air as he gripped Dmitri’s hands, tied tight behind the chair he sat upon. Dmitri felt hot breath against his neck, heard the stinging clang of metal as a knife was opened wide, and churned with terror as the man wrenched the muscles of his tremendous, stifled arm and spread the fingers of his left hand against the cold sharp blade.

  “Please!” Dmitri cried out. “No, please! Not my fingers!”

  “Ah,” The Voice cooed with pleasure. “But see, Dmitri, you are not in your world, and I am in mine.” He shoved the blade into his thumb, and Dmitri felt the hot blood ooze out across his palms and flood onto the floor. “I see the concept has not been made fully clear to you yet.”

  Dmitri felt the man release him, and as his muscles sighed in relief, he heard a dragging chair, which the man placed directly in front of Dmitri. Dmitri heard the man sit down and could smell his odor, feel the heat of what must have been an enormous frame—if only he could see his face and appeal to his eyes.

  “Even exchanges, Dmitri,” the Voice continued, tapping him on the cheek almost playfully. “Something for something else. Easy. You see? You tell me what your friend is planning, and I will leave your fingers be. Or, I will not, say, reveal your darkest secret to the man you revere above all others.”

  Dmitri choked upon his shock. “I don’t know what you mean,” he muttered, quite sick with it.

  “You do not know?” the Voice taunted. “How ever could you not?” He leaned in close to Dmitri’s ear and whispered so quietly that it could have been the Voice of Dmitri’s own conscience revealing all into the darkness. “Doesn’t your blood beat hard when you see her coming? Doesn’t her voice thrill in your ears, and the scent of her send you swelling throughout the night?”

  It could not be.

  “He makes her throb with his politics, his utopias,” the Voice persisted. “He makes her tremble in her soul. Do you really feel you can compete with that, Dmitri? What do you give her? Remnants! Weakness! Standoffishness! When does your shyness and the enormity of your pathetic love become nothing more than arrogance? Why even here—in this gray frozen cunt of the world—why would a woman such as she even think to notice you?”

  Dmitri flushed with despair.

  “Now. Once again: What is your comrade planning?”

  “I do not know, sir,” Dmitri said sullenly. “He keeps so much from me. I do not know, and that is the truth.”

  The Voice was silent for a moment. But then he called out, “Guards!”

  A gang of men entered the cell now. Dmitri heard their feet as they entered, thudding about and lugging in a heavy load. They surrounded him, and one removed his blindfold. His eyes stung—the light, however meager, had been kept from his eyes for far too long. His visual perception had been compromised, his mind unable to keep up. But there was no mistaking it. Standing before him, there it was, clear as morning.

  His cello.

  “Now, Dmitri,” the Voice said from far behind him, reminding him that this vision before him was no dream but indeed a true and present and horrifying reality. “For the very last time, now: What do you know?”

  Then, at once, Dmitri caved.

  Without knowing himself, his voice expelled the plot. His afflicted mouth delivered confidences as easily as kittens.

  Perhaps all men are enslaved in part by their little loves—obsessions that are not digestible, ideas that rub and irritate like sand in the belly of an oyster. They are defined by their servitude to such things.

  As Dmitri watched the men destroy the instrument, he thought to himself that the cello, in such a place as this, was superfluous, and thus somehow squalid. It therefore had to be destroyed. He saw that now.

  At least that was what entered his mind as he watched the men demolish it. Decimate it anyway, despite all pitiful divulgences. He could hear the music of it surge within his skull—the cello cried out from the corner, offered its forgiveness, told him he was clean and good, however helpless. The music turned to screeching, pleading, crying out for help; its timbre strangled, the tune harsh and dissonant. It all happened so abruptly, Dmitri Petrov did not know what to think. . . . As they thrashed its frame to splinters, fractured it to shredded shards and matchsticks, Dmitri thought, My love—the greater love, perhaps; for it was the only thing that ever loved him back.

  “You are forbidden to see them again,” the Voice whispered over the broken man, who wept soundlessly into his now unchained limbs. “Not that I suspect you shall ever want to. . . .”

  Dmitri stared in disbelief as the guards smashed the cello—he had believed his confession would save the instrument. No: that pile of useless flinders might as well be him. He had smashed all promises to fire kindling and obliterated his friend and, worse, the woman they both adored.

  forty-five

  WAITING IS A SPECIAL KIND OF ANGUISH. PERCHIK HAD BEEN gone thirty-five days and seventeen hours, and in his absence, Hodel felt as though she were being buried, encased in dense, relentless clay; immovable, obdurate—the soil possessed with a consciousness intent on ending her. She knew her body had been taken from the earth and therefore must be returned to it.

  God spoke it unto Adam: “For dust you are, and to dust you will return.”

  Yet man’s soul came from above.

  “He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul.”

  And when our earthly tasks have been accomplished, she thought, that soul rises back to God, returns to its source.

  Was she returning now? Perhaps. She felt the walls of life close in, smelled the pungency of hot, wet earth as it continued to fall upon her—claim her for its own. But Hodel remembered Mama’s words: We show greatest dignity to the body and do not mar or harm it in any way. It must be returned in its entirety to the earth and to the creator, just as it was given, without any violence or interference.

  If that were true, how could she return to God if she were interred within the earth without her heart? For Perchik possessed it utterly, and somewhere in this camp—in a location so near to her and yet so barred—he held dominion over her heart, and thus, prevented her from being taken. An ordinary woman might have shrunk from fear, but Hodel was no ordinary woman—she was afraid of nothing.

  The Gentleman stood above her as she lay upon the bed, unable even to moan.

  “He is weakened, my dear; I shall not lie to you,” he said with eagerness in his tone, trying, possibly, to bolster her. “But he is being looked after. . . .” He trailed off, not knowing what to say next. “We are so very nearly done.”

  He moved a chair to her bedside and sat upon it, fiddling idly with his hat. He paused. He sighed. Hodel sensed he wanted something.

  “Is there anything I may say or do to bring you comfort, Hodel?”

  Nothing you can say will be worth saying, she thought but did not utter.

  “Anything at all?”

  No.

  Well, there it was. In the wake of her misery, The Gentleman surrendered his own. Beneath the refined exterior, The Gentleman wanted, above all else, not to be revered or respected or even obeyed. He wanted to be loved. It could be that all his odd behaviors—all the sanctimonious child-rearing, the rigorous perfection of his personage—were attempts to attain it, while all his tortured rage was merely the petulance of the rejected urchin that lay below the surface of the starched collars and brightly polished boots. The urchin coveted such love, desired desperately to clinch it in his hands and caress it roughly, like an animal’s pelt.

 
; “Hodel, I do care so deeply for you. But we must learn to truly speak.”

  But Hodel could not speak. Her heart was missing.

  The Gentleman stood, as if he knew the cause was lost. Then, pausing in the door frame as he moved to leave the house, he said, spite lacing his tone, “Your friend Dmitri Petrov betrayed your husband, you know. No matter. Betrayal is the way of the world.”

  forty-six

  ALL TRACES OF HIM WERE CLEARED BEFORE DMITRI RETURNED from interrogation.

  “What has become of Yevgeny, then?” he inquired of the overseer upon returning. “His bunk has been cleared.” Dmitri sat down upon the empty mattress and looked around him. “Has he been reassigned to another barracks?”

  The overseer casually rolled a cigarette in the corner. “What, the old man?” he said. “Dead. Cleaning the furnace. Cleared away this morning.”

  Yevgeny, it would seem, like any dullard worth his salt, died just as he had lived—with warmth.

  It was in the furnace that they found him. Warm. With a smile on his face. Discovered on a Thursday after eight days of labor there, and two days or so of neglect.

  The overseer reached into his jacket pocket and retrieved a box of matches. “And since the northern bunks are overcrowded, looks like you shall have a replacement in the morning.”

  Dmitri stared hard at him, eyes locked adamantly upon he who delivered so offhand a remark. He could not move at all. He felt his eyes might break apart and fall to pieces.

  Dmitri turned on his heel, made swift haste of his exit.

  Before long, he came to the middle of the seemingly infinite taiga field: arms held fiercely around his center, hatless, gloveless, without protection from the relentless winds that soon made him quite numb. He reveled in the harshness of the elements in this moment.

  Grisha and Anatoly followed him, keeping a safe distance.

  “They say he had a smile upon his face,” said Grisha softly after a few moments.

  “Aye, they did,” Anatoly added, nodding.

  Dmitri inhaled the biting air, the rime in his lungs oddly soothing.

  At last he spoke. “Is it all gone, then?” He sobbed below his breath. “Did they—take the little sculpture of the cello?”

  “No,” Grisha murmured. “I have kept it safe.”

  Dmitri’s jaw hardened. His eyes were steady. Yet his face was streaked with white, salty lines already turning to frost.

  “Thank you.” He spoke so quietly, perhaps only the wind could hear him. His friends stood there in the silence for so long a while, the dull dusk of evening turned to woeful darkness. “Do leave me,” Dmitri uttered. They nodded and left him there, alone with his grief.

  During the darkest days ahead, Dmitri would think back on his time in Nerchinsk—on the mines and his companions and, of course, Yevgeny. How he longed for a glimpse of all the moments he had so pushed and raged through.

  But whenever he met someone he came to like, he always said, voice soft but full and genuine: “I so wish you could’ve known him.”

  forty-seven

  HODEL HAD PROMISED HER PAPA THAT SHE AND PERCHIK WOULD be married beneath a canopy. And so they were. The day after her arrival in Nerchinsk, a bed linen served for the task. The rest of the ceremony was ramshackle (and would have horrified her mother), but Hodel didn’t mind. All she could do was give thanks fervently that she had arrived at this moment at all. She saw it as a sign from God: He arranged their love, and thus she would strive every day of her life to honor it. God in His grace would provide. So stated the bride’s prayer: “God blessed them and said to them, ‘Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.’”

  The very first time with him was nothing like she had imagined. She was dissolving like a crystal into the source itself. She wept as she confessed to him that she had been defiled; but to her relief, he held her close, kissed her eyes, and insisted that in his heart he knew her body to be “as pure as the soul within it,” and that was all that mattered to him.

  She was still at first as they lay beside each other, but as he held her face and placed his mouth upon hers, she shifted beneath him. She realized she had never felt—for there had never been—bare skin upon her own.

  An unknown feeling rushed up inside of her: a kind of hunger, a pining. So this is desire, she thought, and the absolute yearning of it was instinctive, ancient, and shared with every human who had ever wanted before them, and would ever want again—it filled her like a wineglass, then came to overflow above the edges.

  Her breath was short; she caught it in quick gasps.

  “I am frightened,” she whispered, stopping him, for she was suddenly alive to her entire body quaking from so great a desperation.

  “Hodel . . .” He shifted, bringing their bodies closer with a gesture of pure tenderness. “My wife,” he entreated, enclosing her, “do not be afraid. . . .”

  His diffidence delighted her, for it was comforting to see him as vulnerable as she. At last her mouth opened against his own, and she blossomed and unfolded into his infinity.

  Something caught within; from the depths of her, the dull and lolling heat burst into a flame. In the freezing night, he beckoned to her essence—lifting her toward a summit she had never known before.

  She grazed her mouth against his ear and summoned him away from this land of ice and labor, from the bustling intersections of his thoughts. Reaching for him, she found the knowledge of it present within her, the skill latent, waiting only to be released. She loved him.

  Her insides heaved. She trembled with uncertainty, and all at once she realized he was trembling too. She felt his body, hot and clamoring, crying out in response to her own. She felt the sweat upon his face as he pressed it up against her, hearts pounding as they both seized, cried out.

  Her eyes opened. They caught their breath. Incapable of speech. Wherever they had gone, they had traveled there together. . . .

  “Perchik?” Hodel said in the compass of her husband’s arms, in the earliest hushes of their first morning. “You have seen the world. What is the most important thing?”

  His face grew grave. He placed the span of his great hand upon her heart and touched her chest with reverence. Locking eyes with her, he replied, unsmiling, “This.”

  Perchik could not tell if she was truth or figment, but as he stirred, he found himself clinging to her. He brought his fingers to his face and thought he might just smell her upon them—the hope of it alone still made him quicken. He was astonished by how inexperienced he felt in her presence, and laughed like a boy, in ecstasy that things could be as clear as this.

  He loved her. He loved her because nature willed it. Because they were already united and of one body. The bare flesh on every part of her belonged to him. The scent emitting from her skin was his.

  When he first laid eyes upon her, he had been terrified. There could never have been a creature like her before. An unsettling heat radiated from her eyes—an intelligence that seemed innate. It transfixed him. She had no knowledge of her beauty, not the full extent of it, and this made her all the more inescapable. As he looked at the length and ravishing curve of her form, and at the sagacity of the mind contained within it, he felt himself fill up, like a well surging from the deepest and most secret crevices of the earth.

  Perchik had been no stranger to lust. He had surrendered to it countless times before, could write an atlas of the female form. But in his search for triumph (or, perhaps, for comfort), all he had ever acquired was worthlessness. Nothing more. All he had received was an utterly indifferent gratification. He was left only with his own debasement. A bitter emptiness.

  Oh, Hodel, he thought as his mind rose from the reverie, all women before you have turned to ash. . . .

  forty-eight

  THE DOOR CLANGED AS THEY APPROACHED. PERCHIK FELT THE depth of cold within the stones along his body as he lay upon the ground facing the wall, and heard two sets of footsteps, only one of which entered his cell.

 
; “We have released your comrade,” The Gentleman said above his head. “Dmitri Petrov is to be returned to Petersburg. No longer useful. He told us everything, I’m afraid.”

  Perchik lay there, stunned. Stunned, of course, but not surprised. Steadfast he remained. Oh, Dmitri, he thought, poor sod, too soft for such a world as this. What must have been days ago, Perchik had stopped urinating, and his head screeched with pain as though his brain had shrunk and was clattering against his skull. He was starving. Swollen. Nearly blind.

  “Don’t you see, Perchik? You have nothing. You might have ‘comrades’ to execute your will here or in the cities, but I’m almost ashamed to admit that they are of little concern to me, personally. You are my concern. And I’m terribly sorry to tell you that we simply have no reason left to keep you here.”

  Perhaps there was a secret part of him that knew it would not work; a silent place within him that knew it would end like this. Yet in his mind, Perchik could see a pillar high above the ground: a beacon of ignited truths that shone upon the earth below! Upon the unworked soil that churned to reach its potential. Upon the starving creatures scattered on it—the starving and the sick. Upon all humanity in this, its grayest and most desolate time of confusion. He felt he had been created to redefine the human capacity for fellowship; he had been appointed to prove man’s greatness by a God he still fiercely believed in, despite it all. He believed. He passionately believed. Belief and passion were nearly all he had.

  For he had her, of course: Hodel. And she was twice the strength of any antidote or nourishment, more formidable a force than even hope itself. In the battle against deathly cold and growing weakness, against poison and through despair, she was his bright torch, the pillar of fire calling forth to extinguish every darkness. The world he hoped to form was not for man; it was for her—and so he could not leave it. Not just yet.