After Anatevka

by Alexandra Silber

  “You heap such misery onto this world—it is time to bid farewell to it,” The Gentleman said.

  “You cannot rule me, sir.”

  “Nonsense. Your pain is our pleasure, Perchik. You see?”

  “There is no way to rule another man. The only rule is brotherhood.”

  Suddenly, something occurred to Perchik: he would never truly lead again. Never. He would be robbed of the chance before he had even truly begun. He began to laugh.

  “Go on and laugh. Whom do you think you’re fooling, comrade? That is the laughter of despair. And your despair is our satisfaction— don’t you see? We have you in a corner like a rat, and you shall submit. You shall submit or else we shall destroy you.”

  “You cannot!” Perchik choked on his hysterics, his voice rising with determination.

  At once The Gentleman attacked. Darting like a hawk, he lifted Perchik by the neck, slammed him against the wall, and breathed hard into his face, revealing his fat, buttery complexion flushed with sweat and fury. “How have we not broken you?” he said, his eyes boiling over to the edge of rage.

  “It is her,” Perchik said, his countenance serene. “It’s her.”

  The Gentleman was riled. His eyes flickered with defeated dread. Perchik was revealing a superb endgame The Gentleman had never dared to conceive of as possible. Perchik saw the other creature living beneath his uniform; the buttons and seams on his shirt strained against the evil that was aching to escape. The Gentleman exhaled and, trembling, threw Perchik hard upon the floor as he all but ran away.

  “Feed him, Irina,” he called from down the corridor. “We must keep him alive. That is, until we kill him.”

  Irina knelt beside Perchik and gently spooned soup into his mouth, which stung his insides as it went down. Between each taste, he gasped great drinks of air to adjust. Irina’s face was drawn—hollow-cheeked and barren-eyed.

  “How have you survived this place, Irina?” Perchik whispered. “How have you survived him?”

  Irina looked deep into his eyes, and Perchik felt his heart frost over at the edges with the intensity of her expression. She placed the bowl upon the floor and buried her hands within the folds of her skirts. She was quiet for a long while, as if in prayer for the shame she was about to reveal.

  “My mother was from Hulunbuir, a small town in China ruled unofficially by the Russian government. Mother was from a tea-making family that exported brick tea to this region along the railway. Father fell in love with her at first sight when he and other young soldiers went across to patrol the railway, so he captured her and brought her to this place against her will, along with a cartload of other forced female settlers. The camp was not as large as it is now; it was more of a village, and there were very few women—one for every ten men.

  “Mother constantly attempted escape, but her plans were always thwarted. Father dragged her back and beat her, only to turn about with soothing words and loving little gifts. Were it not for my birth, she most likely would have killed herself. She lived to protect me from the swinging temperament of my father. She taught me languages and poetry, femininity, and, most of all, about the ancient art of tea.” Irina drifted off in thought for a moment. “The art of tea my mother gave me, which father used to poison you.”

  It locked into place at last: Perchik had been poisoned by the tea that Hodel brought back from The Gentleman’s office—the tea he knew she never drank.

  “I loved her,” Irina said. She described all this so simply, as if none of it—not a single nauseating detail—mattered anymore.

  “When I was just thirteen, just on the eve of my womanhood, mother died of smallpox. The village was riddled with it. And straightaway, father was altered. Not by grief, exactly, but by something almost . . .” Perchik watched her as her mind grappled for the right words. “Something far more wicked than that. It was as though something very deep inside of him very quietly snapped, like a lock on a door no one heard turn. My mother’s death opened up all the truly mad things within him. Things that had perhaps always been there, but lay dormant.”

  They sat still in the airless room. No breath, no pulse, no clamor of anything could be heard.

  “Father kept saying I was ‘too much like her.’ That I was going to be thought of ‘any day now as a free girl,’ one that the men of this camp would quickly tarnish. He could not stand that. And so, before long, I came to take my mother’s place.”

  Perchik could not breathe. He barely found the breath to whisper. “Irina. Whatever do you mean?”

  Irina could not meet his gaze. Those eyes—so icy and identical to The Gentleman’s own—turned milky with the truth of it. Her face lost color as the monstrous revelation left her lips. “You see . . . I am also his girl.. . . .”

  His eyes grew wide, his blood halted as his heart stopped beating, and his stomach fell with the news of a horror far worse than Perchik ever could have feared.

  “And he felt that Andrey sullied me, you see—beyond what any ordinary father could abide. But what occurred will reoccur. It shall become some kind of odious pattern.”

  forty-nine

  IN PRISON, A HOME LIFE SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE. BUT HODEL SCRAPED together a sense of home in this little room at the Volosnikovs’, and in her growing solitude, the plague of restlessness envenomed her. If she tried, she could imagine Tzeitel’s voice echoing from within her memory: We must transform a simple house or dwelling into a home. In Hodel’s prior life, such concepts seemed a nuisance. The recollection ate at her; how duplicitous are memories—sweet one moment, torturous the next, seen through many filters as time advanced ever onward.

  Hodel took refuge in filling the place with welcome and warmth. That little room stood in unrelenting silence, existing in a ceaseless allegiance to the evils of Nerchinsk.

  It was in such a state that Dmitri Petrov found her when he stole away in the moonless shadows of the camp on the eve of his departure from it.

  “Tea?” she inquired over her shoulder. She yearned for the energy to greet him with kindness, but her resolve was weak, her nerves frayed, and every scrap of energy went to preserving her own sanity in her husband’s absence.

  “Please,” Dmitri replied uneasily—they had not seen each other since any of the horrific incidents.

  She moved to heat the pot. Dmitri Petrov shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He was suddenly aware that he had never been alone with her. His guilt filleted him—exposed his inner flesh, which flinched and shrank away with every passing moment in her presence. The wind shook and howled about the house. He owed her many things.

  “Hodel,” he began, staring feebly at the floor as if the words could be discovered there, picked up from within the wooden planks. “Hodel, I—I want to say . . . I feel I owe you . . .” He was terrible at this. “Well, I owe both of you, really, without a doubt, the most sincere—”

  “Dmitri, don’t.” She cut him off, putting him out of his evident misery. “Don’t.” Her face displayed not even the subtlest hint of emotion. “No need. It is done.” She grabbed the tin pot by its long wooden handle and placed it on the stove above a spasming flame that gasped for life, convulsing desperately in short, bright bursts. “Ver derharget!” Hodel cursed in Yiddish as the fire went out. “Now we shall never start another—never, never!” She threw her hands up in fury, all hope extinguished with the flame. She turned her back toward Dmitri and slammed the pot of frigid tea down upon the counter. Posture wilted, one hand covering her face, and with fingers clenched about her eyes, she exhaled heavily—she had needed that fire.

  Dmitri edged toward her, removing a flask from his jacket.

  “Perhaps this will serve . . .”

  “Whatever do you mean?” Hodel said, still riled.

  Without meeting her eyes, he nestled in beside her like a tamer might approach an angered animal in the wild. “Here. . . .”

  Dmitri poured the liquor from his flask, covering the bottom of a small tin mug. He then placed a finger to h
is lips—Quiet, the gesture spoke—as he reached across her body for the box of kitchen matches and struck one hard against the wall.

  How it blazed! Dmitri Petrov’s fingers held the tiny light, the smell of it intoxicating: all possibility and heat. The struggle between them vanished as their faces were illuminated by the little orange inferno. Dmitri took care of her in this moment. He was Dmitri Petrov: knowledgeable, capable. How grateful she was. How greatly she needed him. But Dmitri’s magic was not yet done—he dropped the tiny match just above the rim of the cup. The alcohol burst into a sudden flame. She gasped.

  “This is how we melt the snow down in the mines when we are desperate.”

  “Incredible.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  Her eyes filled with the incandescent blue of the flame. Rimmed with sleeplessness and tears, the darkness of her eyes reflected the depth of the fire’s power. And then she found herself clutching at Dmitri’s limbs, embracing him, weeping.

  Dmitri Petrov did not know what to do. So confusing and surprising was this contact, so crippling and loaded. Her body felt like the body of his cello—as familiar and as right. Yet he merely stood there. He allowed Hodel’s embrace for so long, he could not determine if the stabbing pangs he felt were of pleasure or of shame. In impassioned, swirling gusts, his love for her heaved. At last he raised up the great span of his arms and wrapped himself around her trembling body.

  Dmitri Petrov ceased existing in that moment—he was suspended in fantasy as he held her. The wind outside ceased to howl; the pulse of blood ceased to pound within him. This was much more than any moment that had come before—or, he was quite certain, would ever come again. But in a heartbeat, the moment had crested. Time stirred once more, contracted back from suspension, and crept cruelly on. Then, all at once, there came a knock upon the door.

  “Who’s there?”

  “It is I, Hodel,” The Gentleman replied beyond the door.

  Dmitri Petrov desperately searched the room for a means of escape, but it was of no use. Hodel grabbed him by the coat and threw him beneath the kitchen table, then covered him with the cloth that lay upon it.

  “Not a word,” she whispered. He nodded. “Not a breath.” Hodel gathered herself, straightened her headscarf, cleared the tears from her face, and opened the door.

  “Good evening, Hodel,” said The Gentleman.

  “Good evening, sir.”

  Without invitation, The Gentleman moved past her into the body of the room. He stood, taking the place in. He seemed caught in the net of his thoughts.

  “Hodel,” he began in a somber tone, “I’m afraid I bear some rather awful news.” He pulled a chair toward the kitchen table and settled himself just inches from Dmitri Petrov. Her stomach turned. She saw something terrible in The Gentleman’s countenance—the veins in his neck stood out, his face was quite red, and his expression was one of both self-satisfaction and quiet hysteria. His latent nature had been exposed the night he stood by the destruction of Andrey Tenderov and had only continued to creep out from the darkest corners within him. If she thought about it—truth be told—she had seen it always.

  “I am so sorry, Hodel,” he said, “but Perchik is dead.”

  At once, the world around his face went dark.

  “The elements quite ravaged him, my dear.”

  His voice echoed, reverberating through her as slowly, and darkness gathered around the image of his face. She lost her grasp of the world entirely. Every sound and sight smudged out around her until nothing glowed at all except the ice within those eyes—those eyes that stared so intently, they caught her by the larynx and gripped upon her reason. Eyes that blazed with cold—the last sight that she caught before she fell and darkness took her altogether.

  When she came around many minutes later, she found herself inert upon the bed. She turned and started—The Gentleman was too close beside her, his eyes bearing down.

  “There, there, my dear,” he said with gentleness as she moved to protest. “No need to speak a word. I quite understand.” He raised his hand and moved his fingers along the length of her hair. “Do you remember, Hodel, what we discussed the night that we first spoke?”

  She did not. She stared at him unflinchingly.

  “Do you?” he bit, voice harder than before.

  She shook her head.

  “Your eyes are beautiful, Hodel. So beautiful. But they are also tired and full of lies. I know that you remember. For how could you forget so magical a meeting?”

  There was a part of her that thought, This cannot be—but the rest of her knew it had been so all along.

  “I looked at you and said, ‘I would like to request that you accompany me to Nerchinsk. Would you consider this proposal?’ Then you said, ‘I would, sir.’ And then I promised that I would personally see to it that no harm would come to you, and I have kept my word. Have I not done so faithfully, my dear?”

  She could not take her eyes from him as he unraveled.

  “And then I said, ‘Do we understand each other?’ And you nodded. You nodded, Hodel, and that was when I knew you understood me, and I rejoiced in the knowledge that this day would one day come!”

  She knew so well how solitude could twist and inexplicably warp the soul of a perfectly ordinary man, drive him to covetousness, to cruelty. The Gentleman had deformed in his deprivation. The realm beyond hunger is starvation, and the realm beyond starvation is a world of empty, miserable lightness. It is only in that realm where such leaps to the unthinkable—to evil itself—are no longer leaps. They are but steps. Footprints in the frozen mud, spotless boot by spotless boot.

  “I knew he would eventually break,” The Gentleman said, rising from the chair. “Eventually, they all do, in one way or another.” He smiled down at her and took one step too close. “You see, you are a free girl now, my dear.”

  Her jaw was set, face gleaming with tears despite the fire in her eyes—the tears a fuel, an accelerant that thrust her up and toward him with all her fury. She wailed, biting as he thrust himself upon her. His breath was hot and rank; she could feel it on her face and smell its fetidness. He panted hard before her, his sex riled. “Everyone breaks, my dear.” He picked her up and slammed her against the wall, his mouth opened wide upon hers as if to suck the very life from her.

  Her pent-up rage exploded upon him—her strength quadrupled in the presence of his gloating phallus as he wrenched it out and up beneath her skirts. But, in an instant, he gave way.

  The Gentleman clutched his throat as Dmitri Petrov attacked him from behind, wrestling with a ferocity he had never known as he wrung a scarf tightly around The Gentleman’s neck. The Gentleman fought to escape Dmitri’s grip, his erection wet and heaving toward the woman they coveted.

  Free from his clutches, Hodel lunged, kicked his quivering prick, and watched him collapse with a howl before gathering all the acidic hatred in her heart and spitting it upon him.

  “You should die for this!” she railed, watching him writhe as saliva trickled from his mouth and encircled his bulging head. In the cacophony of everyone’s panting breath, Dmitri moved toward her.

  “My friend—” he gasped, quite full of feeling.

  “Don’t touch me!” Hodel wailed.

  Dmitri stalled in horror. “Please, Hodel, I only wish to help you, I—”

  “A lot of help you did me, Petrov—a great deal of good you’ve done us all!”

  He knew it to be true. He was wholly worthless. Not that it mattered anymore. Dmitri turned from her, contorted by his shame—he had murdered his friend, betraying all he ever cared for.

  “Dmitri—no!” Hodel cried, for The Gentleman had struggled to his feet again. He swiftly throttled Dmitri across the head with a cauldron from the kitchen and watched him crumble to the floor. The Gentleman turned toward Hodel once again.

  “You think you are so great, with your smug expression!”

  He pinned her down onto the floor beneath the enormous heft of his body, now dripping
with sweat from anger and exertion. He moved his gluttonous hands up her skirts and squeezed hard at the back of her legs. “No one makes a fool of me, you filthy little Jew.” He ripped the meeting of her underthings. “You little witch! You have beguiled me so, and nothing is ever denied to me!”

  She felt his weight give, his panting cease. The Gentleman’s head lolled, collapsing upon her chest, and he was out cold on top of her. The room was deathly quiet.

  Gazing upward she could see, with the cauldron clutched in his hand, a wheezing, determined Anatoly.

  “Seems we got here just after the nick of time,” said a stunned Grigory Boleslav.

  Footsteps rumbled outside—people wondering what the commotion was about. Grigory threw Anatoly a look. They knelt to move The Gentleman’s body off Hodel.

  “Roll him over, Anatoly; we must get him across the floor somehow.”

  Freed from beneath The Gentleman’s enormous body, Hodel found herself in Grisha’s arms. “Deep breaths, my darling,” he soothed. “It is all right.”

  Grisha gestured at Dmitri and nodded to Anatoly to tend to him.

  “Come along, Mitya!” said Anatoly, picking him up by the collar and shaking him vigorously. Dmitri was motionless.

  “Dmitri Petrov, come along—for the love of God!” Grisha bellowed. Anatoly removed Dmitri’s spectacles, then smacked him hard across the face. At last, Dmitri stirred, and Anatoly took him into his arms as they heard the footsteps of guards approaching up the lane.

  “Quickly!”

  Then they ran across the fields. Pursued by guards, they ran as though from fate itself. Toward what location or which fate, Hodel did not know.

  fifty

  THEY DIVERGED WITH ANATOLY ALONG THE ROAD AS HE CARTED Dmitri back to the barracks.

  “We shall see you at the meeting point!” Grisha called as they ran.

  Grigory took Hodel by the hand. They darted through the shadows and approached The Gentleman’s office. He smashed the front window with the edge of a pocketknife and opened the door from within, then moved to the back room with greatest speed. He lifted a floorboard beneath the shelving.